What You Want to See

by Kristen Lepionka

  Among the many question marks peppered through what I knew so far was Agnes Harlow. Marin’s death had taken place near her home—but why? I was deep in the weeds with Agnes’s family, but they seemed pretty certain that Marin hadn’t been in Agnes’s life since her brother died.

  I closed my eyes as I rocked slowly back and forth, thinking.

  Marin had already shown aptitude for selling off antiques owned by the Harlow family, and from what I could tell, Agnes’s house was full of them. I wondered if the neon thermometer that Rudy Carmichael posted about had come from Agnes, somehow.

  I yawned, and told myself to get up and go back to bed so I didn’t fall asleep on the porch.

  EIGHTEEN

  Of course I fell asleep on the porch. I woke up shortly after seven, the rising sun directly in my face. My spine was stiff and my feet were numb from hanging off the armrest for a few hours. For a moment I was confused. Then I remembered why I’d come out here—to solve my case with my computer and a cup of tea. At the thought of my computer I jerked upright, terrified that it had been stolen because I didn’t see it on the ledge. Then I spotted it on the small plastic table next to the swing. Shelby must have seen me asleep out here and moved it; if she hadn’t, then I’d been visited by a ghost or an unusually considerate thief.

  After I took a quick shower, I dropped the car off at Joshua’s garage and let them arrange a loaner for me, a white Ford Focus that smelled like new car and old ketchup. Joshua wasn’t in yet, which was just as well because one, I still felt guilty, and two, I was wearing a bit of a disguise and I didn’t want to explain myself. I had on a sleeveless turtleneck to cover the bruise on my throat, with a grey pencil skirt and black heels. I’d put on eyeliner, located a pair of glasses, and pulled my hair back into a twist secured by all of the bobby pins I could find in my bathroom. The effect was, I had to admit, a little jarring. I looked like an important lady on her way to work at Jones Day. Between my getup and the new car, I thought I might stand half a chance of staying incognito at the funeral.

  I hadn’t been inside Saint Joseph since my father died. Then, the rows of the cathedral behind us were all filled. Today, though, it felt the way I remembered it from being a kid, cavernous and cold—impossibly empty with its dramatically vaulted ceilings, its arched concrete pillars hulking along the length of the nave. I slipped in a few minutes before the service was supposed to start and took a seat in a pew at the back of the crowd, looking around for Leila as discreetly as I could.

  The organ swelled up with “Amazing Grace” and everyone turned to face the altar. As Tessa’s casket was carried forward and her family filed in somberly, I hoped they found more comfort in the ritual than I had at Frank’s funeral. But it was hard to say. Vincent and his wife, both impeccably dressed in black, walked rigidly next to each other, a conspicuous gap between them. Two young men followed behind, mid-twenties, tall and thick, uncomfortable in suits. As they passed, I recognized one of them from the night of the shooting. Derek. He’d shaved and gotten a haircut, but it was clearly the same person. The other guy was a little older, a little more put together, but they had the same features—I figured this was Simon. Tessa’s other brother. The crowd of people in attendance ran the gamut from churchy ladies, to uneasy middle-aged dudes who looked like they were worried about their souls, to a handful of young women in a group near my spot in the back. Tessa’s friends, maybe. I saw two men who looked like cops—the haircut, the suits. None of them noticed me as I sat there with my nose in a hymnal, discreetly scanning faces.

  Nothing happened till a woman a few rows in front of me went up to the lectern to do the first reading. As people shifted to let her out into the aisle, I caught the profile of someone sitting at the end of the pew. Shiny black hair, pulled away from her face with a wide, flat barrette. She turned her head enough for me to be able to tell it was Leila. Her features were pinched with real pain. It seemed real, anyway. She turned back to the front of the church.

  At the lectern, the reader’s voice was clipped and tight as she struggled through Wisdom 3:1–9—And their departure was thought to be a disaster, and their going from us to be their destruction; but they are at peace. I kept my face hidden behind the songbook and continued to watch Leila. She appeared to be alone, with the nearest person a respectful distance away.

