Shoot from the Lip (27 page)

Like DeShay said, Mancuso probably used an alias to get hired and had a fake or new social security number attached to that alias. Reputable housecleaning agencies required their employees to be bonded, and a rap sheet in your background showing multiple arrests for solicitation wouldn’t get you a job with an agency like Purity. I wouldn’t be asking about Fiona Mancuso, but rather a woman who had a very distinctive and visible tattoo.

How should I approach this? I couldn’t call up and say I was a PI. The agency would get their back up, want to know if there was a problem. I decided I’d be a customer. Since someone cleaned my place every couple weeks, I knew the drill. When I called, they’d send someone out to evaluate my house, determine exactly what I wanted done, how often and at what charge. Which would take about a week. We couldn’t afford to waste time. I needed to be a customer in a desperate hurry for a housecleaning—definitely not a stretch for me.

I dialed the Purity number, hoping I could convince them I needed help right now.

“Purity Maids, this is Randy. How may I help you?” the man answered.

“My name is Abby Rose, and your agency was recommended to me. I understand you do good work, and I’d like to get my house cleaned as soon as possible.”

“Thank you for calling, Ms. Rose. As the manager, I’m authorized to give a free cleaning to the customer who recommended us. Was it a friend or relative?”

Uh-oh. Think fast, Abby.
“Um, actually, neither. A friend and I were in line at Panera Bread and I was talking about how I didn’t like my current maid service. This lady behind us mentioned Purity.”

“Too bad. She missed out on her freebie. Anyway, we can get an evaluation done by tomorrow and—”

“But I
really
need the cleaning done tomorrow—I’m having guests, and the place is a mess. This lady mentioned a specific maid, said she didn’t have her name but that you’d know her because of her tattoo.”

“Unless she works your area, we can’t promise that a certain maid will be sent to your house—and certainly not on a rush job. Tomorrow will require me to do rescheduling, and I’m afraid that will cost extra.”

Damn. I gave away too much too soon.
“Maybe she works in my area. This tattoo is on her left ring finger.”

“Ah. Loreen. She’s quite popular. Where do you live? I’ll see what I can do.”

My heart sped at getting a first name. I thought,
Where do I need to live?
But I had the feeling that if I asked too many questions—like Loreen’s last name or her territory—he’d get suspicious. Nope, I saw no way around giving the manager what he wanted. “I live in West U.”

“Sorry, Loreen works in The Woodlands four out of five days a week, and her other houses are in the Memorial area.”

“Darn,” I said. “Could I get her another day this week?”

“That would take a massive overhaul of my schedule. I have an excellent pair assigned to West U—Angela and Dolly. I can fit you in at, say, ten a.m. Tuesday, depending on your square footage. I’m seeing on my job chart that they only have until noon to do the house.”

“My home is small, maybe twenty-one hundred square feet. And ten is fine,” I said.

After he gave me a quote and took my credit card info, I gave him my address and hung up. At least they were coming tomorrow. I sure hoped Angela and Dolly liked to talk, and that one of them knew Loreen, or at least her last name.

I left my office, which ticked off Diva and sent her scurrying up the stairs to find a warm place in my bedroom. I wanted to swing by Jeff’s apartment and check on how he and Doris were doing, maybe join them for dinner. But before I could gather my purse and an umbrella, the doorbell rang.

I closed my eyes and whispered, “Damn,” when I saw Paul Kravitz in the monitor. Couldn’t he have stayed away longer than a weekend?

I let him in.

“Hello, Abby. Looks like I need to be brought up to speed—especially since you didn’t call me when a certain significant event happened after I left town.” He strode past me into the living room and sat down on the sofa.

I followed him and said, “Hi, Paul. Come on in and have a seat.”

“A man was murdered, a man connected to the Christine O’Meara case,” Kravitz said.

I lowered myself onto the farthest chair from him. “I figured you’d be back soon and I’d tell you then. How did you find out?”

“HPD is communicating with us—but I thought you and I had an arrangement to cooperate with each other, for Emma’s sake.”

