all morning. You know, just get up and go about my business like nothing happened.” She looked up at me with sad, crystalline eyes. “But it’s stupid, y’know. I mean, Don was everywhere. Everything reminds me of him. I can’t stop wondering what the hell’s going to happen now.”
“Are you a relative? Miss … ?” I realized I didn’t know her last name.
She looked up at me with a quick, genuine grin. She almost looked amused. “Jones.” She shielded her eyes from the sun with her hand to get a better look at me. “I’m Brianna Jones.”
She spoke in a way that said she was used to people knowing who she was. I didn’t. So I just nodded and said, “It’s nice to meet you, Ms. Jones.”
She giggled at being addressed formally. “No. I’m not family. Well, you know, Don was the kind of guy who had a loose definition of ‘family’—a lot of people were either in or out of it over the years, from what I understand. Tiffany was his wife. Ed’s his son. I heard he was married once before. But beyond that, Don didn’t have much real family. But he was Uncle Don to a lot of people. Like me, I guess. People he took under his wing. He really wasn’t a bad guy, despite what some people said about him. He was like a father to me.”
There was a strange mixture of innocence and weariness in her voice, and it made me wonder how old she was. She could have been seventeen, but her body said twenty-five. I asked the only thing I could think of. “So how long have you lived here?”
She thought about it for a second. “About three and a half years. I moved in on my eighteenth birthday. Don said I couldn’t move in until I was eighteen.”
I did the math quickly and tried to process her comments. The whole thing made me want to ask a million questions that had nothing to do with why I was there. I took my hands out of my pockets and really wished I had something to write with. A list of names wouldn’t do me a damned bit of good if I couldn’t write it down. Rather than stand there like an idiot, I asked, “What about your family?”
She smirked and rolled her eyes. “If you saw the shithole I grew up in out in Northridge, you’d move into a place like this the first chance you got. Believe me.”
I had to stop myself with that. I ran my eyes over the smooth curves of her calves as she crossed her legs and turned toward me. “So, back to the party,” I said. “Who was here. We’d like to chat with as many people as possible who might have seen the cops arrive. Who might have seen anything at all?”
She took a deep breath and started rattling off names. “Well, Pete was in the room when Don got shot. I was just outside the room. I’d been talking to Pete right before it happened. Then there was Duffy, and Rick and Tony. Most of the girls were here.” She proceeded to rattle off a dozen more names that I knew I would never remember. I’d obviously have to go over the list with her again sometime. It was a thought I enjoyed more than I knew I should.
When she was done, I asked, “What were you and Pete talking about right before it happened?”
“Nothing, really. I was pretty drunk. I think I was just pestering him. He got kind of annoyed and said he needed to talk to Don alone and they went into the office.”
“Do you know what they were talking about?”
She shook her head and shrugged. “You’ll have to ask Pete. Pete and Don were always having private conversations, ever since Pete started coming around a few years ago. They were weird together. Don always gave Pete a lot of attention. So, anyway, they went into the office to talk and a minute later Don got shot.”
“Where were you when it happened?”
“I was back in the living room. No one even noticed the gunshot. Just all the sudden Pete came running into the room with blood all over his hands. He was hysterical. Then the two cops came running in from the deck. Then all hell broke loose. When people saw the cops they thought it was a bust.”
Brianna’s eyes shifted to look at something behind me and I turned to