I was still awake when Will’s alarm went off at 5:30 A.M., and I got up with him, although I could sleep until seven and still make it to work on time.
Will went out for his run and I dressed in some clothes I’d left at his place, gray suit trousers and a red blouse, nothing fancy. I didn’t want to freak out Russ Meyer.
I called Bryson once I was caffeinated and dressed. “David, can you pull an address for Russell Meyer in Highland Park and meet me there?”
Bryson grumbled. “Do you have any idea how early it is? I’m barely out of my tighty-whities from the night before, Wilder.”
“Just don’t show up naked and we’ll be in good shape,” I said. I wanted to get the jump on Russ, shake him up, try to spook something out of him. A hugely disproportionate number of homicides involving women and girls are the work of pissed-off boyfriends or husbands.
Plus, he was the only lead I had.
Bryson texted me back with the address, and I drove to the run-down section of Highland Park, which was becoming more gentrified every day. There was a Java Jones on the corner of Meyer’s street, and an organic market, but the bum sleeping just down the sidewalk shattered a little bit of the ambiance.
Bryson’s grimy Taurus was parked at the curb in front of a pool hall, and I knocked on his passenger window.
“Yo, Wilder,” he said, thrusting a white bag at me. “Got you a cruller. Those hippies down the block do a pastry that ain’t half bad.”
“This is the address?” I said, pointing at the pool hall. Bryson nodded, brushing crumbs off his tie. Bryson was handsome, in a pugilistic way, if you could get past his blocky neck and his appalling taste in fashion, music, women and just about everything else.
Still, he was an honest cop, and a stand-up guy once you peeled away the layers ingrained by Charles Bronson movies and too much time in strip clubs.
“Apartments above the tavern,” he said. “Guy shacks up in one of ’em. Credit is for shit—he owes about a grand in back rent from what I could see.”
“He got a sheet?” I said, starting for the back stairs to the apartments above the closed-up bar.
“Minor stuff,” said Bryson. “Underage DUI, vandalism, drunk stupid misdemeanors. The kind we all got hiding behind our eighteenth birthday.”
“Speak for yourself,” I said, mounting the rickety stairs. Paint flaked off the brick wall under my palm and a dog snarled from behind one of the doors we passed.
“You mean to tell me that you never raised any hell?” Bryson snorted.
“I raised plenty,” I said, giving him a grin. “I just never got caught.”
“Guess that’s why you’re the lieutenant, then,” Bryson muttered. “All brass is good at being slippery.”
“David, you keep talking like that and I’m gonna think you don’t love me anymore.” I raised my fist and pounded on Russ Meyer’s door. After a few moments, a lock clicked and a pale, scruffy goatee with a pale, scruffy face behind it peered out.
“Yeah?”
“Russ Meyer?” I said. He squinted, looking me up and down. His eyes were glassy and bloodshot with the tiny roadmaps of veins particular to stoners. Stoned on what was the real question.
“Maybe. You asking in a personal or professional capacity?”
I showed him my shield, and a large, predatory smile. “That, Mr. Meyer, is entirely up to you.”
“Wow,” he said, blinking. “Uh, you wanna come in?”
“That’s a start,” I said. He stepped back, ushering us in. He was clad only in boxers and a ratty robe, and I could see a tattoo crawling across his stomach, concave where the rest of his skinny body was convex. Oh, yeah, the ladies must drop into a dead faint when this guy came calling.
We stepped inside, Bryson straight ahead and me to the side, clearing his line of fire. Neither of us was going to take Russ’s laid-back stoner-dude act at face value.
Nothing sinister happened when I entered the dim apartment. I felt cobwebs brush my face and dust go up my nose, and I sneezed. Bryson stopped inside the door, wrinkling his nose.
“Uh, you want some coffee, Officers? Maybe a donut?” His mouth twitched, trying to hide his smile unsuccessfully.
“You think that’s funny?” Bryson demanded, sucking in his waistline. I held up my hand.
“It’s fine, David. Mr. Meyer should laugh while he can.”
Russ slumped down on his plaid sofa, eliciting a shriek of springs, and fumbled a cigarette out of the crushed pack on the coffee table. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means that Lily Dubois is dead, Russell, and her parents fingered you as the asshole boyfriend interfering with their baby girl.”
He choked on his first drag. “Lily’s dead? You’re messing with me.”
I grabbed the cigarette from his hand. “I am so far from messing with you, you don’t even want to know. How old are you, Russell?”
He glared at me, floppy strawberry blond hair hanging in his pimply face. A rat skittered in the kitchen area, and I caught a whiff of rot. “I’m waiting,” I told him. I was going to need a dozen showers when I left this filthy craphole.
“Seventeen,” he said, finally. I gave David the nod, and he rummaged on the tabletops and the Murphy bed in the corner until he found a chain wallet, stamped with the Diesel logo. High-end clothes, shitty apartment. Either Russ was a heavy-duty user or he was even more of a poser than he looked.
“Hey, that’s mine!” Russ said, jolting off the sofa. I pushed him back down.
“Well, will you look at this horseshit,” Bryson said. “Our boy is twenty-one.”
I looked back at Russ. “Well?”
“It’s
