What You Want to See

by Kristen Lepionka

  I patted the cover of the cookbook. “I promise you, I wouldn’t know what to do with a cookbook if my life depended on it.”

  Suzy Kinnaman led me over to the front porch, where we sat in those plastic Adirondack chairs that make you lean back awkwardly. A few seconds later, the garage door closed. It did not escape my notice that Sam’s family did not seem to want me in their home or around their stuff, even the items that no longer sparked joy. “So Dad was telling us that you came by Brighton Lake yesterday,” Suzy said eventually. “Can I ask, what about?”

  “I’m looking into your mother’s family. Your uncle’s second wife, to be specific. Marin.”

  “Marin,” Suzy said. She looked out at the lawn, chewing on her lip. “Yeah, I barely remember her. I went to college shortly after Bill married her.”

  “What do you remember?”

  “I remember at Bill’s funeral, she was wearing sunglasses. She and her kid, both in sunglasses. Identical sunglasses. It was so weird.”

  I waited, but that seemed to be all she was going to say. “So you didn’t think much of her.”

  “She was fake. That’s mostly what I remember about her. Fake. But also, I had other things to think about, back then. Like my mother being insane. My dull uncle’s trash-bag trophy wife didn’t really concern me much.”

  She said it with a bit of an edge, like her family was something she preferred to keep firmly in the past. “Of course,” I said. “And your mother wasn’t close with her either?”

  Suzy kept her eyes on the grass. “No, but Agnes isn’t close with anyone, really. Except the cats, maybe, and those cats weren’t even hers. Why are you asking about Marin?”

  “Well,” I said, “she was killed last week.”

  “Killed?”

  “Murdered.”

  “Whoa.” She finally looked at me, her eyes going wide. “That’s … awful. Wh—wow, that’s crazy. She was murdered. What happened?”

  “I’m not too sure yet, but the reason I’m here is that it took place in Victorian Village, near your mother’s house.”

  “And you think—what?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking questions. As far as I can tell, she didn’t have any other ties to the area. So I’m trying to figure out what might’ve happened. It could very well be a coincidence, and she was there for some other reason that I haven’t come up with yet.”

  Suzy shrugged. “I’m not sure what to tell you. The house is empty. And I doubt my mother was in touch with anyone from Bill’s family. She thought Marin was a shrew, just out to steal the Harlow family money. Which wound up being true, from what I remember hearing, but all of that was so long ago. I haven’t even thought about her in years. The thing about Agnes,” she said, “is you never know what’s the illness and what’s her. She can be so funny, so smart. But she can be really nasty. Even when she’s taking her meds. So it’s always been hard to have a relationship with her, for anyone.”

  “Including you.”

  “Including me. We’re not close. I don’t blame her for being sick, nothing like that. I just have to protect myself.”

  I nodded. “How often do you speak with her?”

  She didn’t answer for a while. “I saw her at Christmas,” she said, looking away. “If you’ll excuse me now, I have to get to work.”

  * * *

  When I left the Kinnaman house, I rustled up a phone number for the Ohio Hospital for Mental Health and went through the prompts for the alphabetical staff directory to leave a message for A.J. Watson, Agnes’s case manager. I asked him to call me back but figured he wouldn’t, on account of patient privacy; still, it was worth a try. It seemed like he’d been in close contact with her when no one else had.

  Then I called Georgette Harlow and asked if she could meet me for lunch, and an hour later we got together at 1808 on Winter Street. Paul, she told me, was at work, and was very sorry to miss another opportunity to dish about Marin, which didn’t surprise me in the least. “But I told him, pettiness is my specialty, so I figure I can handle it,” she said, plucking the olive out of her dirty martini. “So what’s the latest?”

  “Well,” I said, “it’s about your aunt.”

  Georgette’s features twisted. “Agnes?”

  “You sound disappointed.”

  “Not disappointed. Just … a person’s slightly estranged, schizo aunt doesn’t make for much of a story. What about her?”

