Page 6 of Fade Out
“Someone killed Rita and mailed her to the CPA in the office next to me?”
I’d walked by the box and that was where the courier was delivering it. Gardner just stared at me.
“When I came into my office on Sunday morning there was a note from Rita. She said she was going to make me sorry.”
“Except she was already dead.”
“Well, I actually have no idea when she was in my office,” I said. Then I tried to remember when the last time I was in there, before Sunday morning, when was I—Saturday morning. Early? Or was that Friday?
Gardner was staring at me, his eyes watery and bloodshot. “You’re going to tell me eventually, you know. But please, take your time. I’m on triple time in about thirty minutes.”
“Let me get this straight,” I said. “You think I killed Rita, put her in a box, and then mailed her to the office next to mine.”
He sighed heavily as though this was all too silly. “No, you mailed the package to an address near the river. An address that doesn’t exist. You used the CPA’s office as your return address.”
“That wasn’t very smart of me.”
“I thought I’d be polite and not point that out,” Gardner said.
“Where did I mail the package from?”
“You brought it into the Quickie Courier location in Evanston. ”
“Did I? You have a witness? Someone who saw me carrying the box into—”
“We were given your general description. I feel pretty good about you being picked out in a lineup.”
So, did that tell me anything? Was Rita’s murderer someone who looked roughly like me? I was tall and thin and had brown hair. I looked like a lot of people.
“My fingerprints aren’t on the box.”
“Yeah, the courier told us you were really careful not to touch it when he asked for your help on the stairs Monday. I assume you wiped down the box after you packaged up Rita.”
“And then I carried it into a Quickie Courier office? Wearing gloves? Your witness said I was wearing gloves?”
“We haven’t finished analyzing the prints we took off the box.”
“See there’s a problem here. If I sent the box to an address downtown, then I was hoping to get rid of it. But it came back, basically because, as you say, I’m an idiot. Now you’re telling me I knew the box was returned on Monday and I didn’t do anything about it. That makes me an even bigger idiot.”
I watched Gardener. He didn’t say anything.
“I know you don’t like me, but do you really think I’m that dumb?”
He pretended to think about it for a moment and then said, “Yup.”
“How was she killed?”
“Please stop asking questions you know the answers to. You were looking for her. We know that. The two of you were in a gunfight last week.”
“She shot at me. That’s not a gunfight.”
“In Chicago it is.”
I sighed and looked up at the ceiling. There was something I was trying to figure out, but he kept interrupting me. What was it? Something to do with my office—the last time I was there it was clean. Or rather it was the same. That’s what it was like when I came out of the office and found the courier in the hallway, so my office was obviously not a murder scene. If she had been killed there, if someone had cleaned it up I would have noticed differences. Things would have been moved. There’d have been the smell of cleaners. There was no way she was killed in my office. She was killed somewhere else. So, where?
“Where was she killed?”
“We’re looking closely at your office.”
