Grandfelt scratched at her lower lip with her upper teeth, then said, “Okay. I have to trust you. This Anne Cash woman…she’s vicious.”
“Sheisa trial,” Lucas said. “But really, if she’s vicious, she’s yours. This whole thing is not our idea, it’s yours.”
“But we’ve actually turned up new evidence,” Grandfelt snapped back. “Opened up a whole new path of investigation. Not Anne Cash: you two. And this Bud Light.”
Lucas said, “I’ll give you that. It’s possible that we’ll actually catch Doris’s killer; or if he’s dead, identify him.”
Grandfelt turned down the offer of a lemonade or potato chips, and after another minute of meaningless conversation, she and Wise walked out.
14
Stephanie Brady poked her head out her door, eye-checked Lucas and Virgil, and said, “Come in. I hope you’re not allergic to cats.”
They weren’t, and a good thing: four cats, three tabbies and one black as Satan, were either already in the living room, or came strolling in, to inspect the visitors. The house was neat, with minimalist furnishings and a complete lack of knick-knacks. Through a doorway, they could see a kitchen and a man standing by a counter, with his back to them.
“Let’s do this in the kitchen,” Brady said.
They went that way, trailing her, and the man turned to meet them; he’d been eating a bowl of cereal while he looked at a laptop. He was thin, balding with a modest brown mustache, wearing a yellow Miles Davis tee-shirt. He had a glass of milk in his hand. He said, “Hi. I’m Dan Peltz, Stephanie’s husband.”
They shook hands and Brady said, “I’ve got the picture box on the table…I just got home. I didn’t have time to sort the photos, we can do that now.”
The kitchen smelled like cereal and toast and milk, with a faint, but not subtle, odor of cat pan. A brown cardboard box sat in the center of a hardwood table with four chairs around it. One of the cats jumped up on the table, looked in the box. Peltz picked the cat up and dropped it on the floor, where it landed as soft as a sponge.
The box, twenty inches wide and long, and a foot high, with a lid, looked like it might once have contained a cowboy hat. The interior was half-filled with a pile of photographic prints, most of them four by six inches, a few smaller, some larger. They looked like they’d been machine-printed at Walmart or Target.
A small Canon 35mm film camera sat beside the box. Brady picked it up and said, “This is my old camera, but I hardly used it—Doris used it last. I noticed there’s still a roll of film inside. The film probably isn’t any good anymore. It’s been in there for twenty years.”
“Where’d you keep this stuff?” Lucas asked.
“Well, at the apartment. Not in Doris’s room, where everything else was. Because, the camera was mine. The box was in the hall closet, on a shelf, where we could both get it when we wanted it. When the investigators went through Doris’s stuff, I never thought about the box,” Brady said. “I stayed in the apartment until I met Dan and never touched the box until we moved here. Then, this was like six or seven years after the murder…”
“Seven,” Peltz said. He took a sip of milk, leaving a rim of white on his upper lip. He licked it off. He was a type that Lucas found irritating: he was satisfied with who he was and what he had, and always had been. No tread wear on Dan. “Almost eight.”
“I didn’t think there’d be anything significant in it after all that time,” Brady concluded.
“The BCA has a photo lab contact who might be able to save the film,” Virgil said. “I’d like to take the camera with me. If we get prints of you, or people you know, we can return them to you.”
“That’d be fine, but I can’t hardly remember using it,” Brady said. “I don’t know when phone photos started. When they did, which I think was a little after Doris was killed, I started using my phone and never looked back.”
—
She set thecamera aside for Virgil, reached into the box, pulled out a handful of photos, shuffled through them, and dealt a half dozen out to Lucas and Virgil. “That’s Doris in the photos. They’re not very good.”
The photos were faded, the color gone blurry, as if they hadn’t been fixed very well. But they could see Grandfelt as she’d been when she was alive, and her pretty pale face showed the kind of sad defiant vulnerability that both Lucas and Virgil recognized from the faces of women they’d known who sold sex.
They divided up the rest of the box between the four of them, and in the end had a stack of photos of Grandfelt, including twelve with several different men. The photos were poor enough that they were unable to decide how many of the twelve were actually of different men, and how many might be duplicates. With one exception, all the photos were taken in or outside of bars. The exception was a photo taken at Bee Accounting, of Grandfelt and a man standing next to a coffin-sized Xerox machine. Brady recognized the man: “That’s George McCallan. I don’t think Doris would have had anything to dowith him. He was obnoxious and he smelled funny. You notice that they don’t look especially happy.”
Lucas spread the other eleven photos like a tarot spread: “You don’t recognize any of these guys? You’re sure?”
“I don’t. None of them worked at Bee. Like I said, I didn’t go to clubs very much. Except, you know, for Prince,” Brady said. “Doris went three or four days a week, Wednesday or Thursday, then always on Friday and Saturday for sure. She liked to get high and she liked to dance.”
“Alcohol, weed, coke?” Virgil asked.
“All of that, I think,” Brady said. “I talked to her about it, but she said she was okay. She never bought any drugs, she said, sometimes she used when somebody gave her some. I told that to the investigators.”
“How many nights a week didn’t she come home?” Virgil asked.
“Oh, she stayed out late, but she always came home. Late, I mean, two or three o’clock. A couple of times, the sun was up, but she always showed up.”
