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“Someone gave him the script and the bible. The man killed himself. And now Greer is dead.”
Alicia studied Tess. “But you just said they’re looking for her boyfriend, right?”
Actually, Tess hadn’t said that. “He’s officially a person of interest at this point.”
“But it makes sense, especially if she was sleeping with Ben Marcus.”
“Are you saying that you know this for a fact?”
“I’m saying that I know Ben Marcus has sex so often, and with so little thought, that I wouldn’t be surprised if he started humping a doughnut off the craft services cart one day.”
Flip had alluded to the same behavior on Ben’s part but said an affair between Ben and Greer was unthinkable. And it was, Tess decided – not because of Ben but because Greer wouldn’t settle for anyone less than the boss.
Her beer finished, Tess decided to let her doppelgänger have the oblivious evening she so clearly desired. She stood. “One last thing-”
“Home alone, sleeping. That’s one thing I don’t miss about the old job, those crazy hours.” Alicia smiled. “That is what you were going to ask me, right? Where I was the night Greer died?”
“Actually, I just wanted to use your bathroom.”
The powder room proved to be one of the few projects that Alicia had found the time and money to complete. It had a pretty pedestal sink, a striking light fixture, and one of those state-of-the-art toilets that used a minimum of water. Tess flushed it twice, giddy as a child.
A few blocks away, Tess pulled over and found a little free wireless bleeding into the air, possibly from the McDonald’s. She used it to look up Wilbur Grace on her laptop, see if he was still listed in Baltimore. There he was, Wilbur R. Grace on Elsrode Road, mere blocks from where she sat. How could she not at least drive by, given that it was all but on her way back to Selene’s condo?
And once she found the house, on a dead end that ran into Herring Run Park, how could she not get out, walk around. It was never her intention to break in, of course – or so she told herself as she fiddled with the kitchen window, which slid up so effortlessly that it seemed rude to resist its invitation.
She flicked the kitchen light switch. No power – it must have been turned off by now – and it only would have drawn the neighbors’ attention. But there was a streetlight outside, and once her eyes adjusted, she began to look around, feeling silly. What did she expect to find? A man had killed himself here, hung himself from the ceiling fan above the charming, old-fashioned table, a white metal top with an elaborate black design. It was sad, but it probably didn’t have anything to do with Ma
“Don’t disdain the obvious, Monaghan,” she said out loud, keen for company in the dark, achingly quiet house. She wandered into the living room. Like the kitchen in Alicia Farmer’s house, it was a Baltimore time capsule, only this one was stuck in the early 1960s. Why was the furniture still here? Maybe Wilbur Grace had died without a will and everything was being held up by probate. That was a mess, Tess knew from experience, but it would be sorted out eventually. Until then, the house would sit, and – she heard a creak back in the kitchen. Someone else was opening the kitchen window, which Tess had been careful to close behind her.
Flight or fight? She chose neither, crouching behind the sofa instead. Her eyes had adjusted to the light; that was her one advantage. If someone else was entering through the kitchen window, he – or she – had no more right to be there than she did, so that was a push. She had left her gun in the car – distinct disadvantage. Burglars tended to be averse to violence, hence their choice of profession. But when confronted, they could be unpredictable.
Voices. There were two of them, male and female, trying to whisper but not having much success. “Are you sure-?” “Yes, I’ve done it before.” “But what if-?” “He’s dead, no one’s here, no one’s ever here.” “It’s creepy, though, him dying here.”
By then, the duo was in the living room, heading toward the stairs, two teenagers, a six-pack of beer dangling from the boy’s hand. Tess should have let them go. It was no business of hers if two kids wanted to take a shot at adding another stat to the city’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy rate. She could have let them pass, then retreated silently out the window. She was trespassing, too.
“You come here often?” Tess called out when they were about halfway up the stairs.
The girl screamed, and the boy dropped the six-pack, which bounced down the steps and broke free of the plastic rings, rolling across the wooden floor. Surprised and overwhelmed, they couldn’t begin to figure out what to do. The girl tried to run down the stairs as the boy ran up, only to block each other.
“Don’t choose a career in any kind of crisis or emergency work,” Tess said, picking up a beer. She was tempted to open it for the sheer insouciance of it, but it would only spray everywhere, making a mess. Besides, she wasn’t in the mood for a Natural Light. She was never in the mood for a Natural Light.
“Who are you?” the boy asked. “What are you doing here?”
“Let’s just say I have a right to be here,” she bluffed, “which is probably not your situation. Breaking and entering, drinking alcohol when you’re under twenty-one, getting ready to have sex with a minor-”
“I’m a minor,” the boy protested, even as the girl said: “We were not!”
“The law doesn’t care about the boy’s age,” Tess said, having no idea if this were true. “But I’ll tell you what. I’ll forget about everything I saw and everything you’ve done, if you’ll just tell me some things I need to know about the man who lived here. You did know him, right?”
“Mr. Grace?” the boy said. “Yeah.”
“What was he like?”
“Weird.”
That was more than she had hoped for, actually. She was counting on getting the usual “Nice man, quiet man” rap, the default of incurious neighbors everywhere. Translated: I never paid attention to him.
“How so?”
“He’d invite the neighborhood kids over to watch movies.”
Well, Crow did that with Lloyd.
“And that was okay, he would give us sodas and stuff, screen us these old movies, then ask us what we thought.”
Again, not so different from what happened in her home.
“And he even wanted to make movies with some of us.”
Shit.
“Not like that,” the young man added hastily. Perhaps he had told the story before and always gotten the same reaction. “Movies with stories, that he had written out. Short. They weren’t exactly the Matrix, but they were kind of good. Only he stopped doing that, like, a year ago or so.”
“Did he keep the movies?”
“Shit, I don’t know. His equipment was old school, some big clunky camcorder, VHS tapes. Who still has that shit?”
Tess glanced around the room. There was a large armoire in one corner of the living room. Using a pinpoint flashlight on her key ring, she opened it and found a television and a cable box, but no DVD player, and no VCR. Below the television was a shelf with films in both formats, mostly classics, but there were no homemade movies among them.
“You steal this stuff?” she said.
“What stuff?”
“You said he watched movies, he had to have something to watch them on.”
“No,” the boy said, adamant, even a little offended. “I wouldn’t do nothing like that. I come over here to – you know, have fun. I’m not a thief.”
The girl spoke up, outraged. “This is the first time I’ve ever been here.”
The boy smiled sheepishly at Tess, as if expecting her to take his side, to understand that a super-suave Herring Run stud such as himself – hadn’t he sprung for an entire six-pack of Natural Light – couldn’t be expected to be tied down to just one girl.