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

by Julie Smith

  She went back to “Out on the TOWN.” Now this had a lot more going for it. She had to admit that scribblings that escalated from a simple newsflash that a TOWNsperson had tied to getting the autopsy report and launching what amounted to a coast-to-coast investigation was a use of computer technology she hadn’t really thought of before. Lenore, Layne (Teaser), and Bigeasy were large in “Out on the TOWN,” Lenore and Layne especially. Both were deep in the drama of it; wanted to keep it going, maybe keep Geoff alive that way. (Or maybe throw suspicion off themselves.) But there was no new information—nothing she hadn’t already seen with Layne.

  As long as she was just browsing, she found a topic that explained the nuances of smileys and another that was essentially a guide to TOWN abbreviations. F2F, for instance, meant “face-to-face,” a type of interaction most TOWNies seemed to want to avoid. Then there was IMHO: “in my humble opinion”; SMTOE: “sets my teeth on edge”; MIML, as in “the MIML says”: “man in my life”; and Skip’s personal favorite, AFOG, as in “I broke up with my boyfriend; it wasn’t true love, only AFOG”: “Another fucking opportunity for growth.”

  Just to round things out, she went to “Sex.” Topic 543, at the top of the reverse list, was “The Sensuality of Ears.” She went down the list, finally settling on “What’s Your Favorite Perversion?” It was quite amazing. People whose names could be looked up by pushing a button were perfectly candid on threesomes, dogs “trained to give pleasure,” nippling (an invention of the person who described it), and various degrees of bondage.

  Dazed, Skip hustled out and over to “Books” as an antidote. If she had expected high literary discourse, she didn’t find it in the first topic she tried, “What’s so great about The Secret History?”

  The posts went something like this:

  “Loved, loved, loved it. Do yourself a favor and race right out.”

  “Couldn’t stand the characters.”

  “Well, I’ve known assholes like that. But what an absurdly implausible plot!”

  She was tempted to post something like: “I think what the author was trying to do, Georgie and Rinty, was create an allegory in which neither the plot nor the characters really mattered. Rather, it was her view of the moral bankruptcy of the modem college student—”

  Something stupid and meaningless—well, laughable, actually—but at least it would show these creeps who were taking up her time with their unsolicited goddamn opinions. Who cared?

  Certainly not Skip. Not even a little bit. She was bored nearly to distraction by “liked it,” “didn’t,” “did for a different reason,” “didn’t either,” which truly seemed a big part of most conferences that weren’t specifically set up for something—like games, or working out computer problems, or trading information on where to buy things. Every time she nearly numbed out from the boredom she simply went to another topic, another conference. She was absolutely astonished when she checked her watch and noticed it was three-thirty A.M.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “MAMA, NO!”

  “No what, honey?” asked Lenore. Caitlin had been fussy lately.

  “Yuck!”

  “You don’t like the soup?”

  “Hate the soup.”

  So she had to dump it and make noodles. Caitlin had eaten noodles for the fifth straight day in a row. They said at day care that she ate other things at lunch, even now and then consumed a vegetable or two, but Lenore wasn’t sure she wasn’t going to get anemia and vitamin deficiency from steady starch.

  “An orange for dessert?”

  “No!”

  “Yes.”

  “Uh-uh.” And the kid banged her spoon on the table to make her point.

  “You’re so cute when you’re mad.”

  Caitlin just stared at her, unable to comprehend. Or else she did comprehend and thought the remark as stupid as Lenore did. But she had said it out of the sudden rush of love that came over her as Caitlin’s alien gold curls caught the light.

  Her father had been black—“had been” because Lenore only saw him once. Or at any rate he had been a Creole, someone with more white blood than black, probably, but “black” all the same. He was a beautiful tall tan man (as well as she could remember) with hair lighter than Lenore’s, but not nearly so light as Caitlin’s, which was curly as poodle fur and shot through with gold. Not blond, but pure gold. Her skin was dark walnut, the most beautiful color Lenore had ever seen on a human being, and she was chubby, with tiny little creases in her arms and legs.

