Chosen Prey

through all the pieces,” she said. “I just want to have some kind of rational, up-front discussion. I mean, we haven’t even formally decided to get married yet.”
    “Weather, will you marry me?”
    “That’s not what I was looking for, exactly,” she said.
    “Well, will you?”
    “Well, yes,” she said, the menu still open in front of her, like a book.
    “Good. That’s taken care of. Put the ring on. And tell me what the fuck Number Five is. That’s not something with snails or clams, is it? Or from diseased geese?”
    “Lucas . . .”
    “Weather, I’m begging you,” Lucas said. “Not right now. Not in Eau du Chien. We can go home, have a beer, get comfortable.”
    “You’ll wave your arms around and rave,” she said.
    “I will not.”
    “You won’t if we Talk here,” she said.
    “Goddamnit, Weather.”
    The waiter thought they were having a fight.

8
    L UCAS ARRIVED AT the office at nine o’clock, ragged after a long, intense evening. Marcy was shouting at somebody on the telephone. A bullet-headed man sat in a chair next to her desk, watching her talk. When she saw Lucas walk in, she shouted, “Gotta go,” hung up, and said, “Where’ve you been?”
    “Had to run Weather over to her place early, then bagged out there for a couple of hours. What happened?”
    “You know the guy with the butch haircut and the long black coat who was seen with Aronson outside of Cheese-It?”
    “Yeah?” Lucas’s eyes drifted toward the bullet-headed man, who’d turned to look up at him.
    “This is the guy,” Marcy said. “Jim Wise. Walked in a half hour ago.”
    Wise stood up, and Lucas noticed that he had a black coat folded over his arm. “I saw the picture in the paper and I thought it had to be me,” he said. “I was in there with her, and I had the coat, and my hair used to be cut shorter.”
    “Put the coat on,” Marcy said.
    Wise pulled the coat on, buttoned it, shrugged his shoulders, and looked at Lucas.
    “Damnit,” Lucas said. Behind Wise, Marcy rolled her eyes in exasperation. “How well did you know her?”
    “Not very well. I’ve got a furniture business, Wise-Hammersmith American Loft. Maybe you’ve heard of it?” When Lucas shook his head, Wise continued. “We sell period furniture and accessories—lamps, art pottery, and so on. Anyway, Ms. Aronson did freelance ad work and we needed some good-looking ads cheap, to run in the trade magazines . . . and that’s what I was seeing her about.”
    “Did she do the ads?”
    “Yeah. Three of them. They’re still running.” He stooped, picked up a brown leather briefcase, and took out a magazine with a chair on the front cover. He opened it to a folded-over page and showed Lucas the ad—a photograph of an English-flavored arrangement of fruitwood furniture topped with a glass lamp, and overlain with an arty typeface. “The thing is, getting an ad done is a lot more complicated that it should be. You’ve got to get certain kinds of output and all that computer stuff—I don’t understand it. We just paid her two thousand dollars, and she arranged for the photographer and did the digital stuff, and gave us disks with the ads on them, all to the magazine’s specs. That was what it was.”
    “Did you see her more than the one time?” Lucas asked.
    “Yeah, when she delivered them. The disks with the ads. Our store’s down on Lake Street.”
    “Why’d you meet at Cheese-It? She lived downtown here.”
    “She worked there. She was up front about it—she was working until she got her feet on the ground—and suggested that I just stop in when I had a minute, and we’d talk. We wound up walking down to a coffee bar so I could sketch out what we wanted. We’d already put a special type font on our signs and business cards, and we wanted to keep going with that in the ad.”
    They talked for another three minutes, and Lucas was convinced: Not only was he probably the right guy, he probably had nothing to do with the killing. “I’ve got a guy I want you to talk to, if you have a few minutes. Give a statement,” he told Wise.
    “You think I’m okay? The whole thing was quite a shock. Seeing the picture in the paper.”
    “We’ll pull the picture,” Lucas said. “We’ll say that you came forward voluntarily and . . . Whatever sounds good.”
     
    L UCAS CALLED S LOAN, who was the best interrogator on the force, took him aside, and explained what he needed. Sloan took Wise off to Homicide to make