by Gregory Ashe
“No. One is lazier than the other.”
“We’re not going to find anything at Teddi’s you know. This is a waste of time.”
“No, it’s not. Tucker and Rik were both at the party. It’s the logical place to start tracking their movements up to the murder.”
“We should be—”
“North, we’re doing this the right way. But it sucks that it’s not as fast as we want it to be.”
North didn’t have a good response, so he hit the accelerator. For the next several miles, Shaw was silent as he tapped and swiped. North kept replaying the last few days: the frantic, pointless scrambling; the ache in his jaw from grinding his teeth; those awful pre-dawn hours, waking still drunk but not drunk enough and tangled in sweat-soaked sheets. Then he played back the last few hours. He went through the nightmare brunch, the interview in the Borealis office, the treacherously familiar smiles and shrugs and hangdog expressions that Tucker knew how to use to perfection.
Shaw’s hand came to rest on his forearm, stroking lightly. He made a quieting noise that from anyone else would have sounded patronizing. Would have ended, most likely, in a broken nose. Instead, though, something rippled through North, and he felt dangerously close to crying.
He coughed into his shoulder. “What the fuck are you doing anyway?”
“Soothing you.”
“Not that, dumbass.”
“Like an infant.”
“Cute.”
“Like a wee little colicky bairn.”
“Bairn?” North yanked his arm away. “Colicky? Fuck you.”
“Let me pet your arm again.”
“No, fuck you. What are you doing on your phone?”
“Stalking Tucker’s life. What did you think I was doing?”
“Another of your freaky porn searches.”
“First of all, you shouldn’t kink shame.”
“Yeah, well, common courtesy? In the future, after you’ve finished spanking it, please close all the tabs where you’ve googled ‘large scrotum, small penis.’”
“I was doing research!”
“I saw the used tissues in the trash.”
“I had to clean the screen. The screen was dirty!”
“Oh yeah? Cleaning the screen? Is that why we went through about three hundred boxes of tissues junior year?”
“Do you want to hear what I found, or do you want to be mean to me?”
“Hear what you found.”
“Fine, but you have to—”
“Then be mean to you.”
“North!”
“Just a little. Ok. Go ahead.”
Shaw leveled a deadly look at him. “Tucker and Rik,” he said slowly, biting off the words, “were definitely more than casual sex partners. I’ve been scrolling through his cloud backup—it has all his messages, his photos, his call log. He and Rik were talking constantly. Messages back and forth. Um, some adult pictures.”
“How big are their scrotums? Scroti? That was a joke, please don’t answer that.”
“You’ve already seen Tucker’s, and Rik’s—”
“I said please don’t answer.”
“Anyway, it was definitely serious. The relationship, I mean.”
“Sexting and pictures are not serious for Tucker. Saying I love you is serious for Tucker. It took him almost two years to say it to me, and we were dating exclusively most of that time.”
The hum of the tires underscored Shaw’s silence.
“That motherfucker.”
“He might not have meant it, but…but he does say it, North. A lot, if I’m being honest.” Shaw was quiet again, scratching his cheek. “There are also a lot of pictures. And videos.”
“Of Rik? Like he was stalking him?”
“No.”
“Of them fucking.”
Shaw looked out the window and ducked his head.
North pulled off at the next exit. It was Big Bend, which felt right considering the fucking turn his life had taken. He parked next to the free air compressor at a BP, killed the engine, and held out a hand.
“I don’t think—”
“Give me the fucking phone.” That’s right, North told himself. Mr. Calm, Cool, and Collected. “Please.”
The sun was in his eyes. He blinked, shading himself with one hand, and scrolled through the phone’s gallery of photos and videos. Pictures of Tucker and Rik in 2019, after North and Tucker had separated. Pictures of Tucker and other guys too. Pictures from 2018. Lots of guys. Sure, North thought, when we were on the rocks. Pictures from 2017, pictures of Tucker and all those good-looking bros naked in the bed North and Tucker had shared. Things had been starting to go bad, but North hadn’t known about this, hadn’t even suspected. He’d thought they were working things out. He’d thought it was a bad patch. But 2016? Just as many pictures there, and North had been happy. And 2015. Back and back, years of betrayal documented with fucked-out grins and videos with Tucker moaning a stranger’s name. Rik was in a lot of them, year after year. But there were plenty more besides Rik.
