“I’m sorry. He never said. It was just an anecdote over coffee one morning. He might have mentioned her to a friend in more detail.”
“We’ll look into it,” Eve said as the buzzer sounded.
Peabody rose, gestured the droid back. “I’ve got it.”
“I don’t want to see anyone but Ethan. I don’t want to —”
“Don’t worry,” Eve assured her.
“I need to see my son, Lieutenant. I’m sorry, I can’t remember your name. I can’t quite remember.”
“Dallas. I’m going to arrange it. I’m going to go see him myself when I leave here, and I’ll arrange it. Dr. Morris is looking after him. I promise you he’ll be well taken care of.”
“Mina.” The man who rushed in was dashing, dramatic in looks. Tall, imposingly so, and whippet lean. Like the droid, he had a generous mane of hair gone silver at the temples, and eyes of dark and piercing brown under arched black brows.
Ignoring Eve he dropped to his knees by Mina’s chair, drew her into a hard embrace.
“Dorian. It’s Dorian. It’s —”
Though she’d kept her word, hadn’t fallen apart, she broke now on one keening wail.
3
On the street, Eve surrendered to the wind and dug the silly hat out of her pocket.
“She held up longer than I thought she would,” Peabody commented.
“That’s an iron spine. We’ll check in with Morris now, then start hitting friends, coworkers. I want to talk to Chamberlin. The conductor guy’s the in-charge guy, so, yeah, we need a conversation.”
She got behind the wheel, sat a moment with an eye on the side mirror to judge traffic. “Earnest Tina.”
“He had a sense of humor,” Peabody said. “He probably told somebody else about her, and we can get the names of the clubs he liked to play in.”
“She’s a possibility.” Eve took her shot, zipped out, left a blast of horns in her wake. “She’s writing an opera – do people still do that? I thought all the people who wrote operas have been dead for centuries.”
“There was that thrash opera a couple years ago – Noise. I sampled the disc, but it gave me a headache. I think people still write the regular ones.”
“Well, she’s writing one, and with a name like Earnest Tina it won’t be thrash. She wants to pick Kuper’s brain about dead opera-writer types. Maybe she wants him to use his influence to get hers produced. His mother’s sleeping with the in-charge guy, another potential leg up there. But he’s not serious enough by her standards, goes around playing at dingy clubs. Disrespectful to her and the opera.”
It seemed seriously out of orbit as motive, but…
“People kill people for all sorts of screwy reasons,” Eve concluded.
“The torture?”
“We have to meet this Earnest Tina, figure out just how screwy she is. Let’s do a run on Ethan Chamberlin. He’s got the initial. Maybe he couldn’t get what he wants from the mother with the son so tight in there.”
“Or maybe he really wanted to do the son instead of the mother.”
“Now you’re thinking.”
“I bet you’ve been to the opera,” Peabody said as she started the run on her PPC.
“Twice. Then I drew the line. I’d go again when they finished building the ice palace in hell.”
“I think I’d like it – I mean to at least go. The costumes, the music, the drama, and everybody all dressed up and sparkly.”
“You can’t understand anything anybody’s saying, then they all die. We get plenty of that on the job.”