The Love-Haight Case Files by Donald J. Bingle Jean Rabe Page A

tastes. It was getting almost too cool for flies.
    “I was still in the crack, picking aluminum … there was a lot of aluminum that night … when the hooded man came back out of the law office for his car. Tossed something in the crack. I was afraid he’d seen me there, but he was in too much of a hurry to notice. And after he drove away I looked for what he’d tossed. Turned my flashlight back on.”
    “What was it, Sadie? What did he throw in?”
    She waited, clearly wanting another bribe, but Dagger shook his head.
    “Didn’t want it, what he’d tossed,” she said. “The hooded fellow was a druggie and had shot up. It was a hypo. I don’t do drugs.”
    Those kinds of drugs anyway , Dagger thought.
    “Don’t want AIDS or anything like that. No resale value on hypos that I know of.”
    “Anything else happen? Did you see anything else?”
    “Yeah. The cops came and the ambulance. Lights all over, lots of noise. Me and Jerry went out to get a better look. Had to go around ’cause Jerry is fat and won’t fit through the crack. Had to go around and up the sidewalk. That’s when we found out the devil thing had killed the lawyer. The cops were pulling the devil thing out of the lawyer’s place.”
    Dagger squatted, eye-level with the homeless woman. “What about before that, Sadie?”
    “Already told you. Isn’t nothing else to tell. Done told you more than you needed to know. Don’t need to keep jawing with you.”
    “Before last night, Sadie. What did you see before last night?”
    She drew her lips together, like she’d just bitten into a lemon, and she leaned forward. The bile rose higher and Dagger felt it on his tongue; she had that serious of a stink about her.
    “What did you see the night before that, Sadie?”
    “The Buick the night before, and the night before that, too. But not any nights previous. Just the two nights before the devil thing killed the lawyer.” She paused, eyes brightening. “That’s because the ones in the Buick, they were casing the place, right? They were planning to kill the young lawyer, weren’t they? Just looking for the best time.”
    Dagger nodded. “Tell me some more about the Buick, Sadie.” He added one more candy bar to his bribe, and then, when he moved on, repeated the exercise with the other homeless people in the alley behind Thomas Brock’s law office. But none of them were as helpful as Sadie.
    Dagger had not intended to spend his afternoon in this alley. In fact, he’d not planned on getting up before noon … rough night with the moon so full. He’d tried to ignore the phone buzzing this morning, but he saw the Caller ID: Evelyn Love. He’d done some work for Saul Goldstein’s office and had met Evelyn there, liking her enough to add to her education—with skills they didn’t teach in law school. So Dagger had picked up the phone, his voice thick with sleep and the aftereffects of his rough night, and listened to Evey’s tale, agreeing at the end of it to investigate Thomas’s murder.
    Because of Evey, Dagger had done some work for Thomas Brock, finding the young lawyer almost a little too green and too much of a boy scout for his liking. Still, Thomas paid on time.
    Saul had died of a heart attack and left Evey out in that proverbial cold, and now Thomas was dead. Poor Evey, she didn’t have a lot of luck with employers. At least she’d managed to outlive them.
    Dagger had talked to Thomas’s ghost before making his rounds in the alley, wanting to hear the recounting of what happened. Not as helpful as Dagger had liked, but then he realized how quickly Thomas’s demise had come. Sadie’s information had been far more useful. And he realized Sadie had been right: Thomas should have known better than to have opened his door to the fey and the hooded man.
    O O O
    Following Sadie’s leads, Dagger found the biker bar hellhole about an hour after leaving the alley. Looking like the set of a rap music video, the place was wedged