Spin State - Chris Moriarty [114]
“You’d bet right, then.” Li grinned. “I can’t walk into this place without the creeping feeling that Sister Vic is going to rise from the grave and ask me for my hall pass.”
That got a laugh.
“What can I tell you?” Sister Ted asked, when they were settled in the dilapidated relative peace of her office.
“What Sharifi was doing here two weeks ago for a start.”
“Making a donation. We have a lot of Ring-side donors.”
“Do all of them come here to visit personally?”
“Hannah was a former student. And she was extremely generous.”
Li couldn’t help glancing around the run-down office at that and thinking of the cheap buildings the school was housed in.
“She gave the things that counted,” Ted said. “Books. Food money. And she guaranteed every student college tuition at the best school she could get admitted to. Every student. Do you have any idea what that means to the girls we get here?”
“I can imagine.”
“I imagine you can do more than imagine.”
“How well did you know Sharifi?” Li asked, brushing the implied question aside.
Ted smiled. “Not that well. She was my age, you know. The women who would have taught her are all long gone.”
“What did she visit for, then?”
“To talk to me.”
“About?”
“A new gift.”
“Look,” Li said. “I’m investigating Sharifi’s death, not your school. Can you just spare me the effort of dragging this out of you?”
The sister’s eyes widened slightly. “Can you just tell me what you want to know, then, and spare me the effort of guessing?”
“I want to know who killed her.”
“Oh.” Sister Ted pursed her lips and made a faint blowing sound. That was all the reaction Li’s news got from her. But then Li got the impression this was a woman who was used to bad news. “She seemed like her usual self. I’d only ever met her instream before that, of course.” She gestured to the ramshackle bulk of an old VR rig gathering dust in the corner of the office. “But she was adamant that she wanted to wrap this gift up in person.” She shifted in her chair, setting the old springs creaking. “If I’d thought anything like that was going on, I would have tried to help, Major. I liked her. And not just because she got our girls to college. She was the kind of person you just liked, somehow.” She grinned. “Well, the kind of person I liked. I imagine she pissed the hell out of most people.”
“What about the gift? Anything unusual there?”
Sister Ted twisted in her chair to reach a file drawer. “Have a look at it,” she said, handing a thick sheaf of paper to Li. “The digital original’s on file Ring-side.”
Li flipped through the document, her heart beating faster with every page she read. It was a will. A will that left everything Sharifi owned to St. Joseph’s School.
“Congratulations,” Li said. “You’re rich.”
“I know. I would have expected to feel better about it.”
Li handed the papers back, and Sister Ted set them on the desk, absently, as if she were thinking of something else. Or someone else.
There was a problem finding Korchow’s street. The cabbie kept circling through lunch-hour traffic, insisting that he knew the address, that the turn was in the next block, or the next one. Finally Li got out and walked.
She stumbled onto the shop abruptly, turning a blind corner into a narrow flagstoned alley and bumping up against a spotlit window full of old carpets and inlaid furniture. A gold-lettered sign read ANTIQUITIES and below it, in dark red, she saw the same intricate lozenge design she had seen on Korchow’s card.
He sat at a small desk toward the back, in a carved laminate chair that was either an astronomically expensive generation-ship artifact or a very professional forgery. A tank silk raincoat and a stylish gas mask lay neatly across a nearby table, as if Korchow had just come in or was just leaving.
“Major,” he said. “What a surprise. I hope you didn’t have too much trouble finding me?”
“I did, actually. Pretty out-of-the-way place to