by Bill Alive
“What MEANS means?”
Mark rubbed his eyebrows. “Maybe I should do this myself.”
“No no! I got it,” I said. “Skip the MEANS column, because anyone could have gotten poison for the milk. It’s not like, say, strangling Olivia and then hauling her body up a bell tower to fake a suicide. Not everyone would be strong enough to do that.”
“Right. Not that we’re going to talk about Olivia, because Samantha made it clear that Gwen was right and Olivia did commit suicide.”
“I guess,” I said.
“Don’t get sidetracked,” he said. “We’re solving for Ed. With MEANS out, that leaves MOTIVE and OPPORTUNITY.”
“Helga’s totally got opportunity! She could poison the milk right at her farm!”
“True.” In Helga’s OPPORTUNITY column, he typed in YES. “But for motive…” he said, and typed in NO!!!!!!
“What?” I said. “It’s still possible—”
“If you say one word about witchcraft—”
“Okay, okay!”
“The woman runs a fricking horse therapy program for autistic kids,” Mark snapped. “She had no real reason to kill either Vanessa or Ed, and every reason not to kill a customer with her own product. Plus, I vibed that she was completely surprised by Ed’s death. Helga is out.”
“Fine,” I said, secretly hoping she’d turn out to be the murderer anyway. “Who’s next?”
“The other person on the farm. Kelsey.”
“Kelsey? Why?”
“He could be obsessed with Vanessa,” Mark said.
“He is obsessed with Vanessa,” I said. “And he’s a huge jerk about it. But, I mean … he’s also super religious.”
Mark smirked. “Religious people do occasionally commit murder.”
“But Kelsey didn’t have a chance with her! He’s not going to just kill her husband and hope she looks his way!”
Mark shrugged. “Stranger things have happened.”
In Kelsey’s MOTIVE column, he typed, MAYBE, if obsessed with Vanessa (and delusional about his chances).
He said, “The real problem is OPPORTUNITY. If he was obsessed with hooking up with Vanessa, poisoning her milk looks pretty stupid.”
“He could have known she was on a business trip,” I said.
“Maybe … but he’d have to know exactly when she’d be back and that Ed would be back first and that he’d drink the milk before she did. That’s a lot of chances for the wrong person to die. And not just any wrong person, but the exact woman who’s the whole motive for the crime.”
“I can’t see how Kelsey would know all those details,” I said.
“Ed did needle Vanessa about knowing Kelsey,” Mark said. “They must have talked about something.”
“Yeah, but it sounded like Kelsey did all the talking. Chinese invasions and stuff. The way Kelsey talked about her, it wasn’t like they were within a hundred miles of ever being close. She didn’t even tell us about her business trip.”
“That’s true,” Mark said. Under Kelsey’s OPPORTUNITY, he typed, Probably not.
Then he said, “Speaking of Vanessa…”
He typed Vanessa in a new suspect row.
I flinched. Which made Mark wince.
He grunted, “I know you’re totally unbiased.”
“It couldn’t be Vanessa,” I said. “Mrs. Snarski said she saw Vanessa walk in and then heard her scream. Like, right away.”
“So? Vanessa could still have poisoned the milk.”
“She’d have to poison it, and get Ed to drink it, without drinking it herself, all super fast so she could scream without freaking him out.”
Mark frowned. “I suppose she couldn’t scream and then hand Ed a glass of poisoned milk. Even Ed might pause to reflect.”
“Besides, I thought you vibed that Vanessa was surprised,” I said.
“No I didn’t, I vibed that she was somehow expecting it.”
“But not like she did it,” I said. “Or even knew it was really going to happen.”
Mark tugged his lip. Under MOTIVE for Vanessa, he typed, MAYBE, especially if she had a secret lover and/or Ed was violent. But under OPPORTUNITY, he typed, No (because of scream). Probably. Grr…
“Wait!” I said, excited. “What if Ed committed suicide?”
“Ed?” Mark said. “Why? I didn’t get any suicidal vibes.”
