Milo said, “When did Marcella drop by?”
“Saturday morning.”
“Do you remember what time?”
“Maybe…ten? I came in through there.” Pointing to a second back door. “I wasn’t open for business, caught up prepping for the show. I heard pounding on the front door, figured some homeless person is going bonkers, went out to see. If it looked sketchy I was ready to call 911.”
“Have you done that before?”
“Not yet but one needs to keep one’s eyes open, right?”
“Right. So Marcella was the one knocking.”
“She and some guy. He’s just standing there but she’s waving her hands and looking agitated. I let them in and she goes on about Benny not coming home the day before. You’re here so I guess he still hasn’t.”
Milo said, “He’ll never come home, Ms. Okash.”
“What do you mean?”
Out came the card.
Okash read it, eyes scanning slowly. “Really? Oh, fuck, that’s disgusting. That is truly disgusting. What the fuck happened?”
Not shocked; annoyed.
“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” said Milo. “Did Benny show up for work on Friday?”
“Sure, the usual, around elevenish. Normally, he leaves between two and four, I’m flexible. That day I had to be out for the afternoon, got back at four thirty and assumed he’d left.”
“Benny was here by himself.”
Okash folded her arms across her chest. “He wasn’t a child and the deal wasn’t I had to babysit him.”
“He could just let himself out.”
“The door self-locks.”
“So Marcella showed up Saturday. You’d heard nothing from her the day Benny didn’t come home?”
Okash’s eyes turned icy. “All these questions. I have to say I’m starting to feel uncomfortable.”
“About?”
“Being questioned like a suspect. I did someone a favor, that’s all—and yes, turns out Marcella did call me on Friday. I was busy, didn’t check for messages.”
“Don’t mean to upset you,” said Milo. “It’s just in cases like these we need to talk to everyone.”
“There’s talk and there’s inquisition.”
The door to the front room swung open hard enough to bang against the wall. Letting in crowd noise and Geoffrey Dugong. The painter’s body canted forward.
Unlike Okash, an animated face: eyes blazing, cheeks flushed, mouth working.
“You leave me the fuck alone out there! I’m supposed to talk to these fuck-brains by myself?”
Okash regarded him the way a pedestrian looks at dogshit. “I’ll be out in a second, Geoffrey.”
“You better—who the fuck areyou?”
