Aphrodite

by Russell Andrews

  Much to his surprise, Justin Westwood decided that what he’d do was go see about a yoga lesson.

  Deena Harper’s class was just ending. Justin peered in from the street, through the tinted plate-glass window that separated Deena’s studio from the sidewalk. She was wearing a pair of black tights and a black tank top. No shoes, just a pair of thick gray wool socks. He saw two middle-aged women doing their best to unfold their legs and stand up. And one young man—Justin thought it was the guy who ran the computer store a couple of buildings down—who seemed amazingly fit and remained in a sitting position, legs folded, breathing deeply in and out. Finally, the computer guy stood up and all three people handed Deena some money. She thanked the two women and kissed the guy lightly on the cheek, then the three students emerged onto the street in front of Justin. He nodded at them, hesitated, aware that they were all watching him as he stepped through the doorway into the yoga room.

  “Hey,” he said, casually.

  Deena looked up, surprised. But she smiled when she saw him.

  “I’ll be with you in a second.”

  She dashed into a back room and Justin had time to survey the studio. Not all that much to survey, really. A few gym mats on the floor, several more rolled up and propped against a corner. One whole wall was a mirror. There were a couple of chalk boards with strange, non-English words on them: trikonasana and sirsasana and parsvakonasana. Across from the mirror was a small poster, handmade, that said, My religion is kindness.—Dalai Lama. The room was clean and clutter free, but somehow it radiated a degree of warmth and serenity that pleased him.

  Justin looked at himself in the mirror, bent down to see how close he could get to touching his toes. He got just about to his knees, heard himself grunt. He decided he should look up, check out his form. It wasn’t pretty, that much was for sure. Made less pretty by the nerdy East End Harbor Police uniform he was wearing. It looked more like a Boy Scout uniform than something that should be on a cop. And it was all made even uglier when, unfortunately, Deena chose that moment to return from the back room. Justin looked up at her, his arms dangling in front of him, his legs bent, his head cocked, his uniform sleeves snagged a few unsightly inches above his wrists. He straightened up as fast as he could, felt his back wrench, decided there was no way in hell he was going to acknowledge the pain and show this woman that he was barely capable of bending over.

  “Ever do yoga?” Deena asked.

  “Can’t you tell from my expert technique? I used to be a black belt.”

  “Wrong discipline,” she said. “No belts in yoga. Other than that, you were totally believable.”

  He winced now, wanted desperately to stretch his back, but that’s when he noticed that standing behind Deena, as if hiding, was a small girl. She looked like a miniature of the older woman.

  “This is Kendall,” Deena said. “This is Mr. Westwood. Or is it Officer Westwood?”

  “Justin,” he said. “It saves a lot of confusion. You can even make it simpler and call me Jay.”

  The little girl poked her head out, smiled shyly, a charmer of a smile, then ducked behind her mother again. Justin knew what he should say. He used to be good with kids. Why is such a beautiful little girl hiding, that’s what he should ask her. If I were that beautiful, I would definitely not be hiding But nothing came out of his mouth. He just stood there awkwardly, looking at mother and daughter.

  “So,” Deena said finally. “Is there news?” He looked startled, his brow furrowed in confusion, so she said, “You know. About Susanna and …everything.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Not exactly.”

  “I thought maybe you’d come to give me an update. Thought maybe you’d caught them.”

  “I’m just passing by.”

  “Is anything happening?”

  “Sure,” he said, but it didn’t sound convincing, even to him. “Lots of stuff.”

  “That’s very reassuring. I’m sure I’ll sleep soundly now.”

  “Aren’t you sleeping?”

  “No,” Deena said, “as a matter of fact, I’m not.”

  “Bad dreams?”

  She looked as if she wanted to say something, but glanced down at the little girl and thought better of it—why put bad dreams into her head—and just nodded. All she said was, “Are there any other kind?”

  “He doesn’t know you were there,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You might have reasons for your dreams, what you saw. But whoever that guy is, he thinks he got away with it. He doesn’t know there was a witness.”

