The Dangerous Edge of Things - By Tina Whittle Page 0,44
what happened to her.”
Janie glowered, like she wanted to argue.
“Just tell me,” I said. “Is it true?”
She sat there for a second, then exhaled. “Yeah, it’s true. She always felt like she owed him for that one, and he made sure she kept feeling that way.” Janie shoved the papers back at me. “He did it, didn’t he? He killed her.”
“I don’t know.”
“I told her to stay away, but she wouldn’t listen. He kept telling Eliza he was a better man when he was with her, and she believed that. She liked that.”
Don’t we all? I thought.
“But she mainly kept him around for the drugs, you know? She said she was kicking the stuff, and I believed her…but then I found out otherwise.” She looked me right in the eye, and I saw effort behind it. “They found drugs at her apartment, some meth, some pot. The manager at her place told the cops he’d been suspicious, but that he hadn’t wanted to say anything.”
“You mean Jake Whitaker?”
She shrugged. “I don’t remember his name.”
Suddenly, I was thinking about Whitaker, how he’d lied when he said Eliza was well-liked. And I remembered something else that had been bothering me.
“This may sound off the subject, but how well did Eliza know Mark Beaumont?”
“She’d met him at one of the staff events, said he was real nice. He even sent her this Christmas card one time.”
“So they were close?”
Janie looked at me like I was a little cracked. “He’s Mark Beaumont. She’s a receptionist. Everybody got Christmas cards.”
“But he’s doing all this—”
“Yeah, well, I appreciate it, I really do.” She unfolded her napkin, wiped her mouth, folded it again. “But it’s not really about Eliza, you know?”
Yeah, I knew. The construction noise across the street abruptly ceased, and a startling silence fell. It was disconcerting, like being in the middle of a party when suddenly the only voice you can hear is your own. A mockingbird trilled from the shrub beside me. I guessed it had been singing all along.
Janie didn’t speak. It wasn’t until I reached for my bag that she said, “There’s something else.”
I waited. She stared at her napkin. “I went to the bank to clear out her account. Mama thought we could use it for the funeral. Anyway, Eliza had been getting money, a lot of money.”
“How much?”
“A thousand here, more or less there.”
“For how long?”
“Ever since she moved here, six months or so. The police found a shoebox full of cash on the top shelf of her closet.” Janie cast her eyes sideways, like she was afraid of being overheard. “I know what that looks like, all that money. I know what the police are thinking, especially since she got hooked up with Bulldog again.”
“Was she involved with any other shady people?”
“You mean like that stripper friend of hers?”
“What stripper friend?”
“I don’t know, Bambi, Tricksie, something like that.”
A stripper. I remembered the other thing Rico had discovered—that my mysterious caller had called me from a pay phone right in front of a strip club.
Janie’s eyes went shiny, but her composure didn’t crack. “The cops wouldn’t let me have any of her stuff, not the cards I sent her, not her computer. I went over there to get something for her to wear. She had textbooks for this psychology course and some flowers in a vase in the kitchen, one of those bouquets you get at the supermarket. I keep thinking, if she could have found something to get serious about…”
I imagined the scene, a life cut short in midstream, the rest of the world running on around the absence, eventually washing over it. I thought about my old apartment—the sheets that hadn’t been changed, the half-eaten roll of cookie dough in the fridge, the risqué e-mails from my ex-boyfriend.
She pushed her coffee away. “I’ve got to clean it out eventually. Of course I do, it’s always me. And she’s family, flesh and blood, I ain’t denying it. But you tell me, what the hell do I do with all this?”
“I don’t know, Janie.” And we just sat there for five more minutes. And I was telling the truth—I didn’t know what to do next, especially not with my envelope full of illicit information—but I hoped that I would figure it out, and soon.
The jackhammer started again. Something always did.
Chapter 23
I waited until Trey and I were pulling out of the Beaumont Enterprises parking deck to spring it on him. “Hypothetical situation. Pretend I have some information that I