“I call her that to remind myself not to make a pass at her,” Matt said.
“Really?”
“Really,” Matt said. “Tell Charley what really happened, Mother.”
“Okay. From the top… ” Olivia began.
“… so at the end, what you have are two decent young cops who feel guilty as hell for not breaking into her apartment,” Olivia finished. “Even though they did exactly what they were supposed to do.”
“Jesus,” Charley the bartender said, and turned away, to return in a moment with the bottle of Famous Grouse.
“On me,” he said, as he started pouring. “Not on the house, on me. I feel bad about what I said before.”
“That’s absolutely unnecessary and we shouldn’t,” Matt said. “But we will.”
“Are they going to catch this guy?” Charley asked.
“We’re going to get him,” Matt said. “The question is when. The sooner they get him, the sooner they’ll be able to be sure he won’t be able to do something like this to somebody else.”
“Maybe I get this from the movies,” Charley said, “but those Homicide detectives seem to know what they’re doing.”
“I know two that don’t,” Matt said. Charley looked at him in surprise. “These two,” Matt finished.
“You’re Homicide?”
Matt nodded.
“And that’s what we’re doing here. Trying to run this guy down. We understand Cheryl used to come in here.”
“Who told you that?” Charley asked.
“Her mother,” Olivia said. “And she gave me a list of people Cheryl hung out with.” She handed him the list. “Do you know any of these people?”
“Most of them,” Charley reported after a minute.
“Any of them in here right now?”
Charley looked down the bar, then looked through the doors of two adjacent rooms and came back to report that none of them were.
“Well, we’ll run them down,” Matt said.
“It would help if you could tell us anything about Cheryl,” Olivia said. “What kind of a girl was she?”
“Let me say something unpleasant,” Matt said. “It’s okay to say unkind things about the dead if the purpose is to find out who killed them.”
Charley considered that a moment.
“I take the point,” he said. “Okay, so far as I know, she was really a nice girl. If she were a bimbo, I’d say so, okay? You want my gut feeling?”
“Please,” Olivia said.
“I think she came in here hoping that Mr. Right, the guy on the white horse, you know what I mean, would walk in and make eyes at her. And I don’t think he ever did. She was good-looking. Guys hit on her. But she wasn’t looking for a one-night stand, and I never saw her leave here with a guy. Sometimes, when she was in here with her girlfriends, a couple of them would leave together with a couple of guys. Never alone. You know what I mean?”
“I get the picture,” Matt said.
Matt’s cell phone went off.