And then North knew. He scrolled back further. He stopped himself. Then he scrolled again because it was like trying to build a dam across the Mississippi with tiddlywinks. When he saw the pictures, Tucker in his wedding tux, some fuckboy in a polyester hotel uniform, he tossed the phone into Shaw’s lap. Then he leaned his head back and closed his eyes.
The muted sound of traffic came from Big Bend. Voices. A man laughing. The squeak of the Morrokide upholstery, Shaw shifting in his seat.
When Shaw settled his head against North’s shoulder, he did it so slowly and gently that North wasn’t startled. The spicy musk of Shaw’s hair product filled his nose. One of Shaw’s hands came to rest on North’s stomach, the offer of a hug. North screwed his eyes tighter, counted his breaths, and fought the knot in his throat.
Wiping his face, he sat up, and Shaw pulled back. Everything except his hand, which remained on North’s stomach, firm and warm and grounding.
“Well,” North said, voice rough, “so. That answers that.”
“North—”
“Can we please not do this right now?”
A moment’s hesitation. Shaw nodded, biting his lip.
“Call Teddi. Ask him about the caterers he used. And have him queue up the video from his home security cameras.”
“Maybe you need a little time—”
But North started the GTO, and Shaw’s voice died off. He pulled his hand back and reached for the phone.
They drove to Lafayette Square. Teddi met them at the front door, in a peacock-tail bowtie and a Truman Capote suit. “Dear hearts, what in the world was that barbaric phone call about? Shaw, sweetness, have you forgotten all your manners? You practically sounded like North here.”
“Did you find the name of the company?” North asked, pushing past Teddi and into the house.
“Of course, I keep all the paperwork. Taxes, you know, in case I can call it a write-off. What are you—”
“Give it to Shaw. Where’s the security camera footage?”
Teddi minced after him. “On my computer, of course, but—North, are you ill? Hold on, I’ve got these outrageous smelling salts I bought in New Orleans. They’re very Doris Day. North!”
The laptop was set up in the breakfast nook, with the video already queued up. At the other end of the open-plan room, the rat-tat-tat of gunfire came from a TV, where Jack was stretched out, shirtless, playing a video game. North dropped into a seat at the table. He played the video.
“He really doesn’t seem like himself,” Teddi was saying.
“It’s been a rough few days,” Shaw whispered.
“You don’t have any footage from inside?” North asked, examining the screen.
“No, of course not.” Teddi fluttered his hands. “This is my sanctuary. Just the one out front, and the one out back.”
North tried the alley camera first, playing footage from the n
ight of Teddi’s party. Without looking up from his feed, he said to Shaw, “Does that cloud account have a backup of Tucker’s movement?”
As Shaw was digging out his phone, Teddi asked in a thrilled underbreath, “Is this about Tucker killing that man? He had all my money, you know. When I heard he’d been killed, I swear I aged ten years.”
The alley camera’s recording showed nothing of interest—a little after nine, a neighbor took out the garbage, but otherwise, the screen remained empty. He switched to the front camera. The video footage showed Teddi’s lawn and a section of the street in front of his house. In fast-forward, cars came and went, zipping in and out of sight, a few of them parking, guests approaching Teddi’s door with herky-jerky movements. North recognized many of the guests, although he didn’t know all of them by name. He watched Tucker arrive. Peter and Paul. Rik and Jean. Percy. Himself and Shaw. And then later, when the party had died down, Rufus.
“I didn’t know Rufus was invited.”
“Him?” Teddi peered at the screen. “I don’t know him. I certainly didn’t invite him. I mean, for heaven’s sake, darling, he looks like one of those Hell’s Angels. Absolutely disgusting. He must be one of your people.”
