by Paul Neuhaus
Glen nodded. “That’s true. I do have special insights. In point of fact, I’m an incredible badass. But—and this is important, so listen up—the next time I see Darren Taft I’m gonna burn him to the ground. Fuck him, fuck you, and fuck the unicorn you rode in on.”
Quinn couldn’t help grinning. “I’m sensing some bad blood between you and Darren.”
“This is none of your business, but I’m gonna tell you anyway so you’ll a) understand and b) go away. Darren Taft fucked my sister. Not only did he fuck my sister, he got her pregnant. He used a magic condom that broke, filling my sister’s sainted uterus with mystic energy and causing her to give birth to a sort of goblin. She can’t leave the house; the baby can’t leave the house and I’m up nights listening to it grumble in its creepy grown-up voice. Why Taft thought I’d be willing to talk to you is beyond me. Now. Do me a favor and go kill yourself.”
Quinn nodded and kept her laughter inside until she’d made it into oddly-shaped room number four. Once there, she could no longer contain herself. Glen told her nothing she could use, but she couldn’t help finding his story and his umbrage very, very funny. She was still chuckling when she entered the main room.
The Starbucks was, as promised, opposite the stage. The line was short, but a woman stood near its end rummaging through her oversized purse. “I’m sorry,” Quinn said. “Were you in line?”
The woman, a brunette with penetrating blue eyes looked up from her rummage. “What? Oh, no. Go ahead.”
Henaghan got into line. After a moment, she felt a tap on her shoulder. It was the brunette. “God, this is so stupid,” she said, her pale face flushing red. “I, um— It looks like I left my wallet at home. Would you— ? I mean, if you don’t mind— Could you spot me a coffee? I’ll be your best friend forever.”
It was Quinn’s turn to blush. A muddle of emotions washed over her. Shyness, empathetic embarrassment on the other woman’s behalf, and (much to her shock) attraction. She’d never had a lesbian-y thought in her life, but she felt the same draw to this woman she’d felt many times before toward males. The brunette was, after all, a knockout. “I, uh— I mean, yeah sure,” Henaghan said. “Order yours when I order mine. I’ll put it on my app.”
The brunette exhaled, releasing the tension from her shoulders. Her big purse almost touched the ground. “Oh, thank God. I mean, when people do stuff like that to me, I automatically assume they’re a pervert or a grifter or something.”
Quinn smiled, still awkward around the woman. Eye contact with the brunette was electric. “I definitely don’t think you’re a grifter,” she said.
“Well, good. I’m—” But then the brunette laughed, genuine and loud. “I see. I’m not a grifter, but I may be a pervert.”
The other woman’s mirth delighted Henaghan. “I don’t like to commit to anything when the jury’s still out.”
The brunette stuck out her hand. Her long-fingered, alabaster hand. “I’m Molly,” she said. “Molly Blank.”
Quinn took the hand and shook it. She grinned. “Molly Blank. I thought you looked familiar. Gridiron Gals. NBC. 2006. You played ‘Kelly’.”
Molly’s jaw went slack. “Holy Christ. What’d you do, commit IMDB to memory? Gridiron Gals lasted, what, four episodes?”
“Five,” Henaghan replied, letting Blank’s hand go. “It was not well-liked.”
Molly laughed. “You’re being kind. Critics burned a cross on my lawn.”
“I haven’t seen you in anything lately…”
“That’s because I’m over thirty-five which means I can’t get arrested. They want them twenty-two and under with titties like hot air balloons.”
The word “titties” made Quinn blush again. Fortunately, they’d reached the front of the line. She ordered her own drink and got out of the way for Blank to order hers. Coffees in hand, they moved away from the counter. “Well—” Henaghan said, thinking the encounter must be over.
“Come,” Molly said “Chat. This is a mixer. Mix a little. If I’m going to be your best friend forever, I need to at least know your name.”
“Sure,” Quinn said. As Molly took a place against the wall, Henaghan watched her. Blank wore a pink, spaghetti-strap top with a floral print mini-skirt. She was taller than Quinn, and her legs were long and toned. Again, Henaghan flushed as she realized she was watching another woman’s legs.
