“Does that always work for you?” I asked her as we got in the elevator, my purse tucked under my arm.
“Does what always work for me?”
“Ordering people around.”
One of Beth’s eyebrows rose. “Shea, is it lunchtime?”
“Yes.”
“Are you hungry?”
“I guess.”
“Then we’ll have lunch. I don’t see where the confusion is.”
The elevator doors slid open on the ground floor. “You don’t have very many friends, do you?” I asked her.
“I don’t have any friends,” Beth said, her tone blunt. “You know the reason.”
“It’s been forty years.”
“Not in this town, it hasn’t.”
I followed her out onto the street, then down toward the piers. Beth led me into one of the high-end cafés that the tourists frequented. “I’m wearing scrubs,” I said self-consciously as we stepped inside.
Beth swept her gaze down me and up again, assessing. “I don’t see a problem.”
There wasn’t. We were seated immediately in a corner booth and given glasses of water in seconds. I couldn’t tell whether we were favored because Beth was infamous or because she was obviously rich. It certainly wasn’t because of me.
“What?” she asked me, looking at me from above the rims of her reading glasses as she perused the menu.
“I can’t figure out whether to like you, to feel sorry for you, or be annoyed by you,” I replied.
“Try all three,” she said, as if the answer were simple. Then she looked at her menu again. “I think you’d like the lobster bisque.”
Of course she’d order for me. “Okay.” I closed my menu.
Beth closed her menu, too, and pushed back her reading glasses again. “You haven’t called me.”
No, I hadn’t called her. After the interview with the whisper was deleted from my phone, I’d plunged back into real-world research, the kind that was based on verifiable facts. And I had no desire to go back to that house. “I’ve been busy.”
“I thought you wanted to interview me.”
“I do.”
“Well, here I am.” She took a sip of her water. “I suppose Joshua told you a few things about me.”
She was fishing, I realized. Even though Beth was the one who had set up the interview, she wasn’t entirely sure what Detective Black had told me. I hadn’t called her to fill her in, and she wanted to know.
The idea was surprising. I hadn’t thought Beth had any weaknesses. I thought of Black’s bitter voice as he said, We aren’t friends, and I wondered if he was one of them. I also wondered why she called him Joshua.
“It was a good meeting, I guess,” I said lamely.
Beth’s gaze narrowed at me across the table. The waitress appeared, and Beth gave our order. I wasn’t ready for this. I wasn’t prepared to fence with Beth Greer in the middle of my workday. When I’d gone to the Greer mansion, I’d built up to it, gone in prepared. This time, she’d ambushed me. My instincts told me that if I thought that wasn’t deliberate, I was probably a fool.
But I’d lost our first interview without the chance to transcribe it, and now I had another opportunity. I wanted to know about Mariana. About Julian’s murder. About the Lady Killer murders. The source of all of those answers was sitting across from me. I figured I may as well not let it go to waste.