by Linda Sands
Chamonix was thirteen miles away, riding in the rain, adrenaline pumping almost as fast as her legs, when twenty-year-old Sarah McClaren stepped into the alley to puke up five beers and three shots of tequila, and stumbled over the victim.
Chapter 14
WHEN MY PLACE ISN’T MINE. OR YOURS.
Tommy was sitting at a table in the back when I walked into My Place. The décor had changed again. In the last two years it had gone from sixties cool to shabby-chic retro, and now it felt like a tropical beach scene.
I sunk into a wicker chair across from him and said, “Before you start talking, I need to eat. I’m starving.”
“I know. I already ordered.” He pulled napkins off identical sandwich plates and pushed one toward me. It was like having the wife order lunch, only Tommy always remembered what I liked.
“How’s everything?” I asked, trying to be expeditious while appearing as if I cared.
Tommy shrugged. “It’s okay.”
I swallowed a bite of the turkey BLT, and asked, “Who’s the guy?”
Tommy looked at me. “You really want to know?”
I lied. “Of course.”
He told me about the new love interest, a guy who was kind to animals and his mother, someone who had the same taste in music, who finished his sentences, a guy who might be the one.
I nodded as if I’d been listening. “What does he do?”
“He studies the triangle of affinity, reality, and communication on the bridge to total freedom.”
“What?”
“He’s a Scientology counselor. An auditor. He’s really good at it.”
I tried to hold back but the laugh escaped, in the form of a bray or maybe more of a guffaw. I’ve never been known for my polite titter. My outburst earned me a headshake and sigh from Tommy and a glare from Francie behind the bar.
This was pretty much her business. She didn’t own My Place, but ruled it—had since Randall got sick. Apparently he was barely hanging on. No one believed Francie’s stories of tango dancing at midnight and long weekends in Paris. Randall was dying in their bed at the B and B in Elmira—not that it was an operating B and B at the moment. There aren’t many people who’d consider a vacation in the countryside with a man dying in the bed upstairs a proper getaway.
Francie sipped her drink through a twisted pink party straw while turning the pages of a glossy magazine with her enormous hand. She hadn’t been a feminine male, and the lady part was hard for her. Maybe Francie had been Frank too long. I still saw her as the boy in the plaid pants who got shoved around a lot in elementary school. That was the problem with never leaving your hometown. Your past was right in front of you.
I held up my empty glass. She raised a perfectly waxed brow and gave me the finger.
I looked at Tommy and said, “How many Scientologists does it take to change a lightbulb?”
Tommy sighed.
“Come on,” I said.
He looked away, lips pursed in a thin line, jaw clenched. Finally he said, “I don’t know. How many?”
“None,” I said. “The lightbulb must find eighty thousand dollars to become clear, then it will have the self-determinism to change itself.”
Francie arrived in time for the punch line. She gave me a smile, placed another ginger ale in front of me, and was still chuckling as she lumbered away.
Tommy didn’t find it amusing. “Honestly? I think Buck’s only into it because of Tom Cruise.”
I thought he was kidding, but I saw tears in his eyes and wondered how much this guy Buck was going to break Tommy’s heart and where the shithead lived so I could pay his Dianetics-loving ass a not-so-cordial visit.
“Hey, look. I’m sorry I joked about it, okay? It takes all kinds, right?”
Tommy wiped his eyes, sat up taller, and said, “Yeah. All kinds. Look at you.”
“Me? What’s the matter with me?”
Tommy smiled.
“All right. All right.” I held up my hands to ward off the verbal blows I knew I had coming. “Let’s get back to the important stuff.”
Tommy said, “I thought we weren’t going to talk about me anymore.”
“Cute. I’m talking about the case.”
“And Bu-uh-ffy.” Tommy sang like a taunting second-grader.
I stopped him before he went on to “the k-i-s-s-i-n-g song.”
“She goes by Barbara now.”
