“I know you’re still pissed at me about the pool furniture, but we really need to talk,” he said, keeping his voice low.
She glanced backward into the apartment. “Can’t it wait until morning? I just got Maya to sleep.”
“Sorry, it really can’t. This is important.” He paused. “We need to talk about Evan Wingfield.”
Her eyes widened. “Okay, come on in. We can sit out on the patio and talk without disturbing Maya.”
Shewas dressed in loose-fitting pajama pants and a T-shirt, and her hair was mussed. She clasped her hands around both knees, perched uneasily, like a bird, on the rusty metal chair.
“How long have you known?”
“I knew something was up with you the first night you got here. But I didn’t figure out that you were her sister until later that first week. That’s when I found out about Tanya’s death and the fact that Maya was missing.”
“Why didn’t you arrest me, or turn me in?”
“I would have, at first. But Ava insisted you were good people, right from the start. She would have kicked my ass. Plus therewas Maya. And then you jumped Mrs. Ben Dover in the parking lot and kept her from splitting my head in half. And you saved Harry Bronson’s life, making him chew that aspirin. I decided to wait and see what happened. Mostly, I guess, I was trying to figure you out.”
“Let me know when that happens. I’m still trying to figure me out too.” She paused. “I didn’t kill Tanya.”
“Can you tell me what happened?”
“Back in New York, I had a standing Sunday-morning playdate with Maya. We’d go to the park, or out to breakfast. Just the two of us. But that morning, Tanya texted me that Maya’d had a rough night, and she wanted her to sleep in. She also mentioned Evan was coming over.”
“Was that unusual?”
“Very. Things had gotten really bitter between them, with all the lawyers and everything. He’d made some nasty threats. But she said he wanted to talk things over between the two of them, to get things settled. Tanya thought that meant he was going to give in and let her take Maya with her to California.”
“She was moving to California?”
“Yeah. She wanted to get away from Evan, restart her acting career. She’d rented a house, found a new agent out there… she was begging me to move with her.”
“Okay, so what happened next?” Joe asked.
“She was supposed to text me that morning, to let me know he was gone. But when I didn’t hear from her, I got worried. I called and texted, then finally went over there. I had a key, so I let myself in. And that’s when I found her.…”
Letty ducked her head and began to cry. “She was…”
Joe leaned forward and grasped her hands. “It’s okay.”
Her chest was heaving as she struggled to get the words out. “Blood. Around her head. And then I looked up, and oh God. Maya was standing at the top of the stairs, crying.”
“Do you think she saw what happened?”
“I don’t know,” Letty said, her voice catching. “It all happened so fast.”
“Okay,” he said. “But why didn’t you call the cops, when you found her?”
“Because I knew, right away. It was Evan. Tanya told me, if anything bad ever happened to her, it would be Evan. She made me promise, swear, that if anything happened, I would take Maya and go.”
“Go where? Did she tell you to come down here, to the Murmuring Surf?”
Letty shook her head. “Not exactly.”
“How exactly?”
She dabbed at her eyes with the hem of her T-shirt. “You had to know Tanya. She was… complicated. She liked secrets. You never knew the whole truth with her. A few months ago, when things were really bad between her and Evan, she told me she was afraid of him. Because he wouldn’t ever let go of Maya. Not because he actually loved her, but because Evan thought she was, like, his property.”
“Did Wingfield physically threaten to harm her?”
