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Murder House

Page 11

by Jordan Castillo Price


  I turned and found the bearded bald guy at the counter watching me closely. I held open my hands and said, “Again…I’m not carrying a bag.”

  “Store policy. No bags.”

  I sighed and took a step toward the stacks…then realized that maybe I could turn that creep’s scrutiny to my advantage. I struck off for the counter instead, and said, “Say, do you know Sylvester Hale?”

  “Of course. I make it my business to know all our local authors.” His lip curled. “Even if they are self-published.”

  My persona probably had an opinion about self-publishing too, but I couldn’t for the life of me determine what it should be. Then again, if Bly were there, he’d tell me to just pick anything and defend it later. As long as I was consistent, that’s all that mattered. Since everyone likes being agreed with, I rolled my eyes and said, “Tell me about it.” But maybe the guy would’ve preferred a fight. He looked at me like I was full of shit, so I went into damage control mode and trooped out my fake credentials to introduce myself. “Victor Baine—I’m a contributing columnist for the Zeitgeist Journal.”

  The guy’s demeanor brightened like he’d just had a hundred-watt bulb shoved up his cornhole. “Jermaine Cleghorn. Welcome to my shop.” It was a step up from no bags allowed, anyhow. He turned and started pawing through a teetering pile of People Magazines. “Y’know, I think I have a few issues of Zeitgeist you could sign….”

  Unless the FPMP stagers had done a phenomenally thorough job, I doubted my fake articles appeared in print. Especially not in a pile of dusty used magazines that hadn’t been touched in over a year…though given the scope of the Program’s reach, I wouldn’t have been one hundred percent shocked if my byline did somehow make an appearance.

  “Listen,” I said, while Cleghorn stirred up a bunch of dust. “I keep trying to hook up with Hale, and he keeps dodging me. Are there any particular times I can find him here?”

  “Hard to say, he just bought a stack of trashy psychic biographies not even a week ago, so it’ll be a while before he needs something new to read. That lurid tell-all from the fraud who could supposedly predict weather patterns—obviously, that’s ghostwritten. I’ve seen her blog posts. The woman can’t tell a gerund from a participle.”

  I couldn’t possibly be more out of my element. “I know, right?”

  “No doubt Sylvester will be busy filling his head with a bunch of ridiculous balderdash. It’s stunning how gullible people are these days—and, even worse, it’s just sad to see what lengths some people will go to attempting to prove they’re still relevant.”

  “So Hale should be back, when?”

  “Well, let’s see…there’s Book Club. We’re reading Sojourn into Darkness next month, a literary exploration of sadness. I might be able to scrounge up another copy for you.”

  Next month? If I was still on this case by then, I’d know a thing or two about sadness, all right. “Nothing sooner?”

  “Our Mystery Potluck is coming up a week from Saturday—not only is it a scripted, fully enacted murder mystery, but no one knows what anyone else is bringing. Once we ended up with three different green bean casseroles. Three!”

  Even that was more than a week away. “I don’t mind green beans, but I’m not really a fan of mysteries.”

  “Neither am I. Formulaic regurgitation. But I do what it takes to pay the bills, even if that means pandering to pop culture.”

  “There’s nothing sooner?”

  “A reading’s coming up tomorrow, but of course there’s no signup required for that, so I can’t say whether Sylvester will be here or not. He might make the effort if the weather’s not too daunting.” He gave me a flyer for the event—Faldstool Fridays—and I folded it up and slipped it into my pocket while my stomach sank. I thought this gig would only last for a couple of days. After all, how could it be any simpler? Talk to a neighbor and see if he’s as differently-abled as me.

  And now my “simple” assignment was stretching into the weekend with no end in sight.

  17

  Buck up, I told myself. It’s only a week. Jacob’s not going anywhere. And besides, you just saw him at the gym. Everything’s fine, you’ll survive.

  You always do.

