ER - A Murder Too Personal Read Free

ticked off a list of people she used to associate
with. “I don’t know who her friends are now. The way she was, she
didn’t maintain relationships.”
    “Who was her latest boyfriend?” Forgash
asked, more tentatively this time. “Or was she still banging
Wheelock?”
    “How the hell should I know? Maybe she didn’t
even have one.”
    Didn’t have one? Not too likely. I couldn’t
imagine her without a current stud. Was he the bastard who killed
her?
    “Can you give us some idea where she got that
coke, Ed?”
    “Damned if I know, Gene. She didn’t even
drink when we were married. Claimed it was bad for her health. She
only ate healthy foods, exercised regularly, strictly by the book,
you know.”
    Black nodded in acknowledgment. He was the
type who took in information slowly, processed it thoroughly, and
never forgot it. “Tell me about her,” he said. “What kind of person
she was…what she did…”
    I considered his question. What could I tell
him? That she was elegant. It was the best word to describe her.
There wasn’t anything cheap or second-rate about her. That she was
loving. When she loved you, she gave everything she had without
restraint until she couldn’t give you any more. There was no
deception or artifice about her.
    That wasn’t what they wanted to hear. There
was nothing useful I could tell them now. I’d been out of the
picture too long.
    “Talk to her sister,” I said. “She can tell
you more about Alicia than I can.”
    “We will, Ed. Only she’s been out of town.
She’s due back today.” Black’s eyes wandered over the top of my
desk, inspecting the folders and stacks of paper.
    “Was she close to her sister?” he asked.
    “Yeah,” I said. “They talked on the phone
almost every day. No one was closer to her.”
    I finished the last bitter dregs of my coffee
and tossed the cup in the garbage.
    Then I had a vision. Tall, thin, blond. Lying
on the floor with unseeing eyes and mouth open.
    “What did she look like, Gene?”
    He glanced at his partner with a pained look,
then back at me. “One slug through the back of the head. No
struggle. Her apartment was ripped apart though.”
    “Forced entry?” I asked.
    “Nope.”
    “What was the time of death?”
    “That’s enough, Rogan,” the seamstress cut
in. “We’re not here to answer your fucking questions. Now you tell
me what kinda gun you carry.”
    “Glock seventeen. But I don’t carry it all
the time, my friend. It’s at home.”
    He squinted at me. “Have no fear. We’ll check
it out.”

CHAPTER III
     
     
    There were just a few peanuts left. Dave
Tanner rooted around absentmindedly in the bottom of the bowl. I
signaled the waitress for another round of Budweisers and held up
the bowl for her to see.
    Tanner stared across the tables as the girl
sashayed away from us. He’d thickened some since our days of
humping through Thua Thien province, but he still played a mean
game of pickup basketball. And he still sported a crewcut.
    Only now he was an institutional bond
salesman with a white-shoe Wall Street firm, one of those venerable
second-tier outfits you see in the middle of the tombstone ads.
    “Too broad abeam?” he asked.
    “What?”
    “Her ass.”
    I shook my head. “She’s a good kid. Studying
to be a lawyer.”
    We were sitting underneath an oversized red
umbrella in the outdoor patio of Cafe Centro on East Forty-fifth,
surrounded by a barricade of shrubbery. It was a hazy late
afternoon with just a faint breeze stirring. All around us office
workers were scurrying home or out to an evening rendezvous. Men in
dark suits with stress lines creasing their faces. Women in
flowered dresses carrying shopping bags filled with credit card
purchases. A couple at the next table were hunched together, deep
in conversation. They’d had a few drinks already and, from the
snatches of conversation I could hear, the guy was laying a
full-court press on the girl to convince her to take him back to
her