by Kylie Logan
She remembered what Loretta had said, about how Florie wouldn’t want anyone to know how desperate she was, so she didn’t mention it. What difference did it make now, anyway?
“She was always such a good student,” Jazz said instead.
Brody nodded and a curl of dark hair tumbled onto his forehead. He brushed it back with one hand. “It’s a small school so, naturally, we all know each other. These last months, I couldn’t help but notice that Florie seemed … preoccupied.”
“Because of her job with the horror film festival?”
“I doubt it. She told me…” As if the weight of the memories it carried were too much to bear, he set Florie’s photo down. “Florie and I would sometimes chat and we always got along. Her advisor knew it and he thought maybe I could get through to Florie, so he asked me to talk to her. I met with Florie a number of times during the semester. I saw what was happening to her grades and I thought if I kept in touch, if I checked in with her now and then … well, I didn’t want things to get out of control. I knew she was working for the film festival, but when I asked if it was taking too much of her time, she insisted she was only doing a few hours a week.”
“So there must have been some other reason her grades were off.”
“And I’m afraid I have no idea what it was. She never said. But then, girls like Florie, they have their secrets.”
It wasn’t the first she’d heard much the same words, but before she had a chance to consider them, Brody bent to retrieve the photo. “I do know it’s a shame she’ll no longer be able to share her talent with the world.”
Another look at the array of photos on the wall and Jazz had to agree. There was insight in Florie’s work, a sort of sixth sense that let the observer look beyond the subject, into the subject. Like looking into the eyes of the elderly African-American woman.
Ready to leave, Jazz surveyed the cubicle one last time and stopped, caught by a small square of paper pinned on the wall near the desk. It was something torn from a newspaper, its edges frayed and jagged, and from this distance, she couldn’t see much more of it than the letters in boldface type across the top.
Looking for a Divorce Attorney?
“Ms. Ramsey?”
Jazz snapped out of her surprise just in time to see Brody step back to allow her out of the cubicle. She thanked him for his time and headed to the door, one question pounding through her brain.
Why would Florie Allen need a divorce attorney?
CHAPTER 8
Tanya was short, skinny, and as pale without makeup as Florie had been with it troweled on. When Jazz left the building, she and Khari were outside smoking.
Jazz closed in on them as soon as Khari waved from over by a bike rack in front of the building, pointed down to the girl at his side, and called out, “Tanya!”
“You supervised the video shoot,” Jazz said as soon as she was close enough. “The commercial for the horror film festival.”
Tanya took a drag on her cigarette, sucked in a lungful of smoke, and released it from one corner of her mouth in a stream that frothed like hot breath on a cold day. “I was the producer. Yeah.” Another puff and she dropped the butt and stomped on it with one black-and-white Converse Chuck Taylor.
“What can you tell me?”
When Tanya wrinkled her nose, the stud in it winked at Jazz. “It was a pain in the ass.”
“Because of Grace and Florie.”
“She knows all about it.” Khari finished his cigarette, too, and went over to a tall cylindrical receptacle where he snuffed it out and discarded it. “This lady, she knows how they were fighting.”
“Then there’s nothing else to say.” Tanya shrugged. “It was ugly, and I’m glad it’s over.”
“But you’re still working on the commercial.”
“We’re editing.” She dug a lip gloss out of her purse and uncapped it. “And without Florie around, let me tell you, it’s a breeze. It better be. The commercial starts airing next week and we need to finish up.”
“I just wondered…” Jazz’s shrug was a mirror of the one Tanya had just given her. There was still so much she didn’t understand. Like if Grace could possibly be involved in Florie’s murder. And the ad she’d seen pinned to the wall in the studio upstairs. “Was Florie ever married?”
Tanya laughed. “I would have heard about that. Especially since I know she had her eye on my man Khari here.” She wound her arm through his. “What do you think?” she asked him and bumped his hip with hers. “Was some married chick hitting on you?”