“I thought I saw him,” Shaw said. “Rufus, I mean. But I wasn’t sure.”
North grunted.
“And to answer your question, no, Tucker’s location history isn’t being backed up to the cloud. We’ll have to do this the old-fashioned way.”
On the screen, guests were starting to dribble out of Teddi’s house. Rik helped Jean into a car, watched her drive off, and then did something with his phone. Called an Uber, most likely, because then Percy emerged from the house, and they exchanged a few words, and a few minutes later, a sedan pulled up, the illuminated ride-share sign flashing in the windshield. Rik climbed in, the Uber disappeared from the frame, and Percy got in his car and drove away. Rufus stopped on his way out to kick the purple glass sculpture that adorned Teddi’s lawn—which made Teddi draw in a sharp breath—and then walked down the sidewalk until he left the camera’s field of vision. Tucker stepped into view, stumbled on the steps, and caught up against the railing.
“He definitely looks wasted,” Shaw said.
“He’s got a lot of practice.” North leaned closer. “He knows how to fake it.”
After a few more missteps, Tucker got into the Beamer.
“It’s been parked there the whole time,” North murmured. “Nobody even came close to it.”
“But if someone wanted to get into his car, they had lots of opportunities before tonight.”
North nodded wordlessly. On the screen, Tucker drove away, car drifting back and forth across the double-yellow line.
“Well,” Teddi said breathlessly. “Does it mean something?”
North kept watching.
And there it was: 00:49:57. Right after midnight on July 5. A brown Ford beater without license plates, which had been sitting on the opposite side of the street, seemingly unoccupied, for the whole night, swung away from the curb and followed Tucker.
Chapter 7
BOARD-AND-batten siding. Streaky, peach-colored paint. Green fuzz along the bottom of the walls where shallow eaves left them exposed to summer thunderstorms, suggested fruit before ripeness. Or, less poetically, mold.
The Sunset Stayaway occupied a large lot in the area of St. Louis known as The Gate. It was a mixture of old warehouses, brick bungalows, crumbling tenements, and overgrown vacant lots. In places, The Gate was coming back to life—St. Louis University was spreading south, sprawling across I-44, and construction of new medical complexes and high-rise hospitals meant that money was coming. But money hadn’t reached the Sunset. Its original, single-story building hunched to the right; at the taller end, an ell of slightly newer construction offered two stories of rooms. A kid, no older than twenty, was smoking weed as he leaned out over the stairs. He was wearing a too-large Calvin and Hobbes t-shirt, and the sun glittered on his coils of silver and gold chains. When he noticed Shaw looking, he grinned, exposing a missing front tooth, and waved.
The office was tucked under the stairs, the door sheared off at one corner by the angle of the staircase, and Shaw had to duck to enter. Inside, the Sunset’s décor was consistent with its exterior: carpet worn down to the backing in places; particleboard furniture, chipped and dusty; a yellowing plastic display of tourist brochures: 1976 – CELEBRATE THE BICENTENNIAL WITH FIREWORKS AT THE ARCH and a sun-bleached brown MISSOURI – THE CAVE STATE! The girl behind the desk might have been out of high school, but if she was, Shaw guessed she’d skipped a few grades. She was black, her weave a lustrous henna red. The book in her lap was Goethe, but she looked like a girl in a commercial for a dating app—the kind who’d be on roller skates or wagging a lollipop at the viewer.
“Welcome to the Sunset Stayaway,” she said brightly. “By the hour or by the night?”
“That answers one question,” North said.
“Twenty dollars by the hour,” she said. “Thirty-five dollars for the night.”
“Why wouldn’t I pay for the whole night and only stay two hours?”
“You could, I guess, but that wouldn’t be very honest.”
“He doesn’t need two hours,” Shaw said.
“What the actual fuck?” North rounded on him.
“Oh no, that’s not what I meant.” To the girl, with a brilliant smile, Shaw said, “He’s definitely got the stamina.”
“Stop talking.”
“He’s a very active lover.”
“Ok. That’s enough.”
