“I did.”
“What the heck?” someone yelled from the other side of the tarp. “Where’d the monkey come from? He’s contaminating the crime scene. Somebody call animal control.”
Diesel slipped under the tarp and returned with Carl. We hustled back to the car, we all got in, and Diesel took off down the street.
“He’s holding something in his hand,” I said to Diesel. “It looks like a key.”
Carl put it in his mouth and bit down. “Eeee!”
I traded him a mint, and I took the key. It was sized to fit a diary or journal, and it was intricately engraved with tiny vines and leaves.
“Is this yours?” I asked Diesel.
“No. He must have picked it up off the ground.”
“Maybe he got it off Reedy. Maybe he snatched it out of his pocket.”
“I took a look at Reedy, and he didn’t have pockets. He was only wearing boxers and one sock. I guess he could have had the key stuck up his nose or inserted south of the border.”
I took hand sanitizer out of my purse and squirted it onto the key. Diesel cut across a couple streets, found Lafayette, and turned toward Marblehead.
“Are we done?” I asked him.
“If we were done, I’d be on a beach in the South Pacific. I thought we’d go back to your house so you can finish your soup and I can do some research on Gilbert Reedy.”
CHAPTER TWO
Diesel peeled off Pleasant Street and wound around the historic area of Marblehead, following narrow streets designed for horses and foot traffic. He turned onto Weatherby Street and parked in front of my little house. The clapboards are gray, the trim is white, and there are two onion lamps on either side of my red front door.
Glo was sitting on my stoop with her black sweatshirt hood pulled up and her canvas messenger bag hugged to her chest. She’s single, like me. She’s four years younger, an inch shorter, and she’s the counter girl at Dazzle’s. Her curly red hair is chopped into a short bob, and her taste in clothes runs somewhere between Disney Princess and punk rocker. Today she was wearing black Uggs, black tights, a short black skirt, and a black, orange, pink, and baby blue striped knit shirt under the black sweatshirt. She stood when she saw us, and her face lit up with a smile.