When they werewalking away, Virgil said, “Let’s go find the roommate. Brady.”
“The BCA should have an address for her,” Lucas said. “Make a call.”
In the truck, Virgil called Jon Duncan and got Stephanie Brady’s address, workplace, and phone number. When Virgil called her, she said her office was on the south side of St. Paul, near the airport, and that she was eating lunch across the street. She’d be back in fifteen minutes.
12
The offices of Canton, Domingo and Brady, CPAs, were in a small, freestanding yellow stucco building two blocks from the Mississippi, with an Apple/Mac computer repair service on one side and lactation consultants on the other. Before they went in, Virgil checked his backup cell, and found that he’d already had two calls. He read the voicemail transcripts and deleted them.
Lucas: “Crap?”
“Crap.”
“Toldja.”
—
Stephanie Brady hada lot of freckles. A lot.
She was slender and tall with red-brown hair, a thin, long nose, wore a greenish suit; Lucas noticed that she had large hands, like a piano player has in the movies.
“I’ve been trying to forget the murder for twenty years,” she said, when she came to the receptionist’s desk to meet them. “Come on back to our conference room.”
“We saw in the interviews you did at the time of Doris’s murder that the investigators came to you three times, for interviews. They also picked up all of Doris’s possessions,” Lucas said as they took chairs around a circular mahogany table in the conference room. One wall was a bookcase stuffed with tax code volumes that appeared to be unused.
“That’s correct,” she said. “Doris had an expensive wardrobe and they wondered if she’d gotten gifts from guys she’d dated…or if…they were wondering if she’d been paid, you know, to have sex with guys and used the money to buy the stuff.”
“I take it she couldn’t have paid for it with the salaries you guys were on?” Virgil asked.
She shook her head. “No way. Some of those shoes…they’d be way more than we made in a week, and she had lots of them. I tried not to be curious about it, you know, because she said she got financial help from her parents. I suspected that wasn’t true, because she didn’t want to talk about it—but why wouldn’t you talk about it, if you were interested in fashion, and the money came from some innocent place like your parents? The investigators told me later that she didn’t get money from her parents.”
“Did you go out with her? Did you hang out together, go clubbing?” Virgil asked.
“Only once in a while,” Brady said. “We’d go over to First Avenue if there was a rumor that Prince might show up. I was a huge Prince fan, so I’d go with, if she’d heard something.”
“The source of the money—you didn’t inquire or suspect anything about a specific guy?”
“No.” She hesitated, and then, “That’s…why I wondered if she got money from them. There seemed to be several of them. Sometimes she…smelled like sex, if you know what I mean.”
Lucas nodded: “We do.”
“One thing we didn’t do was double-date,” Brady said. “I didn’t date much anyway, I was too busy. I always wanted to be a CPA because they make the big bucks. That takes extra schoolwork and also work experience—a minimum of two thousand hours of work experience—and you have to study for the exam, which is no walk in the park. Anyway, when I wasn’t working, I was usually studying and taking classes, not going out to clubs.”
“Doris wasn’t interested in being a CPA?”
“She said she’d do it later. You know, when she was in her thirties. After she was married.”
Virgil: “Huh.” He looked at Lucas.
“I got nothing,” Lucas said.
“There was one thing, that the original investigators didn’t get, and I don’t think is important, but I thought later, like, years later, that maybe I should have mentioned,” Brady said.
Virgil: “Yeah?”
“I had this old Canon film camera. I think it’s called a Rebel. I only had one lens for it. Anyway, Doris used it more than I did. She liked to look at the pictures and she had a lot of them printed. I’ve still got the photos, in a box, that she took. I looked through them years after she was killed. I didn’t see much of interest, but I do have quite a few photos.”
Virgil said, “We’d like to see them. Maybe they’d show the people she hung out with; or executives she was talking to?”
