Grave Apparel, page 17
That was all he saw.
“But Quentin,” Lacey protested. “Your bench is right here facing Eye Street! You must have seen more than that!”
“Smithsonian, I am a working man!” Quentin drew himself up with dignity. “This is the Christmas season! Friday night, party time, lots of people on the street, jingle in their pockets, goodwill to men in their wallets? My best business hours, pal.
Besides, this is not my only office, you know.” He seemed affronted that Lacey might think he was some slacker lounging on a park bench. “I was heading for my branch office over in McPherson Square, two blocks east of here. I got a prime bench on K Street! You want to make the real money in the District, you got to be on K Street, where the legal beagles bark. None of this two-bit Eye Street action, K Street is where it’s at. Am I right, Smithsonian, or am I right?”
Lacey allowed that K Street was where it was at. “So you saw her run across the square and that was that?”
“That was that,” Quentin said. “But I tell you something I learned on the street, Smithsonian. That little lamb in shepherd’s clothing mean something to you? Then you be on the lookout for her. Little lambs, they always draw the big, bad wolves.”
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*
*
*
Jasmine failed to call back. The name Lee was a dead end, and Quentin’s information was tantalizing, but it led her nowhere. No schools, Mac had said. She was stumped. Lacey gave up at five o’clock and tried to make her escape from the office. She was thwarted by Peter Johnson. It was that kind of day.
“I need to talk to you, Smithsonian,” he commanded.
“Not now, Johnson.” She stood and grabbed her bag.
“Yes, now.”
He sat down imperiously on her desk, prompting Lacey to shove him right off her desk. “Have the courtesy to at least park your butt in a chair,” she said. “And not my chair.”
She sat back in her broken-down ergonomic chair. Johnson picked himself up and sat in the rolling Death Chair, which for some reason usually came to rest near Lacey’s desk. It had earned its moniker when a fashion writer, Lacey’s late unlamented predecessor Mariah, had died in it one day, many hours before her not-so-untimely demise was discovered. The Death Chair wasn’t an ergonomic model, but an old-fashioned oak armchair with a grooved bottom. Someone had painted a skull and crossbones on it. The staff cartoonist had long been suspected, despite his denials.
Sadly the Death Chair did not deter Johnson, who pulled out a notebook and pen with his ink-stained fingers. “What do you have for me?”
She could feel her eyebrows lift in surprise. “Excuse me?”
“What have you found out about Cassandra’s attack? Suspects? Theories?”
Lacey shook her head. Did Johnson really think she’d spent the rest of the day coming up with suspects for him?
“My day was not so productive. What did Cassandra tell you?”
“You’re the only one who’s seen her in person.” His pale eyes were accusatory.
“You never got to speak to her? Oh, I am so honored to be her one and only. But she told me nothing at all of any importance.”
“I was only able to get her on the phone for a few minutes,”
Johnson said. “Felicity Pickles was the only name she came up with.” He gave her his attempt at an imperious reporter’s stare.
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“They had a fight. Cassandra was found wearing one of those ridiculous sweaters. Felicity Pickles’s sweater.”
“Yes, they had a fight. And I saw her in the alley wearing Felicity’s sweater, remember? But I don’t think Felicity did it.”
“You don’t think so.” He peered at her skeptically over his glasses.
Lacey leaned back and stretched. She might as well show him she was bored. “What about those friends of ‘Cassie’s’ at the hospital?”
“They don’t know anything.” Johnson put his notebook down. “I asked.”
“You asked them what they knew and they said, ‘Nothing’?
And you believe them why exactly?”
“If they knew something, they would have told me.”
“And why is that, Peter? Because you’re a reporter and they trust you?” Lacey always assumed the overwhelming probability that people who spoke to her were lying. Even if they weren’t, their stories were always calculated to put them in the best light.
“My. Gut. Instincts.” Johnson tapped his pen on each syllable like a conductor’s baton to emphasize his words. His glasses slid down his nose and nearly off the tip.