  When the service was over, I lingered outside, pretending to read a Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults pamphlet from a table near the door. I kept my nose down but watched Leila to see what she’d do, which turned out to be nodding somberly at one of the brothers, brushing past Ruth Pomp without looking at her, touching Vincent Pomp on the sleeve and murmuring something, to which he nodded, his hand lingering at her hip.

  I lurked in a corner of the small, dark lobby, watching the exchange. Pomp shook his head, cupped her shoulder. Ruth Pomp stood in the doorway with her sons, her features stunned. The guys who looked like cops were outside the church by now, eyes on the Pomp brothers. Leila wore a black sheath dress and a grey cardigan with tiny pearl buttons. Her eyes were caramel-colored and rimmed in kohl. She was beautiful. I’d noticed that yesterday but it was even more apparent now, in this intimate moment they clearly thought no one else was going to see.

  Finally, Pomp broke away from Leila, glanced at his wife, then looked up at me, a bit surprised. He gave me a somber, funereal nod but didn’t come over. Instead he joined Ruth and they filed out onto the steps, still not touching or even acknowledging each other. Leila watched them, then looked at the floor, then just started walking over to me.

  Her arms were folded over her chest. At first she didn’t say anything. She looked mad and scared at the same time. “You have no idea what you’re doing,” she told me finally. “We need to go somewhere else.”

  * * *

  We went across the street to SuperChef’s and got a table by the wall. She hadn’t said a word since we left the church and as we sat there, she seemed like she might not say anything now either. Her features had a current of energy in them. I said, “So do you want to tell me what we’re doing here?”

  She squeezed a lemon wedge into her iced tea. “You work for Arthur.”

  I nodded. “How did you know?”

  “I Googled you. You’re a private detective. Marin was all worked up about a private detective Arthur hired to follow her. And now you’re following me. Context clues.”

  “Maybe you should be a detective.”

  “I already have a vocation.”

  “Which is?”

  “I am a problem solver. An efficiency expert. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, and all that.”

  “Archimedes.”

  She smiled faintly. “Smart girl.”

  “Sometimes. But what does Archimedes have to do with you?”

  “I would rather have a conversation than follow somebody around, trying to guess what they’re about.”

  “Touché.”

  “Not everyone shares this vocation, though. And I’m not just talking about you, but about many people I know. This makes them impatient, which makes them dangerous. So here is what we’ll do: You tell me what it is you are trying to accomplish by showing up at this funeral, and I will see if I can help.”

  This wasn’t what I had been expecting. I took a bite of my croissant and used the time to think about what to say. After a brief silence, I said, “Now you want to help me?”

  She gave me that smile again. “I’m trying to get rid of you. I need you to stay away from me, and I suspect that only happens if I throw you a bone. I could just lie to you, send you off in the wrong direction altogether, chasing shadows. But I like efficiency. So I’m just being honest to save us both time. Tell me what you want.”

  I didn’t trust a single thing about her. But I was curious where this would go. “Who are all these people you know?”

  “I have many associates. Many friends,” she said. I still couldn’t place the accent.

  “Like Vincent Pomp.”<
br />
  “Sure.”

  “You’re involved with him.”

  A perfectly arched eyebrow went up a fraction of an inch. “You know more than you let on.”

  “I know that he owns your condo,” I said, “and that you shared a tender moment back there a few minutes ago.”

  “So you’re interested in Vincent. Something like this?”

  I watched her for a few seconds, debating whether I should give up any ground to her. She had a point. Having a conversation did save time, especially if she could fill in some gaps for me. “Like you said, I work for Arthur. The police think he shot Marin, and I want to prove he didn’t.”

  Leila sipped her tea. “That is too bad,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “This is not something I can help you with. I don’t know who shot Marin.”

  “One of your many friends, maybe?”

  “Marin was among my friends. We’re all reeling from what happened. But I don’t know why she’s dead. Is there anything else you want?”

