Murder Inside the Beltway - Margaret Truman [24]
“Ms. Simmons?” Jackson said.
She stopped and glared at him.
“Can we talk for a minute? I’m—”
She walked away.
“Whoa,” he said, catching up with her and blocking her path. He fumbled for his detective’s badge and displayed it. “I’m Matt Jackson, detective, MPD. I’d like to speak with you.”
She cocked her head and sneered, “Yeah, I’m sure you would. Maybe another time.”
He shifted his position to prevent her from advancing toward the curb, where a taxi had pulled up.
“Get out of my way,” she said.
“Look,” Jackson said, “either you agree to talk with me now, or I slap cuffs on you and we do it at headquarters. Your call. It’s about your friend Rosalie Curzon.”
“I never would have guessed,” she said. “That’s my cab waiting.”
“After we talk, I’ll drop you wherever you want. But first we talk.”
Until this point she’d been all toughness and challenge, not a hint of any southern accent or charm. Then, as though she’d received an instant Dixie transplant, she sighed, lowered her suitcase to the pavement, and said in a softer voice, “Ah suppose ah don’t have any choice, do ah?”
Jackson smiled. “No, ma’am, I suppose you don’t.”
She looked around. A middle-aged couple came from the building and didn’t try to hide their interest in what was going on.
“Can we go somewhere?” she asked.
“Your apartment?”
“No, ah don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“My apartment?” Jackson said.
It was her first hint of a smile. “Are you sure you’re a cop?”
“Want to see the badge again? Look, tell you what, we’ll go to my apartment. It’s in Adams Morgan, only a couple of blocks from here.” He pointed to his car. “That’s mine. I make good coffee, the real thing. When we’re through, I’ll drive you wherever it is you want to go.”
She chewed her cheek.
“By the way, where were you going?”
“Home. All right. But if I answer your questions, I’m free to go?”
“That’s right, unless you confess to killing your friend. Then—”
“Don’t even joke about that.”
They dismissed the taxi, whose driver was visibly miffed, placed her suitcase in the trunk of Jackson’s car, and drove the short distance to his apartment.
“You live here alone?” she asked.
“Yeah. I mean, sometimes my girlfriend stays but—”
“It’s so neat.”
He laughed. “I like order around me. Must mean I have a disorderly brain. At least that’s what a professor of mine claimed about externally neat people.”
“You went to college?” she said, going to a window and looking down at the street. In her experience, cops weren’t college-educated.
“Uh-huh,” he said from the kitchen, where he readied the coffeemaker. When he returned to the living room, she’d removed her raincoat and settled on the couch, her shoes on the floor in front of her. She wore a white sleeveless sweater that was too tight across her sizable bosom, and jeans that were also too tight. This was a woman who would fight a weight problem as she aged, he thought. But that was in the future. Right now, she was a tall, solidly built woman who looked as though she spent considerable time in a gym, maybe even lifting weights. The most striking thing about her was a mane of copper hair.
“Coffee will be ready in a minute,” he said, pulling up a yellow director’s chair.
She spread her arms. “So, go ahead and ask your questions.”
He pulled a slender notebook and pen from his inside jacket pocket, removed the jacket, hung it over a matching chair, and resumed his seat. “I suppose I can start by asking why you were leaving D.C. and going home. Home is South Carolina?”
“How did you know that?”
“Your, ah, your sheet.”
She winced. “Pretty sad, huh, a nice southern girl like me having a rap sheet?”
“We all make mistakes.”
“It wasn’t a mistake. It’s what I chose to do with my life, at least for part of it.”
“Prostitution.”
She nodded.
“I’m not judging you, Ms. Simmons.”
“Good. You can call me Micki.”
“Okay, Micki, and I’m Matt.”
“Micki and Matt,” she said with a laugh. “Sounds like a TV sitcom.”
“It does, doesn’t it?”
An expression crossed her face. “I can’t