What You Want to See

by Kristen Lepionka

He was terrified. All bark, no bite. Or maybe not. I kept the gun down at my side. “Not if you tell me everything.”

  He sighed, wiping a sheen of perspiration off his forehead. “Okay. The clock woman.”

  “Yes. The clock woman.”

  “I’m sorry for what I wrote, if that’s what this is about—”

  “Rudy.”

  “Okay. Okay. I bought a clock from her. On Craigslist. This was a long time ago. Two thousand seven. She was selling this Herschede for four hundred bucks—she didn’t know what she had. No clue. Thing was worth four, five grand. I saw the listing go up and got to her a few minutes later. We met up in the parking lot of that Meijer on 23, I gave her cash, boom, done. I buy things all the time this way. Nothing out of the ordinary.”

  He swallowed. I motioned impatiently.

  “No one who comes into a store like this is going to put out five grand for a clock. So I told my assistant—I had this assistant at the time, Jared. I’m not good on the computer. I told him to list it in a couple clock forums for sale, see if we could find a buyer. Big mistake.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “Well, it didn’t sell right away, but I wasn’t in a hurry to sell it since I paid so little. Then a couple months later, guy shows up from the Delaware County sheriff’s department. A detective. He says, so about this clock. Turns out, the woman stole it from some rich family, crazy people from the sound of it, and they’ve been scouring the state for their precious family heirloom.”

  “Till they found it on your website.”

  Rudy nodded. “Yeah. So I said, I don’t know anything about that, I just bought it from her—and then suddenly I’m in handcuffs for receiving stolen property. And this clock, it’s worth enough money to make it a felony. Six to twelve months in jail, that’s what they told me the penalty was for this. All because I innocently bought something from this woman.”

  I wasn’t so sure that Rudy Carmichael had ever done anything innocently. I said, “Did you serve time?”

  He shook his head. “I gave it back. There weren’t any charges. But that wasn’t the end of it. Same year, I got audited. By the state.” He gestured around the messy shop. “And that was not fun.”

  “You think that was related?”

  “Of course it was related!”

  He was about to launch into a rant about the injustices of the tax code, but I interrupted him. “Did you ever see her again?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t try to hurt her?”

  “No, come on,” he whined.

  “Talk to her?”

  “Just when I called about the neon sign.”

  “And that was pure luck.”

  Another nod.

  “You mean to tell me that you nursed this grudge for ten years and took no action?”

  Rudy’s face fell. “What do you call my Craigslist ad?”

  Two women came into the shop, and he looked at me with wide eyes. “Come on. I have customers. Haven’t I been through enough?”

  “One more question. Do you know the name of this family?”

  At that, he finally had something to give me.

  * * *

  Rudy’s information on the crazy, rich family who ruined his life was limited to the tax commission employee who cursed him with seven years’ bad audits: a man named Barry Caruso, who was related to the family in some way. He was also dead. I sat at my desk with a drink, trying to figure an angle around this one. The Caruso clan were civil servants and electricians, not crazy, rich people in Delaware County who owned expensive clocks.

  But were any of them amateur genealogists? I went to a genealogy website and found Barry Caruso’s particular branch of the family tree. He’d been one of four kids, two boys and two girls. I opened new tabs for all of them. The ladies Caruso were both married, one to a used-car salesman and the other to a high school gym teacher. The surviving Caruso son was divorced; his wife, Georgette Harlow Caruso, was the daughter of a prominent Delaware County probate attorney.

