Aromas had made it onto the tourist trail after the publicity of a few months ago, and Katrina’s murder only made a brief dip in the number of our customers. We were busy again at the end of the week. I asked Haruto to add a couple of extra half days to his work schedule, and Davie was still on for three afternoons a week, but I needed at least two more part-timers. I’d been reluctant to hire anyone in case the increased tourist business was temporary. Then I’d need to lay them off, which I wouldn’t have the heart to do, and I’d be worse off than before. My former partner had left the store in some debt. It wasn’t a huge amount, and I could have paid it off from my personal funds, but it had become a point of pride to get Aromas into the black and prosperous.
While I did some sums on the back on an envelope, I also wondered who—besides me—had a reason to kill Katrina. I scribbled over the numbers to make a list of potential killers. It could have been someone we knew nothing about, like one of the ex-CEOs maybe. But, if it wasn’t random—and Nat’s idea about her briefcase seemed to bear that out—it had to be someone who knew where she lived, who knew she’d be parked on the street, and who knew she’d be leaving for work at five in the morning. Nat was right; it wasn’t business, it was personal. So it could be her cousin, Gavin, although he’d seemed pretty broken up about losing his only relative. He didn’t inherit anything, so it was hard to see a motive, especially since he’d probably lost his home, too. We’d hardly seen Matthew on the street in the days since her death, but if he had a guilty conscience, he wouldn’t run away; he’d be sure to tell the first person who asked. I couldn’t picture either Professor or Ruth D’Allessio killing her, even if they were going to be living next to the condo development. I wondered about the priest who’d stolen her photo; I supposed he could have been trophy hunting like a serial killer, but did priests commit murder? Wouldn’t they be more likely to call down hell and damnation on someone? Then there was Angela, with her secret abortion. I didn’t know her, but Nat said she’d always struck him as a fairly colorless, pleasant enough woman. Still, backed into a corner and faced with the loss of her fiancé, perhaps she’d struck back. I also put a reluctant question mark against Sabina and Kurt, who’d recently given up their opposition to the condo project.
By then I’d tumbled down the rabbit hole as far as I was willing to go, largely because I couldn’t imagine any of these people chasing me down an alley at gunpoint. I abandoned the list when a man who’d been hesitating in the doorway suddenly decided to come inside. Little wisps of fog swirled into the shop as the door closed. Older men often approached the shop cautiously for some reason, as if they weren’t sure of their welcome. This one was dressed head-to-toe in black, even to the scarf looped around his neck. He was probably in his sixties, and a little bit portly. He had a thick patch of scarring down one side of his face and across his eyes and forehead. I gave him a friendly smile, but he looked around at the shelves of personal grooming products with faint distaste, as if he wished they weren’t quite so … feminine. He spent a few minutes wandering around, picking things up and then putting them back, the way people do when they don’t know what they want or they’re trying to waste time for some reason without earning the shopkeeper’s ire.
He came to the counter with a bottle of shampoo and a shower cap. He was essentially bald, so I had to assume they were a gift of some sort, although when I offered him gift wrap he just seemed puzzled. He had an accent I didn’t recognize and an odd, slightly smoky smell. His fingers were nicotine stained, which is something you don’t see very often now that it’s almost impossible to find a place to smoke in comfort. He smiled, exposing a gold canine tooth.
“I think perhaps you are the person I am seeking,” he said. Actually, his accent was so heavy I’m not sure I got that right, but I think that’s what he said. The smile fell away quickly, and his face was suddenly completely without expression, which was slightly unnerving.
He asked me something so out of the blue I assumed I’d misheard. “Excuse me?” I paused in the act of handing him his purchases. The turquoise-and-white-striped bags usually gave me a little lift, even after a year in business and a lot of high-impact water under the bridge.
“I am looking for Mr. Clement Pryce. I think you might know him.”
I hesitated. That sounded as if he knew my grandfather, whose name was actually Pryce-Fitton. He could just be a nice guy, ex-friend of my grandfather’s, but his eyes bothered me. I’d learned to read people by watching their eyes—remind me to tell you about the kid who stabbed me in the hand with a ballpoint pen. This man’s eyes were dead. They were the kind of eyes you’d expect to see on a prisoner of war or someone who’d lost his family in a fire. On the other hand, he didn’t seem nervous enough to be planning to rob me, or charming enough to be a reporter. He could be a photographer from one of the London tabloids; all he’d need was a phone with a sharp camera lens. On the other hand, he was older—and better dressed—than any of the robbers or journalists I’d come across, but it wouldn’t do any harm to be cautious.
“I’m sorry, I don’t think so,” I said, and fiddled with the glasses I sometimes wear nowadays because I couldn’t wear a Batgirl mask to protect my identity.
