To the Power of Three

by Laura Lippman

  Josie preferred the local stations anyway, with their cheesy ads for cars and copiers and insurance. This time of day, these channels were filled with shows about judges—sarcastic, adamant, bossy judges, who cut so quickly to the heart of the matter, making questions of right and wrong look so simple. You—pay the rent. You—fix his car. You—replace the dress. The gavel banged and the losers bitched once outside the courtroom, but the judge’s decisions were final.

  30

  Dannon Estes could tell he made the detectives uncomfortable. Some people have gaydar, but Dannon had gay-hating-dar. Not that these guys were haters. Their reactions were more subtle than that. The younger one, who reminded Dannon of Alec Baldwin—circa Married to the Mob, moving through that hot-tub mist, back before he had gone totally to seed—had the general air of bafflement common to the hyperhets. What? You don’t like tits? You don’t like pussy? What’s that about?

  The older guy, the fatherly one—now, he was the type who felt sorry for Dannon. His stepfather had much the same air when he was forced to spend time with him, as if Dannon were missing a limb or something. Disabled, or differently abled, as Glendale students were encouraged to say.

  Then again, Dannon had made a point of informing these police officers he was gay, singing it out loud and proud. He couldn’t really blame them for being focused on it, given that it was the first thing he had told them about himself.

  “We understand you went to the prom with Perri Kahn,” the older guy had started, and Dannon had promptly interrupted him.

  “Just as friends. I’m gay. But I suppose Mrs. Kahn told you that.”

  “Um, no, that didn’t really come up.” The older guy was so clearly lying, determined to ignore the fact. You would think that Dannon had farted or something. “But you were friends, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Good friends?”

  “Pretty good, but just the past year.” Dannon, used to the fierce precision of the Glendale divas, would never be caught embroidering his social status in any way. That was one of the school’s deadly sins, an offense for which one would be taunted and punished. “We knew each other from theater stuff, going way back, but we didn’t start hanging out together until last fall.”

  “Would you say you were close?”

  “I suppose so.” I hoped so. I only built the past year of my life on that concept—being Perri Kahn’s new best friend.

  “She tell you anything about her…plans?”

  “How do you mean?” Shit, that was the wrong way to say it. “No, she didn’t tell me she had planned anything.”

  “But she told you something.”

  “Not really.” Technically true. She hadn’t told him anything.

  “You know, it’s just unusual for a thing like this to happen without anyone having an inkling.”

  Inkling. What a funny word. If Perri had been here, they would have exchanged a look or stifled their laughter. Inkling. It was like the riff from The Sunshine Boys, the whole laundry list of what words were funny, what words weren’t. Pickle, cucumber…

  “No, I didn’t have an inkling.”

  “Back at Columbine,” the handsome cop put in, “there was a Website and everything. And in some other school shootings, kids told people what they were going to do, showed off the gun, told people when it was going to go down.”

  “Yeah, only this wasn’t Columbine,” Dannon said. He was feeling strangely fearless. He had always been a behind-the-scenes guy, but maybe he was a better actor than he realized. “I mean, that’s what Ms. Paulson keeps telling us. Columbine was, like, about the school’s social hierarchy. This was something private among three friends that just happened to play out on school property.”

  “But why?”

  He shook his head. “I honestly don’t know.” And this was true, too. Perri had never explained her anger. Was it because she didn’t completely trust him? Then again, to the extent that she had confided in him, he had betrayed her, so perhaps she was shrewd enough to realize that Dannon didn’t deserve her trust.

  “Was she unhappy? Did she speak of suicide? Did she have some kind of grudge toward the dead girl?”

  He should never have agreed to speak to these men. Now that he was in too deep to turn back, he should just keep feigning ignorance. But Dannon had never been able to shake his own fascination with the story of the imperious three, broken at last.

  “Perri never spoke of it. To me. To anyone.”

  “The shooting?”

