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“Handy.” Olivia turned to the little side hall and opened the room on the left. “Bathroom, laundry room, and closet? All in one . . .” She looked around the room. “. . . maybe forty square foot room?”
“I want a soaking tub,” I said. If she was an expert, she could expert that. “You know one of those big—”
“Yes, I know. That’ll take some doing. But I see your point, a big tub with a big window out onto that back view? Definitely something to ask for.” She closed the door, took two steps across the hall and opened the door to the bedroom. “Huh.”
“It’s a bedroom,” I said, feeling defensive. “All it really needs is a bed.”
“If we take these storage units out and build in a real closet on that outside wall to act as even more insulation, we could get the other closet out of the bathroom,” she said, mostly to herself. “Maybe even put a stackable washer-dryer unit in here since Anemone says you don’t have many clothes. That might give us enough room to get the tub in the bathroom.” She shut the door and looked up at the ceiling. “Attic?” She yanked down on the chain hanging there that I’d been ignoring, and a step ladder creaked down, bringing dust with it that didn’t deter her from climbing. “Okay, then,” she said, her voice muffled a little because her head was in the attic, and came back down. “We can take the ceiling out over the living room, give you a cathedral ceiling, couple of skylights, and that’ll get rid of the pokiness of the place, get more light in here.” She frowned, but it was the kind of frown that came from thinking hard. “You finish liberating your mattress and let me take some measurements and then you can take me to lunch while we talk about this.”
I’d been standing there like a dummy while she’d glided around my floor, so I said, “Look, I really want to do this myself—”
“That’s why we need to talk about it,” Olivia said. “I understand there’s a diner here that’s really good?”
I was hungry, and it was clear that Anemone had raised Olivia because the woman had the same drive that her stepmother did, so I said, “Yes, I’m starving, we’ll go to the Red Box.”
“Free your mattress,” she said and got a tape measure out of her backpack, and I went back to peeling the plastic off the memory foam.
CHAPTER 25
I learned from Steve Crider that Bartlett and O’Toole had declared that the theft at River Vista was no longer a case. I was waiting on Rain’s unofficial report on the hit and run scene, but she hadn’t been optimistic about giving me more, and I wasn’t optimistic about getting anything. The autopsy would take more time but wouldn’t make Jim Pitts any less dead. And it probably wouldn’t reveal any surprises.
Thacker’s murderer, Mickey Pitts, was dead. Who paid him fifty thousand for the hit?
What had happened to Thacker’s computer and phone that Mickey had taken?
Where was Mickey Pitts’s other two hundred thousand dollars?
Where had Mickey been hiding around Burney after he got out of prison?
What were the Wolves up to out at River Vista that required the law to stay away?
And then there was what Pete had said to me yesterday. I didn’t know where he’d learned about my father. I needed to talk to Liz about it before it hit the Burney gossip mill, but I’d never spoken to anyone about my father, not even Rain. She knew the facts, but not the emotion. That was because I didn’t know the emotion. Shame? Definitely anger. As Rain would say, I was revisiting the ghosts of fucked-up-shit past.
I sat at my desk and tried to come up with a plan of attack on how to figure out who paid for Thacker’s death and what exactly the Wolves and Cash were up to at River Vista, but I was having a hard time focusing. Maybe I wasn’t cut out for this detecting thing?
I must have been too lost in frustrated thought because Bartlett startled me when he spoke from behind my left shoulder.
“What are you doing?”
I managed to control my startle. It seemed Bartlett had a talent after all. Sneaking up on people. “Thinking.”
Bartlett got inspired at that, perhaps because he thought he too could sit in a chair and look confused like I’d been. “When I was in high school, a teacher told us to write things down in order to see them.”
That wasn’t that long ago, I thought, but I nodded since I had nothing else to do at the moment.
Bartlett went to the whiteboard where the guys kept a running tab on the sodas in the fridge so everyone could pay up at the end of the month. He wrote:
Mickey Pitts Reign of Terror
Factory
Museum
Shady Rest* (Thacker death)
Navy Blue’s house
Gazebo (Blue Park)
