by Kylie Logan
“I didn’t buy it to hang,” she told Sarah. “I bought it to try and figure out why Tate Brody bothered to ask the Allens if he could have the picture, take it from Florie’s studio, then rip it to pieces.”
“What did you decide?”
“Nothing yet. That’s why I need your help. I thought if we spent our lunch hour in here doing some brainstorming, we might get somewhere.”
“There is no way I’m eating lunch with you in this room!” Leave it to a best friend to be unforgiving. Sarah pinched her nose with two fingers. “I’d gag just trying.”
“Then don’t eat lunch.” Jazz dragged a yellow legal pad off her desk. “But you still have to think. The way I smell won’t affect that. You’re the artist, tell me what you see.”
For a woman who lived and breathed art and style and preached its gospel far and wide, it was an offer Sarah couldn’t refuse. She stepped back, stepped forward again, squinted.
“The colors are certainly amazing.” She pointed toward the upper left quadrant of the picture. “See the way the oranges and the yellows merge and blend over here? And this blob in the middle. It’s out of focus, and normally, our brains would rebel. We want our world to make sense, and if we have to wonder, if we have to think and speculate, it makes the logical parts inside us get all antsy. But that’s the beauty of this piece, isn’t it? We have to stop. We have to stare. We really do have to think about what everything is and why it’s there and what Florie was trying to tell us by what she included in the picture, and what she left out. Like this.” She pointed dead center. “Is that a car? Or an animal?”
Jazz had wondered the same thing the first time she saw the picture, and because she was no closer to an answer now than she had been then, she shook away the thought. “How about the rest of it?” she asked. “I mean, some of it’s pretty obvious, right? Like here in this corner.” She closed in on the photograph so she could point out the image in the upper left-hand corner. “Brass numbers on a red door.”
“An address?”
“That’s what I thought, too. But see…” Jazz leaned closer. “The numbers are blurred, and there are only three of them, and if you look really closely here…” She pointed to a narrow strip just to the right of the door. “It doesn’t look like paint. Or like siding. Or like stone or brick like you might see near the front door of a house. It looks like—”
“Wallpaper!” Smell or not, Sarah saw what Jazz saw and came to stand beside her. “You’re right. There’s a bit of a pattern to it.”
“I’m thinking hotel room door,” Jazz said.
Sarah’s mouth fell open. “That’s brilliant. It explains the…” She narrowed her eyes. “Three thirty-six. Those are the numbers, right? So it’s the door to hotel room number three thirty-six. Which hotel?”
Jazz hoped her raised eyebrows were enough to tell Sarah she was asking for the impossible. “Let’s make a list,” she said instead, and she started one on the legal pad, sketching out a rectangle and then writing hotel room door in the spot where the door was on the photograph.
“The blob in the center…” It had always been questionable, yet now, Jazz looked at the smears of color with new appreciation. Jazz wasn’t at all sure how things like computer graphics and special effects worked, but she imagined Florie had used some special technique on this part of the photograph. “It looks like the back of a car. See, here,” she told Sarah.
“But not a license plate.”
“No.” Jazz chewed over the thought, and the truth of the thing might never have occurred to her if she hadn’t visited Florie’s apartment on Murray Hill, if she’d never talked to Croc, if she didn’t turn on the TV before she left for work and hear the news that had electrified all of Cleveland that morning—that the police were interviewing a person of interest in the Florie Allen murder.
She suspected she knew who that person of interest was.
“Oh my gosh! It’s the Audi symbol. Look. One, two, three, four interconnected circles. Only the way Florie manipulated the images, they look more like suns.”
“Exploding sun,” Sarah commented. “I wonder what that says about the person who owns the Audi.”
Jazz wondered, too. Just like she wondered about the other images Florie had memorialized and Tate Brody had thought so much of that he wanted to own a copy of the photograph.
“It’s a love letter.” The words escaped Jazz on the end of a gasp of amazement. “A love letter to Brody.”
