What You Want to See

by Kristen Lepionka

  I sat back down on the retaining wall and thought about the bottle of whiskey sitting on Arthur’s desk, wishing I’d grabbed it. But what kind of person would that make me, if I had? I stared down at my hands. There was blood embedded under my fingernails, deep. I dug at it with the fraying edge of the wet wipes. Easy enough to pretend it was paint, I told myself. Paint. Red paint. Nail polish. With a name like Blazing Rose or Show Stopper.

  Not the blood of a young woman without a face.

  I stood up, struck with a sour tug in my throat and an urgent need to get out of there. Then I bent over sideways and puked into the bushes.

  “Roxane.”

  Perfect timing. I coughed and willed my stomach to settle. “Hi,” I said as Tom approached me. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and nearly gagged at the smell of blood and lemony disinfectant.

  His warm brown eyes swept down to the shirt, recognition flashing through them.

  I said, “Don’t. Please.”

  “Are you—”

  I cut him off. “No, I’m good, I just—” I coughed again. “There’s something in my throat, I need a mint or something.”

  Tom nodded like he understood and produced a linty stick of gum from his pocket and held it out to me. “It’s cinnamon,” he said, “so I don’t know—”

  “No, that’s great, thank you.” I unwrapped it and shoved it into my mouth, chewing hard, waiting for the cinnamon flavor to cover up the taste of bile on my tongue. I took a series of deep breaths and told myself that all of this was helping. “What’s going on here?”

  “You’re the witness—you tell me.”

  “No, I mean, there’re a lot of cops here.”

  His eyes flicked again to the shirt with amusement.

  “Come on, I said don’t,” I told him.

  “Hey, I wasn’t going to say anything. It’s just that I’ve been wondering where that shirt was.”

  I nodded calmly. Then, in a melodramatic gesture that made me cringe even as I was doing it, I yanked the shirt over my head and thrust it at him. “Here, take it. I don’t want to keep you from your favorite shirt that you haven’t seen in six months.”

  Tom’s eyebrows went up in surprise, either at my outburst or at the blood on my tank top. Or both.

  “It was the only shirt I could find in the car,” I added, lowering my voice a little. “I didn’t expect to see you here. Now, please, just tell me what’s going on.”

  He took the shirt as if by reflex, but then pressed it back into my hands. “I think you need it more than I do at the moment,” he said. “Are you all right?”

  Our eyes met for a long time.

  Finally I looked away and pulled his shirt back on. “I told you, I’m good. Now it’s your turn.”

  He didn’t say anything for a few seconds. Then he said, “Double shooting in broad daylight? There’s going to be a lot of cops on the scene.”

  I didn’t think that explained it but I just nodded, chewing with focus. “I talked to the Craigslist guy this afternoon.”

  “And?”

  “And he lost his shit and almost threw a portable phone at me.”

  Tom nodded at the scene before us. “You think that’s related to this?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, and his eyes winched up.

  “It’s not. You should just go home, okay?”

  I stared at him. “I should just go home.”

  He touched my shoulder, and I batted his hand away. “What the hell is going on here?”

  “It’s developing,” Tom said, “but suffice it to say it has nothing to do with Craigslist antiques.”

  “Do you know her name? The victim.”

  He nodded.

  “And?”

  “I can’t tell you that. Her next of kin hasn’t been notified.”

  I opened my mouth to say I had a right to know, then realized that I didn’t. Instead I said, “What about Arthur?”

  “Surgery.”

  The door to the print shop opened and the bully cop emerged. He looked around and made a beeline for where we were standing. The bully’s face appeared to be communicating something to Tom in inscrutable cop language, and then he stabbed a finger through the air at me. “You’re free to go.”

  “I’ll wait, thanks.”

  His polo shirt was embroidered with his name: “Lt. S. Chase.” He chuckled without smiling. “No, you don’t understand. This is a crime scene, we no longer need you here, so you’ll have to go. Freely or not.”

  “I’d like to talk to Janet before I leave.”