He grinned. “Hardly. In fact, there was a whole group of us sitting around one day talking about things like life after graduation, and Florie, I remember how she said that from her experience, she’d never seen anything good about marriage. She swore she was never getting married.”
Tanya smeared on the gloss and tucked away the tube. “Not that anyone here knew all that much about Florie, anyway. She wasn’t around much lately.”
“Where do you think she was?”
“I can’t say.” Tanya made a face. “Grace is my roommate and when you’re friends with Grace…”
“You can’t be friends with Florie.” Jazz didn’t need her to explain. “Do you know if Florie lived on campus?”
Tanya shook her head. Her hair was the color of corn silk, long and straight and shiny in the light that oozed down from above the building’s main entrance. “She shared a house somewhere, not with anyone from here at school.”
“Did she have a boyfriend?”
“That’s what that cute cop wanted to know.” Grinning, she slanted Jazz a look. “You work with him?”
“No. But I know him. Well, sort of.”
“He got a girlfriend?”
Jazz let go a sigh that was too revealing. “Believe me, you don’t want to go there.”
“And he’d never treat you as good as I do!” Since he knew she wasn’t serious about Nick, Khari wrapped an arm around Tanya’s shoulders. “I’m springing for falafel tonight. Tanya…” He gave Jazz a wink. “Tanya loves falafel.”
“So Nick … er … Detective Kolesov, did he ask about the building where you shot the commercial?”
A chill breeze whipped across the plaza, and Tanya leaned in closer to Khari. “Sure. He wanted to know all about our production schedule. You know, when we started filming, when we finished.”
“You were done before last Saturday, right?”
“Well, mostly.”
Jazz perked up. “You weren’t?”
When Tanya and Khari started walking, Jazz fell into step beside them. “Our work was done,” Tanya said. “At least we thought so. But Brody, he’s so cool! He’s got a great eye and a real feel for what’s going to work and what isn’t. He loved the footage we got, but he suggested we shoot some B roll. B roll, that’s—”
“The extra film that’s edited into a video to show different scenes and try to make things more interesting.” Jazz felt self-conscious explaining herself to kids who slept and ate and breathed their art. “I took visual arts as an elective in college.”
“Yeah, well…” Clearly an elective in visual arts didn’t carry much weight with Tanya. “Brody thought B roll would help. You know, it would add a little more atmosphere, make things a little darker, a little spookier.”
“Was he right?”
The look she shot at Jazz made Tanya look years older and wiser than she was. “He’s the one who’s going to grade us at the end of the semester, does it matter?”
They stopped at the curb, waiting for the light to change.
“So you shot B roll.”
“We didn’t.” The light turned green and they crossed the street together. “Brody’s got a heart, you know? Not like some of these other instructors who keep piling on the work. He looked at what we had on Friday, and that’s when he suggested the B roll. He also said he was sure we had better things to do on a weekend, so he offered to do it himself.”
“Tate Brody shot the B roll last
Friday?”
They were outside the Falafel Café, and Khari paused, his hand on the door. “Not Friday,” he said. “It was Saturday.”
“And he shot the B roll—”
“In the same building where we shot the footage for the rest of the commercial,” Tanya said. “The one where they found Florie’s body. I told the cop that.”
And Jazz was sure Nick was plenty interested.
Rather than mention it, she dug a little deeper. “That cop, he was probably thinking what I’m thinking. Florie wasn’t a video student. She had no reason to be there.”
Khari and Tanya exchanged looks.
“Maybe not officially,” Khari conceded. “But she was there. I know it for a fact because I saw her leave her studio that afternoon, and she told me that’s where she was going after she worked her film festival job. She told me to make sure I mentioned it to Tanya. You know, because she figured Tanya would tell Grace. And Florie, she wanted them both to know Brody had asked her to come along and shoot some stills and use them in the publicity campaign. She was trying to get to Tanya and Grace. You know, by showing them that Brody had singled her out.”
