Free Alone by Loren D. Estleman Page A

Rankin?”
     
    “Did you see the shooting?”
     
    “Was Roger Akers blackmailing Rankin?”
     
    “What was he using for blackmail?”
     
    “Will you testify if there’s a trial?”
     
    “Do the police think you’re an accomplice?”
     
    “Are you an accomplice?”
     
    “Who are you wearing?”
     
    A microphone stuck him in the eye, “Hey!”
     
    “Oh, sorry.”
     
    He blinked. He could feel the eye starting to swell. “The answer to all your questions is ‘I don’t know.’ If you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.” He took advantage of a shift in the crowd to plunge through an opening. He sprinted the rest of the way to the entrance, tears streaming from his bruised eye. Shoe leather slapped concrete just behind his own heels. Annoyance turned to panic.
     
    The door didn’t budge when he tugged on the handle. He’d never known it to be locked during business hours.
     
    Caught in the tsunami of reporters and their questions, he smacked the door with his palms and shouted to a uniformed guard inside. The man shook his gray head. Valentino scooped out his wallet and pressed his university ID against the glass.
     
    The lock clicked. The guard pulled the door open just wide enough for him to slide in sideways, then shouldered it shut against the horde. Valentino recognized him then.
     
    “I thought you worked in the parking garage.”
     
    “Campus police reassigned me here today.” His eyes narrowed behind heavy bifocals. “You’re the one always forgets his pass. Chaplin.”
     
    “Valentino. You just saw my ID.”
     
    “I only look at faces. You sure are a lot of trouble. We got to pull officers off important details just to flush out all these unauthorized personnel. Where’d you get the shiner?”
     
    “Power of the press.” He got into the elevator and pushed the button.
     
    Ruth was at her desk in the common area. She never was not at her desk except when she slept, if she slept. Valentino held the opinion that she did all her resting in a coffin in one of the abandoned heating tunnels beneath the building.
     
    At a distance of twenty feet, she was a well-groomed brunette of thirty-five, fashionable in her dress but not accustomed to smile unless something amused her. At half that distance she was a gargoyle of sixty or older, weatherproofed by a dozen coats of brittle lacquer that would shatter the second her lips moved more than a centimeter above or below a straight line. No one ever got closer than that. Until quitting time, when she hoisted herself onto her muscular calves, shouldered her enormous Gucci bag, and clickety-clicked out on stiletto heels, she directed all of Valentino’s and Broadhead’s telephone calls and processed all their letters and e-mails in a blur of fingers that no camera, film or digital, could fix in space. “Half hummingbird, half grizzly, that’s our Ruth,” Broadhead had said, the first time Valentino came to him with a complaint about her attitude. “I understand her maiden name was Less.”
     
    “Where’d you get that?”
     
    “Billy Wilder. She did some temp work for him after Harry Cohn died and before she came to work here. He also said, ‘I fled Hitler for this?’”
     
    Now Valentino found her waiting to pounce when he got off the elevator.
     
    “A cop was here for you.” With handcuffs, her tone seemed to imply. “He left this.”
     
    He took the card she’d thrust at him. It bore the etching of a police shield and the name Lieutenant Ray Z. Padilla.
     
    “I wonder what the Z stands for?” he asked.
     
    “Maybe he wrote it on the other side.”
     
    He intercepted her granite gaze. “Is it really necessary I turn it over to find out?”
     
    “Don’t flatter yourself. I stopped reading your personal correspondence two years ago. I got a bigger thrill out of Rin-Tin-Tin’s.”
     
    “Rin-Tin-Tin got fan mail?”
     
    “Bitches, all of them.”
     
    He turned the card over and read:
     
    EITHER CALL ME OR TURN