“Kay?” His voice was quiet behind me.
I turned and he caught sorrow not meant for him.
“What are you doing?” He stared as I poured water into a pot.
“Exactly what it looks like.”
He got quiet, his eyes on mine.
“I knew him, knew Ted,” I said. “Not terribly well. But he was popular with my staff. He interviewed me many times and I respected … Well . . . ” My mind left the path.
Wesley was thin, which made his features seem even sharper, his hair by now completely white, although he wasn’t much older than I. He did look tired, but everyone I knew looked tired, and what he did not look was separated. He did not look miserable to be away from his wife or from me.
“Pete told me about your cars,” he said.
“Pretty unbelievable,” I said as I poured.
“And the detective. What’s his name? Roche? I’ve got to talk to his chief anyway. We’re playing telephone tag, but when we hook up, I’ll say something.”
“I don’t need you to do that.”
“I certainly don’t mind,” he said.
“I’d rather you didn’t.”
“Fine.” He raised his hands in a small surrender and looked around the room. “He had money and was gone a lot,” he said.
“Someone took care of his plants,” I replied.
“How often?” He looked at them.
“Non-blooming plants, at least once a week, the rest, every other day, depending on how warm it gets in here.”
“So these haven’t been watered for a week?”
“Or longer,” I said.
By now, Lucy and Marino had entered the duplex and gone down the hall.
“I want to check the kitchen,” I added as I set down the can.
“Good idea.”
It was small and looked like it had not been renovated since the sixties, Inside cupboards I found old cook-ware and dozens of canned goods like tuna fish and soup, and snack foods like pretzels. As for what Eddings had kept in his refrigerator, that was mostly beer. But I was interested in a single bottle of Louis Roederer Crystal Champagne tied in a big red bow.
“Find something?” Wesley was looking under the sink.
“Maybe.” I was still peering inside the refrigerator.
“This will set you back as much as a hundred and fifty dollars in a restaurant, maybe a hundred and twenty if you buy it off the shelf.”
“Do we know how much this guy got paid?”
“I don’t know. But I suspect it wasn’t a whole lot.”
“He’s got a lot of shoe polish and cleansers down here, and that’s about it,” Wesley said as he stood.
I turned the bottle around and read a sticker on the label.
“A hundred and thirty dollars, and it wasn’t purchased locally. As far as I know, Richmond doesn’t have a wine shop called The Wine Merchant.”
“Maybe a gift. Explaining the bow.”
“What about D.C.?
“I don’t know. I don’t buy much wine in D.C. these days,” he said.
I shut the refrigerator door, secretly pleased, for he and I had enjoyed wine. We once had liked to pick and choose and drink as we sat close to each other on the couch or in bed.
“He didn’t shop much,” I said. “I see no evidence that he ever ate in.”
“It doesn’t look to me like he was ever even here,” he said.
I felt his closeness as he moved near me, and I almost could not bear it. His cologne was always subtle and evocative of cinnamon and wood, and whenever I smelled it anywhere, for an instant I was caught as I was now.
“Are you all right?” he asked in a voice meant for no one but me as he paused in the doorway.
“No,” I said. “This is pretty awful.” I shut a cabinet door a little too hard.
He stepped into the hallway. “Well, we need to take a hard look at his financial status, to see where he was getting money for eating out and expensive champagne.”
Those papers were in the office, and the police had not gone through them yet because officially there had been no crime. Despite my suspicions about Eddings’ cause of death and the strange events surrounding it, at this moment we legally had no homicide.