What You Want to See

by Kristen Lepionka

  I found the shop easily, nestled in a row of vintage stores on High between Weber and North Broadway. Some of them, like the Boomerang Room, specialized in midcentury decor and clothes and had a clearly defined aesthetic. Others specialized in everything, or nothing, for example High Street Antiquities, which was a glorified junk shop, packed wall-to-wall with artifacts spanning the entire breadth of American history—neon signs, furniture, clothing, art, all stacked haphazardly around narrow aisles. It resembled a place about to get burned down for insurance money.

  “Hello?” I called, not wanting to venture too far down any of the aisles for fear I’d be buried in an avalanche of crap and never heard from again.

  A few seconds later I heard a door open and the muffled sound of something collapsing. “What the fucking fuck,” a voice boomed from somewhere back there, “goddamn piece of shit!”

  I figured this was the clock person.

  “Hi there,” I said when he appeared, shoving a mountain of records out of his path. He was a huge guy in his early forties, both tall and broad, with an unruly beard and collar-length hair. He looked mad.

  “Help you?” he barked, jamming a pair of glasses onto his face.

  “Uh, yeah, hi.” An image of Marin Strasser standing here popped into my head and I struggled to contain an out-of-place laugh. “I emailed, about your Craigslist—”

  “What? I can’t hear you. Come over here. Just walk on it. Or kick it out of the way. I don’t actually give a shit.” He motioned me over to the counter, which featured a glass case of Bakelite costume jewelry.

  I stepped over the records he’d just knocked down to reach the counter. “I emailed,” I said again. “About your post on Craigslist. The woman with the clocks.”

  He laughed and thrust out a hand. “Rudy Carmichael. She get you too?”

  “Almost.”

  “Bitches,” he said sadly, shaking his head. “No offense. I didn’t know if I’d get any hits with that post, but I figured why the hell not, nothing to lose. You can imagine my surprise when I called her about the Taylor thermometer and I heard that voice—I’ve been trying to find this particular bitch for going on ten years. Ha! Joke’s on her. So you’re a what, a dealer?”

  “Yeah, Springfield,” I said vaguely, flapping a hand. “I paid her a deposit on another Herschede, this was two months ago, maybe. She said it would be over four hundred bucks to ship it out there, so I said I’d come get it. And she ghosted me. What happened to you?”

  He was looking curiously at me. “What kind of Herschede?”

  “Uh,” I said, racking my brain for some kind of detail from my point-two seconds of research, “turn-of-the-century, with spindle gallery sides?”

  He smacked the counter so hard that the jewelry underneath rattled in the case. “Bullshit. Who the fuck are you? I know every dealer in Springfield and not a one of them would describe a Herschede like that. Did she send you here?”

  “No, Christ, no,” I said, “calm down. I’m a private investigator, and I’m just looking for information about her—”

  “You said you had information.”

  “Well, kind of—can—”

  “That’s just like her too. You bitches are all alike.”

  “Hey, now.”

  “Hey nothing. Get out of here. I’m not telling you anything.”

  “Have you seen her recently?”

  “What? No. Get out of my shop.”

  “Can you just tell me what happened?”

  He reached under the counter and I stumbled backward, certain he was about to produce a weapon. But instead he came up with a grimy cordless phone. “I’ll call the police. Get the fuck out.”

  I held up my hands in defeat and walked back out through the mess, wondering if he was going to write a Craigslist rant about me too.

  But at least I’d learned something. Two things. One, his name. And two, the fact that it wasn’t much of a stretch to imagine him killing someone.

  SEVEN

  I met Arthur that evening at his print shop to collect money and information. The money came in a thick envelope with my name written on it in block letters. It made me briefly wonder how many other thick envelopes of cash he was doling out today.

