And I wanted to see what other connections I could make.
The vacuum turned off and a young woman leaned into my line of sight. She wore denim short-shorts and a hot-pink tank top, no bra. “Um, can I help you?” she said, like she really, really did not want to help.
“I’m looking for Bobby,” I said. “He around?”
She shook her head. “He’s gone, dude.”
“Gone?”
“This is my place now,” she said protectively. “Bobby moved out.”
“Where’d he move to?”
“He got this boat or something. Gonna sail the world, I guess.”
“Wow.”
“Right? It’s wild. Totally off the grid.”
“Did he say why?”
“Uh,” she said, like it should’ve been obvious, “because the world is fucked?”
“Oh. That. Well, do you know how I could get in touch with him?”
“Off. The. Grid,” she said. “Helloooo. No one can get in touch with him.”
She was getting on my nerves. “Can I ask how you know him?”
She put her hands on her hips. “How the fuck do you know him?”
“I just really need to talk to him. It’s, um,” I said, stalling while I tried to come up with something good, “it’s just that I’m … pregnant. And Bobby’s the…” I trailed off, folding my arms over my midsection in what I hoped was a frightened, maternal sort of gesture.
Her eyes went wide. “Oh. Fuck.”
I nodded.
“I mean,” she said, “I don’t really know him that well. He was my stepdad, but my mom divorced him a long time ago. She just died.”
“I’m sorry.”
She nodded. “But Bobby knew I needed a place to live. So he called the other day. I’m renting it from him while he’s gone. He left me these weird instructions to pay him with Bitcoin.”
“Weird how?”
She unfolded a piece of paper from her pocket and handed it to me.
On it, a messy blue scrawl explaining how to use the Bitcoin ATM at a cell-phone store in Franklinton to send him money anonymously. I wouldn’t have guessed that Bobby Veach was so tech-savvy. Then again, I obviously wouldn’t have guessed that he was going to run, either.
“When is he coming back?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is he coming back?”
“I guess that depends on how much he likes being off the grid.”
I said, “I suppose that’s true.”
* * *
Brighton Lake was really more of a pond, a man-made kidney-shaped thing with a cadre of overfed ducks floating near a small fountain. The care home itself comprised three buildings: two brick towers in the rear of the property that housed the active seniors, according to the website, and a white single-story building in the front that housed the common areas and the skilled-nursing wing. It looked nice enough, but I didn’t want to go in. I was reminded of my grandmother, who’d died in a place like this when I was fifteen. I hadn’t wanted to go in that time, either. But it wasn’t about me then, and it wasn’t about me now.
I walked into the lobby, signed in, and asked the receptionist where I could find Agnes Harlow’s room. She told me and pointed down a long hallway, past a circle of old ladies in a community lounge area. They were knitting and laughing. Maybe it wasn’t so bad here. They seemed to be having a good time, anyway.
I went to the end of the hall and found Agnes’s room, my resolve cracking with every step. This was the type of place I remembered: the small rooms, the hospital smell, the greying figures propped in their adjustable beds. Agnes was one such figure, small and still, a long, grey braid draped over one shoulder. Eyes open but gazing at the ceiling. Her cheekbone was bruised, and she wore a tan brace on one arm. She had a visitor, an elderly man slouching in a chair beside her bed, reading out loud from a Bible.
“‘For the Lord knoweth the ways of the righteous,’” he said. “‘But the way of the ungodly shall perish.’”
I lingered in the doorway for a moment before deciding to come back later. But the man sensed my presence and put the Bible down, eyes flicking to mine under heavy, still-dark eyebrows. His hair was a gradient of black to white and longish on top, held out of his eyes by a pair of tortoiseshell glasses. His face was craggy and expressive. With his baggy white Oxford sleeves rolled up to the elbow, he looked like an eccentric professor. “Hello, young lady.”
“Not that young,” I said. Agnes didn’t react; her eyes stayed on the ceiling. “I didn’t mean to intrude.”
“Younger than me, at least by half. Are you here to see Agnes? You can come in.”
I took one step into the room. “Is she…” I started.
“Awake?”
I nodded.
“Yeah, she’s just bored with me. Are you a volunteer or what?”
I pushed down my natural instinct to lie. Instead, I told him, “No. I was just hoping to ask Agnes a few questions. I’m an investigator.”
“A cop?”
“No, private.”
“Oh, a Mike Hammer type? Agnes, things are getting interesting now.” The man flipped his glasses down onto his nose and he squinted at me. “But what’s a private investigator want with a little old lady?”
I sat down in the other bedside chair. “It’s about family, actually. Are you family?”
“We used to be married. Samuel J. Kinnaman,” he said, shaking my hand. “Sam.”
“Roxane.”
“Must be the Harlow side of the family,” he said softly, “because my side, we’re not the type to require, ah, intrigue.” Then he looked up, almost embarrassed. “Sorry, Agnes, I don’t mean to pry into your business.”
The woman in the bed glanced over at me, her eyes fierce.
“Those things which you have seen,” she whispered urgently, “and the things which are, and the things which will take place after these things, and the things which you have seen.…”
I had a sinking feeling.