  “Okay. Mom’s dumb, huh?’

  “Yes. Yes!” Now Caitlin was banging happily, delightedly.

  “Honey, don’t get so worked up so close to bedtime. Let’s go take a bath, okay?’

  “No!” But she smiled when she said it.

  Half an hour later, Caitlin was fresh in a white nightgown with Mickey Mouse faces all over it, and Lenore was suddenly overcome with the burdens of the day, with missing Geoff.

  “Bedtime, honey.”

  “Story!”

  “Not tonight. Mama’s too tired.”

  “G’night Moon.”

  “That’s right. Good night to you too, Moon.”

  “Book.”

  She spoke sharply. “I said no, Caitlin.”

  And suddenly, it was the great flood of Tupelo. Damn! The slightest little thing and the kid tuned up and cried.

  “Goddammit Caitlin, shut up!”

  That only made her cry more.

  Well, there was nothing to do but rock her, which Lenore did until they were both asleep. Lenore came to with a start, grateful she hadn’t dropped the baby in her sleep.

  She put Caitlin to bed, but she couldn’t go herself yet. There were things to do. Many, many things to do.

  She began to get things out—the black altar cloth, the black candles, the cauldron, the ritual black-handled knife. She was so tired….

  A bath first. It would wake her up and she needed to do it anyway, to purify herself, to get ready. She put out her black robe.

  She put herbs in the water—vervain, marjoram, peppermint, rosemary—a special mixture for the things she needed; healing, especially.

  Afterward, she decided against the robe. Better to work sky-clad. But she wore her cord, from which hung charms that were still working, each tied in its own silk or leather bag, and around her neck she slipped a pendant, a silver pentacle hung on a black silk cord.

  She found the four candles she needed to call the quarters—yellow for east, red for south, blue for west, and green for north. She got ready some paper and matches—later there was something she would bum in her cauldron. (Some held that the cauldron was really a cup that should never hold anything but water. Lenore did not subscribe to that; she needed fire in hers.) She got the water and salt she needed, her altar pentacle; her chalice. And a bolline, a white-handled knife, for carving words in the candles, the black ones. And then another thing—dragon’s blood to anoint the candles.

  Was that all? She thought so.

  She was exhausted. But she had everything together and she had already written the incantation she would need.

  It was just past Samhain and the veil was still thin—she could feel the pull from the other side. She felt it often at this time of year, but more so now; because of Geoff, she thought. She couldn’t cope on her own; she thought she would never be rid of him, rid of this horrible weight on her shoulders, this knife in her heart. But what she was about to do would help.

  She picked up the black-handled knife.

  * * *

  Pearce Randolph poured himself a nice friendly little drink of bourbon before logging onto the TOWN. It was a nightly ritual, one he had come to love. To adore.

  Sometimes he would light a cigar, puff on it, rub his softening belly, and think smugly to himself, I own this TOWN; I’m somebody here.

  Tongue firmly planted in cheek, of course. Pearce Randolph was in no way a stupid man, a fact of which he was well aware and reminded himself when he needed to. But yet, w
hen the silly old thought came, he rather relished it. Especially if he was well into that friendly little ritual bourbon.

  He also had more serious thoughts, along the lines of Get out of TOWN by sundown.

  And You’ll never eat lunch in this TOWN again.

  He had the power to make someone disappear. He was loved on the TOWN. You couldn’t do it by hate, by being nasty to someone—the TOWN didn’t work that way. What you had to do when one of these arrogant assholes came along, these goddamn know-it-alls, was simply outpost them. Outperform. Upstage.

  They were there partly because they thrived on competition, but mostly because they had to be at the top of the heap all the time. So Pearce had his work cut out for him. He was mayor of the goddamn TOWN, and that wasn’t easy to do, considering the vast majority of heavy users were concentrated in California and actually knew each other F2F.

  That he did pride himself on; that was the fun of it. Of course it helped that he was a professional writer and what you did on this thing, when you got right down to it, was you wrote.

