Death Will Pay Your Debts

by Elizabeth Zelvin

  "I'm working on it," I said, "well, thinking about it. And nagging doesn't help, Ms. Control Freak."

  She scrunched up her face in a phony pout.

  "You mean you aren't grateful that I'm not enabling you?"

  "Yeah, yeah," I said. "Addicts are addicts, I give you that."

  "That's what I meant," she said. "Recovering Sophia wouldn't have committed adultery or blackmailed anyone or—for argument's sake—tried to break up anyone's marriage. Or if she did, she'd have been struggling with a load of ambivalence and guilt. Addict Sophia, on the other hand, could have flung herself right into any of those things."

  "All she would have cared about," I said, "was the high."

  By the time I got home, my muscles ached. The kiss of the sun had been more like rough sex. When I held my palm an inch off the back of my neck, I could feel the heat rising. I held a mirror up to it and admired the color. I could have passed for a redneck in rural Mississippi. I thought of blowing off my date with Jimmy to go to a meeting. With his cheap Irish skin, he could empathize on the subject of sunburn. He should have been the one rowing the damn boat anyhow. But I didn't want to disappoint him, so I slapped aloe on my neck, popped a couple of ibuprofen, and took the crosstown bus to pick him up as scheduled.

  Jimmy was sitting at the computer reading news bytes out loud to Barbara, who sat curled up on the couch knitting a tiny garment of some kind in bright fuchsia and rich teal, which was as close as she planned to get to pink and blue. She co-opted me to help her make a ball of yarn out of a loose skein by draping it over my extended hands and winding it up from one end.

  "Sophia's not news any more," Jimmy said. "She's been bumped by some woman who got herself killed falling down the stairs at the Met."

  "How did it happen?" I asked. "Was she trampled by a horde of opera buffs fleeing from the third act of Siegfried?"

  My one experience of grand opera, at Barbara's urging, had not been a happy one.

  "Not that Met," he said. "The Metropolitan Museum, not the Metropolitan Opera."

  "The stairs that lead up from the Great Hall to European Painting?" Barbara asked. "It's a long flight, two flights really, but they're not exactly steep. Or do you mean the outside steps up to the main entrance?"

  While my dad and Jimmy's had been taking us into bars from a tender age and teaching us to lie about it to our moms when we got home, Barbara's had been taking her to concerts and museums. They'd even explained the art and music well enough to convince her that culture was cool.

  "Inside," he said. "She was a museum employee, and it was after hours, when there aren't a lot of guards around. My guess is the security cameras would be focused on the art, not the stairway. The Great Hall is a giant lobby, not a display area."

  "So what happened?" Barbara asked. "Did she break her neck or what?"

  "Did she fall, or was she pushed?" I said.

  "It says they're investigating the circumstances," he said.

  "I don't think you could push someone down those stairs with any guarantee of killing them," Barbara said. "She'd have had to tumble or hit her head just right. Or she might have been unconscious first, or even dead."

  "It's not our murder, pumpkin," Jimmy said. "We've already got a murder, and Bruce and I want to get to our meeting on time."

  "I don't mind," I said. "I heard something about the Met recently, but I can't remember what it was or who said it."

  "Museum or opera?" Barbara asked.

  "Opera, I think, or maybe I assumed it, the way I did just now. I was never traumatized by the museum."

  "Don't blame the opera house," Barbara said. "So maybe it was a mistake to start you off with Wagner. If you'd only try again, I know you'd like Mozart or Puccini better. Let's do it before the baby comes. I'm afraid I won't be going out much once it's born."

  "Stop right there," I said. "You're sneaking awfully close to the guilt edge." As Jimmy laughed and Barbara punched me in the arm, the elusive memory came back to me. "Got it! It was Eleanor saying Sophia's sponsor worked at the Met. I did assume she meant the opera. I thought she was a singer, maybe in the chorus, or I don't know, she could have been anything from a set designer to a ticket taker."

