Page 12 of Wrong Door

A small, careful smile played at her lips. "Okay," she said. "I'm going to tell him yes."

"Good."

Neither of them said anything for a moment. The quiet between them was mostly comfortable, which was its own form of information Miles supposed.

"Get some sleep when you can," she said.

"You, too."

She held his eyes in the screen for a second longer, warm and steady. “Bye, Miles,” she finally said, and then the call ended and the screen went dark.

Miles stayed in the alley a moment more. The street noise from both ends filtered in, distant and ordinary. He put his phone in his pocket and looked up at the narrow strip of sky visible between the buildings. It was a deep, clear navy going darker toward the zenith. He wondered if he was only noticing the distinct nature of the colors because of the paintings he’d seen this afternoon.

With that final, overturned painting from Ostroff’s studio still in his mind, Miles pushed off the wall and went back inside to get back to work.

CHAPTER NINE

Vic's hotel room looked out over a courtyard with a large magnolia tree in it. The hotel was a narrow, four-story building on Liberty Street, the kind of place that had been a boarding house at some point in its history. It had been renovated and redesigned without losing the settled quality of old Savannah construction, the thick plaster walls and the wide-planked floors and the windows that sat deep in their frames.

After digging into backgrounds and assisting Miles with filtering through a few documents on the chemical nature of the deaths, they’d called it a night around midnight. She had slept better than she expected to, which she attributed to the quality of the quiet more than anything else. It was one of the more comfortable and peaceful hotel rooms she’d experienced in a very long time. Her alarm woke her up promptly at 5:45. She was dressed and in the small lobby with her coffee by 6:15. Miles came down ten minutes later.

He looked like he had slept, technically. He was showered and put together, but there was something behind his eyes that still looked troubled. It went beyond simply being tired, but somewhere deeper. She’d seen this same weariness on him several times over the course of the past few months as Kane had become more and more of a nuisance. She had asked Miles about it on two separate occasions—once coming directly after they’d wrapped the case in Austin—and he’d brushed it off. One time, he had mentioned that he was having nightmares and it was sometimes hard for him to sleep, but that’s really all she’d gotten out of him. That had been immediately after leaving Los Angeles, and he had not brought it up since…so neither had she.

They grabbed breakfast from the small café alcove off the lobby, neither of them bothering to sit. Vic took a bagel with cream cheese and Miles took a cheese Danish and they ate standing at the counter while Vic pulled up an email on her phone.

“Did you look over the customer list Pruitt sent over?” she asked.

“Yeah, the list of regular customers at Hale’s, right?”

“That’s the one. I flagged three last night based on proximity and contact frequency. Standing orders, weekly arrangements, people who actually knew him…. all that."

Miles finished the Danish. "Who's first?"

"Cecelia Marsh. She runs a tailoring shop on the east end of Broughton. From what I could tell, there’s a four-year standing order, weekly arrangement for her front counter. Pruitt's notes say she and Desmond were friendly." Vic set her phone on the counter and picked up her coffee. "Then there’s a Philip Okafor, who co-owns a framing shop two blocks west. After that, a bookstore called Wren and Ink."

“Let’s get to it then,” Miles said, tossing his napkin into a nearby trashcan.

Outside, the morning was genuinely beautiful in a way that felt almost pushy. It was one of those days where the weather seemed to be reminding all of the Savannah residents just why they’d chosen to live here. The air was warm but not yet heavy, the sky a pale, clear blue above the canopy of oaks that lined the block. The streets were quiet at this hour, the city not yet fully in motion.

The drive to Cecelia Marsh’s tailoring shop on the east end of Broughton took under fifteen minutes. She had just opened for the morning, literally turning the sign in the window when they approached. When Vic broke the news of Hale’s death, Cecelia cried immediately. Ceceilia was in her early fifties or so and, on trembling legs, sat down on a small stool next to a workspace taken up by a large sewing machine.

"He delivered the arrangements himself, most weeks," Cecelia said once they got her to talk without hitching for breath. "He didn't have to do that. He had part-time staff. But he liked to see where the flowers ended up. He had opinions about which arrangements worked in which spaces, and he wasn't shy about sharing them." She smiled at something she could see in her memory, a look that made Vic’s heart feel warm for a moment. "He rearranged my front counter once without really asking. Just started moving things around and explaining why as he went. I wasn't even annoyed. He was right."

"What was his relationship like with the other merchants on the street?" Vic asked.

"Good. Genuinely good. He wasn't the type who was friendly because it was good for business. He was just…just friendly." She sniffled and blew her nose with a tissue from a box under her counter. "He organized a collection two years ago when the man who runs the shoe repair place on the corner had a health scare and had to close for six weeks. Desmond put a jar on his own counter and told every customer who came in about it. That was just him."

"Did he ever mention anyone he was having trouble with?" Miles asked. "Professionally or personally?"

Cecelia looked at him as though she was waiting for the real question to follow. When it didn't, she shook her head. "In twenty years on this street," she said, "Desmond Hale is the last person I would expect you to be asking that about. Desmond was the person you called when something went wrong. He wasn't someone things went wrong with, if you follow me."

They thanked her for her time and were out of the alterations and tailor shop at 8:15.

The second visit was Philip Okafor; his framing and art supply shop was just two blocks to the west. According to Pruitt’s research, he had a twice-monthly order from Hale's and had known Desmond for going on seven years. He was more contained than Cecelia Marsh, and more measured in how he spoke. And the portrait he offered was pretty much identical to Ceceilia’s.

"Seven years," he said, when Vic asked how long he'd known Desmond. "Give or take. He's been on this street longer than that, but that's when we started doing business together." He leaned against the counter with his arms loosely crossed. "He's on the merchants association board. He organized a fundraiser a couple of years back when one of the other shop owners had a medical situation and had to close for a while. That's the kind of man he is."

"Any chance you knew who his part time help was?" Vic asked.