Courtney approached me in the hallway as I unlocked my office. “Mr. Meecham just sat down with a woman who knew the murder victim. Can you join them?”
Flora Nuñez’s acquaintance was perched on one of the client chairs in Fred Meecham’s inner sanctum, looking edgy. She was a tan-skinned woman in horn-rim glasses and wearing a dark sweater with an autumn leaf pattern on it and black jeans. “Ms. Colón,” Fred said, “this is Alex Rasmussen. He’s working as my investigator. Alex, Lucinda Colón.”
“Lucy, please,” she said. “It is nice to meet you.” Her fingers were cool, her grip soft.
She wasn’t pretty by conventional standards—her mouth was too wide, her dark coppery hair cropped very short—but there was a fashionable glamour about her. I took a chair, and Meecham said, “Ms. Colón was just telling me that both she and Flora Nuñez came from the same town in Puerto Rico. Patillas, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, but we only met when we were here. We went in a class at the community college together, and we became friends.”
“How long did you know each other?”
“For more than two years.”
“Did Ms. Nuñez ever mention Troy Pepper?” I let Meecham pose the questions.
“They knew each other in New Jersey, before Flora came to Lowell. They were in contact with each other and were planning to get together when the carnival came to town.”
“When did she tell you this, Lucy?”
“In May, I think. She said this guy that she used to date and was sometimes in love with, he was going to be in Lowell in September. They dated before, but it never got too serious.” She had a charming accent and a lively manner, though I read sadness for her friend in it, too.
“Did you ever meet Troy Pepper, or see a photograph?”
“Yes, she showed me a snapshot she had of him. But I never saw him with my own eyes.”
“When did you see Flora last?”
“Oh, not for a while. She was working at the Hilton downtown. A chambermaid. But on the telephone, we spoke often. Is very sad what happened.”
“When you talked with her the last few times, did she mention Troy Pepper?”
“She just said that she was going to tell him something. But I don’t know what it was. She seemed pretty excited to see somebody, but I don’t know for sure. I think it was him.”
“Were they lovers?” Meecham asked.
Her hesitation was either modesty or surprise. “I think so, you know. Once upon a time. Back in New Jersey. But since then? Quién sabe? Flora didn’t tell me too much of her life. I think she seen other men sometimes.”
“Here in the city?”
“Maybe here, yes. But I don’t know who.”
“Did you ever see her with bruises, maybe, or a swollen eye?”
“No, never.”
“Did she ever seem … frightened, or afraid?”
She hesitated. “Maybe yes. I think so.”
“Recently?”
She nodded.
“Do you know why?” Meecham asked.
“No. I don’t.”
“Have you any idea?”
“No. But what I think … I think maybe it was of Troy Pepper she was afraid.”
Meecham sent a glance my way but didn’t lose his rhythm. “Because of things she said, or … ?”
“Is just what I think. I don’t know very much.” That was the theme she stayed with for the rest of our questions. When she finished, he thanked her for coming in and saw her out.
“What do you think, Alex?” he asked when he came back in.
“If Pepper and the victim had a history, it could be motive, especially depending on what she was planning to tell him—if she was breaking something off, that could be motive. It could also be that she was going to tell him she wanted them to be together. Hell, it could be any number of things, some of which would support Pepper’s innocence, others that would damn him.”
He pushed fingers across his forehead, as if to erase the deep creases there now. I said, “The cops seem pretty sure they’ve got the case on ice, but I don’t know enough yet.”
He nodded. The accused hadn’t given us much to form an opinion on. I’d have liked to insist that I was simply an information gatherer, as impartial as a machine, as wise as Solomon, but the reality was that believing a client was innocent, or that he’d been wronged in some way, was valuable. If it was the other way, and I was comfortably convinced that he was guilty, I had decisions to make. With Pepper, I wasn’t close to anything like assuredness yet. And I realized that the only person who could help me decide was the person who seemed not to want to.
Back in my office, I had a phone message to call Phoebe Kelly at her office in the Registry of Deeds, which I was happy to do. “What are you doing?” I asked when she answered.
“Hey, it’s you. I thought I heard bells ringing. I’m reading the latest issue of People. Don’t worry, I’m not on county time.”
“You’d be getting more done than a lot of people who are. What’s the deal?”
“Coffee break. What are you doing?”
“Sniffing out clues.”
“I’m sniffing mocha latte.”
“So much for a fascinating probing of each other about our life’s work.”
“I’m sorry. I thought you were kidding. Were you finished?”
“I am kidding.”
“Okay. I’m not. The boss is taking all of us out to dinner tonight. Jennifer, the office manager—do you remember her? The older woman who has the cubicle by the window? Anyway, she’s retiring. Guess who might get her desk?”
“No kidding?”
“It’s not a sure thing yet. Anyway, we’ll be at Cobblestones. Do you want to meet me there after, or are you going to be glued to the Pats game?”
“The TVs there are bigger than mine.” We agreed on a time.
“And now I really am on the clock, so I’ve got to run. Bye.”
We were a new item, and part of the fun was learning each other’s little moves: on the phone and in person … maybe, in time, in a life. I tried on that scenario. Phoebe had declared herself a team player, a born lifer in whatever situation she found herself. She had married her junior high school boyfriend and insisted it would’ve been a forever thing if he hadn’t died in a car crash. She liked plugging away at the steady job, putting in the time and making grade, a cubicle by the window, maybe even retiring in it someday, with handshakes and good wishes, and the prospect of a financial pillow for the rest of her days. Not a bad trade, I suppose, for some people. It’s what Roland Cote was doing, and Ed St. Onge: one an inveterate bachelor, the other contentedly wed for years, both devoted to the job. But not yours truly. I’d once been married and had once been on the job. I told Phoebe this, going into the whole ignominy of my fall, admitting to her that it wasn’t something I liked to dwell on, and she listened and said that time was often enough to get beyond things, but not always, that occasionally it was necessary to go back and try to work through something. Was that what I needed to do? I glanced at the bottom drawer of my desk, where I kept the fat yellow file of all that had
gone down, beginning with that fateful night in the courtyard behind the old hosiery mill. I started to pull open the drawer …
I yanked the galloping horse of soul-searching to a halt midstride. I shut the drawer. I hung up my jacket and settled in to give a couple of hours to Atlantic Casualty, but the hoofbeats echoed on for a time before they faded completely.