“We already covered my sordid history,” Molly said. “Tell me about you.”
“About me?” Quinn said, embarrassed. “What do you wanna know?”
Molly laughed. “You’re not very good at this whole socializing thing, are you? You look like the headlight deer. What do I want to know? Anything. Where you from? What do you do? What’s your favorite kind of pie? Again, you should probably start with your name…”
Henaghan shook her head. “Boy, I am bad at the socializing thing. I’m Quinn. Quinn Henaghan. I’m an assistant at ACT. And I write. I’m from Atlanta, and I don’t particularly like pie.”
Blank’s face twisted like she’d eaten a lemon. “No favorite pie? I’m gonna retract my BFF offer. I don’t trust a person who doesn’t like pie.”
“What about cake? I like cake.”
Molly smiled around the lip of her paper cup. She was about ten years older than Quinn and the smile made her crow’s feet appear. It only made her sexier. “Keep talking…” she said.
“I like pudding. All kinds of pudding. Um, cupcakes, I guess. Not Jello, though. I can’t stand Jello.”
“No one likes Jello.”
Quinn sighed and made a b-b-b-b sound with her lips. “I’m sure this is fascinating for you,” she said, acknowledging her own awkwardness.
“You work at ACT and I’m a client. Small world, am I right?” Blank said, ignoring Quinn’s observation.
“Who’s repping you?”
Molly smiled. “Barry Faber. ‘The Woman’s Agent’. He said he could get me out of the doldrums. Get me some honest to God, older lady parts.”
Quinn scrunched her nose. “Older lady parts. That sounds like the worst OBGYN specialty of all time.”
Blank burst out laughing. Not a dainty woman’s laugh, but an earthy I-don’t-give-a-fuck laugh. It suited her. “Meat drape central.”
“That’s the grossest thing I’ve ever heard in my life,” Quinn said, choking on her latte.
“Then you need to get out more.”
“I definitely need to get out more,” Henaghan replied, both meaning it as a set-up and not meaning it as a set-up. She was confused.
“I was—” A beeping came from Molly’s purse. “Shit,” she said, fishing her iPhone out of the deep bag. Silencing the alarm, she said, “I have to go and give my dad his pills.”
“Is he okay?”
“Yeah. He’s old. And cranky. He won’t take his pills unless I put them in a ball of raw hamburger meat.”
“For real?”
Molly grinned. “No, but very nearly. Give me your phone.”
“Huh?”
“Give me your phone. I don’t have cooties.”
Smiling, Quinn handed her phone to Blank.
Molly tapped the two devices together and they emitted a satisfied beep.
“What’d you do?”
“AirDrop,” Molly said, meaning the Apple protocol for sharing info between two gizmos. “I added my contact card to your address book. I want you to call me. I think we’re gonna get along. You like desserts and binge drinking. Two of my favorite things.” She gathered up the purse she’d dropped at her feet.
“I didn’t say anything about binge drinking,” Henaghan said.
“You didn’t have to. Your eyes are fucked.”
Quinn raised a self-conscious hand to her eyes.
Blank pulled the hand back down again and Henaghan felt a charge. “Don’t worry,” Molly said. “It looks good on you.” Blank took a moment to get her iPhone screen back to the first app assortment.
Quinn spied something odd on the brunette’s phone. “Waitami
nute,” she said. “You’ve got the Starbucks app on there. You coulda paid.”
As she left the wall, Molly smiled with big white teeth and said, “Oopsie.” When she was several strides away, she held her hand up to the side of her face in the universal sign for “Call me”.
As Blank blended into the crowd, Quinn found herself looking at the older woman’s ass. Huh, she thought. I’m totally looking at a pretty girl’s ass.
Henaghan left the Friar’s Club not long after Molly Blank. She’d talked to Darren’s frenemy and met a new friend. She had no social reasons for staying and more coffee would be a bad idea. Walking through the dimly-lit streets on the edge of Beverly Hills, she hugged herself against the chill and wondered where she’d parked her car. When she stopped to take her iPhone out of her purse, she realized something. All the way from the Friar’s Club there’d been a set of footsteps sounding in tandem with hers. When she stopped, so did the other set. Henaghan sighed, and decided to address her problems one at a time. First she opened the Maps app on her phone and found the route back to her parked car. This was a feature she was sure would’ve saved countless murder and rape victims in the pre-smartphone era. Thanks, Apple.
