Read Online All Shots by Susan Conant - Free Book Online

think she was you.”
    “Who is she? You must know by now. What’s all the secrecy about?”
    “We don’t know much yet, but, yeah, she’s unidentified. There was a purse there, but it’d been emptied. No cash, no ID in it, junk dumped out. Lipsticks, empty wallet. The neighbors say that this Dr. Ho had a house sitter lined up, and the guy backed out at the last minute. He didn’t want to leave it empty because of the plants and the fish.”
    “Fish,” I said. “I can never quite get that. They’re pretty. But why keep pets that don’t love you back? Anyway, speaking of fish, I heard that Dr. Ho picks up women at Loaves and Fishes. The neighbors think that’s what happened.” Kevin shrugged. “No luck reaching him.”
    “He’s in Africa. That’s what I heard. What else was in the house? What else that belonged to the woman, I mean.”
    “Stuff in the name of Holly Winter.” Kevin is not normally laconic. He was working away at the steak and trying not to talk with his mouth full.
    “Kevin, you just showed me that. What else?”
    “The other one, too.”
    I helped myself to a french fry. “The other Holly Winter? There were things of hers there, too?”
    Kevin nodded.
    “Bills and stuff from her trash? Kevin, look, this whole situation is weird for me. Could you please give the steak a rest and talk to me?”
    He put down his knife and fork, wiped his mouth, and looked me in the eye. “It looks like someone got into the other one’s apartment. She was in England for the summer. Lah-di-dah. She just got back on Tuesday. And she left a key hidden where nobody’d ever guess. You got it: under the doormat. You see, the way it works is that the world’s divided in two, the smart and stupid, and the way you tell the smart ones, they’re at Harvard, and it’s a whole other world there, so—”
    “She went to England for the summer and left her key under the doormat? What did she expect? Harvard. I thought she had some connection with Harvard.”
    “ABD. Does that mean something to you?”
    “All but dissertation. In what?”
    “Statistics. She works, too. Teaches a course. Consults, whatever that means. And she knows this Dr. Ho. They’re not friends. She says they know each other from some group that hates Superman. What’s wrong with Superman?”
    “It’s not just Superman, Kevin. It’s media characters in general.”
    “I gotta tell you, Holly, you’re being a lot nicer about this than she is. Wants to know everything, wants to see everything, wants action. She’s wicked pissed.”
    “At a woman who had the misfortune to be murdered? Well, I don’t exactly like it that the woman went through my trash, but she obviously got a lot worse than she deserved. Kevin, is all this about identity theft? Because I don’t think my identity’s been stolen. I do all my banking online. I keep a close eye on everything, and there hasn’t been anything suspicious.”
    “Checked your credit lately?”
    “No. But I will. Kevin, did she say anything about the guy on the motorcycle? The one I told you about. Adam-Did he show up at her house?”
    ‘“Preposterous notion.’ That’s a quote.”
    “He said something about someone named Calvin. Had I heard from Calvin? Or maybe had Calvin said something… I don’t remember. Yes I do. He said, You haven’t heard from Calvin?’ As if I should have. Or as if he expected me to have heard from Calvin, whoever he is. I was so angry at Leah for leaving this guy, Adam, in the house that I wasn’t paying all that much attention. Did I tell you about that? Leah let him in, and when she went out, she left him sitting in my kitchen. I mean, Leah reads Latin, she’s taken all these premed courses for vet school, she gets As, and she can be totally brainless. It sometimes seems to me that Harvard ought to have a required course on common sense.”
    “I hope you chewed her out.”
    “I did. She won’t do it again. Or she won’t do exactly the same thing