This was going to be a fun ten minutes, I could tell. “I want to ask you about Julian,” I said.
“Such a nice man. Handsome, too.” Sylvia took another drag on her cigarette and shook her head. “I worked for him for four years. I saw everything—everything. You’re lucky, because you’re talking to the only person who knew what was really going on. Even those police who came to me after Mr. Greer died didn’t know their asses from a hole in the wall, and they didn’t bother to ask. Because who cares what the secretary knows, right? Well, let me tell you, we know everything. So listen up, Miss Twenty-Nine.”
“My name is Shea,” I said.
“Are you going to listen, or are you going to talk?”
I sighed. “Listen. I’m going to listen.”
“Good. The first thing you need to know is that nothing was Mr. Greer’s fault. It was all because of that woman he married.”
I blinked. “Mariana Greer?”
“She was the worst thing that ever happened to him. Everyone knew it. Sure, she had money, and I suppose she was beautiful, but she didn’t have class. He used to come to work exhausted because they’d had a fight and he didn’t get any sleep. I’d put calls through from her, and she would be in tears, yelling at him about something. At work. It was a damned disgrace.”
I watched her. Beneath her gruff exterior, Sylvia was lit up and righteous. This was her cause, the thing she’d waited decades to talk about. I decided to play into it.
“What was the wife’s problem?” I said.
It was exactly the right question. Sylvia glanced at me and took another drag of her cigarette, drawing out the drama. When she spoke, she relished the words. “Oh, she had problems, all right. When Mrs. Greer’s mother died, she didn’t leave her fortune to her daughter. She left it to Mr. Greer, her daughter’s husband. What does that tell you?”
To me it sounded sad, but I kept my face blank with confusion. Sylvia scoffed at me and tapped her temple with her fingertip.
“Mariana Greer was crazy?” I asked.
“Why else would her own mother leave her inheritance to her husband instead of her? She wasn’t competent. Mr. Greer had a file of papers the mother had left to him. I didn’t see all of it, but some of the papers had to do with his wife being sent away somewhere when she was eighteen.” Sylvia made air quotes with her fingers at the words “sent away somewhere,” her cigarette waggling in the air. “He didn’t know about that before the wedding—I can guarantee it. It was only after they were married and her mother died that he learned his wife had been a mental patient. A damned mental patient—can you imagine? I felt sorry for that man.”
I itched to go home to my laptop, or to call Michael. I’d never seen evidence that Mariana Greer had been mentally ill. “What happened to those papers?” I asked.
“Mr. Greer got rid of them sometime before he died. Burned them probably. The shame.”
“What about the daughter? Did you ever meet her?”
“No. But we all know what happened with her, don’t we?” Sylvia said smugly. “And we all know why.”
“You think she committed those murders.”
Sylvia stubbed out her cigarette in the plastic ashtray on the table. “With bad blood like hers, who else do you think did it? Santa Claus?”
I couldn’t say why she made me angry exactly. Certainly, I was no defender of Beth, and Beth didn’t need or want my help. For all I knew, Sylvia Simpson was absolutely right.
Still, I said, “You went through his papers, didn’t you? Julian Greer’s private file from his mother-in-law. He never showed that to you. You snooped.”