Witness in Death (In Death #10)(38)

So he sat on the stage, still dressed with the final courtroom set. An odd place for a man with his background, he thought with some amusement, as he used his personal palm computer to scan updated stock reports and revise a departmental memo.

He'd turned the stage lights on, though that had simply been for convenience. When she tracked him down, he sat in the dock under a cool blue spot, and he looked as seductive as a condemned angel.

"They ever get you that far?"

"Hmm?" He glanced up. "You've seen my records. No arrests."

"I've seen what's left of your records after you played with them."

"Lieutenant, that's a serious accusation." Still, a smile flirted with his mouth. "But no, I've never had the pleasure of defending myself in a court of law on a criminal matter. How's the boy?"

"Who? Oh. Ralph. A little shaky." She climbed the stairs to the dock. "I had a couple of uniforms take him home. We shouldn't need to talk to him again. And after he recovers, he'll have all his pals buying him a beer to hear the story."

"Exactly so. You're a fine judge of human nature. And how's our Peabody?"

"What do you mean?"

"You're a good teacher, Lieutenant, but a fierce one. I wondered if she'd recovered from the bruising you gave her."

"She wants to make detective. She wants to work murders. First rule, you go on a scene, you don't bring anything with you. No preconceptions, no conclusions. And you don't take what you see at first glance on face value. You think Feeney didn't slap me upside the head with that a few times when he was my trainer?"

"I imagine he did and had plenty of bruises of his own when he hit the rock of it."

"If that's a fancy way of saying I'm hardheaded, it doesn't insult me. She'll learn, and she'll think more carefully next time. She hates screwing up."

He reached up idly to brush his knuckles over her cheek. "I thought the same myself. Now, why don't you think this is self-termination?"

"I didn't say I didn't. There are a number of tests to be run. The ME will make the call."

"I wasn't asking for the medical examiner's opinion but yours."

She started to speak, then set her teeth and jammed her hands in her pockets. "You know what that was down there? That was a f**king insult. That was a stage carefully set for my benefit. Somebody thinks I'm stupid."

Now he did smile. "No. Someone knows you're smart -- very smart -- and took great care, right down to the bottle of what will undoubtedly turn out to be Quim's own home brew."

"I've checked his locker. You can still smell the stuff. He kept a bottle in there, all right. What did he know?" she muttered. "Head stagehand? That means he'd have to know where everything needs to be and when. People, props, the works."

"Yes, I'd assume so."

"What did he know?" she said again. "What did he see, what did he think? What did he die for? He wrote down stuff in this little notebook. The handwriting on the death note looks like a match. If the ME doesn't find something off, he's likely to rule it self-termination."

Roarke rose. "You'll be working late."

"Yeah. Looks like."

"See that you eat something other than a candy bar."

Her mouth went grim. "Somebody stole my candy bars again."

"The bastard." He leaned down, kissed her lightly. "I'll see you at home."

If Eve's preconception that theater people led richly bohemian lives had taken a dent after a look at Michael Proctor's living quarters, it suffered a major blow when she reached Linus Quim's excuse for an apartment.

"One step up from street-sleeping." She shook her head as she took her first scan of the single, street-level room. The anti-burglar bars covering the two grimy, arrow-slot windows were coated with muck and caged out whatever pitiful sunlight might have struggled to fight its way into the gloom.

But bars and muck weren't enough to keep out the constant clamor of street traffic or the uneasy vibrations from the subway that ran directly under the ugly room.

"Lights on," she ordered and was rewarded with a flickering, hopeless yellow glow from the dusty ceiling unit.

Absently, she stuck her hands in her jacket pockets. It was colder inside than it was out in the frisky, late-winter wind. The entire place, such as it was, smelled of old sweat, older dust, and what she assumed was last night's dinner of hash and beans.

"What did you say this guy pulled down a year?" she asked Peabody.

Peabody pulled out her PPC, scanned. "Union scale for his position is eight hundred and fifty a show, with ascending hourly wage for put-ups, tear-downs, turnaround, and overtime pay. Union takes a twenty-five percent bite for dues, retirement, health plans, and blah-blah, but our guy still raked in about three hundred thousand annually."

"And chose to live like this. Well, he was either spending it or stashing it somewhere." She strode across the bare floor to the computer unit. "This piece of crap's older than the piece of crap I just got rid of. Computer on."

It coughed, wheezed, snorted, then emitted a sickly blue light. "Display financial records for Quim, Linus."

Password required for data display...