And Now She's Gone(51)
He scrubbed his face with his hands. “I just want her to stop. I don’t want to keep paying her. I want my dog back—that’s really why I hired you guys. Fuck her—she could drop off the face of the earth, but I’m scared she’s gonna keep blackmailing me and I need it to stop. I’m hoping you find her and that Nick, you know, convinces her to leave me the fuck alone. You probably don’t know this, but Nick can be … persuasive.”
“The cops—”
“I don’t want the cops involved. This is my reputation. My career gets destroyed because I started seeing someone else? Isabel and I, we weren’t even married. And when I did try to break things off with her properly, in March, she lost it and left town, but then she came back with bruises and I worried that she hurt herself because of me…”
The two sat in silence until Gray asked, “May I have the condo key and your permission to touch and take what I need? Since your name is on the lease.”
He worked the key off his key fob and handed it to Gray.
Now she had all the keys to the condo. No one could enter except through her.
“If I continue…” Gray said.
“I’ll keep paying your rate. Just get my dog back and make all of this stop.”
27
Gray was exhausted now, and buzzed from delicious white wine and the last breaths of lunchtime Vicodin. She had one more hour left in her, an hour and a half at most, before her internal clock hit midnight and she turned into a pumpkin.
Sitting in traffic, she was too irritated to listen to Oleta, Angie, or even Jill. She didn’t want to hear about lost love, found love, found faith, lost faith. She wanted to get to that damned place, to finish this damned case, either by standing over a body or by sitting across from one.
The evening brought with it cool breezes, and the sky swirled with colors of tangerines and pomegranates, eggplants and lemons. She was hungry, and her fridge at home was filled with diet shakes. Neon signs lining La Brea Avenue suggested burgers, chicken, and poke.
No, she didn’t want any of this.
Fifteen minutes later, a young black man with sleepy eyes spooned oxtails and gravy into a foam carton. “Your first side?” he asked.
A line snaked across the rust-colored tile floors of Dulan’s. Squirming kids, exhausted nurses, and starving men wanted their protein and three sides. Cobbler, too, but only if it was fresh.
Gray stood at the front of that line and her eyes darted from the steaming steel pockets of glistening collard greens and the colorful medley of corn-tomatoes-okra to the creamy orange of macaroni and cheese. At the register, she added a tub of peach cobbler to her bill because, today, she had earned every sugary cinnamon bite. She deserved the soft crunch of crust after having received a faked proof of life picture. Those buttery, melt-in-your-mouth peaches, no longer fruit but more of a memory of fruit, were rewards for peeking through Kevin Tompkins’s album of peeping tomfoolery. Every calorie she ate would replace a smidgen of the soul she’d lost since meeting Ian O’Donnell and the people associated with this case.
And Hank. Fucker. Not a text, not a call. Nothing. She’d eat both corn muffins to cloud her feelings about that. The six thousand calories and countless carbohydrates would slog down those feelings, mute her hatred and resentment, quiet the “Girl, you was used” drag queen that sometimes perched and preached in her head.
The bottle of Viognier that she purchased from the fancy downtown grocery store would help it all go down like a queen’s feast. No LaCroix at queen’s feasts.
Her phone rang right as she buckled her seat belt. Wasn’t Nick. Wasn’t Hank. It was definitely work related, and she’d already accepted that being a private investigator was not a nine-to-five gig. And so she answered.
“Hey, it’s Bruce Norwich, over at Allan Construction.” The man sounded out of breath and phlegmy but strong enough to haul a beam of wood across his back. “Looks like you called a few hours ago. Sorry for getting back to you so late.”
Glad that she had answered, Gray explained that she was working a missing persons case. “And Omar Neville’s name came up, but only as a friend. He certainly hasn’t done anything wrong. It’s just that we can’t find someone he knows.”
Bruce Norwich barked a laugh. “You taking more clients? I haven’t seen Oz in weeks.”
“He’s in Nevada, isn’t he?”
“He was supposed to be, but he never showed up. I waited two weeks for him to come, but nope, no Omar. No word from Omar. No nothing from Omar. So I fired him last week—not that he knows that.”
“He didn’t pick up his last check?” Gray’s face had numbed, and now she couldn’t feel the words vibrating off her lips.
“Nope. Someone else signed for it.”
Gray grabbed a pen from the center console and a napkin from the bag. “You know who signed for his check?”
“Uhh … Lemme look…”
She closed her eyes as Bruce Norwich flipped through the pages of a ledger. “Here … I found it. So … his wife picked it up. Yeah. Says here, Elyse Miller. You should probably call her—she’ll know where he is.”
Gray sat in her car, gaping at the cars racing up and down Crenshaw Boulevard. Unblinking. Unmoving. Until: “Who the fuck is Elyse Miller?”