Death Before Facebook (Skip Langdon #4) (Skip Langdon Mystery) (The Skip Langdon Series)

by Julie Smith

  “What?”

  She looked miserable. “His feet must have been cold.”

  Skip didn’t want to think about it either. “What did you do?”

  “I don’t know. I think I must have screamed or something.”

  “And then?”

  “I pulled the ladder off and put his head in my lap; and stroked him. But his head didn’t feel right.”

  “How did it feel?”

  She winced. “Not right. Soft.”

  “Was anyone else home?”

  “No. Cole was in Baton Rouge. I had to call 911 myself. I knew he was dead; I was hysterical.”

  “How did you know?”

  “He felt so cold. And his head.”

  “How long did you sit there with his head in your lap?”

  “Maybe a few seconds. Not long.”

  “When you got up did you let his head come down hard on the flagstones?’

  “He was my son!”

  Skip waited.

  “I put him down very gently.”

  Skip looked up at the roof. “Had Mosey gotten up there before?”

  “Oh, that cat. He goes everywhere.”

  “But there?”

  “I don’t know. Not that I know of.”

  “I’m just wondering—did you hear the ladder fall? Or Geoff yell or anything?”

  “No, I’m on the other side of the house. And besides, I could sleep through a hurricane. I take these pills to sleep and they put me so far out I wouldn’t know if a bomb fell.”

  Skip thought that might explain why she seemed so out of it. “Did you take one today?”

  “Last night, but I got up with Cole and then went back to bed. I’m okay to talk. Shall we go back in? Maybe I could make some coffee.”

  Skip liked it better outside and she didn’t want more coffee. But she said, “That would be nice,” thinking Marguerite might drink some herself. She seemed so dull and listless, her voice so devoid of expression, it might help, she thought. Back in the kitchen, she said, “Let me do it.”

  “That’s okay. I can manage.” Marguerite seemed very thin as she moved about her messy kitchen, pathetic and lonely in her baggy sweats. Skip thought it odd that she was alone so soon after her son’s death, that the house had not been touched, as if visitors had not come. When Marguerite opened the refrigerator, Skip saw that it was nearly empty, not filled with food the way it should have been—with casserole dishes and hams, cakes and pies from friends and relatives.

  “Do you think you should be alone?” she said. “Could I call someone to stay with you?”

  Marguerite said, “We’re always alone.” She looked off in the distance. “Neetsie’s friends used to come over now and then. I don’t know—I guess Cole and I aren’t very social. We don’t… belong to a church, or clubs or anything. Neither of us goes out to a job.”

  She sounded as if she were wondering aloud how she had come to this friendless state.

  “Do you have relatives?”

  “Cole doesn’t. My dad died a long time ago. My mother’s in a nursing home.

  “All the same…” She stared into space again. “We’re having a memorial service. People might come over afterward—is that what they do?”

  Skip shook her head—working in Homicide didn’t make her a funeral consultant.

  Marguerite looked panicked. Two cats, a tortoiseshell and a black-and-white one, rubbed against her ankles. “I guess I should clean the house.”

  That was a job Skip didn’t envy.

  “Hello, pretties. Hello—should Mommy feed you? Mommy’s so bad. Such a bad mommy that can’t even feed the kitties.” She tapped some cat chow into a bowl. At the sound, another cat glided in, a black one. Skip had now seen half a dozen cats, none of whom was Mosey, and one dog.

  “Does your dog bark when strangers come around?”

  “Sometimes—she barked at you. But sometimes not—she’s a lousy watchdog. Why?”

  “I just wondered about the day Geoff was killed. Did you hear her then?”

  She frowned. “I don’t think so. But the pills. She could have barked two feet away and I wouldn’t have known it.”

  Marguerite asked what Skip took in her coffee, handed her a steaming mug, and picked up a mug of her own. “Shall we go in the living room?”

  At least, thought Skip, there was some sun in there.

  “I don’t have much time to clean,” said Marguerite. “I have so many projects.”

