The day after that, Gary comes by the apartment. She comes to the door holding Katie. He’s got a “Come Back to Work Soon!” card he bought at the drugstore, and there’s cash in the envelope. It’s $110. This is the part Miranda can’t figure out. A hundred, maybe, but what’s the extra ten for?
He says the guys are sorry, they got carried away, but they really need her back soon, you know? She’s so good and all. But if she wants, take an extra day. He won’t dock her pay or anything.
And she goes back.
And works with them.
And pretends to get over it.
Because she’s not done yet.
Not by a long shot.
17
I PUT MY TOILETRIES into my bag, zipped it up, and bounced down the stairs. I had a lot on my agenda. Grab a cab to meet Sandler of the health department, hit the car rental agency, drive to Canborough to see what I could learn there, then head further east to Groverton. I was doing a last-minute check. Cell phone? Check. A map? Check. The photo of Trixie from the Suburban? Check. A bit of cash? I checked my wallet. Forty-eight dollars. Check.
I had a go for liftoff.
I slung the strap of the bag over my shoulder, opened the front door to leave, and came face-to-face with Detective Flint.
He had his fist suspended in midair, or mid-knock, and I guess we both surprised each other, taking half a step back.
“Detective Flint,” I said, catching my breath.
He smiled kindly, lifted his fedora a tenth of an inch in greeting, and set it back on his head. I looked over his shoulder, and there, at the curb, was Trixie’s GF300. A man got out the driver’s side, walked halfway across the yard and tossed the keys to Flint, got into the passenger side of an unmarked car parked in front of it.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“We’re done with it,” he said, tipping his head toward Trixie’s car. “Forensics went over it, didn’t find a thing. She took your wheels, so go ahead and use hers.” He dangled the keys in front of me and I took them warily.
“Thanks,” I said, pocketing them. “That’s very thoughtful of you.”
“Don’t go thinking I made a special trip. I have more questions. First one being, you taking a trip?” His eyes were on my overnight bag.
“Uh, just an overnighter, I suspect,” I said.
“Little vacation?”
“No, it’s for an assignment. An out-of-town assignment, a feature I’m doing,” I said.
Flint nodded. “You mind if I come in?”
“No, of course not,” I said, admitting him to the house and tossing my bag onto the floor as we eased into the small living room at the front of the house. Flint, clearly a man of manners and breeding, took off his hat once inside, and held it in his right hand by the brim.
“What sort of assignment?” he asked.
“Well, actually,” I said, “I can’t really discuss assignments I might be working on for the paper, with the police. I’d have to speak to my editor about that.”
“The reason I’m asking is, it’s my understanding that you’ve been suspended.” He gave me that friendly smile again. I said nothing. “So I don’t understand how you could be going off to do an assignment for the paper if you’re not actually working for the paper at the moment.”
I was starting to sweat. Flint didn’t even have me under the hot lights in an interrogation room yet. I was here in my own home, and I could feel beads of perspiration on my forehead. I could see how bad this looked. Found with a dead guy one day, discovered hitting the road with bag packed the next.
“I talked to some people where you work—well, where you worked,” Flint said. He tossed his hat onto the couch so that he could reach into his jacket for his notebook. He turned over a couple of pages, squinted to get a better look at his own handwriting. “You know a woman named Frieda, I think it is?”
“Yes,” I said.
“She runs the housing section at the paper?”
“Home,” I said, without the exclamation mark. Flint would have wondered what was wrong with me had I shouted it at him.
“You got moved there, according to Mr., hang on…Mr. Magnuson?”
“That’s right.”
“Yeah, I had a little chat with him. You got moved out of your feature-writing job because of this difficulty with Mr. Benson, the deceased, this business about trying to get him not to write about Ms. Snelling.”
“That was his interpretation. I never told him not to write about her.”
“Yeah, well, unfortunately, it’s kind of hard to ask him about that at the moment.” I felt a droplet of sweat run down my neck and under my shirt collar. “So,” Flint continued, “you went to work for Frieda, and she said things didn’t work out very well there.”
“Not really. But I didn’t have much of a chance to settle in.”
“She told me you were upset about a lot of things, including your troubles with Mr. Benson. She said, and just hang on a second here, I wrote this down. Okay, here it is. She said you referred to him as a ‘dipshit’ reporter. Does that sound right?”
I swallowed. “It does sound like something I might have said.”
“And that you also said you’d be happy if he got caught in a, hang on, got caught in a ‘Wal-Mart cave-in.’ Does that sound like something you said?”