by Julie Smith
She had been almost completely wrong and yet somehow right: The man in the picture was the perfect sidekick to the one she’d pictured. He was thin, not fat, average height, and clean-shaven. But a beard would have been a good idea. He had a pointy, elflike chin. Three things she’d guessed perfectly: he did indeed wear glasses; his hair was limp and greasy-looking; and he was the very exemplar of “nerd.”
What was it about these guys? she wondered. Why were they such a type—brilliant, withdrawn, dorky, into computers and science fiction? She knew the answer, or thought she did. They were unhappy with the real world, had little self-esteem (as Knowles Kennedy, who had a surfeit of it, had observed), and sought alternate universes.
Okay, fine. That was who they were as a class, but who was Geoff Kavanagh other than the nerd from Central Casting? His nerdiness was all too apparent; what was his Geoffness, so to speak? Well, she couldn’t say that aloud. “What was unusual about him?” she asked finally.
“Unusual?” Knowles looked puzzled. “Well, he was… so smart and all. I don’t know—he was kind of your average—”
“Nerd.”
“Yeah.”
“Did he have any enemies?”
“What? You mean he was murdered?”
Skip shrugged. “I have to ask.”
“Did he have any enemies! He didn’t even have any friends.”
“How do you know?”
Knowles looked ashamed. “Well, I don’t. I really don’t know. It’s just that he never talked about them. He never talked about anything except things; events; stuff you could get out of books. Not life. He hardly ever got any personal calls. He could always work late or take someone else’s shift. I think he even lived with his parents.”
“Did anyone here know him any better than you?”
“Well, Jody might have. She worked with him a lot .Hey, Jo!”
A plump young woman ambled over, black, wearing clothes a couple of sizes too small, and, from her saunter, well pleased with her appearance. “Jody, this is Officer Langdon. She’s looking into Geoff’s death.”
“He was a good guy. Everybody liked Geoff.”
“You did?’
“Sure I did. Talkin’ to Geoff was like goin’ to college.”
“Did he ever talk about his personal life?’
“Claimed he had a girlfriend.”
“Did he mention her name?’
“Lenore. Oh, sure he had a girlfriend. Like everybody’s named Lenore. He probably picked the name from some book. You know, I’d talk about this place or that place, right around here, and he wouldn’t know what I meant. Tell you the truth, I don’t think he got out much. Stayed home with that computer of his. On the town every single night; always on the town. It was like that was his world. You know the town?’
Skip gulped. Knowles looked as confused as she felt.
“The town. It’s like a computer thing. Wait a minute, now, he told me once… let’s just see if I can get it.” She put her hand to her forehead and closed her eyes. “I got it The Original Worldwide Network.”
“Oh. The TOWN. Is it a bulletin board or something?’
She shrugged. “More like a religion. Or maybe a real town.”
CHAPTER TWO
MAYBE, SKIP THOUGHT, the girlfriend could shed some light. Marguerite Terry had given her a phone number, which produced the following message: “If it’s daytime, I’m at Stringalong. If it’s night, don’t ask—especially at the full moon.” This was followed by one of the more fiendish cackles ever heard outside a production of Macbeth. Just as well it was daytime, but what was Stringalong?
According to the phone book, it could be found on Magazine Street. A store, maybe.
Once inside, Skip still wasn’t sure. It was a store, but was it a business? It was if selling beads wasn’t a front or a money laundry—because beads were all Stringalong had to offer. Tiny beads, large beads, glass beads, crystal beads, amber beads, jet beads, carved beads, beads in every color and beads of pristine clarity, about enough beads to fill up a shoe box if you dumped the entire inventory into one small space. But of course that would be no way to sell beads. They were displayed in hundreds of small plastic cases, and cost ten cents apiece and upwards. But still. How could you make a living selling beads? Who bought beads?