  "Or the person who cleans up after the elephants in Aida," Barbara said. "You never heard that old joke? Someone asks the guy with the shovel why he doesn't take up another line of work, and he says, 'What? And leave show business?' But I digress."

  "You always do," I said.

  "The dead woman's name was Judith Orson," Jimmy said, "and I've found her in the museum's online staff directory. She did something in the editorial department. Sophia's sponsor was a Judith, right? I have a vague recollection of her saying 'Judith O.' Maybe I spoke too soon. Maybe it is our murder."

  "You mean this woman who died at the Met was Sophia's sponsor," Barbara said, "and her death is related to Sophia's. It would be awfully weird if the deaths had no connection. Someone killed her."

  "I agree," I said. "Judith knew something about Sophia, and she was going to tell the police."

  "Because we told her to," I said.

  "So in a way," Barbara said, "it's our fault she got killed."

  Now I did feel guilty, and it wasn't even Barbara's fault.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: Jimmy

  "It's hard to believe," Jimmy said, gazing out over the vast exhibition hall, "that they've never had a gaming con in the Javits Center before."

  "In the virtual world, New York is not the center of the universe." Graham Costello grinned and pushed his horn-rimmed glasses higher on his nose. "But it's still a place that people want to see. We want geeks and gamers who can attend only one con a year to pick TomorrowCon. We're giving out millions in tournament prizes, but it's not just for the gamers and their fans. I don't care about the players. It's the developers and their products that interest me. "

  "You said you'd be hunting for acquisitions," Jimmy said. "Where do you start?"

  Jimmy's gaze traveled over the milling throng, packed as tightly as straphangers at rush hour, surging along the aisles. Every booth, ablaze and whizzing with animation, contributed to the cacophony of human and electronic sounds. If the steel and crystal ceiling hadn't been more than thirty feet high, the sheer concentration of light and sound might have made the place explode. It looked like the Grand Bazaar of some faraway planet more advanced than Earth, which, considering the con's name, was probably the idea.

  "It looks overwhelming," Costello said, "but it's only three dimensions, after all. Come on, let's walk."

  "Which do you acquire," Jimmy asked, "developers or products?"

  "Both," Costello said, "depending on what I think will make money for me. By the time the con is over, I'd like to be in negotiations for two or three small companies."

  "It's every start-up's dream, isn't it?" Jimmy said. "To be bought out by a giant in the field?"

  "But not yours," Costello said. "You've always been a lone wolf."

  "I never was a start-up kind of guy," Jimmy said, "just a freelancer who wanted to work from home and do things my own way. But the industry has gotten too big for me."

  "So if you came to work for me," Costello said, "would you consider it selling out?"

  "Not at all," Jimmy said. "I gather you want me for my creativity, not my business skills. I haven't run out of ideas yet."

  "If I thought you had," Costello said, "we wouldn't be having this conversation. We'll talk again at the end of the day. I'd like your opinion on a few of these start-ups. Each of them has a single product that's reached a certain level, and now they can either find venture capital and expand or sell to me and move on to the next thing. Don't worry about profitability, that's my department. I want to know if you think these games are dead-end ideas or could be developed to a much higher level."

  "What kind of games are you looking at?" Jimmy asked. "I've worked mostly on role-playing games."

  "There's still a big market for role-playing games, but turn-based games are hu
ge right now, and so are open world games. How flexible are you? If you were twenty years younger, I'd ask, How hungry are you?"

  "As far as game design goes," Jimmy said, "I don't want to stay in a rut. I still need that spark, and I think at this point I can get it best from something bigger than just me. And I'd better be flexible, because I'm about to get married and become a father."

  "Congratulations," Costello said. "So you are hungry. I think we can turn that into a win-win situation."

  "I hope so," Jimmy said.

  "You know Miriam Kahn," Costello said.

  "She was kind enough to refer me to you," Jimmy said.

  Costello grinned.

  "She told me I'd be making a big mistake not to get you on board."

  "I hope she was right," Jimmy said, deciding that Costello didn't need to know how slight his acquaintance with her was. He'd have to thank her again for recommending him to Costello in such glowing terms. "Is she here today?"

