Tuesday Mooney Wore Black

by Kate Racculia

  “I don’t – know—” Tuesday’s mental files were frozen. They didn’t riffle. They didn’t flutter. This information was beyond them. “If you’re not Nathaniel Arches, then who are you?”

  “I am Nathaniel Arches,” said the man sitting beside her. “That asshole is my little brother.”

  Tuesday sat.

  And stared.

  He patted her knee. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m still taking you to lunch.”

  Afternoon hours in the office were, for Tuesday, the most challenging. Lunch made her full and sleepy. Lunch sucked away her motivation. After lunch, without even lunch to look forward to, the afternoon was long and dull and Tuesday’s brain was at its natural snoozy nadir.

  That day, after that lunch, Tuesday returned to the office something close to high.

  Or drunk, maybe. It was a little hard to walk. It was a little hard to focus, and, yes, she’d had a bourbon, neat, with the bloody steak Nathaniel Arches had ordered for her, but it wasn’t the booze or the red meat. It was the new information, all the radical recalibrations she had to sort and process and confirm. It was nuts. It made sense (even though it was nuts), and her professional pride was smarting, but she couldn’t – it was possible, surely, but – why hadn’t—

  How had she overlooked Edgar Arches Junior?

  “How do you find what you don’t even know to look for?” Nathaniel had said – not about his brother, or at least not consciously, but it had struck Tuesday as absurdly on the nose. “You don’t. You can’t, because you don’t know how. But I do. That’s what makes me so good at my job. That’s what elevates N. A. Arches, that’s why it stands head and shoulders above the pack. That’s what makes me better.” His own relative yet absolute awesomeness was a theme Nathaniel returned to with some frequency. “It’s like a goddamn sixth sense. I can see the future in some shitty nothing company. I can see a way forward that makes a profit. It’s not something you learn; you just have to know.” He took a sip of bourbon. “It’s something you’re born with.”

  This Nathaniel Arches was everything Tuesday’s original research indicated he would be. The blurriness that had appeared around her first impression – the fuzz of Archie – resolved, and the callow, shallow, outrageously self-involved billionaire asshole snapped into focus. He was less cartoonish, observed in the flesh. He gave off a certain magnetism, possibly the kind of charm they talked about when they talked about everyday sociopaths. His face was like a too-perfect, vaguely plastic copy of his brother’s. He didn’t blink much. Tuesday suspected everything Nathaniel said and did was in the service of taking exactly what Nathaniel wanted from the world while giving the world back as little as possible.

  He had taken her to a steakhouse in the financial district, unmarked by any sign. It wasn’t the kind of place you went to be seen; Nathaniel, Sexiest Scenester that he was, knew those places, and had, she suspected, deliberately not taken Tuesday to any of them. The dark green walls and carpet swallowed sound. What light there was shone off the polish of dark red wood. It was redolent of old white men. Tuesday could have walked there from her office in under fifteen minutes, and she guessed Nathaniel worked in the gleaming glass building that towered above it, but that, she knew, was not the point. Not the point of this lunch date, and not the point of Nathaniel Allan Arches.

  He smiled at her. She did not smile back.

  “It’s why I should have the company,” he said, still smiling, perhaps even wider, at her discomfort. “As my father intended.”

  “You mean you’re entitled,” she said, “to Arches Consolidated.”

  “What other company is there?”

  Many others. Again: not the point of Nathaniel Arches.

  “You’re probably wondering why I reached out,” he said.

  He squared his shoulders toward her. Laid both palms flat on the shiny surface of the table and then turned them up, as if to say: See? I’m an open book. I’m opening for you right now.

  What a fucking prince I am.

  “My sister,” he said.

  Tuesday had already assumed as much, but let him continue.

  “She met you at Lyle Pryce’s this past weekend. She saw some – evidence, apparently. In your possession.” He cleared his throat. “Eddie is our little brother. Like most little brothers, he has always been a gigantic pain in the ass.”

  “What did he do?” asked Tuesday.

  Nathaniel didn’t answer her directly.