“Ah! Perhaps this will help. I have something—” He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a handful of small papers and receipts. He sorted through them, crushing a couple of them in his fist and tossing them on the floor, and then reached into the breast pocket of his overcoat. He pulled out one of those old-fashioned leather wallets almost the size of a paperback book, the kind people used to take on vacations because it fit their passport and oddly sized foreign currency
“It is this.” He carefully withdrew a piece of newsprint, which seemed to be an ad for lingerie, and I took a step back. Robbers, reporters—I guess fetishists needed a category of their own. You might think I was unreasonably skittish, but the last time a perv had come into the shop, the few clothes he’d been wearing had been quickly dispatched for my edification. Grappling with a naked man who’d managed to douse himself in one of our more expensive body lotions was an experience I had no desire to repeat.
But he unfolded the paper and showed me the other side by smoothing it flat on the counter with his palm and then pushing it toward me with a stiff finger. I recognized the image of my grandfather. It had appeared in The Chronicle a few months before, during all the excitement caused by two murders, a near-fatal assault, and the arrest of one of our own. We’re a close-knit neighborhood, and, speaking for myself, we hadn’t yet recovered from the series of shocks.
I took a couple of seconds to regroup.
“This gentleman,” he said impatiently, pointing a finger at Grandfather. The photographer had caught him walking past the front window of Aromas, frowning at the camera. It was actually a very bad likeness, and I was surprised he was recognizable to anyone but me. “He and I were colleagues years ago. Imagine my surprise seeing him in the newspaper.” He blinked at me and smiled widely, evidently to encourage my participation in his astonishment. The smile disappeared almost instantly, and his oddly flat expression returned.
I picked up the clipping. “This was from quite a while ago,” I said.
He shrugged, which didn’t help me much.
“I don’t think I know him,” I lied, because lying was practically second nature. “But I can ask around, if that will help.”
He flashed the gold tooth briefly in another smile. “Excellent,” he said. “Thank you very much.” It came out like “Tunk you verree masch,” which took me a second or two to grasp.
“When you find him,” he said with a slight bow, “tell him Sergei was asking for him. Sergei Viktor Wolf.” He shifted his scarf out of the way to reveal a Roman collar, which explained the all-black wardrobe. It was a surprise, and one that you might think would give me reason to be more trusting. On the other hand, it reminded me that I’d seen the priest at Katrina’s memorial filching a photo from her album, which wasn’t exactly priestly behavior. I’d have to remember to mention it to Nat and see if he knew which photo was missing.
I stopped staring at his priest’s collar and pulled my phone from the back pocket of my jeans. The collar made a friendship between them less likely because my grandfather was slightly suspicious of Catholic priests. It was an unusual prejudice in a man who was otherwise very modern in his thinking, and predated the scandals of recent years, when mistrusting priests seemed to have turned into a cottage industry. I also couldn’t imagine how they could have been “colleagues” in the past. As far as I knew, my grandfather spent his career in fairly high levels of the civil service, something to do with agricultural policy. When I was young, he was always going over to the countries of the old Soviet Union to discuss tractors and food production methods with politicians. I couldn’t think of a time when he would have worked with a Catholic priest. Sergei’s heavy accent sounded vaguely Russian; maybe that’s where they had met.
“Would you like to leave a number?”
He patted his pockets, took out his phone, and clicked through a couple of screens, then recited a number with an unfamiliar area code, which I dutifully entered into my phone under “W.”
Then, making conversation the way you do, especially if you’re still mentally apologizing for thinking he was a pervert, I handed him his bag again and said, “Are you visiting the city?”
“Indeed, yes. I come to visit friend, who died.”
That sounded like a funeral. “I’m very sorry for the loss of your friend.”
He shrugged. “Not close friend,” he said, and I adjusted my sympathetic expression several degrees.
Ignoring my professed ignorance of Grandfather or his whereabouts, he added: “Tell Mr. Pryce it is Sergei Viktor Wolf. From Houston. That is very important, eh? That you mention Houston.”
I nodded, and after waiting for a couple of seconds and blinking rapidly, he said again, “Sergei Viktor Wolf from Houston.”
“Got it,” I said. He hesitated again, very obviously lacking confidence in me as a messenger, but then turned and left, closing the door quietly behind him. Another wisp of fog floated inside.
After he left I took advantage of the store being empty, grabbed the broom, and did a quick sweep around, since he wasn’t the only customer who threw papers on the floor. As usual, and no matter that I’d swept the floor less than an hour earlier, I rounded up a few sprigs of potpourri and a receipt or two and a crumpled, and presumably used, paper napkin. I made sure everything got tipped into the dustpan without getting closer to it than the length of my broom. Sometimes it’s just nonstop glamour around here.
I also swept away the small drift of lightweight rubbish gathered in the doorway. It was usually one of my first jobs upon opening, but I’d had other things on my mind that morning. The prevailing breeze blew in Aromas’ direction, clearing detritus from the entrance of the women’s hat shop opposite and depositing it on mine. It happened all up and down Polk Street, to the chagrin of merchants on this side and the mild satisfaction of those opposite. I made quick work of today’s collection, which was as eclectic as usual, with a discount coupon to the nail salon on the next block, a handful of dead leaves, and a crumpled paper coaster featuring a golden Venus de Milo. There was also a cup from a coffee shop across town, which I hastily stepped on and crushed rather than risk having to explain the prevailing breeze thing to Nat.