  "Yes," Costello said, "along with her two partners in the project she was working on when I hired her. She encouraged me to bring them in too. Now I've got their project under contract, and the two ladies are working in my New York office for a few weeks before they go back to Podunk and start working remotely. They'll do fine. But Miriam is the spark in that particular fire. She's got the brains and the balls, and her code is pure poetry. The other two supply the wackiness that you need to come up with original ideas. Let's say two-thirds of the wackiness. Miriam herself is equally offbeat. If they were teenage boys, it wouldn't be surprising, but they also wouldn't come up with the concepts these three gals do. You have to meet the other two."

  "I'd like to," Jimmy said.

  "Believe it or not, they're all wives of clergy."

  "I know Miriam's husband is a rabbi," Jimmy said.

  Costello snorted.

  "You'd never believe it to look at her."

  Without being able to remember exactly what Miriam had worn to sit shiva for her brother-in-law's wife, Jimmy thought she'd looked appropriate for what Barbara called the rebbetzin. Costello pointed out the location where he'd find them, then shook hands and went off to his next appointment. He almost didn't recognize Miriam, who in this profoundly different environment had transformed herself into whatever you called an over-forty geek girl with spiky red hair that had to be a wig, enormous round horn-rimmed glasses, cargo pants, red high-tops, and a T-shirt that read "Geek Girls Do It Digitally" on the front and, on the back, a list of the accomplishments of tech and science-minded schoolgirls that included a breast cancer detection app and the discovery of a new molecule.

  Miriam welcomed him warmly and introduced Francine, a preacher's wife from a Missouri town that she claimed had fewer inhabitants than the periodic table had elements, and Thea, a Californian who was married to a Unitarian minister who had a boutique vineyard in Napa on the side.

  "Or maybe the theology is the sideline," Thea said cheerfully. "He's a dear man, but he doesn't have a techie bone in his body, so finding these two soulmates was a blessing."

  "A gift from God," Francine added.

  "You met online," Jimmy said.

  "In a chat room for wives of clergy, believe it or not," Miriam said.

  "We had never met f2f," Thea said, "until Mr. Costello flew us in for our interviews."

  "It's the first time I've ever been in New York City," Francine said, "and we're having a blast."

  "We work really well together in cyberspace," Thea said. "We weren't sure we'd click as well when we met up, but it's been great."

  "We're so lucky," Francine said. "Aren't we, Miriam?"

  Miriam smiled, but Jimmy thought her smile looked as if it wanted to sag and her eyes as if she'd missed a lot of sleep. He wondered if she had told her friends that the family was in the midst of a bereavement and a murder investigation. Techies never took time off for anything, especially personal business.

  "You won't be staying in New York, though?"

  "Being a minister's wife is a lot of work," Thea said, smiling, "and none of it takes place in cyberspace. We've used remote access ever since the three of us started designing together. Luckily, Mr. Costello believes there's no limit to what you can do from wherever you happen to be." remote access a lot in our collaboration."

  "Going hands-on with each other's work boosts our creativity," Francine said. "At least, it does mine."

  "What is the game that Costello has under contract?" Jimmy asked.

  "It's not a game," Miriam said. "It's not competitive, and there isn't a goal. It's a virtual world, or rather, a virtual environment."

  "What kind of environment?"

  "What I said before about a ministry and everything around it taking place in real life," Thea said, "gave us the idea. RL is flesh and oxygen and stuff."

  "A virtual environment for clergy and their families?" he asked.

  "No, no, though that's a part of it," Thea said. "A virtual environment for religion."

  "For what Thea calls flesh, " Miriam said, "the players pick avatars or create their own. You could call the system itself the oxygen."

  "As for stuff," Francine said, grinning, "there's no limit to the amount of virtual stuff the players can accumulate."

  "Where's the market?" Jimmy asked. "I assume you convinced Graham Costello that there is one, or he wouldn't have been interested."

