Killer Content

by Olivia Blacke

  I flung the garbage bag into the dumpster and heard it hit metal. I guess the trucks had been by recently. “Customers aren’t supposed to be back here.”

  “We’re just gonna be a second,” the other customer replied. “It’s all good.” He held the door open for me. “Ladies first.”

  A sign on the inside of the back door announced “Alarm will sound if door is opened,” but that was a lie. Short of installing an actual alarm on the back door, there wasn’t much I could do about customers using it all willy-nilly. Even if the cheap-as-dirt owner could be convinced to open his dusty checkbook, the employees would disable it the first time they were inconvenienced by it, just like everyone—myself included—left the door propped open with a brick even when we weren’t outside. It was easier, especially when we had our hands full with trash or deliveries.

  As the door caught on the brick, a flash of red light in the hallway caught my eye. Mounted high up on the wall was a round black disk set into a white box. The red light I’d seen was a small power indicator on the bottom. I hurried back toward the front of the store, where Andre was finishing up a transaction with a customer. Once she left, I got his attention. “Since when do we have security cameras?” I asked.

  “I dunno. A year, maybe?”

  “So before I started?” I asked.

  “Yeah. We had a break-in one night after hours. Todd thought it was an inside job, which is patently ridiculous. He had the cameras installed the next day.”

  I didn’t like knowing that someone had been taping me every day while I was at work. It felt like an invasion of privacy. Had I been on camera the other day when I changed shirts in the stockroom? I shuddered. “How many cameras are there?”

  Andre shrugged. “I don’t know, why?”

  “Because it’s creepy, that’s why.”

  “So, take it up with Todd,” Andre said. Not exactly the response I’d expected from him, but he had a point.

  “Yeah, alrighty then.” As I returned to the café, I scanned the walls for more cameras. I didn’t see any, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there.

  The rest of my shift was uneventful. Tables took longer to turn over as people sat around chatting long into the night, sipping a selection of craft beers and ordering sharable plates from the kitchen. New customers joined existing tables, until six or eight people crowded around a four-top, making it challenging to keep checks straight.

  Waiting tables, even at a café with a limited menu and so few seats, could be physically and mentally demanding. I had to concentrate to bring the correct order to the correct person, which was difficult when people started hopping from table to table. But even then, my mind started to wander.

  I made decent money at the café. Not enough to afford an apartment in this neighborhood, but on the worst day, I still made about double what I’d make at the Crawdad Shack back home. On top of her job at the café, Bethany made extra cash from advertisers on her popular YouTube videos and had a side hustle selling the finished soaps on Etsy. So why was she always behind on her rent?

  It didn’t make sense.

  I tried to recall the text messages I’d seen on Bethany’s phone before I’d been forced out of the kitchen, but I couldn’t remember if I’d seen any from a bank. She was a lot more popular than I’d imagined, judging by the sheer volume of texts she received even after she was dead. I’d only glanced at the previews—I hadn’t had time to read them all—but they’d ranged from the “Hey, wanna catch a bite later?” variety to people who hadn’t had a chance to say their goodbyes leaving one last message.

  Mixed in with those were the annoying notifications I always turned off—so-and-so commented on/shared/liked your post. And there were lots of comments. There were also reminders that she had an upcoming hair appointment, that an Amazon order had been delivered, and that a payment had been sent.

  Except that couldn’t be right.

  If she was dead, what was she doing sending money? For what? And to whom?

  I needed to go back to her apartment, unlock her phone, and find out.

  “Yo! Miss!”

  I shook myself out of my stupor when I realized that one of my tables was trying to get my attention. “Sorry, must have zoned out for a sec.”

  I gave him an overly large grin, one that suggested I might be a little spacey, but gee I was nice and didn’t you want to be friends? I may have never fulfilled my mother’s dream for me of participating in the Miss Louisiana pageant when I was younger, but the few pageant prep classes I’d taken before six-year-old me decided this was not for me still remembered the basics. Lesson number one had been how to smile and influence the judges.

  “No worries,” the customer said, the slightly hostile tone he’d had earlier dissipating. “Can I get another?” He waggled his beer at me.

  “Coming right up,” I said brightly. I delivered his beer and made my rounds. The night was winding down, and several tables asked for their checks. The kitchen had closed ten minutes ago, and I could hear Silvia over the din, banging pots and pans around. Andre was squeezed into the tiny kitchen as well, washing dishes and checking inventory. He stuck his head out of the window and waved me over.

  “How many tables do you have?”

  “Just three now.”

  “Do you mind handing them over to Emilie, and then taking Huckleberry out for a walk before we close? I’d do it, but I still have to place orders for next week.”

  “No problem,” I agreed. Truth be told, I liked walking Huckleberry. I would have happily volunteered to do so in a heartbeat. I just didn’t like it when Todd ordered me to do it.

  “Could you walk me to my car?” Silvia asked. “I hate walking around this late at night alone.”

  “Sure.” By the time I’d gotten Huckleberry leashed up, Silvia was ready to go, too. “You have a car?” I asked her. “I didn’t think anyone here drove.”