“But there’s this control issue, and I think probably thirty minutes, thirty-five tops, he hits his limit.”
“You little shit.”
“Oh my gosh, no, no, no. I hear how that sounded. He’s not, you know, premature. Not like that. He just wants to, um, ‘reach completion’ as Miss Vandermeak would have said in ninth-grade Health, and he’s not patient at the best of times.”
North’s eyes promised murder.
The girl was covering her mouth with one hand.
“We don’t want a room,” North said, the words brittle and painstakingly slow as he turned back to the girl. “We want to talk to you about Thursday night.”
“Oh.” Her expression fell. “You’re reporters or something?”
“No, we’re investigators.”
“Oh. Like with the cops?”
“We’re connected to one of the detectives on this case, yeah. Can you tell us who was working Thursday night?”
“I already went over this with, um,” she plucked a card from the mess of papers on the registration desk, “Detective Cao.”
Shaw grinned. “You’ve never been involved in a police investigation before, have you?”
The girl shook her head.
“You’re going to have to tell this story about a hundred more times.”
“Really?”
North shrugged. “Nature of the beast. Who was working Thursday?”
“I was.”
“And your name is?”
“Malika Hill. My grandparents own this place, but they’re too old to do anything. I’ve got a room in the back,” she pointed over her shoulder, “and I’ve got plenty of time to do my homework. Not now, I mean. I’m on summer break.”
“Goethe on summer break?” North asked. “That’s some heavy lifting.”
“He likes to make sure people know he’s read Goethe,” Shaw said.
“At least I did read Goethe,” North said, “instead of cutting up an entire copy of The Sorrows of Young Werther into paper dolls and hanging them all over my fucking apartment, so that when my roommate comes home to score for the first time in weeks, the cute little twink he brought back takes one look and says he doesn’t want any Children of the Corn shit and takes off and won’t answer any phone calls.”
“He bottles things up sometimes,” Shaw told the girl. “This is good. Let him get it all
out.”
“I was blueballed for another month.”
“It definitely doesn’t take you a month, North. Nobody has that kind of stamina. Like I was telling Malika, you reach completion in thirty minutes, thirty-five tops. And I’ve been one of your more patient and indulgent lovers.”
North was making a sound ominously like a tea kettle. In a strangled voice, he said, “Don’t. Say. Lovers.”
“Are you the only one who works here, then?” Shaw asked Malika.
She was watching North with huge eyes. “Kind of. Pops watches the desk so I can get some sleep, and Maw-maw helps with the rooms when she can. And we’ve got a girl who comes in and dusts once a week. If things get really busy, I call her and she comes over to help. But mostly, I do as much as I can. In a business like this, you make money by controlling costs—we don’t have the resources to expand, and our clientele isn’t interested in upgrades.” Eyes cast down, she gave a self-conscious smile and shrugged. “Olin School of Business.”
“What do you remember about Thursday night?”
“I’ve got a pretty good memory. Not much happened. I keep the office open until two; after that, I go to sleep. They have to buzz me awake, and I charge them four hours no matter how long they’re staying.”
“We’re looking for a couple of men—”
Malika pointed past them. Shaw glanced over his shoulder; beyond the glass door, he saw only a stretch of the parking lot. He looked back, but Malika was still pointing, so he checked the office door again. Then he understood: the office’s position at the juncture of the two wings and the angle of the staircase combined to limit the view out into the lot.
“I don’t know if Pops and Maw-maw did it on purpose,” she said. “I kind of think they did. Some people like privacy, and they like knowing that a snoopy motel clerk can’t tell anyone their business. If they pay for a room, they have to talk to me, and I’ve got a good memory for faces. But anybody else? They park on that side of the lot—” She gestured to the area blocked by the staircase. “—and they can come and go as much as they like. I won’t see a thing.”
“How about the man who rented the room?”
“George?” She quirked a smile and nodded at the motel guestbook. When North reached for it, she shook her head. “The detectives already took the pages he signed. George Takei. That’s what he put. I mean, I know I’m young, but I’m not an idiot.”