Killer Content

by Olivia Blacke

  Playing with Rufus was a nice distraction, but I couldn’t get Bethany out of my mind. The police weren’t going to be any help. Last night’s storm would have washed away any possible evidence at the park. All that remained was the one thing that the cops hadn’t bothered to do. I needed to talk to Bethany’s friends.

  The problem was, I didn’t know any of them. No, that was wrong. I knew Izzy. She could point me in the right direction. I got dressed and walked the eleven or so blocks to Untapped Books & Café.

  Before coming to Williamsburg, I measured everything in miles. According to Google Maps, it was approximately point-seven-five miles from Aunt Melanie’s apartment to the bookstore. But in the few short weeks I’d been here, I was already starting to think like a New Yorker, who measured distances in blocks, not mileage.

  It could be worse. I could be living in Jersey, where apparently everything was measured in exits off the Turnpike.

  Eleven blocks sounded like a lot, but I’d gotten used to walking everywhere. Aunt Melanie had told me I could use her bicycle—a vintage Schwinn—but to be honest, I was more than a little intimidated by Brooklyn traffic. Besides, I liked walking. It gave me time to think and a chance to watch the world around me. If I was on a bike, I’d be so nervous about being creamed by a taxi that I wouldn’t get to enjoy sightseeing.

  When I got to Untapped, I was surprised to see Todd manning the front desk. “Where’s Izzy?” I asked.

  “Sick. Not like we’re short already. Her calling out is icing on the cake.”

  “Oh.” I knew I should pound sand before Todd tried to rope me into taking over the cash register for him, but I hadn’t come all the way down here to give up that easy. “You’ve got Bethany’s home address, don’t you?” Then realizing how creepy that request might sound, I hastily added, “I want to send a sympathy card to her parents.”

  He blinked at me. “Sure. Yeah, that’s a good idea. Pick one out, and let everyone sign it. Her address is somewhere on my computer. While you’re at it, post something cute on Instagram. There’s a folder on my desktop of Huckleberry photos.”

  Unlike most bookstores these days, Untapped Books & Café didn’t devote half of the real estate to the same toys, games, and junk food that customers could buy anywhere. But we did sell stationery, journals, and greeting cards. Instead of mass-produced cards, all of ours were handmade by local artisans. I selected one that seemed appropriate and circulated it around to the employees that were on shift.

  Todd signed the card, along with Kim. Parker scribbled his name in the card, too. “How are you holding up?” he asked me.

  “Fine, I guess,” I told him. “I mean, it’s sad, of course.” Was it weird that I felt guilty that I wasn’t torn up about Bethany’s death? Or maybe my obsession with how she had died was my way of mourning. If we’d been closer, or known each other longer, it might have been different.

  “If you need a shoulder, I’m here for you.”

  “Thanks, Parker. That’s sweet,” I told him.

  “That’s our Parker. Such a sweetheart. Amiright?” I turned around to see Andre Gibson, the assistant manager, leaning into the window that separated the tiny, cramped kitchen from the diners in the café. “I know it’s not on the menu today, but do you have the ingredients for your yummy peanut and tofu Thai salad? Got a special order out here.”

  “Yeah. Gimme a sec and I’ll whip it up.”

  As soon as Parker turned to the refrigerator and started pulling out the ingredients, Andre turned his attention to me. “How you doin’, ’Dessa?”

  “Same ol’, same ol’,” I replied. I’d met some strange and interesting characters in Williamsburg, but by far, Andre was one of my favorites. I think that was at least partially because, despite all of our differences, Andre and I shared the same weird sense of humor.

  Andre had been born in those fuzzy years, too late to be Gen X and too early to be a Millennial—a Xennial? Oregon Trail Generation? Despite pushing forty, he still lived with his mother, along with his boyfriend, his younger sister, and a much younger cousin. Between student loan debts and the lack of affordable housing, my generation tended to live at home longer than those that came before us, but in New York City, it was perfectly normal—expected, even—for multiple generations to live under the same roof.

