“The park was the scene of a homicide a few hours earlier,” Risa interjected. The nerves he’d noticed earlier appeared under control. “We need to question everyone who was seen in the vicinity. Did you see anyone while you were there?”
“Sweet thing, I wasn’t there.” He slapped his palm lightly on the table in emphasis. “I’d like to help. Be a John Q. Citizen and all, but you don’t want me to lie, do you?”
“No, but something tells me I won’t be able to stop it, either.”
His teeth flashed. “That wounds me deeply. I came here of my own free will to help out the trusted men in blue, and alls I get is mistrust?” His eyes watchful he asked, “How ’bout that other guy? The one supposed to be there with me? What he got to say?”
“He’s been uncooperative.”
At Nate’s words, Juicy seemed to relax. “There you go, then. He probably wasn’t there neither. People gets things wrong all the time. Your witness just must have been seeing things.”
After several more minutes of getting nowhere, Nate gave up. The man wasn’t going to come clean about his whereabouts, and there was no way to press the issue without telling him Crowley had given him up. Since that wasn’t an option, there was nothing to do but to kick him loose.
“All right you can go.”
Juicy remained sitting, looking from one of them to the other. “That’s all you got? Seems like a waste to leave already after coming all the ways down here.”
“You have something else to say?”
Although it was Nate’s question, the other man addressed Risa with his answer. “Heard you was asking questions about Tory’s, a bar used to be in my neighborhood.”
“That’s right. Did you know of it?”
“I remember it. I was just a kid but I ran the streets ’bout every night. Used to be a nice place. I remember Tory, too. She had a kid my age. Skinny little blond kid. Nose always running. But sometimes he’d slip out of the place if it was busy and no one was looking to make sure he was in bed. Then me and him would hang out. We was just kids.”
“Do you know Tory’s last name?” Risa asked.
He lifted a shoulder without interest. “Never cared. And never saw her or the kid again after the place burnt down. Played in the building a lot after that, though. Took the city forever to tear it down.” He gave a grim smile and leaned forward. “Heard the building was haunted because someone got caught in that fire. Burned right along with the bar. Never got out of the upstairs apartment. If I died like that, I’d haunt a building, too.”
Seeming to have said all he was going to, he got up and ambled to the door. Went through it. The officer on the other side of it fell into step beside him to escort him out.
“Interesting,” Risa murmured.
“But hardly surprising.” The chair scraped as Nate rose and stretched. “Guys like him deny everything. And I couldn’t use the only leverage I had that might have gotten to the truth so the whole meeting was a bust.”
She rose, fell into step beside him as they left the room and headed back to his office. “I think he told the truth about one thing.”
When he cocked a brow at her, she continued, “He’s a chameleon. Just like he said. He dropped the street vernacular when he was telling us about the fire, did you notice that?”
“And that tells us what, exactly?”
“It tells us that he’s adept at fitting in wherever he needs to.”
An hour later found them both on their cells. Nate finished first and waited impatiently for Risa to do the same. When she did, she had a page full of notes and an expression of satisfaction. “Okay, I’ll still need to get more background from the newspapers archives, but the clerk in the property office gave me a place to start. Tory Marie Baltes had owed the business in question. She’d bought it five years earlier. Paid her taxes on time. No problem on file until the building burnt. Technically she still owned the structure. Insurance should have paid off, if the owner carried it. But it was listed as abandoned and eventually the city took it over.”
“Is she the one who died in the fire?”
Risa lifted a shoulder. “Can’t tell that from property tax records. But if what Juicy told us is true—a big if—I have a