“Yeah, well, maybe when I found the GPS tracking device on my car, I decided cooperation is a one-way street for you—and goes in your direction.”

“What are you talking about?” He looked truly surprised.

“And,” I went on, trying to keep him on the defensive while he was a little confused, “what’s with the guy you put on Emma? You never mentioned him.”

Kravitz rubbed at a few drops of rain on his suit jacket shoulder. “It never came up, did it?”

He had me there. “You should have told me.”

“We put someone on Emma because we don’t want her talking to other reporters. Now, what’s your explanation for not telling me about the murder? I want to know about this man and his connection to Christine O’Meara.”

“I thought your police friends already told you,” I said.

He pointed at me.
“You
are pissing me off. If you’d called me, I would have sent our own guy to the murder scene to tape. Now we can’t even examine local news footage, because going to any of your TV stations would tip them off that the infant bones and the Billings murder might be connected.”

“Listen,
Paul.
I don’t care whether you got to tape or not. And if you or one of your yokels like Louie put that thing on my car, don’t expect anything more from me.”

He took a deep breath, his stare never wavering from my face. “I did
not
put a GPS device on your car, and I specifically told my investigators to leave you alone. Since someone else is obviously on to your investigation, did it dawn on you that you led a killer straight to Billings?”

“Oh, yeah. It
dawned
on me.” I felt an unexpected burning behind my eyes and fought hard to avoid the tears. I succeeded.

But Kravitz saw. He was an experienced interviewer and could read the emotion in people’s faces. “Sorry. That was unfair.”

“No, it’s the truth. What do you want from me?” I asked.

“I want you tell me how you found Billings and what you learned about his connection to Christine O’Meara.”

“Like I said, sounds like you already got everything,” I said.

“Not exactly. I want your take, with every detail you can remember. We’re already doing a background check on this guy, but you were one of the last people to talk to him. It’s the details that make a good story, Abby. The telling details.”

I was watching from my office window when the Purity Maids minivan pulled into my driveway Tuesday morning. The van was turquoise, like their uniforms, and the logo on the vehicle was white with darker turquoise letters. I realized I’d seen vans like this in the neighborhood before, but they blended into the background, like so many other things that weren’t important at the time.

Last night, after I’d told Kravitz all those telling details he so desperately wanted, I’d spent the evening with Jeff and Doris. Jeff had made plenty of calls Monday and scheduled interviews with two home health care agencies today. When I left them to drive home, I felt a sudden sense of loss. Jeff and I had a comfortable routine that would have to change. Though I didn’t resent Doris, I realized we’d have to come up with new ways to spend time together. She was a part of our lives now. A new challenge—but maybe a reward, too.

The two women who’d gotten out of the van, one black, one white, dragged to my doorstep a vacuum, mops, and two plastic pails filled with cleaning supplies. I opened the door before they could ring the bell and welcomed them inside.

“I am thrilled you could do this on such short notice. I’m Abby, by the way.”

The older woman set down her vacuum and pail in the foyer and pulled a folded paper from her uniform pocket. “Ms. Rose, right?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Dolly, and this is Angela. You understand that ’cause this is a rush job your credit card’s already been charged in advance?”

“Yes, and I’m sorry if I’ve inconvenienced you.”

“One dirty house is the same as any other,” Dolly said. “Don’t make no difference to me. How many bathrooms you got?”

“A powder room down here and two upstairs.” I smiled at Angela, hoping she might be someone I could chat with, because Dolly was already wheeling her vacuum into my living room. From what I could tell, she was all business.

“Angela’s gonna do the upstairs, and I’ll—” Dolly stopped talking when Webster loped into the living room to greet my visitors. The woman’s stiff posture indicated that she wasn’t happy to see him. He sat patiently in front of her, waiting to be petted. I knew he wouldn’t get his wish. “I didn’t get no alert about animals. You got any more?”

“A cat. But they’re both really sweet and—”

“I don’t care if they got angel wings; you gotta put them up. And if they’ve made messes anywhere, we don’t touch animal waste.”

