Page 81 of Nightshade

“Do I have your permission to open the cabinet and look through this room?” Stilwell asked.

“Have at it,” Sneed said. “If you find drugs, they were hers, not mine. I’ve been sober since I moved out here.”

“Don’t worry, I’m not looking for drugs. Where’d you move out from?”

“I grew up in the San Fernando Valley.”

“What part?”

“Panorama City.”

Stilwell nodded. He didn’t know much about Panorama City except that it had drive-through drug markets. Moving to an island to get away from it was probably a smart idea.

Stilwell pulled a set of disposable gloves from his pocket andsnapped them on. He opened the cabinet’s two doors. The left side had shelves, and the right side had a hanging bar for clothes. There were a few blouses and pairs of black chinos on hangers. He searched the pockets of the pants first but found them empty. He checked the labels on the blouses and saw nothing recognizably expensive.

“How long have you lived on the island?” he asked.

“Four years in July,” Sneed said.

“And you’ve been in this apartment the whole time?”

“Not at first. You have to live on the island for ninety days to qualify to live here. So I sort of stayed on couches until I could get in. Sort of like what Leigh-Anne was doing.”

As she talked, Stilwell noted the folded clothes on the cabinet shelves as well as a few cardboard boxes with the Amazon logo. One shelf held a small collection of books stacked on their sides.

“How did you connect with Leigh-Anne about renting out this room?” he asked.

“I had a friend who worked at the Black Marlin and he connected us,” Sneed said.

“Who was he?”

“Just a guy who worked at the Trap but then got a job there for a while.”

“He’s not there anymore?”

“No, he went back to the mainland. A friend of his opened a bar in Studio City and he went to work there.”

“What’s his name? I might want to talk to him about Leigh-Anne.”

“Todd Whitmore. I can’t remember the name of the place he works at now.”

Stilwell took one of the Amazon boxes off the shelf and opened it on the bed next to the sleeping cat. It contained various unopened hair products, including two tubes of Colors hair dye.Both had purple screw-on caps and were labeledNIGHTSHADE. Stilwell thought of the purple wildflowers that grew on some of the island’s hillsides.

“Nightshade,” Sneed said. “She loved that color. Like the flower. I said to her once, ‘Don’t you know that nightshade is poisonous?’ But she didn’t care.”

Stilwell closed the box and moved on to the next one.

“So you said she wanted to get her stuff but you wouldn’t let her in,” he said.

“That’s right,” Sneed said. “She owed me two fifty for the last month she did stay here—that was March—and then I told her it was another two fifty for the month she stopped staying but didn’t tell me. I could have tried to find somebody else if I had known.”

The second box was more personal-care products. After looking through it, Stilwell put it back on the shelf.

“Was there something in particular she said she wanted to get?”

“No, she just said she wanted her things.”

“Did she say she’d pay you the money?”