  I nodded at the church across the street. “I want to know who killed Tessa Pomp and put Arthur in the hospital.”

  Leila’s eyebrows went together. “You’re hurting my feelings,” she said, “only wanting things I can’t give you. Knowing this is what I want. But I don’t know who killed Tessa. It would be very lucrative for me if I knew. But I don’t.”

  “Lucrative,” I said.

  “Vincent is grieving the death of his only daughter. He wants to know who has done this, so this person can be dealt with. If I knew, he would be dealt with already and you would not need to look for him.”

  “Or her.”

  “Or her,” Leila said. She smiled again. There was no warmth in it, but it was not entirely cold somehow. “So let’s try once more, see if we can find something you want that I can give you.”

  “Let’s talk about the passports, then.”

  “I have nothing to do with that.”

  “Is that right.”

  “What, because I’m brown you assume I’m a terrorist?”

  “No, not at all,” I said, “but somebody over there is making passports. And you’re the intaglio expert.”

  “This is what you want to know about?”

  “Among other things, yes.”

  She studied her nails, which were painted blood red. “Here’s a little story. One of Arthur’s clients is the local UFCW. That’s United Food and Commercial Workers. We were to make membership ID cards for them, on card stock. Hundreds a week, because turnover is high. Print, cut, laminate. So Arthur bought this machine. The Datacard. It prints on PVC, it does magnetic keycard access, holograms. Like what they have at your bureau of motor vehicles. I found it to be an inspiring device, so I began to play with it. Driver licenses and whatnot. There is a market for this, you see. Harmless, mostly. Kids who want to buy beer.”

  I thought about that. “You started out selling counterfeit driver’s licenses,” I said. I grasped for one of the terms my brother had thrown out yesterday. “Tor. Dark net. Bitcoin.”

  She smiled. “Yes. A nice girl like me, if you can imagine! Taking money from Reddit-obsessed seventeen-year-old boys, and the occasional person with a secret. It was an okay gig. Good money. I made the mistake of telling my lover about how well this was going.”

  “Mistake?”

  “Vincent sent me some business, here and there. Marin, for example. Before he was with me, he was with her. But eventually he suggested I cut his younger son in, and for some reason, I listened. Derek, a boy in need of a vocation.”

  “So you got him a job at Ungless Printing.”

  She nodded. “To help me produce these things. Everything was going fine, but Derek wanted more, more, more. Before long he wanted to make OSU IDs, security badges, he wanted to do every state in the country, he knew people in Windsor and wanted to do Ontario driver licenses, he wanted to do green cards. Things escalated. I told him passports were a bad idea. Much too difficult. I’m an artist, but Derek—not an artist. I said no.”

  “You did?”

  “In your spy movies, you’ve heard of honor among thieves? There are lines you can cross, and there are lines you don’t. This far and no further. The people in the market for a fake passport are not good people. And the risk was much greater.”

  “But the intaglio class,” I said. “You tried.”

  Her eyes narrowed slightly. She didn’t know that I knew about that. “I tried. I was curious. But I was right. Too difficult. So Derek found someone else to help.”

  I thought for a second about what I knew of Arthur’s business. “Bobby Veach.”

  She nodded.

  “And then he and Derek figured out a way to get rid of you.”

  She nodded.

  “By making up a story about copier toner.”

  Another nod.

  “And then what?”

  She tapped the screen of her phone, checking the time. “My ride will be here any minute. You’re running out of questions.”

  I paused and took another bite of croissant so I could think. Then I said, “Tell me about Nate.”

  Instead of answering, she glanced up at the window behind me.

  I turned around to see a white Cadillac parking at one of the meters on Broad Street.

  The same white Cadillac that had been at Arthur’s office the night of the shooting.

  And Nate Harlow got out of the driver’s side.

  I felt my heart speed up. “I thought you didn’t know who shot Tessa,” I said, staring at the car.

  “I don’t.”

  “That car was there that night,” I said, “I saw it. I was there too.”

  Leila didn’t react at all. “Nice try. But no.”

  “Oh, so you really didn’t know that.”

