Craving (7 page)

“Perhaps she knew better than to make a mess for me,” he said. “Katherine will see you out.”

Chapter 6

We were rushed from the building and a thick file was dropped in Unger’s hands. Beside the car, I lost my temper and caught his elbow.

“What the hell?” I demanded. “He all but admitted he hated her guts! What if he’s the reason she jumped?”

He looked at me, and though his eyes said he was in complete agreement, it was clear there was nothing he could do about it. “Corporations like this have vicious public relations policies. They all walk a fine line between countless insider trading rules or environmental agreements and criminality. If we start knocking down walls asking questions for one suicide, they’ll have my badge.”

I glared at him.

“Ms. Pierce.” He sighed and looked around. “I wanted to help give you some answers, but the truth is, I don’t think there are any. I’ll go through this file, but I’m not sure we’re going to find anything.”

I knew he was right. The logical part of my brain was sure that he would find nothing but a sterling employment record, decent pay, and not a trace of embezzlement. Eva predicted her death because she knew what she was going to do and I was just grieving. I knew it, but I still couldn’t let it be.

“Unger . . . Matthew, there has to be something. She wouldn’t just
do this.
She had to have a reason. She had to feel like there was nothing else. Otherwise, there’s no point!”

He tossed the folder into his back seat and put his hand on my shoulder. “Ms. Pierce, sometimes people don’t have a point, and that’s the point.”

While I stood there refusing to cry in his presence, he got into his car and drove away. After he was gone, I stared at the entrance to the lot in dejection, until the town car pulled in and parked in front of it. As I stood behind my car and watched, Moksha swept out of the building, a look of harassed outrage on his face. He got into the back of the car and it pulled out of the lot in a considerable hurry.

I got in and pulled out behind it. Maybe I wasn’t a detective, but I’d yelled at enough detective movies to know how a tail worked. Two cars back, not too aggressive or safe, I drove like someone who had somewhere to be. Never mind that I wasn’t sure where the somewhere actually was.

I thought they might take him to the airport, to jump into a private jet, or to his opulent, high-rise condo, or something equally rich and spectacular, but instead the sleek car made its way across the city toward the river. I slowed down, and when the car pulled from the busy avenue into a narrow access street between two warehouses, I pulled over and put it in park.

“Where is he going?”

I sat there for a few moments, debating. I ticked reasons off on my fingers, wished I had binoculars, a camera, or a trench coat, and finally, pounded the steering wheel in frustration. Making up my mind, I ran across the street and stood behind a dumpster, trying to ignore the wretched smell. The town car sat idling in front of an open metal doorway. Above the door was a darkened neon sign in a font that I could not quite read.

A nightclub?

For fifteen minutes, I waited behind the putrid dumpster, sure that whatever Moksha was doing, it would only take him a few minutes, or the car would have been parked. Just as I was regretting my choice of shoes and promising to never again consume any kind of meat product, Moksha exited the building with a woman in a blue silk dress. They seemed to be arguing, though I couldn’t hear anything that was said. He stood very close to her, his dark eyes pummeling hers with questions. His lips barely moved, though he looked fierce, like he might lean forward and tear out her throat with his teeth. For a moment I pitied her, until he pushed past her and she turned.

She was beautiful, with luminous pale skin, long auburn hair in a wavy, forties style, and it was clear if he struck her, she would’ve fought right back. Her majestic face glared after him and as he pulled away in his fancy car, she crossed her arms and tilted up her chin. In her eyes was the pure, unadulterated disgust of a duchess.

Moksha with his rich corporation, his flagrant disrespect, and a smile that oozed nouveau riche, for some reason couldn’t hold a candle to her imperial, nonchalant elegance. She leaned against the door frame, slowly blinking her false eyelashes, until her glance found me.

My heart jumped. I had to make a choice. Sensible, happily-married-to-a-cheating-loser Lilith would have pretended to be looking for something in the dumpster that she might have accidentally dropped while pulling a double shift in the meat packing plant, or whatever, but pretend-forensic specialist Cassandra Blake already had one stiletto heel knee-deep in the proverbial mire. I stepped out, and as the car pulled past me, dark reflections smoothing over its tinted windows, I gave it a stoic glance, as if I had backup waiting, and walked toward the entrance.

