by Bill Alive
“Oh, you know. Working,” I said casually. And here I had worried that a suit coat might be underdressing. Glancing around, I realized that the default winery uniform was a crisp pair of possibly-ironed jeans and a sporty leveled-up tee shirt. Including for the women. Oops.
“You look nice,” she said. She smiled.
My vision blurred. Everything swirled around the vortex of her dark eyes. I think I said something like, “Cool.”
“So where’s your detective friend?” she said.
“Oh. He’s, um, busy.”
Her phone pinged with a text. She broke contact to check her phone, then smiled a private flirty smile, thus clarifying that the previous smile she’d given me was one-hundred percent Friendly Polite. Her thumbs danced on the screen, eagerly replying to some dude named “Harry”.
“That’s a shame he didn’t come,” she said, still texting. “Your friend’s kind of cute.”
“Really?” I blurted. “He’s bald!”
“So’s Jason Stratham,” she said, still texting. “Nobody’s perfect. Do you disqualify every attractive woman who doesn’t include gigantic breasts?”
“What? No! It’s not like yours are super amazing!”
I think I explained earlier about the Reduced Brainpower Issue. Yeah.
She snapped up from her text with a glance that skewered me. I hadn’t known it was possible to have dead silence in a swarm of blathering yuppies.
Finally I said, “Sorry. Um. How was work?”
“Fine,” she said, ice cold. “What does that have to do with a murder investigation?”
“It’s just a question. That’s what detectives do, we ask questions.”
“About my day? That sounds more like a question for a date.”
I squirmed. “I don’t have to explain my questions. Maybe I’m being super subtle.”
Her eyes narrowed. “So I am a murder suspect?”
“No! That’s not what I meant!”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes! You’re not a suspect!”
“Then what do you want, Mr. Villette? I have already told you everything I am at liberty to discuss about Lindsay Mackenzie. Why did you drag me out here after a long day?”
“I just—”
Her phone pinged again. She bent to another flurry of texts.
Eight or so inches away from my head, one of the fashion-shoot guys was playing a hand-slapping game with a moderately hot girl who was actually dressed up. At least one of them thought they were flirting, but I couldn’t tell which.
“Listen,” I said. “Let’s try again here. Can I get you some wine?”
“No thanks, I have to drive.”
“But it’s a winery! You’ll have time to dry out!”
“Sorry. I have to get going.” She rose and strode away through the crowd.
I stumbled after her. “No problem, that’s totally cool, but if I have any more questions, are you sure I should call you at work? Would your personal number be more convenient?”
Without looking back, she said, “Actually, let’s do email.”
“Oh really? Because in person is really better, it’s part of our unique method, and we don’t have to meet at a winery if you’re not into drinking, we could totally park. I mean, at a scenic view. With other people around, of course.”
We’d reached the cars, and she turned on me with the face of a stone-cold professional. “Email,” she said. “Here’s my card.”
I wilted.
Her eyes softened. “Look, Pete, I was only her doctor. I’m not a good use of your professional time. You should be talking to her ex-husband, her sister, her crazy mother-in-law—”
“Mother-in-law?” I said, perking up out of my misery. “I didn’t know she had a mother-in-law. Crowley’s mom?”
She stepped back. “I don’t know for sure, I could be mistaken. She may have mentioned her once.”
“See, this is super helpful!” I said. “You and Lindsay really hung out.”
She frowned and crossed her arms. “Mr. Villette, I was her neurologist, I met her once a month or so for twenty minutes. That’s it. I’ve done all I can for you, but we need to stop wasting each other’s time. And I really need to get going.”
“Right. Got it.”
She spun and marched away across the grass.
Twenty feet later, she stopped and cried, “What the hell? Someone parked me in!”
Crap.
I hustled up, straining to hope that some other idiot had also done the unthinkable, and that the car blocking her in just looked a lot like Thunder.
Nope.
“Oh, um, that’s me,” I said, fumbling for the keys.
“You?”
