Born Under a Blond Sign Page 3

  I wandered out into the outer office. The barking was slightly quieter out here but only slightly.

  Somehow, it didn’t seem to be bothering Brigit at all. She was perched on her office chair, staring at her computer screen and sucking iced coffee through a straw.

  “Do you hear this?” I said.

  She looked up, raising her eyebrows. “You didn’t tell me that Gilbert Pike was Miles’s brother.”

  “That’s because I didn’t know,” I said. “The dog is really barking. You can’t tell me that’s not annoying you.”

  “You didn’t know?” she said. “And yet you don’t sound surprised.”

  “I didn’t know yesterday. I found out last night when Miles showed up at The Remington,” I said. “About the dog. I need to do something about this. Do you think the alarm would go off if I went through one of Kitty’s windows?’

  “You saw Miles last night? I thought you weren’t speaking to him.” Brigit leaned forward at this. She was always eager for news about my relationship with Miles, even though it was none of her damned business.

  “Yeah, we drank wine at my place, but he left to be with his family this morning,” I said. “I don’t think the window thing will work. I’d have to get all the way up to the third floor, and I don’t really have access to a ladder. There is that shed outside the building, though. I wonder if there’s a ladder in there…”

  “This morning?” said Brigit. “Oh my God, did he stay with you last night?”

  “Yes,” I said. “But it wasn’t like that. We’re not together or anything. He made that very clear to me this morning.”

  “Oh, Ivy.” Brigit made a sympathetic face. “I’m so sorry. You were there for him in the face of this tragedy, and then he shuts you down? He liked used you.”

  “No,” I said. “That’s not how it is. Really, it’s fine. Miles is a complicated person, and the two of us together is complicated.” I wandered over to the window to peer down at the shed that I was talking about. I wished I could know if there was a ladder in there without breaking into the shed. Which I’d have to do. The good news was that the padlock on it would be dead easy to pick, but the bad news was—

  “I saw how heartbroken you were after last time,” said Brigit. “Seriously, he can’t just toy with you like that. You deserve better. You’re a good person, Ivy, and you deserve to be happy. I know he’s going through hell right now with his brother, but that’s no excuse for being an asshole.”

  “He’s not an asshole.” I turned away from the window. There had to be an easier way to deal with this Kitty situation. One that didn’t involve breaking and entering. And one that would be permanent.

  “Look, you can make excuses for him, because you love him, but I’m allowed to be annoyed at the guy,” said Brigit. “That’s what friends do, you know? I’m here to call him an asshole for you while you say that he’s just under a lot of strain. Let me call him an asshole for you.”

  I headed back to my office. “I’d really rather you just stayed out of it. Knowing Miles, it was just an anomaly that he even showed up to see me yesterday, and I won’t hear from him for weeks until he’s got some missing persons case to kick over to us.”

  She got up from her desk and followed me. “Well, that’s not cool. He can’t keep stringing you along like that.”

  I picked up the phone and cradled it between my ear and my shoulder. “Honestly, Brigit, you have no idea the history here. If you knew the things that I’d done to Miles, you might be a little easier on him.”

  “Well, I don’t know, because you won’t tell me anything,” said Brigit. “You keep me all locked out of your life.”

  I rolled my eyes. “You know, I don’t hear you sharing all your deep, dark secrets.” I paged through the phone book on my desk with one hand, searching for a phone number.

  “I would tell you anything you wanted to know, but you aren’t interested.” She put her hands on her hips.

  “And you are way too interested in me.” Aha! There was the number. I put my finger on it to make sure I didn’t lose my spot.

  “I’m not.” She was angry. “I have a healthy interest, because I care about you. Because we’re friends. We’re friends, aren’t we?”

  “Brigit.” I rolled my eyes, dialing on the phone.

  “Well, aren’t we?”

  I held up a finger. “I’m on the phone.”

  “You’re calling someone while we’re talking?” she said.

