Mr. Mercedes (Unnamed Trilogy #1)(35)

She extends her hand and gives him a good no-nonsense shake. “Thank you for coming.” As if it had been at her request.

“Glad you could see me,” he says, following her in.

That same kick-ass view of the lake smacks him in the face. He remembers it well, although they had only the one interview with Mrs. T. here; all the others were either at the big house in Sugar Heights or at the station. She had gone into hysterics during one of those station visits, he remembers. Everybody is blaming me, she said. The suicide had come not much later, only a matter of weeks.

“Would you like coffee, Detective? It’s Jamaican. Very tasty, I think.”

Hodges makes it a habit not to drink coffee in the middle of the morning, because doing so usually gives him savage acid reflux in spite of his Zantac. But he agrees.

He sits in one of the sling chairs by the wide living room window while he waits for her to come back from the kitchen. The day is warm and clear; on the lake, sailboats are zipping and curving like skaters. When she returns he stands up to take the silver tray she’s carrying, but Janelle smiles, shakes her head no, and sets it on the low coffee table with a graceful dip of her knees. Almost a curtsey.

Hodges has considered every possible twist and turn their conversation might take, but his forethought turns out to be irrelevant. It is as if, after carefully planning a seduction, the object of his desire has met him at the door in a shortie nightgown and f**k-me shoes.

“I want to find out who drove my sister to suicide,” she says as she pours their coffee into stout china mugs, “but I didn’t know how I should proceed. Your call was like a message from God. After our conversation, I think you’re the man for the job.”

Hodges is too dumbfounded to speak.

She offers him a mug. “If you want cream, you’ll have to pour it yourself. When it comes to additives, I take no responsibility.”

“Black is fine.”

She smiles. Her teeth are either perfect or perfectly capped. “A man after my own heart.”

He sips, mostly to buy time, but the coffee is delicious. He clears his throat and says, “As I told you when we talked last night, Mrs. Patterson, I’m no longer a police detective. On November twentieth of last year, I became just another private citizen. We need to have that up front.”

She regards him over the rim of her cup. Hodges wonders if the moist gloss on her lips leaves an imprint, or if lipstick technology has rendered that sort of thing obsolete. It’s a crazy thing to be wondering, but she’s a pretty lady. Also, he doesn’t get out much these days.

“As far as I’m concerned,” Janelle Patterson says, “there are only two words that matter in what you just said. One is private and the other is detective. I want to know who meddled with her, who toyed with her until she killed herself, and nobody in the police department cares. They’d like to catch the man who used her car to kill those people, oh yes, but about my sister—may I be vulgar?—they don’t give a shit.”

Hodges may be retired, but he still has his loyalties. “That isn’t necessarily true.”

“I understand why you’d say that, Detective—”

“Mister, please. Just Mr. Hodges. Or Bill, if you like.”

“Bill, then. And it is true. There’s a connection between those murders and my sister’s suicide, because the man who used the car is also the man who wrote the letter. And those other things. Those Blue Umbrella things.”

Easy, Hodges cautions himself. Don’t blow it.

“What letter are we talking about, Mrs. Patterson?”

“Janey. If you’re Bill, I’m Janey. Wait here. I’ll show you.”

She gets up and leaves the room. Hodges’s heart is beating hard—much harder than when he took on the trolls beneath the underpass—but he still appreciates that the view of Janey Patterson going away is as good as the one from the front.

Easy, boy, he tells himself again, and sips more coffee. Philip Marlowe you ain’t. His mug is already half empty, and no acid. Not a trace of it. Miracle coffee, he thinks.

She comes back holding two pieces of paper by the corners and with an expression of distaste. “I found it when I was going through the papers in Ollie’s desk. Her lawyer, Mr. Schron, was with me—she named him the executor of her will, so he had to be—but he was in the kitchen, getting himself a glass of water. He never saw this. I hid it.” She says it matter-of-factly, with no shame or defiance. “I knew what it was right away. Because of that. The guy left one on the steering wheel of her car. I guess you could call it his calling-card.”

She taps the sunglasses-wearing smile-face partway down the first page of the letter. Hodges has already noted it. He has also noted the letter’s font, which he has identified from his own word processing program as American Typewriter.

“When did you find it?”

She thinks back, calculating the passage of time. “I came for the funeral, which was near the end of November. I discovered that I was Ollie’s sole beneficiary when the will was read. That would have been the first week of December. I asked Mr. Schron if we could put off the inventory of Ollie’s assets and possessions until January, because I had some business to take care of back in L.A. He agreed.” She looks at Hodges, a level stare from blue eyes with a bright sparkle in them. “The business I had to take care of was divorcing my husband, who was—may I be vulgar again?—a philandering, coke-snorting ass**le.”