“She doesn’t like strangers much,” he said. “And she’s not having a good day. Some days, they’re better. Other days, she goes pretty far into herself. Schizophrenia. This place, it’s no good for her. It’s tough, seeing how she ended up. She doesn’t say much. And what she does say, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Not to us, anyway.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. I kept my voice gentle. “Listen, maybe you can help me.”
He shrugged. “If I can, why not.”
“When were you and Agnes married?”
“Oh, goodness. A hundred years ago. The end of the eighties.”
“And you stayed close, even after you split?”
“Not so much split. She left me, me and my girls, in one of her fits. Nineteen eighty-nine. Just walked out.”
“Wow.”
“In some ways, that was a relief. Things were hard. She would go through periods of not taking her pills, and it made her difficult to be around. But I never stopped caring about her. Never stopped trying. And now, well, she’s got nobody. She chased everyone away. Except me, even after everything. The last few years, I guess they’ve been hard on her. Till recently I was out in California with my older daughter, but I came back when Agnes had her fall. Didn’t want Suze to have to deal with it all on her own.” He shook his head quickly. “Sorry. That wasn’t what you asked. Yeah, we stayed close enough.”
“Do you ever remember meeting her brother’s second wife? Marin. And her son, Nate. Agnes’s nephew. Do you know them?”
Sam thought for a second and said, “No.”
Agnes said, “Herodias.” She dragged out the “s” into a long, tense hiss. Then she turned and faced the wall, again muttering, “Those things which you have seen…”
Sam said, “The Harlows were unrelentingly Catholic. I think it’s from the book of Revelation. I don’t know what it means. If it means anything at all.”
Then I showed him Marin’s picture, but there was no reaction in his eyes.
> Ditto for Nate’s.
“Agnes never went in for the blood-is-thicker stuff. So we didn’t see a lot of Bill and his people, even when Agnes was doing well, when we were still together. He had some bratty kids, five, ten years older than ours. They weren’t the most, you know, empathetic people. When it came to Agnes’s diagnosis. Like it was some kind of affront, for a rich person’s brain to go bad. It’s simply not done.” This last phrase he said like it was a direct quote.
It was easy enough to imagine Georgette Harlow saying it just like that.
Sam added, “Of course, maybe they got closer later on, Agnes and them. But I’d be surprised.”
* * *
I drove back toward the city, detoured up to the OSU campus for a bribe from Buckeye Donuts, and then stopped at my brother’s. Andrew opened the door of his Italian Village loft looking aggrieved. “It’s ten in the damn morning,” he said, rubbing his eyes.
“Ten thirty, actually. And I came bearing breakfast.” I held up a drink carrier and a greasy bag. “I thought you didn’t get hungover, anyway.”
“I still get tired, though.” He snatched the bag away from me and let me in. “Crullers. What is wrong with you? Nobody likes crullers.”
“There’s long johns too,” I said. I followed him into the loft, which bore evidence of a lady visitor: a fancy purse and a pair of Louboutins next to the door.
“Don’t ask.” My brother carried the doughnuts over to the granite kitchen island. His place was nicer than what one might expect a thirty-seven-year-old bachelor to own, although he and I shared the same shitty housekeeping skills. He grabbed a jug from the fridge and doctored his coffee with milk and a slug of whiskey. “So what do you want?”
“I have a question,” I said. “Vincent Pomp. Do you know him?”
“What makes you think I would?”
“You know about a lot of things. And you know a lot of people, too.”
He dragged a hand through his collar-length hair. “I know the name.”
I splashed a drop of whiskey in my tea—for flavor—and bit into a cruller. “And?”
“And, he’s a real-estate guy on paper, but he’s also a lender.”
“Payday loans, I know that.”
“Well, I’d probably go with loan shark, but okay.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Are we talking small time, or big time?”
He shrugged. “Big enough, I guess. He’s got a lot of money. And he’s paranoid, from what I hear. Or maybe just loaded. He’s got a driver, a gated guard shack at his place, all that.”
“Why?”
“Who knows. Like I said, I know the name, but I don’t really know the man.”
“What about his family?”
My brother shook his head. “I don’t know his family either.”
The bedroom door opened and a woman scuttled out, head down. Without looking at either of us, she grabbed her bag and shoes and escaped from the apartment.
My eyes met Andrew’s, and we both laughed.
“You could have at least offered her a cruller,” I said.
Andrew finished his coffee. “I told you, no one likes crullers. So why are you asking about Pomp?” He squinted at the trash can and pitched his cup toward it, missing badly.
“You need glasses.”
“I need practice. You need glasses.”
“I have glasses. I just don’t wear them.”
“You’re such a brat,” Andrew said.
“But you love me.”
“I do. Which is why I don’t love the sound of you involved with somebody like that. Now, if you were to ask me for a reco on a tattoo artist, then I could help. But this so-called underworld stuff—not really. I just sell weed to out-of-towners.”
I sipped my tea, thinking. I didn’t need a tattoo artist. “Okay, what about Bitcoin?”
He bit into his second long john. “What about Bitcoin?”
