Evidence of Murder (3 page)

“Lake Erie is freshwater, and glaciers give off warmer air at this time of the year. What do you want?”

“Come with me to talk to Georgie, Jillian’s boss. The escort-service guy.”

“I’m not a freakin’ cop, Frank. I’m a scientist. I work with microscopes and fibers. I don’t interrogate people, and not even lunch at Pier W is worth chatting with a pimp!”

“He’s not a pimp,” he corrected her, while pointedly missing the I-90 on-ramp. “He’s a businessman. Come on, this guy is never around women he can’t intimidate or pay off. He won’t know what to do with you sitting there.”

“Don’t you—”

She had almost said
Don’t you have a partner?
Before she remembered that no, he didn’t, that his last partner had been shot in a bank robbery, the partner he had resented more than liked, the partner she had been engaged to marry, and since then he had managed to circumvent all efforts of the department to assign him another. And she remembered something else, something that had existed in another time, another life—sympathy for someone other than herself.

“Okay,” she said. “But I’m ordering lobster.
And
the Brie plate.”

George Panapoulos—aka Georgie Porgie—worked out of a storefront on West Twenty-fifth, just two blocks from the West Side Market, sandwiched in between a bail bondsman and a used-appliance dealer. He had tried to add a splash of color to the grimy street, however, spelling out BEAUTIFUL GIRLZ! in six-inch-high fluorescent pink letters along the window. The inside smelled of bug spray and cigarette smoke, but the receptionist lived up to the advertising, a petite blond in spandex, her eyes a crystal blue and slightly unfocused.

“I’m here to see Georgie,” Frank told her in the commanding tone he’d practiced on Theresa since she was four. She’d stopped listening at six, but it still worked on other people.

Heavy footsteps made the thin walls tremble, and Georgie appeared with a cigarette in one hand and a stack of envelopes in the other. Theresa had expected a stereotype, a used-car salesman with lots of gold jewelry, but George Panapoulos looked more like an aging college student. He had neatly trimmed black hair and wore a maroon sweatshirt with jeans. The only concessions to flash were a stylish goatee and a gold band with one fat diamond on his right hand. He only grinned when he saw Frank, and then his eye fell on Theresa. Like her cousin had said earlier, he opened his mouth to make a comment, then apparently thought better of it. “What can I do for you, Detective?”

“I need to ask you about one of your ex-employees. In private.”

“I’m a little busy right now—”

Frank waited.

“—but I’ll take time for anything that concerns my girls. Come on back.” He turned away from them without hesitation and led the way through a narrow hallway with stained wallpaper.

His office continued to work against stereotype. Papers, manila folders, and pictures of girls covered the desk, the bookshelf, and a battered credenza. More pictures covered the walls—girls of every race, size, and hair color, including a few not found in nature; girls in bikinis or less; girls in full-length gowns—pinned up willy-nilly with thumbtacks or even straight pins. It took Theresa a full minute to find Jillian’s. Theresa now believed in Georgie’s legitimacy—the deluge of young girls seemed no worse than the average magazine or group of billboards, and no way would a pimp keep this much paperwork.

The man no longer in question threw himself into a desk chair covered in 1970s orange vinyl and motioned for them to sit. His guest chairs were the only two uncluttered surfaces in the room. “Now don’t tell me one of my girls is in trouble, because I won’t believe it. They’re all clean. I’m legit now.”

“So you told me,” Frank said.

“It’s worth it, let me tell you. It’s worth the taxes and the forms and having to send out those friggin’ W-2s every January. I can sleep at night, I don’t have to take my gun into the shower with me, and I don’t have to call my lawyer every time someone like you shows up at my door.”

“I’m happy that you’ve seen the light.”

Georgie glanced at Theresa; again, he seemed on the verge of asking who she was, and then didn’t. Her cousin had been right. Georgie Porgie didn’t know what to do with her. She perused the photos of girls with lots of makeup and not enough body fat, and ignored him.

“So what are you here about?” he asked again. A phone rang in the lobby, abruptly cut off as the receptionist snatched it up.

“Jillian.”

“Which Jillian?”

“How many you got?”

“Three.” A dented space heater in the corner kicked on, pushing out puny waves of warm air to do what they could against the heavy dampness, and he raised his voice to be heard over the rattling heater. “Funny, come to think of it. It’s not a common name these days.”