  He chewed his lip for a second, debating whether or not he wanted to argue with me. Then he looked at Tom and said, “Heitker, get her out of here.” He went back into the shop and the door banged closed, the cracked glass sagging.

  “Is that your boss?”

  “Chase? No. He’s from—” He shook his head. “This is a situation you shouldn’t be in.”

  “No kidding. He’s from what?”

  “Roxane.”

  “Tom.”

  We looked at each other. My sinuses were tight.

  Finally, he said, “Property Crimes.”

  None of this was making any sense. “What kind of property?”

  “Roxane,” he said again. “I can’t tell you.”

  “Why? What’s going on?”

  “To be determined.”

  “Is that all you’re going to say?”

  Tom sighed. “I’m not enjoying this, you know.”

  I felt like I was going to cry. “Well,” I said, “if I’m supposed to leave, you’re going to have to move your car.”

  * * *

  I headed back to my neighborhood and parked on Main and went into the Westin. The bar was full of solo men in business suits, all gazing without interest at a baseball game on television. I took the only open seat and waited for my brother to notice me. The guy to my left nodded at me in greeting, then gave me a halfhearted once-over. I could see him scoring my attributes—not bad-looking, but a serious case of resting bitch face, plus the weird, oversize T-shirt. All in all a six, maybe six and a half since he was lonely and I was there. Fortunately, I was spared from having to tell him not to talk to me because Andrew swooped in and slid a full shot glass across the bar at me. “Cheers,” he said, pouring a shot of his own.

  I downed the shot and pushed the glass back to him. The whiskey I’d had with Arthur was a distant memory. “I need a double,” I said.

  Andrew downed his own shot and swept the small glasses deftly into the plastic bin under the bar. “Rough day?”

  He turned around and poured us each a generous whiskey on the rocks as I met his eye in the mirror behind the bar. “Yeah.”

  When he turned back around, he glanced down at my shirt. “What the hell are you wearing?” he said. “Is that Dad’s?”

  “It must be.”

  My brother raised an eyebrow.

  I was going to throw this shirt away as soon as I left the hotel. “It’s just a fucking shirt, okay?” I said before he had a chance to inquire further.

  “What the hell happened to you today?”

  I leaned on the bar and drank a little whiskey. “Last week, a client bounced a check to me. I told him to call me later when he had the money to pay me. Now, all of a sudden, his fiancée gets murdered, he gets shot, someone who works next door is dead—I have no idea what happened.”

  Andrew was multitasking—listening while slicing an orange—but when I said that, he looked up sharply.

  “Are you being careful?”

  “Why is everyone asking me that all of a sudden?”

  “I don’t know, because, well.” He paused, his eyes on the burn scar on my wrist.

  “Change the subject.”

  “Because you have many, many virtues, Roxane, and caution is not one of them.”

  “Look, I’m trying, Andrew,” I said. I dropped my right hand to my lap. “I’m trying. Honestly, this whole situation started with me trying not to be reckless fo
r a change and taking on what I thought was a boring case. Please, let’s change the subject.”

  Finally, Andrew shrugged. “Guess who I saw in here a few weeks ago.” He tipped his head to one side. “Actually, speaking of reckless, I probably shouldn’t mention this.”

  That could only mean one person. “Catherine was here? In the bar?”

  “Not her. The husband, whatsisname, Wystan. He was wearing this douchebag hat, a straw one. Like in a barbershop quartet. I think that dude has a problem.”

  “A problem?”

  “He was asking,” Andrew said, then dropped his voice to a whisper, “he was looking for oxy.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “He wanted to buy it?”

  My brother nodded.

  “From you?”

  “I guess. I told him I don’t mess with that. Well, actually I told him that neither he nor his succubus wife would be buying anything from me ever again, even if I did mess with stuff like that, which I don’t.”

