The Last Dead Girl Read Online Free PDF Page B

AGENT
.
    â€œThat’s me,” he said. “You pay or no?”
    â€œWhy should I believe you? Anyone can have a card printed.”
    â€œOh, you can believe me,
kámoš
.” He looked over at the other stoop. The old woman was there now, standing with the door half open. “Hey, Nana,” he said to her. “This one’s real slick.”
    She put her head down and waved a withered hand in the air, as if she was disgusted with the both of us.
    Simon Lanik turned back to me. “You got a key. Good for you. You won’t be here long, and the girl won’t either. Unless somebody pays.”
    â€œHow much does Jana owe you?” I asked.
    He hesitated just a little, as if he might be padding out the number.
    â€œThree fifty,” he said.
    â€œI don’t have that much.”
    â€œWhat you got,
kámoš
?”
    I brought my wallet out. “Four twenties,” I said. “Eighty bucks.”
    â€œThat’s a start,” he said, reaching for the bills.
    I held them back. Nodded in the direction of the old woman. “I’ll give them to her,” I said, “and you’ll write me a receipt.”
    He laughed. “Whatever you want, Slick.”
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    I got my receipt and Simon Lanik went away. I went inside. I poured myself a bowl of cereal and thought about whether Lanik might have been responsible for Jana’s bruise. I decided he made a poor candidate. I could see him slapping a woman if she fell behind on the rent, but he had written the receipt with his left hand, scribbled it in pencil on the back of his business card. Jana’s bruise was on the left side of her face. I thought she must have been hit by someone right-handed.
    I took my cereal into the living room and sat at her desk. She had an address book with butterflies on the cover. Names and numbers committed to paper, because she didn’t own a cell phone. The person who hit her was probably a man, because men hit women. Probably someone she knew, so his name could be in the book. I paged through it. There were about thirty entries. None of the names jumped out at me, except one.
Roger Tolliver.
Jana had mentioned him. He was one of her law professors, a rising star on the faculty.
    I dragged a legal pad across the blotter, picked up a pen, and copied down his name and number. I didn’t know what I would do with it. Call him up and ask him if he hit her in the face? Ask him if he hid out in the woods last night, with a popsicle?
    I could figure it out later. For now, I copied more names—every man’s name I could find in the book. Then I remembered the night I met Jana; I thought of it as the Night of the Doe. She had a file with her that night, a green folder thick with papers.
    I’m curious about what’s in there,
I’d said.
    Now you’re just being nosy.
    I hadn’t seen the folder since. But the desk had a file drawer. I opened it and found it stuffed with folders. None of them labeled, but only one of them thick enough to be the one I was looking for. I started to take it out, and that’s when I made the bad mistake.
    I stopped.
    Because Jana Fletcher had trusted me to be alone in her apartment. She had given me a key. And she had made it plain enough that she didn’t want to tell me about what happened to her face, or about the contents of this folder.
    So I closed the drawer.
    I kept the names I’d copied. Tore the page from the pad, folded it, and put it in my pocket. But I didn’t do anything with it—not until after she died.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    T hat was Thursday morning, the twenty-fourth of April. In the days that followed I learned some important things about Jana Fletcher.
    I learned that she’d been born on the night of the spring equinox, which made her an Aries, though she didn’t believe in astrology. I learned that she had broken her arm as a