Killer Content

by Olivia Blacke

  Alarm bells went off in my head. Pick up her stuff? Dirty work? I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. He didn’t know. “I don’t think you understand . . .”

  “No, you don’t understand. I think I’ve been perfectly reasonable but there’s only so much I can . . .”

  I broke in, talking over him for a second before he stopped to listen. “Marco, you’ve got it all wrong. We need to talk, in person preferably. Can I meet you somewhere?”

  “Look here, I’m at work. I don’t have time for this nonsense.”

  “I’ll meet you after you get off,” I offered. “Tell me where and when.”

  The pause was long enough that I was afraid he had hung up on me, but instead, he sighed heavily, and said, “Fine. Whatever. I’ve got a break coming up.” I was about to interject and tell him it would take a while for me to get all the way out to Astoria, but then he continued, “Do you know the taco place in Domino Park?”

  I exhaled a sigh of relief. It might be poor manners to break the news of Bethany’s death to Marco so near to the spot where she died, but it beat schlepping all the way out to Astoria. “I’ll be there in fifteen.” I had to look down and check my outfit. “I’ll be the petite brunette in the white tank top and purple skirt.”

  “I’ll be the giant in the orange safety vest,” he said, and disconnected.

  Giant? I wondered as I hurried toward the nearest subway entrance. If I caught the train just right, I might make it with time to spare. I got lucky, and a train pulled up to the platform a few seconds after I did. I made it to the taco stand before Marco.

  I hated arranging to meet strangers in public spaces. Sure, it was safer than the alternative, but trying to find someone in a crowded place when I had no idea what they looked like was nerve-racking. Fortunately, I recognized Marco from his description the second he approached. He wasn’t kidding about being a giant. He was closer to seven feet tall than anyone I’d ever met before, and was wearing a blazing orange vest with a yellow hard hat tucked under his massive arm.

  “Marco?” I asked, hurrying up to him. I looked up. And up. Bethany was taller than me, but unless she wore the world’s tallest heels, she would need a stepladder to give Marco a hug.

  “You must be Odessa,” he said, his voice a deep bass. He had bleached blond hair that looked odd against his warm olive-tinted skin, especially in contrast to a dark beard that crept down his neck, the bushy curls looking uncomfortably warm on a hot summer day. His hand swallowed mine when I offered to shake. “I’ve only got a few minutes. Why don’t you grab a table while I place my order? Get you something?”

  “Thanks, but I’m good.” Even as I declined, my stomach grumbled loudly. I shouldn’t have skipped breakfast. After we were done here, I’d swing by the café and use my employee discount to get a break on one of Parker’s delicious creations.

  “You vegan? Vegetarian?”

  I shook my head. I’d never met a single vegetarian before coming to Williamsburg. When Izzy told me she was a vegan, I’d had to Google the difference. Apparently, vegetarians could eat eggs and dairy, but vegans didn’t eat any meat or animal by-products at all. Not even yeast or gelatin. Believe me, when I found out what was in gelatin, I briefly considered a vegan diet myself. Ground-up cows’ hooves did not sound appetizing.

  “I’ll be right back,” Marco said.

  I found two empty seats at a long community table and claimed them before someone else could snatch them. I took the seat that faced the elevated walkway that Bethany had fallen from, which meant my back was to the Williamsburg Bridge. As I waited, I watched a stream of people flow over the walkway. No one seemed to care that just a day ago, someone had died in this very park.

  “I didn’t know what you like, so I got you one chicken and one veggie,” Marco said when he returned, placing two wrapped tacos in front of me, and six in front of him. That was awful nice of him. He didn’t even know me, and he’d bought me lunch. He unwrapped the first one and looked at me expectantly. “What’s Beth playing at this time?” he asked before taking a huge bite.

  I waited for him to swallow before saying, “I don’t know how to break this to you, but Bethany passed away yesterday.”

  He stared at me with a blank expression. “Huh?” I repeated myself, this time more carefully. I knew my accent got thicker when I was stressed, but I didn’t think I was that hard to understand. “I heard you the first time,” he said, blinking at me. “But I don’t believe it. I can’t believe it.”