“I understand. I’ll put Webster in the utility room.” I turned to see if Angela felt the same way about pets, but she’d disappeared up the stairs. I didn’t blame her.

After I bribed Webster with a rawhide bone and closed him in, I decided to try to endear myself to Dolly one more time, hoping she’d open up, but she was muttering about cat hair as she unloaded her supplies onto my kitchen counter.

“The cat’s probably upstairs. I’ll have to find her,” I said as I passed her.

Once upstairs, I saw the guest bathroom rugs neatly folded in the hall and heard water running. I walked to the bathroom and leaned against the doorframe. “Hi.”

Angela was on her knees cleaning around the base of the commode. She returned my “Hi” and held up the canned bathroom cleaner. “You want me to use something different? We bring our own, but the customer can always—”

“No problem. I didn’t get to say hello to you down there. You been doing this long?”

She went back to spraying and wiping. “Couple years.”

“How many houses do you clean in a day?”

“Maybe five. Sometimes six if we have a few small places.”

“Sounds like a tough job,” I said.

Angela looked at me. “She’s gonna come up here and get on my case if you keep talking to me. You saw what she’s like.”

“Sorry, I always chatted with my former cleaning lady. But she wasn’t with a big agency like Purity. How many people work there?”

“About thirty.” She pulled a wand from her pail and attached a disposable toilet brush, then flushed the commode and began to scrub the bowl.

“You always work in pairs? Because I think that’s a good idea. You could—”

“Ma’am.” Angela sat back on her heels. “What do you want from me?”

“I’m a talker; that’s all.” She was wearing rubber gloves, so I couldn’t tell if she was married, but asking about kids might make her more talkative. “You have children?”

“Two.” She was back to scrubbing. “I don’t mind if you like to talk, but Dolly gets all over me if I don’t finish on time. You’re making that kinda hard.”

“Okay. I’ll leave you alone.” But I wasn’t about to quit without getting any useful information. I took a few steps toward my bedroom but came back and stuck my head in the door. “You look young to have two children. They must be little.”

This time Angela laughed and shook her head. “You can’t help yourself, can you?”

“You got me pegged. How old are they?”

Pretty soon I knew all about Angela. How her husband worked on an oil rig and was gone for months at a time, how some days she had to work as late as eight at night, even though she started at seven in the morning, but I mostly learned how much she loved her husband and kids and how every penny she made went into a savings account for the children—so they could go to college and not be cleaning houses when they were twenty-five.

By then, we’d moved through my bedroom and into the master bath. “Lots of women in the same boat at Purity?”

“Most are worse off. At least my husband’s got a steady job.”

“There was another cleaning woman recommended to me before you two were assigned. Her name was Loreen, I think. Is she worse off?”

“The only thing I know about Loreen is that she’s got some monster houses on her schedule. She’s been around a long time and makes more money.”

“You wouldn’t know her last name? My sister had a team of cleaning women about eight years ago. One was Christine or Catherine or something like that, and the other was Loreen. I was thinking maybe Loreen’s the same person.”

“Why you asking about Loreen?” came Dolly’s unexpected voice from my bedroom doorway. She’d climbed those stairs as quiet as a coon stalking a crawfish.

I turned. “No reason. Just making conversation.”

She stared past me at Angela, who looked like she wanted to jump into the shower and hide. “Angela, you haven’t even changed the sheets. What the heck have you been doing all this time?”

“She’s been doing a very thorough job on my bathrooms,” I said. “They really needed attention.”

“Right.” Dolly looked at her watch. “Not much time, and you got three bedrooms and a hall to clean. I know you don’t want to miss lunch, Angela.”

Dolly gave me a look like I had a houseful of manure that had to be cleaned up—but no. She wouldn’t touch “animal waste.” Had to be me.

The plan to get anything out of the maids seemed to have hit a roadblock, but I wasn’t defeated—not yet. I had another idea. They drove company vans, and that meant they had to drop them off at the end of the day. Fiona Mancuso must do the same, and since I had her mug shot, a stakeout at the Purity agency might work. A stakeout. I’d never done one of those before. I’d like being the follower rather than the followee for once.