Chapter Ten
The apartment building on Elliston Place looked exactly as I remembered it: a lovely example of early twentieth-century architecture built of dark red brick with crenellations and granite accents and absolutely massive, multi-paned windows. I’d spent more hours than I cared to count parked in a loading dock down the street during those first few weeks after David moved out, watching lights go on and off in what I’d figured out was Jacquie’s third-floor window, annoying myself with images of what they were doing in there.
It had been pathetic, really. Or I had been pathetic. But grief—or whatever you want to call the emotional toll of losing your husband to someone fifteen years younger—makes you do stupid things.
Mendoza pulled his Jeep into a visitor’s spot in the small lot behind the building, and I followed suit. After taking a second to check my lipstick in the rearview mirror, I climbed out and went to meet him. We walked around the corner and up the sidewalk to the front entrance in silence.
“Ready?” Mendoza asked.
I nodded, though I wasn’t sure I was. Delivering news of a death is never easy, even when the deceased was someone you didn’t care about and the bereaved is someone you like even less.
Mendoza put his finger on the doorbell next to Demetros, J, and pushed it. I waited for Jacquie’s voice to greet us—or greet me, since she didn’t know Mendoza was coming—but it didn’t happen. Instead, the lock clicked, and when Mendoza pushed the door, it opened.
I had never been inside Jacquie’s building before, just watched it from outside. The lobby turned out to be as spectacularly fancy as the exterior, with a marble floor in a checkerboard pattern—slabs of marble, not tile on top of concrete—and ceilings that were easily twenty feet tall with plaster accents. A wide staircase with what looked like a carved mahogany banister curved up along one side of it.
We took the stairs to the third floor, and came out on a landing that smelled like someone’s curry dinner from last night, with an undertone of carpet cleaner that wasn’t quite strong enough to mask something less pleasant. Roach spray, maybe? It was a long time since I’d had to deal with anything but the very fancy house in Hillwood—certainly too fancy for cockroaches to make their home there—but there’s something about the smell of Raid that you never forget once it has exploded through the insides of your nostrils.
“That and decomposition,” Mendoza contributed, and I realized that I must have said it out loud.
“Ugh.” My face puckered. “Don’t remind me.”
Jacquie’s apartment was in the front of the building, and to the left of the front door from where I’d sat on the street, watching. That made it number 3B. From what I could tell from gazing down the hall, there were six apartment on each floor, three on the left and three on the right of the central hallway.
Mendoza knocked, three sharp raps that echoed down the hall.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then I heard footsteps approaching, quick and light, and the door swung open.
My first thought was that Jacquie looked terrible.
My second was that it wasn’t for lack of trying. She was as put-together as always, if a bit more casually dressed. Zachary would have been on the floor panting like a dog, in fact. She was barefoot—showing off delicate toes painted a dark pink—and her hair was pulled up in a messy knot that somehow managed to look like haute couture. With that, she was wearing skintight yoga pants and a cropped top that made the most of her cleavage (impressive in its own right) and left her midriff—and her navel-piercing—bare.
No, it wasn’t any of that that was the problem. It was the look of terror in her eyes, and the little squeak she let out when she saw Mendoza standing next to me. What little natural color there had been drained from her face, leaving the artificial blush in her cheeks to stand out like clown makeup.
“Detective Mendoza.” Her voice came out barely above a whisper.
“Miss Demetros.” Mendoza’s tone was as professionally neutral as the little nod he gave her. If the yoga pants and cleavage and navel-piercing affected him at all, he gave no sign of it. “May we come in?”
Jacquie’s eyes widened, and one hand went to her chest like she couldn’t catch her breath.
“It’s Nick,” she whispered, “isn’t it? Something’s happened to Nick.”
I opened my mouth, but Mendoza gave me a kick in the ankle. I was wearing boots, so it didn’t hurt, although that didn’t mean I appreciated it. When I turned to him with a scowl, he gave me one back that clearly said, “I told you I would be doing the talking.”
“May we come in?” he repeated.
Jacquie’s hand fell, and she nodded jerkily before stepping aside to let us pass.
I like other people’s living spaces, so even under the circumstances I couldn’t help but look around appreciatively. The apartment was gorgeous. Old hardwood floors, polished to a gleam. Ten-foot ceilings with plaster moldings. And those massive windows everywhere. The smell of Raid was better in here, or maybe the scent of Jacquie’s perfume just drowned it out.
The front door opened into a small foyer with hooks for coats and a shelf for shoes and a closet. The doorway to the left led into a narrow galley kitchen with white cabinets, marble counters, and stainless-steel appliances. Nice, if one the small side.
The décor was expensive but minimal: a caramel-colored sofa that probably cost more than my first car, a glass coffee table with fashion magazines fanned across it, a flat-screen TV mounted on the wall. I wondered (unkindly) how much of this David had paid for, and whether she had trouble affording it now that he was no longer subsidizing her lifestyle.
Had Nick been helping out with money, and that was how he had got in trouble with the Cosa Nostra? Had he taken up gambling to keep Jacquie in the style to which David had accustomed her, and when the house won—because the house always wins—Nick had ended up indebted to the mob?
Jacquie turned to face us, her arms wrapped around herself like she was cold. (To be fair, she probably was. She wasn’t wearing much, and it was November.) “Please. Just tell me.”
It crossed my mind to wonder how she had known to dress up for Mendoza when I hadn’t mentioned that he’d be coming. The outfit certainly hadn’t been donned to impress me; not unless she was still trying to remind me that she was twenty-five while I was forty. But under the circumstances, with David dead and with me working for her, offending me was not going to be working in her favor, and I couldn’t imagine how she’d think it would.
