Another Thing to Fall

Only maybe it wasn’t so surprising. Someone had already been here. The place was a wreck. Had the boyfriend stopped here on his way out of town? Drawers and cabinets had been pulled open, sofa cushions tossed. In the narrow galley kitchen, all the items from beneath the sink had been left on the floor.

Flip’s office had been ransacked, too – stop, don’t think about that, it’s crazy.

He found his way to the bedroom, which was even worse – the mattress flipped, clothing scattered everywhere. Whoever had been here seemed to have begun in a fairly systematic way, then become increasingly antic. The mother had said something about a ring, but Greer had worn the ring even after the breakup. Besides, JJ almost certainly hadn’t returned here after Greer was dead. Police would have been watching the place. Someone else had been here, looking for something. The same something that Ben wanted? How could that be? There was no one alive who knew of its existence – right? Greer had sworn to him that it was their secret, that no one else knew, not even her fiancé.

There was no percentage in staying here. He went out the way he had come in, realizing that the patio door had opened for him so magically because someone else had jimmied it before. When? Days ago, hours ago, minutes ago? He tried to walk nonchalantly to his car, just a guy in a suit, passing through a suburban parking lot. Jesus, that woman was morbidly obese. How do people get like that? And if you had the misfortune to weigh three hundred pounds, why would you wear a huge flowery dress with a purple belt emphasizing your nonexistent waist? He waved at her, figuring that the more attention you drew to yourself, the less likely people were to remember you.

Tess had set her cell on silent for the service and then forgotten about it, what with helping to clean ten-layer cake off Flip and trying to get the dueling mothers to a point where the police wouldn’t have to be called. The plan had been to let the reception take the place of a late lunch, but with most of the food on the floor, they ended up at Chili’s, Lloyd’s favorite restaurant. Crow had made a lot of headway with Lloyd’s taste in films but virtually none with his taste in food. Tess didn’t mind. She shared Lloyd’s love of Chili’s nachos. She was helping herself to the wonderfully cheesy, gooey concoction when she felt something vibrating close to her thigh.

“Yes, Mrs. Blossom?”

“You were right!” The woman screamed with such glee that Tess had to hold the phone away from her ear. “He left the soundstage and went to the girl’s apartment. But he didn’t stay long, not even five minutes. And I peeked in the windows after he left, and the place is trashed. Trashed. He couldn’t have possibly done it, not so quick. So someone else was there, too.”

“Did he see you?”

“Yes, but not in a way that counts. He waved at me, going to his car, but he clearly thought I was just some dumb lady who lived there. Then he drove back to the Tremont.” She laughed, and Mrs. Blossom’s laugh, even on her cumbersome, clunky cell phone, was a thing of wonder, a sweet, high bubble of sound that had been held captive far too long. “This was fun. I hope you have more things like this for me to do. I don’t even care about the extra credit.”

“Remember, Mrs. Blossom, you’re the only student who has qualified for extra assignments, so keep this to yourself when we meet tomorrow. I wouldn’t want the other students to get jealous.” Actually, Tess was trying to work out the ethics of using Mrs. Blossom this way. The woman was a surveillance prodigy. Maybe Tess should put her on the payroll when the semester was over.

Lloyd, who had been apprised of the setup, looked up expectantly. “So he left the viewing and went to Greer’s apartment, just as you thought he would.”

“The weird thing is – someone else had already been there.” Tess was thinking of her own trip to Wilbur Grace’s home, how she had found the window open. Yes, the neighborhood kids had been using it as a makeout pad, but there was still that rectangle of dust in the armoire, the VCR or DVD player that had gone missing, and maybe not because it was so easy to pawn. Then there was the office, ransacked the night of Greer’s death, and the smoke bomb Friday. “What is everyone looking for?”

“The black bird,” Lloyd said, in a remarkably good imitation of Kasper Gutman, as he had been embodied – so fully, magnificently embodied – by Sydney Greenstreet. “Or maybe it’s one of them Hitchcock MacMuffins.”

Tess took a sip of beer. Lloyd had failed the GED on his first attempt, but Crow had insisted at the time that it wasn’t lack of ability but a lack of interest that had undermined him.

“Are you saying a MacGuffin is irrelevant?” she asked, supplying the correct word without calling too much attention to it. That was how Crow corrected Lloyd.

“Of course, that’s what it always is,” Lloyd said, rolling his eyes at her ignorance. One week as an unpaid intern and he was Cecil B. De Mille. “Besides, Greer was killed by her boyfriend and he’s dead. So who cares what’s in her apartment?”

Out of the mouth of – well, not babes, but a pretty savvy seventeen-year-old. Lloyd had a point: If Greer was killed by her boyfriend, who was now dead, what possible treasure or item could have at least two people looking for it so frenziedly?

Two people. Tess shuddered, realizing after the fact how heedlessly she had exposed Mrs. Blossom. Granted, she didn’t think Ben was a threat to anyone – except, perhaps, the television viewers of America. But she couldn’t be sure to what lengths a second person might go to find this thing, this object, this MacMuffin.

Chapter 27

Marie was snoring – full-out, raucous snores, nothing delicate or ladylike. She would be horrified if she knew what she sounded like, but he found it endearing. Snoring was the kind of normal problem that other married couples had. Snoring, stealing the covers, leaving the seat up, nagging. These were the sorts of things a person could confide to a friend, over a beer at the local tavern. If a person actually had any friends. His only friend was dead. Besides, he never had been able to talk to Bob about Marie, the one drawback of marrying his best friend’s sister. He never even discussed her illness with Bob, which was strange, as Bob might have been one of the few sympathetic ears he could find in a world where almost everyone else thought Marie was simply a lazy good-for-nothing.

It was fifteen years since Marie was diagnosed, and he realized in hindsight that her problems went much further back. Probably all the way back to her childhood, he knew now, but he hadn’t been paying close attention to Bob’s kid sister back in the day. High-strung, they said then, delicate, and he found both terms more on point than the rather bland “panic attack” that the first doctor had scrawled on her chart. Now the official papers that flew back and forth read “APD” – avoidant personality disorder. He preferred the old-fashioned term agoraphobia, which translated literally as fear of the marketplace, because it seemed to be the best definition of what ailed Marie. She didn’t want to engage with the world of the market, i.e., work.

Maybe it was only fair. Marie, born in the early 1950s, had already formed her ideas of what a woman’s life should be when the concept of women’s liberation put everything up for grabs. She wanted none of it, and had explained as much to him, in their early days of going together. “Any woman who has ever snapped a garter is never going to burn her bra,” she said, utterly earnest. It had made him laugh. They had been sitting across from each other at the old Pimlico Hotel, having cocktails and feeling very grown up – he at twenty-four, she just twenty-two. He had liked the fact that she was old-fashioned, that she wanted to be a homemaker. Since graduating from UB, he and Bob had been sleeping with the early hippie girls around Mount Vernon, but he had known that was only temporary. Easy sex, no strings, empty as hell. When Marie graduated from Towson, teaching degree in hand, he realized she was a girl he would have to take seriously, and not just because she was Bob’s little sister. She was the Real Thing.