I deflated. “I don’t know. It would just work.”
“Why would he poison the whole jar of milk?” Mark said. “Vanessa might have drunk it too.”
“Maybe he wanted to kill her.”
“Then wouldn’t he have waited until she drank first?” Mark said.
“Yeah, but … oh, maybe he wanted to frame Roxanne!” I said. “Maybe he did send that email so she’d show up and look guilty!”
Mark cocked his head, frowning. “So Ed commits suicide but tries to frame Roxanne as the murderer? Why? He’d have to be both suicidal and also really hate Roxanne’s guts. We haven’t seen evidence for either.”
“Maybe he didn’t think he would die!” I said. “Maybe he’d been secretly building up an immunity to iocane powder! Vanessa would die, Roxanne would take the fall … um…”
I petered out. Mark was staring at me.
“Iocane powder,” I said lamely. “Remember, Princess Bride?”
“I know,” he said. “I don’t think you can build up an immunity to sodium pentobarbital. Maybe you’re thinking of arsenic?”
“It was just an idea.”
Mark sighed. “I’ll give Ed a YES on OPPORTUNITY, but that motive’s pretty weak. He didn’t seem suicidal and he certainly didn’t seem to care about his ex.”
“Then why’d he send Roxanne that email to come meet?”
“We only have Roxanne’s word on that email. Considering she admitted to semi-stalking him at the game store, she might have made the email thing up and just been prowling around his house.”
“Great,” I said. “Who else, then? Anyone else besides Roxanne? What about Brett or Samantha? Or Roger? Or Theodore?”
“None of those people have anything to do with Ed or Vanessa,” Mark said. “They’re all connected to Olivia, who we only connected to Vanessa in the first place because Vanessa had her witch delusion.”
“So that just leaves Roxanne, right?” I said.
“Yep,” Mark said. “And she gets a YES on all three counts. Except…”
“Except your vibe,” I said.
He rubbed his forehead. “Exactly.”
We stared at the spreadsheet in glum silence. Every suspect row had at least one disqualifying NO.
“There must be someone else,” I said.
“There is.”
“Really? Who?”
He leaned back and folded his arms. “Vanessa’s secret lover.”
I slumped. I’d almost forgotten about him.
“Sorry, bro,” Mark said. “Maybe you’ll outrank him until the whole saving-her-life thing expires.”
I bristled, but Mark only smirked. “I know Vanessa is seeing someone, Pete. I can feel it. Hell, Kelsey even told us.”
“Then let’s find this guy!” I snapped. Whoever he was, I wondered whether Vanessa would lose interest if we could prove that her lover had murdered her husband. Then I wondered how I could even be thinking that question. Especially after Mark had told me that whole story about how he’d had the same bright idea with Akina. And that had turned out super great…
“Find him? How?” Mark said. “A pizza guy in an orange car? Where do you start with that? Besides … damn it, he couldn’t have done it anyway.”
“Why?”
“Because Snarski was watching the house the whole time. If the milk was delivered clean, we’re saying that this dude with an orange car would have had to prowl in and out of that garage without her noticing. She only saw Roxanne.”
“Maybe she missed him,” I said. “I mean, someone poisoned that milk.”
“Yeah. But it’s fricking vet poison. Roxa
nne is such an obvious suspect it hurts, and the only thing between her and the needle is my vague vibe.” He rubbed his face. “Why did I ever think I could do this?”
“Hey, it’s okay,” I said. “We’ll figure it out.”
“Or, we won’t. And a woman I think is innocent will die.”
We sank into silence.
Finally I said, “Okay. Moping won’t solve anything. Let’s get something to eat.”
Mark didn’t look up. “Strangely enough, we’re out of food.”
My stomach flopped. “What?” I checked the cupboards and the fridge. They really were pretty much empty.
How had I not noticed this? I tried to stay calm. “Whatever, I’ll go get some groceries. Can you spot me? I don’t get paid till next week.”
Mark rasped a dry chuckle. “That will be tricky, since I don’t get paid until never.”
