Death Before Facebook (Skip Langdon #4) (Skip Langdon Mystery) (The Skip Langdon Series)

by Julie Smith

  “Got the jargon already, I see. I lurk, mostly, but now and then—” He paused for a long time.

  “What?”

  “I was just trying to figure out what. I can’t explain it; something comes over you.”

  “Like a spell?”

  “An evil spell.”

  “Oh, great. First virtual sex. Now black magic. What’s your user ID?”

  “I’m afraid it’s a little unimaginative.”

  “Hit me with it.”

  “Steve.”

  “Steve?”

  “Don’t be so merciless. Look, you’ve got to get on this thing.”

  “My thought, exactly. But I don’t want them to know I’m lurking—and you can’t hide it, right?”

  “Oh, sure you can. Nobody asks for your driver’s license. All you really have to do is join using someone else’s credit card. The TOWN bill goes to them, but you can log on from anywhere; so if you’re working at home, you’ll just get the phone bill yourself. Pretty neat, huh?”

  “But not very inventive, criminally speaking.”

  “Well, here’s something even less inventive—but more elegant. Why don’t you be me?

  “Can I do that?”

  “Sure. All I have to do is tell you my password.”

  “And you’d do that?”

  “I’m not so sure. It’s a little embarrassing.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, hell. Just get a pencil, okay?”

  “Got one.”

  “You can’t use real words because there are programs that can go through the dictionary until they get to your password.”

  “You lost me.”

  “Hackers do this. They’ll break into your personal file and into the whole TOWN if they want to.”

  “Oh, who could be bothered?”

  “Did anyone ever tell you there are a lot of strange people out there?”

  She was almost angry at the senselessness of it. “Why don’t they just get a life?”

  “A lot of them are computer wizards working in computer jobs. They do the whole day’s work in an hour or two, maybe three, but they can’t leave or the boss would notice. So they screw around.”

  “I see what you’re saying. These are people who literally have nothing better to do.”

  “Idle hands are the devil’s playthings—or however that goes.”

  “How about the password?”

  He said something that sounded like “Skip to my Lou.”

  “Huh?”

  “I said it was embarrassing.”

  “I think it’s sweet.” Wow. Not just sweet. It was downright moving.

  “Take it down—Skip2mLu. My darlin’.”

  “Aren’t you romantic.”

  He was silent.

  “Hello?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “That’s a good question.”

  “What’s a good question? What are you talking about?”

  “We’ll talk about it later.”

  “What? We’ll talk about what later?”

  “I’m just not ready yet. I can’t talk about it now.”

  She hung up with fear at the back of her throat. It wasn’t like Steve to put her off, to say ambiguous things.

  He’s met someone else, she thought.

  Why wouldn’t he have? There were two thousand miles between them. They couldn’t go on like this forever, and they didn’t plan to. Steve talked all the time about moving to New Orleans. He loved it, it was becoming his second home. Or so he used to say.

  And now she knew she would call Jimmy Dee. Anyway, he had a computer and she didn’t. On second thought, why call?

  She popped over.

  “Auntie!” Eleven-year-old Kenny ran for her. He was still cuddly, still a little boy.

  “That sounds sooo dumb! Why don’t you just call her Skip?” said Sheila, the thirteen-year-old.

  Kenny looked crushed.

  “Because it’s not my name. Auntie is my name.”

  “Short,” said Jimmy Dee, “for Aphrodite. Because your auntie is a goddess among women. Or, if you want to know a secret, simply a goddess. It used to be Affie, but she’s so modest she insisted on Auntie so no one would know. Keep the secret, would you, angels?”

  “Affie! Affie!” Sheila was convulsed in giggles, giggles of the most contemptuous thirteen-year-old sort. “Affie, Affie, Affie.”

  “Stay for dinner?” Jimmy Dee was keeping his tone light, but Skip saw the plea in his eyes. She needn’t have worried about intruding.

  “What are we having?”

  “To you, fettuccine quattro fromaggi. To Kenny”—he dropped a hand on the little boy’s shoulders, and Kenny smiled up at him—“macaroni and cheese. To Sheila—”

  “Pig slop.”

