“Just leave your keys with him,” I instructed.
“Where do I pay?” she asked.
“Don’t worry about it,” I told her. “I’ll have him put it on my tab. They automatically bill me for guest parking at the end of the month.”
I used my building key first to enter the elevator lobby, next to call the elevator, and finally to make it work. Once I had done so and punched the PH button, I caught the questioning look Anne Marie sent in my direction.
“Yes,” I said in answer to her unasked question. “My wife, Mel, and I live in the penthouse.”
It’s a long elevator ride. About the time we passed the sixth floor, Anne Marie said, “I always thought your name was Jonas.”
When Pickles and I first started working together, he had insisted on calling me by my given name, even though I much preferred being called Beau or J. P. He had come around eventually, but his family must not have gotten the memo.
“I don’t much like my given name,” I said. “Never have.”
After that we fell silent until the elevator door slid open. The penthouse floor of Belltown Terrace is made up of only two units. I showed her to ours, opening and holding the door to let her inside. The attention of first-time visitors is always drawn straight through the dining room to the expanse of windows at the far end of the living room. The glass goes from the upholstered window seat to the crown molding on the ceiling and offers an unobstructed view of Puget Sound on the west and the grain terminal, Seattle Center, and Lower Queen Anne Hill on the north. In the middle of the north-facing windows sat our nine-foot Christmas tree glittering with its astonishing array of lights and decorations.
As I said, most of the time the views through those windows are spectacular with the generally snow-capped Olympic Mountains looming in the far distance. Today, however, in the lashing downpour, the view amounted to little more than variations on a theme of gray on gray. The point where pewter-colored clouds met the gunmetal gray water was somewhere beyond a heavy curtain of rain as a fast-moving storm cell came on shore.
“Sorry about the view,” I said. “It’s usually a little better than this.”
I hoped the quip might help lighten my visitor’s mood. It didn’t. Her face had been set in a grim expression when I first climbed into her vehicle, and that didn’t change. Instead, she stopped in the middle of the room and sent a second accusatory stare in my direction.
“If you were a cop, how did you get all this?”
I shrugged. “What can I say?” I quipped. “I married well.”
That was the truth. Owning a penthouse suite in Belltown Terrace would never have been possible without the legacy left to me by my second wife, Anne Corley. But my offhand comment about that did nothing to lighten Anne Marie’s mood or change her disapproving expression either. She simply turned away and made a beeline for the window seat.
Anne Marie was a relatively tall woman, five-ten or so, squarely built, somewhere in her early fifties. Her graying hair was pulled back in a severe bun, and there was a distinctive hardness about her features that I thought I recognized. Between the time when I’d seen her last—as a teenager at her father’s funeral—and now, the woman had done some hard living, and there was nothing in her demeanor to suggest that this was some kind of cheerful holiday visit.
Once Anne Marie sat down, I noticed that instead of putting her purse on the cushion beside her, she kept it on her lap, clutched tightly in her arms like a shield. I wasn’t sure if she was holding on to it because it contained something precious or if she was using it as a barrier to help me keep me at bay. I also noticed a light band of pale skin on her ring finger that intimated the relatively recent removal of a wedding ring.
If the poor woman’s mother had just died and if her marriage was coming to an end at the same time, it was no wonder that Anne Marie Gurkey Nolan was a woman under emotional siege. I didn’t comment on that deduction aloud, but I tried to take it into consideration as our conversation continued.
“What do you take in your coffee?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “Just black.”
“Strong or not?” I asked. “My wife gave me a fancy coffee machine for Christmas. It makes individual cups of coffee, and we can adjust the strength for each one by turning the bean control lighter or darker.”
“Strong, please,” she said. “It’s a long drive.”
“I don’t envy you making that drive in this weather,” I commented as I walked away.
She nodded but said nothing.