I didn’t turn around, though I could feel myself being watched. Moksha knew he’d led me there. He knew I was about to question the woman. He knew he was under investigation. The car seemed to hesitate, but as I reached the door, it pulled out and disappeared. The woman looked after it in contempt, and though I thought she’d vanish inside and lock the door, she waited for me to find her, almost as if proving a point to the sleaze inside the car.

My mind went over the things they always said in cop shows.

“Hello, ma’am,” I began, “my name is Cassandra Blake.”

Close up, she looked like a porcelain statue, a marble sculpture wearing lipstick, and her face never changed, even as her emerald-green eyes rolled to follow me.

I had to be careful about what I said. As angry as I was about Unger refusing to do anything else, I didn’t want to get him fired. If this woman and Moksha compared notes, a few well-treated lawyers might make a few well-timed calls.

“Is this a night club?”

One manicured fingernail, painted to match the dress, uncurled and pointed upward at the sign. But the writing was still unintelligible, and not because I was at an angle. It was a symbol and I didn’t know what it meant. I looked at her and it was clear that those who didn’t know, would never know.

“Strange place for it, isn’t it, next to a meat packing plant?”

She shrugged one shapely shoulder.

“Do you know a young lady by the name of Eva Pierce?”

She slid away from the door and took a step forward. The dress slinked around her narrow hips and at her ankle, a few crystals clinked together atop expensive-looking sandals.

“I did.”

It was too late to retreat, even though I was beginning to feel more than anxiety. Beyond her was a rectangle of darkness, where anything could be lurking.

“Past tense,” I noted quietly. “Did Moksha tell you?”

Her lush red mouth exposed incandescent teeth. “It was only a matter of time, really.”

“Before he’d tell you?”

She shook her head in a slow, deliberate way, “Before she did it.”

I swallowed the lump in my throat, but my voice still sounded choked. “Committed suicide, you mean?”

Her arms unwrapped, long thin appendages that looked like the branches of a gray birch tree. A thick, heavy gold bracelet dropped to her wrist and shimmered in the sunlight.

“How well did you know her?”

She smiled again and for some reason, I felt threatened.

“Better than anyone,” she said with a laugh in her voice.

My heart skipped a beat. “Did she tell you she wanted to die?”

But my charade was wearing thin. The woman took a step back and her smile reverted into the stern line. “Credentials?”

I stared into her knowing eyes as adrenalin flooded my body, and shared an understanding with the mind behind them. A penciled eyebrow arched playfully. She stepped backward through the door and pushed it shut. The last thing I saw of her was a green eye and the curl of a red lip.

“Go home, sister dear.”

*  *  *

At the apartment, I spent almost ten minutes on hold while Unger extricated himself from his real business to come speak to me. When he answered, I could already hear the polite withdrawal in his voice.

“Ms. Pierce . . .”

“I know!” I took a deep breath and before he could interrupt me, I pushed ahead. “Just hear me out! After you drove away, Moksha came out of the building and drove to a warehouse by the river.”

“You followed him?” Unger almost shouted.

“What else was I supposed to do, just let him walk away when he told us he had a meeting?”

I heard the change of background noise as he covered the mouth of the phone and dropped his voice into it. “You were supposed to do nothing! You told me that you wouldn’t fly off the handle! I trusted you!”

“I know! Okay, I’m sorry! I just . . . he looked upset and after what he said about her, I wanted to see if . . . just let me finish, please?”

I could picture him pinching the bridge of his nose, or leaning his head on his hands in frustration. I heard a few papers shuffled.

“I know that what you’re going through is tough, Ms. Pierce. I know you’re looking for answers or connections, but doing crazy stuff will only get you hurt. You just have to accept that sometimes people lose hope.”

“
You can find hope all the time without stuff like that, but I needed it, and you always knew it.”