“How’s she look? Did she . . . ?” Tommy made an expansive gesture around his torso and puffed out his cheeks.
“No,” I said. “She didn’t. She looks beautiful, despite everything she’s going through. She still looks like the girl I used to—”
“The girl you used to what?” Tommy asked.
I shook my head, not wanting to think about it, definitely not wanting to talk about it. How the ones we used to love can come back and hit us the hardest, how they can remind us of all the things we were, the person we dreamed we’d become, sometimes with them by our side, and how our biggest fear is that in their eyes, we would be found to fall short.
Tommy, being Tommy, read the shrug. “Yeah, I get it. I’ve had a few of those used to’s. myself. I was only asking because her daughter, the artist? She was a real pretty thing. Shame.”
“Yes,” I said, “A shame.”
“She wasn’t gay, was she?”
“Who?”
“Chamonix.”
“I don’t think so. Why?”
“There was something about her work. A guilt or feeling of not belonging. I can’t describe it.”
“Try,” I said.
“Maybe it’s just me, but there was a sadness in her paintings, an incompleteness. It’s something I would expect from someone who’s battling their choices, someone who isn’t sure who they really are. Does that make sense?”
It did. It reminded me of a certain girl named Buffy.
“I’ll send you the gallery website and you can see for yourself.”
“Sure. Meanwhile, let’s see what else you’ve got. Buffy, I mean, Barbara’s a real paying client and we owe her a complete report, right?”
“Riiight.” Tommy reached into his bag and removed a silver laptop. He lifted the lid and pressed some keys, inserted a disc, pressed some more keys.
Tommy was good with all that techy stuff. A real gay geek, you might say—but not me, I’d never call him a geek.
I admit all those clicks and beeps and wires and shit sticking out of people’s ears intimidate me. I wasn’t my grandpa, but I still was in no hurry to zap around the world with my eyes on a blue screen or to have someone buzz me in the middle of a Hitchcock festival, telling me they knew I wasn’t really camping in the woods because the GPS on my phone had led them to the Syracuse Cinema.
I leaned back in the booth, still wary of cancer beams, and said, “So you said you talked to Smith’s neighbors down there by Flannigan’s, right?”
“Yeah. One sec.” Tommy paused his frenetic typing, finger dragging, and thumb tapping and looked up at me as if to say What the hell—I’m working here!? But he saw me sweating, saw me staring at the laptop, so he slowly turned the monitor my way and said. “It’s okay, Tedesco. I’m going to go slow.” Like I was some kind of computer retard—which maybe I am, but unlike me, Tommy is too fucking nice to say it.
The screen changed from a black rectangle to a shot of the exterior of Flannigan’s, then panned to a street shot. “The consensus was that James John Smith was a quiet guy who seemed harmless enough.”
“Isn’t that what they said about Ted Bundy?” I asked.
Tommy looked at me with his are-you-done-yet face. The one that made me feel like I was talking to my father.
I said, “Sorry. So, did you talk to everyone in the brownstone?” For the record, I had no idea if the building was a real brownstone, but it sounded like something a mature, intelligent man would say. It sounded like boss-speak, so I went with it.
Tommy said, “That’s affirmative,” volleying with cop-speak.
“No one saw or heard anything that night or any other night. Apparently sleeping with noise machines or headphones is the cool thing to do if you live downtown.” He pressed some more keys, bringing up an image of the building with black iron railings to the left of the bar—the same building whose garden I had admired from James John Smith’s window.
The next shots were of people outside the same building. An older woman with a high, wide forehead pursed her lips as she sorted through a stack of mail on the stoop of the brownstone. In the next shot, she slipped a white envelope into her pocket as she glanced toward the dark interior of the building. The last photo showed her turned away from the camera, returning the rest of the mail to the box.
Tommy said, “That’s Adele Tibbs, the owner and manager. I gave her your number, told her you might have some questions. She lives here.” Tommy pointed to the ground floor of the building. “There are three more apartments: two on the second floor and one penthouse.”