Khari and Tanya went inside the restaurant, and Jazz continued on to her car, wondering about the divorce attorney, the B roll, Grace, and why the professor had never bothered to mention that he’d been with Florie the night she was murdered.
Before she got to the car, she stopped and wondered something else, too.
By all accounts, Florie was strapped for cash, and she still paid her parents’ neighbor to take pictures of homely, gooey baby Lalo. And yet …
Jazz’s sigh rippled the cool night air.
After all that trouble and all that money, there wasn’t one single picture of Lalo in Florie’s studio.
* * *
“Maybe he killed her!” Only Sarah could say something so horrifying and do it with a smile. Her eyes gleamed, and her nails—painted a luscious shade of mango—tapped out an excited rhythm against the mug she cradled in both hands. “Maybe that’s why that video instructor never said anything about how he was with Florie the night she died.”
“Seems a little too easy, don’t you think?” Jazz counted down the seconds five, four, three, two, one.… The last bell rang and a moment later, the hallway outside her office echoed with footsteps and high-pitched voices. The school day was officially over, and she sat back and watched the girls in their gray-and-navy-plaid skirts and powder-blue blouses stream past her open door. “Besides, you don’t think Nick would have let a fact like that get by him, do you? If I found out Brody was here in Tremont on Saturday, you can bet your bottom dollar Nick knows it, too. If it meant anything, he would have done something about it by now.”
“Like arrest this Brody character.”
“He’s not exactly a character.” Jazz thought back to her talk with Brody. “He’s friendly, he’s good-looking. You know, all artsy-fartsy the way you creative types can be.” She grinned at her friend. “The kids … well, Tanya, anyway, she couldn’t say enough nice things about him.”
“Which doesn’t mean he’s not the killer.”
“Which means…” Annoyed at herself for feeling defensive about the inquiries she’d been making and more defensive than ever because of it, Jazz got up and closed her door so she could change out of her black pants and lightweight peachy sweater and into black capri-length leggings. She tugged a red T-shirt over her head with ST. CATHERINE’S PANTHERS written on it in yellow block letters. “What it means is Nick will take care of it. Nick always takes care of everything.”
Sarah turned in her seat, the better to frown at Jazz over the rim of her tea mug. “He didn’t take care of you.”
“It wasn’t his job to take care of me. It was … it is my job to take care of me.”
Sarah rolled her eyes.
On the way back to her desk, Jazz gave her a pat on the shoulder. “I’m good, Sarah. You know I’m good.”
“You were good when Nick wasn’t around. Now that he’s back—”
“Except he isn’t.” Jazz hadn’t told Sarah she’d found Nick in her yard when she got home from school two days earlier. At the time she figured it would spare her this exact conversation.
“Nick’s doing his thing and I’m doing mine. And that’s that.” She smoothed her pants over a hanger and folded her sweater. “I’m just asking some questions, just trying to get some answers so I can put the whole thing behind me. What Nick’s doing … well, that’s a whole different thing.”
Jazz dropped into her desk chair and slipped on sport socks and sneakers.
“Kind of the wrong season for cross-country, isn’t it?” Sarah asked.
She was right. Cross-country was a fall sport. “Trying to make sure the girls on the team stay active and don’t lose interest over the summer.”
“This time of the year, that’s a lost cause. All they can think about is prom.” Sarah let out a groan that ended in a good-natured laugh. “Oh God, do you remember your prom? I remember satin and ruffles and big shoulders and bigger hair. If my boys ever find my prom pictures, they’ll tease me about them until I’m in the nursing home.”
“I had fun at my prom.” Jazz double-tied her shoelaces. “Except now…” She gave it a moment’s thought, then dismissed it as unimportant. “I don’t even remember the name of the guy I went with. Kevin. Kyle. Connor?”
“Not the love of your life, eh?”
It brought up an interesting point. “Who do you suppose was the love of Florie’s life?”
Sarah pursed her lips. “I chaperoned the year of her senior prom. I don’t remember her being there.”
Maybe because she couldn’t afford a dress.