  “Do you keep the garden yourself?” She looked out the window, more appreciative than ever now that she’d seen the inside of the house.

  “Why, yes. Do you like it?”

  “Very much.”

  “I can do creative projects; I just don’t seem to be able to handle the daily maintenance stuff. Neetsie’s just like me.”

  “I know what you mean.” Skip noticed that Marguerite smiled when she spoke of Neetsie, almost for the first time. She picked up on it: “What does Neetsie do?”

  “She’s a very fine actress, actually. She’s going to be good. I really think she’s going to make it. She goes to UNO at night, just a couple of classes, and supports herself with little jobs she gets.” She smiled again, the indulgent mother.

  “She must be very talented.”

  “Oh, she is.”

  “And Geoff?”

  “Geoff?”

  Skip smiled, tried to make herself as nonthreatening as possible. “What did he do?”

  “He was into computers. Like his dad.”

  “His dad? But he and your husband have different names.”

  “His stepdad. They were very close. Cole taught him about computers and it brought him right out of himself; he blossomed into a new person.”

  Skip thought a thirty-one-year-old man who lived with his parents hadn’t come that far out of himself. She said: “He had a job in computers?”

  A shadow crossed Marguerite’s face. “No. Geoff was a very, very bright young man. Exceptional. But we couldn’t afford the good schools—we had to teach him ourselves. He didn’t adjust to other kids very well. He wasn’t socialized.”

  Skip nodded and smiled, absolutely in the dark as to what she meant.

  “He was brilliant, really. But he read comic books as a kid. You know how some kids do that? He never seemed to outgrow it.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “That kind of mentality. Kind of withdrawn. He was a very quiet, very inward-looking boy. He had a girlfriend, though. Things were looking better for him. I don’t think he’d really had one before.”

  “How about other friends?”

  “Well, he did have a male friend.” Her nose wrinkled, as if he stank. “Layne something, I think.”

  “Maybe we could look in Geoff’s address book if he had one. Did you say he had a job?” Skip knew perfectly well she hadn’t.

  “Well, yes. He—uh—worked at a video store. Mondo Video, down by the Riverbend.”

  Skip wondered if it was a porno place—judging by Marguerite’s embarrassment, that didn’t seem out of the question. Impulsively, she said, “Do you have a picture of Geoff?”

  “What for?”

  “I’m just trying to imagine him.”

  “Could I ask why?”

  “I’m curious, that’s all.”

  “I don’t think you said why you’re here.”

  “Something came up that we needed to investigate; just covering bases. You know how it is.” Again, she smiled, using her smile as a shield: No more questions, Mrs. Terry. Okay?

  Marguerite looked uncomfortable. “I don’t really know where the old photos are.”

  “That’s okay, it was just a thought. I wonder if I could see Geoff’s room.”

  Marguerite looked at her quizzically. “Of course.”

  His room was just to the right of the mudroom, his window almost directly beneath the section of roof where Marguerite said the cat had been. “Excuse the mess,” Marguerite said.

  This would have struck
Skip as funny, considering the condition of the rest of the house, if it hadn’t been so sad looking at the prized possessions of someone who no longer existed, piecing together the story they told.

  The story itself was sad, Skip thought, of a piece with the cracked plaster of the house, its icy dormancy. A gray cat, Mosey perhaps, slept in a hollow of the bed, the saggy spot that indicated Geoff had been overweight, or that no one ever bothered to turn the mattress, or both. She wondered briefly if they had been close, the man and the cat, or if in some feline way, it sensed that he had died coming to its rescue, or even if it was somehow attuned to his spirit.

  Skip didn’t believe in spirits, or anyway, didn’t tend to dwell on them.

  This place, she thought. It’s creeping me out.

  Yet other than the ghostly cat and the sagging bed, the room was perfectly ordinary. But it was a boy’s room, not a man’s, so obviously the room of a boy who still lived with his parents. Makeshift bookshelves lined the walls. A desk had been made from an old door and on it rested some sophisticated computer equipment. There was also a television, VCR, and shelves of videos along with the books. A lot of them were science fiction, and so, she saw, were most of the books. But there was lots of nonfiction, too—computer books, some quasi-science and actual science, history, all volumes that dealt in facts except for two or three on self-hypnosis.

