After Image, page 12
He studies me for a long moment. “Well, isn’t that interesting? You know, I’ve really appreciated your concern and support over the years.” Sarcasm is still his weapon of choice. “When I was really in the shit. When I could’ve used a friend.”
I can’t hold his gaze. “Please. Greg. I just want to talk for a few minutes.”
His jaw clenches. Now that he’s standing closer, I can see the dents all up and down his ears where his piercings used to be.
“Well. Why not,” he says flatly. Then he walks past me and unlocks the door with a rough twist of a key. Stepping aside, he gestures with an elaborate flourish for me to come inside. Which reminds me that Greg used to be an actor. A good one. I went with Allie to watch him in a couple of college productions, and I’d had to grudgingly acknowledge that he was good. Very good.
Slowly, I walk past him into the dark foyer, and it’s only when the door closes behind us that I feel a flicker of panic. I remember the footage of Greg being escorted out of his apartment all those years ago. He’d turned his head away from the cameras, but you could see his stubble and his sweat, and—when he raised a hand to ward off the camera flashes—the yellow bruising on his knuckles.
Greg flicks on the lights and walks into a large, open kitchen. I register pale hardwood floors, a gleaming tile backsplash, then tilt my head to look up at the high ceiling, the large skylight. This place must be worth a fortune.
Greg notices me sizing up the place. “It’s one of my dad’s properties. He lets me use it.”
“Oh.” I don’t know if he knows what Allie told me about his dad. “I didn’t realize you two were . . .”
Greg heads to a cabinet, where he pulls down a glass and a bottle of vodka. “We mended fences, I guess you could say. After he bailed me out of the investigation mess. And now I work for him.”
So. Greg’s new look. His new lifestyle.
He gets ice out of the freezer and then glances at me. “Want some?”
I shake my head.
“Figured not.” He pours himself a generous drink. “So,” he says, taking a sip. “What brings you to my door?” His fingers tap impatiently on the side of his glass. “I mean, I’m assuming it’s the million-dollar question.” He clutches a hand to his chest. “Did I kill Allie Andersen?”
“No,” I say slowly. “Not that.”
“What, don’t you think I’m guilty?” He drains his drink. “Everyone else does.”
I draw in a slow breath. So he’s going to be like this. It’s too soon to ask about the flash drive—if he’s in this kind of mood, he’ll clam up completely. I decide to start with a different tack. “I wanted to ask about that last night. With Allie. What you guys argued about.”
“Oh, didn’t you watch the TV movie?” He yanks off his tie and throws it on the counter behind him. The vodka is making his voice sludgy. “Did you like the guy they cast as me, by the way? What a joke.”
“I want to hear it from you.”
He stares at me for a moment, considering, no doubt, telling me to fuck off. Finally, he says, “It was stupid. I was high. And in the mood for a fight. Allie had been keeping secrets from me.”
“What kind of secrets?”
He looks at me for a long moment, his face guarded. Then he relaxes a little, perhaps deciding to trust me. Or maybe he’s just bored, tired of keeping his story to himself all these years. “The end of that last year, before she . . .” He trails off. “Well, she had all this money. Wads of cash. I asked her where it was coming from.”
“What’d she say?”
“What do you think? ‘Fuck off,’ basically.” He laughs. “Classic Allie. She said it wasn’t any of my business.” He scrunches up his nose. “But, I mean, where would she be getting that kind of money? You didn’t see her working any part-time jobs, did you? Waiting tables? Washing dishes? I don’t think so.”
“So you thought she was working with Jairo,” I say.
He stares at me. “How the fuck—” Then he sighs. “You’ve been talking to that detective.”
I don’t say anything.
“That guy always had it out for me,” he says, and I sense a rant coming on. The injustice of what happened to him. “The police—”
I try to get him to refocus. “But I don’t understand the Jairo thing. Greg, she hardly knew him.”
He raises one eyebrow. “Shows how much you know.”
“What does that mean?” I hate that he still knows how to push my buttons.
