Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 133, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 811 & 812, March/April 2009

I knew what I was going to say before I said it and was already cursing myself for my foolishness. “Look, if there’s anything I can do, anything you need, just let me know.”

She snubbed her cigarette, sat a little straighter on her stool. “I’ll pay you.”

“That isn’t necessary... I mean, there’s probably nothing...” I stopped myself before I said “I can do.” “I don’t mind doing a favor for a friend.”

“I was saving to buy Lea a car. She needed one real bad, and I meant to have one by her birthday.” She shrugged and her words trailed off. “I’ll pay you.”

“What do the police say?”

“She left a note.”

“You think that something happened, that someone else was involved,” I said, certain that she did or that she was trying desperately to believe it. “That’s what you want me to find out?”

Cheryl surprised me. “I don’t know, but if Lea killed herself, it means that my daughter was a stranger to me, that I didn’t know her at all.” She leaned her elbows on the bar and stared into the mirror at her haggard reflection. “I guess I want you to introduce me to my daughter.”

The next afternoon I dragged myself and a world-class hangover up three flights of stairs to Lea’s apartment while the building manager, a spry eighty-year-old woman with copper-colored hair, ice-blue eyes, and a Mississippi accent as thick as river sludge followed behind me and explained that nothing like this had ever happened here. Her building wasn’t the most exclusive in town, but it was safe and clean and until Lea Washburn went headfirst off her balcony, the police hadn’t had to step foot on the property in the better part of ten years.

“I met her mother a couple of times, you know? You could just tell she thought Lea hung the stars and the moon. Then something like this happens so close to Christmas.” At the top of the landing, she brushed past me with a contemptuous glance at my wheezing and went to unlock Lea’s door. “If you weren’t a family friend, I wouldn’t even consider letting you in the apartment.” She jammed the key into the lock as if she were angry with it. “Normally, I guard my renters’ privacy like it was my own. The first thing I told Mr. Tandan when he hired me was that I was a building manager, not a snoop or spy.”

She shoved open the door, let me enter, and then stepped in after me. There was nothing special about the apartment — living room, a tiny kitchen, an even tinier bathroom, a single bedroom that opened to a wrought-iron balcony where one piece of the railing leaned as if it too had considered jumping.

“Just to think,” she said.

She shook her head sadly and made the sign of the cross. Then she said she was going to wait outside because she just didn’t feel right being here where poor little Lea had died.

There really wasn’t anything to see. The bed had been stripped and sprayed with disinfectant; the living room was empty except for a single end table with a broken leg that made it list like a drunk trying to hold on to his dignity. I pilfered through the kitchen. There was nothing there either except for a few dried-up roaches, a broken plate, and a couple of batteries that might or might not have been dead.

“You going to spend forever in there?” the landlady shouted from outside the door.

I lit a cigarette, took a deep drag. “I need to look around.”

She huffed and announced that she had an appointment. Then she warned me not to leave before she had a walk-through to make sure everything was all right.

I went back to the bedroom, picked up a cheap cordless phone from beside the bed, hit the Talk button, and got a dial tone. That didn’t tell me anything other than that the phone still worked so I hit Off and put the receiver back where I’d found it.

I wasn’t expecting much. Earlier, I’d stopped by the Union Avenue precinct, hoping that an old friend had snagged Lea’s case. That hadn’t happened. The case had been assigned to Reggie Morales, a newbie in Homicide who’d graduated with a degree in Criminal Justice from Ole Miss. Within five minutes I knew two things about Morales: He was a sharp dresser, and he was still fresh enough to be polite and answer my questions.

Lea Washburn had committed suicide. She and her boyfriend were having problems. Her grades were tanking, and she was in jeopardy of losing her scholarship and being placed on academic probation. On the night of her death she’d been drinking heavily and eating downers like they were popcorn. Her next-to-last call, unanswered, had been to her boyfriend, her last to a suicide-prevention hotline. Evidently, she’d either gotten a busy signal, hung up, or whoever was working the line wasn’t that damn good at the job.