“Alison Breen, Salvatore Contreras. Can we come into your place to talk?” I asked my neighbor. “I’m not sure whether Homeland Security is bugging my apartment.”
The old man’s eyes brightened: he’s pined for someone young and energetic—and female—since Petra joined the Peace Corps. “It ain’t much to look at,” he warned Alison, “but it’s clean enough and we’ll take good care of you, the dogs and Vic and me, so you come on in, rest yourself. You want tea or coffee or something? I have beer and grappa, too.”
“Stay away from the grappa,” I warned Alison. “Mr. Contreras makes it himself and it has been known to topple strong men.”
She smiled politely, but said water would be fine. She dropped her backpack on the floor and perched on the edge of the old man’s sagging armchair.
I sat on the couch, facing her. “Do your folks know you’re here?”
“I—no one knows I’m here. My plane got in at four; I’ve been waiting here off and on since five. Mr. Contreras came to the door when I rang; he said you were in town and should be back soon, so I’ve kept returning every hour or so.”
“I doubt very much you made your way out of Mexico City with no one the wiser. You’re not the invisible woman, you know, you’re an heiress; your father has someone in Mexico City reporting back to him on what you’re doing. And he told me he was going to get the FBI—”
“Someone on the tech lab staff is watching me?” she cried. “Oh, how—how horrible! How could he do that? When am I ever going to be able to do something on my own, without him breathing down my neck? I hoped—it’s Ramona, isn’t it? I wondered when I found her in my room, but she said she was looking for a candle—oh, how can I trust anyone when I don’t know whether they’re spying on me?”
I couldn’t summon even a perfunctory response. I leaned back in the couch. The springs shifted and one poked me in the butt. That might be the only reason I didn’t go to sleep on the spot.
“How come you’re here?” I said, keeping my eyes open with an effort. “How did you get my name?”
“From my dad,” Alison said. “First he called up with all this insane stuff about Martin. He asked was Martin with me, and I said, of course not, I hadn’t heard from him since the end of the summer. I said we’d all gotten this e-mail from Jari—all of us who were Breen fellows this summer, I mean—asking if we knew where Martin was, which was how I knew he’d disappeared. My dad didn’t believe me; he thought I was shielding Martin, which got us off totally on the wrong foot. And then he said you were looking for Martin, and I was to tell him at once if I heard from you.”
“And that made you leap on a plane for a six-hour flight without even knowing if I was in town.”
She flushed. “I saw the news about Martin’s grandmother. How someone killed her, I mean, and attacked his mom. I thought you would know if he showed up.”
Mr. Contreras came back with a glass of water. He’d arranged a plate with mixed nuts and apples cut into quarters. “You eat something, young lady. You’re worried and you’ve been on a plane all day. You’ll feel better with something inside you.”
Alison flashed a smile and a few exclamations of how kind he was, how beautiful the food looked. She’d spent her life with avuncular friends of her parents fussing over her; she knew how to respond.
“I’d better have a cup of coffee if you don’t mind rustling one up,” I said to my neighbor. “We probably have a long night in front of us.”
“Sure, doll, sure.” He bustled back to the kitchen.
“He’s very sweet,” Alison said.
“Solid gold, so don’t patronize him,” I said. “If you’re so worried about people reporting back to your dad, what makes you think I’m not working for him myself?”
“The way he talked about you,” she stammered. “This sounds rude, but he said you weren’t much of a detective, and that you’d be like a bull in a china shop because you didn’t know how to be subtle.”
“How clichéd,” I said, “although, really, he should have called me a cow in a china shop.”
Alison blinked at me, puzzled.
“Just because I don’t know how to be subtle doesn’t make me masculine,” I explained. “Moving on, why did the fact that your father thinks I’m useless make you believe you could trust me?”
Her lips quivered. “Please don’t make fun of me. I told you I knew it was rude, but I did look you up, I saw you’d solved some big cases. I saw you were willing to go head to head with the police or FBI or people like my dad if you needed to protect a client, and I didn’t know what else to do or who I could turn to.”