  “And you’re telling me this because …?”

  “Because sometimes when people have bad dreams, it’s not just the things they’ve seen. It’s not just what’s real. It’s the things they’re afraid might happen to them. So I thought I should make it really clear that nothing’s going to happen to you. There’s no reason for anything to happen. He doesn’t know you exist.”

  Deena was silent for a moment. Then the right side of her mouth flickered upward in a half smile. “I guess I should have thought of that myself, huh? Could’ve helped out my beauty sleep.”

  Justin was surprised to hear himself say, “I don’t think you need too much help there.”

  The rest of her mouth managed to smile. They stood, facing each other, Justin shifting back and forth on the balls of his feet, feeling slightly foolish.

  “Well …” she said.

  “Well …” he said. “I have to take Kendall over to the library. They’re having a special kids’ book thing. Somebody from Sesame Street or Between the Lions or one of those shows. A storytelling hour.”

  “Is it all right if I walk you over there?” he asked, directing his question to the little girl, who was still clutching her mother’s waist and trying to remain unseen. “I’d really like to.”

  Again, a quick dart of the head, an even quicker smile. “Okay,” the girl said. “It’s okay with me.”

  Deena patted her on the head, looked up at Justin, and added, “It’s okay with me, too.”

  9

  The library was three blocks farther down Main Street, tucked into a residential block. It should have taken them no more than ten minutes to make the stroll. But they were slowed down when a blue Jaguar, driving on the other side of the road, passed them by, stopped suddenly, and began honking its horn. Justin peered across the street, heard someone call out, “Jay? For chrissake, Jay, is that you?” He knew he had to do something—the guy was getting ready to hop out of the car and Justin knew that he’d dash across the street to meet them—so he held up his hand and walked slowly, lumberingly, over to the driver.

  “I can’t believe it,” the guy behind the wheel said. He looked comfortable in the Jag, like he belonged there. His clothes were casual but very expensive, and he was wearing a watch that probably cost two grand. He lifted the arm with the watch and waved his hand at Justin’s police uniform. “Is it Halloween?”

  “Can I help you?” Justin said.

  “It’s me! It’s Jordy. Chris Jordan! I know I put on a few pounds, but from the looks of it so have—” He hesitated, now sounding unsure of himself. “You are Jay Westwood, right?”

  Justin didn’t say anything. He adjusted his sunglasses, tipping them a fraction of an inch higher on the bridge of his nose.

  “Look,” the driver of the Jaguar said, “I heard about Alicia. I tried to get in touch with you—a lot of us did—but you kind of disappeared.”

  “I’m sorry,” Justin said. “I don’t remember any Chris Jordan.”

  “What?” And as Justin turned away, started heading across the street, the driver called after him, “Jay! What the hell are you doing? Jay, for God’s sake! You’re just gonna walk away? You walk away from college, you walk away from your friends, now you’re going to walk away from your old roomie?”

  But Justin didn’t turn back. Even when the driver said, “Jay, I’ve got a place in Southampton. I’m listed. If you want to, call me.” He just crossed th
e street, didn’t turn around until he heard the car speed away. Then he went back to stand beside Deena.

  “What was that all about?” she asked.

  “Don’t know,” Justin said. “I guess he thought he knew me.”

  “Sounds like he did know you,” Deena said. “Sounds like he knew you from college.” When Justin didn’t say anything, Deena asked, “Where’d you go to school?” When she didn’t get an answer, she said, “Justin, where’d you go, a local college? That’s nothing to be ashamed of, you know. I mean, if you’re embarrassed because you didn’t go to a good school, or you dropped out, come on … I bet a few of the guys on the force here didn’t even go to college. Or maybe they went to a junior college. Hey, I didn’t go to the world’s greatest school either.”

  “I don’t like to talk much about my college days,” Justin said.

  Deena chewed on her lower lip for a moment. “He looked pretty successful,” she said. “The guy in the Jaguar. But being a policeman is nothing to be ashamed—”

  “I don’t like to talk about that, either,” Justin said.