“Jillian Kovacic.”

“You mean Perry.”

Frank absently patted the pack of cigarettes in his front shirt pocket; the heavily nicotined smell of the place must have been tempting him. “So you do know which Jillian I mean.”

“She was Perry here. She didn’t officially quit until she got him up the aisle. Jillian hedges her bets.”

“Didn’t jump ship until she had the lifeboat in position?” Frank prodded.

“Jillian’s not dumb. Besides, she seemed to think her new hubby was going to be a big shot soon and didn’t want her job distracting people from his.”

“You didn’t care that she got married?”

“Why would I care?”

“Maybe Jillian was more than an employee.”

“Yeah, so I killed her because I was jealous?” Georgie shook his head and pulled a cigarette from a pack on his desk, looking less like a college student with every minute as both face and voice lost their phony friendliness. “Listen, I’ve got forty-six girls working for me and Jillian is by no means the hottest one. I expected her to quit once she didn’t need the dough no more. I couldn’t believe she came back after having the baby. She lost that weight quick, though, I’ll say that for her.”

Frank let him wind down. “What makes you think she’s been killed?”

Georgie didn’t hesitate. “Her husband. He’s called here twice a day for the past three days asking if I have heard from her, and insisting that she would never just take off and not tell anyone where she went. And he’s right about that. Jillian was pretty reliable. That’s why I kept her on the payroll even though she couldn’t work once the baby began to show.”

Frank gave no sign of accepting this explanation, though it sounded reasonable to Theresa. Instead, he asked, “Can you think of anyone who might have wanted to kill her?”

“Sure. Her husband.”

“Why would her husband kill her?”

“Spoken like the true bachelor you are, Patrick. Husbands don’t need a reason. Neither do wives. Marriage is enough to turn anyone homicidal.”

“Speaking from experience? As I recall, that one girl thought you were going to marry her. What was her name? Debbie? Destiny?”

“Diana. I was, too. I still miss her every day,” Georgie said with patent innocence. But his body had tensed until the cords in his neck bulged under the skin. He flicked open a silver lighter and thumbed the roller against the flint with more force than necessary.

“She had cigarette burns up and down her right arm,” Frank added.

The man took a deep puff, then said, “That’s awful,” with no inflection whatsoever.

Theresa felt a chill that had nothing to do with the space heater kicking off. What
was
she doing here? Her job was to look at a body or a room or a piece of clothing and discern the relevant facts about those things, to give the investigators what they needed to catch people like Georgie. It wasn’t her job to sit there with Georgie. People weren’t like inanimate objects. People lied.

On the other hand, she might try to observe something useful. She didn’t dare interrupt Frank. She’d started talking in the middle of his guitar playing one day and he’d given her the cold shoulder for a month, which, at thirteen, seemed like a year.

Georgie’s hair had thinned a bit on top, revealing a birthmark and an S-shaped scar near the temple. His pupils didn’t seem to jump when they traveled from Frank to her and back again, which should mean he had no illegal drugs in his system. Nicotine stained his left-hand fingers, but he held the glowing butt in his right hand. Ambidextrous? Or trained to smoke with any free hand? He had another scar across the right thumb. An oil spot marred the elbow of the maroon sweatshirt, and he didn’t rest his back flat against the orange vinyl, which made her think he had a gun tucked into the waistband of his pants. This didn’t concern her much; every day found her surrounded by men with guns. Up the hall, the receptionist giggled into the phone.

“Anybody else might mean Jillian harm?” Frank was asking.

“Sure,” the man said again. “Her other boyfriend. The one she didn’t marry.”

“How many boyfriends did Jillian have?”

“Just the two. The one she didn’t marry, and the one she did. Those are all I know of, anyway.”

Theresa rolled her eyes, then felt embarrassed when the man across the desk noticed. She buried her nose in a brochure.
Beautiful Girlz
seemed to be the official name of the place.
Available for trade shows, corporate excursions, and private parties.
Except that Georgie had misspelled
corporate
as
corporete
.

“His name?”

“Drew, and I only know that because he’d call all the time when Jillian worked here. He’d drive the receptionists nuts trying to leave messages, but we don’t take messages for anyone but me here, or else this place would turn into a lonely hearts switchboard.”

