• • •
I think Stern was telling it straight,” Peabody said when they left the building. “Or mostly. I don’t think he liked her, personally, as much as he acted. More admired her professionally and was, like, cordial on the personal level.”
“Peabody, my pride swells.”
“Yeah?” Grinning, Peabody wiggled her shoulders inside her pink coat.
“She wasn’t his type, not just romantically. She’d have moved in on him there, like she tried with Fitzhugh, if she saw some gain in it. Not personal for her, not with Fitzhugh either. Just what could she get out of it. She was cold and a little hard, plenty hard,” Eve corrected. “Stern’s more refined, we’ll say, and not needy in the ego as Fitzhugh was.”
“Foxx hasn’t left Maui in six months, according to all the data. I wouldn’t have thought of Arthur Foxx on this if you hadn’t told me to do a run on him.”
“That’s why I’m LT and you’re lowly detective.”
“Frosty detective who rocks a magic pink leather coat.” Adoring it, more than a little, Peabody stroked her own sleeve.
“Don’t make love to the damn coat. Foxx was just somebody we had to check out, cross off. He’s not a lunatic, and whoever did this leans loony. Plus, he’d have hurt her, made her suffer some. He’d have messed up her face. And he’d have done it two years ago if he’d really meant to kill her.”
Checking Foxx? Just routine, Eve thought.
“I wanted to see if Stern knew how Bastwick played his other partner. He knew, he didn’t care. And yeah, didn’t much like her. But admire professionally works. She was splashier, in court, in the media. And he benefited from that. He’s going to rake in her share of the firm, and that’s considerable, but now he doesn’t have that frontispiece, and he wants one.
“Check his alibi,” Eve added as they climbed into the car. “It’s going to hold, but we’ll want to check it off the list. We’ll talk to her escorts after we go by the morgue.”
“Escorts. I guess that’s a refined way of saying her sex partners.”
“Some of them, sure. Some of them are going to be gay. That’s safe. A great-looking gay guy is the professional woman’s best friend, right?”
“I don’t have a bestie gay guy,” Peabody said wistfully. “I need to get one.”
“None of her ‘escorts’ would be—besties?” she said with a pitying look at Peabody. “Seriously?”
> “It’s a word.”
“It’s a stupid word. None of them will be genuine friends.”
YOUR TRUE AND LOYAL FRIEND.
“Think of her apartment,” Eve went on, shoving the thought aside. “All hers. Her office, all hers. She wasn’t into sharing. Nothing in her place that said she was having an affair, working on having one. I’m betting she mostly used pros. She gets exactly what she wants with an LC—no more, no less.”
“And isn’t obliged to make breakfast in the morning. Yeah, that’s how she reads. It’s kind of sad.”
“It’s not sad to get what you want.”
“It’s sad not to want more than paid-for sex and a styling apartment, and have your assistant be the one who looks like he mourns you the most. I checked her travel. She didn’t even go see her mom or her sister for Christmas. Never left the city. And the next day, she’s back at work, then she’s dead. It’s sad.”
“She lived the way she wanted to.”
“I’ll do better work, I think, if I feel a little sorry for her.”
“She lived the way she wanted to,” Eve repeated. “But she didn’t die the way anyone wants to. That’s sad enough.”
“Now that you mention it.”
• • •
Eve strode down the white tunnel of the morgue with Peabody. No skeleton staff here—ha—as the holidays always brought a banquet of murder, accidental death, and self-terminations.
She made her way to Morris’s domain, caught a glimpse of him through the porthole windows of his doors, pushed them open.