“Oh. Right. Well, you do have a gut. So what do you think of her friends?” She thought it was too bizarre to be actually speaking with Peter Johnson for more than a moment or two in passing. And a hostile moment at that. Johnson considered himself to be at the top of the journalistic food chain and Smithsonian at the bottom. Lacey would trust a politician in front of a TV
camera before she’d trust his opinion of anyone.
“Them? Both men are crazy about her, of course.” He seemed to find this both obvious and irritating. “You may not have picked up on that, but I did. Wendy is her best friend. She and Alex are her housemates. They have all this complicated history with each other you wouldn’t know anything about, but I—”
Yada, yada, yada. Lacey had already gotten all that. “No hidden animosities then?”
“What are you insinuating?” He shoved his oversized glasses back up his nose.
“Cassandra provokes, um, strong reactions in people.”
Lacey sat up and started shuffling papers on her desk. “I just
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wondered if you thought there was anything else motivating their hospital vigil. Impressions, theories, your infallible gut instincts?”
“No. There wasn’t.” He tapped his pen again. “What about your gut instincts?”
“I am not getting any more involved with this thing than I have to be, Peter.” She willed her phone to ring. It didn’t.
“Really? You don’t want to work together on this, Smithsonian? I’m not crazy about working with you either, but Mac suggested we share information. Suggested it strongly. Now, what do you do when you get involved in one of these stories, like those murders with all the fashion stuff? Do you have a logical process, or is it just dumb luck?”
“Like my dumb luck to be having this conversation with you?” Her hands were itching to throw something at him. “I just ask questions. That’s all. Ever try that?”
Lacey wasn’t about to discuss her instincts, or “all the fashion stuff,” or the way that clothes and looks and other little style clues suggested meanings and connections to her and sometimes told her an entire story that most people couldn’t read. He was a man, what did he know about those subtle things? He wouldn’t believe her if she told him, so why even start?
So far her so-called fashion clues consisted of the infamous Christmas sweater, the ubiquitous Santa cap, and the alleged giant candy cane. It was all too precious and obvious, and yet baffling. An enraged overreaction to Sweatergate? Or a clumsy attempt to look like it was, to cover some other motive? Personal or political? Calculated or improvised? Discuss all that with Peter Johnson, who just wanted to scoop her and pick her brain and copy her “process” without even respecting her?
Absurd.
He referred to his notebook. “According to your supposed witness, the assailant wore a red and white Santa cap. At least a dozen guys at The Eye’s Christmas party were wearing those stupid things. Fashion clue?”
“Twelve new suspects? Honestly, Peter, you think it was someone from The Eye? No one here cares about Cassandra’s little fiasco of Sweatergate, except to laugh at her over it.”
“Don’t call it Sweatergate! Cassandra was the victim here!”
“The victim of her own hatefulness. And what should I call it, Slap Down at the Cookie Corral?” She stopped shuffling pa
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pers in case she needed to knock Johnson off his chair. He leaned in with an ugly expression. Lacey noticed the scalp under his thinning hair was glistening with sweat. He was too close to her. She stood up, glared down at him on the Death Chair, and picked up her purse.
“It must be someone at The Eye. The assailant is always close to home, Smithsonian,” he said. “Every police reporter knows that.”
“That lets you out, doesn’t it?” Lacey laughed. “You were never a police reporter! You just watch the detectives on TV.”
“What about our office jinx?”
“Harlan Wiedemeyer? You can’t be serious.”
“He’s bad news,” Johnson insisted. “Everyone knows that.”
“There’s no such thing as a jinx. Ask Mac.” The thought of poor lovestruck Harlan whaling on Cassandra with a candy cane was preposterous. Wiedemeyer was as meek as a mouse.
Besides, Cassandra was in top shape and mounted on her bicycle, versus a tubby little guy whose only daily exercise was hefting boxes of Krispy Kreme doughnuts from the Metro station to the office.
“And,” Johnson continued, “Wiedemeyer is Pickles’s
boyfriend. He could have been doing her dirty work for her.”
“Harlan was wearing antlers, not a Santa cap.”