It was another of Florie’s secrets better left unspoken, so Jazz didn’t mention it.
“If Nick knows about Florie being in the neighborhood with Brody to film B roll last Saturday, I wonder where he’s going with the information.”
“He didn’t tell you?”
Jazz locked her desk drawers and gathered her things so she could take them down to the gym. “When would he have done that?”
“You haven’t talked to him?”
She smiled around the lie. “I haven’t. Now if you’ll get out of my office…”
She was saved from booting Sarah out into the hallway by a sharp rap on the door.
“Matt! Come on in! You’re right on time, I was just going down to the gym.”
Matt Duffey was dressed as informally as Jazz in jeans, sneakers, and a golf shirt striped with gold and a brown the same dark-chocolate shade as his buzz-cut hair.
When he hurried over to give Jazz a quick hug, he stripped off his Ray-Ban Aviators. “I was afraid I’d get here too early and have to wade through a sea of teenage girls.”
“Matt…” Jazz motioned toward Sarah. “This is Sarah Carrington. She teaches art here. Matt is—”
“Very happy to meet you.” He closed in on Sarah, took her hand, and smiled in a way he never smiled at Jazz. But then, Matt was a firefighter and she’d known him forever. He was a little older than Hal and Owen, stationed in a different part of town, but she’d always thought of him like another brother. When Jazz saw the way Sarah smiled at Matt—a little too widely, a little too bright—she wondered why she’d never thought to introduce them before.
“Matt’s doing a workshop for the cross-country team,” she explained. “On orienteering.”
“Jazz’s idea,” Matt conceded. “She thought if the girls got involved in an outdoor activity it would keep them active over the summer.”
“And if they learn to take care of themselves outdoors, they’ll have some confidence if they should ever get lost during a race,” Jazz said. “Then Matt won’t have to get Buddy and go looking for them.”
The confused expression on Sarah’s face didn’t last long. “Let me guess, Buddy is a dog.”
“Search and rescue,” Matt told her.
Jazz smiled at the memory. “My dad loved Buddy.�
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“And Buddy loved your dad because your dad always had the best dog treats. I think, of all of us, Buddy was the saddest the day your dad retired Big George and stopped coming to the weekly trainings.”
Big George was a chunky mixed breed with bad breath and poor social skills. Thanks to Michael Ramsey’s patience and training, he was also the finest search-and-rescue dog Jazz had ever had the privilege to watch work.
“George is as happy as a clam,” she assured Matt. “He sleeps on Mom’s couch and slobbers on everyone who gets close. He’s enjoying retirement.”
“You’ll have to bring him out to training some time. Buddy would love to see him. And speaking of loving to see someone…” He turned his thousand-watt smile back on Sarah. “Do art teachers like to get out?”
She was not a giggler, which was why Jazz paid attention when Sarah’s voice suddenly took on a little lilt. “Are we talking hiking through the woods or something a little more civilized?”
“Hiking through the woods is good, but if martinis are more your thing, there’s this place right down the street and—”
“All right, you two.” Grinning, Jazz waved her hands to get their attention. “Matt’s got a workshop to teach.”
He had the good sense to at least look repentant, but that didn’t mean he was about to give up. “Compass work, map reading. I hear art teachers are really good at that sort of thing.”
“Oh, no!” Before Sarah could say anything that would ratchet up the flirting, Jazz grabbed her arm, hauled her out of the chair, and turned her toward the door. “Sarah’s too much of a distraction. She’s not allowed in the workshop.”
“Fine.” Sarah knew how to play the game. When Matt wasn’t looking, she raised her eyebrows in a way that said she was interested. “I’ll just go home and read about orienteering,” she said, heading for the door. Once she was there, she looked at Matt over her shoulder. “That way we’ll have something to talk about over those martinis.”
He was still smiling when Sarah left.
“Why didn’t you tell me you had a friend that gorgeous?” he wanted to know. “I can’t believe I’ve never met her before!”