When I got back to the hutch, Gwendolyn Haas was sitting on the padded bench in the room where customers trickled in to count the bubbles in the wallpaper, stroking the screen of a handheld device with a thumb. The palette today was slate-blue, from silk blouse to starched skirt to modest heels. It was an even better choice for her red hair and pale skin, and a woman with legs as good as hers should have done away with slacks entirely. It made up for the slight spread of her waist. Well, we were all taking up more space than fashion intended.
I couldn’t tell if she’d been waiting five minutes or all day, and maybe neither could she. That three-by-five screen sucked people into a void where time had no value.
“Your magazines are stale,” she said without looking up. “But then, who reads them anymore?”
For once I had no comeback. I unlocked the door to the confessional and stood aside. She got up, her stiff skirt rustling, and went in past me, still thumbing her doohickey. Only when she was back in the customer’s chair did she put it in her purse—a blue one this time, to match her outfit, slightly smaller than a golf bag—and look around. “You made a joke about a ficus, but you should have some kind of plant. It creates the illusion of life.”
“Not when you forget to water it.” I sat down, took a half-turn in the swivel, and broke a bottle of good Scotch out of the safe. It was a birthday present; I made a note to send myself a thank-you card. “Join me?” I selected two glasses from the stationery drawer and set them on the desk. “No ice, sorry. I can cut it from the tap, if you don’t mind a little rust.”
I made the offer half-expecting to offend her into leaving. I was feeling cranky. She called my bluff. “I can use the iron. I’m anemic.”
In the little water closet I poured two inches, went back, and stained it a pale gold, watching her. She observed the operation without nodding until it turned the shade of old bronze. I brought my own glass to the same level, without water.
“Don’t read anything into this,” I said, twisting the cap back on. “I’m a little bruised today.”
She picked up her glass, drank off the top, and sat back cradling it. Her skim-milk cheeks pinkened slightly. “Me, too. I heard from Dad.”
* * *
I sliced off the same amount. “In person or over the phone?”
“Neither.” She moved a bunch of junk around inside her bag, drew out a Number 10 envelope, and flipped it onto the desk. “Someone slid it under the door of my apartment, sometime this morning. I was up late last night. It was there when I got up.”
I looked at it without picking it up. There was no writing on it, just the Velocity logo with the hollow V with racing lines running through it on cream-colored rag stock.
“I was careful to handle it by the edges.” She shrugged when I looked at her blankly. “Fingerprints.”
“Oh, no one bothers with those anymore. It’s all genetics now.” I drank again.
“Aren’t you going to open it and read it?”
“Tell me what’s in it.”
“But it’s right there!”
“You couldn’t prove that by me. All I know is what you said; which is what I’ll tell the cops if they ask. They have to ask. Hearsay isn’t evidence. I can’t go to jail for withholding it. If I were to read what you say is in that envelope, and it’s what you say it is, I’d be required to report that you had direct contact with the chief suspect in Carl Fannon’s murder; which is what your father is unless and until he comes forward and is exonerated. Then they wouldn’t have to ask. Do you want the cops to know you heard from him?”
All trace of pink had vanished. “Dad and I have some issues, but what kind of daughter would I be if I gave him up and somehow he goes to prison for a crime he didn’t commit?”
“A bitch.”
The man who invented litmus paper got the idea from a redhead. Her face flushed so deep her freckles vanished. Her knuckles whitened gripping the bag, but she didn’t smack me with it. “For someone who works for me, you seem to be giving all the orders.”
“If you knew which ones to give, you wouldn’t need me. Right now I’m wishing I’d taken money from you so I could make the grand gesture and give it back. Am I fired?”
I watched her mood ring of a face shift colors, hoping for red again so I’d be down to two clients, one dead, the other missing; the best kind when it came to having to drop everything and make a report.
“I don’t like walking on eggs,” she said.
“No one does, Miss Haas. Take it from someone who does it for a living.”
She breathed in and out, admired the view through the window, nodded, looked back at me. “He said not to worry about him, that he’s just gone somewhere to think and that I mustn’t think he’s in hiding for anything he’s done, but rather to avoid doing something he finds distasteful. That’s the word he used, ‘distasteful.’ It was always one of his favorites when he felt his partner was stepping over the line. Father looked upon himself as the conscience of the firm. He talked Carl out of some deals that would have put them on the cover of Fortune, just because they struck him as shady.” She leaned forward and tapped the envelope. “I took it from this that this was one of those times when Carl refused to pull out.”
I made a quarter-turn toward the window to see what had caught her eye. A river gull had lit on the roof of the pseudo-pub across the street and was nibbling lice from under one wing. People who’d swing a shovel at a rat throw peanuts to gulls and pigeons because they have feathers. “I’m glad you didn’t tell me about this, Miss Haas.”
“But I—Oh.” She turned paler than when she’d come in. “You mean the police could use this as evidence he killed Carl Fannon.”
“He had means and opportunity, and a dandy motive like smiting his partner in a noble cause could turn a grubby local prosecutor into a national celebrity. That empty bank vault in the Sentinel Building would go on display in the FBI museum next to O.J.’s glove.”
“You won’t tell anyone we had this conversation.”
“We didn’t.”
She nodded again and picked up the envelope. The flap was open and a corner of the sheet folded inside stuck up a quarter-inch, jagged where someone had trimmed it with scissors, probably to remove a printed letterhead. It was dusty pink with a thin green stripe running up the edge.
I said, “Have you got any cash in that duffel?”
“Twenty or thirty dollars. Why?”
“Give me twenty. That makes you my client officially. When the cops bust me for accessory after the fact, I’ll at least have something to tell them better than I’m working for a dead man.”
“Does that mean you have something to go on?” The milk face curdled. “You held out on me until I could put something in your pocket?”
I said something not entirely under my breath. “Lady, if I was going to go to that kind of trouble, don’t you think I’d have held you up for a C-note at least?”
After she left I picked up the crisp pair of tens she’d put on the desk. Alexander Hamilton looked even smugger than usual, with good reason. Not because I’d now squizzen forty dollars out of the Haases on the same investigation, but because my bad luck was holding. If I’d been looking in another direction, I’d have missed that pink-and-green stationery in Gwendolyn’s envelope, sent by her father; all it would have taken was half a second. As long as I had a lead I was still on the case, and how I got it could put me in the tank down the hall from Emil Haas.