The Merchant of Death (Playing the Fool, #2)

by Lisa Henry

  “You can barely see mine!” Henry put a hand to his throat.

  “That doesn’t mean you can keep this ruse up for long.”

  “I know.” Henry extended his leg to nudge Mac’s shin with his toe. “So you’d better hurry back with that information.”

  Mac didn’t even bother to roll his eyes again. His exasperation only seemed to fuel Henry. “Henry?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Promise you won’t do anything stupid.”

  “Anything you think is stupid, or anything I think is stupid?”

  “Either. Both.”

  “It’s a little late for that, Mac. Don’t you think?”

  Mac nodded and stared at the floor. “Yeah.”

  He would have liked another kiss before he went. But he settled for reaching out and ruffling Henry’s . . . wig. “You get in trouble, call me.”

  He handed Henry a business card. And left.

  Viola sat on the tweed couch in Stacy’s house and watched Remy’s card tricks.

  She liked Remy. He was easy to talk to, and he didn’t seem to think she was stupid. He smiled a lot, but there was something sad about him. Watching him was like watching a movie all lit in cool colors, with slow, quiet music, and you knew that even if the characters did some fun things together, it ultimately wouldn’t be a movie that made you laugh.

  Remy showed her how to sneak cards up her sleeve and then pull them out at the right moment without anyone noticing. Then he taught her to play poker, which made Viola go very still for a moment as a bitter, dark, lurching feeling snuffled around her mind. Because she did know how to play. She had known. And then that knowledge had fallen away.

  There was a video game she and Sebastian used to play where you raced cars. One of the courses was a series of mountains, and huge chunks of rock fell from above and bounced on the track, and you had to weave around them or be crushed. That was how Viola imagined her brain—some big, crumbling thing that existed outside of her body. All she could do now was stare up at all she had once been, wondering if she was about to be crushed by all she was losing.

  She could feel the moments she wasn’t behaving right. Like demanding pink marshmallows in the café. That was little kid stuff. Or like telling Sebastian about the angel. Angels weren’t supposed to be real. But this one was. Mr. Crowley had been afraid of it. He’d seen its shadow in his room. And now he was gone.

  And Dreama said that angels were all around. That they watched you and then reported back to God if you were good or bad.

  Viola wondered who reported back to God if the angels were bad.

  She tried to pay attention to Remy and relearn poker. After a few hands, she started to get the hang of it.

  “You’ve got a better poker face than Henry,” Remy said. He was very thin and very pale. He was maybe even younger than Viola. His hair was black with red tips, and he had a metal ring in his lip and a bar in his eyebrow.

  “Sebastian,” she corrected.

  Remy laughed. “Sebastian. Doesn’t seem to fit a guy like that.”

  “It’s from Shakespeare.”

  “Right. Sebastian and Viola. From the one with the storm. The Tempest?”

  “No.” Other people got things wrong, but no one thought they were stupid, or that they needed to be kept somewhere special, away from regular people. Sebastian said life wasn’t fair. But that you had to learn to make the best of that unfairness. “Twelfth Night. There’s a storm in that one too.”

  Remy grinned. “Shakespeare liked his storms.”

  “Sebby hates storms.”

  Remy’s smile faded, and he shuffled the cards. “I know.”

  “I used to take care of him during storms, but I don’t know who does now.”

  “I do, sometimes.”

  “Are you two in love?”

  Remy paused for only a second before riffling the deck. He shook his head slowly.

  “Why not?”

  Remy glanced up. His eyes were greenish blue, like the plastic cup she’d used for brushing her teeth when she was little. Sebby’d had a blue one. Once he had accidentally used Viola’s, and when she’d pointed that out to him, he’d said, “They look basically the same.”

  “But not exactly,” she’d said.

  “Well, you can’t choose who you’re in love with, right?” Remy shrugged. “Henry just doesn’t feel it for me.”