  That fits, she thought. Everything else in the room induces some sort of trance. Why not skip the middle step and go straight for it?

  They intrigued her, these books. She clung to them. Only they and the cat were outside the all too obvious stereotype presented by the rest of the room’s furnishings, the cat because it was a warm, living being, the books because they were non-rational. People like Geoff, like the man she imagined him to be, though they lived in a fantasy world, a world of time travel and other galaxies, had no time for inward journeying. They spent their lives either devouring facts about the rational world or trying to escape it.

  She felt she could probably describe Geoff. He must have been overweight, soft around the belly; but he had never accepted the fact, or else had so little sense of himself that he simply wore T-shirts a size too small without giving it a thought, T-shirts that gapped over his white and hairy belly, mostly black ones bearing skulls and Judas goats and the names of death-rock bands—Napalm Death, perhaps; Controlled Bleeding—odd, violent symbols and words that didn’t fit with the gentle, unkempt man who wore them. He had a short, roundish beard and limp brown hair that always needed shampooing. He wore glasses. Running shoes. Jeans that rode low, displaying the crack of his butt, which was flat. He had once played Dungeons and Dragons and maybe still did. He was the very personification of “nerd,” a bright young man turned inward, poorly socialized, who felt so little kinship with his own planet that he routinely traveled to the ones invented by his favorite authors, who thought of that secret, dreamy place his computer took him to as cyberspace—somewhere exciting, a place more real than his own life, a land he could conquer, not a drab teenager’s room in his parents’ house.

  Skip knew her imagination was on overdrive, but the picture she got was so vivid it spooked her. “He must have been a very nice young man,” she said to Marguerite. “Do you mind if I look through his papers?”

  Skip could see by Marguerite’s face that she did but couldn’t think of a reason to say so. “No,” she said finally. “I guess not.”

  Skip sat at the makeshift desk. What she really wanted was to get at Geoff’s electronic files, the ones in his computer, but for now she contented herself with going through the things on his desk; slowly, ever so slowly. She wanted Marguerite to go away. And eventually, she did.

  Quickly, Skip checked under the mattress, fully expecting to find at least some old copies of Playboy. But there was nothing. She went through his drawers and saw that she’d been wrong about another thing—no death-metal T-shirts; tie-dye instead. Perhaps he’d been a Deadhead.

  She turned on the computer. There were files and files and files; she didn’t know where to start. There was a box of backup disks—maybe Marguerite would let her take these with her.

  “Mrs. Terry?” Skip went back into the living room, to find her hostess stretched out on the sofa, covered with the rumpled blanket, staring into space, the white dog at her feet. It thumped its tail briefly when Skip entered. She asked if she could take the box of disks and was given permission, rather desultorily; Marguerite seemed to have fallen into a fit of depression.

  “Just one other thing and then I’ll leave you alone. Can you give me the name of Geoff’s girlfriend? And his other friend—Layne?” She had found no address book, no Rolodex.

  “Of course. Lenore Marquer. She came over once or twice. Layne did too, but I never caught the rest of his name.”

  “Do you know where Lenore lives? Her phone number?”

  Marguerite shook her head. Skip thanked her and left, drawing in her breath when she stepped outside, grateful for the cool fall air, realizing only now how dead the air had been in the house, how sour and stale. She felt her step lighten, a weight leave her shoulders. Had it been that way for Geoffrey Kavanagh? Had the place felt as much like a tomb to him as it did to Skip?

  And Marguerite Terry? She was mistress of it, had made it that way. How was it for her?

  Geoff’s body had to have crashed hard—but having met his mother, Skip could believe she’d slept through it; she was barely awake when her eyes were open.

  But surely someone had heard something.

  She knocked on doors.