“You haven’t gotten any new clients?”
“I told you, Theodore was my big lead.”
“But that was days ago!”
“Yes, and I’ve been trying to solve two murders where the first is a suicide and the second is super obvious. Now that you mention it, I was hoping you could pay your rent early. I already got behind on the mortgage last month.”
“What?” Cold dread was seeping down my back. “Why are we behind? I thought that other client came through before!”
“They did, but all that money went to fixing Thunder after the crash.”
“Oh my gosh, Mark. We can’t lose the house! What are we going to do?”
Mark cleared his throat. “Honestly, I’m thinking … welfare.”
“WHAT??”
Mark wouldn’t look at me. His face flickered with anger, then drooped into exhaustion. He pushed away from his computer and shuffled over to the couch.
“If I’m going to keep failing at everything,” he said, as he fiddled with the remote, “I may as well stop wasting time with failing to sell any stupid websites. Then I can focus on failing as a detective. At least it actually means something.”
“But—”
“Besides, isn’t catching murderers a public service? Even if you suck at it? Maybe it’s not so terrible for the state to spot me.”
“But can’t you just get a couple more web clients for now?” I pleaded. “Then you can get the investigator license and switch—”
Mark scoffed. “Come on, Pete. You heard Gwen, the Chief doesn’t even want to hire me anymore. That’s my thing, Pete. I get just close enough to wipe out. Hilarious.”
He started up the TV.
I slumped at the table. Ed’s murder was impossible, and apparently so was keeping both our house and our dignity.
All I could hope was that we’d all get a good night’s sleep and wake up to some brilliant new path to success.
Yeah, no. What happened was pretty much the opposite.
Chapter 31
For breakfast, we had rice.
I’d never even made rice. I think that the bag might have come with the house.
Turns out, it’s hard to get motivated to brainstorm brilliant new plans when you’re overthinking how long to cook a breakfast that’s basically going to taste like cardboard.
I wound up burning it anyway. And if failure has a smell, it’s the singe of burnt rice.
I had hoped that if I made breakfast, Mark could focus on the Brilliant Plan side of things.
Instead, he was hunched at the kitchen table, swiping his phone. Out of nowhere, he roared with frustration.
“What? What is it?” I said.
“It’s Roxanne. She was arrested, made bail, went free, and then … this morning they found her dead. From a heroin overdose.”
“Oh my God!” I said. “Dead? We didn’t even know she was using.”
“Maybe that was her first time.”
“You can’t get heroin that fast,” I said. “Not out here. Gwen says that for heroin, people still have to drive out to Baltimore.”
“She hopes so,” Mark said.
“Oh man, you don’t think his people are going to start pushing heroin out here, do you? In Back Mosby?”
Mark looked grim.
We didn’t have to say who I meant by him. We didn’t know his real name anyway, just a nickname, a word that even cops passed around with a flinch.
Numb.
Numb was like the Sauron of D.C., a shadow you didn’t want to think about out here in the Shire. The cops didn’t know his whereabouts, or even his real name. All they knew was that in the last several years, he’d come to dominate the drug scene in D.C., slowly acquiring or wiping out the traditional patchwork of warring gangs. Consolidating.
He’d only been caught once, decades ago, as a teen. And even then, only for a few minutes. The cops had cuffed him, but he’d gotten out of the cuffs. By breaking his own hands.
Yeah. That kind of dude.
So far, Mark and I hadn’t had to deal with any of Numb’s people. I really, really hoped it stayed that way. Crazy lone murderers were one thing. Organized crime made my bowels turn to jelly.
Mark said, “If he is finally pushing heroin out here, it’s not like Gwen’s going to ask for our help. Especially now.”
“Quit it,” I said. “That’s super sad about Roxanne, but there’s nothing we could have done for her.”
“No, I’m sure the idea to get high had nothing to do with facing execution for murdering the ex-husband she was obsessed with.”
“Mark, she’s the one who was pointing a gun at—”
SHUT UP! he said.