  Now she pressed her mouth into a thin line. “It’s time for me to go.”

  Nate strode into the restaurant and dragged a chair from an empty table over to ours. He leaned in and kissed Leila long and deep, and it seemed more like an exchange of power than a romantic gesture. They had a very different dynamic than Leila did with Vincent Pomp. That had been intimate. This was not. Finally Nate pulled away and said, “So what’s good here.”

  “Nate, baby,” Leila said, discreetly wiping her mouth, “we’re not staying.”

  “That’s quite a car,” I said. I stole a glance at Leila, who was staring down at her nails, rattled. “Looks like a Coupe de Ville, ’61?”

  Nate gave me a big grin. “Close. A Series 60. You know your cars.”

  “In my line of work, you learn a little bit about a lot of things. Get really good at recognizing something you’ve seen before. I saw a car very much like that the other night, in fact, when I was trying to stop your mother’s fiancé from bleeding to death.”

  Leila opened her mouth to say something, but Nate beat her to it, laughing as if I’d told a real knee-slapper. “That seems unlikely, doesn’t it,” he said, “that you’d see two different Series 60s in the space of a couple days. But I suppose stranger things have happened. We live in a crazy world. Crazy. But don’t talk about my mother.”

  He threw the last part in almost as an aside, but his eyes went even darker.

  “Excuse me?”

  “She was terrified of you,” he hissed, his smile disappearing.

  “What? She had no idea I was there.”

  He watched me coldly. “You’re a liar, too, then. You don’t get to talk about her.”

  “Okay, listen, I only want to figure out who killed her—”

  “I said, you don’t talk about her.” He raised his voice enough that the other people in the restaurant glanced over at us, eyebrows raised.

  “Nate, baby, we should go,” Leila said, her voice going syrupy-sweet as she slipped her arm through his, “we should go.”

  Nate allowed her to pull him to his feet. His eyes never left mine, and the contrast between his earnest good looks and the dead-inside hollowness of his gaze gave me chills. He
leaned in as if he was going to kiss me on the cheek, but instead he grabbed my shoulder. He knew exactly where to dig his thumb in, just above my collarbone where the bruise was its most colorful. The air rushed out of my lungs for a second. “You’ll see how it feels,” he whispered, “how about that?”

  Leila said, “Now, Nate.”

  She pulled him out of the restaurant. I sat there, a hand over my chest, a tight band of pain humming across my sternum. My rental car was parked across the street and there was no way I could get to it in time to follow them to wherever they were going. But before they reached the Caddy, I got to my feet and took a picture of Leila through the window. She saw me but didn’t react, just turned to face me, almost posing, her mouth pressed into a thin, sad line.

  NINETEEN

  When I got to my apartment, Shelby was in the front room, folding a stack of towels. “You look fancy,” she said.

  I dropped my computer bag next to the table in my entryway and ditched my high heels and shook my hair out of its elaborate twist. “A failed attempt at going undercover.” I nodded at the towels. “You didn’t have to do that.”

  “I also washed the sheets from the bed. I didn’t want to leave you without any clean linens.”

  I sat down on the edge of my desk, watching her do a complicated thing with a fitted sheet so it folded up neatly. “So do you know where this cabin is and all that? I promised your dad I’d get the address.”

  “Oh, right.” She placed the folded sheet on top of the basket and took her phone out of her back pocket. “I tried to be, like, chill about it. When I asked. I thought Miriam was way cooler than me, but she was just like oh yeah, my mom is super overprotective too. So she gets it.” She tapped the screen a few times and my own phone buzzed a few seconds later. “There you go.”

  “Thanks.”

  She tossed her phone onto the couch next to the laundry. “It’s near Logan so it’s on the close part of Hocking Hills. It’s only like an hour away.”

  “Shel, you’re eighteen years old. You don’t have to convince me. If you want to go to the far side of Hocking Hills, you can. And should. Just know that if you’re ever in a situation that doesn’t feel right to you, just call me, that’s all you have to do.”