  “Even without my sister’s – intelligence. So to speak.” Nathaniel pulled the sides of his mouth back in a grimace. “I knew my brother was back. He’s been harassing me for years. Stupid things. Taunting – postcards.”

  “Postcards.” Tuesday frowned. “He harasses you with … postcards.”

  “Just because it’s stupid,” he said, “doesn’t mean it isn’t harassment. Quite recently, the harassment became more intense.” He locked his eyes on hers. “He’s acting like a child, but that doesn’t mean he’s innocent. Or harmless.” He swallowed. “He’s never been innocent or harmless, even when he was a child.”

  It was an exceptional performance. There was just enough truth, Tuesday’s gut said, to convince a less suspicious person it was wholesale fact. But it wasn’t.

  She just couldn’t tell which parts.

  “What has he done?” she repeated.

  Nathaniel frowned at her. “I’d rather not get into the gory details.”

  “You’re going to have to give me more,” Tuesday said, “if you want me to help. And you do want me to help. Don’t you?”

  Nathaniel pulled his arms back off the table. Sat up straight. He jerked his chin in the direction of an unseen waiter who immediately made himself visible with a fresh bourbon.

  Her mental pen, which had been scribbling furiously over a fresh file, paused.

  “Tell me where he is,” Nathaniel said, “and I will give you five hundred thousand dollars.”

  “I don’t know where he is,” she said.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Believe me or not,” said Tuesday, “it won’t change the fact that I have no information to give you.”

  “Seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

  “Why do you think you can buy what doesn’t exist?”

  “Because everything can be bought.” Nathaniel took another sip. “Everything, and everyone. Even you. I know where you work and what you do. I know you know about me. About my family. I know you know about my brother, things that I don’t have access to. I want to hire you. I want to pay for your services.”

  “You want me to sell him out,” Tuesday said.

  “For a fee.” Nathaniel shrugged and smiled a toothy smile. “Let’s not pretend you have a moral compass. Like I said, I know what you do for a living.”

  Tuesday laughed. It would have been impossible to continue without the release.

  “Is this really the game you want to play?” she said. “I’m a particularly adept professional Googler. And yes, I gather publicly available data about persons without their knowledge, for the sake of charity. What do you do, in the world? Without anyone’s knowledge?”

  Nathaniel’s lids lowered to slits. He raised his glass. Took a sip.

  “One million,” he said. “Cash. For my brother’s whereabouts.”

  She looked down at her steak. Pink and wet and half eaten. She didn’t have the stomach for it.

  She looked up at Nathaniel.

  Her mind skittered back to something he’d already said.

  About the company. The only company. That should be his, as his father intended.

  His father, Edgar.

  Senior.

  Her brain leapt.

  “I’ll think about it,” she told him.

  Which was not a lie. He tossed the last of his bourbon down his throat, and she thought about it. He passed her his card, said some curt words about not thinking too hard or too long, and she nodded. They stared at each other for a long beat. Nathaniel sai
d, “So I guess we’re done here,” and stood, and left her, and she thought about it. She spared a brief thought to wonder if she was dine-and-dashing, rationalized that Nathaniel likely had a tab, and then Tuesday left too, and walked back to her office, thinking about it. Thinking about the only company, to Nathaniel, that mattered. Once owned by Edgar Arches. Currently overseen by Constance. Tuesday thought about Archie. Who had led her to think he was Nathaniel. Who had charmed and manipulated her into never questioning who he said he was.

  Had he ever said he was Nathaniel? Or had she—

  She’d had Nathaniel on the brain, because she’d researched him. And she saw only what she expected to see. But then why did Archie—

  What was the point of lying to her?

  She didn’t know whom or what to trust. And when Tuesday didn’t know that, she retreated to the only thing that had never let her down.

  Back in her cube, she decided to start with the ultimate authority. The internal database only she, and not, say, an Arches – whether an Archie or a Nathaniel or an Emerson – had access to. The information was not online. The information was private.

  The information could not be manipulated.

  She opened the hospital’s records. She had access; it was part of her job to confirm whether people had been patients. To confirm their addresses and birth dates. Their identities. It wasn’t an invasion of privacy but a legitimate function of her position, using their personal information to do her job, and do her job only.

