Jubilee's Journey (Wyattsville #2)(50)

The address was a tenement building with a whiskey bottle leaning against the rail and cement steps broken on both sides. The windows of the ground floor apartment were covered with different-colored bed sheets, too dirty to see through. He climbed the steps and entered the vestibule. Several broken mailboxes hung halfway open.

Apartment 5A was tagged B. Kaminski. Could be Bertha, could be Benjamin, or could be both. Mahoney started up the dark narrow staircase.

When he rapped on the door a male voice called back, “Whaddya want?”

“I’m looking for Bertha Kaminski,” Mahoney answered.

The voice yelled, “Hey, Butterball, it’s for you.”

For a long minute there was nothing more; then heavy footsteps thumped across the floor and the door swung open.

The woman looked nothing like Frances Margaret, or Myrtle, as the case might be. She was round and nearly as wide as she was tall. “Yeah?” she said looking square into his face.

“Bertha Kaminski?”

She nodded.

“You owned the house on Kilmer Street in Norfolk?”

“If this is about the basement flooding, I don’t want to hear it. We sold that house as is, and we told them—”

“It’s not about the basement,” Mahoney said. “When you lived there, did you rent an upstairs flat to a couple by the name of Bartholomew and Ruth Jones?”

“Good Lord, that was twenty years ago. I don’t see how they could have a complaint after all this time.”

“There’s no complaint. They’re both deceased.”

“Lord have mercy,” Bertha murmured. “Young folks like that dying already.” She gave a weary shake of her head.

“Do you remember a woman named Anita visiting them? Anita Walker or maybe Jones?”

“Shoot, yeah, I remember Anita. You don’t forget one like her.”

“Is her last name Walker or Jones?”

“Was. It was Walker, but it ain’t no more.”

This was the first solid lead Mahoney had and he jumped on it. “When did she change her name?”

“Sixteen, maybe seventeen years back, when she married Freddie Meyers.” She gave a sorrowful shrug. “Poor Freddie. If Ben would’ve known how she was gonna treat Freddie, he would’ve never matched them up.”

“Ben, he’s your husband?”

“Sort of,” Bertha answered. “We never really got around to the official marrying part.”

“Oh.” Mahoney gave a nod, unsure of whether to say “sorry,” “good,” or nothing. He opted for nothing and moved on. “You got an address for this Freddie Meyers?”

Bertha turned her head and screamed, “Hey, Ben, you got Freddie’s address?”

“Not the new one,” Ben hollered back.

Bertha turned to Mahoney. “Ben said—”

“I heard him.”

“It’s someplace out on the Eastern Shore,” she said. “Franklin, Federal, something sounds like that.”

“Fairlawn Bay?”

“Yeah, I think that’s it.”

“Thanks.” Mahoney turned to leave.

Before he’d taken a step, Bertha said, “But if you’re looking for Anita, finding Freddie ain’t gonna do you no good.”

“Oh?”

“They got divorced five, maybe six, years ago.”

“Did Anita go back to using her maiden name, or did she stay Meyers?”

“No idea.”

“So you didn’t keep up with her? Get her new address?”

“Hell, no. That woman ain’t one you wanna be friends with.” She went on to itemize Anita’s multitude of shortcomings, which included that she was lazy as sin, mean-tempered, and cheap to a fault. “Don’t never ask her to pick you up a quart of milk from the store,” Bertha said, “’cause she’d charge you double!”

It was close to five when Mahoney thanked Bertha for her help and returned to the car. The hour gave him justification for not stopping by the Wyattsville station. Tomorrow he’d report his findings to Gomez. Tomorrow, after he finished taking Jubilee to see her brother. Better that way, he figured. Less intimidating. Gomez had been hammering the boy with questions for three days, and it stood to reason that by now the boy had built up a wall of resistance. If it was just him and Jubilee, Paul would be more likely to respond. In the meantime he could look into finding Freddie Meyers.

He turned onto the causeway and headed back to the ferry.





Mahoney had planned to have a quick dinner, then head back to the station house and see if he could find anything on a Freddie Meyers, but when he arrived home the dining room table was set for seven. “Hurry and get changed,” Christine said. “Lynn and Henry will be here in fifteen minutes.”

“Lynn and Henry Ontiveros? On a Tuesday?”

“Yes,” Christine answered. “She gave me an absolutely wonderful recipe for baked chicken but it serves eight, so I invited them over to share.”

“Can’t it wait? I’ve got something I wanted to take care of down at—”

Christine turned and looked at him with a sad-eyed expression. “I’ve already invited them.”

Of course, dinner turned into an evening of conversation and then expanded itself again when Christine insisted that Lynn show Jack the pictures of their vacation. It was near eleven when they ended the evening.