  “No. I mean, yes—she never said she was going to shoot anybody. But she also never told me why she had stopped talking to Kat.”

  The policemen didn’t say anything. Dannon understood that their silence was deliberate, one intended to make him feel uncomfortable. Old Giff had once expounded on the possibilities of stillness, citing Kevin Spacey’s The Iceman Cometh, how powerful a pause could be after so much steady, constant talk, talk, talk. Despite this insight into his own manipulation, Dannon just couldn’t shut up. He loved to speak of Perri, relished the fact that he knew her, that he had something to offer.

  “There was a lot of speculation over the past year. The divas—”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The bitchy popular girls. Anyway, they were always a little antagonistic toward Perri because she didn’t follow their dictates, you know? She wasn’t scared of them. But she was friends with Kat, who was, like, the queen of the school, so they left Perri alone. Until she and Kat stopped hanging out together, and then they started all these rumors.”

  “Such as?”

  “They were rumors. Bogus.”

  “Still, it might have bothered Perri. Being gossiped about.”

  “It didn’t. She was above that stuff.”

  “Dannon.” The older cop was so much like his stepfather it was freaky. Like, right now, the way he placed his hands on his knees when he was trying to show he was very, very serious about something. His stepfather did that all the time. Hands on knees, Bill was getting serious. “Dannon, what did the girls—the divas—say about Perri?”

  “They said she was gay, that she had fallen in love with Kat, and Kat had dropped her.”

  “And that wasn’t true?”

  “No.” He laughed, although he was sure that made him look weird, laughing. “If I’m sure of anything, it’s that Perri Kahn was not gay.”

  “But did Kat say those things, too?”

  “The only things Kat Hartigan said to me during almost ten years of school were ‘Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!’ and ‘Looking good, Dannon.”’

  The older detective smiled at Dannon’s imitation of Kat, but he couldn’t know just how pitch-perfect it was. Dannon was an excellent mimic. He had cracked Perri up, imitating Kat and their principal and the diva crowd, among others.

  “That’s basically what Kat Hartigan said to everyone. And that’s why she was popular. She was nice. Not two-faced. But kind of bland, too. Perri said she was banal.”

  “And that’s why they weren’t friends anymore? Because Kat was boring?”

  “Banal.” It was such an excellent word; Dannon couldn’t imagine settling for boring old “boring” when one could say “banal” instead. Maybe the cop didn’t know what it meant. “She said Kat was banal, and she had a point. No one can be that nice, you know? But Kat would never spread a rumor—not about Perri, not about anyone. Not her style. Then again, she didn’t stop it either.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “All she had to do was say why Perri was mad at her, instead of letting people gossip. She had that kind of power. But she wouldn’t.”

  “And this made Perri angry, her refusal to stop the rumor?”

  Dannon allowed himself a melodramatic sigh, only to be surprised by the surge of real emotion beneath it. “Perri didn’t give a shit what people said about her. She was beyond that.”

  “Did you know she had a gun?”

  Shit. He thought they had moved past that topic. “Um…”

&
nbsp; “It wouldn’t be a crime, it doesn’t implicate you in any way. But we do want to establish without a doubt that Perri was the one who brought the gun to school. Did she show you the gun? Did she mention having one or how she came to get it?”

  This was a trap. It had to be a trap. If he said yes, there would be more questions, questions he honestly couldn’t answer, but who would believe his ignorance of Perri’s plans once he admitted she had shown him the gun? And if he said yes and the Kahns found out he had known about the gun, they would never forgive him. Oh, he had tried to be strategic, tried to have it all ways—be a friend to Perri, keep her confidences while trying to protect her against her own self-destructive impulses. He was so smart he was stupid.

  “Mom? Ma?”

  His mother, who had been hovering nearby, appeared instantly. Dannon had many beefs with his mom, starting with his name—a gay boy should not be saddled with the brand name for a product that’s famous for having fruit on the bottom—and continuing through her marriage to his humorless idiot of a stepdad. But, ultimately, she was always there for him, in a way that no one else was. She might not believe in him the way Eloise Kahn did, but she always believed him, taking his side against everyone. Except his stepfather.