But a person couldn’t find hope for someone after they were already dead. He was right, I realized. I wasn’t doing this for her. I was doing it to assuage my own guilt. It wouldn’t work, because the only thing that would do that for me was to hear her say that she forgave me, and that was something that would never happen.

“You’re . . . right. I’m sorry, but I think I’ve just caused you some trouble and I thought you should know, since I won’t ever see you again after all this is settled.”

He sighed. He was probably recalling that people in desperate situations with no one else to cling to would reach for the only person that seemed stable, and that to friendless, family-less me, he was that person. I had no right to demand it from him, but it was part of his job description.

“What happened?”

I told him about the club, that Moksha had to have seen me, the questions I had asked the woman in the blue dress. “She knew who I was, Unger, even though I gave her the fake name. I don’t know if it means anything, but I thought at least, it might mean that Moksha knew we were lying. I didn’t want that to come back and bite you.”

He listened in silence and, when I finished, took a few moments to think about it before he cleared his throat. “I appreciate that.”

I hesitated. That wasn’t what I had really felt. What I had really wanted to know was if he thought it was significant that the man who said he didn’t know Eva, knew exactly where she might have been spending her free time, or knew the woman who said she was Eva’s closest friend. It didn’t surprise me that the woman knew me, Eva carried a picture of us in her wallet and if they were friends, she might have seen it, but it did bother me that she hadn’t been more forthcoming.

It was obvious she had no loyalty to Moksha, yet she had told me nothing. Perhaps she wasn’t able, perhaps she was a victim of Moksha’s too. What I wanted was Unger’s badge and the authority to compel her to speak, but I realized then that I would not have it.

“Ms. Pierce.”

“Yes?”

“If you promise to drop it and let me handle it, I’ll go to the club and speak to the woman you saw.”

My chest seemed to open finally and I could breathe. Sitting in the happy face beanbag, I finally allowed my shape to conform to its cushy insides.

“I just want to know why he lied, if it was because I was standing there.”

I heard him massage his five o’clock shadow. “So would I. Promise me you’ll let me do the legwork.”

“I promise. I’m sorry. I knew I was fucking it up, I just . . . when she saw me standing there, I had to.”

“It’s alright. You’ve just gone through something horrible, in a way most people don’t usually have to suffer it.”

“So we’re back to that, are we?”

He attempted a chuckle. “It was pretty crazy; cut me some slack here.”

I could tell our conversation, and thus my last tie to this man, was going to come to an end, and the knowledge that I was depending on him too much did nothing to make me agree to set down the phone. In a last ditch effort to keep his companionship, I segued into another topic with all the expertise of a drunken tugboat captain.

“I don’t know the city. Do you have any ideas on funeral homes?”

“There’s Park’s over on Grand. That’s where the county sends . . .” He stopped and like the good psychic I was becoming, I knew what he was about to say.

“The people who die without family.”

“I’m sorry, but it’s a good place.”

“It’s okay.”

“The M.E. says he’ll be finished with the post by tomorrow. I was going to call you.”

My eyes were blurring and there were tears in my throat as I tried to laugh. “Yeah well, you know me.”

“I’ll have it released to Park’s then. There’ll be paperwork.”

“Thanks.”

“Get some sleep,” he advised gently. “You need to put all of this in perspective, to see that all things come to an end.”

“Unger,” I whispered, “do you believe that everything means something?”

“To somebody, I guess. Are you talking about fate?”

“I don’t know what I’m talking about,” I mumbled. “Again, I’m sorry. If anyone gets upset with you, just tell them I’m crazy.”

“Wouldn’t help.”

“Yeah, probably not.”

“Good evening,” he finished.

I didn’t bother to say anything back. I just put the phone down and felt the structure of my life erode from beneath my feet. It wasn’t a real foundation. I had built it out of wild conjecture and fear. I wanted it all to make sense, just like she said it would. The lack of control was miserable, especially for someone who polished their silver and was too organized to have a junk drawer.

Instead I got up, got out the chemicals, and began to scrub.