  Which meant Remy felt it for Sebby. Viola stored that knowledge away, pleased and sad. Maybe she could tell Sebastian that Remy loved him. Sometimes it wasn’t that you didn’t love someone—it was that you were afraid they didn’t love you back. And once you knew they did, it was easier to let yourself be in love with them. This thought came from somewhere distant—a horizon Viola was always trying to see past, where her adult self lived with a healthy brain and grown-up thoughts. Sebastian said sorry. He said it all the time, and sometimes Viola didn’t know why, didn’t know what he was sorry for. But every now and then, she thought maybe she did.

  Stacy came in and looked for bread to make a sandwich. Viola studied her tattoos again. She had so many of them. Viola thought she might like to get a tattoo. The bread was moldy, but Viola told Stacy she could put peanut butter and jelly on crackers, and it would taste pretty good. Stacy went down the hall to see if Gerald had any crackers.

  Remy was dealing another hand when Carson came out of the back lounge. That room had a TV like Viola’s room at St. Albinus. And it smelled like smoke. There were couches and mattresses back there in case people needed to sleep over. Jo and Stacy were the only ones who had their own rooms. And Sebastian, though he let Remy sleep in his room when he was away. The only thing his friends weren’t allowed to touch in his room was his locked drawer. Viola thought maybe that was where he kept the ring their mother had given him. She’d given Viola one too. A long time ago. They were cheap plastic; she’d gotten them out of a little dispenser outside a Chinese restaurant. She hadn’t had enough quarters to get two, so she’d promised they’d come back. But Sebby had shown her how to trick the machine with a hairpin into giving them another ring. She’d warned him never to do that again, but she’d smiled, glad they could both have rings, just like Viola and Sebastian in Twelfth Night.

  Viola still had hers in her box at St. Albinus. And Sebby’s was probably in that drawer. She wished she could see. Maybe Remy knew Sebastian’s hairpin trick and could get locked things open.

  Carson grunted.

  Viola didn’t like Carson. He was old and had a mean face, and he stared too much. It wasn’t polite to stare. He leaned against the living room doorway and watched them. Viola could see Remy’s muscles tense, but he continued to deal. “All right, Vi,” Remy said. “The wager.”

  “Remy.” Carson’s voice was quiet.

  “’lo, Carson,” Remy said, still not meeting his gaze. He looked at Viola instead and scooted some chips toward the center of the table. “Shall we play it dangerous?”

  “Remy, you promised me something.”

  “I know, Carson. But I’m busy now.”

  “You want your cash or not?”

  “Maybe later.” Remy was trying to act like he didn’t care what Carson was saying, but Viola could see how tense his shoulders were.

  Carson shifted, his hands in his pockets. “I’ll need more from you, for making me wait.”

  Remy finally looked up. “You know, I’m not actually that hard up right now.” Anger made his voice rise. “So maybe you should forget it.”

  Stacy appeared in the hall behind Carson, a box of crackers in hand. “What’s going on?” She pushed past Carson and into the kitchen area.

  “Remy and I were just discussing his finances,” Carson said. Viola hated his voice, low and clotted sounding. Hated his blank stare and the way he hefted his body around like every air molecule in the room belonged to him. And she hated how he grinned when he caught her watching him.

  Stacy grabbed peanut butter from the cabinet. “Remy’s doing some errands for me. I’ll be p
aying him for it.” She unscrewed the jar and jammed a knife in it, pulling out a massive glob of peanut butter. “So no need for you to lose any sleep over his finances.” She was trying to sound casual, but Viola could tell she was angry too.

  Carson remained in the doorway. “But you put limits on where he spends the money you give him, like he’s a fucking child. You’re not a child, are you, Rem?”

  “Fuck off,” Remy said, still studying his cards. “Both of you, fuck off. Viola and I are trying to play.”

  Stacy focused on her crackers. Carson said, “I’m going out.”

  “I don’t need money from either of you,” Remy said loudly. “I’ll earn my own damn living and spend it however I want.”

  No one responded. After a moment, Carson crossed the living room. He squeezed Viola’s shoulder as he passed. “Good luck, sweetheart. He plays dirty.” He shut the door hard behind him, and Viola could hear his loud footsteps on the stairs. She twitched her shoulder, trying to shrug off where he’d touched her. Stacy went back to her room.