  When he wasn’t working at Untapped Books & Café, Andre volunteered with an at-risk youth program and he spent his lunch breaks knitting. He’d even knitted me a fun, floppy hat, but it would be months before it got cool enough to wear it, and I wouldn’t be in Brooklyn that long.

  “Hanging in there,” I told him. I slid the card toward him. “Can you sign? It’s for Bethany’s family.”

  “Of course.” He opened the card, grabbed the pen out of his apron, and started scribbling.

  “What are you doing on the morning shift?” I asked. Andre usually worked the late shift, when the tips were better. He had seniority, so he could pick when he wanted to work. Besides, as the assistant manager, he wrote the schedule and acted as supervisor after Todd went home for the day. Unlike Todd, he was an absolute pleasure to work for, and I loved working on days when he was in charge.

  “I’ve got applicants coming in this morning I wanted to interview personally.” He flapped one hand over his shoulder, toward the bookstore half of the shop. “You know how Todd gets. The last thing I need is him scaring away employees before they even start.”

  “In that case, good luck with that.” I knew we needed a full staff, but the idea of replacing Bethany so soon was depressing. I took the greeting card back from him and slid it into the envelope. “Well, I guess I’ll see you later.”

  “Not if I see you first,” he replied with a wink. I grinned at the cheesy line that sounded like something my dad would say and waved over my shoulder as I ducked into the hall.

  6

  Todd Morris

  20 mins

  Kids these days. Am I right?

  I KNOCKED ON THE door leading into Todd’s office, not expecting a reply since he was manning the cash register out front. But when I pushed the door open I noticed the light was on. That was weird. Todd was a real stickler about wasting electricity, or wasting anything, really. At first, I’d been impressed, thinking that Todd was an environmentalist, but it turned out that he was just cheap. Untapped Books & Café was one of the first places in Brooklyn to stop giving out plastic straws, not because of all the room they take up in landfills, but because they cost too much. Which I guess was a step in the right direction, but it wasn’t fair to people who needed straws.

  His computer was powered on, and unlocked. That was par for the course. Todd couldn’t remember his password, no matter how easy we made it, so we eventually set his computer to never lock. I wiggled the mouse to wake the screen, and the first thing I saw was the internet browser, logged in to the store’s Twitter account.

  Seriously, if Todd couldn’t be bothered to lock his computer, he could at least lock his door. His office was off the narrow hallway that ran the length of the building. On one end was the stockroom where we kept the extra books, cases of craft beer, and boxes of spare neon green polo shirts. On the other end was the exit to the alley. We’re supposed to keep that door locked, but it’s such a pain when it accidentally closes behind us when we’re taking out trash or accepting deliveries that it’s always propped open with a brick.

  This area was supposedly off-limits to customers, but the single-person bathroom was also tucked back here. The restroom was employees-only, but when customers came in with a little kid doing the pee-pee shuffle, we always made an exception and let them use it. It was unlikely that someone would walk in off the street, make their way to Todd’s office, and start posting nonsense to the official Untapped Books & Café account, but not impossible.

  Just to be safe, I scrolled through the store’s Twitter account. No recent spammy posts or trolls. No u
nusual DMs. No posts at all since my comment yesterday about Parker’s hummus. Since that had been a one-day special, I knew I should post something new and fresh for today, but my heart wasn’t in it. “It’s always a good time for homemade Untapped lemonade!” was the best I could come up with on short notice.

  True to his word, a whole folder of Huckleberry photos was on Todd’s desktop, but the pictures were mostly poorly lit or fuzzy. Besides, last time I checked, the only way to post to Instagram was from the app. Resigned to using my own phone for Instagram, I logged out of my own account and made sure I could access the store’s using the password written on a Post-It note that was stuck to Todd’s monitor. I shook my head. What was it about old people and technology?

  After another minute of searching, I found Bethany’s home address on Todd’s computer and wrote it on the front of the sympathy card’s envelope. Knowing that Todd would probably get me to take out the trash or something if he saw me leaving, I decided to go out the back door.