  Who said finding Edgar Arches Junior wasn’t her job too?

  It was surprising how wrong it didn’t feel to fire up the patient database. It was so old it still had a Unix interface, didn’t respond to the mouse but only to key commands, like the first amber-screened computers she had ever used. She typed ARCHES, EDGAR into the search field. It felt better than not-wrong when the database spat back two records. For two ARCHES, EDGARs. One born thirty-five years after the other.

  She opened the first record. Full name ARCHES, EDGAR ALLAN JR.

  Found.

  Found.

  ARCHES, EDGAR ALLAN JR hadn’t had an appointment at the hospital in over a decade. Not since he still saw his pediatrician (Dr. Anton Phillips – still practicing, a favorite, a legend, children regularly went to him through their college years). Edgar Junior’s birthday was April 11. He was going to be thirty-two next spring. Emergency contacts listed – his parents. ARCHES, CONSTANCE ALLAN (relationship MOTHER, occupation HOME). And ARCHES, EDGAR (relationship FATHER, occupation ACE).

  Tuesday stared at “ACE” for a long time.

  It was an acronym. An acronym for Arches Consolidated Enterprises. She knew this. She had known this the whole time.

  Vincent Pryce told her to use her imagination.

  Vincent Pryce gave her the queen of diamonds.

  She found an ace on her own.

  9

  LIBRARY VOICES

  Dex passed under the vaulted mosaic arches of the Boston Public Library, checked his watch for the thirtieth time, reassured himself that if it was at a library, it wasn’t strictly a date – but it wasn’t not a date either, and it was perfectly okay to have become the kind of person who met guys for dates at the library; it didn’t mean he was old or a dweeb or an old dweeb.

  It was six o’clock on Wednesday. Tuesday had returned from her lunch with Archie the day before in a state of cagey high alert. Dex could tell something had happened, but Tuesday wouldn’t tell him anything. At least she respected him enough to admit something had happened. She was looking into it; she’d let him know what she knew when she knew more. And in the meantime, she’d suggested this mission: get in touch with Bert Hatmaker, return Lyle’s insulated beverage tumblers, squeeze every last drop of information out of him that he could.

  Why not just ask Lyle? he’d chatted. Because duh, she said, you’ll have way more fun squeezing Bert.

  This was true. He’d emailed Lyle to ask for Bert’s contact information, to follow up on something they’d talked about over the weekend. Simple interpersonal skullduggery, the kind he excelled at, and she’d responded within an hour. He then wrote his opening salvo to Bert (rabbithat80@gmail, how adorable) without breaking a sweat. But as soon as he sent it, his pulse accelerated by a good ten beats per minute. Every minute, every second he spent waiting for Bert to respond, he felt that he was on a precipice in a wild gale – wearing a fabulous gown, vintage Valentino, midnight blue – clinging to an outcropping of shaky rock over a vast wasteland populated by the ghosts of his exes, and if he didn’t manage very quickly to unlock the secrets of human flight, he was going to plummet to an intensely glamorous death. Then Bert wrote back. And Dex had to fight the urge to squeal.

  This behavior was unusual and troubling.

  The library was Bert’s suggestion. He had an errand to run downtown after school, and they could grab a cup of coffee at the library café. A coffee date, Dex had thought. How freshman year! He had gone on his first real date his freshman year of college, in the late nineties, to the Starbucks at the student union. At four in the afternoon. He and Theo, a boy from his Introduction to Musical Theater class, had never discussed it in those terms, before or after. They had both been sort of walking toward the union after class, and talking about how they liked coffee, and Dex could tell – hoped – guessed – that Theo was also gay, and liked him like that, a hope that was confirmed by four thirty-five that same day, back in Theo’s dorm room. For a date that had started out ambiguous and furtive, it had suddenly become very unambiguous and terrifying, and then wonderful, but never really romantic. It was more surreal than real, but it felt really good and really gay and, three weeks free of the only small-town closet he’d ever known, Dex took every gulp of the world he could get. So was this library date, this promise of coffee in an intellectual setting – was this the universe offering him a second real first-date chance? Or was it just a coincidence?