  Great pep talk—so dramatic, you’d swear I was being deployed for a lengthy tour of duty overseas, not a simple surveillance assignment ten blocks from home that would be over in a few days. But it didn’t feel simple. Jacob might not be far away, but being apart from him was eating at me like a determined mosquito. It wasn’t the actual duration of time we were apart that was bugging me, it was the feeling of having so little control over it—coupled with the uncertainty of how long our separation would actually last. By the time I turned down my side street and began my approach to the townhouse, I was filled with determination. Hale lived right next door, dammit. I’d get him over for dinner if I had to hit him over the head with his walking stick and drag him by his cape.

  I pounded on his front door, then realized belatedly I probably shouldn’t have used my Chicago PD-knock. I’d have to chalk it up to the douchebag’s self-importance. Stay in character, I reminded myself. Apologize for standing him up—but make it sound like it was his fault for not sticking around. And then grudgingly offer to make it up to him later, once Bly would be home. Perfect.

  Hale opened the door and said, “Well, what do we have here?”

  But before I could impress him with the perfectly self-important spiel I’d dreamt up, a door flew open across the street, and we were accosted by—you guessed it—Terri-Anne. “Vic? Vic! I’m so glad I caught you.” She darted across the road in house slippers and a thin cardigan. “Listen, I know it’s last minute, but I was hoping you could stay with Madison for a couple of hours while I go check on my mom. Her phone has been busy for the last three hours, and it probably just means she knocked it off the hook—she’s done it before—but you know how it is. Aging parents. I’ve gotta run out to Naperville and check.”

  “Sure,” I said automatically, mostly because I was too startled to come up with a plausible response. Did the stay-at-home douchebag have parents, and if so, how often did he see them? Was he like Crash, with a standing dinner date, or like Jacob, who mainly saw the folks on holidays and the occasional long weekend?

  “Remember this, should you and your charming husband ever think about having children,” Hale intoned, and closed his door with a very firm click.

  Terri-Anne, fortunately, was too flustered to notice my lack of response or let Hale’s bitchy comment get under her skin. She grabbed me by the sleeve and dragged me across the street. “Help yourself to anything in the fridge. There’s a list of emergency numbers on the kitchen table. Send me a quick text so I have your cell number, and I’ll let you know when I’m on my way back. Madison isn’t allowed to do anything else until she finishes her math homework. It’s pre-algebra, so if you see any origami paper or brush markers and she tells you it’s for school, don’t believe her for a second. No crafting until homework is done. Got it?”

  “No problem. Go check on your mom.”

  Terri-Anne walked me into the dining room where I found Madison ensconced at the dinner table, textbook open, surrounded by papers covered in formulas that were entirely beyond my comprehension. If anyone had ever tried to teach me algebra, I must’ve found the experience particularly scarring—traumatic enough to block it out along with all the psychic experimentation.

  “Oh, hey,” she said, with a speck of enthusiasm. The stay-at-home douchebag might be cooler than her parents, but he was still an adult. She couldn’t seem too pumped up about seeing him. “Don’t worry, I know the drill. I’m a prisoner until I finish every last equation. Because solving for X is so much more important than developing my analytical skills, creativity, and manual dexterity.”

  “Are you through?” Terri-Anne asked her.

  “And building up my social media platform,” she added.

  Terri-Anne sighed. “Ignore the attitude. She spends m
ore than enough time on YouTube as it is. It won’t kill her to finish her homework.”

  Once Terri-Anne was gone, I parked myself at the dining room table with Madison and pulled out my phone. Another new batch of tradecraft lessons had appeared in my inbox, and while I may not understand every last word the Program sends me, I was doing my damnedest to keep up with the reading.

  “You don’t have to monitor me,” Madison said.

  “Less talking, more working.”

  Dealing with kids is not my forte, but I could tell she enjoyed the fact that I wasn’t trying too hard. She got down to her numbers while I did my best to absorb a lengthy treatise on body language. We passed an hour in companionable silence, until finally she closed her notebook and said, “I’m done—do you want to check my work?”