  I looked into my drink for a while. A ballsy move, for Catherine or her husband to show up acting like nothing had happened between us. Even though I was the one she kept on hurting, Andrew took a much harder line with her than I did; he refused to speak to her the last time we were all in the same room together, which was last fall, at a party that I should’ve known better than to go to. I should’ve done a lot of things last fall, such as taking my brother’s lead on the refuse-to-speak-to-her front, because nothing good ever came from letting my guard down with her. I was trying now, though, I told myself, while wondering at the same time if Catherine’s texts had anything to do with her husband attempting to buy drugs from my brother and if that meant she didn’t miss me after all. I ran a hand through my hair and felt a few more slivers of glass shake loose. “I think the correct term is a skimmer,” I said, “a hat like that.”

  Andrew looked at me for a long time. I knew he could tell something was up. But he didn’t press, and I was grateful for that. “My kid sister,” he said instead, “too goddamn wise.”

  EIGHT

  Arthur was unconscious when I got to his room at Grant Medical Center. His chest and shoulder were lumpy with bandages under the sheet, and he was hooked up to a full assortment of beeping and clicking hospital machinery. Janet Morland sat next to his bed, pale and drawn in another twinset, this one purple. She clutched Friday’s morning newspaper in her hands. When she saw me, she said, “He hasn’t woken up yet.”

  I took a step into the room. “How is he?”

  “Serious condition.” Her eyes flicked away. “That’s all they’ll tell me. I called his daughter. She’s on the way. But I didn’t think he should be alone.”

  I watched her for a second and understood immediately: She was in love with him. The kind of love that came from proximity, from spending so much time with someone that they became a part of you, whether you wanted them to or not. I leaned against the wall near the doorway so she didn’t have to look at me if she didn’t want to and said, “I’m sure he’ll appreciate it.”

  Janet said nothing.

  “Hey,” I added, “can I ask you something?”

  Now she turned toward me, her features pinched.

  “Last night, when the cops took you inside,” I began, but something crumpled in her face and she covered her mouth with her hand, eyes welling. I knew I should say something reassuring and just leave, but I couldn’t help myself. I went to the wall directly across from her. “What did they want to talk about?”

  “I—” She shook her head.

  “It’s okay. You can tell me.”

  She just slumped a bit in her chair and closed her eyes. “They mostly just wanted to know all about Derek.”

  “What did you say?”

  She reached up to fiddle with a gold necklace at her throat. A cross. “I said I didn’t know him well. He works in the back on the screen-printing side.”

  “Do you know his last name?”

  “Something with a P. Pomp, I think that’s what it is. I hardly ever talked to him. The only time I ever really did was when Arthur had to fire that foreign woman from the art department.”

  I waited.

  “She stole toner for the laser printer. Just walked out with it right under her arm. People saw it happen.”

  I didn’t think stolen toner cartridges were at the heart of this case. But a disgruntled former employee? Maybe. “Her name?”

  “Leila. Hassan.”

  “When was that?”

  “Oh, like a year ago.”

  “And someone saw it?”

  “Bobby did. The press operator from last night. I think he felt really bad, but Arthur has a zero-tolerance policy where honesty’s concerned.”

  Right. “What does she have to do with Derek?”

  “They were friends,” Janet said. “She referred him, got him hired. So when Arthur had to let her go, he asked me to tell Derek, and make sure there wasn’t going to be a problem with him still working there.”

  “And?”

  “He was understanding. Very nice kid.”

  I left a few minutes later when it became clear that she didn’t have anything else useful to tell me. Though I knew a bit more than I had last night, I had no idea what I was supposed to do with the information. Mild-mannered, middle-aged, ex-Marine Arthur Ungless, Marin—the victim here, but also not, considering the money she’d stolen. Maybe Arthur and Marin were both just terrible people. I had ten grand in cash sitting on my dining room table at the moment, which constituted something of an ongoing obligation, terrible people or not. When the elevator opened the first person to step out of it was Detective Sanko, and I froze.

  “What are you doing here?” he said, with more than a little attitude.

  I stepped out of the way of the other people trying to get off the elevator. “Are you the hospital police now?”