“Which means this…” Sarah pointed to a patch that beneath bright zigzags of hot pink and molten orange, looked green and leafy. “A favorite spot to meet? I bet it’s a park.”
“And look here.” It was Jazz’s turn to poke a finger at the photograph and trace a shape that was blurred and so distorted it reminded her of the modern and incomprehensible art Sarah had once dragged her to a museum to see.
“I’d bet anything that’s Florie,” Jazz said. “See, here’s her nose, her chin, her shoulders.”
“That girl always did have an incredible imagination. And the technical skill to take what she saw in her head and bring it to life in new and interesting ways.” Sarah sighed. “But if it’s that personal, why would this Brody character rip up his copy of the picture?”
“Maybe because it is personal.” Jazz lowered her voice. “I’ll bet anything he’s the person of interest they arrested last night. Maybe Brody knew they were closing in on him and he didn’t want the cops to find the photo and figure out what it was all about, just like we’re figuring out what it’s all about. Except…” Something had been bothering Jazz about the whole Brody connection ever since she visited North Coast the evening before. “They found Florie’s phone in a trash can near Brody’s office,” she told Sarah, because she didn’t know if this piece of information had been released to the press. “And you can bet your bottom dollar he’s telling the cops he doesn’t know how it got there, that anybody could have put it there. You know, to frame him.”
“He’s right.”
Jazz conceded at much with a nod. “And all along he told me that he and Florie were nothing more than student and teacher. But this picture proves there was more going on between them. Or at least it should.” Her shoulders sagged.
“He could say the same thing about the picture that he’s probably saying about the phone,” she told Sarah. “That sure, that might be Florie there in the picture. That there’s a hotel room door, a pretty park. And obviously, he’s not the only one who owns an Audi. Brody can say that Florie could have made this photo for anyone. Or maybe the whole thing is some sort of fantasy straight out of her imagination.”
“But not just anyone ripped it up.”
“It didn’t have to be Brody who destroyed the picture,” Jazz pointed out. “Anybody could have done that and left the pieces so they’d be found, just like the phone, so they’d make Brody look guilty.”
Jazz pressed her fingers to her temples. Ever since she’d found the scrap of photograph, she’d been trying to make sense of it, and every time she felt as if she was getting close, she’d run up against a new brick wall.
“I wish we knew what that was.” Jazz pointed to the last unidentified part of the picture. This bit was off to the right at the bottom of the photograph. Like the rest of the picture, it was overwashed with acid colors, and this bit was shot through with yellow, like fire.
“Tabletop,” Sarah suggested.
“Briefcase. See, here.” With one finger, Jazz outlined the shape. “There’s a bit of a darker patch right here. It could be the briefcase latch.” She was off base and she knew it, but it was worth a try in the name of brainstorming.
“Book?”
“Baloney sandwich.” When Sarah made a face at her, Jazz shrugged. “Hey, we’re tossing out ideas, right?”
“Ideas about what?”
Eileen swept into the room and came to stand between Jazz and Sarah. She wrinkled her nose but didn’t comment on the smell. Instead, she gave the photograph a once-ove
r. “What is it?”
“That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” Jazz told her.
Sarah jumped in. “We think it’s a sort of a—”
“Message. Like a letter. A love letter.” As if it would somehow prove what she said, Jazz showed Eileen the legal pad. “See, we’ve got almost all of it figured out, but there’s this one patch—”
“Here.” Sarah poked one bright-green fingernail against the bottom right-hand corner of the picture. “We can’t figure out what this is.”
Eileen crossed her arms over her chest and settled her weight back against one foot. “A love letter, huh?” She closed in on the picture and tapped a finger against the darker patch. “That is a birthmark,” she said, and glided her finger across the rest of the image that Jazz and Sarah had tagged as a briefcase and a tabletop and a baloney sandwich. “A birthmark on the inside of a man’s thigh. I’d say…” She touched a hand nearly to her groin. “Right about here.”