  I sliced into my salmon. “I think Marin had been in recent contact with her. There are still a lot of questions. And I know you aren’t close with Agnes anymore, but you should probably know that she broke her hip in April. She’s not doing well.”

  Georgette finished the martini, not her first. “Unfortunate.”

  “She’s at a home called Brighton Lake in Upper Arlington, if you’d want to go see her.”

  “Goodness,” she said, almost chuckling. “You know, it runs in the family. Mental illness. Dad said it’s very likely his mother had it, but back then they just decided you were hysterical and that was that. He could get a bit blue himself, Dad could. He said Mother’s genes must have had a stabilizing influence on Paul and me, thank heavens. Agnes probably gave Marin money. Probably didn’t even know any better.”

  “Well, there’s no evidence of that,” I said. “But Marin was murdered behind Agnes’s house.”

  “Grandmother’s house.”

  “Uh—right. Anyway, Marin had no other ties to the area, and I don’t think it was a coincidence.”

  “Agnes loathed Marin, is the thing. It was her idea to hire that private investigator who found out about her previous marriage. I think it was just because of the house. She didn’t want Marin to get the house. Agnes wanted it, even though she already had Grandmother’s. She was pretty stable at that time. She was between crack-ups. Speaking in sentences, at least, and not the John the Baptist and Herodias nonsense she says now.”

  I recalled the eerie way Agnes had hissed that word—Herodias—and wondered what it meant.

  “Did Marin know? That Agnes was responsible for her being cut off?”

  “I’m sure. It wasn’t a secret or anything. God, I’ve been in such a good mood since the other day. Murdered.” She shook her head, gleeful.

  I was definitely starting to prefer the Kinnaman side of Agnes’s family. “So Christmas was the last time you saw your aunt?”

  Georgette flagged down a waiter for another martini. “Yes. We took her a plant, a poinsettia. She said she didn’t want it, because of the cats. It’s apparently poison for cats. But the cats live outside. She insisted that we take it with us because the cats might get the poison through the air. That’s what she said. For the love of God, she’s weird. Even before we found out she was actually crazy, she was always a little odd. Crazy is fun, for a while. I used to love it when Agnes came to visit. Of course, that was before Marin, before Mother died. She was strict, Mother was. No makeup, no drinking, no smoking. Agnes always smoked. And she’d curse like a sailor, goodness.” She was starting to ramble now. “Then she started to get strange. The Pope was communing with her through her car’s radio. It’s almost funny.”

  I definitely liked the Kinnaman side better. I said, “Um.”

  “Oh, come on, like you’d take a claim like that seriously? She would say the wildest things. The pope! John the Baptist! At first everyone just thought that she was reconnecting with it. The Church—did you ever notice how Catholics say it like that? The Church. Agnes loathed Marin. Such a liar. Like her whole shtick about being John Junior’s cousin—talk about a Catholic family, right? But we’d go to Mass for Christmas and it was like Marin had never even heard of the Bible…”

  Something had been needling at me since Saturday, and now whatever it was gave me a sharp little twinge. “I’m sorry,” I interrupted, setting my knife on the edge of my plate, “John Junior’s cousin?”

  Georgette finished her current martini and looked at me, a little wobbly. “You remember him. The airp
lane situation, his poor girlfriend, what a mess. You know, I always thought—”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “He was a pilot too, you know. Dad was.” She reached for her drink and frowned at it when she saw that it was empty.

  “Georgette. What does JFK Junior have to do with Marin?”

  She blinked a few times. “Oh, didn’t I tell you? She said she was a cousin. She said the ‘K’ in her name stood for Kennedy, when we all knew it was Kathleen. Right there on her driver’s license. But no, she claimed she was part of the Kennedy clan. On the Lawford side. Which didn’t even make any sense, because if that was true, why wouldn’t she have Lawford in her name? Even her stories didn’t make sense. Like I said, she was a shit liar, but people just want to believe you. I swear to God, that’s all there is to life.”