“Penthouse?”
“Well, top floor. Anyway. Adele’s parents bought the building forty years ago. She does some kind of botanical research, never married, no surviving siblings. She’s kind of a homebody.”
“Homebody? Is that urban slang, some new street lingo?”
Tommy gave me a look. “You know what I mean. This building’s all she has.”
“What about the other tenants?”
Tommy pulled up another picture. A bald man wearing tiny rectangle glasses was frozen in time, rushing through the door, suit coat flapping behind him. He had a phone jammed to one ear and a bagel in his hand. He didn’t look happy.
“There’s your penthouse. Benjamin Rathbone. He’s never home, some kind of money manager. We might need to catch him at the office. Police report shows a solid alibi, but said he was uncooperative—probably their fault.”
I knew what Tommy was thinking. He didn’t like the cops in this town, maybe any town. The kid had illusions of TV cops—the pensive, softhearted redhead who’d tilt his head, speak hesitantly, then slam you up against the wall. He thought Syracuse cops lacked charisma, chutzpah.
“Don’t get going on that again,” I said. “I don’t want to hear how you could have done it better. You want to be a cop? Be a cop.”
“Two words, Tedesco,” Tommy said. “Navy. Polyester.” He waggled his finger.
“Don’t do that,” I said. “It makes you look gay.”
Tommy smirked. “Whatever. Oh, you’re going to love this.” He tapped the keyboard. “The second-floor tenant, Ms. Bartlet, is in arrears with her rent and missing.”
“Is that right?”
“Yeah. When a tenant stops paying for two months, a landlord tends to notice.”
He enlarged a page on the screen and pointed. “That’s her.”
A wallet-size photo on the left side of the page introduced me to Sassy Panda and her blog: Days of Sassiness.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Our Miss Bartlet’s a blogger.” Tommy leaned back with a satisfied look on his face.
“Excuse me?”
“Come on,” he said.
“What?”
“We’ve been over this before.”
“I forgot then, okay?”
“Honestly, you never listen to me.”
“What? Is it important? This blogging thing?”
He rolled his eyes and huffed.
“Why do I feel like we’re having a lover’s quarrel? Listen, Tommy, don’t get testicle with me, just give me the basics.”
“Ha-ha. Very funny. Trust me. You are not the type I get testicle with.”
“I was offended by that remark. No one likes rejection.”
Tommy said, “A blog is a web log. An Internet journal. They are really, really popular. Some people who write them get book deals, some get on TV shows, some run advertising on their site and live on the income. They sell T-shirts and coffee mugs and actually garner a cultlike following.”
“Fascinating,” I said, yawning.
“Asshole,” Tommy said and punched my arm, surprisingly hard.
I punched his arm back, thinking how much better he faked the “Ow,” than I did.
“This is blogging,” Tommy said. He pulled up three windows at once, splayed them across his computer screen. I saw photos of kids in hospital beds, family vacation shots with travel tips, puppy growth charts, workout videos, and food diaries.
“Who the hell reads this stuff?” I asked.
“Depends. I prefer to think of it as a collection of support groups. You can find anybody writing about anything and commiserate, or just hang out in the backyard and peek in the window, so to speak. Actually, they probably have blogs for those people too.”
“Really?” Now I was interested. Tommy went on to explain where you log in, who runs these things, how you get one, and the rising price of tortillas in northern Mexico. At least I think that was what he was going on about. I was too focused on the page and the pictures our little Miss Bartlet had posted to listen.
She was not a great photographer, an even worse writer. She seemed to be one of those people who thinks everything they say is witty and that folks really want to hear about the amazing birds they spied on vacation while learning how to open up to the universe. Yeah, she was one of them. I skimmed the most recent posts—a tirade against the new morning blend at the local coffeehouse, a sad bit about missing her mother, and quotes from a popular movie with a few photos of the cast. Boring. Where was the illicit sex? The honest reveal of someone’s lies? The panty parties and drunk, topless friends? I thought the Internet was supposed to be fun.