Eileen backed up and headed to her office, shaking her head as she did. “You girls need to get out more.”
CHAPTER 19
Greg called that evening just as Jazz was driving home from dinner at Grandma and Grandpa Kurcz’s house.
“Surprise! We just landed in Cleveland,” he told Jazz. “You’ll be thrilled to know we’re on our way to get Luther. I sure have missed him, and I’ll bet you’ll be glad when he’s out of your hair.”
Glad.
Sure.
Two hours later, Jazz sank further into the couch cushions and glanced at the place where before Greg and Toni arrived, Luther had been sprawled on top of a pile of blankets, happily snoring.
The spot was empty now. Cold. The house was as quiet as it had been before Luther came to visit. After Manny was gone.
Automatically her gaze traveled to the shelf where she’d set the picture of her dad and Big George, her and Manny. Dad and Manny had passed, gone on to new adventures. Big George was old and retired.
And Jazz?
A truck racing by outside muffled the sound of her sigh.
Jazz was a dog trainer without a dog. An investigator with no credentials and zero credibility. A girlfriend who wasn’t really a girlfriend because the man she’d once thought of as the man of her dreams knew exactly what she knew—coffee once a week was all they were ever likely to share.
“God, could you be any more depressing?” Jazz lambasted herself, and just for good measure, slapped a hand against the empty cushion beside her before she pushed up from the couch. She went into the kitchen and a couple minutes later she was back, a glass of cold milk in one hand and three of Grandma Kurcz’s homemade chocolate chip cookies in the other. She set the glass and the cookies on the coffee table along with a DVD in a jewel case that she pulled out of the jacket she’d worn to the Allens’ that day, and did her best to settle herself in spite of the harsh reality that intruded—even chocolate wasn’t enough to lift her mood.
A glug of milk washed the taste of self-pity out of her mouth. A bite of cookie settled her stomach, which had been doing a pretty good imitation of a Mexican jumping bean ever since she and Sarah discovered the secrets of Florie’s mind-bending photograph.
Was it worth calling Nick to tell him what she’d found out?
She glanced at the clock and decided not to bother him. It was late, dark, and if what she’d seen on the six o’clock news meant anything, he’d had a hell of a day. Sure, he had a person of interest he was interviewing, but like she suspected would happen, that person—probably fashionable, handsome, two-timing Tate Brody—had been released from police custody due to lack of evidence.
What might have been a birthmark on what might have been a man’s inner thigh on a photograph taken by a student who was later murdered wasn’t going to change any of that. Not tonight.
Tired of listening to the sounds of her own rough breathing, bored with the workings of her brain, round and round like a hamster on a wheel, Jazz grabbed the TV remote and hit the On button.
The first thing she saw was the blue-skinned monster from the poster at the film festival.
Think you can stand the terror?
The monster’s face faded and the picture blurred. When it came back into focus, her TV screen showed broken wiring, pitted tiles, falling plaster.
The building where she and Luther had trained.
The place where Florie had been killed.
The commercial the kids had cobbled together for the film festival.
Her boredom dissolved in a whoosh of adrenaline, and Jazz sat up.
Three nights of fright.
The narrator’s voice was low and gravelly, a whisper from the grave.
Three nights of panic. Three nights of …
The picture shuddered violently. The camera panned out of control from pockmarked floor to falling-down ceiling to cobwebbed corner.
Three nights of horror!
A graphic, the letters bloodred, flashed across the screen. Web site, theaters where the movies would be shown, times.
The commercial was short. And surprisingly well done. Jazz was sorry Florie never got to see the finished product. It wasn’t anywhere near as impressive as the video project Florie had produced on her own, of course, but that was no big surprise. The commercial involved teamwork. And Grace. The video project, that was all on Florie, and she’d come through with artistry and a big dose of panache.