  He could do what he had to do in thirty minutes, but he usually spent a leisurely hour, even an hour and a half, dropping witticisms here, bon mots there. First, the TOWN Hall, everybody’s favorite conference. If the TOWN had been the COMPANY, this would have been the virtual watercooler. As it was, in twentieth-century America there wasn’t an analogous meeting place in. a real town. Which was one of the things, in Pearce’s opinion, that made the virtual one superior. You dropped in, you said hello, you got the news, you bantered a bit, and you went on to your other favorite conferences. Pearce liked Writing, Movies, Books, Confession, Games, Weird Stuff, and Sex, but he never posted in the last, just lurked. It was amusing to match up the ingenuous disclosures here with the pomposity affected by the same users elsewhere.

  Pearce skipped Sex, Games, and Weird Stuff tonight. He was addicted to Writing for the companionship with other writers, and to Books and Movies because they provided lots of scope for what he did best—writing and thinking.

  But tonight Confession was the undisputed hot ticket. Poor old Geoff wasn’t even cold and the TOWN had turned him into a game. Still, Pearce had to admit, Geoff was its leading citizen right now, which might have pleased him. Geoff hadn’t been much of anything in life, except a nerd, much like everyone else on the TOWN.

  Pearce typed out G CON—“get Confession”—and then went to “Out on the TOWN.” But in the end it was disappointing; nothing new, really. The latest topic, “TOWN Without Pity,” had some merit if you liked to observe the maunderings of self-righteous assholes. Predictably, all the politically correct, put-you-in-the-wrong types were posting here. Living in New Orleans instead of L.A., Pearce had never met them, but he knew who they were: guys with scrawny shoulders and dirty blue jeans, women with fifty pounds they didn’t need and scrunched-up, toady little faces. There were those types, the PC ones, and then there were the Henry Clays, those who’d missed out on dynamic careers as diplomats permanently assigned to the Bureau of Tempests in Teapots. They were always posting the sort of little gem that was meant to defuse but made you want to rip their throats out: “I can really see Lefty’s point, Bilious, but I just wonder if it isn’t time to put this behind us and quit fighting among ourselves. After all, what’s really important here?”

  Out-self-righteousing the PCs.

  Back to “Out on the TOWN.” At least Lenore hadn’t posted today. One of the worst things about Geoff’s murder, as far as Pearce was concerned, was the ready-made stage it gave Lenore. Privately, he called her “the TOWN crier.” If Lenore had a problem, the whole TOWN had to be consulted, and if she didn’t she was going to make one up.

  So far they’d seen her through unwed motherhood. “Should I Have an Abortion?” was the topic she’d posted in Confession. The woman had no shame. That was followed by “Lamaze or No?” and a seemingly endless stream of self-involved dramas having to do with whether she should tell the baby’s father the kid existed, what she should name it, and of course, how much motherhood meant to her, she’d known, of course, she’d been told, but she really couldn’t have imagined…

  Right Firm grasp of the obvious. That was Lenore.

  Pearce had helped to get “Out on the TOWN” going; that had been fun (though at the time, the way he felt it seemed more like a necessity—he had to talk to somebody, even if it wasn’t really talking). But it was fun because it was an opportunity to use his mastery over his subjects. He always enjoyed that.

  However, the thing it had become wasn’t his cup of tea. These people were serious. They were sorry Geoff was dead and they were seriously trying to do something about it (in their lame little ways, of course). They actually thought they could solve a murder just by yakking electronically at each other. All of which might be amusing if it wasn’t such bad taste to display wit in the face of grief, and wit was Pearce’s forte. His baby had turned into an ugly duckling.

  Disgustedly, he typed EXIT. He might as well use his computer for what he’d bought it for.

  He opened a file called “Regrets,” possibly a chapter in something, he wasn’t sure yet, but definitely an exercise he needed to do right now. He typed 1967, and the very sight of the four digits excited him, conjured up the scent of patchouli oil and pot smoke; the sounds of throngs shouting “Hell no, we won’t go!”; the touch of a thousand skinny girls in peasant blouses, with center-parted waist-length hair. The most beautiful of them all was… he couldn’t bear to think of her, not yet, not without setting the stage.