  “I beg your pardon, my good young lady. I bet you’ve never seen a pig in your life, much less slop.”

  “I used to ride horses,” she said, and stalked out.

  Skip said, “You know that expression ‘tossed her head’?”

  “I do it often.” He pantomimed removing his head and throwing it to Kenny, who laughed as if it were the first time he’d seen it.

  “But some people really do it.”

  “Come, let’s go toss a salad.”

  The kitchen was shiny as a new car and up to the nanosecond. Two teams of workmen had worked for six months to tear out the four apartments into which the gorgeous old house had been divided, and make it whole again. The kids’ mother, ill with cancer, had died in the meantime, and they’d stayed for a while with their grandparents. Skip couldn’t believe it had happened so fast, but here it was—hardwood floors, paint as fresh as a breeze, and perfect, storybook rooms for each of the kids. Jimmy Dee had hired not only decorators, but child psychologists; he had consulted mothers, dads, and kids about how to furnish the rooms, what toys to get for Kenny, what half-teen-half-kid things for Sheila. Predictably, neither had said a word on seeing their perfect new rooms.

  Later, Kenny had grudgingly admitted he liked his, and Sheila had begun to complain about hers.

  “At least she’s talking,” Jimmy Dee said.

  Skip looked at him sideways. “You’re going to wear out your cheeks trying to keep smiling.”

  “How do you get a kid to like you?”

  “Expensive gifts?”

  “Didn’t work.”

  “Time.”

  “Cut up this tomato, will you?”

  “Dee-Dee, really. Her whole world’s been turned upside down. And besides that, she’s thirteen. If she weren’t surly, she wouldn’t be normal.”

  “See this hair?” He picked up a strand of it. “It’s turning gray.”

  “It’s been gray for years.”

  There was a bump from the other side of the house, followed by a loud wail from Kenny and then the sound of running footsteps. Sighing in unison, Dee-Dee and Skip ran to the back, to what Jimmy Dee was pleased to call the library, because he’d put all his books in there, but what, in fact, was more or less a very elegant TV room. It was full of dark wood and flowing draperies that were almost apple green, but deeper than that, with a golden sheen. It was a room so beautiful Skip thought it would make her weep if she ever saw it uncluttered with toys and schoolwork. And yet she liked the way the kids had made it theirs, doing their homework on the low, broad coffee table, pulling pillows off the sturdy cocoa-colored couches to lie on while watching television.

  Kenny was just changing the channel. He looked up, his face reproachful. “She kicked me.”

  “Sheila!”

  Sheila’s chunky frame appeared in the doorway, feet planted apart, long hair snaky. “What?” She had made one syllable sound a lot like “Want to make something of it?” Her jaw looked as if it would take a team of oral surgeons to get it to move.

  Kenny pointed a skinny finger. “She changed the channel and then when I went to change it back she kicked me and pushed me over.”

  She ran at him. “You kicked me, you little shit!” And this ti
me she did kick him. He fell over howling, holding his injured leg, milking it for all it was worth.

  “God damn it, Sheila!” said Jimmy Dee, going for her, grabbing her arm.

  “You let go of me.” She wriggled loose on her own, unfortunately having built up enough momentum so that she stumbled forward, fell over her huddled little brother, and landed in a heap on top of him. He set up a new howl, and Skip saw Sheila’s face as she rolled over and came up—not merely flushed and angry and sullen, but absolutely miserable. It was a face that said, “No one loves me; I haven’t a friend in the world.”

  “Oh, honey,” said Skip, reaching for her.

  “Leave me alone!”

  Jimmy Dee was trying to comfort the screaming Kenny, whose dignity was no doubt hurt a great deal worse than his leg. Sheila ran from the room.

  Sighing, Skip turned off the TV. “Maybe it’s time for homework.”

  “You’re going to punish me for something she did?”

  “Punish you how?”

  “I was watching a show!”