Greg walks over to the window and opens it, letting in a cold breeze. “I saw Jairo. Outside your apartment, one time. He was driving Allie home.”
The temperature in the room is dropping rapidly.
Allie in Jairo’s car?
Greg returns to the kitchen island and pours himself another drink. “And I don’t think it was the first time. I mean, you know what she was like back then. Whenever I texted, she’d say she was ‘busy,’ but she wouldn’t say where she was. I don’t know where she was going, but it’s not a stretch to think she might’ve been with Jairo.” He snorts. “And that was just stupid, so stupid. Jairo was just a small-time criminal, but his family—I heard they were into some serious shit. Allie had to be nuts to get mixed up with people like that. Anyway, that night—I was trying to get her to see sense.”
“So you punched a hole in the wall,” I say.
He raises his glass in a mock toast. “Ah, you did watch the TV movie. Yeah, well.” He pushes away from the countertop and sets his glass down with a clang. “I wasn’t in the best state of mind.”
“What happened after that?”
Greg pauses, his neck muscles tensing. “Look, yes, I punched the wall. Like an idiot. Broke my fucking knuckle doing it. But then I walked out. I took a long walk around the neighborhood, trying to calm down.” He draws in a deep breath. “Then I took a couple of Xanax, and I was feeling pretty damn zen by the time I got back to the apartment. That is, until I saw that Allie had taken my car—and a boatload of my money.” He laughs bitterly.
“What do you mean, a ‘boatload’? It was two hundred dollars.” I’d seen Greg drop more than that at a happy hour.
Greg cracks his knuckles one by one. “No, it wasn’t. I told the cops it was only two hundred. But I lied.”
“Why?”
He grimaces. “Right after they brought me in, before I realized what a shit show the investigation was going to become, I thought Allie had just taken off for a few days. I figured she’d come back when she’d gotten over her little mood. At that point, all I wanted was the cops off my back. There’s no way I was going to tell them I had ten grand lying around my apartment.”
“Ten grand?” I say. “Allie stole ten grand from you?”
He shrugs. “Give or take, yeah. She was the only one who knew where I kept it.”
“Jesus. You were making that kind of money?”
“Oh, for sure,” he says. “I mean, I only got into dealing to make a little extra cash when my dad was being a dick about my trust fund, but when I realized how easy it was—stuff started to get out of hand.”
I blow out a breath.
He stares down at his feet. “I think about that sometimes. I mean, if I’d kept going at that rate, I could’ve gotten myself in some real trouble.”
I sit down on one of the kitchen stools, trying to fit this information into my understanding of Allie’s last night. If Allie had ten grand on her when she walked into Barclay’s, that changes everything. For one thing, it certainly doesn’t suggest she was about to commit suicide. With that kind of money, she could’ve gotten a long way away from LA. She could’ve bought a different car, a new passport.
“But why didn’t you tell the cops about the money?” I ask. “Later, I mean, after they found the drugs.” It hadn’t taken long, in the search of his apartment, for the police to find Greg’s stash behind a panel in his bathroom wall.
He throws his hands up. “Don’t you think I tried? By that point, it was too late. I’d already lied about so many things—they didn’t believe a word I said. And then my dad sent his lawyer in, and that guy was crystal clear: I had to stop talking, about everything. So I did.” He shakes his head. “I just wanted to keep myself out of jail, Tash. Because I didn’t do anything to Allie. I’d never hurt her. You know that.”
There’s a long silence. From outside the window, I hear a far-off siren, its sound winding up through the hills.
“Anyway.” He picks up his glass and twists it around and around in his hands. “That night, when I came back and found the money gone, I thought it was just another one of Allie’s stunts.” He stares out the window into the pitch-black garden. “Those next few days, I kept expecting her to show up.” He laughs. “I was still expecting that when the cops knocked on my door.”
When he turns back to me, tears have gathered at the edges of his eyes. This is the Greg I only saw glimpses of back in college. The one who relied on Allie more than he liked to admit.