  The information was a little harder to get. “No, I don’t know who this is,” Arthur said, shoving the locket back across the desk to me. We were sitting in his office, which he had partially destroyed that afternoon looking—without success—for his gun. Arthur was pale and sweaty, his eyes desperate. The desk between us, as well as the floor, was covered in thin pink invoice forms that had once occupied a filing cabinet in neat stacks. It was after business hours but Arthur’s receptionist was still out front, and the hum of machinery vibrated from somewhere in the back of the suite. He reached into the bottom drawer of his desk and pulled out a bottle of whiskey and two little paper cups, to which I nodded. “And I never heard her talk about this Rudy Carmichael. Or a clock. You’re probably laughing at me inside,” he said. He poured the whiskey and nudged one of the cups in my direction.

  “No, I’m not,” I said. Wondering what the hell he was thinking, maybe, but not laughing. Nothing about this was funny. I watched him toss back his drink in one swallow. I wrapped the locket back up in the Hermès scarf and pushed it into my pocket. Then I tossed back my shot too. “I’m just trying to understand. When you met her, where’d she live?”

  “Downtown.”

  Okay, maybe now we were getting someplace. “Downtown where?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Or not.

  “You never picked her up?”

  “We’d always meet, you know, at the restaurant or whatever. She started spending the night pretty quick, and then, I mean, she didn’t officially move in till after we got engaged but she was with me all the time almost from the beginning.”

  “She was staying over.”

  “Yeah.” He leaned back and one of the invoices stuck to his forearm and he snatched it off. “And I liked it that way, right? We were just having so much fun. It’d been a long time since either of us had any fun. We were both married before, and I guess she had a real hard time after her husband left her. She never thought she’d feel so at home with anyone else.”

  “This ex-husband,” I said. “Know anything about him?”

  “She didn’t talk about him much, but I think they were on good enough terms. She said there was a part of her that would always love him. William, that’s his name.”

  “William Strasser?”

  Arthur looked up at me for the first time in a while. “No, I think that’s her maiden name.” He rubbed a hand over his face. “Christ, I don’t even know.”

  A car rolled slowly past the window, speakers cringing to the blown-out bass of an unidentifiable song. “Is it always this busy here?” I said as the car disappeared.

  Arthur looked vaguely over his shoulder. “It’s, uh, a busy area,” he said. “There’s traffic. Listen, are you hot? Because I can hardly breathe.”

  I studied him. His breathing was a little shallow, his face still pale and slick with sweat. “I’m okay,” I said. “Are you feeling all right?”

  He stood up shakily. “I think I just need some air. I’m gonna go outside for a minute. I’ll be right back.”

  I stood up too, worried now that he was about to have a heart attack or something. “Arthur—”

  “No, I’m fine, I’m fine,” he muttered, “just need some air. Please. Let me go.”

  He walked out of the room and a few seconds later I heard the front door to the suite open and close. I saw him through the window behind his desk as he stood on the sidewalk and looked up at the twilight sky, tears streaming down his cheeks. So not a heart attack. Just mixed-up grief. I sat back down and stared at the sea of pink invoices on the desk, wondering if he’d called the law firm I’d told him to call, or his daughter, if he’d even told any of his employees what had happened, if I was literally the only person who knew what he was going throu
gh. Scary, if that was the case. I was good in certain types of crisis, but not exactly ones of emotion. I poured another inch of whiskey into my cup and drank quickly. I was stressed out just by looking at the mess he’d made in here, and my own threshold for chaos was usually high. I squared some of the invoices into a neat stack and glanced up at Arthur again; he was still weeping on the sidewalk, but some of the color was returning to his face. I began collecting invoices from the floor. If I couldn’t help him find his gun or explain what the hell Marin had done to him, at least I could organize a bunch of papers.

  And that was when the window exploded.

  * * *

  I saw it before I even heard the gunshots. The window turned into a mist of splintered glass and time stopped for a second. A bullet lodged in the wall behind me, then another. I dove for the floor, rolling away from the jagged opening as a big gun boomed again outside—one, two, three, four, five, ten times. A deafening rattle that vibrated the filing cabinets. Every part of me tensed up and my hand flew to my hip, but my own gun was locked in my car. So was my phone, I realized.

  The shooting stopped and I heard the squeal of tires in the parking lot, doors slamming.

  Then an abrupt, piercing silence.

