Dead Boyfriends by David Housewright Page B

two weeks?”
    â€œCops asked me the same thing. I really haven’t. Last I saw of anyone over there was two weeks ago Saturday.”
    â€œThat would be . . .”
    â€œAugust first, but even then all I saw was a car drive up and then leave a few minutes later.”
    â€œWhat kind of car?”
    â€œIt’s like I told the cops, I don’t know from cars except it was black, a sports car. Now my ex, the prick, he knows cars. If he treated me as well as he treated his car . . . ”
    â€œDid you see who drove the car?”
    â€œNot really. It could have been anyone.”
    â€œWhat time did you see the car?”
    â€œAround noon?”
    â€œIs that a guess?”
    â€œI remember eating lunch and that’s when I saw the car, so I figured it was around noon. It could’ve been later.”
    We talked some more, but nothing new came of it. Mollie offered another Grain Belt, and I was tempted. Instead, I passed, telling myself that a semiprofessional private investigator wouldn’t drink while on the job. I gave Mollie one of the cards I had made up. It read R. MCKENZIE and had my phone numbers printed on it. Mollie set the card on her table and promised if she thought of anything more, she’d call.
    I returned to my Audi, still parked in front of Merodie’s house. The car was broiling. The AC worked well but took time to cool the interior, so after I started the engine and turned the air-conditioning on full, I slid out of the car and shut the door behind me. While waiting for theAudi to become habitable, I glared at Merodie’s house. The stench of death was still in my nostrils, hair, and clothes and probably would be for some time to come.
    I turned away from the house and looked across the lawn toward Mollie Pratt’s place. For a moment I thought I saw her watching me from behind her living room drapes, but then she disappeared.

5
    Woodbury, located southeast of St. Paul, was nearly an hour’s drive from Anoka. Yet more than distance separated the two cities. Anoka was old, with a history and traditions that stretched back to 1680. Woodbury, on the other hand, was brand-spanking new—I had a Carl Yastrzemski autographed baseball that was older. It wasn’t even a city when Yaz won the Triple Crown in 1967, yet it was now home to over sixty thousand residents.
    The private street where Priscilla St. Ana lived served a quintet of estates that somehow all bordered on different holes of the Prestwick Golf Course. Like most of Woodbury, the five houses looked like they had all been built yesterday. I parked in front of the one with red brick, white trim, and a slate gray roof set way back from the street, only a little more pretentious than its four neighbors. It reminded me of an Italian villa, or at least what I supposed an Italian villa to look like, having never actually seen one.
    I hurried along the tile walkway to the front door of the estate—Icouldn’t think of it as a house—and used the bell. A doughlike woman of indeterminate age answered. She was dressed in a fawn-colored uniform and demonstrated no emotion or interest when I announced that I had an appointment to meet Priscilla St. Ana. With a curt “Wait here,” she closed the door, leaving me outside with no way of looking in. She returned a few moments later with instructions.
    â€œFollow me, please.”
    I trailed the maid into the immense house, moving through sumptuous, decorator-perfect rooms that would have caused my father to faint dead away at the excess. ‘Course, my father was a man who used the same toaster for thirty years and believed the automatic icemaker that came with the refrigerator I bought when we moved to Falcon Heights was an unnecessary luxury. I told him that since I was now filthy, stinking rich I intended to surround him with a lot of unnecessary luxuries. He fought it every day of the six months he had left to live.
    The maid