It’s this moment that convinces me to take the leap, to ask the question I came here to ask. “Greg, did you ever see Allie using a flash drive?”
His forehead wrinkles. “What?” Whatever he’s been expecting me to say, it isn’t that.
“That key chain Allie had—the little panda bear. It was a flash drive.”
He looks puzzled. “So?” Then his expression changes. “What’s going on, Tash? Does this have something to do with the body they found in the canyon?”
“No,” I say quickly. “This is just—a lead I’m following up on. From the tip line.” Will Greg believe that? “You said you thought Allie was doing deals behind your back. Is there any chance she would’ve been keeping information about that on the flash drive?”
He snorts. “C’mon. Allie could be reckless, but she wasn’t stupid. If she was working with Jairo, there’s no way she’d put any of that in writing.”
I frown. “What could’ve been on it, then?”
He thinks for a minute, his head tilted to one side. “Well, if I had to guess,” he says slowly, “I’d say it’d be that essay she was working on for Macnamara.”
“Essay? What essay?”
Greg stares at me. “The essay,” he says. “Shit, Tash, don’t you know anything?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Well, this Macnamara asshole—even before he started sleeping with Allie—he’d started filling her head with all this bullshit. Like, ‘Oh, you’re so talented, I never met a writer like you before.’ Blah blah blah.”
My heart constricts. “Yes, I remember.”
Greg laughs. “I mean, it was textbook, wasn’t it? What better way to get some undergrad into bed? Tell them they’re the next Sylvia Plath or whatever.” He rolls his eyes. “And then he tells her that this essay she wrote for his class—that she should try to publish it.”
“What?” It’s been years, but the jealousy still stings, like the sudden shock of a paper cut.
“I can’t believe she never told you. She was all amped up about it. Apparently, Macnamara was friends with this editor at a big magazine. He was going to send Allie’s essay there when she’d finished it.”
I feel numb. Allie never told me a word about this.
Greg leans back against the kitchen counter. “I mean, this guy was blowing so much smoke up her ass. C’mon, you know Allie. She was barely passing her classes. There’s no way she was some kind of literary genius.”
I chew on my lip. I used to think the same thing about Allie, that she wasn’t really that smart. Or maybe she had dyslexia or something, and that’s why she struggled to pass even her remedial classes at Palos Verdes Prep. Then, one day, I’d come back from my Saturday SAT prep class and found Allie sitting on her bed, scribbling in a notebook she had propped on her knees.
“What’s that?” I asked. I’d never seen Allie write in a journal before. Mostly when I found her alone in her bedroom, she was listening to music or doing her nails.
“Nothing,” she said, flipping the notebook closed.
I jumped on the bed next to her. “Wait a sec—are you keeping a diary?”
“Don’t be stupid,” she snapped. But she looked stricken, like I’d caught her doing something heinous.
“Hey,” I said. “Sorry I said it like that. I just didn’t know that you . . . wrote things.”
She shrugged, stuffing the notebook under her pillow. “It’s nothing. It’s stupid.”
“I bet it’s not.” When she didn’t respond, I nudged her shoulder. “C’mon, let me see.”
But she wouldn’t say anything more about the notebook, not even after I pushed a few times, so I let the subject drop. Later, though, after she’d left to go to the gym, I slipped back into her room. Feeling like a criminal, I searched through her desk drawers, even under her mattress. Finally, I found the notebook in the air-conditioning vent, tucked behind the mini bottles of liquor. Sitting down cross-legged on the bed, I opened to the first page, prepared to see a long rant about Isabel or Giles. Typical teen-angst stuff.
But it wasn’t that. Allie was writing poetry. Lots of it. I read through the first few pages, my head buzzing. Silly, shallow Allie. Allie, who was in all the lowest-tier classes at school, who never spent any time on her homework—Allie could write like this? Where had she learned to do that?
I flipped rapidly through the notebook, looking at the ink spreading over the pages. The most recent poem was written in small sections, like Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” Except—how would Allie know about that poem? She was in remedial English. Had she been reading my AP English textbook on the sly?