  Dex didn’t believe in coincidences.

  Wait. That wasn’t true at all. Dex believed in coincidences, and fate, and signs and wonders, and the great interlocking gears of the universe telling him to do things, and though he’d gotten pretty good at ignoring what the universe was telling him to do (most recently: quit your soul-sucking job and open a karaoke bar!), it didn’t mean he couldn’t still hear it screaming.

  He turned down the hall toward the library café and Bert Hatmaker was already there.

  He was wearing neatly pressed pants, a genuinely distressed denim jacket and something collared, and blue and green and argyle beneath it. Very Cambridge prep, Dex remembered – right down to his shoes, which were the most expensive things on his body. And like that, Dex’s anxiety was gone. What poured over him instead felt a bit like the calm assurance he’d first experienced in Bert’s presence at brunch, and also a bit like how Dex imagined the first signs of a stroke might feel.

  Bert turned and waved a little, but did not advance, which meant Dex actually had to walk toward him. Dex had to move his feet and either look away awkwardly or maintain eye contact for the length of the hallway, staring Bert down like a deranged lion eyeballing a gazelle.

  Bert looked flustered. “It’s closed,” he said, shrugging and pointing a thumb back at the café door. “I just assumed it would be open.”

  “Library’s not too big with the after-work crowd,” said Dex, thinking of The Bank and all those golden girls and boys drowning their finance salaries in golden beer.

  “I don’t see why not,” said Bert with a twist of a smile.

  Dex tucked his hands in his pockets. Yes, Bert made him feel calmer. Made him feel like he didn’t have to put on a show. Though that produced its own kind of uneasiness, because if Dex wasn’t putting on a show, he wasn’t quite sure who to be. “Run your errand?” he asked.

  Bert nodded. “I did.” He smiled. “You too?”

  “Oh – right!” and Dex opened his messenger bag and brought out Lyle’s travel mugs. Bert tucked them inside his own bag, and when h
e looked back up at Dex, he seemed a little let down, his face betraying a hope, maybe, that this meeting wasn’t just another errand for either of them. Dex had never met an adult man so obviously in earnest. He wanted to make a warm nest for him, a shelter from the vulgarities of the world and all the bigger, crueler animals that would chew him up and spit him out.

  “They probably wouldn’t have let us take coffee into the library anyway. Want to look around?” Dex asked. Bert brightened.

  Two birds with one stone, Dex thought. He could interrogate and flirt. This was an excellent distraction. He otherwise would have spent his Wednesday night breathing into a paper sack in frustration over everything Tuesday was withholding.

  They walked outside, following the loop around the library’s open courtyard. Connecting the original old library with its modern addition, the courtyard was a gorgeous square arcade with a shady sheltered walkway, tables and chairs looking out over a garden, and a fountain with a statue of a pixie, perhaps, or some other breed of mythological creature, dancing whilst taunting a baby with some grapes. The fountain was turned off, whether for the night or the season, Dex couldn’t say. He didn’t remember the last time he’d been here, but he remembered the feeling: of being outside and inside at the same time, the air cool and light as the stone surrounding you, the city at a distance but audible everywhere, like you were tucked deep in its stone heart.

  “I should come here more often,” said Bert. “It’s hard when you work and live on the other side of the river. There’s no real reason to come into Boston proper.”

  “Don’t you visit Lyle?” Thrust, thought Dex, though everything he knew about fencing metaphors came from movies. “Or does she come to visit you?”

  “We usually meet somewhere. There’s a townie restaurant in Porter Square that she loves, right on Mass. Ave. The Newtowne Grille. I think she likes it because no one recognizes her, or if they do, they don’t care. She’s been going there for years, and they have no idea.” Bert cocked his head. “I mean, they know who she is – they know she’s the girl who gets a whole pitcher and a cheese pizza all to herself, who plays the same song on the jukebox every Wednesday night. But they don’t know who she married.” He sighed. “They might now. Her face has been in the news enough.”