  She shrugged. “It’s my dad’s car.” We walked briskly down the sidewalk. With his new haircut, Huckleberry seemed to have shed a few decades, which still put him in the hundred-and-fifty-years-old range, but he had more pep in his step than I’d seen since I’d met him. “I live out in Elmhurst, and working nights, it’s easier driving, you know?”

  “Elmhurst?” I asked. I was still learning all the neighborhoods, and I didn’t think I’d heard of that one before.

  “Queens,” Silvia replied.

  “That’s quite a commute,” I caught myself saying and had to laugh at myself. Back home, it was nothing to drive four hours to Dallas to see a play or something, because there was never anything going on in Shreveport. Now, after only a few weeks, I was starting to think that the adjoining borough of Queens, a mere five miles away, was on the other side of the universe. “Why not get a job closer to home?”

  We crossed the street and Huckleberry made us stop so he could sniff the base of a streetlight. I wondered how far away she’d parked. Sure, street parking was a full-contact sport and spots were hard to come by, but we’d already gone four blocks. “I was living with my significant other and a few of their cousins here in Williamsburg when I took this job. Then we broke up a few weeks ago, and I moved back home. Temporarily. I’m still trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up, comprende?”

  “Do I ever,” I agreed. I liked waitressing, don’t get me wrong, but it wasn’t exactly the career I’d pictured when I was little. “What did you want to be when you were younger?”

  “A nurse,” Silvia said. “Maybe an astronaut. Or an astronaut nurse. You?”

  “A unicorn,” I admitted.

  “That’s way cooler than an astronaut nurse. Well, this is my car. See you tomorrow?”

  “Yup,” I agreed. I was working the morning shift, which started a little more than nine hours from now, and she’d be coming in about the time I was cashing out for the day.

  The wa
lk back gave me time to think. Bethany had spent most of her time over at Marco’s in Astoria according to everyone I talked to, and the fact that she hadn’t kept much in the way of clothes or toiletries at her own apartment supported that. So why did she bother to pay rent on a place in Bed-Stuy? She’d said she liked the day shift at Untapped because it kept her nights free, but if Marco had been able to meet me on short notice for lunch, he had to work in the neighborhood, too. Maybe they commuted together in the morning?

  And why had they broken up?

  Four days had passed since Bethany’s death, and I had more questions than I’d had in the beginning, and no answers at all. A tiny voice in the back of my head suggested that maybe I wasn’t cut out to be a detective, but I squashed that as surely as if it were a cockroach in my kitchen. I didn’t have time for that kind of negativity.

  Sure, I hadn’t had any luck finding Bethany’s bracelet. Everyone I met had a reason to be mad at Bethany, but no one had enough motive to kill her. What was it the investigators always said in those true crime podcasts I loved to listen to? Follow the money. That was it. She used Venmo, that much I knew. She probably did all of her banking online, too. All I needed to do was take another look through her phone.

  When we got back to Untapped Books & Café, the last of the customers were loitering around the front door, smoking a final cigarette or taking a pull on their vape pens before heading home. I had to knock on the door for Andre to come and unlock it. I settled Huckleberry in for the night and hung up his leash on the hook. After taking out the last load of trash, I nudged the brick out of the way and let the back door close. I pushed on it to make sure it was locked. It was.

  Andre handed me a fold of bills. “Tips from your last tables,” he explained.

  I stifled a yawn. “Thanks.”

  “You want me to walk you home?” he asked, looking concerned.

  “I thought you had to finish up orders.”

  “All taken care of. Come on, let’s lock up.”

  As he finished his final checks, I felt around my messenger bag to make sure I had Bethany’s phone with me. I’d thought about leaving it at home, but if it had rung and Izzy had found it, I would have to explain what I was doing with the phone. This seemed easier at the time. Maybe I should have left it in the apartment, because then I wouldn’t have been tempted to take the subway down to Bed-Stuy in the middle of the night on the off chance that one of Bethany’s roomies was awake.

  “You live up near McCarren Park, right?” he asked.

  I wished I hadn’t agreed to let Izzy host Bethany’s wake at my aunt’s apartment building’s rooftop pool. It felt weird that suddenly everyone knew where I was staying. It wasn’t that I cared that my friends and coworkers had my address, it was that I didn’t want them thinking I was some kind of bougie snob just because my aunt had a ritzy apartment in a swanky building. “Yup.”

  Andre looked concerned. “Isn’t your building that way?” he asked, pointing his left arm.

  “Yup,” I agreed. “But I’m headed to the subway. I need to run a quick errand.”

  “This time of night? Maybe you should wait until morning.”

  I smiled and looped my arm around his. Most of the bars and restaurants were closing. Nearly as many people wandered the sidewalks as there would have been at high noon. More, maybe, since the only time it was bearable to be out on the street was after the sun went down. “I’ll be fine,” I assured him. “I know what I’m doing.”

  20

  Odessa Dean @OdessaWaiting ∙ June 28

  What am I doing in Bed-Stuy at almost 3AM on a Friday? Wrong answers only #schoolnight #nightowls #Brooklyn

  I THINK IT’S SAFE to say that I did not, in fact, know what I was doing.