I found the notebook so unnerving that I stood up quickly, placing the notebook just as I’d found it in the AC vent. Then I screwed the panel back on with trembling fingers. This wasn’t how things were supposed to be. I was supposed to be the smart one. That was the deal, the unspoken balance between us. I didn’t tread on Allie’s territory, and she didn’t intrude on mine.
“She was a good writer,” I say now to Greg. “Really good.”
“Oh, come on,” he scoffs. “We’re talking about Allie. She copied every single one of your essays for her classes.”
“Yeah, I know. But she didn’t do it because she couldn’t write her own. I think she had this idea that it was a mistake to let people know she was smart.”
We’d had arguments about it—me trying to convince Allie that her life would be so much simpler if she’d just try to do well in school. Oh, like your life is simpler? she’d retorted. I mean, look at you. You’ve been kicking academic ass for so long, no one even notices anymore. Now you work up a sweat if one of those A’s happens to be an A minus. Whereas, I don’t have to worry at all. The trick, which you have not figured out yet, is to keep expectations low.
I told her that was the dumbest thing I’d ever heard.
No, listen: You have to disappoint them consistently—but then, every once in a while, do something halfway decent. And then they fall all over themselves telling you how great you are.
“Allie was always on the verge of failing her classes,” I tell Greg. “But I think she did it on purpose.”
“What, like as a fuck-you to Isabel?”
“Maybe.” Who knew why Allie did the things she did? Sometimes I thought she was punishing Isabel. Other times, it seemed like she was punishing herself. “So, what happened with this essay?”
He snorts. “Well, if you can believe it, after Macnamara filled her head with all this stuff about getting published, he changed his mind. Just like that.”
“Why?”
He rolls his eyes. “My guess? There never was any editor, any magazine. It was all part of his bullshit. Then, when Allie got serious about it, he had to backpedal. Of course, he tried to spin it so he didn’t look like a total asshole. He fed Allie some line about how she should be careful about putting her name out there, like the media attention could be too much for her. It sounded like a load of crap to me. Allie thought so too. That’s why she broke up with him.”
I frown. That’s not right. “Allie didn’t break up with Macnamara. He broke up with her.”
He looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. “Who said that?”
“Ruiz. That’s what Macnamara told him.”
Greg shakes his head. “Well, Macnamara’s fucking lying. Allie told me all about it, and trust me, it was her kicking Macnamara to the curb. Not the other way around.”
The light in the kitchen glints off the stainless steel stove. Is Greg right? Did Allie break up with Macnamara? Or was Allie just too proud to admit that she’d been dumped?
And what had she written in that essay? I thought of her notebook in the AC vent, how she’d taken care to make sure no one would discover it.
“Did you read the essay?” I ask Greg. “Did she show it to you?”
“Fuck no. She had the file passworded on her computer.”
I stare at him. “How do you know that?”
He has the grace to look embarrassed. “Okay, so I tried to open it once. Sue me.” He rubs his knuckles against his chin. “This one time, I showed up at the apartment. Allie and I were supposed to go out for happy hour. But then she texted, blowing me off for, like, the millionth time, saying she wasn’t going to meet me after all. But I was already at the apartment and bored out of my mind, so I logged in to her computer. Just out of curiosity. But yeah, no luck.”
He leans back against the counter. He doesn’t seem to care whether I believe him or not. Which is what makes me think he’s telling the truth.
I press my hands against the cold countertop. Allie used to let Greg log in to her phone, read her messages, even pretend to be her over text. But she’d passworded this file.
What was in it that she wouldn’t show even to him?
CHAPTER 24
The next day, I’m so agitated I can barely make it through the afternoon at work. The things Greg told me are churning in my head. The night Allie left the apartment, she had $10,000 on her, and she’d written an essay she didn’t want anyone to see. Ruiz needs to know all this. But after the way I stormed out of the diner last night, I’m reluctant to text him. What reason does he have to reply? Instead, I leave work early and head to the police station.