  I popped back into the kitchen to say goodbye to Parker and noticed two giant bowls of his famous peanut and tofu Thai salad were sitting in the window, waiting to be delivered. In addition to being delicious—and this was coming from someone who had been deeply suspicious of tofu before coming to Brooklyn and finally trying it—it was colorful. Plated on a bed of greens with big, lightly grilled chunks of marinated tofu, sprinkled with bright orange carrots and golden brown peanuts, and drizzled with a creamy sauce, the dish looked as good as it tasted.

  “Hey, Parker, you gonna put this on the menu tomorrow?”

  He looked up from where he was slicing pickle spears. “I could. Why?”

  “I’m gonna feature it, if you don’t mind,” I said. I took a couple of snapshots of the colorful meal next to a bottle of Arts and Craft Lager, posted it to Instagram, and tagged it as tomorrow’s chef special. That should make Todd happy, at least for a little while. I waved goodbye to Parker and slipped out the back door, careful to not disturb the brick propping the door open.

  A few blocks later, I was on the subway, heading deeper into Brooklyn. Bethany’s apartment was in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a neighborhood south of Williamsburg. Like Williamsburg in the nineties, Bed-Stuy was undergoing gentrification and the previous generations of residents were being pushed out to make room for young urban professionals. Rents rose steeply as more people searched for apartments in the neighborhoods closest to Manhattan.

  Quiet, tree-lined streets greeted me as I emerged from the subway station, the shade providing welcome relief to what was promising to be a scorcher of a day. In contrast to Williamsburg’s industrial chic, Bed-Stuy was made up of tall, narrow brownstones crammed together in long rows of alternating colors and complementary architectural accents that broke up the sea of conformity. Bethany’s apartment looked like a single-family four-story home until I mounted three brick steps and reached the front door—a metal, reinforced security door disguised as an ordinary wooden entry door—and noticed a buzzer panel with eight different buttons.

  I rang the buzzer for Unit C and a woman’s musical voice answered, “Yes?”

  “Hi. I’m a friend of Bethany’s. Can I come up?”

  Without any answer, there was a buzz and a click as the front door unlocked. I pulled it open, noting that it was a lot heavier than it looked. Inside was a narrow hallway with two doors on either side—two had those peel-and-stick letters they sold at the hardware store marking them as A and B; the other two doors were unlabeled. I saw a steep staircase at the end of the hall. I mounted the stairs and found Unit C on the second floor.

  A woman stood in the doorway, one hand clutching the door. She was tall and thin with lovely brown skin and heavy, shadowed bags under her eyes. Her dark hair was short and tightly curled. She had sharp cheekbones and high arched brows. “How did you know Bethany?” she asked, eyeing me suspiciously.

  “I worked at Untapped Books & Café with her,” I told her. “I’m Odessa, the new girl.”

  She nodded and opened the door wider. “Bethany told me about you. She said you had a mad thick accent, but I thought she was exaggerating. Guess she wasn’t. Come on in.” I followed her into a long, narrow room. “I’m Cherise. We’ve got two more roommates, but they’re not home right now.”

  “You’ve got four people living here?” I asked in astonishment, looking around at the tiny space. The brownstone had originally been a single-family home, but had since been subdivided into individual apartments. Bethany and her roommates split an apartment that couldn’t have been much larger than five hundred square feet. I still had a hard time wrapping my head around the typical living arrangement in New York, which was apparently stacking people in a tiny space like cordwood until the building burst at its seams.

  “Yup. It’s way better than my last apartment. We had three people living in a studio, with only one single bathroom per floor. We all share the kitchen downstairs here, but at least we have our own bathroom,” she explained, and I shuddered. Back home in Piney Island, I’d converted my parents’ garage into my private living area. I had to go into the main house to cook or use the restroom, but I was sharing with family, not strangers. Bethany and Cherise’s apartment made me appreciate Aunt Melanie’s palatial apartment even more.