  The neighbor next door hadn’t heard the crash but had heard the cat meowing; had been awakened by it shortly before seven and had looked out the window, but had seen nothing—only a ladder propped against the house. She’d wondered why the cat just didn’t get on it and walk down. She didn’t hear a crash, but she had been gone for half an hour, between eight and eight-thirty, when she drove her husband to work.

  The neighbor on the other side had heard a thump and a clatter—but had thought nothing of it. She later realized the thump must have been Geoff and the clatter his ladder, but it hadn’t seemed grisly at the time—just a neighborhood noise. She thought it must have been slightly after eight.

  Unfortunately, neither of these neighbors, nor anyone else on the block, had seen anyone outside at all, much less anyone strange.

  No one knew Geoff or the Terrys.

  Skip headed to Mondo Video.

  If she’d expected Mondo Nerd, in keeping with the image she’d formed of Geoff, she was wrong. The manager was a freckled redhead, hair a quarter of an inch long, if that. He was broad-shouldered, button-down-shirted, clear-eyed, and looked as if he wanted desperately to be wearing a navy blazer but knew it wouldn’t look right in a video store. He was about five feet nine and made Skip, who at six feet was used to shorter men and could take them or leave them, feel as if she ought to hunch over to talk to him. He had the firm grip of a kid who’d learned it at a good prep school, and the last name of a dynasty. “Knowles Kennedy,” he said, applying the grip.

  Skip squeezed back, identified herself, and stated her business.

  “Geoff,” said Knowles. “One of our best men. Really bright and knowledgeable. Not real ambitious, though.”

  He was about twenty-four, Skip guessed, and already he’d done better in life than Geoff ever had.

  “Bet he really knew his science fiction.”

  “That was his thing. How’d you know?”

  “I just had a feeling.”

  “What a memory! That guy could tell you every scene of The Day the Earth Stood Still or—what’s the one about the pods?”

  “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”

  “Yeah. Both versions. But he knew all the obscure stuff as well. And all the new ones. Other stuff too—I mean, besides science fiction. He could sing every theme song from every James Bond movie.”

  “He must have been popular with the customers.”

  A shadow passed
over Knowles’s face. “Well, not really. He was kind of shy, I guess. He could talk to them about the movies, but he never thought about ’How’re you doing today?’ Not real outgoing, I guess. He lived in his head, you know? It was like whatever was going on in there was the real world and what happened out here just got in the way.”

  Skip grinned. “Space case?”

  “You could put it that way. I mean, he functioned; he did a great job here, but the guy was brilliant—face it, this job was way below his abilities.”

  “How could you tell he was brilliant?”

  “Well, you know—by the way he talked. He retained things; like I said, he remembered everything from every movie he ever saw; and he knew a lot of just plain stuff too. Mostly science. I don’t think he even went to college—at least not for very long. He was self-taught; and there wasn’t much he didn’t know about. If you want to know the truth, he could be kind of a know-it-all.”

  “Liked to hear himself talk?”

  Knowles looked uncomfortable. “Well, I don’t think it was that exactly. He didn’t have enough whatever-you-call-it— self-esteem—for that. I think he just didn’t notice when he was lecturing. It was his only form of communication. See, he could tell you all this stuff about the War of the Roses or the Holy Roman Empire, but he didn’t know he was a big fat bore when he was doing it because he didn’t know enough to check your reactions. He didn’t even look you in the eye—he’d be staring off into space or something, lecturing away and thinking you were fascinated. But like I said, he couldn’t remember about ’hi, how are you?’ He was just shy, shy, shy. But nice. He meant well.”

  “Oh?”

  “Oh, yeah. He wanted everybody to enjoy his favorites as much as he did. He couldn’t remember their faces or names, but when he saw the movies they’d brought back, he’d ask how they liked them—and then he’d go crazy helping them find something suited to their tastes.”

  Geoff was sounding more and more the sort of person his room had spelled out. On impulse, Skip said, “What did he look like?”

  “What did he look like? Was his face—uh—”

  “No, no, I’m just curious.”

  “I think I might have a picture from a party we had.” He disappeared and came back. “There. The one in the weird T-shirt.”