  Then he nodded his head, jutting his chin forward, indicating that they should continue on their way to the library.

  When they arrived, Kendall—whom Deena sometimes called Kenny or Ken—went running in ahead of them. By the time Justin and Deena got up the steps and to the librarian’s desk, the little girl was comfortably settled amid a horde of youngsters in a room directly behind the foyer. The room had a sliding door separating it from the entry hall, but the door was open. A middle-aged man with a large monkey puppet on his hand was already addressing the excited children.

  As they sidled in closer to the doorway, the librarian looked up from her desk and saw Deena. Justin realized he’d never been in the East End Harbor Library before. Out of habit, he glanced down at the librarian’s nameplate. Her name was Adrienne.

  “Terrible thing, wasn’t it,” Adrienne whispered to Deena. From the way she said the words, Justin knew immediately that she was one of those people who got extraordinary pleasure from gossiping over terrible things.

  “You mean about Susanna?” Deena asked and Adrienne put her hand to her mouth. “Sshhh,” she said and pointed toward the kids nearby. Then she nodded vigorously, quietly saying, “Yes, I mean Susanna,” and Deena whispered back, “Terrible.”

  “She was in here the day she died.”

  “Really? Checking out a book?”

  Adrienne shook her head. “Using the computer. This one right here.” She tilted her head in the direction of a large desktop model, probably three or four years old. It sat to the left of the front door, in the foyer. “She was very mysterious about it. Didn’t want me looking over her shoulder. Not that I would anyway.”

  Justin stepped forward now. “What was she working on? Did she say?”

  Adrienne put her finger to her lips again. “Who are you?”

  “I’m with the police department here.”

  Adrienne nodded vigorously again. “I can see that. Ohhhhh yes— I’ve seen you directing traffic. Seems to me you slow things down rather than speed things up. What kind of crazy system is that?”

  Her quiet rant was interrupted by a chorus of laughter from the kids in the room behind them. The monkey puppet was singing a goofy song. You could see that the actor who had the puppet on his hand was really doing the singing. He was making no effort to hide that fact. But none of the kids were even looking at him. They were all staring delightedly at the fuzzy creature on the end of his arm as if he were a totally separate entity.

  “Do you know what Susanna was doing on the computer?” Justin whispered.

  “Don’t have a clue.”

  “She went on-line?”

  “She did. I collected the eight dollars.”

  “But she didn’t tell you what she was looking for?”

  “Didn’t tell me a thing. All I can tell you is she looked pretty intense and excited, like it was something important. And then when she left, she was kind of wobbly. Like she suddenly got sick.”

  “She was,” Justin said slowly. “She called in sick to her office.”

  “Well, I can vouch for that. She could barely walk when she left here.”

  “So she was here at lunchtime, then.”

  “Around twelve or twelve-thirty, I’d say. Stayed for forty-five minutes or so.”

  “Have a lot of people used this computer since she was here?”

  “Three or four. Is that a lot?”

  He shook his head. “You mind if I use it?”

  Now Deena spoke up. “You gonna trace what she was looking at?” She realized she’d said it too loudly. The man with the puppet on his hand gave her an annoyed glare from the adjoining room.

  “If I can,” Justin said softly.

  The librarian looked skeptical. “You know how to do that?”

  “I’ll have to see.”

  “It’s four dollars for every half hour on-line.”

  “I’ll spring for it,” Justin told her. Then he sat at the computer, waiting for Adrienne to return to her desk before he began tapping away.

  The first thing he did was click on the Start button, then he went to Programs and clicked on that. He double-clicked on Windows Explorer, ran the cursor down until he came to the Windows program, and tapped on the mouse. He ran the cursor down again until he came to a file that read Temporary Internet. He clicked twice and a window appeared with small files inside it, six to a row, each one labeled directly underneath.

  “These are all the recent routes people have used to get onto sites,” he said to Deena, making sure his voice was kept low enough to disturb no one and draw no attention.

  “I’m impressed,” she acknowledged. “But how do you know which ones were Susie’s?”