  “ASPCA,” said the voice on the other end of the phone.

  “Hi,” I said. “I’d like to report an incident of animal cruelty.”

  Brigit’s jaw dropped open. “You cannot be serious. Keeping a dog in a bathroom—”

  “My neighbor keeps her dog penned up in a space that’s far too small for the animal,” I said. “I’m fairly convinced that the poor thing doesn’t have proper access to food and water either.”

  “Would you like to lodge a formal complaint?” said the voice on the phone.

  I grinned. “Boy, would I ever.”

  Brigit shook her head at me in shock.

  * * *

  After that, I spent the rest of the afternoon being lectured by Brigit about how awful a person I was for lying to the ASPCA. I kept interrupting her to explain that I wasn’t lying. There was absolutely animal cruelty going on up there. I tried to remind Brigit that she had never actually seen the bathroom in which Fluffy was locked up in. It was small. Really small. But Brigit said that stuff didn’t matter. The truth was that I was harassing Kitty Richards and that I was going to get in trouble for it.

  Whatever.

  She chased me back into my inner office, still going on and on about why I was terrible. I eventually had to send her back to her desk and pointedly close the door.

  Once I did that I could still hear her out there, but she wasn’t talking to me anymore. Instead, she was sighing a lot and swearing under her breath.

  I turned music on so that I wouldn’t have to hear her.

  Brigit yelled something through the door at me, that I was passive-aggressive or something.

  I ignored her.

  Then she was banging on the door.

  “What?” I said.

  “Are you still coming to my art show?” she wanted to know.

  I went over to the office door and opened it.

  She winced as the loud sounds of Eddie Money poured out of the office. I liked to listen to classic rock. Brigit only liked country music.

  “Of course I’m still coming to your art show. Why would you ask me that?”

  “It’s only that you’re angry with me now, and—”

  “I’m angry with you? You’re the one who’s ripping me a new asshole.”

  She took a deep breath, and I knew that opening the door to her had been a bad idea, because she was about to start right in on why everything I’d done was so wrong and immoral and everything else.

  And then I was saved, because Miles walked into the office.

  He was wearing a t-shirt and jeans, and he looked incredibly informal, which wasn’t typical for him. At work, he always wore a suit, and the most he usually did to “get comfortable” was to take off his tie and jacket and unbutton the top button of his dress shirt.

  I hurried over to intercept him. “Miles. You’re here. How are you?” Which was a stupid thing to ask, because he wasn’t okay. Of course he wasn’t okay. His brother had shot people and then shot himself. Miles must be feeling terrible, and he probably didn’t want to go into that. I was an idiot.

  But he said, “Fine.”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  He grimaced.

  Brigit rushed over to the two of us. “Mr. Pike, gosh, I’m so sorry to hear about Gilbert. I just want you to know that he was always a really great guy when I knew him, and I just can’t imagine what happened.”

  He looked her up and down. “Thanks. Um, who are you?”

  “That’s Brigit,” I said. “She works with me. You’ve
met her like five times.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Sorry.” He turned back to me. “Actually, what she was saying is why I’m here.”

  “It is?” said Brigit, sounding excited. “Wait. How?”

  He ran a hand over his face. “Is there somewhere I can sit down? I just feel kind of wiped out. I’m still hungover from last night, I think.”

  That was why he should have come to breakfast with me. I would have fixed him right up. I knew the secret to after-drinking food. And it wasn’t, as some people thought, grease. Instead it was three things: healthy carbs to soak up the alcohol, protein for energy, and rehydration. Lots of water, of course, but fruit was also a great idea. Course, it didn’t make you feel like a hundred bucks afterward or anything. Nothing did that.

  “Of course,” I said. “Why don’t you come back to my office?” I led him back into the inner office, where I had chairs set up in front of my desk for clients.

  He sat down.

  Brigit had followed us and was hovering in the doorway. I was about to shoo her away.

  But then Miles said, “I want to hire you.”