  That seemed promising. I smiled up at the wall of my office, pleased with that bit of information. Compared to the rest of the case so far, it felt easily won—but according to the clock on the wall, almost two hours had passed. I had Elliott Smith on the stereo, loud, but it was still too quiet inside the apartment. That probably meant it was me, and that the quiet was actually in my head. But my head didn’t feel quiet at all. I got up and went to the window and looked out at the street, empty except for my car and a green pickup truck with a handwritten For Sale sign on it. Instinctively, my hand went to the patchy burn scar on my wrist, a reminder of my last big case. The green truck. The fire. The two women, including Shelby’s best friend, Veronica, whom I’d rescued from the house of horrors, which was what the media called it in the handful of interviews I did at the time. I thought rescued was a little melodramatic, and so was house of horrors, but there wasn’t really a better word to describe it. So maybe it was a rescue after all. Once I was even beamed from the NBC studio on Olentangy into a brief, awkward conversation with Matt Lauer on The Today Show. My mother recorded the broadcast and I could only watch about thirty seconds of it. I did not have a future career in TV, there was really no doubt about that. I saw a bit of an uptick in business and fielded two job offers, one from a law firm and the other from a big security agency in town. I didn’t take either of them too seriously. The money would have been nice, but I didn’t love the idea of someone else telling me what to do, not after being the one in charge of what I did for the past ten years.

  As it was, I had a hard enough time listening to myself.

  So I rode the wave while it lasted, but eventually business died down again. There were only so many mysteries out there that needed solving, even in a city like Columbus. But I was okay with it. I had medical bills and the scar to remind me of just how messy it could get out there. Not like I needed the reminder, though. Because I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Especially when I was alone, which was often. Maybe too often. Maybe that was a problem. As I looked back to my computer, Bluebell slammed a door upstairs. Rationally, I knew that’s what it was, but the big, hollow bang of it pushed me up against the wall, heart racing, as if this window might explode on me too.

  I slumped back into the desk chair and held a hand over my gun.

  A little shaken up, Tom had said.

  I pulled up on my computer a Dispatch article about the shooting.

  Two people were shot in an apparent drive-by at an office building near State Route 161 and Sinclair Road on Thursday. Columbus Police said a white Cadillac was seen fleeing the area. Tessa Pomp, 19, of Upper Arlington, was pronounced dead at the scene, and another individual was injured.

  There was no mention of whatever had gotten the cops so excited.

  I found Tessa Pomp’s Facebook page next, took in her smiling face, blue eyes, a silver barbell pierced through her eyebrow. Features that were no longer intact when I saw her. A long list of posts on her timeline from the last twenty-some hours, emojis in memoriam, broken hearts and praying hands.

  I clicked around for a few minutes looking for more details on the murder. Her funeral was Tuesday morning at Saint Joseph, which was where my father’s had been. Her obit didn’t mention her violent end except to say “Tessa left this earth too early for us to understand, but God always has a purpose for us and therefore we all must believe that Tessa is still among us fulfilling hers.”

  Did that belief bring comfort to anyone? I hoped it did, but I had my doubts.

  I pinched the bridge of my nose.

  A little shaken up.

  I returned to the task at hand and dialed Georgette Harlow Caruso’s number.

  “This is Georgette,” the woman who answered said when I asked for her.

  “Hi there,” I said. “I apologize for calling so late. My name is Roxane Weary, and I’m a private investigator—”

  “Oh, for the love of God,” Georgette snapped. “Nice try. You can just tell her to
fuck right off, okay?”

  I blinked at the phone for a second. “I’m sorry?”

  “It’ll go through in four more years, and that damned whore can hire all the lawyers and private eyes she wants, but it isn’t going to change a thing. They’re lucky to be getting anything at all, frankly.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said again, “who are we talking about?”

  Georgette went quiet for a second. Then she cleared her throat and started over in a more civil tone. “What is this regarding?”

  “Well,” I said, “it’s kind of a long story, but I’m trying to put together some background about a stolen clock.”

  She laughed without humor. “Right.”

  “Look—”

  “No, you look. I don’t know what she’s up to this time, but I am not telling you a thing.”

  The phone clicked in my ear.

  What was Georgette talking about? What would go through in four more years? There was only one thing I really knew about the woman who called herself Marin Strasser: People tended to have very strong feelings about her.