  “We’ll go chronologically. Or backwards, really. See if anything seems logical.”

  He began clicking down the long list of locations. There were a lot of things that were impossible to decipher—letters that didn’t form words and numbers that seemed meaningless—as well as terms like e-mail and AOL and Outlook and cookies and sportsdata.

  “Adrienne won’t be happy,” he murmured.

  “Why not?”

  “Someone’s been logging onto porn sites.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Here’s a string of three: tiffanyphoto, titsgalore, and fatasspix. I’m just guessing, but—”

  “Seems like a pretty fair guess. You think Susanna was checking out porn?”

  “No, I’d put my money on a horny thirteen-year-old boy.”

  She looked at the list of sites on the screen and frowned. “Can you really tell anything from these little things?”

  “No,” he confessed. “I was just hoping to see if anything struck me.” He started to click the Escape button, but then hesitated. “Huh,” he said. “Here’s one: Oscars.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Not sure. Could be somebody looking for people named Oscar. But I think your friend Susanna was checking out some information about an actor. Someone she thought was nominated for an Academy Award. So maybe there’s a connection.” He stared off into space, collecting his thoughts, then clicked out of the window. “Let me go on-line and check something else,” he said.

  As soon as he was connected, he moved the cursor to the address window and clicked on the arrow to its right. Approximately thirty Internet addresses appeared and Justin leaned forward, squinting to read them.

  “Listen, will you do me a favor?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “Do you have the last issue of the Journal? The one with the obit Susanna wrote about the actor in the old-age home?”

  “Probably.”

  “Will you go home and get it?”

  “Will you keep an eye on Kenny?”

  Justin glanced back at the room full of enthralled children and nodded. Deena said, “I’ll be back in fifteen, twenty minutes.”

  As she walked out the door, Justi
n felt a twinge of guilt. He didn’t need the obit; he’d practically memorized it and remembered all of the key details. But he didn’t want her privy to what he was searching for. And as soon as he’d seen the sites in the address window, he knew he was on the right track.

  Two or three people had used this computer to log on since Susanna Morgan had used it. So he skipped the first three addresses. The next four entries were, in order: William Miller, Best Supporting Actor, Oscar Winners, and Internet Movie Database. He wanted to see things in the order that Susanna had seen them, so he let the cursor linger for a moment, then clicked on International Movie Database. Immediately, the address came up: http://www.imdb.com. Then he was connected to the site. He ran down the list of categories. You could get daily movie grosses and reviews and updated show business news. He tried to retrace Susanna’s thought process, so in the window that was labeled “search,” he typed in: Oscar Winners. When that site came up, he could hear in his head—clear as a bell—Wallace P. Crabbe ranting and raving about the 1938 Oscar winners, so he typed in the year 1938, just as he was certain Susanna had done. When the list came up, sure enough, William Miller’s name was not among the nominees. He remembered Crabbe screaming about Miller’s movie The Queen of Sheba, so he typed that in the search window and double-clicked. Crabbe had been right again. There was no 1938 movie with that title. There was no talkie with that title, either. There was one Hollywood film called The Queen of Sheba and that was obviously not the right one. It was a silent film made in 1923. Miller would have been two years old.

  Impatient now, Justin decided to cut to the chase. He typed the name “William Miller” into the search window and clicked. Moments later, Miller’s bio appeared on the screen. Justin Westwood began to read. And as he read, his mouth dropped open. This was wrong, he thought. This couldn’t possibly be correct. He went back to the home page, typed in just the name Miller. He thought there’d be another William Miller, maybe with a middle initial, or there’d be a Bill Miller— something to differentiate the actor who’d died in East End Harbor from the man whose bio Justin had just seen on the screen. But no, there was only one William Miller, and the details of his life and career reappeared on the screen. Justin read through all the information, tried to absorb the specifics, then read through it all again, still not convinced he was seeing what was right in front of his eyes. He tried to imagine what Susanna Morgan had done when she’d reached this page on the Web site. He tried to imagine her forcing herself to believe that what she saw could possibly be the truth. Just as he was doing.