Except, he said it inside my head.
I froze. That had been loud and clear, way too clear. He looked surprised himself. Even … scared.
He fumbled for his bowl and jammed a spoonful of rice in his mouth. He grimaced, hard, clearly surprised at how much the taste had exceeded his worst expectations. He pushed it away.
“Come on,” he said quietly. “We’ll be late to the office.”
So the welfare thing was for real.
I felt like I might throw up. And it wasn’t just the burnt breakfast.
I guess I’d never realized how deeply the middle-class mindset was baked into my bones. Missing mortgage payments, going on welfare … these were unthinkables, unforgivables, like drowning a puppy. We were not that sort of people.
Come to think of it, we avoided that sort of people, fending them off with checks to charities. And the larger the check, the stronger the inoculation against their plague of poverty.
Guess the vaccine hadn’t taken.
As Mark and I rattled down toward the social services office, I tried to talk myself out of feeling so terrible.
Wasn’t Vivian always talking about Universal Basic Income? The more that automation and robots took over the grunt work of maintaining civilization, the less we’d need humans to do the work anyway.
It was like those automatic checkout machines at the grocery store … sure, maybe they took away “jobs”, but was anyone really going to miss their dream career as a cashier?
That’s the thing about actual dream careers, they take years and years of trial and error before you’re good enough to even think about making any money.
So maybe Vivian had a point. Maybe it was time we just gave everyone a permanent stipend so they could 1) stop scrambling for crap jobs they hated just to avoid starvation and 2) have the time and mental bandwidth to work on on stuff they cared about, that might blossom into something new and awesome for society that we couldn’t assign to a robot.
Anyway … all nice in theory, but I wanted to be the guy arguing for UBI after I’d already made my own pile in the wild free market. My current enthusiasm had a certain whiff of bias.
Here in the current real world, welfare sucked. Welfare meant failure. Period.
Because we still lived in a universe where it was somehow better for the economy to have one more disenchanted web developer than a super-detective in training.
The squat social services building did
nothing to lift my mood. Apparently even the architect had found welfare depressing.
The cramped lobby was lumpy with ancient carpeting, and the old plastic chairs were crammed in tight, like there weren’t enough square feet or tax dollars to go around. The people waiting seemed to exceed the averages for shabbiness and excess weight, even in Back Mosby. They slumped with stares that measured time by the next monthly check, and they smelled like cigarettes and loss.
Beside me, at the entrance, Mark winced. “I don’t suppose you could think happy thoughts?”
“Right,” I said. “Sorry.”
The first thought that came was Vanessa nuzzling into my neck.
Mark recoiled. “Never mind.”
I squeezed into a chair and dutifully tried to conjure up cheerful G-rated distractions while Mark went to the receptionist. But he came back with a stack of forms, looking more defeated than ever.
“Any luck?” I said.
“Oh sure. I’m a single male, no kids, and I haven’t had an official job since I was 22. For government assistance, I’m a slam dunk.”
“You mean you might not even get anything?”
“Brilliant deduction,” he said, with icy calm. “But I don’t know for sure unless I fill out all these forms. Let’s see. Less than two thousand dollars in the bank? Check.”
I sighed. “If it doesn’t work out, there must be some job for a web guy.”
“Sure, until everyone finally gets smart and outsources to Bangladesh for five dollars an hour,” he said, as he scribbled into the top form. “But I could still get in a few more years of four-hour commutes and hating my life. My bad for thinking I could do something real.”
He slammed down the pen and hunched forward. “I can’t believe it all comes down to some stupid pizza guy in a crappy orange car,” he groaned.
I had nothing to say.
Then he snapped up. Alert.
“What?” I said. “You getting a vibe?”
His gaze darted sideways. I followed the look — he was scrutinizing a tough old dude who still might have the muscles to break a guy’s arm, even though his huge gut was spilling out the sides of his overalls. The dude was ostentatiously avoiding Mark’s eye, but Mark talked right at him.
“You know that pizza guy?” Mark asked.
