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“And you say Venture Capital does have an office here, but you don’t know who Abril Arrington is? Do they get a lot of calls? Or has any of her clients come here asking for her?”
“Not enough to make me remember. And if someone had come looking for her it would have had to be while I was at lunch. And they still would have had to sign in and out.” The woman said pointing to a logbook that sat on the counter. “To tell you the truth, I know everybody who works in this office. If that person, whatever her name is, had an office here, I would know her. Venture Capital may have an office here, but they don’t do business here.”
“Did you tell all of this to detective Silver?”
“Who?”
“Detective Silver. He’s the cop assigned to the case.”
“I never heard of him. You’re the only one who’s been here asking questions.” The phone started ringing. “Would you excuse me for a minute,” the woman said, turning slightly to grab the phone. “United Brothers Shipping,” she sang into the receiver.
While the receptionist took her call, Olivia looked around the lobby and thought it was strange that somebody could have an office they never came to. She also thought it was a little strange that Detective Silver hadn’t been there.
“Do you think it would be alright if I took a look in her office?”
“I can tell you where the office is, but I can’t let you in. Even if I wanted to, I don’t have a key to the clients offices.”
Olivia smiled, knowing she could pick a lock. “Just tell me where it is, and I’ll be out of your hair.”
The receptionist told Olivia where to find the o
ffice, and she went off by herself in search of it. After making sure the hallway was clear, Olivia went to work on the lock. Olivia dug in her purse for her tension wrench and inserted it into the keyhole. She had no trouble at all with the lock and was inside in no time.
It was a small one-person office with a desk and two chairs in front of it. On the desk, sat a computer and a phone, but nothing else. No papers, no mail, opened or otherwise. No personal pictures on the desk or on the walls. In fact, the walls were bare.
Olivia looked in the desk drawers and in the small file cabinet. “Nothing,” she said and sat down at the desk. “Who are you, Abril Arrington?”
After leaving the never used office of Venture Capital, Olivia drove to the North Avenue condominium where the murder was committed. Her mission there wasn’t to check out the crime scene. Although she was dying to get in there, Olivia was there to canvas the neighbors—to find out something about the mystery woman.
Olivia had been there for over an hour, knocked on a few doors and talked to a few residents in the parking lot. She talked to the police’s eyewitness and confirmed his story. He saw somebody leaving in a hurry but couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. Everyone else she spoke to said basically the same thing about Abril Arrington. They were all naturally shocked by the murder.
“She seemed like such a nice person,” a few actually said. But nobody could tell Olivia anything about her. Most didn’t even know her name.
Olivia got in her car, ready to drive downtown to Marcus’s office. She backed out of the space and was on her way out of the complex when she saw an older woman, sitting in a first floor window. She was immediately reminded of her great grandmother. Olivia looked in her rear view mirror at Abril Arrington's condo then pulled into the first space she could.
Olivia got out of the car and walked toward the older woman’s building. As she walked, she tried to gauge the distance from the window to the condo. “Hundred and a half, maybe two hundred feet.”
Olivia turned toward the window, the woman was watching her. Olivia thought back to the days when she was a little girl, when her great grandmother used to sit in the window all day. She was well into her nineties and couldn’t get around very well.
“Sitting in this window makes me feel alive. Even if I can’t be out there, I can see my little piece of the world and be a part of it,” she told Olivia once.
If that woman was anything like her great grandmother, she would have seen everything and everybody that came and went from the area.
“How are you today, ma’am,” Olivia said as she approached the window.
“Doing just fine,” the woman said slowly. “Thank you for asking. How are you today? I know you must be hot as long as you been out in that sun.”
“Yes, ma’am. It is hot today.”
“Might get up to a hundred—that’s what they say. But you know half the time they’s guessing anyway.”
“Even if it doesn’t make a hundred, it’s hot enough out here,” Olivia said and laughed a little.
“What you been doing out there so long anyway? You been out there for over an hour—just about an hour and a half.”
“I have.” When the woman said that, Olivia knew she was talking to the right person. “Ma’am, my name is Olivia Wayne. I’m a private investigator looking into the death of a young woman that was murdered here in the complex.”
“Thought that’s what it was about.”
