lot more believable than Eva La Louche." He would not stop staring at her, not even when he pulled a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and began to smoke in her face. His gaze was relentless.
"Why are you glaring at me?" she finally asked in a voice that sounded remarkably like a little girl's.
"Because Eva Stubbs died with a contusion the size of a softball on her head. And I want to know what she had to do with you. And how you knew it might be her." He ground out his cigarette on the table top, half finished, and promptly lit up a fresh one.
"She was attempting to help in the investigation of Emily's death," Auntie Lil admitted in a feeble voice.
"What? Speak up. You talk louder than an announcer at the ball park. I ought to know. You've been pestering me for a week. So don't pull that little old lady crap on me. Pull yourself together and tell me everything you know." In his anger, all traces of the usual bitter, disillusioned cop had disappeared. Santos was on his home turf and it had been violated and, by God, he was now taking charge.
He was right. She was behaving foolishly. She did have to pull herself together. There was no need for her to feel guilt over Eva's death… was there? After all, she had warned the women not to go off on their own. And Theodore had warned them against being on the streets too late at night. Eva had probably disregarded both of their cautions. It was not her fault the woman had died. She straightened her shoulders and began. "She was a friend of Emily's. They go back many years. As rivals, more than friends, I would say. I think she had been watching Emily's building and following various people."
"Following people?" The detective's cigarette dangled incredulously from one corner of his mouth, making him look like a Humphrey Bogart character from a forties movie.
"Well, you wouldn't pay any attention when I told you Emily lived in that building," she said defensively. "Someone had to look into the situation."
Santos opened his mouth, changed his mind and shut it abruptly, then stared out a tiny barred window and counted to twelve softly. Only his lips moved. No sound came out—which did nothing for Auntie Lil's nerves. "What else?" he finally asked calmly.
"I don't know anything else," she admitted. "Eva has been missing since yesterday morning, I think. She did not show up for lunch at St. Barnabas. Which was, I gather, unheard of for her."
Detective Santos sighed. "That puts the last time she was seen at about 11:00 a.m.," he thought out loud. "One of the other women at her shelter saw her heading uptown at about that time. Know anything else?"
When Auntie Lil shook her head, he leaned across the table toward her until they were nearly nose to nose. "I'm going to tell you something very important," he began in a deadly calm voice. "And I'm going to be a lot nicer about it than Lieutenant Abromowitz was. Who, by the way, I'm beginning to think may be right about you after all. Two women are now dead. And something tells me that the second one did not have to die. Something tells me that if you had not come on the scene and whipped Emily's friends into a frenzy of righteousness, that this old woman might have been around to enjoy a few more years of her meager but fairly comfortable life."
Now that made her mad. "No one forced Eva to do anything," Auntie Lil said defiantly. "And she would rather have died doing something important than to have wasted away bored to tears."
"How about you? How do you want to die?"
"Die?" she repeated faintly, her rebellion dissolving. "That wouldn't be a threat?"
"It's not a threat from me. Have you thought that maybe Eva wasn't the intended victim after all? That maybe it was you. There is a great resemblance between you and the latest corpse, wouldn't you say? With the exception of that pathetic dyed black hair, the two of you are remarkably alike in physical characteristics, aren't you?"
For once Auntie Lil was silent. It was an unpleasant but inescapable point.
They heard the sound of muttering and heavy footsteps nearing the room. The approaching male voice sounded artificially firm, infused with booming enthusiasm and phony competence. "We consider the case closed," he was repeating in an overly hearty baritone. "Thanks