  TEN

  Georgette Harlow Caruso lived in a brick Victorian on a quiet street just north of 36. It boasted a mansard roof and an ornate wrought-iron front porch with a wheelchair ramp running from the side of it. I knocked and heard the barking of a small, angry dog for a few seconds, and then the door opened and a brown-haired woman looked out at me through black-framed glasses. She was short and stocky, mid-middle-aged and dressed in white pants and a black boat-neck shirt with a chunky silver necklace. “Can I help you?”

  “I’m Roxane,” I said. “We spoke on the phone last night. I thought maybe you’d be open to chatting in person about the clock?”

  She narrowed her eyes, but intrigue glimmered in them. She said, “All this about the clock? Ten years later?”

  “The clock is only part of it. I’m mostly interested in the woman who took it. Can I come in?”

  Georgette’s mouth twisted. “This is just like her.”

  The door closed an inch or two. Before she could shut it on me all the way, I blurted, “Just so you know, she’s dead.”

  Georgette’s face went totally blank. Then she said, “Who are we talking about?”

  “An interior designer named Marin?”

  “Oh, is that what she’s calling herself now? An interior designer?” She let out a harsh laugh. There was an interesting kind of wariness about her: cautious, but the kind of cautious that comes from experience rather than a sheltered life. “Well, isn’t that fancy. She’s no interior designer. And she’s not a Kennedy cousin either. The K stands for Kathleen. How do you know she’s dead?”

  I withheld my curiosity about her Kennedy-cousin comment and I gave her the oversimplified version by saying, “My client was accused of murdering her.”

  At that, she practically crowed. “Murder!”

  “Um,” I said, “yes. And who she was is a bit of a mystery, so I’m just trying to put the pieces together.”

  Finally, Georgette stepped back and opened the door for me. “Well, plenty of pieces here.”

  * * *

  Georgette Harlow had dropped the Caruso from her name. She had lived in the Delaware County house with her brother Paul since William Harlow passed away. “More or less,” she said now, shooting a glance over at Paul. They were fraternal twins, fiftyish, bespectacled, attractive in that way that money made you attractive, whether you were or not. We were sitting in the living room, or one of them. The house was massive, done up in smooth dark woods and plush upholstery. I was on the couch with Georgette, and Paul was in his power chair next to the end table. He was, he’d told me, a diversity poster in action: he had MS, and he was gay. “Once we got the miserable slattern and her brat kid out of here, anyway.”

  “Slattern,” I said. “Not every day you hear that one. She has a kid?”

  “It’s not every day you encounter a slattern, honey,” Paul said. “Although I suppose it’s bad form to say so now that she’s dead, right?” He didn’t look like he felt the least bit bad about this fact. Neither of them did. “And yes,” he added. “She has a son.”

  “Nate,” Georgette chimed in.

  I showed them the picture from Marin’s locket, and they both nodded.

  “The baby Jesus,” Paul said, and his sister laughed.

  “So who is she?”

  “Our ex-stepmother, technically. She married Dad a few years after our mother died. He was close to fifty. And she—Marin—was twenty-five.”

  Georgette added, “For reference, we were also twenty-five.”

  “Ouch.”

  The twins nodded.

  “You have to understand,” Paul said. “Dad was always a practical, reasonable person. Upstanding. He sat on the board at Ohio Wesleyan, for chrissakes. He and Mother made one hell of a couple, before she got sick. Then, after she died, he met Marin and he turned into somebody else. That’s not just a thing to say, either. Married in Vegas, of all places. And the way he spent money on her—it was insane. Furs, trips, anything she wanted.”

  “Bail, too, let’s not forget.”

  “Oh, how could we.”

  They glanced at each other, nearly giggling.

  I said, “Bail?”

  “Drunk driving, shoplifting. Petty, trashy stuff. I don’t even know how many times she got arrested,” Georgette said. “The wife of William Harlow, shoplifting earrings from Macy’s? Ridiculous. They both drank too much, got into these big, ugly fights in restaurants—”

  “Like the time we were all at the Refectory for his birthday, and we got asked to leave, they were bitching at each other so much,” Paul said.

  That sounded familiar.

