Eight Perfect Murders(14)

“Sorry,” I said. “It’s fine. I’m still working on these.”

He cleared the agent’s plate, and she ordered more coffee. I decided to make an attempt on my eggs, thinking it would look strange if I didn’t. Agent Mulvey looked at her watch and asked me if I was going in to work.

“I’ll go in,” I said. “I doubt I’ll have any customers, but I’ll check on Nero.”

“Oh, Nero,” she said, with affection in her voice.

I remembered that she had cats of her own and asked her, “Who’s looking after your cats?” As soon as I said it, I realized that it was a very personal question. It also sounded as though I was trying to figure out if she was single. I wondered if she thought I was hitting on her. I wasn’t a whole lot older than she was—ten years maybe—although I did know that my hair, prematurely white, made me look a little older.

“They’re fine,” she said, avoiding the question. “They have each other.”

I continued to eat, and she glanced at her phone, then put it facedown back on the table.

“I do have to ask you where you were the night of September thirteenth, the night that Elaine Johnson died.”

“Of course,” I said. “What night was it?”

“It was the thirteenth.”

“No, the day of the week.”

“Let me check.” She picked her phone back up, scrolled for ten seconds, then said, “It was a Saturday night.”

“I was away,” I said. “In London.” I take the same vacation every year, two weeks in London, usually at the beginning of September. It’s low tourist season because the kids are back in school, but the weather is usually still good. Plus, it’s an okay time to be away from the store.

“Do you know the exact dates you were away?” she asked.

“If the thirteenth was Saturday then I flew back the next day, on Sunday, the fourteenth. I can send you the flights I was on, if you’d like. I know it was basically the first two weeks in September.”

“Okay, thanks,” she said, which I took to mean that she wanted me to send her my exact flights.

“If Elaine Johnson was killed by Charlie . . .” I said.

“Yes?”

“Then it makes it much more likely that Charlie is definitely using my list.”

“Yes, it does. And it means that he not only knows who you are, but that he knows people around you. I’m assuming it can’t be a coincidence that one of the victims is someone you knew personally.”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Is there anyone who has a grudge against you, maybe an ex-employee, someone who might have known that Elaine Johnson was a regular at Old Devils?”

“Not that I know of,” I said. “There aren’t that many ex-employees from the store, actually. I only need two extra people, and the two I have now have both been with me for over two years.”

“Can you tell me their names?” she said, pulling a notebook out from her bag.

I gave her Emily’s and Brandon’s full names and she wrote them down.

“What can you tell me about them?” she said.

I told her what I knew. It wasn’t much. Emily Barsamian had graduated from Winslow College, outside of Boston, about four years ago, and gotten an internship at the Boston Athen?um, a prestigious and historic independent library. She’d supplemented her income by coming to work at Old Devils for twenty hours a week. When the internship was finished, she upped her hours and had been with me ever since. I knew hardly anything about her personal life because she rarely talked, and when she did, it was only about books, or sometimes movies. I suspected that she was a secret writer but hadn’t confirmed it. Brandon Weeks was my gregarious employee. He still lived with his mom and his sisters in Roxbury, and both Emily and I probably knew everything about him, certainly everything about his family, and about his current girlfriend. When I’d hired him, as extra help during the holiday season two years ago, I admit that I had doubts about whether he’d show up with any kind of regularity. But he stayed on, and as far as I remembered, had never missed a single day or even been late.

“And that’s it?” Agent Mulvey asked.

“For current employees? Yes. I go in every day, myself. And when I go on vacation, either we hire a temp, or Brian, my co-owner, comes in and does a few shifts. If you want, I’ll put together a list of past employees and send it to you.”

“Brian is Brian Murray?” she said.

“Yes, you know him?”

“I saw his name on your website. I’ve heard of him, yes.”

Brian is a semifamous writer who lives in the South End, and who writes the Ellis Fitzgerald series. He’s easily up to about twenty-five books by now; they don’t sell as well as they used to, but Brian writes them anyway, keeping his female detective Ellis at a perpetual thirty-five years old, and keeping both fashion and technology advancements out of his narratives. The books are set sometime in late ’80s Boston, as was the TV series called Ellis that ran for two years and provided Brian with the town house he bought in the South End, his lake house in the far north of Maine, and enough extra money to invest in Old Devils.

“Include other people on your list, if you think of them. Pissed-off customers? Any exes of yours we should know about?”