“Big deal. He ditched the hat and put on the antlers to throw people off the track.”
“Yeah, good idea, so he’d stick out in a crowd where everyone was wearing Santa hats.” Lacey wiggled her fingers over her head, antlers-style. “And the antlers lit up, just so you couldn’t forget him.”
Johnson closed his mouth tightly. Lacey folded her arms and stared him down.
“Maybe Wiedemeyer didn’t do it. But does he have an alibi?
Does Pickles?” He got to his feet and stomped off. “Find out.
That’s all for now.”
Ha! As if they were some sort of team, Lacey thought. Or worse, as if Johnson were her boss on this story. Mac thought they should work together? What on earth was he thinking?
Chapter 19
Lacey sat back down at her desk and called Wendy Townsend at the Garrison of Gaia offices. She was just leaving, but she said Lacey could stop by the house shortly; she’d be there in twenty minutes. Because Lacey had suggested to the boorish Johnson that Cassandra’s roommates might have some interesting information, maybe she should observe them in their native habitat, the “crowded commune,” as Henderson Wilcox had called it. Not for Peter Johnson, but for herself. This story seemed to keep demanding that Lacey get involved with it, but she was determined to work her own angles, not his. And maybe Jasmine would call, and Lacey could try to “reel her in.”
Lacey didn’t care how Cassandra lived, but perhaps she could get some sort of feeling for the dynamics between the housemates. She took a moment to freshen her makeup and call Vic. Even though they didn’t see each other every day, she was getting awfully used to him being around. He was working tonight, but he told her to stay safe and to call him if she needed him. She caught a cab to the Mount Pleasant neighborhood, where Cassandra and the others lived.
Wendy Townsend met Lacey at the door of the small townhouse and ushered her into the front room. Wendy was wearing a green and white Garrison of Gaia sweatshirt and gray leggings that bagged on her thin frame. Thankfully, her perfume had faded a little during the day. The toxic cloud was gone, but the powerful memory of the jungle gardenia lingered on. Lacey tried not to wrinkle her nose.
The house was long and narrow, with a tiny living/dining area and kitchen on the first floor and bedrooms and bath upstairs. It could have been fabulous with some tender loving
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care, Lacey thought. There was a fireplace with a beautiful wooden mantel and a crown molding and chair rail around the room, but someone had slapped a coat of flat dingy apartment white paint on everything long ago and now it was chipped and dirty. It looked cheap and forlorn.
Decorated in early castoffs and late Salvation Army, the room was also full of cardboard boxes. This was not the kind of place in which company would be afraid to spill something on the carpet; it was so stained Lacey couldn’t even put a name to its color. Maybe “grunge.” Two sturdy-looking bikes hung on the wall near the front door. A variety of helmets dangled from a wooden rack meant for hats and coats. Lacey wondered where Cassandra’s crumpled bike had ended up.
She focused her attention on the lone framed object on the wall. It was a newspaper clipping of Wendy with her fist in the air, being hauled out of a tree by police. The headline read, TREE-DWELLING ECO-ACTIVIST DEFIANT AS POLICE SHUT DOWN
PROTEST. The article detailed her efforts to save the tree from a logging company by living in it for as long as it took. Wendy lost her struggle, and her tree, but gained notoriety. Lacey didn’t read the entire thing, but she got the gist. You might fault their methods, she thought, but not their commitment.
“My finest hour,” Wendy said. “That poor tree. Come sit down.” The woman had a hungry quality that had nothing to do with her being too thin. She stood too close to people and watched them too closely when they spoke. There was a desperately needy undertone to her kinetic behavior, almost devouring. Her smile seemed like the prelude to a shark attack.
A large yellow dog lay sprawled on a bedspread-covered sofa. The spread was covered in a second spread of dog hair.
When the dog growled and moved into attack position, Lacey didn’t know whether to run or stand her ground.
“Bruno! Good boy! Bruno likes you,” Wendy said as she wrangled the animal off the sofa, down the hall, and through a door to the basement, which she slammed. The dog barked loudly. He sounded angry. “Don’t worry about Bruno. He’ll calm down soon. Have a seat.”
