Read Deadly Quicksilver Lies for Free Online Page B

wonder.
    “Justina was after my grandmother.”
    I understood from her tone. Never was a kid who did not resent hearing how he or she was named after some old fart they never met and couldn’t care less about. My mom played that game with me and my brother. I never figured out why it meant anything to her. “Any special reason?”
    “The name’s been in the family forever. And Granny would have been hurt if...”
    The usual. Never made sense to me. You sentence a kid to a lifetime of misery on account of somebody might get his feelings hurt if you don’t. Three rousing oriental cheers, say I: foo-ee, foo-ee, foo-ee. Who is going to be upset the longest?
    You entered Emerald’s suite through a small sitting room. There you found a small writing desk with its chair, in blond wood. There was an oil lamp on the desk. There was one more chair, a storage chest with a cushion on top, and a small set of shelves. The room was squeaky clean and more spartan than it sounds. It did not look promising.
    I hate it when they clean for company. “Your daughter ever take a powder before?”
    Maggie hesitated. “No.”
    “Why did you hesitate?”
    “Trying to decide. Her father kidnapped her when she was four. Some friends convinced him that a child is better off with her mother.”
    “Would he try something like that today?”
    “Probably not. He’s been dead eight years.”
    “Chances are he wouldn’t.” As a rule, the dead don’t get involved in custody disputes.
    “She got a boyfriend?”
    “A girl from the Hill?”
    “Especially a girl from the Hill. How many does she have?”
    “What?”
    “Look, believe it or not, it’s easier for Hill girls to slip around than it is for downtown girls.” I offered examples from my own cases, one of which had featured a bevy of Hill girls working the Tenderloin just for the thrills.
    That stunned my Maggie Jenn. She had a blind area, an inability to believe her baby could be anything less than the absolute image of what she desired. It hadn’t occurred to her that Emerald was going to break her heart. Plainly, she didn’t understand that people sometimes did the wicked stuff for other than survival reasons. Whoring as an amusement was a concept too alien to encompass.
    Only the classes in between don’t believe in whoring.
    “You didn’t grow up on the Hill.”
    “I admit that, Garrett.”
    I had the suspicion that my pretty Maggie had maybe had to make ends meet to make ends meet during the hiatus between husband and crown prince. I didn’t need to know about that, though. Not yet, anyway. Maybe later, if it began to look like the past had some bearing. “Plant yourself on a chair. Talk to me about Emerald while I work.”
    I prowled.
     
     

11
    Maggie said, “To my knowledge she has no boyfriends. Our circumstances don’t let us meet many people. We aren’t socially acceptable. We form a class unto ourselves.”
    A very classy class it was, though Maggie Jenn and her kid weren’t its only members. The sisterhood of mistresses is quite large. At these rarified heights, a man is expected to have a mistress. It demonstrates his manhood. Two is better than one.
    “Any friends at all?”
    “Not many. Girls she grew up with, maybe. Maybe somebody she studied with. At her time of life, kids are real status conscious. I doubt anybody would let her make any strong connections.”
    “What’s she look like?”
    “Me, twenty years less shopworn. And wipe that silly grin off your mug.”
    “I was thinking how looking for you twenty years younger would have me hunting somebody barely out of diapers.”
    “And don’t forget that. I want my baby found, not —”
    “Right. Right. Right. Any special stress between you before she disappeared?”
    “What?”
    “Did you have a fight? Did she stomp out yelling about how she was never coming back in ten thousand years?”
    “No.” Maggie chuckled. “I had a few of those with my mother. Probably why she didn’t squawk