The location of her vehicle established, she turned in the direction of the footsteps. Behind her, silhouetted under a streetlamp, was a Chuck Sato-shaped blot. “Nobody likes a lurker,” she said aloud. She took two steps forward and the shape that might’ve been Sato took one step back. Full of a weird, unexpected bravado, she held up her right hand and a ball of fire appeared above it. The two shapes—the petite woman with the large handbag and the dark spot wearing a suit from another era regarded one another.
Then Chuck Sato turned and went back the way he’d come. Parked on the street behind him was a Cadillac Convertible Coupe. ‘40s-era.
Quinn parked her car in the lot by her apartment then walked to Fang’s Restaurant. On the way back, sweet and sour chicken in hand (in a brown paper sack folded over twice and stapled), she walked back toward her complex. It was a walk she’d taken many times before on autopilot. There was little to see but broken sidewalk and a concrete flood control channel—a visual dead spot where nothing ever happened.
Nothing until that evening.
Even when she was a good ways away, Quinn knew something was amiss. The darkening sky was lit by strobes of red and blue. Parked by the curb near the channel were three police cars and an ambulance—all with their cherry lights going. A couple of uniforms stood talking near one of the cars, but they were making no effort to keep people away from the railing overlooking the waterway. A crowd of looky-loos leaned against the cylindrical rail, peering through the high chainlink fence beyond. Henaghan increased her pace so she could secure a spot near the right end of the railing. She arrived just in time.
Down in the channel, near an island of trash, a group of cops stood in a perimeter around two EMTs. They pointed flashlights so the ambulance personnel could see. Right as Quinn pressed her stomach against the thick rail, the EMTs pulled a body out from under the trash. It was bright white in the flashlight beams. A woman. Young. Nude. Covered with bruises. She had a crude symbol carved into her stomach. Henaghan couldn’t see the symbol and she wouldn’t have been able to read it anyway, but she knew that it was a Sanskrit character. The number “6”.
However long the body had been down there, it wasn’t long enough for rigor to set in. The empty thing flopped and lolled as the EMTs pulled it from its hiding place. The trash pile snagged one hand and the two men pulled and pulled to free it. Something about that pathetic tug-of-war set Quinn off. She moved away from the railing, skirted the edge of the crowd gathered there, and puked into a trashcan mounted on a stand embedded in the sidewalk. The violent retching made her eyes hurt. A couple of people nearby looked at her briefly before returning their gaze to the show playing out below.
Rosebud had ended his hiatus within sight of Quinn’s apartment.
The walk from the flood control channel was a wobbly one, and Quinn had to rest herself against telephone poles more than once. She’d never seen a dead body and this was an especially grisly first. Rosebud. Two hundred yards from her apartment. Not good news. A bad situation compounded by the sight that greeted Henaghan when she topped the stairs leading to her place. Not only was Noah’s suitcase still on her porch, Noah was there too. Looking twitchier than usual.
Quinn brushed past him and put her key in her lock. “I don’t wanna do this now, Keller. Now is not a good time.”
Noah followed her into the apartment, vibrating with agitation. Quinn found out after they started dating that Keller had had a problem with Meth in his early twenties. It looked like he might’ve gone back on the stuff. “I changed my mind,” he said.
“That’s good,” Henaghan said, not especially interested in what he’d changed his mind about. She went into the kitchen and dumped the sweet and sour chicken she no longer wanted. Then she returned to the living room and laid down on the couch with her eyes closed.
“I changed my mind. I mean if the offer’s still good.”
Quinn didn’t open her eyes. “What offer?”
“For money. For a plane ticket. For tonight. For right now. A plane ticket and a cab to LAX. If you don’t care about me paying you back.”
She raised her head and slid backward enough to rest her noggin against the couch’s left armrest. “Back to Raleigh?”
