hair was pulled back, and it looked like she might have put a little bit of makeup on but I couldn’t be sure.
“Can I get you anything? Coffee?”
“If you’re having some, sure. If not, I’m fine.”
She went and got us both a cup of coffee, adding milk and sugar to mine without asking. While I waited I bent down and scratched the dog on the back of his head. He was old, I realized, his big eyes filmed with cataracts. “That’s Jack,” she said, when she handed me my coffee. I took a sip as Polly settled herself across from me on the couch. She crossed her legs and the robe fell away from her legs. She was heavy in the middle, her stomach bulging against the robe, but Polly Greenier had lovely legs, lightly tanned and beautifully shaped. Her toenails were painted an iridescent blue.
I had wondered before coming here if Polly would have heard yet about the body in the Severson house, but I now knew that she had. I could tell as soon as she’d opened the door, the phone against her ear. She’d probably been talking about it all morning.
“You’ve heard?” I said. “About the body that was found this morning?”
“Oh, yeah. It’s all over town. Is it really Miranda Severson?”
“She hasn’t been ID’d, but, yes, we believe it’s Miranda. But I’m here because of Brad Daggett.”
“I don’t know where he is. I swear to God. I told the police chief everything last night.”
“No, I know,” I said. “I didn’t come here because I thought you might know where he is. I came here because I wanted to hear more about the last time you saw him. I heard from Chief Ireland that it was last Friday night.”
“That’s right.”
“Can you tell me about it? I know you’ve been through it already, but I’d like to hear it as well.”
She told me how she and Brad had had an on-again, off-again romance since practically forever, all the way back to Kennewick High, and that they both still hung out at Cooley’s, and occasionally hooked up, and that the last time this happened was Friday. “I’m not proud of it, but we go way back, you know. Sometimes I thought we were destined to wind up together.”
“You sure it was Friday?”
“Oh, yeah,” she said, leaning forward and plucking her pack of Marlboro Menthols off the table. “You don’t mind if I smoke, do you?” she asked.
“No, of course not.”
“You want one?”
“Sure,” I said and leaned across to pull one of the cigarettes from the hard pack. I usually only smoked hand-rolled cigarettes, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to bond a little with Polly Greenier. She lit her cigarette first, then passed the Bic lighter over to me. I hadn’t had a menthol in years, and the first minty drag punched me in the throat. “How are you positive it was Friday?” I asked.
“It’s the only day of the week I get off work early. I do the five-to-one shift at Manor House Nursing Home on Friday. Afterward I went to Cooley’s for lunch and that’s where I saw Braggett . . . I mean, Brad . . . we had a few drinks, then went back to his place.”
“Did you plan on meeting him there, or was it just chance?”
“Half and half, really. I’d seen him earlier in the week, and he’d mentioned it to me. Asked me if I still got off early on Friday and told me that he was planning on being at Cooley’s, and maybe we could have a few drinks, celebrate the weekend.”
“Was that usual for the two of you. Making plans to meet?”
She blew a plume of blue smoke from her nostrils and rounded the ash of her cigarette against the edge of a glass ashtray on the coffee table. “No, not really. We didn’t usually make plans. We’d just run into each other. It’s a small town, you know.”
“Anything else unusual about that day, about Brad?”
“He was a little strange, I’ll admit it. Like, he insisted on paying for my lunch and buying me beers. He was kind of all over me. I mean, that’s happened a lot in the past, but not usually in the middle of the day. I thought it was weird, but I also kind of liked it. I thought maybe he’d gotten lonely since his marriage broke up and decided he wanted a girlfriend.”
I finished my cigarette, put it out in the ashtray. “Polly, Brad