“I’m so sorry, I was running late, didn’t want to hold you up…”
“So you double-parked someone in front of a tree? You had this entire hill to choose from!”
“I didn’t know it was you.” I crashed into the driver’s seat and kept talking through the open window. “Totally my bad, good thing I’m heading out now too, no problem. Thanks for the email, really appreciate it, we’ll be in touch…”
She glared in disbelief.
I cranked the ignition.
Nothing happened.
“You are kidding me,” I muttered. I twisted the key again. And again.
She loomed and bent at the car window. This was the closest we’d been all evening, so her Aura of Hotness ratcheted up to “excruciating”. I realized that if the wind picked up, her hair might touch my arm.
It would really be nice if this part of the brain could be taught to not interpret all proximity as “Make-Out Imminent.”
“Everything okay?” she said, with dangerous calm.
“It won’t start! I have no idea, it’s not my car…”
She pointed at the headlight knob. “The lights are on.”
I stared. I clicked them off … on … off…
“It didn’t make a noise,” I said. “When I got out, there wasn’t any warning noise, I always just turn the lights on automatically for safety, I don’t even think about it, it never occurred to me that…”
She glared me into silence.
“Um,” I said. “Do you have any jumper cables?”
Chapter 19
Two hours later, I staggered home.
Mark was entranced at his supervillain control center. Without looking up, he gave me a relatively cheerful, “How’d it go?”
I hadn’t felt this terrible since I’d asked this skater girl at the coffee shop to a concert and she’d said yes, then brought her fiance. But Mark’s friendly greeting gave me a wave of comfort. This is what being roomies was all about. Even after a terrible day, you could come home, pull up a chair, and pour out your troubles to a fellow—
“Man, what the hell?” Mark jerked away like I was radiating tear gas. “What happened to you? Can you go sit on the couch or something till you feel less excruciating?”
“Fine!” I snapped, and stomped across the room to my exile. “You know, dude, sometimes that’s pretty weird.”
He shrugged, and kept typing. “You’re the one who wanted to move in. Relax. Get a beer.”
I sighed. “I think I still have a kombucha in the fridge.”
“Uh oh. He’s pulling out the hard stuff. So what happened?”
“Well … the good news is, I found out Lindsay has a crazy mother-in-law.”
“Oh yeah, Grandma Crowley. She was in the email from the Linux guys.”
“Great, never mind then. It was totally pointless.”
“Did you not check your email?” he said.
I don’t know why older people don’t get that if something’s actually important, they should text. Using email is like taping a ransom note to the Lifestyle section of the Washington Post and being like, what, did you not read the entire stupid paper?
“Maybe it went into Spam,” I said.
Mark shrugged. “I put in a long day today, so we should be good to go see G
randma Crowley tomorrow. Assuming you didn’t total my car.” He snapped up, like he’d sniffed something burning. “Hey, what’s up with the car?”
“Could you not do that?”
“Is the car okay?”
“It’s fine! If you don’t count that it doesn’t beep when you leave the lights on, so then the battery runs down, so then you have to spend forty-five minutes hunting down jumper cables and the whole time Jivanta is just seething.”
“Dr. Kistna? Why’d she stick around?”
I told him the whole story, including how I didn’t know how to use the cables, and one of the fashion-shoot guys who did know how had also had this super deep conversation with Jivanta about meditation, Thich Nhat Hanh, and “mindful sex”. Totally got her number.
When I finished, Mark said, “Huh. Yeah, I definitely always turn off the lights. Automatic, I guess.”
“Thanks. For an empath, you kind of suck at empathy.”
“No, I suck at sympathy,” he said cheerfully. “I read once that it’s like if someone’s on a cruise ship throwing up over the side, sympathy is rubbing their back. Empathy is throwing up yourself.”
I’d never thought of it this way. Right now, it didn’t help. “Whatever. If you’d been there, she would have been perfectly happy.”
He shrugged. “I don’t think so.”
“She said you were cute!”
