“Actually there? Couldn’t tell you. Not often. Mostly I see her coming and going. Once in a while I happened to see her go in.”
“What time of day?”
“Normal time,” said Hawkins. “Daylight. Never paid attention.”
“Not at night?”
“I wouldn’t know if it was. Go to sleep at nine and get up at six to do my push-ups.”
“When’s the last time you saw her?”
“Not for a while,” said Hawkins.
“Weeks?”
“Maybe. Can’t say. Could be a month.”
“Nothing more recent.”
“All these questions, she the one who did it?”
“We’re not even close to that, sir,” said Alicia. “In fact, this is the first we’ve heard of her.”
Lionel Hawkins said, “Well, I can’t be the only one who noticed her, someone crazy like that. The way she walked was enough to figure it out.”
“Figure what out, Mr. Hawkins?”
“Stiff, not normal, the brain all scrambled up. Maybe on drugs, too.”
He made a churning motion.
Alicia said, “When you did see her enter Ms. Matthias’s house, was it through the front door?”
“Nope, always the back. And that’s all I can tell you.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“NowI’vegot a question foryou.Do I need to be keeping my .38 at the ready?”
“There’s no sign anyone’s in danger,” said Milo. “I’d just continue normal precautions.”
“Normal,” said Hawkins. “Too bad she wasn’t. Neither of them, actually.”
“She and Ms. Matthias.”
“I never saw her much, either. Which is kind of a symptom, right? Being a hermit? Shutting yourself in? The one time I tried to be friendly—shortly after I moved in—I’m taking out the garbage and see her doing the same. I wave and shout out hello. She ignores me. At first I’m thinking it’s, you know, my complexion, welcome to the neighborhood. Then I thought, Hey, all the other neighbors are prettyfriendly so she’s either a racist or weird. Then when I saw how she lived I moved closer to weird.ThenI saw the daughter and said, You got that right, Lionel. Making a kid like that, she’d have to be weird.”
—
We returned to the sidewalk in front of Martha Matthias’s house.
Alicia said, “Interesting.”
Milo said, “When I get back I’ll get hold of Martha’s retirement docs and see if any dependents show up.”
“Dependent as in heir, L.T.? Oldest motive in the books.”
A silver Jaguar XE approached the cordon. A uniform went over and talked to the driver, allowed the car to nose in next to Alicia’s unmarked.