“Do you know what it is?”
My brother raised an eyebrow. “Planning to put your money in alternative currencies?”
“Would you just tell me how it works?”
He opened the balcony door and motioned for me to join him. “I need to smoke.”
My father’s strict rules against smoking in the house had clearly made a major impression on both Andrew and my mother.
Andrew lit a cigarette, squinting in the bright sun. “Bitcoin is a digital currency. It’s like cash that you use online, basically. So if you want to pay for something online, anonymously, that’s the way to do it. It’s also popular with a certain brand of antiestablishment doomsday prepper.”
I wondered if that applied to Bobby Veach and his off-the-grid living, or if there was more to it than that. “What are people buying anonymously?”
“You know, Silk Road shit. Dark net. People sell drugs that way, weapons, porn, counterfeit green cards, bootleg DVDs—you’d be surprised how much of a market there is for bootleg DVDs.”
“Copier toner?”
“What the fuck is that?”
“Like, office supplies?”
“Ha. No.”
“Have you ever seen one?”
“A copier toner?”
“No. A bitcoin.”
Andrew exhaled a stream of smoke at the sky. “No. It’s not a physical thing.”
“You’re losing me.”
“It’s not like a dollar bill. It exists only in cyberspace. If anything, it’s a sheet of paper with a serial number written on it.”
I thought of the weird slips of paper from Marin’s nightstand. “With QR codes?”
He shrugged. “It sounds like you’re asking about something specific now.”
I explained about the slips, and my brother nodded. “That sounds like ATM receipts. Maybe. I’m not an expert—this shit is way too complicated for me.” He stubbed out his cigarette against the brick facade of the building. “These questions today—are they about the same case? Because it sounds a little … I don’t know.”
“It’s nothing. I promise. I’m leaving. You’re welcome for breakfast.”
My brother laughed and caught me in a one-armed hug. “Be careful.”
“Oh, shut up,” I said.
FOURTEEN
As I drove back downtown, I thought about things.
Bobby Veach was on the run.
Vincent Pomp’s daughter had been shot to death outside of Arthur’s print shop, while one of its employees was living in a building that Pomp owned.
Marin was dead too, murdered behind her ex-sister-in-law’s house.
Maybe this was the world’s most complicated stolen-copier-toner ring, but I had my doubts about that.
I told myself I was doing what Tom had asked and staying out of his case as I took another drive past Leila’s house. I was doing a lot of driving past people’s homes so far. I wasn’t sure this counted as progress.
But it did count as billable miles, which was almost the same thing. At least on paper.
I parked on her street and reclined my seat. On one hand, she had to come home sometime. On the other hand, there was only one of me, so twenty-four/seven surveillance wasn’t possible. It would take at least three people to pull that off, and there was no guarantee it would go anywhere. And on the third, imaginary hand, even though she had to come home eventually, “eventually” meant any time between the present moment and the inevitable heat death of the universe.
I scrolled through my phone, looked at Catherine’s number, shook my head, looked at it again. Calling was a bad idea. That was probably why she’d resorted to texting me punctuation. I quickly typed out a message to her:
… Hi. I have a work thing I could use your help on. Would you be up for that?
Five minutes later, I got a response from Catherine: she lives!
Then a separate message: and sure.
* * *
Half an hour later, I was sitting along the back wall at Upper Cup with my laptop and a glass of iced tea when the door opened and the atmosphere c
hanged. I didn’t need to look up to see who it was. I knew the smell of her, the way the air moved around her. But I looked anyway. Catherine wore a plain black tank and tight white jeans. Her pale green eyes were rimmed in navy eyeliner and I noticed her ring finger was currently unadorned.
I hated myself for noticing that.
She didn’t walk over right away, just got in line at the counter to order a dirty chai, standing with her back to me while the barista made it. I kept my eyes on my screen, but I could no longer concentrate on anything. Finally, she doctored her tea with a dash of cinnamon at the condiment station and sat down across from me.
“That thing is like a thousand years old,” she said by way of greeting, with a nod at my computer. “Crime doesn’t pay?”
“Crime occasionally pays, but this still works, so what’s the difference?”
“It looks like it’s being held together by muffin crumbs.”
Despite myself, I laughed out loud.
“So,” she said, “you’re not returning my texts, and you’re drinking iced tea. What’s happened to you?”
“I don’t have that much to say to dot dot dot,” I said, “and, not that I have to explain my tea temperature to you, but it’s hot outside.”
She shrugged. “You know I’m always cold.”
“I do.”
We looked at each other for a while.
“I was surprised,” she said after a pause, “that you didn’t respond. That isn’t like you.”
That, I thought, was very telling. “Just taking a page from your playbook,” I said.
“Which is?”
“Radio silence to drive somebody crazy. Is it working?”
She laughed that big laugh of hers, dirty and sexy and joyful all at once. It always made my chest hurt, like my heart was too big for my rib cage. “I thought you were mad at me.”
I drank some tea. “I’m not anything at you. But it’s finally dawning on me that you aren’t good for me, Catherine, so I’m just keeping to myself.”
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