Chapter Nine
Fifteen minutes later, Ava and I sat in front of the desk of a Mr. Paul Walker at 32 King’s Cross Street. His office was a long narrow room with walls and floors of red brick. Probably an alley or breezeway once upon a time. It was squeezed in between a thrift store and an abandoned record store that still had dust-covered albums on display and an air of shame about it, of failure. I wondered if there were any treasures hidden in its depths. Probably not.
Walker had gone to the back of his space to a mini-refrigerator, from which he fetched two bottles of water. He used the sleeve of his shirt to wipe down the bottles and tops as he came back across the uneven floor between us. The walls squeezed in behind him, squirting him forward, or so my eyes told me. It was a house of mirrors at a low-rent carnival in here.
“So tell me about the case, Ms. Connell,” Walker said as he handed the waters across the desk to us, then sat.
I’d only worked closely with one other investigator before: Nick. What a contrast Walker was to him. Walker’s belly looked about five months pregnant under his Cruzan Rum t-shirt. Sweat was beaded on his forehead. His whole office smelled in need of a shower. If I’d have had a handkerchief with me, I would have held it to my face—after I cleaned my water bottle. I set the bottle down on the floor beside me.
“My parents were on St. Marcos for a week last year. They came here for their fortieth anniversary. They had a great time, and they called me every day.” A twinge of guilt shot through me as I remembered the irritation I’d felt at seeing their number on my phone. People I loved interrupting a life I didn’t, and I was irritated with them. “They did all the normal tourist things. They took a catamaran out to one of the cays. They hiked in the rainforest. They went to a secluded beach to snorkel. It was like they recaptured their youth here. They even called me one day and said they’d walked up on two people having sex on the beach, literally. My mom giggled like a teenage girl when she told me about it, some big bushy-haired blond man and a tiny black woman, she told me. But she loved it. She loved everything about the trip.”
Get to the point, Katie. Funny how eloquent I could be about other people’s problems, but how awkward about my own. I finished the rest of my story without diving off into irrelevant detail.
Walker’s eyes lasered my face while I talked. When I finished, he remained silent, slowly tapping his pen against his lips.
“Mr. Walker? Do you have any questions?” I asked.
“Oh. Sorry. You remind me of someone I used to know,” he said. His comment crawled across my skin like a scorpion. “Yes, just a few questions to help me get started. Before your parents died, where did they have dinner?”
I remembered this. They had loved the restaurant and returned to it for their last dinner. “Fortuna’s. Do you know of it?”
“Yes, it’s a very popular place.”
My eyes strayed to the framed NYPD ten-year service award on the wall over his left shoulder. Beside it hung the obligatory island fishing picture, Walker and an equally large black man and even larger blond man standing on the stern deck of a boat named Big Kahuna, the three of them together hefting a huge marlin.
Ava spoke for the first time since we’d all exchanged greetings at the beginning of the meeting. “Baptiste’s Bluff not exactly on the way from the restaurant to the hotel.”
Walker ignored her and continued speaking to me. “Did they go anywhere else that you know of that last night?”
“Not that I know of.”
“The casino? A moonlight stroll on the beach, perhaps?”
“I’m sorry, I just don’t know. I have the accident report from the police, though. And they said the coroner might have a report, too.” I held out the police file, and he took it, opened it, and set it in front of him.
“OK, I’ll get that from the coroner.”
“Also,” I hesitated, looked at Ava, then plowed ahead. “The officer that investigated their deaths died shortly after them. You can see on the report that a different officer signed it than the one who investigated. I don’t know if that means anything, but—”
Walker cut me off. “I’ll look into it. All right.” He glanced down at the opened file and the police report on his desk. “I think I have everything I need from you. There’s a five-hundred-dollar retainer, to get started.”
I needed to do this, but was just writing this man a check and trusting him to look into it enough? Would spending the insurance money I hadn’t needed make me feel less guilty? I wanted to call Nick and ask his advice. I wanted to run out the front door. I wanted a rum punch. I wanted Mom and Dad back. I swallowed hard and pulled out my checkbook.
As I wrote him a check, he continued to talk. “My case load is very heavy right now. I know I can’t get to this for a few weeks. It’s not an emergency, after all, as your parents are already dead.”
Another skin-crawling moment. He was right, though. Crass, but right. I set the check on the desk with my business card on top of it and used my fingertips to push them across to him. They dug a trail of clean through the dust on his desk.
“Well, thank you, Ms. Connell. I’ll be in touch,” he said, grabbing the check before my fingertips left it.
As Ava and I stood up to depart, he said, “Oh, one last thing. It’s better for me if I talk to the potential witnesses fresh. It interferes with my investigation when my client tries to do it first herself. So, if you please, let me do what you have hired me to do, and you enjoy the rest of your stay on our lovely island.”
“Fine,” I said.
And we left, as fast as I could get out of there.
~~~