There was only one person in the store, a small woman, thirty, maybe, with darkish hair that more or less just hung, a slash of red lipstick, and a short black dress that showed off half a dozen doubtless handmade necklaces. She had a tiny face, heart-shaped; a gamine face with a pointy chin that reminded Skip of Geoff’s. If this was Lenore, it was a Mick-and-Bianca kind of match. She was a fawnlike creature, in her slimness, her elusiveness, but she wasn’t pretty, and she probably wasn’t innocent—she simply looked as if she’d spook easily.
Stepping closer, Skip saw that she had a mole near the corner of her mouth, a tiny flaw that lent personality to her face. She had a feeling talking to her was going to be like trying to catch water in your hand.
“Lenore Marquer?”
“Yes.” The woman’s mouth quivered. “Is Caitlin all right?”
“Caitlin?”
“My daughter. You didn’t come about her?”
“No.”
She breathed in. “Thank God. She’s in day care—I live in fear.”
Skip smiled, happy to reassure her. “It’s not about that at all. I’m Skip Langdon from the police department—”
“Omigod, it’s about Geoff! Shit! I knew it. I knew it. I told them. Shit! He was murdered, right? We all knew it. It was only a matter of time…”
“Hold on a minute. You seem to know more about this than I do.”
“It’s not about Geoff?”
“No, it is.”
“You decided to move on the autopsy report, right? Finally. We thought maybe you wouldn’t. God, we were worried sick, but now that it’s staring me in the face, the cold reality of it…” She put her hands to her mouth, apparently to stop the sobs that were coming out anyway. Tears flowed like a hot rain, in no time turning the tiny face a blotchy crimson, almost puce. She was out of control, and Skip had to remind herself that Geoff had been dead only five days; the wound was still open, still angry and dangerous.
“Lenore, maybe you’d better sit down.” Skip looked around for a chair, but didn’t see so much as a footstool.
Lenore’s body was still heaving. Unable to sit, she came out from behind the counter, pulled the door open, and made a show of gulping in fresh air. She had a tattoo on her ankle, a handsome coiling snake.
Skip was in agony. Obviously Lenore couldn’t talk if she couldn’t even breathe, but it was killing her not to be able to fire questions.
Two women starting to pass the store were obviously drawn by the face at the door. “Oh, look,” said one. “Let’s go in there and look.”
Lenore stepped aside.
“What’s this—a bead store? You sell beads here?”
Lenore managed a smile. “And a few necklaces we make on the premises.”
“Are you all right, dear?”
“Fine—uh—allergy attack. Is there anything I can help you with?”
The woman turned to her friend. “Steff, this could be just the thing.” To Lenore, she said, “I have this suit that has a peculiar ocher color in it and I just can’t find the right thing to wear with it.”
“Well, let’s see. What color blouse do you wear with it?”
Skip considered smashing all the display cases. Better yet, smashing Steff and friend. But there was nothing to do but wait. Ten minutes later, Lenore shot her a helpless look and said to her customers, “Could you excuse me a moment?”
She came over to Skip. “I’m sorry, but I just work here, I don’t own it. I can’t afford to lose this job, I really can’t.”
She had a way of making everything into high tragedy; Skip really hadn’t planned to cost her her job. But before she could speak, Lenore said, “Look, I don’t know anything, anyway. W
hy don’t you go see Layne? He’s Geoff’s best friend and he works out of his house. He has time.”
“Layne who?”
“Bilderback. He lives in the Quarter.”
That was convenient: So did Skip. This way she could take a sandwich home and put her feet up for a few minutes between interviews.
I could even meditate.
In the privacy of her car, she laughed. That was her little joke with herself—she would meditate if she could, she just couldn’t sit still. She was especially unable to sit when her adrenaline was flowing, as when she was fascinated with a case, the way she was with this one. Even putting her feet up would take a major effort. In fact the hell with it. She ate her sandwich at her kitchen counter, opening her mail as she did it. Wondering how Lenore Marquer had known about the autopsy report before she did.