“Did he know she got married?”

“He must have. The calls stopped when her employment did. But then he started up again the past three days, looking for Jillian.”

“This ex-boyfriend’s been calling here?”

“Even more than the husband. He’s been driving poor Vangie out there crazy. If you talk to him, tell him to stop or I’ll charge him with harassment.”

“I’ll need his last name.”

“I don’t have it. Vangie might. He’d chat with her and her soft little heart all the time until she got tired of it and learned to cut him short, which made him turn nasty. My other receptionist just hangs up on him. Him, and the thousand other mopes who call here, trying to get private time with my girls.” His mouth took on a pouty shape as he seemed to contemplate the nerve of these guys, thinking they could get for free what he had invested in, cultivated. Theresa almost felt a twinge of empathy for him.
It’s probably how a Blockbuster manager feels about pirated movies,
she thought.

“How long did Jillian work for you?”

“About a year and a half. Subtracting six months for the baby body, of course. Who’re you, anyway?” he apparently now felt comfortable enough to ask Theresa. She introduced herself, and Georgie’s heavy eyebrows came together. “M.E.? Like you do autopsies?”

“No, I’m a forensic scientist.”

“But that’s the morgue, right?”

“Yes.”

He puffed for a moment, holding her gaze with either concern or curiosity in his eyes. “So Jillian really is dead?”

Frank cut in. “Only missing. When was the last time you saw Jillian?”

“A week after the wedding. She came in to pick up her last check, from a tech conference last month—three days of holding up a big microchip on a revolving stage, not real classy, but I don’t design the shows, just staff them. I told her I had a cocktail party coming up, a real estate developer wanted to entertain some Japanese investors. They love blondes, and Jillian was good at that sort of thing. Smart enough to hold up her end of the conversation but too sweet to do much other than agree with whatever was said. She laughed and said no, she was out for good, and left. That was it.”

“She say anything about her husband, her baby? Troubles at home?”

“We didn’t chat. Just business.”

“She have any repeat customers? Other than Drew?”

“Drew ain’t a customer, he’s a problem. Besides, Jillian don’t have customers.
I
have customers.”

“And you get feedback from them, right? Anyone comment on Jillian in particular? Request another performance?”

“Nope.”

“Never?”

“No. Look, everyone
liked
Jillian, I’m not saying otherwise, but they like all my girls. Why not? They’re quality.”

“I see.”

“No, you don’t.” Georgie seemed to be working on a good case of righteous indignation. “You think I’m still a pimp. This is different. These girls are the ones who aren’t pretty enough to be models but aren’t desperate enough to be hookers. They don’t want to be hookers, and they don’t have to be. All they have to do is stand up straight and look pretty, laugh at a guy’s joke even if it’s in another language, and occasionally hold up a product or lean against a car. That’s it.”

Frank remained impassive. “They never take on side jobs?”

“No. Not like you mean. Do they sometimes date guys they meet through a job? Sure. Doesn’t everyone?”

Theresa caught herself nodding, stopped, and coughed. The smoke-scented air had grown oppressive, and the space heater only made it worse. She wanted to leave.

“Did Jillian?” Frank pressed.

“I wouldn’t know.”

“What did she tell you about her fiancé, when she worked here?”

“You’re not listening to me, Detective. I saw Jillian maybe once a week or less. We didn’t confide in each other about nothing, not her baby, not the dresses she picked out for the bridesmaids, not nothing.”

“If I find out you know more about Jillian than you’re telling me, Georgie—”

“What? You’ll what? There’s nothing you can do. I’m legitimate now.”

“Nobody’s legit when it comes to murder.”

“Jillian’s not dead.” Georgie stood up, apparently to signal the end of the interview and his patience. But then his expression changed and that look returned, the slight frown and the glittering eyes, worry combined with excited curiosity. “At least I hope not.”

Theresa wasted no time in plunging out to the street, sucking in the cold air until her sinuses hurt. Frank had lingered to speak to the receptionist, and he had the car keys, so she stayed close to the storefront door and tried to blend in. She eyed anyone who passed, without making eye contact, then felt slightly ridiculous as two little girls walked by without, apparently, a care in the world. West Twenty-fifth might not be Pepper Pike, but it was hardly a war zone.