Noah nodded. He was a wreck. He was wearing the same clothes as when Quinn had seen him last. He hadn’t bathed either. All that would’ve been bad enough but his sheen of sickly sweat made him look as if he was in the throes of a brain-killing fever.
“Where’ve you been?” Quinn said.
He averted his eyes. “I, uh, couldn’t get through to Olkin, and Billy changed his number. I had no place to go.”
“So, where’ve you been?”
“On the street. I didn’t wanna bother you.”
Henaghan’s eyes narrowed, a dawning suspicion. “Where’d you sleep last night?”
He looked toward the front door, then back at his ex-. His mouth opened then closed again. He pointed behind himself like a child formulating an excuse. “Back there.”
“Back there where?” Quinn said, sitting up.
“In the aqueduct thing. In a big pipe.”
Quinn’s jaw went slack. “What’d you see, Noah?”
He shook his head no but spoke anyway. “I didn’t see it. I mean I didn’t see it, you know?”
“What do you mean?”
“I— I didn’t see him do it. Which I’m grateful for. I don’t wanna see something like that. Ever.”
“You mean you didn’t see him kill her?”
He nodded, again childlike.
“The girl… She was already dead?”
Another nod. “I mean like she would have to have been, right? Looking like that…”
“Did you see him? Did you see the man?”
Another head shake. “It was dark. The sun was about to come up but it was still dark. He didn’t see me. I didn’t see him. He was wearing black. He put her underneath. The thing. I think he was wearing a mask. He was big. Real big.”
“Did he make a sound? I mean did he say anything?”
“No. He was quiet as a— What’s a quiet thing?”
Quinn slid her legs off the couch and got into a seated position, her nausea and fear mostly burned away. “Sit,” she said. Keller did as he was told. He didn’t look at her. He stared at the hardwood floor. “Noah, you can’t keep this to yourself. You have to tell the police.”
He panicked. “No,” he said. “I have to get out of here. Back to Raleigh. Like now. I wanna be already gone. There’s no way I’m hanging out here. If I go and tell, they won’t let me leave. I’ll be stuck here. And I’ll be homeless. I can’t. I just can’t.”
“Alright, alright. I hear you.” If she’d been more empathetic, she would have put her arm around Keller, but even under these circumstances, she didn’t trust him
to not get the wrong idea. “Is your phone working?”
“What? My phone? Barely. I got a sliver of charge.”
“Plug it in. If you’re gonna make it to the airplane and into the sky, you’re gonna need at least half your battery.”
He looked at her, confused, but finally went to the iPhone charger she kept in the kitchen. When he returned, Henaghan had her own phone out.
“Is PayPal okay?”
Noah nodded, relief driving away some of his darkness and fear.
“Do you know what a flight’s gonna cost? You gotta book it before you call a cab.”
He nodded but didn’t make a move.
“On the computer,” Quinn said. “Sit down and book a flight. I just sent you a grand.”
He returned to himself at that, his Southern gentility resurfacing. “Oh, Quinn, that’s too much. I only need like—”
“I’d rather error on the side of too much rather than too little. I just want you to understand that, if the cops come ‘round asking about you, I’m going to give them your info in Raleigh. It’ll be okay though since you’ll already be there and they can’t make you leave.”
“Are you sure?” Noah said, sitting down at the iMac. “Isn’t there, what’s it called, extradition?”
“That’s for perps, not witnesses. At least I think so. If anything, they’ll come to you, or talk to you on the phone, or get Raleigh law enforcement to do it. Since you left in such a hurry, you might be a suspect for a while, but I don’t imagine that’ll last long.”
“A suspect?” he said, his panic returning. “Will you alibi me?”
“Oh, fuck no. I’m sticking my neck out far enough as it is. Anyway, this is all theoretical.”
Keller nodded then went back to the Jet Blue website.
“You know, when I first saw you, I thought you might be back on the Meth,”
Noah looked over his shoulder at her with sad eyes. “That hurts me a little. I mean I’m stupid, but I’m not that stupid.”
After Noah left, Quinn compacted herself under her comforter and willed herself to sleep. She surprised herself when her thoughts turned to Molly Blank.