  “Hire me?” I said, motioning Brigit inside. “For what?”

  “Well, you’re a detective, right?”

  “You know that,” I said.

  “And even though sometimes you end up solving murder cases, a lot of times, you solve other kinds of cases. Like whether or not people are cheating on their husbands and stuff, yeah?”

  “Miles, you don’t have a wife for me to check up on,” I said. Then I gave him a sharp look. “You don’t, do you?”

  “No,” he said. “Don’t be ridiculous. Look, I want to hire you to try to figure out what drove Gilbert to do this. Like Brigit said, he was a great guy. He wasn’t the kind of guy who would just start shooting people. I need to know what happened. And it’s not something that I can do myself. If there was some way that I could make this a homicide investigation, then I could go digging on my own. But there’s nothing there to investigate, so there’s nothing I can do. I need someone else to look into it for me. Someone I can trust.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, obviously, I’d be happy to look into it, Miles.”

  “You’ll find me answers,” he said.

  “I’ll do my best,” I said.

  “And I’ll pay you.”

  “Oh,” I said, shaking my head, “something of this scope, on a lieutenant’s salary… Maybe we can work out like an adjusted rate or something.”

  “I have money, Ivy. My family has money. Just tell me how much this would cost.”

  I looked at Brigit. “Tell him our daily rate.”

  Brigit told him.

  His eyes got wide. “Wow.”

  “I am the detective that brought down Ralph the Hatchet,” I said. “Besides, I get that much money for a few weeks in a row, and then sometimes I go a few more weeks without a job. So, it balances out.”

  “It’s not a problem,” said Miles, recovering. “I’m going to pay you, Ivy. Just say that you’ll take the case.”

  “I’ll take the case,” I said.

  * * *

  “No, this is his side of the room,” I said to Brigit, pointing. “That side is the roommate’s.”

  “You sure?” she said. “That side has a poster of a big snowy mountain, and Gilbert liked snowboarding.”

  “I’m sure,” I said, lifting up his notebook from his desk. His name was written in the upper right hand corner, along with his phone number. I guess he’d done that in case he ever lost it.

  We were starting our investigation in Gilbert’s dorm room, which was so messy, it would have made Miles’s palms sweat. Gilbert lived in a suite-style dorm with three other guys. There was a kitchen and living room area, a bathroom, and then two bedrooms, each occupied by two guys each. The sides were both filled with identical furniture—a bed, a wardrobe, a desk, and a dresser, but the two roommates had organized them differently, so the room wasn’t a mirror image of itself. In its messiness, however, it was essentially homogeneous. Both beds were strewn with clothing. The floor was as well. Both desks were piled with a mixture of books, notebooks, and dirty dishes.

  The roommate, however, had a computer on his.

  Shouldn’t Gilbert have a computer too? I started to look through the stuff on the desk more closely, pushing aside papers and textbooks. “Where’s Gilbert’s computer?”

  Brigit turned back to me from the wardrobe, which appeared to be mostly empty. Unsurprising since all the clothes were on the floor. “What?”

  “He should have one, right?” I said. “All kids these age have computers, don’t they? Hell, when I was in college, practically everyone had one, so he’s got to have one somewhere, right?”

  She furrowed her brow. “Well, maybe he only had a tablet or something.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “For college? Is he going to type his papers on a tablet?”

  “Good point,” she said. She began throwing aside the covers on the bed. “It’s got to be here somewhere. Maybe he had a laptop he browsed on in bed or something.”

  I got down on my knees to look under the desk. “The thing is, we could find all kinds of stuff out about him from his computer. Maybe he was sending people emails about how he was feeling or something.”

  Brigit grinned. “Maybe he kept an electronic journal.”

  “Is that a thing?”

  “Well, not really,” she said. “But it would be awesome if he did. I mean, then we’d have all the answers right there.”

  “What we really need is his phone,” I said. “But I bet he had his phone on him during the shooting.”