“When did our blogger go missing, again?” I asked as I clicked the down arrow, browsing the dates of each post.
“Two months ago, give or take,” Tommy said.
“So why is there a picture of her apartment’s windowsill garden with yesterday’s date?”
“Let me see,” Tommy said, angling the laptop back toward him.
He skimmed and clicked, tapped a few keys, then did that thing with his finger on his lip that meant he had an idea.
Tommy grinned. “She pre-posted.”
“Pre-posted?” I asked. “Is that like pre-pulled? How you never wait for me to unlock the passenger door before you pull the handle?”
“No, Tedesco. Our blogger wrote these posts at some earlier point in time and set a future posting date. It’s quite simple . . .”
Then he said some techno-babble stuff that I really didn’t hear because I had swung the laptop back to face me and was clicking through photos on the site. I stopped at one that had caught my eye earlier.
“Can you make that bigger?” I asked, touching the screen with an apparently greasy index finger.
Tommy slapped my hand away. “Okay. Just don’t touch the glass. You’ll leave prints.”
“Gee-sch. Picky much?”
Tommy snorted. “Gee-sch. Dorky much?”
The picture I’d pointed to was of a bird on a windowsill, not any windowsill, but Miss Bartlet’s windowsill. The windowsill of the window that faced the alley. The alley that separated her apartment from Smith’s.
“See?” I said, as the image grew, was pixelated, and grew again. Beyond the bird, beyond the alley space, there was another window. Smith’s window. A man was caught in profile and behind him was another figure, fuzzy and hard to make out. The man was probably Smith, but the figure behind him could have been anyone. It was impossible to tell.
There was something about the way the frozen images spanned the screen. Something unsettling, like looking at pictures of your mom when she was eighteen, pretty, and half-undressed. Like you’d caught her being bad, though the pictures were about fifty years old and the last time you saw your mom half-undressed you’d been giving her a sponge bath at The Home.
“Save that,” I said, flicking a hand at the screen, then turning away.
I felt in my pockets for gum, candy, something. While I was feeling around, my phone buzzed and scared the shit
out of me. I hate buzzing phones almost as much as alarm clocks.
Tommy grinned when I snatched the phone from my pocket.
“Asshole,” I muttered as I answered the call, wondering when he’d had a chance to bugger my phone.
“Mr. Tedesco? This is Adele Tibbs. Your assistant said you wanted to talk to me? I don’t know how I can help you, I hardly—”
“Miss Tibbs. Thanks for returning my call. I just had a few questions for you.”
Tommy turned the computer toward me and pointed. I felt like the president reading the national address from a teleprompter when I asked Adele, “When did you first meet Mr. Smith?”
“Well, I guess it was a few days before he reopened the bar.”
“Had you ever seen him before?”
“No. I mean, not to my recollection.”
Great. I had an Ollie North. I strayed from the Tommy questions and went with, “How well did you know Mr. Flannigan?”
“We were quite friendly,” Adele said. “As you might expect of people who have been neighbors for over twenty years.”
“Twenty years? Is that right?”
“It would have been twenty-two years this November.”
“I see.”
“We’ve seen a lot of change on this block, but no one was more surprised than I was when Mr. Flannigan told me he was leaving and asked me to hand over the key to Mr. Smith.”
“You had the key?”
“We were neighbors. That’s what neighbors do.”
“Did you know that Mr. Flannigan lost the deed to his building in an online poker game, Miss Tibbs? Don’t you find that odd?”
“Mr. Tedesco. I am eighty-two years old. I find a great many things odd.”
“Did you know your neighbor was a gambler?”
“I was raised to hate the sin, not the sinner. Mr. Flannigan was a good man.”
“Was?”
“I’m sure he still is.”
Tommy typed something, then swiveled the laptop to face me.