  “I don’t like him,” Viola whispered.

  “Nobody does.” Remy leaned forward. “You know what, though? He thinks with his little head. And people like that are easy to control.”

  Viola laughed, though she wasn’t sure what Remy meant. She waited for him to lay his cards down.

  “Are you laughing at what I said, or is that the mirth of someone who knows she’s won?” Remy asked.

  “You’ll just have to find out.”

  “You’re a tough one to beat, Vi.”

  “I used to know how to play. Then I forgot after my accident. That was a long time ago.” She suddenly couldn’t stop talking, even though Sarah and Dreama at St. Albinus were always telling her not to say too much at once. “Sebby thinks he hurt me. But he didn’t. The other man did. The man was hurting Sebby; just Sebby didn’t want to say so. But I can’t talk to him about that. He feels bad even though I tell him it’s okay. I know he didn’t hurt me.”

  “Your brother,” Remy said slowly, “has an odd tendency to believe he’s hurt people when he hasn’t. And to fail to notice when he actually has.”

  Viola set her cards down too. Sebastian must have hurt Remy a lot by not being in love with him. Once, in the hospital—not St. Albinus but a real hospital, a long time ago—Viola’s roommate had been a boy who’d needed surgery to remove a tumor in his brain. Viola had liked him a lot. She’d made him a card. Later his friend had visited him, and Viola had heard them laughing about something, and then the boy said, “The retarded girl gave it to me.”

  Remy turned his cards over, and Viola did the same. She looked down and was embarrassed to realize the cards she’d played were completely random. They didn’t mean anything when they were put together, and they certainly didn’t beat Remy’s flush. She pushed the chips at Remy.

  “Did you play dirty?” she demanded.

  “What?” He paused in gathering the chips.

  “Did you play dirty, like he said?” Viola was suddenly very angry, but she wasn’t sure why.

  “No,” Remy said softly, shaking his head.

  “You played dirty.” She said it loudly, meanly, and she said it even though she knew he hadn’t played dirty—she’d played foolishly.

  She got up and went to Sebastian’s room, which was right beside Stacy’s. She shut the door, and got down beside the dresser, rattling and pulling on Sebby’s locked drawer until the knob broke off. Then she hurled the knob against the wall, flopped down on the bed, and stared at the ceiling.

  St. Albinus. Mac couldn’t stay away from the place. He was there the next morning, knocking on Henry’s door. Ridiculous, because he had more to worry about than this little pantomime. There were OPR and John Doe, for starters. Hell, there were a hundred different things that should have been given higher priority than the Henry Page circus, but, somehow, here he was.

  “Shit, Henry,” he said in an undertone as Henry reappeared at last from Viola’s small bathroom. “Seriously?”

  Henry was wearing a summery dress that showed off his very shapely—and very shaved—legs.

  “Viola,” Henry reminded him in an undertone. “Have you called in Bosslady yet?”

  “No.” He tried to lift his gaze from the hemline that swung around Henry’s knees. “For starters, you don’t have a crime. And, if you did, it would be a matter for the local police, not the FBI.”

  “What do you mean I don’t have a crime? The emails, hello?”

  “That’s a motive,” Mac said. “And if we had an actual crime to go with it, it would be a damn good motive. But it’s a big leap between Mr. Crowley leaving his money to this place, and Mr. Crowley getting murdered. You get that, right?”

  “Shit, Mac, it’s a classic! Call in the cops, throw in your patented glare, rough the bad guys up a bit, play the music, and let’s get out of here!”

  “What?” He rubbed his forehead. “What music?”

  “You know. The music.” Henry spread his fingers as though he was playing an imaginary piano. “The da-dum!”

  “Are you doing the music from Law & Order?”

  “Da-dum,” Henry repeated. “Cue montage of crime scene photographs and newspaper headlines.”

  This was one of those moments—and there had been a lot—when Mac felt like he was watching two different Henrys. The manic, fun, reckless one who demanded attention with his outlandish behavior, and the other one. The one who tried to pass unnoticed in the background. The one who was afraid to get pinned down. The one who, when Mac looked at him too closely through all the smoke and mirrors, tried to hide. The real one?