  I let out a breath, taking an inventory. I was okay.

  Then I remembered where I was.

  Arthur.

  I hauled myself to my feet and looked out through the hole where the window used to be and saw him lying on the sidewalk, blood spreading across his shirt.

  I dashed out of his office, almost running smack into a middle-aged guy with a thick mustache, wiping his hands on a rag. He barely registered me. “Janet? Janet?” he said.

  I found the receptionist crouching under her desk, looking stunned. I bent over her, scanning for blood but not seeing any. “Are you okay?” I said. She nodded numbly, her eyes on the carpet. I grabbed the phone off her desk and thrust it into her hands. “Call the police. Is anyone else here?”

  “Derek,” Janet murmured as she reached for the phone in slow motion.

  I left her to it and went to the front door, its glass pane spiderwebbed but not broken. I flung it open, and crossed the length of the sidewalk in three long strides as a big white Caddy flew out of the lot and into the street, shocks crunching over the curb. “Arthur,” I said as I dropped to my knees. I could see two dark spots in the slick of red that was his shirt, the bullet holes like twin mouths just below his collarbone. His eyes were slitted but they widened a little when I felt along his jaw for a pulse, and he opened his mouth, lips trying for some words that wouldn’t come. “Arthur,” I said again. I was no doctor, but this was a lot of blood. My own voice was shaky. “It’s okay, don’t talk.” I unbuttoned my shirt. The thin fabric would do little to stanch the bleeding, but little was better than nothing.

  “Why is this…” Arthur murmured, “… happening.”

  “Arthur, I don’t know, I don’t know.” I tried to force myself to breathe deep, to calm down. But I jumped when I heard footsteps on the bits of window behind me.

  “They’re coming, the paramedics are coming,” the receptionist said. “What can I do, tell me what to do—” She stopped speaking abruptly. My shirt still pressed to Arthur’s chest, I looked over my shoulder at her. She was staring, slack-jawed, down the sidewalk, at a bloody hand sticking out of the hole where a side door used to be. “Oh my God.”

  I stopped her from going toward it, guiding her down next to Arthur and pressing her hands over my blood-sticky shirt. A keening sound was coming from the doorway. I scrambled to my feet and went towards it. My teeth ground together when I reached the doorway. The hand belonged to a young woman. A girl, really. My lungs seized up. The rest of her was splayed on the floor, a massive pool of red fanning out underneath her, soaking the grey carpet and her light brown hair to an inky black, a spray of broken glass around her like a saintly halo in a stained-glass window. A big, youngish guy was crouched over her body, blood spreading through the fabric of the knees of his jeans. The keening sound was coming from him. “No, please, no, no,” he was saying, his hands flapping over her in a panic.

  “Derek?” I said.

  His head snapped around at my voice.

  “The bleeding,” I added, “do you have a towel?”

  He stared at me and moved his mouth soundlessly. I stepped over the glass and looked at the young woman. Her face was a mess of blood and bone, her forehead gone, her mouth slack. She was a teenager, twenty at the most. Her fingers twitched and I heard her take in a faint, wet breath.

  “A towel,” I said again. “Something, anything.”

  He sprang to his feet with a swiftness surprising for his size and disappeared through a doorway. I dropped to my knees next to the woman and felt along her jaw for a pulse, already knowing that it was no use.

  * * *

  Heat radiated up from the asphalt surface of the parking lot, but somehow I was still cold. I was stuck in limbo. No one would tell me anything about Arthur’s condition, and I wasn’t allowed to leave. After repeating my spiel about the car for the fourth time, I sat down on the retaining wall next to the receptionist, Janet.

  She was about Arthur’s age, a short, wiry black woman in a navy-blue twinset. She seemed like the type who could probably be described as unflappable in most circumstances, other than being shot at while sitting in her office. She kept shaking her head as if someone had just told her a very improbable story. The mustached man—a press operator named Bobby Veach—was pacing around the parking lot, talking on his cell. Neither of them knew who the young woman was. Derek, meanwhile, had never returned with that towel, and was nowhere to be seen.