  “I’m so very sorry for your loss.” Somehow it sounded even worse than when I’d said those same words to Cherise earlier.

  “You’re mistaken,” Marco said.

  “I wish I was,” I said. Why did no one believe me? Didn’t I look trustworthy?

  Marco pushed back his chair and stood up. “Look here, I know Beth’s mad because I dumped her, but this is just cruel.”

  I stood, too, and was dwarfed by him. “I’m telling the truth. Hold on half a second and I’ll prove it.” I googled Domino Park news, and an article popped up with a candid shot of Bethany that looked like it had been pulled off her Instagram. The article was titled “Local Woman Plunges to Her Death in Domino Park” and included a link to the viral flash mob proposal video, which now had millions of views. “Look familiar?” I shoved my phone toward his face. He stared at the article.

  He shook his head. “No. That can’t be her. That’s not my Beth.”

  “I’m afraid it is. If you want, I can put you in touch with the cop who has her case. Or you can call her roomie, Cherise. She’s the one who gave me your number.”

  “Cop? Case? How did it happen?”

  “She fell,” I said.

  “She fell?”

  “She fell off the walkway,” I said, gesturing toward the elevated walkway over Marco’s shoulder. Even from this angle, it didn’t look that high. “The cops are calling it an accident, but they’re wrong. Bethany was murdered, and I’m gonna prove it.”

  7

  Odessa Dean @OdessaWaiting ∙ June 25

  Summer in the bayou: unbearable. Worst in the world. Doesn’t get any hotter than this.

  Summer in NYC: hold my beer

  #1000degrees #melting

  WHAT?” THE EXPRESSION on his face was abject shock, which morphed into pain. He stood, his shoulders hunched and his face averted. “I have to go.”

  “Wait,” I pleaded with him. “I need to ask you some questions.”

  “What’s wrong with you?” He smacked his huge hands on the table and looked at me, tears streaming down his face. “You tell me my girlfriend’s dead. That she’s been murdered. You drop this bomb on me and expect me to, what? Stick around and chat?”

  “But you broke up . . .”

  Marco’s face twisted into anger. “Not that it’s any of your business, but I love Beth. Always have. Always will. Yes, she cheated on me and broke my heart but I never in a million years thought that we wouldn’t have a chance to set things straight.”

  “I’m so sorry for your . . .”

  “Save it,” he snapped. “Gotta bounce.” Then he stormed off in the opposite direction.

  Not that I blamed him.

  He was distraught, and I did sort of spring everything on him. But what’s an easy way to break the news to someone that a person they cared about was dead? “Hi. Nice weather we’re having. Your ex got murdered yesterday,” certainly wasn’t it.

  “ ’Scuse me. You gonna just sit there all day or what?” A stranger loomed over me, a tray of tacos in his hand. His lips were pursed and his eyebrows knitted together.

  I looked around. There were no empty seats. Someone had already taken Marco’s spot, and I hadn’t even noticed. I unwrapped one of the tacos he’d bought for me and took a bite. The stranger made an annoyed sound in the back of his throat and moved on, searching for someone else he could in
timidate into vacating a spot for him.

  When I’d first come to New York, I was taken aback by the gall of some people. People are rude in the South, too, but it’s subtle. A passive-aggressive wave here. Neglecting to offer someone sweet tea when they came to call. Backhanded compliments like, “Well, aren’t you just as cute as you wanna be?” when what they actually meant was, “You didn’t fall too far from the ugly tree.”

  New Yorkers are no better or worse than the folks I grew up with in Louisiana. They were just more overt, and nine times out of ten, they were reacting to something they perceived as rude. Like when I’d bumped into the dog walker last night. Sure, she’d flipped me off and said some nasty things about my parentage, but in her mind, I’d started it. Even the food truck driver who’d almost run me over was reacting because I’d gotten in his way. Sitting at a crowded eatery, taking up space at a community table but not eating was, at least by Brooklyn standards, a rude act. A stranger calling me out on it wasn’t.