  “What is it, honey?”

  “I don’t want to talk to the police anymore. Do I have to?”

  The good-looking one, Infante, stood. He was over six feet, and his five o’clock shadow gave him a menacing look, but his intent was clearly to charm. Hey, flirt with me, Dannon wanted to say. She’s taken, but I’m totally available.

  “It’s always better for people to cooperate, ma’am. It’s a mistake for innocent people not to talk. Makes them look guilty.”

  “Dannon isn’t guilty of anything.”

  “So he should talk to us, don’t you think?” The detective continued to try to ply his handsomeness, but Dannon’s mother was indifferent to conventional charm tactics. She had said no to a lot of men before her second husband came along, and his main charm seemed to be his earning power. “You can sit in, ma’am, if it would make you feel better.”

  “I don’t want to talk to them at all, Mom. I…I…” Dannon clutched his stomach, groaning. Oh, yes, he had missed his calling, staying behind the scenes. “I’m having that stomach thing again. You know how I get. I gotta go. I gotta go, or I’m going to shit my pants right here.”

  He ran from the room, dashing into the powder room in the hall, where he didn’t turn on the light because it would trigger the exhaust fan, and he wanted to hear what was going on in the living room.

  “He does have a sensitive tummy,” his mother said. “Always has. Dannon’s very sensitive. But I’m sure he doesn’t know anything about what happened at the school, close as he and Perri were. If he did, he would have confided in me. Dannon tells me everything.”

  I did once, Mom. When had he stopped? Upon her remarriage? When he had finally come out, at least to himself? No, earlier than that, back in middle school, when a cruel girl had mocked him for having boobs. A girl who happened to be named Perri Kahn. That had been the day that Dannon realized there were things in his life his mother could not fix and that confiding such problems in her would only serve to make her feel sad and ineffectual. He had sucked it up, endured what a fat gay boy had to endure, made it through middle school and into high school, which was marginally kinder. By high school the groups had solidified, the territory had been meted out, and the warfare had subsided. High school had been fine for everyone but the most obvious misfits, the ones who courted trouble. Dannon kept his head down, his profile low.

  And then one day Perri Kahn had arrived in his life—a whirlwind, a benediction. At first he thought it was only because she needed an ally to get Old Giff to pick Anyone Can Whistle as the fall musical. When that battle was fought and won and then lost, he assumed that Perri was still hanging with him because she had divined his talent for eavesdropping and wanted to know things he might have heard or overheard, in places she could never go. But no, she was a genuine friend.

  He had never had the nerve to mention how mean she had been, back in middle school. He was scared that she had forgotten he was once an object of scorn; reminded, she might drop him rather than confront her own cruelty. He accepted Perri as she believed herself now to be, a disciple of fairness, bordering on self-righteous. Perhaps Perri had sought him out as a penance. She had been trying to set a lot of things right in these past few months, reaching out to all sorts of people she had once wronged. But he was the only one she had befriended. He was the one she had hung out with—not Skeevy Eve Muhly, not Fiona Steiff, not Binnie-the-Albino Snyder. Just him, Dannon. Only he was sufficiently cool enough to be Perri Kahn’s friend, and he would protect her as long as he could.

  Just a little rumpus, she had promised him, holding the gun to her cheek. No big deal.

  “He knows something,” Lenhardt said as they headed out of the cul-de-sac and onto one of the long, looping drives that ran along the spine of Old Town Road. “He didn’t have the balls to lie to us, so he bolted. But he wasn’t smooth enough to cover his panic.”

  “Smooth? By his own testimony, he literally almost shit himself.”

  “Would you have known? If we hadn’t known going in, if he hadn’t made a point of telling us?”

  “Known what?”

  “That he was a fag.”