  “Are you all right?” I said to Janet.

  She said nothing, just stared down the sidewalk at my bloody madras shirt, lying on the curb like a Law & Order prop. Then she looked at me and quickly looked away. I’d covered my bloodstained tank top with a random shirt from my trunk, a faded CPD basketball-team tee that Tom had left in my car at some point last fall, but my arms were stained red up the elbows, like gruesome opera-length gloves. Without a word, Janet fumbled with the flap on her handbag and pulled out a package of wet wipes and handed it to me.

  I began cleaning myself off. “Thanks.”

  She nodded and went back to staring at the sidewalk.

  Bobby Veach drifted over to us, sat down next to Janet, got back up. “How long do you think they’ll make us stay here?” he said.

  Janet said to me, “What do you think?”

  Veach frowned. “What does she know?”

  “I’m a private investigator,” I told him, handing him a business card.

  His face, already hard with tension, went even tighter. “What? Why?”

  I said, “Arthur hired me.” But before I could go on, his phone rang and he turned away from us and walked off.

  Janet sighed. “Don’t mind him. Pressmen are an interesting lot. Do you know what’s going on?”

  That was a very good question. The police population on the scene only seemed to increase the longer we waited there in the fading twilight, uniforms and plainclothes cops traipsing in and out of the print shop, phones pinging. A coroner’s wagon was parked behind my car, its back doors open. I felt sick to my stomach. “No,” I said. “I guess it just takes a while.”

  The cops had stretched crime scene tape around half the parking lot. On the other side of it, a cluster of people dressed in crisp white karate gis looked on, trading their evening martial-arts class for this bit of intrigue. There were nine cruisers parked at odd angles in between, and their blue and red lights turned my view into a demented carnival. A tan unmarked car pulled up behind the group of spectators, and Tom and Sanko both emerged. Tom scanned through the crowd, spotted me, nodded.

  “This is bad,” Janet said, her eyes on Tom and Sanko as they joined into a conversation with the guy who appeared to be in charge, his badge on a lanyard around his neck, like cops in television shows. Janet produced a pack of cigarette
s from her bag, but her hands were trembling too much to work the lighter.

  “Here.” I dropped the clump of pinkish wet wipes on the wall beside me and took the lighter from her. After flicking my thumb against the spark wheel, I held it out while she passed her cigarette through the steady flame.

  “Thank you.” She dragged hard on it and tipped the pack in my direction.

  I shook my head and resumed wiping off my arms. “I’m good.”

  “I know I should quit.” She exhaled toward the darkening sky. “I always say, but you have to die of something, right?” she said, and winced.

  “Have you worked for him long?”

  Janet flicked ashes onto the sidewalk. “Oh, yes,” she said. “Since the beginning. Since he opened the shop, what was it, thirty years ago. My first job. So I’ve probably worked for Arthur since before you were born, baby.”

  Not quite, but I got the point. I said nothing.

  She looked back down at the sidewalk. Smoke from her cigarette spiraled up through the air between us. “He gives people credit. Too much credit. He always has.”

  “Are you talking about Marin?” I said, not following.

  “He gets taken advantage of. Because he tries to see the best in people. I know he hasn’t taken a salary from the business in years.”

  “Really.” I remembered that Arthur told me they’d just gone through a rough patch, but that things were turning around. Or maybe that was just wishful thinking, the way a compulsive gambler always feels lucky.

  “You should really ask him about it,” Janet said, and just then the lanyard guy lumbered over to us, frowning under his grey flattop. He looked like a bully.

  “Janet Morland?” he said to me.

  Janet raised her hand like she was giving an oath.

  “You work here?”

  Janet looked at me, terrified. I stood up and glanced around for Tom, but I didn’t see him. “What’s going on?” I said. I put my hands on my hips, acutely aware of how ridiculous I looked in this moment: ginormous shirt, clutching a wad of pink-tinged wet wipes.

  “We just need to ask you some more questions.” The cop put a meaty hand protectively on Janet’s shoulder. Then he looked at me. “Don’t go anywhere.”