Lucinda shrugged. “Oh, don’t mind me. I’m always on a tear. Just ask Mr. Jackman. There’s just a part of me that doesn’t understand why all this stays up. All those people out there, like Annie’s brother, living in thirty-thousand square feet when the girls we serve don’t have a room to themselves and the space they do have has cockroaches crawling all over it. Thomas Jefferson thought that the country should be made up of farmers and artisans, small businessmen, small craftsmen. He thought that the country would be ruined if there were any men richer or more powerful than that. Maybe he had a point.”
“Thomas Jefferson was a rich man who owned a plantation and slaves,” John Jackman said drily. “What’s this all about, Lucy? I didn’t realize you’d gone Communist on me while I was busy elsewhere.”
“Oh, Lucinda would never go Communist,” Anne Ross Wyler said, coming into the room with her hair so completely a mess that it looked like she’d put a wig on backwards. “She thinks the Communists are as bad as the capitalists, they just put a different name on doing the same old stuff. Hello again, Mr. Demarkian. Hello, John. Is there a reason for this visit in the middle of the day?”
“Ask him,” John Jackman said.
“I wanted to get a look at the place,” Gregor said. “And I wanted you to show me the cars. Where they’re kept. How they get in and out of the property. It hadn’t occurred to me before I saw this place up close, but you must have a certain amount of worry with the cars. You have two, don’t you?”
“Two, yes,” Annie said. “A station wagon and a two-door. Why?”
“Which one did you have on the night your brother died?” Gregor asked.
“The two-door,” Annie said. “The deal is to park inconspicuously, although I’m not very inconspicuous anymore. Still, a small dark car isn’t very intrusive.”
“They painted her trunk orange once while she was in some convenience store,” Lucinda said. “Annie likes to pretend it was just kids, but I know better. They were trying to mark her. They managed it for about a day.”
“Less than that,” Annie said. “Why do you think we’d have trouble with the cars?”
“With people stealing them,” Gregor said. “It’s one thing to break windows or not to break them, but a car is a valuable piece of property. And there are car thieves all over this city who wouldn’t think twice about coming into this neighborhood if they thought they could get a decent vehicle without much trouble.”
“Maybe,” Annie said, “but they haven’t yet.”
“We keep the cars in a little garage around the back,” Lucinda said. “We’ve even got a driveway. She bought a house just around the corner and had it demolished. She cut the driveway through and had the garage built. You wouldn’t believe what trouble we had getting all the permits.”
“It wasn’t as if anybody was ever going to live in that house again,” Annie said. “There wasn’t much more left of it than stray bricks and loose asbestos. This whole neighborhood is full of asbestos. And no, we don’t lock the garage, Mr. Demarkian. There isn’t any point. In the middle of the night, when we sometimes have to go out, we tend to be in a hurry.”
“They pick up the girls if they call,” John Jackman explained. “The ones who get scared by a john or who’ve just gotten beaten up by a pimp.”
“They go back, though,” Lucinda said. “You wouldn’t believe it. It’s like they’ve been brainwashed.”
“What kind of car is the station wagon? What kind of car is the two-door?”
“The two-door is a Honda,” Annie said. “I don’t know what kind of Honda. I don’t pay attention to that sort of thing. The station wagon is a black Volvo Cross Country. I know because we just bought it maybe six months ago, and the guy who sold it to us insisted on giving us the brochure.”
“He was just doing his job,” Lucinda said.
“I don’t know why everybody on earth seems to think his job is to sell me something,” Annie said.
There was a faint buzzing. John Jackman stuck his hand inside his jacket and came out with his cell phone. “Excuse me,” he said, retreating back into the hallway.
Gregor looked around the living room. It was a pleasant space, not too large, not too small, newly painted, newly carpeted, dusted to within an inch of its life. On one wall, there were bookshelves. On another, a plain brick fireplace. The furniture was serviceable and comfortable, but not extravagant.