Page 189 - Labelle Gramercy, On the Case

Jury-rigged

“She tried renting an apartment managed by one of the tenants, a
member of a recovering alcoholics’ group. It took that person, a
rather tense older lady, about one day to figure out Eva’s predilection
for the hard stuff. The rental agreement had a clause about public
inebriation being cause for breaking the lease and triggering
immediate eviction if discovered within thirty days of signing.
Probably not legal, but Eva didn’t feel like fighting it. Instead, she
packed her bags—which were not large or numerous—and took a
taxi to the YWCA.”
“And was she there on the night of April 19-20?”
“As far as we can tell. The place does have a curfew, so if she were
not there at ten p.m. she would have had to stay out all night, and I
don’t think she has the finances or the inclination to do that.”
Labelle hammered in a few dozen more keystrokes and sat back.
“So that was the state of your knowledge at the beginning of May.
It seems to me a pattern was emerging that should have warned you
the jurors were not safe. Yet another died: did that disaster not bring
the mayor and every editorialist in the city down on the department
like a ton of bricks?”
I squeezed my lips shut, holding in laughter. When she tried to
inject colloquialisms into her speech for emphasis, she frequently
picked an expression long fallen out of popular usage.
“Ah, yes, the fourth murder raised a considerable uproar in the
press and among those municipal officials soon up for re-election.
But it wasn’t my idea alone to dedicate all our assets to tracking the
Simulians. Captain Nimeau had to answer for that.”
“Then he must not be pleased at the lack of progress in solving the
case.”
I nodded. “You’re right about that, Lieutenant. I figure I’ll be
going from the outhouse to the penthouse when it’s over.” That was
as far as I would go in tooting my own horn before the final piece of
the puzzle was put in place.
She again arched her eyebrows. If she did that often enough, I
deduced, she would develop forehead wrinkles. How many times a
day, for how many years, would she need to be baffled for that to
happen? Something I would play with on my desk pad in idle
moments, I predicted; the perfect diversion during her interminable

188