  And in an overpopulated metropolis like New York City, taking up too much space was the biggest crime of them all.

  I scarfed down both tacos—delicious, by the way. I was used to crunchy-shelled tacos that were stuffed with way too much lettuce and cheese with a hint of flavored crumbles that might be beef. The tacos served in Domino Park were on a whole ’nother level. The soft corn tortillas were made by hand daily onsite, and were filled with fresh, yummy ingredients that didn’t need to be drowned in hot sauce to be palatable.

  When I was done, I gathered my trash, plus Marco’s leftovers, and moved away from the table. My spot was snatched up before I’d taken two steps away from it. As I walked away, I could hear someone else arguing that they were waiting for my seat, but the one who was now occupying it had the classic schoolyard defense of “you snooze, you lose” on their side.

  It was getting hot, and after enjoying the delightful tacos, I was thirsty. But I didn’t want to brave the long lines at the counter for just a bottle of overpriced water, so I headed for the park exit instead.

  Summer in Louisiana was rough. Sometimes I would rather don a full-body chicken suit and jump in the boiling vat of water at the Crawdad Shack than walk across the black tar parking lot to my car. Humidity hovered around 125 percent, if such a thing were possible, and it could be a hundred degrees in the shade.

  And it couldn’t hold a candle to New York City in June.

  It wasn’t as hot, at least not according to my weather app, nor as humid. But Williamsburg offered no shade. The sun reflected off the windows and sidewalks and metal and cars, trapping heat between the towering buildings and turning the city into a shimmering oven. Summer was short but brutal, with limited working air conditioners and rolling brownouts as the city’s aging power grid could not keep up with demand.

  And the smell.

  I couldn’t even begin to describe the smell.

  Imagine eight and a half million unwashed people squeezed into an elevator for a three-day weekend. Now imagine that the elevator didn’t have a bathroom or a fan, and it was a gazillion degrees. New York in the summer kinda smells like that. Only worse.

  Between the smell and the sun beating down on me, I was getting a headache. I headed back toward Aunt Melanie’s apartment building, hoping that the long walk would give me time to figure out what I needed to do next. It always seemed so easy in the true crime podcasts I liked to listen to. Everyone the amateur detective interviewed would drop a hint, and they’d stumble across clue after clue until they had all the puzzle pieces. I was starting to think it wasn’t quite as simple as they made it seem.

  By the time I got halfway home, I was drenched in sweat. All thoughts of Bethany’s death were replaced with fantasies of diving into the pool on the rooftop deck of my aunt’s building and staying under the water until I grew gills. Now that sounded like a viable plan.

  The apartment lobby was all steel and marble with darkly tinted floor-to-ceiling windows. The temperature was set to a few degrees above iceberg. Last night, soaked from the rainstorm, it had been miserable. But coming in out of the heat of the day, it was pure paradise.

  In one corner was a pair of wingback chairs, a lamp, and a potted plant that nearly brushed the eleven-foot-high ceiling. Along the back wall ran a bank of mailboxes. Guarding it all was a long, low desk. The concierge desk was staffed from eight to seven, and would accept anything from packages to pizza for the residents. The concierge today was an older African American gentleman who always looked at me like he knew I didn’t belong.

  I waved at him and summoned enough energy for a half-hearted smile. “Afternoon, Earl.”

  “Miss Odessa,” he replied, his expression never changing. Then he sniffed and I felt self-conscious. After a thirteen-block walk home from the park under a blazing sun, I doubted I smelled like a bed of roses. More like a bed of rose fertilizer. “You have a visitor.”

  “I do?” I glanced around. We were the only two people in the lobby.

  “I sent them upstairs to wait,” he explained, with the barest hint of a smile. I was glad he found me amusing.

  “Thanks, Earl.”

  “You’re welcome, Miss Odessa.”