  “Actually, it’s time to wash up,” said Jimmy Dee. “Dinner in five minutes.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  Dee-Dee, in the manner of parents, had lied about the five minutes, of course. But in fifteen or twenty, they were all four seated at the kitchen table (the kids much preferred this to the dining room), Sheila and Kenny actually looking combed and fresh, as if they hadn’t just been mixing it up like a couple of street thugs.

  They were an odd contrast, these two, exactly the opposite of everything everyone said about kids. Boys were supposed to be rambunctious and aggressive, yet Kenny was gentle to a fault, the kind of kid a bully could smell a mile away, and wanted nothing more than to please. He had freckles across his nose and neat brown hair that he actually knew how to part and slick down. When he did that, Skip wanted to rumple it and say, “Lighten up, kid.” But he was so proud of this adult skill that she held back.

  She wished sometimes that he’d come home one day with a mohawk, done in pink and purple stripes, and a nose ring.

  Sheila was another story entirely. She was big for her age, tall and carrying baby fat, with a lot of color in the face and wavy blond-brown hair with gorgeous sunlit streaks that she let fall over one eye and that was quite often a little on the greasy side—she wasn’t yet at the hairwashing-every-five-minutes stage. She was big and full of beans and she was one tough customer.

  While Kenny was content to sit on the floor and color, she flounced about the house seemingly from pillar to post, trying to work off energy, at times kicking or hitting anyone who got in her way, sometimes deliberately attacking her little brother, or so it seemed—physically attacking him, as he’d reported tonight.

  If Kenny should lighten up, she should calm down, and Skip had to swallow those words as well. Often, Jimmy Dee didn’t. He lost his temper with her, he yelled at her. These were the reasons she resisted him, but on the other hand, Skip knew perfectly well, she taunted him. He wasn’t used to children; he didn’t have the skills yet to know how to defuse her. He saw her simply as a big kid attacking a little one and his instinct was to defend the underdog.

  She had to blame someone for her unhappiness, for her mother’s death, her father’s desertion, for being uprooted and moved to a strange town. Jimmy Dee was simply handy, Skip thought. Sheila had had two sessions with a therapist and after that had put up so much resistance to going it had been easier to let it go for a while.

  Skip adored her—adored them both, actually, but she identified with Sheila. Sheila was uncomfortable with her body, as Skip had been with hers most of her life, before she realized size could be an advantage and had become a cop.

  Sheila was in a place she didn’t want to be. Throughout her childhood, Skip had felt like an alien who’d somehow wandered into a culture she didn’t understand. Sheila actually was one.

  Sheila had a lot of attributes that were supposed to belong to boys; so did Skip.

  “Maybe we should just get Kenny some Barbie dolls and Sheila a football,” she had said once.

  Dee-Dee had raised an eyebrow: “As if being raised by a gay uncle isn’t confusing enough for them.” But he’d thought about it a minute. “Uh-uh,” he said. “It’s more like this. Kenny might like to do needlepoint, I think. Or knit maybe. And Sheila needs a Samurai sword.”

  “You really don’t like her, do you?’

  His face twisted into a grimace. “How can you not like a child? But she’s violent. What am I supposed to do with that?”

  “Well, let’s see. First we’ll have her pledge Kappa at Newcomb—”

  “Oh, cut it out.”

  There were two ways to get around both kids—one was to take them on an adventure, any adventure, and promise ice cream as part of it. The other was to have Auntie tell a few grisly cop stories. Skip had to censor, and she felt a little funny about telling stories from the streets, necessarily violent and scary stories, but she knew her tales were nothing compared to what was in the rest of the culture. Anyway, she liked to think she was a good role model.

  Tonight she told them about a suspect who vaulted a fence when she was chasing him, and in the course of it lost his wallet, which contained his identity and address. When she got to his house, his wife claimed he’d been in bed with the flu all day. Skip arrested him anyway, but had a bad moment when she came down with the flu two days later.

  Kenny, the one who’d looked forward to “macaroni and cheese,” almost forgot to eat. Sheila, who’d called dinner “pig slop,” shoveled pasta mechanically.

  Kenny stared. “He didn’t do it. Somebody stole his wallet.”

