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“I see. Well, thank you anyway.” Pulling a silver Montblanc pen out of her Balenciaga purse, Alexia smiled sweetly. “I appreciate that the information is sensitive and I can’t make copies. But I wonder, Chief Dublowski, would you mind terribly if I took a couple of notes?”
Chief Harry Dublowski hadn’t been kidding when he said the police had had little to go on. The smattering of personal information they had on Jenny had almost all been gleaned from a single interview with her former roommate, a girl named Kelly Dupree.
Alexia paid Kelly a visit at work. Kelly’s Nails was a hole-in-the-wall manicure place, squeezed into a sliver of a building between a convenience store and a pharmacy in a nondescript Brooklyn neighborhood. But its proprietress had made an effort to bring the place to life. There were stylish leather chairs, the gleaming white walls were newly painted, and an appetizing array of Essie nail colors were arranged in the shape of a rainbow along the back wall, giving the salon the look of an old-fashioned candy store.
“I’ll be right with you!” the eponymous Kelly announced cheerfully. She lost some of her sparkle when Alexia explained that she wasn’t a customer, that she was here about Jenny.
“Look, I’m working, okay? I don’t have time. I already told the cops everything I know.”
“I appreciate that. I’m just concerned that maybe the police gave up a little easily.”
Kelly’s eyes narrowed skeptically. “Uh-huh. You’re concerned. Right.”
“I’m not a reporter. I’m a friend of a friend.”
“Listen, lady. If this is a scam and you misquote me in some salacious bullshit article, I swear to God . . .”
“It’s not a scam. A few minutes of your time, that’s all I need.”
Kelly had to admit that the polished older lady with the British accent didn’t look like a reporter.
“Okay,” she said, against her better judgment. “I’ll meet you in Starbucks when I’m done here. Right across the street. Say five o’clock?”
She was as good as her word. At five on the dot, Alexia ordered coffees and the two women sat down to talk.
Kelly Dupree was red-haired with pale Irish skin and a smattering of freckles across her nose that made her look younger than her twenty-eight years. She had the overplucked eyebrows of a professional beautician, and she tapped her acrylic nails loudly and nervously on the table as she spoke.
“I’m sorry if I was a little abrupt before. It was awful what happened to Jen. But a lot of the newspapers and TV people treated her death like entertainment. As if it were some sort of sick reality show, you know? It’s made me wary of talking about her.”
“I don’t blame you,” Alexia said. “I used to be a politician—I’m retired now—but I certainly understand how manipulative the media can be.”
“So what is your interest in Jenny? No offense, but I’m having trouble believing you’re a ‘friend of a friend.’ Jen didn’t know too many people like you.”
“I knew her father, many years ago. We lost touch. When I heard about Jennifer’s death and what happened, I felt I owed it to Billy to try and find out the truth. Perhaps I’m wrong, but it seemed to me as if the police kind of let things slide.”
Kelly Dupree laughed bitterly. “You’re not wrong. The cops were as bad as the media. Worse in a way. For a few weeks Jen’s murder was a hot story. Then everybody forgot about it and moved on to something new. They had no leads. Their so-called investigation was a joke. As soon as they realized it wasn’t Luca, that was it. They gave up.”
“Luca Minotti? Jenny’s boyfriend?”
“Fiancé. Right. Sweetest guy on earth. Luca wouldn’t step on a spider if he could help it. Lucky for him he was in Italy when she went missing, otherwise the NYPD would have pinned it on him for sure. They wanted it to be Luca so bad. That’s all they asked me about.”
Alexia sipped her Americano. “And what about you. Do you have any theories, any thoughts as to who might have killed her?”
Kelly shook her head. “Not really. Some psycho. I mean she wasn’t robbed. She wasn’t raped. There was no reason for it. It was so senseless.”
“Was Jenny troubled at all before her death?”
“She was cut up about her dad. You knew he was murdered too, right? In London, the year before Jenny.”
“Yes,” Alexia said quietly, banishing an image of Teddy from her mind. “I knew that. Were they close?”
“Oh God, yes. Very. Billy was a little odd, you know, but Jen was his only child. He adored her. She worried about him a lot.”
“About his mental health, you mean?”
Kelly nodded. “Yes, that. And his loneliness. But you know, there were other things. He’d been in jail a long time ago, before Jenny was born. I never quite knew the details, but Jenny seemed convinced he was innocent of whatever it was he got sent down for. It made him paranoid. Right before he died, I remember he called the apartment and told Jenny that the British government was out to get him. That they’d drugged him and put him on a plane or some nonsense. He was really frightened.”
Alexia’s hand tightened on her coffee mug. Poor Billy! He came to me for help and I scared him out of his wits. And then to have nobody believe him, not even his own family. The guilt was like a stone around her neck.