  “Yeah,” said Brigit. “But if it’s evidence, couldn’t Miles get it for us, maybe?”

  “Maybe,” I said. I straightened and went over to his dresser. I began opening drawers, which were miraculously still full of clothes even though the floor and bed were covered in clothes. How many articles of clothing did Gilbert have?

  The door opened. “Hey, what are you doing?”

  Brigit and I both turned to see a guy entering the room. He looked about twenty. He was wearing a baseball cap.

  “Ivy Stern,” I said. “I’m investigating the situation with Gilbert Pike, and we have permission from the family to search his room.”

  “Oh,” said the guy. “Okay. Well, I was just going to get some clothes and stuff.”

  “You the roommate?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “My name’s Jory. I just, uh, I can’t sleep in here right now, you know? It’s too creepy, knowing that he did what he did. So, I’m going to get some of my stuff and go crash with my girlfriend for a few nights. But I can wait until you’re done.”

  “Hold on,” I said. “Can we ask you some questions about Gilbert?”

  “Well, I guess so,” he said.

  “Were you two close?” asked Brigit. “Sometimes people just end up as roommates because they need someone to live with. Was it like that with you two?”

  “No, we were friends,” said Jory. “I was probably his best friend. I just…” He looked down at the floor, almost as if he might start crying. But then he straightened his shoulders and raised his gaze. “It’s really hit me kind of hard, you know?”

  “What can you tell us about his state of mind in the past few weeks?” I asked. “Anything that, in hindsight, you can see was pointing towards him doing this?”

  “That’s just it,” said Jory. “He would never have done this. And in the past few weeks, he didn’t seem any different than usual.”

  “He wasn’t stressed out about anything?” said Brigit. “A test? A girl? Anything?”

  “No,” said Jory. “Well, maybe. But not anything out of the ordinary. He was the same as he always is. I can’t make heads or tails out of this whole thing. I knew Gil real well. At least I thought I did.” He let out a helpless, bitter laugh. “Maybe you can’t really know anyone. If someone like Gil could do something like this, then maybe there isn’t any way to know what anyone
would do.” He shook his head.

  Brigit nodded. “Yeah, I know what you mean.”

  He gave her a funny look.

  “I knew him too,” she said. “Not as well as you, but I had a class with him last year—”

  “Hey, I thought you looked familiar,” said Jory. “You go here, don’t you?”

  “No, I graduated.”

  “And now you’re a cop?”

  “Private detective,” she said. “Well, an assistant, anyway.” She blushed. “It’s not important. The important thing is just trying to figure out why Gilbert did this.”

  “I have no idea why he did this,” said Jory. “If you would have asked me days ago if I thought that Gil would ever do this, I would have staked my life on the fact that he couldn’t.”

  That seemed to be the general consensus, didn’t it? What had been going on with Gilbert to cause him to snap like this? I looked around the room, wishing that the answer would jump out at me. But all I really saw was dirty laundry.

  I turned back to Jory. “Did he have a computer?”

  “Yeah, a laptop,” said Jory. “What? Isn’t it here?”

  “Nope,” I said.

  “Huh,” said Jory, making a confused face. “Well, come to think of it, he might have taken it home.”

  “Home?”

  “Yeah, I don’t always sleep here, because I stay with my girlfriend a lot. Off campus. But he did say something about going home for a couple of days. His family lives close enough that he could commute if he wanted to, but he always said that he’d rather live on campus. So, I don’t know why he was going home, but maybe he took his computer there.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Brigit’s art show was that evening, and I let her leave work early to get prepared.

  I had promised her that I would go, so I would. I wasn’t really big on art stuff, but I knew that this was important to Brigit, so I would go. Brigit was a good kid, and I really appreciated her help. She was the best assistant I’d ever had. Most everyone else that I’d ever hired had never gotten much interested in the cases. They’d answered the phones, done the billing, and that was it. Brigit was part of everything, though, and it made my job so much less lonely. She was… well, she was my friend.