  “Oh, yeah, he’d suck a dick.”

  Lenhardt had felt sorry for the kid. Not because he was gay per se, but because he was so obviously, painfully gay, a pudgy little stereotype who might as well lisp through life with a “Kick Me” sign affixed to his back. It was one thing to be swishy and arch within the safe boundaries of Glendale High School, with its “No Hate Zone” sign in the front hall. College would be another version of the same bubble world. Eventually, however, this kid was going to take up residence on a planet where everyone didn’t get all warm and fuzzy at the sight of some gay guy, inviting him in and asking him to play fairy godfather with their lives—redo the furniture, restock the fridge, rearrange the closet.

  His cell phone buzzed, and the caller ID showed a name that didn’t register, not at first: A.CUNNING.

  “Lenhardt.”

  “Sergeant? It’s Alexa Cunningham from Glendale High School. There are some things going on here, odd things. A theft…well, I’m not sure how to explain it over the phone. It’s terribly complicated. But it just struck me that it could be key to your investigation. Could you meet with me?”

  He sighed, looking at his wristwatch. He had promised to try to make Jessica’s swim meet tonight.

  “Could this wait until tomorrow?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Should I come up to the school?”

  “No, I think it’s better if I’m not seen talking to you, as what I’m doing might be considered insubordinate. Is there some place we could meet, sort of off the beaten track?”

  “There’s a place on Joppa, called Wagner’s. Can you swing by there about five?”

  “Absolutely.”

  He studied his phone. He could call his wife and tell her he was a likely no-show at the meet, or he could not call and hope the gods were merciful, that he would slide in toward the end and never be missed.

  He did the chickenshit thing and left the message on the home phone, knowing that no one was there to pick up.

  31

  It was his mom’s idea to cut flowers from her garden when Peter said he was thinking about visiting Josie Patel, see how she was holding up. “This is so thoughtful of you,” she said, arranging the purplish flowers in bright tissue paper. Peter was a little humbled by his mother’s pride, given that he wouldn’t have dreamed of making such a visit without Dale Hartigan’s encouragement. Peter had never been particularly fond of Josie, and he liked to think he was not a hypocrite. Show business required so much phoniness that he worked hard not to make it a habit in his real life, insofar as it was possible.

  To Peter, Josie Pat
el was nothing more than Kat’s pesky shadow, and there had been countless times that he had wished he could shut her in a drawer, just as Mrs. Darling had captured Peter Pan’s dark twin. The summer that Peter and Kat had dated, Josie had come to the pool with Kat every day, then gone to movies and restaurants with them, even to the parties where she was clearly out of place. Because while Kat looked so much older than she was—Peter had no idea she was fifteen until he was already head over heels—Josie looked like a middle-schooler.

  Perri had tagged along, too, once or twice, but she was smart enough to realize she wasn’t wanted. Josie never seemed to get that. Or if she did, she didn’t care. She rode in his backseat, the little chaperone, and he began to suspect that it was at Kat’s invitation. Then there came a July day when Josie simply stopped coming along, and Peter understood that this was Kat’s signal that she was ready to be alone with him, to allow more than the tentative good-night kisses she had allotted up to that point. They spent the rest of the summer looking for empty houses, hidden spots along the Prettyboy Reservoir, anywhere that Kat could cocktease him into oblivion.

  Mrs. Patel answered the door. Not exactly a hot mom, not like Mrs. Hartigan, but pretty in a worn way.

  “Mrs. Patel? I’m Peter Lasko. I know Josie through Kat, and…well, I wanted to pay her a visit.”

  “What beautiful irises,” she said. Peter, used to compliments, thought for a moment that she was referencing his eyes. Then he remembered the purple flowers that his mother had chosen. So that’s what they were, irises.

  “I wasn’t sure if it was right to bring flowers—she’s not sick, exactly. But everyone likes flowers, right?”

  “And Josie loves purple. Let me get a vase for those while you go up to her room.”