  I took the elevator upstairs to the fifth floor. When the door opened, the first thing I saw was Izzy, sitting on top of a large hard-sided suitcase that looked to be held together with duct tape and prayers. Her nose was buried in her phone, but when she heard the door swoosh open, she looked up. “I was just about to text you.”

  “Been waiting long?” I stepped out and the door closed behind me. Along with the big suitcase she also had a duffel bag stuffed to bulging, a backpack, and one of those enormous crinkly laundry totes. “You, um, going somewhere?”

  “They’re fumigating my place, so I was hoping I could crash here for a day or two.”

  “That’s an awful lot of luggage for a day or two,” I said.

  “Oh, you know how it is.” Izzy stood and ran her hand through her short, artificially orange hair. It had a touch of wave to it and barely came to the tops of her ears. She grunted as she picked up her duffel bag and slung the strap over her shoulder. “You never know what you’ll need.”

  “Glad to see you’re doing better.” I flipped through the keys on my keyring, letting them clank against each other. “You seemed pretty upset last night, and Todd said you called in sick this morning.”

  “Well, I’m not exactly in a partying mood, but the last thing Bethany would want would be for me to sit around moping and feeling sorry for myself. So, um, would you mind opening the door? This bag is getting awful heavy awful fast.”

  “I’d love to help, but Aunt Melanie was adamant about me not having any visitors.” We stared at each other, the long awkward pause stretching out between us. “I mean, if it was my place, of course I’d invite you in, but it’s not . . .”

  Izzy grinned. “Don’t worry about it. Your aunt won’t be back for months. She’ll never know I was here.”

  “Sorry, but I promised.”

  “And I a hundred percent understand. If I had any other options, anything at all . . .”

  “I hear that Bethany’s old apartment has an opening,” I said, then quickly bit my lip. Talk about insensitive. I unlocked the door and waved her inside.

  Izzy put her bag down and started to explore the living room. “Yowza, this place is enormous,” she said, wandering slowly past my aunt’s collection of knickknacks and bizarre decorations, taking it all in. “Bethany’s roomies are cool, but Bed-Stuy?” she asked, thumbing through the books on the shelf. “No thank you. That commute would drive me up the wall.”

  “What commute? It’s ten, fifteen minutes on the train, tops, to Untapped. I used to drive longer than that to get to the Crawdad Shack back home, but that was only because my parents’ house is on the far side of town by the railroad tracks and if I timed it wrong, I had to wait for the train to pass so
I could get to work.”

  Izzy giggled. “Sometimes I forget that you’re not from here, and then you whip out some story about life in the bayou.”

  She forgot, even for one second, that I was an outsider? That I utterly didn’t belong? That I was a proverbial fish out of water in Williamsburg? “I think that might be the nicest thing anyone’s said to me since I got here, and that’s counting the time you pointed out that I’d accidentally tucked the hem of my skirt into my underpants.”

  “What are friends for?” Izzy asked with a grin.

  She had a point. My aunt would surely find out, and there was no telling how she’d react, but Izzy was my friend. And she needed my help.

  I liked to think of myself as a good person. I respected crosswalks. I never shoplifted or littered. Back home I volunteered at the old folks’ home. I ate my vegetables and recycled. I most certainly did not turn my back on a friend in need. “Just for a night or two?” I asked.

  “Maybe three. Help me with my suitcases? I mean, sure, it’s a real swanky building and all, but I can’t leave my stuff out in the hall where just anyone could walk off with it.”

  “True.” I grabbed the large wheeled suitcase and dragged it inside. Frankly, I wasn’t concerned that one of the neighbors would steal something. The building had concierge trash collection, and if anything, bags left in the hall were liable to be whisked away and dropped down the incinerator chute. Especially a beat-up old suitcase or a plastic tote filled to the brim with miscellany.

  The cat chose that moment to make an appearance, ignoring me completely in favor of winding his way around Izzy’s legs. She dumped her backpack onto the growing heap of luggage we’d dragged inside and scooped him up, rubbing her face into his fur as he purred so loud that I could hear him from halfway across the room. “And who’s this cutie patootie?” she asked, her voice muffled by his fluffy body.