  I was busy applying some new body language as the d-bag, sprawled out in the chair with my ankles crossed and a mean slouch. I looked up from my phone and said, “Nope. Just keep in mind that if it’s not done and it gets back to your parents, next time you need a warden, you’ll end up with someone a lot less hands-off than me.”

  Madison screwed up her mouth to one side and considered, then opened her notebook and said, “I suppose I can give everything one more check.” By which she meant finish the final three equations—but I wasn’t gonna say anything.

  Funny, how easy it was to get along with her, and how brutal it was to interact with Jacob’s nephew Clayton. She was just about the same age, but the two of them were worlds apart, both intellectually and personality-wise. I couldn’t imagine Clayton doing algebra. His relationship with numbers only went as far as fantasy football. His extracurricular pursuits were generally sport-related, unless you count the spelling bee his mother Barbara had insisted he compete in. He lost on the word puerile.

  If that’s not irony, I don’t know what is.

  I stared at the spread of papers on the table with my eyes slightly defocused, not quite looking at them, instead focusing inward as memories played past my mind’s eye. I never figured myself for sentimental, but being apart from Jacob had brought out the sap in me.

  I thought about our dining room set, a black lacquered monstrosity that was sturdy enough to stand up to all kinds of abuse. The last time we played cat sitter, we’d ended up booby trapping the entire surface with yards of bubblewrap and double-stick tape. It was definitely worth the startled look on Punkin’s face when she hopped up for her usual round of begging. And the bubblewrap turned out to add a little cushion to the pushin’ when we found ourselves overcome with the urgent need to bang one morning before work.

  Not that the tape did Jacob any favors. When the cats were on their way home and I peeled it back off, I spotted a line of body hair that matched up with a pale stripe on the back of his thigh. Luckily he wasn’t face-down, or he might have ended up with a Brazilian wax.

  I was musing on his body hair. The way it slicked down in dark, wet patterns in the shower…the way it ruffled against my stubble at night (of course I never pointed out that Jacob had back hair, he’d get a complex) …the whorls and patterns that defined his already-sculpted abs….

  “Okay.” Madison closed her algebra book with a decisive snap. “Can I do something interesting now?”

  “By all means.”

  She ditched the homework, then brought out a tray of papers, markers and paints. When she set it down on the table, an inquisitive rat face peeked out from her hair.

  “Hey, Peanut Butter.”

  Madison quelled a smile over me remembering the rat’s name.

  “What are we making tonight?” I asked.

  She hauled out a stash of glass bottles and jars that had clearly been liberated from the recycle bin. “Potions and poisons.”

  “Like Harry Potter?”

  She rolled her eyes at me as if I couldn’t have possibly suggested anything lamer. “Like Liquid Sight.”

  Yet another ridiculous example of the psychic dramas on TV these days. The only good thing about that show was the fact that it gave its leading man ample opportunities to remove his shirt. The premise was that a high-level telepath managed to unlock the key to time travel using a potion he lifted from the psyche of a savant chemist, and every week he stumbles across some random famous historic figure and subjects them to a mind-reading.

  Needless to say, Liquid Sight is beyond hokey.

  Jacob and I can’t be bothered watching those shows. The storylines are so obvious, you see the ending coming from a mile away. And they play so fast and loose with the facts, I always end up rage-switching with the clicker. Give me a good, old-fashioned Gilligan’s Island rerun any day.

  “So,” I ventured, “you’ve managed to replicate the secret sauce for time travel?”

  Madison sighed tragically. “They’re decorative.”

  I was unexpectedly saddened she’d already lost the capacity for make-believe.

  She slid a label and a few markers my way, then set to work penning her own creation. Peanut Butter wobbled down her arm, hopped onto the table, and proceeded to get the lay of the land. As the rat sniffed around, depositing the occasional brown pellet behind him, Madison painstakingly inked the words Toxic Psyactive in stilted, lopsided calligraphy, arched over a grinning poison-skull. Meanwhile, I filled my label with random-colored squares. Eventually, Madison broke the silence.

