Free Brides of Blood by Joseph Koenig Page A

hiding it. She was wearing a sleeveless, above-the-knee dress of thin summer fabric, the neckline a gentle V between lightly freckled breasts.
    The first question was automatic: “Is your husband at home?”
    “I have no husband.”
    Single women were discouraged from living alone. Women like her did not remain single for long. His experience had been that few homicide investigations didn’t pose more questions than they answered. Contradiction was the skeleton on which the best cases were fleshed.
    He stepped inside without being invited. He had seen the same shabby broadloom rug and convertible couch, the bruised table and chairs in other apartments that he had come to recognize as furnished units. The music blared from a tape player on the bathroom sink beside several articles of soapy underwear. He shut off the water, which the young woman had seemed to believe masked the sound.
    “I’d like to ask you about the body found in the courtyard.”
    She fixed him in a venomous stare. “I didn’t kill her. Does that answer the question?”
    “In part.” Though he believed himself to be incapable of blushing, Darius’s face felt hot. “Were you awake at that hour? Did you notice anything?”
    Her expression didn’t change, but the effort in holding it started her lower lip to quiver. “I heard sirens, but was too sleepy to get out of bed. In the morning the neighbors told me what had happened. Everything I know is second-hand at best.”
    “Your name, please?”
    “Maryam Lajevardi.”
    Darius jotted it in his notepad. “And what did the neighbors say?”
    “That a girl had been shot, and her body left downstairs to be discovered. And the police had been here for most of the morning.”
    “To be discovered? What do you mean by that?”
    “Those are their words,” she said. “You’ll have to ask them.”
    “And, you say, you slept through it all?”
    “Like the dead.” Maryam Lajevardi palmed the cassette, as though she were concealing vital evidence.
    “I assure you,” Darius said, “this concerns only murder. I don’t care about music.”
    “One mustn’t close one’s mind to anything. You may find you enjoy the Beatles.”
    “It’s forbidden.”
    “ There’s the crime.” She dropped another tape in the machine, turned up the volume on a heavy metal group.
    Her lip was fluttering wildly. She clamped it under her front teeth as Darius went into the living room. The apartment looked down on the courtyard, affording an unobstructed view of the benches where a tired-looking old man sat smoking a cigarette. Yellow draperies wafted from the window in a light breeze.
    “Are you a student, Miss Lajevardi? Do you work?”
    “I’m employed at the D. Azadi currency exchange on Firdowsi Street.”
    Darius rubbed the yellow cloth between his fingers.
    “You haven’t written it in your little book.” Her lip was out of control. “Selling traveler’s checks,” she said to quiet it.
    Obscured by an accent Darius couldn’t quite place, her voice had softened to a throaty whisper. “Miss Lajevardi,” he asked, “what are you doing living here alone?”
    “Is it against the law to have my own apartment?”
    “Answer the question, please.”
    Her lip was still. She bit it anyway as she sniffed back tears. “You won’t make me go back?”
    “Back where?”
    “Bandar-e-Shah.”
    “That’s where you’re from?”
    She nodded. “My father is the manager of the state caviar factory there.”
    “What brings you to Teheran?”
    “What has this to do with the girl—”
    “Will be for me to decide,” Darius said.
    Without exhaling, she took a deep breath. “Last month I turned twenty-two. In the eyes of my father I officially became an old maid. It was arranged for me to marry the foreman of the factory. He’s forty-seven, coarse, crude, uneducated—a religious fanatic as well. I took what money I had saved and came to Teheran. I’ve been living here for six weeks.”
    “And?”
    “And?