Concealed in Death (In Death #38)(66)

“Perhaps she can keep me company for a while.” Stooping, Summerset picked up the toy.

“She’d like that,” Mavis began. “If she gets in the way—”

“Pretty girls are never in the way.” Smoothly, Summerset plucked her from Roarke, balanced her on his bony hip with an ease of motion that baffled Eve. Bella launched into a fresh spate of babbling, feet cheerfully kicking in fuzzy pink boots.

“I think that can be arranged,” Summerset told her as he carried her out.

She patted his cheek, said something that sounded like “some shit.” Eve found herself puzzling over it, until she put it together.

Shum shit. Summerset.

Now that she could appreciate.

Bella grinned over his shoulder, waved a hand. “Bye-bye! Bye-bye!”

“Someshit—that’s her name for him. You gotta love it. Did he actually understand her?” Eve wondered.

“She was flirting for cookies,” Mavis said, then just sat, closed her eyes.

“Mavis, what happened?” Leonardo sat beside her, cuddled her as he would a child. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

“The girls. We heard the media blast, remember? All those girls. Roarke’s building. They said it was your building.”

“Just recently, yes.”

“I think, sometimes, I think maybe it’s all a big, wicked loop. Who you know, what you do, where you are. I knew some of the girls, Leonardo. Some of the girls they found in Roarke’s building. The girls on Dallas’s dead board upstairs. His building, her case. My friends, from another life.”

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” He pressed his lips to her hair, rocked her.

“I don’t know why it’s screwing me up like this. It was a million years ago, and I hardly thought about them, ever. But . . . seeing them, and knowing, and they looked like they did. Mostly like they did.”

“What can you tell me about them?” Eve began, and Roarke put a hand on her shoulder.

“Eve.”

“Look, I’m sorry.” Instead of taking a chair, Eve sat on the table directly facing Mavis. “I know it’s rough, but if you knew them, even a million years ago, something you know might help me find who killed them, and why.”

“They wouldn’t get you. I did. Do you ever wonder why? I got you, almost from the bounce—or the bust. You were so official, and so grumpy in your uniform.”

Those hard black cop shoes, Eve thought. God, how she’d hated them. She probably had looked grumpy.

“And you looked like some kid playing fairy princess dress-up, even with your hand in that mark’s pocket.”

“I didn’t even have his wallet yet.”

“And tried to tell me you were just trying to get his attention. Bogus.”

“I was pretty good at the lift, even though I mostly ran cons. But now and again you’d see some tourist just asking for it, you know? You know?” she repeated to Roarke.

“I know very well.”

“You ever think about that, Dallas? Your man and your best girl, thieves and grifters.”

“Night and day.”

With a watery laugh, Mavis leaned her head against Leonardo’s arm a moment. “My moonpie here, he knows it all, all the way back. When you love somebody, they’ve got to know who you are, even if you’re not exactly who you were. Did she tell you about me—back then?”

“No,” Roarke said, “not, I think, all of it.”

“You wouldn’t.” Mavis looked at Eve, and saying nothing told her she, too, kept her friend’s secrets. “Some’s in the bio. It plays okay, former grifter, turns it around and scores on the music charts. The before that? Wouldn’t ring so sweet, so I twisted it around some.”

“Yeah, I noticed.” And on that, too, Eve had kept her silence.

“We do what we do, right? Let me spread it all out, okay, so we’re all up on it. And maybe it’ll help settle the jumpies.”

As Mavis was beginning to sound more like Mavis, Eve nodded, then rose to take a chair and the wine Roarke handed her.

“Start wherever you want,” Eve told her.

“Okay, well, big entrance. My mother was a drunk and a junkie. She’d drink, smoke, pop, and stick anything when she was rolling. The father wasn’t around much, then not at all. I don’t remember him very well, and I don’t think she did either. We lived mostly around Baltimore. Sometimes she worked, sometimes she didn’t. Sometimes we’d skip out on the rent in the middle of the night because she’d snorted it up. It made her crazy, but when she was using she mostly left me alone. It was better when she was using.”

She paused a moment, seemed to gather herself. “But she’d get busted, maybe I’d get shuffled out unless I slipped the leash. Then we were in the rehab cycle, and when she was in that mode, she’d get religion. The kind where she’d have me by the neck twenty-four/seven, preaching weird stuff, not your basic God stuff, the hellfire crap.”

She sighed a little, nuzzled into Leonardo. “I don’t get why some people want God to scare the shit out of you. Anyhow, she’d throw out all my things—my clothes, my discs if I had any, the lip dye I’d probably shoplifted. Everything. “New broom sweeps clean,” she’d say, and make me wear these dresses—always brown or gray, high neck, long-sleeved, even in the summer. And—”