  "Almost seventy-five percent of Americans believe in God," Miriam said, "but less than twenty-percent go to church or synagogue or another house of worship for all sorts of reasons. Besides the people who don't get there because they're elderly or have disabilities or caregiving responsibilities or live in a remote area where services aren't available, we think we could tap the millions of people who might be glad to go if they could do it from their computer, without leaving home."

  "No one would have to listen to a sermon if they didn't want to," Francine said. "Their avatars could have the fun of dressing up for church without spending the money. Well, we have a lot of ideas, and once we start beta testing, I bet we'll have plenty more."

  "What do you call it?"

  "Virtual Shul," Miriam said. "That would be the Jewish version, of course."

  "You're kidding," Jimmy said.

  "Only if Graham Costello thinks I am," she said. "And he doesn't."

  "My fiancée Barbara's a nice Jewish girl," he said. "She'll love it."

  He didn't have to tell them that while she'd love the name, she'd be unlikely to attend a virtual synagogue.

  "That was the highlight," Jimmy said, telling Barbara about his day that evening.

  "But it's not even something you'd be working on," she said.

  "I meant for entertainment value," he said. "On the serious side, maybe forty percent of what I saw excited me for one reason or another. There were some brilliant systems built on alternate history. What was really staggering was not the individual games but the magnitude of the whole industry. I knew, but I'd forgotten how different the impact is when you're there in RL, seeing it all in one place like that."

  "As opposed to sitting here in our living room all by yourself," Barbara said.

  "Don't tease, peanut," he said. "Some of the turn-based games are huge. Millions of people subscribe to watch the top players compete."

  "Who do they compete with?" she asked. "Computers? Robots?"

  "Yes, AI—artificial intelligence to you—or other players," he said, "depending on the game. Barb, to be on the creative side of something on that scale, talking to people who know something, maybe working with some of them—that prospect is more exciting than I expected."

  "I'm glad. The highlight I want to hear about is whether this Graham Costello offered you a job."

  "He did, and it's a good job. The money is decent, and he's offering incentives, so if something I work on takes off, I could make a lot."

  "Did you say yes?" Barbara came up behind him as he sat at the computer and put her arms around him.

  "I told him I wanted to talk it
over with you," he said.

  "Good answer," she said. "But it's okay, Jimmy, it's your decision, really. As long as you didn't say you had to discuss it with Dan and Eleanor."

  "I have some common sense, pumpkin. I didn't mention pressure relief or the twelve steps to my prospective employer. And I don't think there's anything for Dan and Eleanor to object to. I'll work with them on a spending plan once I know what I'm actually making, so I won't wake up one morning to find it all gone. Been there, done that, never again!"

  "It sounds like you want to take this job," Barbara said.

  "I'd be able to work from home maybe three days a week," he said, "at least most of the time. So I could still watch the baby and change diapers. It wouldn't mean I'd disappear, I promise, petunia."

  Barbara ruffled his hair, then bent over to kiss him.

  "I know," she said. "I love you, and I want you to be happy. Rich and happy. So if this is what you want, go for it. Ooh, ooh, Jimmy! Give me your hand." She grabbed his hand and pressed it to her belly. "I felt the baby! It kicked!"

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Bruce

  My mother's condition was getting worse. I'd never exactly enjoyed Ma's company, and it was downright depressing to see her mooching around in ragged slippers and a stained housedress and hear her calling me by my father's name. I couldn't run away, either, not into booze and not into pretending I'd forgotten she existed. My conscience wouldn't let me. If it had, both Barbara and my sponsor would have been right there reminding me I had a responsibility. I got into the habit of taking the Long Island Railroad out to East Islip every week to check up on her. I could always tell she hadn't showered in a while. If I'd been a daughter, I could have helped with that. I was not prepared to see my mother naked, not in this lifetime. I begged her to let me get her some household help. I figured I could afford an aide for a few hours a couple of times a week. But only over her dead body, she said, would she let a stranger into her home to take advantage of her and steal the silverware. The silverware was a set of stainless with three spoons missing that she'd bought with green stamps back in the day. But she was ready to guard it like a duchess.