“I got a vibe of mild attraction, nothing serious.”
“What? You can tell when a girl likes you?!”
“Sure.”
I gaped. My mind was seriously blown. “You mean you…” I was stammering. “…you can, like, walk through a mall and you know which girls are into you?”
He grinned. “Why do you think I still work out?”
“But why were you such a fringy mess before? Why aren’t you with some supermodel who’s into ‘Mr. Clean with a Righteous Stache’? Dude!”
His grin drooped, and he swiveled back to his screens. “Kind of been there, done that.”
“Really?”
He sighed. “It still feels cool sometimes, sure. I mean, it doesn’t take an empath to vibe that glimmer of possible attraction. But I get way more than a glimpse.” He frowned.
“And that’s a problem because…?” I said. “The rest of us are guessing! You can see whether they like you for sure!”
He shook his head. “I can see how much they’re projecting. They’re not really seeing me … just a cluster of cues. They walk around primed to pattern match, scanning for a particular combination of shape and voice and moves that will trigger the perfect cascade of memories and hopes and endorphins. Now I understand how the few hot girls who really know they’re gorgeous must feel all the time.”
“It’s not just endorphins,” I said. But my chest twinged with anxiety. What was actually happening when I obsessed over, say, Jivanta?
“Trust me,” he said. “In that first glance, I could be a fricking robot.”
“People don’t want robots!”
“They’re already buying robots. As we speak. Crappy prototypes that seem laughably ridiculous until those fake gorgeous eyes are gazing at you. A robot doesn’t have to say much, Pete. It just looks perfect and acts like you’re amazing. If those things go mainstream, the human race is done.”
“But … I mean…” How could he say all this shit with such calm, typing away at his stupid code while the world burned? “It’s not all meaningless.”
He laughed, not unkindly. “If it were really meaningless, you wouldn’t care.”
I exhaled. “That’s true.”
“Unless there’s some evolutionary advantage to not thinking it’s all meaningless.”
“Dude! I thought you were Catholic or something!”
He sighed. “It’s complicated.”
“There’s no way we’re just robots! What about spirit and love and karma and beauty and … I don’t know …”
“Sure, maybe Plan A was for everyone to be drop-dead gorgeous,” he said, still typing. “Maybe we were meant to respond with falling-in-love intensity to everyone, because every single person would have been beautiful and kind and good and overflowing with wonderfulness. And instead we’re stuck with the shreds, with billions of us all disfigured beyond recognition, one big planetary cancer ward. But it’s all just temporary, and every rare hot chick who still manages to light you up is a hint of future godhood. You’ll be buff. I’ll have hair. Forever and ever, amen.”
“Yes,” I managed to say. “That.”
He swiveled back toward me and crossed his arms. “So if we’re all going to be gods and goddesses, why is everyone so full of shit?”
“Easy,” I said. “Bad karma.”
He rubbed his eyebrows.
And his phone rang.
He frowned and checked the screen. “Number’s not in my contacts,” he said, but he pressed the phone to his ear. “Hello?” His eyes went wide. “Oh! Hi Gwen!”
“Gwen?” I said.
“Hey listen, about the hospital, I’m sorry if I … you sure? Okay. Cool. Wait, wait, Pete’s here, let me put you on speaker.”
He set the phone on his desk and Gwen’s official voice crackled out. “I called to inform you both that there’s been an autopsy on Lindsay Mackenzie, and it has confirmed that she could not have been poisoned.”
“So you did do an autopsy!” I said.
Her voice stiffened, if possible, even more. “Yes. Now that we have confirmed the absence of poison, we can all be certain that she was not murdered. She died of natural causes, exactly as we thought.”
I wilted with disappointment, but Mark said brightly, “Thanks so much for calling to let us know!” Like she was some kind of client.
“I called so you’d stop endangering yourselves and others,” she said firmly. “The woman had a clear health issue—”
“Oh, but we talked to her doctor. She’s quite attractive, Pete just took her out for drinks.”
“Mark!” I groaned.