  Sanko cleared his throat, not cracking a smile. “You have the magic touch, I’ll give you that.” He folded his arms across his chest, his eyes giving me a once-over. “This case made perfect sense before you got involved.”

  “Right, because I made all of this happen.”

  “Like I said yesterday, it’s time for you to get uninvolved, okay, sweetheart?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You. Uninvolved. I don’t know what you think you know,” he said, “but this stops, now. You don’t need to come back here. He’s not your friend. Let us grown-ups do our thing. We don’t need anyone playing Veronica Mars in the middle of this.”

  He nodded, like that settled it.

  But it didn’t—not by a long shot.

  * * *

  There was a black Crown Vic parked in front of my building when I got home. It had chrome rims, shiny ones. So not a cop car. But it still gave me pause. I thought about circling the block until it left, but curiosity got the better of me, as it so often did. As I walked up the sidewalk, the driver’s door opened and a muscular buzz cut in a tailored suit got out. He nodded at me. “Roxane Weary?”

  I stopped walking. “Yeah.”

  He took a step back and opened the door behind him. “Please,” he said. “Mr. Pomp would like to speak to you.”

  I stared at him, recalling the name Janet had just told me: Derek Pomp. “I haven’t met Mr. Pomp, but if he would like to speak with me, we can do so right here in the open.”

  The buzz cut casually unbuttoned his suit jacket to reveal a semiauto at his waist. “Please,” he said again. “Mr. Pomp would like privacy for this conversation. Get in the car.”

  With a confidence I did not feel today, I lifted up the hem of my shirt to reveal my own gun holstered to my hip. “Are you for real? I am not getting into a car with a stranger.”

  Then the rear passenger-side door opened and a shiny double-monk-strap shoe appeared, followed by a charcoal-grey trousered leg. I rested my hand on the handle of my revolver, regretting my decision not to wait till the car was gone. But the man who stepped out of the backseat looked like a lawyer, not a thug
. He was mid-forties or so, a vaguely oily-looking fellow with slicked-back black-and-silver hair and a fake tan. Despite good grooming, his face was haggard, his eyes puffy and rimmed in red.

  “It’s okay, Bo,” the man said.

  Bo got back into the front seat and closed the door.

  The man took a few steps and stuck out his hand. “Vincent Pomp,” he said. “I own the Phoenix Group. I apologize for the drama. I lost my daughter last night, and Bo is being overly protective of me.”

  I thought about that. “Your daughter,” I said. I pictured the girl without a face, Derek Pomp weeping over her. “At the print shop.”

  He looked at me warily. “I understand you were with Tessa when she died. Miss Weary, I do want privacy for this conversation.”

  “I’m sorry about Tessa,” I said, “but you have to understand, showing up at someone’s home and demanding she get into a car does not exactly inspire trust and confidence. No woman in her right mind would do that.”

  Mild surprise flickered through his face. “To be honest, I didn’t think of that. But I mean you no harm. I’m just a businessman. I just want to talk to you about what happened. Preferably not on the street.”

  “A businessman with a driver who carries a gun,” I said. But he was clearly in pain. “We can talk inside. You have five minutes. And Bo stays out here.”

  We went into the building and up the half flight of steps to the first floor. The overhead light in the small lobby was out again, the landing ashy with darkness. I began to question my judgment for bringing him in here. I opened my front door and left it wide open, then leaned against the wall in the entryway, holding my gun against my thigh. My thumb was on the safety. “This is as private as it gets,” I said. “Next time you can call first.”

  He nodded, giving in. “My son said you tried to help Tessa.”

  I nodded. Although Pomp was on the slight side and the guy from last night wasn’t, there was a resemblance in the eyes, dark and wide.

  “Derek’s grateful. That you were there. I’m grateful. To try to help a stranger. That’s something I will remember.” Pomp ran a hand over his face. “I know you’re a private investigator. I know you’re a good one. But what I don’t know is why you were there in the first place, and I want you to tell me.”