She ate fast, knowing she’d be sorry in a few minutes, but unable to concentrate on the task at hand, only on getting to Layne Bilderback.
He lived on the border of the Quarter, on the downtown side of Esplanade, just off Dauphine. Not the greatest neighborhood, some would say, but beautiful; breathtakingly beautiful. With its tree-lined center divider (“neutral ground” in New Orleans) and its gracious old houses—houses that seemed almost alive, almost to bow and click their heels, they were so welcoming—it was hard to imagine a flourishing drug trade behind the walls, but the neighborhood had that and everything else; Skip knew because she’d worked VCD—the Vieux Carre District—now prosaically called “the Eighth.”
A black man sat on the steps of the house Layne lived in. “How’re you?” he said, as friendly as if it were fifty years earlier and the races weren’t permanently angry at each other.
Skip stopped to enjoy the moment. “Fine, thanks. But cold.” She shivered a little.
“Yeah. My wife won’t let me smoke inside—she’d rather I freeze to death.”
“At least she lets you come home.” It wasn’t that funny, but she and the man shared a big laugh, pals for a moment—the sort of moment you didn’t get in every city, she thought when she liked New Orleans, which she did right now.
I’m actually happy, she thought with surprise, and remembered guiltily she was on a murder case.
“Does Layne Bilderback live here?”
“Upstairs.”
She pushed the button. In a moment a young white man appeared on the balcony. “Yes?”
“I’m Skip Langdon—did Lenore Marquer call about me?” She was trying to avoid saying the “p” word out on the street
“No. Should she have?”
There was no help for it. “I’m from the police department. Could I come in, please?”
“Let’s see your badge.”
The smoker disappeared quickly, either spooked or minding his own business. Skip held up her badge.
“What’s this about?”
“I think you know, don’t you?”
“About time you got here,” he said; and let her in.
He was short by Skip’s standards, about Knowles Kennedy’s height. Though he wore a sweatshirt and jeans, she could see a well-muscled, slim-waisted torso; clearly he worked out. He was pale, had barely any hair, and wore glasses. Not really a nerd, this one, but probably an intellectual. She deduced that by his surroundings as much as his appearance. It was the usual gorgeous high-ceilinged, French-windowed French Quarter gem, but the paint was a dirty beige, as if he could care less, the furniture functional, to say the least—other people’s castoffs, it looked like—and there were more books and magazines on the floor alone than in certain library branches. There were bookshelves too, but they were only partly filled with books—cardboard boxes were stacked on them, board games, apparently, but more than Skip would have thought existed.
“Are you from Homicide?” He gestured toward the trashed-out couch, which had a fake Navajo blanket thrown over it, probably to hide the rips and stains.
She sat. “Yes. What am I here about?”
“Geoff Kavanagh. Can I get you anything?”
She shook her head impatiently, hoping he’d go on; she wasn’t disappointed.
“So you guys finally caught on to that autopsy report. We were wondering if we were going to have to storm headquarters or what.” He sat in a broken-down rattan chair.
“Would you mind telling me what’s going on here? And who ’we’ is?”
“It’s the talk of the TOWN, Officer.”
“Detective,” she snapped. Rank usually mattered not a whit to her, but this guy was making her angry. “You mean the computer bulletin board?”
“Oh. You know about the TOWN.”
“Not nearly enough, apparently.”
“Come on, I’ll show you.”
“Let’s talk a minute first.” She felt a need to regain control. The case was spinning out of orbit. “What was your relationship with Geoffrey Kavanagh?”
He blushed. “We weren’t lovers if that’s what you mean.”
“It isn’t.”
“Well, I mean—he was my best friend, and I’m about as openly gay as you can get.”
It was all she could do not to glance at her watch. I guess you are, she thought. We’ve known each other—what, two minutes?—and I now know one thing about you. That.
“How did you two meet?”