“And she assured us that Lindsay was religious about taking her pills and she couldn’t have had a seizure up there. Poison’s out, fine, but maybe the plane was tampered with.”
Gwen’s official voice broke into human frustration. “How do you tamper with a glider to make it fly for awhile and then crash? I’m not even sure that’s possible. And that would take significant flight experience.”
“So maybe it’s one of those pilots. That Jonas Lynch guy with the beard creeped us right out.”
“Mr. Falcon, I can’t arrest people just for being creepy. Lucky for you.”
Mark grinned. “Do my ears deceive me? Gwen, was that a joke? Pete, did you hear that?”
I imagined how Gwen must be glowering, and I quailed. I swiped my fingers across my throat in the universal gesture for drop it.
“Mr. Falcon,” Gwen said coldly. “If you’re done—”
“Come on, Gwen!” Mark said. “There’s no way you’re calling me on duty. All your cop colleagues think the autopsy seals the deal, but you’ve got this tug in your gut, you know something doesn’t add up. You want to talk it out.”
“I called you to tell you the exact opposite,” she snapped. “I have no intention of discussing this investigation with you. I am off duty, and I’m about to hang up and vacuum my living room. And if you were really an ‘empath,’ you’d know that.”
“I can’t read every last thing in a person’s mind,” Mark said. “It’s about strong emotions. Do you really have deep feelings about your vacuum cleaner? Is that how single women fill the void these days?”
I realized I had drawn my feet up onto my chair seat and was huddling in the fetal position.
“Given the men available, it’s a smart choice,” Gwen said.
“Ow! Zing!” Mark said. I had never seen him like this. The more pissed she got, the more he acted like she was maybe into him. “Okay, go get your hunky vacuum cleaner, and you two can do your thing while we go over the case.”
“There is
nothing to go over,” she said, exasperated. “The husband had a relatively amicable divorce, all things considered, and Lindsay’s money goes to the sister who already had a fortune anyway.”
“But before Lindsay died, Sibyl could only get her money in installments,” Mark said. “Which she didn’t find out until after their mother died. At Sibyl’s wedding. Less than a month ago.”
“What?” Gwen demanded. “She didn’t tell me that.”
“No offense, but you’re a cop. Sometimes we mere mortals clam up.”
No response.
“Gwen? You there? Hello?”
A vacuum cleaner roared on.
Mark actually looked surprised.
Over the vacuuming, Gwen said quietly, “What else did she tell you?”
Mark told Gwen everything we’d learned from all the suspects, except for the weirder empath moments like Lynch vibing “numb”. Gwen kept interrupting with questions, and before I knew it, those two were reviewing the possible suspects. Together.
Lindsay’s husband Crowley was pretty much in the clear. He didn’t seem bitter about the divorce and he couldn’t get her money, so he had no real motive.
Her sister and her scammer husband Fidelio, on the other hand, had gone into crazy debt because they thought they’d inherited millions. Plus, Sibyl might have an expensive drug habit. Then they’d found out they’d only get a monthly installment … unless Lindsay died.
Meanwhile, her father was obsessed with his financial failure and fixated on getting back in the game. With Lindsay out of the way and a sudden surge of cash to Sibyl, how long would he want to wait for her to drink herself to death?
“No wait, that wouldn’t work,” Mark said. “If Sibyl did die, the money would go to Fidelio, not Mackenzie.”
“But you said that Mackenzie is lawyer happy,” Gwen said. She’d thawed almost to the point of ‘not unexcited’. “His wife’s will had deliberately excluded Lindsay’s husband. Mackenzie could make a strong case that his wife would never have wanted her money to go to Sibyl’s husband either.”
“Exactly!” Mark said. “Kill Lindsay, wait for Sibyl to kill herself, launch the lawsuit…”
“No, never mind. That’s ridiculous,” Gwen said. Her flicker of excitement had faded. “We’re imagining a father who would kill his own daughters on the mere chance of winning money in a lawsuit.”
