“All right then. Want a lift back?”
He gestured to a short line of motorized carts.
“I’ve got legs.”
“Which I admire as often as possible.”
Still holding her hand, he led her out the side door. “We’ll stroll back then, and you can tell me about the side piece.”
“She’s pitiful. No, that’s not fair.” She stuck her free hand in her pocket to warm it. “She’s a kid, Roarke, twenty-one and painfully naive. From someplace out in corn land. Shipshewana, Indiana.”
“Shipshewana? Are you winding me up?”
“It’s an actual town, I looked it up. If you consider a place about one square mile a town. Barely six hundred people live there. A lot of them farm. They probably have more cows than people there.”
The thought of which gave her the serious creeps.
“So our young side piece bid farewell to Shipshewana, came to the bright lights, big city, and ended up in a river-view apartment, being kept by a married man.”
“That’s the short of it,” she agreed. “The long’s got more gray areas. She’s desperate to be a Broadway star. Came to New York for those bright lights, and ended up working at a strip joint.”
“All too common, isn’t it?”
“Says she just danced—no sex—and you have to believe her. Not just that open face, the way she just babbles out reams of information because she’s lonely, but her background data finishes the picture. Copley’s set her up there with the usual bullshit. His wife doesn’t understand him, treats him bad, he’s working on a divorce, then they’ll get married.”
“You’re saying they grow them green in Shipshewana.”
“If Felicity’s an example, they don’t grow them greener. And, meanwhile, Copley will invest in her future by paying for dance and voice and acting classes. And she sleeps with him whenever he’s available, fawns over him, m
akes him feel desirable and important. She thinks he’s out of town right now, on important business.”
“Did you tell her otherwise?”
“Not directly. She wouldn’t have bought it from me anyway. I sort of put a couple thoughts out there, and steered her toward talking to her stripper friend who seems to know the score. She took me for a pal of his, was pitifully grateful to meet what she took as a pal of his, to spend time, to talk about him because—she says—she’s not really supposed to talk about him or them. Fucker. She’s going to have a few scars from this. Still, maybe they’ll be good for her in the long run.”
“And Ziegler?”
“She didn’t recognize the name. She doesn’t know anything on that. Copley tells her what works for him, and that’s it. But what it told me? She’s young, sexy, and built like every straight man’s wet dream.”
“Is that so. Have you a photo?”
“Pervert,” she said mildly.
“Perhaps, but as a straight man I could verify your findings.”
“My findings tell me he wants to keep his sexy toy as long as he can. He gets sex, adoration, and devotion, and since he’s paying for it out of money he’s skimmed from his wife, it’s a full win for him. One he might have killed for if Ziegler found out, threatened to clue in the wife.”
“So you managed to cross a name off your suspect list with the young Broadway hopeful, and gain another area of motive for one of the top on your list. Not a bad bit of work in a short time.”
“I had Peabody do the run on her, so that saved me time. Data indicates the kid came from a solid, two-parent household, has two older sisters, played well in school. Why do they call it ‘homecoming’?” she wondered.
“Who calls what ‘homecoming’?”
“People—the thing in high school.”
“Ah.” He paused by a side door of the house. “That’s an American thing, isn’t it?”
“You live here,” she reminded him.