  Pushing aside Agnes Harlow for a second, I tossed two twenties on the table to cover my lunch. “I have to go.”

  SIXTEEN

  I ran into my apartment, almost tripping over the wheels of my desk chair in the process of lunging for the cigar box I’d found in Marin’s dresser.

  Her passport.

  STRASSER, MARIN KENNEDY

  I sat down heavily on the edge of my desk. “It’s a fake,” I said to the empty room. It had to be. Her name was Marin Kathleen. Kennedy was a dream, an aspiration. I briefly considered whether she might have had her name legally changed, but no—there would have been a paper trail for that.

  I flipped on a light and squinted at the detail on the booklet’s printed pages.

  Intaglio, a printing technique used to get the fine line detail on money, Catherine had said.

  Counterfeit green cards, my brother had said.

  The passport was fake, someone in Arthur’s print shop had made it, and I was willing to bet I knew who.

  * * *

  “Look at you,” Catherine said when I got to her house. “Identifying medieval printmaking techniques on sight.”

  We were standing over her kitchen counter, Marin’s fake passport and Catherine’s real one on the granite surface between us. Up close, and in comparison to the genuine article, the counterfeit was easy to spot—the materials were a little too shiny, the colors were off, the patterns weren’t as intricate. But in passing, it was damn good.

  “Aside from the part where they swipe it, right? I don’t know anything about fake passports but I have to imagine there’s no way to fake that part. So what’s the point?”

  “I have no idea,” I said. “But I bet people are willing to pay for something like this. I bet it would fool somebody.”

  Catherine picked it up and looked at Marin’s picture. “In high school I had a fake ID. My neighbor made it in his basement. I was fifteen years old, buying beer, getting into shows. Nobody ever looked twice at it. There is no doubt in my mind that this would be able to fool somebody.”

  I sighed. Things were starting to make sense—not everything, but a lot of it. The police at Ungless Printing last week. Tom’s insistence that I stay out of it. If passports were being manufactured at Arthur’s shop, it was probably a federal case at the minimum, and a tangle of multiple jurisdictions at the most. It was easy to see how that was bad for Arthur. His business, his problem.

  “I really need to talk to her,” I said.

  Catherine shrugged. “I sent her a Facebook message, but she didn’t respond. It says she read it, though. Why does that feature exist? What I want to know is who invented that.”

  I had wondered such things myself, but that didn’t matter at the moment. “What did your message say?”

  “It just said Hi, how are you?”

  I laughed. “You’re terrible at modern life.”

  She elbowed me in the side, her eyes flashing. “I’ve never denied that. Anyway, I was trying to start a conversation first, rather than just drop an invitation on her out of the blue.”

  “Can you try again? Tell her … say you’re trying to get rid of some supplies. Something to do with this intaglio crap. Ask her if she wants them.”

  Catherine lifted the lid of her laptop. “Okay, I can see how that’s better than hi.”

  I watched over her shoulder as she typed a new message. Hi again—sorry to bug you again—I have a huge box of aluminum plates and Charbonnel inks that I need to get rid of TODAY. No space in new studio. Reaching out to old students to see if there are any takers?

  She hit Enter and the message blooped across cyberspace. A second later, the message showed as seen.

  And a few seconds after that, Leila Hassan responded.

  * * *

  Catherine set up the meeting for later that afternoon, to take place in front of Hopkins Hall, where her office was. “You can park in front of the building,” she told me, “there’s usually spots during the summer. I’ll give her the box and then you can follow her or whatever you intend to do.”

  “You don’t actually have to be there,” I said, “I just need to get her to be there.”

  “I don’t want her to think I’m some kind of asshole, what if she goes in the building and starts yelling about me?”

  “She’s a criminal. I don’t think you need to worry about what she thinks of you. Also, I have never heard you express concern that someone might think you’re an asshole.”