Lacey looked at the sofa and considered how her heather tweed skirt would look covered in yellow fur. It was tweed, but still. “Allergies,” she said, indicating the sofa. Lacey liked dogs,
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but she preferred dogs whose owners were acquainted with vacuum cleaners. The angry barking continued.
“Ah. Too bad. One of those people, are you?” Wendy returned with a chrome chair from the kitchen, on which Lacey gratefully sat, after giving it a wipe with her hand. “Allergies.
You probably grew up in a sterile environment. You really need more contact with animals, not less. Desensitization.”
“Perhaps some other time.” The imprisoned Bruno body slammed the basement door, shaking the whole house. He followed up with furious barking, which matched the pounding of Lacey’s heart.
“Pay no attention to the little doggie,” Wendy said. “He just wants to play.”
“Sounds more like he wants to have me for dinner.” Lacey clenched the chair with her hands and tried to calm her racing pulse.
“You’re not worried about Bruno?” Wendy’s high-pitched giggle sounded as if it could slide right into a sob. “He’s just a big wuvvable doggie-woggie.” She sprawled on the sofa arms akimbo, heedless of the dog hair. Wendy’s sweatshirt had a nice even coat of Bruno’s fur.
“How long have you lived here?” Maybe Lacey was being unfair about the place. Maybe they just moved in. Maybe the carpet had been stained by the previous occupants.
“Oh, four or five years, why?”
“Just wondering.” Lacey tried not to stare at the decor.
Stacks of books leaned against the wall in the hallway. The cardboard boxes spilled their contents on the unmentionable carpet.
“Tell me something.” Wendy leaned forward, elbows on knees. “Why should Cassie want you to find out what happened to her? That’s what the police are for, unless of course they’re paid to look the other way. She doesn’t even like you. And you don’t like her. So why you?”
“You don’t sugarcoat anything, do you, Wendy?”
“Why should I? I’m just being honest. You’re just a parasite, you and the whole monolithic reactionary media. Nothing personal.”
Being honest was so overrated, Lacey thought. “Does that mean you don’t like me too?” she asked.
“I just met you.” She gave an offhanded shrug. “If Cassie
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wants you to find out what happened, then so do I. And,” she added logically, “it’s not like I have to like you.”
“No, you don’t,” Lacey agreed. Neither do I. “Well, that’s out of the way. So why don’t we start.” She was thirsty. A glass of water would have been nice, or even better a cup of hot tea, anything to cut the thick atmosphere of dog hair that was beginning to fill her throat and lungs, but she wasn’t about to ask.
Townsend apparently wasn’t about to offer. “Does Cassandra have any enemies?”
“Everyone has enemies.”
“Anyone specifically?”
“Besides you?”
“I am not her enemy. I am her coworker, as we have already established. But I am not her enemy.” Lacey stood up. She was finding it hard to breathe in the small close room. “I’m involved because Cassandra asked me to be.”
“Wow, Smithsonian. No need to be touchy. There is that chubby woman who wears all the offensive sweaters.”
“They are not offensive,” Lacey said, resuming the edge of her seat. “They are festive.”
Wendy shrugged. “Whatever. She’s dangerous, did you know that?”
“Leaving aside Felicity Pickles.”
“Fine. There is also the global capitalist cabal, which is destroying the planet.” Wendy changed positions and crossed her legs, raising a fog of dog fur.
“And leaving aside the dogma. Specifics, Wendy. I’m talking about threats anyone might have made to Cassandra, or conflicts, disagreements, arguments, strange e-mails, anything new or unusual or out of place.”
“Not that I know of.” Wendy sighed. It seemed to be really hard for her to focus on things in her immediate world, rather than the important questions facing the planet.
Think globally, slack locally, Lacey thought. “Odd visitors, stalkers, weird phone calls?”
“I don’t know. We all have our own cell phones. No one even calls on the wall phone. We only use it to order takeout.”