  “Know how the ancient Romans used poisons in warfare? They filled fragile clay jars with scorpions and lobbed them into the enemy troops.”

  “Huh. That’s interesting.”

  My answer seemed to please her. She picked up steam. “Did you know that you can build immunity to some poisons by taking a tiny little amount every day and getting your system used to it—but if you try it with the wrong type of poison, it’ll actually build up in your system and kill you?”

  “I did not know that.”

  Markers squeaked as Madison added flourishes to her lettering and I colored in my squares.

  “Ever notice Mr. Hale keeps a big jar of strychnine in his garage?” This last question was floated with a studied casualness. I looked up from my squares and cocked an eyebrow. She said, “I saw it a few months ago—when I was riding my scooter in the alley, before it snowed. Before Amelia Griggs died.”

  “Listen, kid, I might not have personally spawned, but I know schoolyard muckraking when I hear it.” I almost reminded her that false accusations of murder weren’t something the cops took lightly—but the stay-at-home douchebag hadn’t done a dozen years in homicide. “Hale was probably worried one of Amelia’s rats would sneak out and set up residence in his pantry. He might be a crabby old man, but that doesn’t make him a murderer.”

  By the time Terri-Anne got home, the poos were brushed into the trash, Peanut Butter was back home with Tuna, I’d filled up on chicken tetrazzini, and numerous “potions” had been created. All in all, a pretty productive evening.

  Although, as I debriefed my fellow agent, I realized it was too bad I hadn’t learned anything useful about Hale. “Wait a minute,” Bly cut into my thoroughly uneventful narrative. “An actual rat?”

  “Is there another kind?”

  Bly shuddered. “Do you know how many stakeouts I’ve been on where I’ve had to stand there in a dark alley, perfectly still, while the fucking things crawled right over my shoe?”

  Chicago’s rat problem was almost as legendary as its murder problem. “It’s a pretty tame rat.”

  “You touched it?”

  Well, I guess I’d skritched the little guy behind the ears once or twice. And when I didn’t immediately deny contact, he shuddered again…to the point where he had to stand up and walk it off.

  “Tell me you washed your hands.”

  Actually, not. “I’ll do it again. Just to put your mind at ease.”

  If he was able to spot the lie with his talent, I couldn’t say. Since he was picking up on my emotional state and not my actual thoughts, he probably wasn’t getting anything more from me than mild amusement.
/>   And maybe a bit of trepidation on how he’d take the news that a whole colony used to live in our townhouse.

  18

  In the end, I figured bedtime wasn’t the best time to tell Bly our place had once been home to a few dozen rodents. He had a hard enough time falling asleep, what with the knowledge that someone had died right upstairs. He didn’t need to get worked up every time a tree branch rasped against the siding.

  I slept okay with a bellyful of cheesy chicken and pasta, but I was still up and at ’em by sunrise, and once Bly headed out to the office, boredom immediately set in. It was too early to go bother Hale, and it was important that I stay on his good side, so I set about pretending to be an actual person who actually moved into an actual house. The living room seemed like it would get the most traction, between the large window and the fact that anyone who came to the door could see right in, so I started there, unpacking moving boxes.

  Like it wasn’t bad enough when I had to do it for real. Except at least with the cannery, it was my stuff. I never thought I attached any sort of sentimental meaning to a bunch of random objects, but handling these things that belonged to the made-up person I’d become, I realized I was a little more sentimental than I thought. The boxes in my current domicile were just so much clutter and crap.

  Okay, I told myself. Stay in character. What would a pretentious cerebral writerly type unpack first? I glanced down the manifest. Aha. Books. Unlike the massive vase of flowers, which I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to display, the books would be easy. They went in the empty bookshelf. And whichever way I ended up stacking them, I could always claim it was my personal system.

  While the task was encouraging, the titles of the books sure were not. Illustrating Revision and Fetishization. Flashback and Identity. Describing Pathos: Society and the Savage. Good thing I didn’t have to read any of them. It was hard enough keeping up with the barrage of tradecraft theory.

 

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