  That went for life in general. I meant it when I told Silvia I had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up. This adulting business wasn’t as simple as I’d thought it would be. My parents made it look so easy. They met in high school, got married, got grown-up jobs, bought a house, had a kid, and settled down for the important business of growing old together. They didn’t take a less-than-minimum-wage-paying temporary job that six years later was still their only source of income. They didn’t go to senior prom with a bunch of other couples because they didn’t have a date.

  And they certainly didn’t wander around Bed-Stuy at almost three in the morning.

  Don’t get me wrong. Compared to twenty years ago, Brooklyn is freaking Disney. Then again, a smart person wouldn’t wander around Disney at three a.m., either.

  Being in the service industry, I was used to working odd hours. Anyone who could work nine to five, Monday through Friday, was a mystery to me. Sometimes my shift would last four hours, sometimes it would be twelve. I could close one night and open the next morning. I could work ten days in a row, or get five days off straight, depending on the luck of the draw. The end result was that sometimes I forget that the rest of the world had a schedule.

  Everyone else woke up at the same time every day, walked the dog, showered, and went to work. They ordered the same coffee at the same coffee shop every morning. They ate lunch at noon and then caught the rush-hour train home. They were in bed by eleven and asleep by eleven thirty. By the time it got this late—or was it this early?—there was no one out except for the weirdos, the insomniacs, and me.

  New York may be called the city that never sleeps, but to be honest, after midnight on a Thursday, this part of Bed-Stuy was practically comatose.

  As I made my way to Bethany’s old apartment, I congratulated myself on finding it without any assistance from the map app on my phone. Maybe there was hope for me yet. I scanned the windows of her building for any signs of life, but it was dark.

  I couldn’t see any movement—no one getting up for a glass of water in the middle of the night. No one staying up late, glued to their screen as they binged Netflix. No one peeking out behind a curtain to see what the petite brunette wearing a dead woman’s orthopedic shoes was doing lurking around their neighborhood at this unearthly hour.

  I mounted the steps and checked the front door, hoping that it had miraculously malfunctioned and would spring open with the lightest touch. No joy. I should have known that was too much to hope for.

  If it had been the middle of the day, I would have used the old tried-and-true trick of pushing each buzzer in succession until a rando decided to let me in. I didn’t think anyone would fall for that in the middle of the night, though, and I imagined that their response if I tried would be less than polite.

  I think it was safe to say that I had hit a dead end. I should have called it quits, gone home, and caught at least a little sleep before my morning shift tomorrow. That would have been the smart thing to do. The reasonable, adult thing to do. So of course, I chose Option B.

  There were several possibilities for the Smart Lock on Bethany’s phone. Without the password, I couldn’t be certain if she was using Bluetooth, GPS location, or something else entirely, but when her phone was in her apartment, it was locked. Then when I went into the kitchen, it unlocked. Something about the kitchen unlocked her phone.

  Maybe I didn’t have to be inside her kitchen for the Smart Lock to work. I had no idea what the range was for Smart Lock. Maybe I just had to be near enough.

  The apartment building was a four-story brownstone, a narrow house surrounded on either side by other narrow row houses. In lieu of a front yard, a smooth concrete surface was taken up by two large garbage bins and a broken planter that may have once held a decorative bush but was now home to dandelions. The front door had a narrow, barred window on either side of it. Each subsequent floor had two sets of windows—one a wide double pane and one narrow like the one downstairs. Each double window had a decorative architectural arch above it, and each single window had a narrow ledge below it that was too small to be a balcony, but had enough room to hold a potted plant or, in the case
of the third floor, a bald mannequin dressed in a sequined evening gown.

  I assumed that there were also corresponding windows in the back of the house, maybe overlooking a shared garden, but in all likelihood they would open into a few inches of space between themselves and the nearly identical brownstone that backed into it. There were no windows on the sides of the house because they shared a wall with their neighbors. It didn’t bode well for privacy or an abundance of natural light, but it was practical in a city where every square inch was precious.

  If I remembered correctly, the kitchen was on the left side of the house and the apartment that Bethany rented with Cherise, Tran, and her other roommate was on the right. I moved the large trash can out of the way and stuck my hand, clutching Bethany’s phone, between the bars of the window I was 99 percent certain was the kitchen.

  The phone sprang to life. I wanted to jump for joy.

  I sat down on the cracked steps that led up to the front door and pulled up a list of apps on the phone. A jumble of icons, in no discernable order, for every ride share, delivery, and food service ever created crowded the screen. Either Bethany moonlighted as a delivery driver, or she ordered a whole lot of takeout. She had apps for events and individual rewards programs, along with icons for every social media site I’d ever heard of and some I hadn’t.

  It would have taken me weeks to go through all of her private message apps, but I saw the logo for a large chain of banks and knew I’d hit pay dirt. “Bingo,” I said to myself, clicking the app.

  In a world of technology and convenience, there’s a balance between security and ease of use. I didn’t want to have to enter my password every time I opened email up on my own device, but for more sensitive apps like banking and bill pay I used two-factor authentication. Bethany didn’t. Her bank account app opened without so much as prompting me for a password.