“Online.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“On the TOWN. We were both in the Southern conference and found out we both lived in New Orleans. So we met; we had a lot of interests in common.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, computers. Virtual reality. Virtual communities. Virtual sex.”
“Virtual what?”
“I just threw sex in to wake you up. They haven’t developed it yet, but everybody’s on the edge of their seats. Virtual communities exist, though. The TOWN’s one. We all know each other and care about each other even though most of us have never set eyes on each other or heard each other’s voices and never will; its headquarters is in California somewhere, and that’s where most users are. But I know Darlis and Busy from out on the coast as well as I know anybody in New Orleans.”
“Layne, you’ve got to get out more.”
“Well, I can’t. I work out of my house and everything I like to do you do indoors.”
“Wait a minute; what do you do?”
“You mean for money? I’m a puzzle constructor.”
“A puzzle constructor?”
“Yeah. Like crosswords and logic puzzles. For puzzle magazines mostly, plus one or two general publications.”
“Well, I guess somebody has to do it.”
“It doesn’t sound like fun?”
“Oh, it does. I’m just reeling from the weirdness of it. I guess I never met a puzzlemaker before.”
“But you always wanted to.” He gave her a winning smile, displaying such friendly blue eyes that she’d have sworn he was flirting—and he probably was. She’d noticed lots of gay men flirted with her and she loved it—no danger of awkward misunderstandings.
“I guess I must have.” She’d almost forgotten her irritation. But it came back when she realized the implication of his job. “So you see Geoff Kavanagh’s death as a puzzle to solve.”
He shrugged. “When your best friend dies, you do what you know. I’ve got a friend who works for a newspaper out in California. Every time another gay man dies of AIDS, he makes sure he writes the obit. That’s his way of dealing with it.”
“Was Geoff gay?” Skip knew she was getting off the track, but this was turning out to be a pretty free-floating conversation.
“Not that I know of. And, as I said, he was my best friend.” Beneath the cleverness, Layne had a simplicity of expression she liked, a straightforwardness she wondered if she could trust.
“Okay. How’d you find out Geoff was dead?”
“Lenore called me. She’d called him at work and he hadn’t shown up. She tried home and his mother told her. I got all excited and posted about it. And then everybody
else started, from all over the country. There’s a whole topic about it—we think he was murdered.”
“Hold it, you lost me a mile back. I can understand looking at a death like a puzzle because you’re a puzzlemaker; I can even understand trying to block out the pain of a friend’s death with intellectual activity…”
He winced, probably hating the mention of emotion of any sort.
“… but I don’t really see why you’d come to the conclusion your friend was murdered just because he died in an accident.”
“Oh. I guess you don’t know about the flashbacks.”
“Is that some computer term I don’t know?”
“You really don’t know, do you?”
“Know what, goddammit?” She was starting to realize how much she hated the feeling of being out of control.
“Okay, if I understand correctly, you just came because of the autopsy report. All you know so far is Geoff’s death was classified ‘suspicious’—right?”
“I’ll do the questioning, all right?”
Layne leaned back in his chair. “Go ahead.”
“Tell me about the flashbacks.”
“Well, I was about to. I just wanted to know what you already knew, so I could save us some time.”
She held her peace, though her teeth clenched with the effort of it.
But Layne couldn’t leave it alone: “Are we having our first fight?”
She was angry at herself for allowing him to see how irritated she was, and wondered how to get out of it. She tried a smile that she hoped wasn’t a rictus. “Flashbacks.”
“Okay, we’ll work it out later. Well, it was in Confession—”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Confession. That’s the name of the conference.”
“And what’s a conference?”
“It’s a place where you can go and talk about a subject—a virtual place, that is. Sometimes you go to Confession and a new topic might be sex, say, and people just post things like ‘I haven’t done it in two months. What about you?’ It’s luck of the draw, you know? Sometimes it’s like that, and sometimes people really get down.”
“There was a flashback topic?”