At the same time she reached for another cookie, Jazz grabbed the jewel case she’d tossed on the table. Since it hardly seemed to matter in the face of the monumental discovery that Florie’s photograph was a tribute to a lover who might be Tate Brody, she hadn’t mentioned to Sarah that when she was at the Allens’, she’d found something else there in the upstairs bedroom between the framed photograph and a pile of hot-pink envelopes.
“Video Project, Florie Allen.” She read the words scrawled in purple marker across the case and felt as bad now as she had when she pointed it out to the Allens and told them she’d love to make a copy, and they told her to just take it, that they had no use for it.
Maybe they could show Florie’s incredible video project at the memorial service they were planning at the school in her honor.
Suddenly feeling as if there was some purpose for sitting there—more than just feeling sorry for herself—Jazz popped the disc into her DVD player and sat back, ready to be amazed by Florie’s talent all over again.
She sat up like a shot when the first scene showed on the screen.
WELCOME TO CLEVELAND.
A sign on the berm of the freeway.
The sounds of traffic whizzing, so loud it nearly drowned out the narrator’s voice. Florie’s voice.
“Cleveland was founded in 1796 by a man named Moses…”
Florie must have turned away from the microphone; her next words were lost beneath the grumble of a passing eighteen-wheeler.
“No, no, no!” Jazz scooted forward on the couch. “This isn’t right. This isn’t Florie’s project. Where’s the beautiful sunrise? Where are the people hurrying to their jobs and their schools?”
Instead what she saw was a mishmash of images, many of them out of focus. The narration was clunky. The music was too loud and often drowned out Florie’s voice. The scene breaks were abrupt, jarring.
Jazz’s insides flipped. Watching the total train wreck that was the video project, she couldn’t help but remember what Grace had told her. The night before the project was due, Florie was in a panic.
If what Jazz was watching was all Florie had prepared at the time, Jazz could see why.
By the time it was over and the final screen said Cleveland, By Florie Allen, Jazz didn’t even bother to shake her head in wonder. She needed answers, and as far as she could see, there was only one person who could give them to her. She picked up the phone and left a voicemail for Eileen. She’d be a little late getting into work the next day.
* * *
She had never been to North Coast except in the evening. Then the
school had a sort of laid-back vibe. Smooth and easy.
In the early-morning hours, the energy was different. Frenetic. Between the nearby Case Western Reserve University, the massive hospital complex just a block away, and the throngs of people who visited the museums in the area, the neighborhood hummed. Crossing the street, Jazz dodged a driver who was more interested in texting than keeping her eyes on the road. She scurried into the school and zipped up to Brody’s office.
He was right where she hoped he would be.
“Good morning.”
It was clear from the start that Brody must have been the person of interest who’d been talked about on the news, and that his run-in with the law had done nothing for him, mentally or physically. Like a man on drugs, his eyes were dull. They were rimmed with gray, sunken, sad. His clothes were as stylish as ever, though this particular morning, his shirt looked too big for him, his shoulders lost in the folds of white cotton. His footsteps when he turned from where he was standing at his bookcase were unsteady.
He’d pulled a book from the shelf and, seeing her, he tossed it over to his desk. “What the hell do you want?”
“Just to talk.”
“Every time I see you, you tell me all you want to do is talk. Talking to you hasn’t gotten me anywhere but in deep shit.”
“Not my fault,” she answered automatically, then thought better of sounding too confrontational. Instead, she took a careful step into the room. “The cops, they interviewed you. And they released you.”
“Of course they released me. I haven’t done anything. And how do you know about it, anyway? My name wasn’t mentioned on the news. My wife watched all the stations, she checked all the online stories.”
“I was here Tuesday. The grapevine was already buzzing.”
“Which explains why most of my colleagues wouldn’t meet my eyes when I saw them on the way into the building this morning.” His mouth twisted. “I suppose I have you to thank for that, too.”