  Her eyebrows went up. “Hey, I’m helping you here.”

  “I know that, and I appreciate it immensely. But you don’t have to actually give her anything.”

  But it turned out that Catherine did have a box of etching inks that she was trying to get rid of, so she packed it up and we drove up to campus in my car. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d driven her around—the last time I’d had her in my car, we had been doing something other than driving—and I loved the way she looked to the right of me, her long blond hair whipping in the breeze from the open window, her delicate features in profile.

  I shook my head at myself.

  “What?” She glanced over at me, smiling coyly.

  “Nothing. I’m just grateful for your help.”

  “Right.”

  “Really, I am.”

  I looked back to the road but I felt her eyes on me.

  “Will you let me know what happens?”

  I nodded as I pulled up alongside Hopkins Hall and parked behind a van. There were several open spots in front of the van—hopefully they’d stay that way, so Leila would park there and allow me to follow her easily. Catherine got her box out of the trunk and leaned down next to the door to say, “I mean it, I want to hear about what happens later.”

  She hefted the box onto one slim hip and disappeared into the building.

  Twenty minutes later, a silver Audi with tinted windows pulled into the parking lane, and a woman got out. Her hair was curly, glossy, and dark, pulled back from her face in a low ponytail. Her left deltoid was tattooed with an ornate hamsa. She looked about five-six, fit, and very attractive. She was dressed in jeans and a sleeveless blue blouse, her eyes hidden behind oversize sunglasses. Someone sat in the passenger seat, but I couldn’t make out anything beyond a person shape. Leila looked up at the building, then at her phone, repeating this gesture every few seconds until Catherine pushed open the door to the building and came out with the box.

  It was almost absurd how well this ruse had worked. I couldn’t hear their exchange but Leila looked pleased with the box as she smiled and nodded at Catherine and said what looked like yes, totally several times. Then she loaded the box into her trunk and got into the car.

  I shot Catherine a thumbs-up through my open window and, after giving Leila a head start of a few seconds, I followed.

  * * *

  We drove to a furniture consignment store in Clintonville, where Leila went in for a few minutes and returned with a modest wad of cash. Then a jewelry store, where she came out empty-handed. I still couldn’t see into the car well enough to identify who she was riding with.

  From there, we went north on High Street, past Morse, past my mother’s st
reet, and up to 161. Toward Arthur’s office.

  No, to Arthur’s office.

  Leila turned into the stucco office park, but instead of driving straight back to the building that housed the print shop, she turned right and went to the far end of a building that ran perpendicular to Arthur’s. I kept going north, not wanting to out myself as a tail by following her into the lot.

  Instead, I turned in to the next driveway—a water-treatment plant—and rolled slowly up to a fence so I could see the stucco building through the rusty chain-link. I felt around in my backseat for a pair of binoculars and found them tangled in a bra that I did not think was mine. But that mystery would have to wait. I hopped out of the car and peered at the stucco building. There were three vehicles parked directly in front of it—Leila’s, a white delivery van, and Vincent Pomp’s shiny Crown Vic. Leila’s trunk was open. Dropping off the intaglio supplies? I focused on the door to the suite, which bore the residue of vinyl letters that had been recently removed. I watched for a few seconds, sweat pooling at the small of my back in the afternoon sun. Then Leila came back out of the office, with Pomp behind her. He looked bad, his face pale, shirt wrinkled. He skimmed a hand down her upper arm but she shook him off, inclining her head toward the car.

  That was interesting.

  Then she slammed the trunk closed and climbed into the vehicle, while Pomp stood in the lot, looking lost.

  I followed Leila out of the maze of offices and we merged onto 71 going north, Leila and her mystery passenger in the passing lane, me in the center lane a bit behind her. With the AC cranking, my body temperature began to come down from hyperthermic levels. I leaned back, put Emily Haines on my aftermarket sound system, and nonchalantly kept an eye on her car.