  “I always hoped they were on the brink of ending it,” his sister said. “She was always threatening to take Nate and leave, and Dad adored that kid. The baby Jesus.”

  They both cracked up again. Paul caught me looking confused and said, “Nate was a holy terror. Truly. A nightmare child. But in their eyes, he could do no wrong. He could be writing on the walls in blood and Marin would be talking about what a precious angel he was. Thank God we never had to live with the kid.”

  “Interesting way to talk about your half brother,” I said.

  “Well,” Georgette said, “who knows if it was even true.”

  “That William was Nate’s father?”

  They nodded in unison. “Nothing would surprise me,” Paul said.

  “And we know she wasn’t faithful to him. Especially right before he died.”

  “But that’s another story.”

  “And even if Nate really was Dad’s, biologically, Marin did everything she could to keep us from getting close to the kid anyway. She’d tell him lies about us—that we’d tried to kill her, that we wanted to send him away. You probably think we’re pulling your leg. But this is the God’s-honest truth. The woman was pathological.”

  I looked down at the blank page in my notebook. All of this sounded a bit too much like the plot of a Lifetime movie, and the way they finished each other’s sentences was frankly a little creepy. But then again, Marin had stolen seventy-five thousand dollars from Arthur while living in his house and pretending to plan their wedding. So pathology might very well factor into it. I figured I could decide later on whether or not I believed this bit of family history. I nodded for the twins to continue.

  “Where was I?” Paul said. “Oh, right. The baby Jesus. He kept getting kicked out of schools. The Chase Academy, St. Matthew’s, this paramilitary school, on and on. They tried to bribe him to behave: karate classes, archery classes, art, dance, nothing worked. Holy terror.”

  “This was middle school, probably.”

  “He was, what, eleven when it happened?”

  “Ten, I thought.”

  “Well, what year was he born?”

  “It was the year we went to the Virgin Islands for our birthday—”

  They might have quibbled over this detail forever, so I interrupted. �
��Can you just tell me what happened?”

  Georgette and Paul looked at me in unison. “She slept with one of Nate’s karate teachers,” Paul said. “And Dad found out. Sweating up the sheets in every motel between here and Powell. Motels my father paid for, by the way.” Paul’s eyes were practically gleaming with delight. “Which was how he caught her. Credit-card bills.”

  “Uh-oh,” I said.

  “Uh-oh is right. He started divorce proceedings that week.”

  “But then he had the heart attack,” Georgette finished. “Playing a round of golf.”

  Paul said, “Dead at the fourteenth green.”

  Good Lifetime movie title. I waited for one of them to claim that Marin had murdered him with antifreeze in his iced tea.

  But instead, Georgette said, “He had a history of heart problems, Dad did. Which only got worse once he took up with Marin, because she wasn’t helping him take care of himself. Anyway, it was a shock, and also, it wasn’t. But after that, things got really bad.”

  “Because of the will. Or lack thereof.”

  “Your dad didn’t have a will?” I said. “Even though he was an estate planner?”

  Paul gave a flat little smile. “Well, that’s just it. Of course he would’ve had a will. But Eugene—his business partner at the law firm—he said that Dad didn’t. He was very kind to Marin in those days, and not so nice to us. So we assumed he was fucking her.”

  Georgette nodded. “Or was hoping to fuck her.”

  “Either way,” Paul said, polishing his glasses on the edge of his shirt, “we still don’t know exactly what happened there. But even though Dad had filed for divorce, they were still married at the time of his death—or so we thought—and under Ohio law, if someone dies intestate, the spouse inherits exactly half of the estate.”

  “Which was considerable,” Georgette said.

  Her brother said, “Quite.”

  “And her getting half meant that each of us was only getting one-sixth.”

  “A third of the remaining half to me, Georgette, and Nate. Plus Dad had set up a trust for Nate already. Something he couldn’t access till he turned thirty.”

  “Which wasn’t fair. The extra sixth to him. That’s what I was talking about on the phone. The trust. I thought it was just another one of her ploys. But we’ll get to that.”