  I handed her the envelope with the card inside. “A couple of the folks at work signed this. Do you think you could get it to Bethany’s family?”

  Cherise frowned. “Bethany didn’t have a family, not really. I guess we were her family. Well, us, and her friends from work.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss.” I didn’t know what else to say. “Have the police been by yet?”

  “What for? Bethany’s death was an accident. At least that’s what the guy who called to notify me said. I’m listed as her emergency contact,” Cherise explained.

  It was just as I’d expected. I knew they were overwhelmed, but if the police wouldn’t investigate her death, who would? “What if it wasn’t?”

  “What do you mean?” Cherise asked, eyes growing wide. “Why would anyone want to hurt her? Sure, she wasn’t the most popular person in the house. She wasn’t even the most popular person in the apartment, truth be told. She monopolized the kitchen for her YouTube soap-making videos, and left a mess behind that could qualify for federal relief. She never had rent on time, and refused to share her Netflix password. I mean, she meant well but to be honest, the best thing about rooming with Bethany was that she was hardly ever at home.”

  “Oh?” I asked, ears perking up. I remembered Izzy telling me something similar, but it hadn’t struck me as important until now. “Where did she spend all of her time?”

  “She had a boyfriend in Astoria. Stayed at his place most days.”

  Bethany had a boyfriend? I knew almost nothing about her. “Do you have his address?”

  “Maybe.” She scrolled through the contacts on her phone. “I got a first name, Marco, and a phone number.”

  “I’ll take whatever you’ve got.” I gave her my phone number, and she texted me the contact file. “Did Bethany have any enemies?”

  “You’re kidding, right?” Cherise laughed. “She might have been a pain in the butt sometimes, but she wasn’t the kind of person who had enemies. Unless you count those folks at the bank. They were always calling about her student loans. She sent them money when she could and the calls would stop for a week or two, but then they’d start up again.”

  “Did Bethany owe a lot?” I asked.

  “She graduated from Princeton,” Cherise explained.

  Most days I regretted not going to college. In my imagination, college made everything better. I’d have a better job and could afford to move out of my parents’ house. I could get a car that didn’t have rust spots larger than my fist. But at least I didn’t have crippling student loan debt hanging around my neck while working for less than minimum wage side by side with folks like me without an
y college at all.

  “Well, thanks for your time and for her boyfriend’s contact info. Sorry about Bethany.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to be in the market for an apartment, would you?” she asked.

  Inside I cringed. It was a nice enough neighborhood, but I couldn’t imagine stepping over three roommates all the time. “I’m good, but if I hear someone’s looking, I’ll let you know.”

  I’d passed a cute little park on my way to Cherise and Bethany’s apartment, so I headed back to it and claimed an empty bench. I pulled up the MTA app to see how to get to Astoria from here. It was only eight miles, less as the crow flies, but the way the tangled subway lines were laid out, I’d have to take a train to Manhattan and then back out to Queens, an hour-and-a-half-long trip. Still, at $2.75, it beat the $40 fare the Uber app estimated.

  And that was assuming that Bethany’s boyfriend would speak to me.

  I dialed his number, and it went to voicemail. I hated leaving voicemails. Just last night I was discussing with Detective Castillo about how no one ever called anyone anymore, and now here I was, calling a total stranger. Irony much? My number would pop up as unknown and he’d ignore it, just like I would if the tables were turned. “Hi, my name’s Odessa. I’m a friend of Bethany’s. I’m trying to reach Marco. Can you call me back, please?” As soon as I hung up, I started composing a text message to Marco, but before I could type half of it, he called me back. “Hello? Marco?”

  “You said you’re a friend of Beth’s?” he asked, without bothering with a greeting.

  “I worked with her at Untapped Books & Café,” I explained. “Do you have a minute to chat?”

  “What about?” I heard a heavy sigh on the other end of the line. “Look, if she wants to pick up her stuff, she can do it herself. She doesn’t have to send her little squad to do her dirty work like she did last time.”