  He rummaged through his vinyl records—he still had all of them, along with his old-fashioned stereo. The CD player would come, as soon as he sold a novel or two. Or his screenplay. That was probably what he should be working on—everyone knew it was easier, quicker, and worth more money. But lately, he’d been working on this other thing, this “Regrets,” whatever that was. That was the way writing worked for him; it bubbled up and couldn’t be stopped. If it wanted out, he released it.

  Bob Dylan was what he wanted, something along those lines. But what he found was better—the Jefferson Airplane, Surrealistic Pillow. He found “Today,” the cut that, of any song in the world (except maybe “Light My Fire”) was the most evocative of 1967, of the way he’d felt about her. It began like this: “Today I feel like pleasing you.”

  He poured himself another bourbon and settled down to write:

  She was older than I was, but not by much. Twenty-nine, I thought, maybe even thirty, which excited me in an odd sort of way, because of course that was over the line. It meant you couldn’t trust her. But then trust was the last thing on my mind when I saw her there, smoke swirling blue around her head, the glare of the lights cruel as napalm; and yet even whited out as she was—a lesser beauty would have been a caricature of harsh lines and tiny sags—she exuded a tropical lushness; smelt, practically, of ylang-ylang or plumeria.

  A rubber band held her hair at the nape, but loosely, so that it fell in wings to her chin, and when she bent her head—so serious, so moody—over her guitar, a shadow fell across her chest. She wore bell-bottoms and a white peasant blouse. A ropy sort of belt that she had woven and then decorated with some flowered thing was tied round her waist, the ends allowed to flow at her right side. The same trim, a strip of pink flowers embroidered on a yellow background, had been sewn to the hems of her jeans.

  But the thing you noticed most was the way she clutched that guitar—like a lover; like a baby; like the thing she held dearest in the world. She was singing an Appalachian folk song, a ballad about a faithless husband and the unfortunate way he’d disappeared one day, after seeing something odd in the woods—

  Pearce stared at the screen. He could recall every detail of her clothing, her expression, he even knew how long her nails were (clipped short), but he couldn’t remember the words of the song. What had the husband seen in the woods? An elf or something? A dead animal? This was why it was so hard to finish things. They had to be right. He knew he couldn’t f
inish this piece until he had the song. He’d have to go to the library and research it. He put an asterisk on the page; it was going to take up the rest of tomorrow.

  The mood didn’t end. He didn’t have the song, but he couldn’t shake the rest of the memory. To his amazement, it was coming out against all odds.

  When her set was over, I found my mouth dry, my tongue stuck on the roof of my mouth, my feet paralyzed. What if she didn’t come back? What if I never saw her again?

  She came back! She did “Wildwood Flower” for an encore, and it was oddly appropriate, somehow described her. It evoked a mossy smell, a springlike scent, a mysterious waft from something ephemeral and delicate, like the thing the faithless husband had seen in the woods. Something magical, something that would escape if you blinked.

  Like her.

  I saw now that this was who she was; despite her lush appearance, her bold tropical beauty, in her soul she was a wraith; she was Rima from Green Mansions, or maybe some tiny winged creature from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It was her voice that gave her away—so high, so clear, and pure as the heart of a nun. I knew that now she would disappear for good, and she did. A being like that does not drink in a bar.

  And yet, the next time I saw her, it was in a bar—the Dream Palace on Frenchmen Street, the kind of place you went in 1967 for an interracial kind of experience, a bohemian thrill in a safe (though often noisy) kind of way. It was a dark, ramshackle old cavern of a place, with tiny tiles on the floor and a celestial mural on the ceiling.

  She was with friends, a man and a woman, all three of them wearing jeans, the man looking like the pictures of Jesus in my Bible story books. Thinking they must need another man to join them—wishing that, actually, not thinking anything at all—I marched over as if I had all the confidence of a person on drugs (which, at that moment, I wasn’t).

  “Aren’t you Marguerite Kavanagh?” I said, for the first time thinking it odd that so exotic a being should be Irish.