  “No, he did do it. He’d made bail by that time, so I went back over to his house, with a temperature of a hundred and two. What do you know, he was lying in bed, a whole different color from two days earlier, and sweat all over his forehead. We both got the flu from his wife, who got the idea because she was sick.”

  “Criminals have lousy imaginations,” said Sheila. She looked at Dee-Dee, then Skip, and Skip felt a momentary tingle. For a moment all was forgiven; uncles and aunts were okay people.

  Kenny said, “She wasn’t the criminal; he was.”

  Sheila hit him. “Oh, shut up!”

  Kenny set up a howl.

  Jimmy Dee had had a glass of wine by now. Skip thought this nearly always improved his parenting. “Sheila, could you apologize to Kenny, please?”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  Jimmy Dee sent Skip a “help me” look. She said, “Honey, we have this thing in police work. Do you know what excessive force is?”

  Kenny answered for her: “It’s like when you hit somebody and you didn’t really have to.”

  Sheila raised her hand again, ready to give a second swat. But she caught Skip’s eye. “Overkill?”

  Skip nodded. “Overkill. As in, that’ll be enough.” She changed the subject quickly. “One of you wouldn’t have a laptop I could borrow, would you?”

  “I’ve got a notebook. That’s better.”

  She went home with a computer she could take to bed. Jimmy Dee had shown her how to attach her phone so the modem would work. All she had to do was ask it to dial the number of the TOWN (programmed in by Jimmy Dee at her request).

  Sure. She knew how that went. In about a week the glitches would be ironed out and she’d be connected.

  But not true; magically, the TOWN identified itself and asked her for login: Steve. Then her password: Skip2mLu. And zap, she was on the TOWN.

  Now what?

  It was quite a lot like being in a real town—say, New York or Paris—with eighty million different options. She could walk down to the corner for coffee or she could take in the opera. And why do just one? Why not the movies, then the opera, then coffee and after that ice cream?

  There were categories: Body and Mind, the World, Interactions, the Arts, Sports, Politics, Hill and Dale, Computers—on and on like that; she counted twenty-three. And under each
category, there were conferences. In some twelve or fifteen; in one or two, a hundred or so. At random, she picked one: Pets. She ended up at the top of a list of topics. As instructed by Steve, she pressed BR for “browse, reverse.” Now she was at the bottom of the list where the current topics were. The last one, Topic 256, was “TOWNies recommend vets”; most of the entries had to do with West Coast practitioners. Number 255 was “When Calicoes Turn Bad.”

  She tried another conference: Relationships. Worse still— there were 733 topics. Already she was overstimulated and she’d only been here five minutes. She could see how a person might feel safe on this thing. It was so enormous, surely you were just another graffiti artist. She realized with a shock that was what this felt like—illicit scribblings on someone else’s wall.

  I’ll just see what looks interesting and go there, she told herself.

  First she went to Confession. It was nothing if not lively. The topic devoted to Geoff’s death had the rather flip title, she noticed, of “Out on the TOWN.” Outraged, Lenore (whose user ID was her name) had started a new topic called “TOWN Without Pity,” in which TOWNspeople were invited to assess their own voyeurism, cruelty, and lack of feeling. Someone called Bboy had answered: “Now, hold on, Lenore. I think about ninety-nine percent of the posts in that topic are really very caring. The topic name is a little over the top, but surely you realize that one of the main ways people have of dealing with grief is black humor.”

  A third user, none other than the legendary Bigeasy, had said simply: “Great book on that subject—The Grief Cycle by T. M. Collins.”

  To which Greenie had riposted: “I think Lenore has a good point. Haven’t we been acting a little like vultures?”

  “Speak for yourself, Green One. :-).” wrote Arthurx. The little pictograph was something both Steve and Jimmy Dee (a veteran of AOL) had told her about—a little side-wise face called a “smiley,” the idea being to defuse anything that might sound sarcastic, to show that the writer was just kidding.

  If the idea, thought Skip, was to make you feel like you were in a real conversation, this topic was a terrible advertisement. Because a lot of conversations were like this—banal. A lot of forgettable remarks came out of people’s mouths, but fortunately they were forgotten two minutes later. These were here forever; legitimate graffiti.