  “It’s ‘duhn-duhn,’” he said.

  “It’s ‘da-dum,’” Henry insisted.

  “‘Da-dum’ is like, Disney princesses doing chores with the help of woodland creatures. Law & Order is definitely ‘duhn-duhn.’”

  “Oh please.” The light summer dress billowed as Henry twisted away. “God. Federal Bureau of Incompetence!”

  “Henry,” he said in a low voice, while Henry busied himself fixing his hair in the mirror. “Henry. Sebastian.”

  Henry’s hand stilled, hovering over a glittery barrette. “Don’t call me that.”

  “It’s your name, isn’t it?”

  Henry fixed the barrette in place. “I suppose.”

  He didn’t push it.

  “I don’t see how this doesn’t concern the FBI,” Henry said. “It’s extortion.”

  “Where’s the proof?”

  “Who the hell leaves their money to the place where they spent twenty years of their life imprisoned and forced to eat weird pudding?”

  “Weird pudding?”

  “I had the pudding earlier, Mac. It was weird.”

  “Maybe Crowley liked it here.”

  “He hated it here.” Henry smoothed his wig. “Though to be fair, he kind of hated everything. Especially the Japs.”

  Henry knocked over—Mac suspected on purpose—a package of stickers, and bent to pick them up.

  Mac looked away. Looked back.

  Henry was doing this on purpose. He wanted him to look. Or he wanted him to feel too uncomfortable to look. And Mac would be damned if he was going to give him that satisfaction.

  He looked and kept looking. Henry was going to raise some suspicion with those legs. Yes, they were smooth—ungodly smooth—and yeah, they were slender, but they were muscled in a way he doubted the real Viola’s were. He didn’t know why Henry hadn’t opted for jeans again. Except that Henry was stunning in that dress, and of course the dress provided easier access, which he should absolutely not be thinking about, because he wasn’t here to grope Henry, and besides, those clothes belonged to Henry’s sister, who was in long-term care. Should have been a boner killer.

  Henry straightened and set the stickers back on the shelf.

  “So what’s . . .” He stopped. He’d almost asked, What’s wrong with Viola? Probably not the best way to frame the question. “Has your sister been here a
long time?”

  Henry added a little more liner under his eyes. “Seven years.”

  “Has it helped?”

  Henry met his gaze in the mirror. “She’s not going to be cured, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “I don’t know what I’m asking. I don’t know anything about her.”

  “That’s probably for the best.”

  He picked at some lint on Viola’s blanket. “So that’s a ‘shut up’?”

  “Whatever the polite, fed-friendly version of ‘shut up’ is.”

  He nodded. “Little cool out for a sundress, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know. Pretty hot in here.” Henry turned to face him. “I wasn’t sure you’d come back.”

  “I said I’d get the information, didn’t I?” Actually, he hadn’t said that. But he’d gone and done Henry’s bidding anyway. He wasn’t sure he believed any of this stuff about Crowley and an extortion plot, but something was going on at St. Albinus that had Henry worried enough to place his sister in hiding. And Henry wasn’t really the paranoid type. For all his seeming recklessness, Henry was careful about what he involved himself in.

  “But you don’t have any information. And you still came back to check on me.”

  “I do have information. I told you, I can’t touch the law firm without sending up red flags. I’d need the Bureau’s backing. And Carlisle’s clean.”

  “One traffic ticket.”

  “Yep.”

  “And you’re waiting on a callback from his previous employer?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I don’t think we have time to make polite inquiries, Mac.”

  “What sort of inquiries do you suggest we make? The kind where we tell Carlisle you looked at his emails, then slam his head into a table and ask if he stole Crowley’s money?”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  Henry’s hands were on his hips. The shadows of his collarbone above the neckline of the dress made Mac swallow.

  “Not a game, Henry,” he warned.

  Henry bent forward and placed his hands on his knees. Looked Mac in the eye. “I know that, Mac. My sister’s involved. Don’t you think I know that?”

  “I think you want to do the right thing. And the right thing is stepping back and letting local authorities start an official investigation.”