“And today?”
“And today,” she said, “I am aware that I owe you, and Cat, and I would only ask you to give me a few more hours to rest. I’m sorry. I’m very tired. Can we talk later?”
I nodded. “Okay.”
I found Catherine in the living room, curled up in the chair where I’d slept. She was still awake, but barely. I crouched down in front of her. “Hey,” I said. “Cat. When did you start introducing yourself to everyone as Cat?”
She gave me a sleepy smile and leaned forward for a kiss. “I don’t know,” she said, “do you hate it?”
“A little. You’re a Catherine to me, through and through.”
“Maybe I turned into a different person after we first met,” she said, which was kind of true. “And maybe now I’m turning back.”
Something hurt, in my chest. I couldn’t tell if it was a good hurt or a bad hurt. Knowing our history, probably a little of both. “There are a few things I need to check on,” I said, “hopefully something to back up her story. But I don’t want to leave you here alone with her. I can call someone to come over and keep you company—”
“Oh, there’s no need,” Catherine said, sitting up. “Leila and I were having a good conversation while you were asleep. Artist to artist. It’s really okay. She can barely stand up. And it’s not like she’s a stranger or anything.”
I studied her delicate features. “She’s not an honest person,” I said.
“Maybe not honest, but it’s okay. Don’t you think if she was going to try to run or something, she would’ve done it while I was in the shower?”
I didn’t say anything.
Catherine kissed me again. “Go. I’ll be fine.”
TWENTY-THREE
I wanted to talk to Alecia Watson, but first I wanted to be dressed in non-bloody clothes. I stopped at home and gave a thorough inspection of the cars parked on the street before I got out, but nothing was out of the ordinary. And inside the building there were no traces of what had happened last night except for a single drop of blood on the edge of a worn Oriental rug on the landing. With the light still out, no one would ever notice.
I told myself to remember to call the landlord. Later, when I wasn’t in the middle of this mess.
I was freshly showered and wearing clean clothes when I heard the door to the building creak open. Heavy footsteps that stopped at my apartment, and a loud, forceful knock.
I shook my gun out of its holster and said, “Who is it?”
“Vincent Pomp. I just want to talk.”
I felt my jaw bunch up. “I’m in the phone book.”
“I’m sure you are.”
Neither of us spoke for a while.
“You came to Tessa’s service yesterday,” he said finally. “Why?”
“I was there when she passed. It seemed like the right thing to do.”
“I wish I could believe you. Where is he?”
I parted the curtains and looked out at him. He seemed startled by the gesture. He was alone, his suit jacket rumpled and dotted with rain. I opened the door and stood facing him, my gun at my side. “You’re talking about Nate Harlow.”
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know. But I’m looking for him too.”
“Why?”
“I think he’s responsible for everything that’s happened. But I told you to call first next time. This is my home. You don’t just show up here acting entitled to answers.”
Pomp narrowed his eyes at me. “You’re not afraid of me,” he said.
He apparently couldn’t see the tremor in my hand or hear it in my voice. “It doesn’t really matter if I’m afraid of you or not. I don’t know where Nate is, so I can’t tell you. I imagine that he’s trying to get away from this city by now.”
“He killed my daughter. He shot my son last night.” He slumped a little against the wall. “Derek has a collapsed lung and might not make it. All he wanted to do was make a little cash.”
I knew he was a bad guy, but I almost felt sorry for him. His world was caving in because of Nate, and he didn’t even really know the guy. “Not enough cash in the Pomp family business?” I said.
Pomp was quiet for a moment before he answered me. “Derek always has to do things his own way, on his own terms. He ran into some trouble with drugs a while back, and I wouldn’t let him near Phoenix after that. He just wanted to show me he could do it—be a responsible businessman. He didn’t ask for all this.”
I wasn’t so sure that the word responsible applied here. But I didn’t want to let on that I knew what Derek was involved in yet. “All what?”
“The print shop. The police found things inside. Things that tie my son to some criminal activity. It’s quite serious. And now, even if he does pull through, he might wind up in prison for the rest of his life. That’s what.”
“Lucky for you that you never ended up buying the print shop from Arthur,” I said, taking a guess.
His nostrils flared. “You know about that?”
“I know Arthur didn’t want to sell it,” I said, “but he had no clue about what Derek and Leila were up to. Did he?”
Pomp shook his head slowly in a resigned sort of disbelief. “No, he didn’t. I made him an exceedingly generous offer, too, because Derek had proved to me that there was money in it, even though the print shop had been operating in the red for the last three years. But Arthur wasn’t interested—not in one and a half times what the dump was worth on the up-and-up.” He shrugged. “They always say that everybody’s got a price, but I’m not sure what his is.”
“So if you wanted to go into business counterfeiting passports with your son, why not just start over? Why bother buying the print shop from the last honest man in the city?”
He almost smiled. “The last honest man,” he said. “Right.”
“That’s not an answer,” I said. “Why not build your own?”
“Efficiency.”
I thought about what Leila had said. Archimedes.
Pomp added, “Why reinvent the wheel, when all the pieces and parts were right there.”
“But he wouldn’t sell.”
“I thought I figured out a way around that. I bought the entire office complex.”
I studied him, picturing the office I’d followed Leila to yesterday. The recently removed vinyl letters. “How is that going to help?”
“Derek said the print shop was having trouble making rent some months. So even if Arthur wouldn’t sell to me, once he owed me, he could be controlled. You don’t have much leverage against a person you already owe.”
I raised an eyebrow. “That’s pretty clever on your part.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Because that way, you’re pretty insulated from all of it on paper, aren’t you?”
He laughed without humor. It turned into a wounded howl. “Fuck being insulated. I want my children. And I want to smash in Nate Harlow’s skull.”
“You’re not the only one. But I still don’t know where he is.”
Pomp shook his head. “If I find out you’re lying to me,” he said, but his heart wasn’t even in it.
* * *
Rattled from my conversation with Pomp, I called Tom as I drove over to Lilley Avenue. Once again, it went to voice mail. This time, I waited for the beep. “Tom. It’s me,” I said. “I need your help.” I gritted my teeth as I had to slam on my brakes to avoid running a red light. “You said to tell you if I needed help, and I do. Please, call me so I can explain.”
Everything was going to be fine.
Tom would call back.
Neither Nate nor Vincent Pomp had any possible way of finding Catherine’s house.
Before the light turned green, I grabbed my phone off the seat and tapped out a text to her:
Everything okay?
Her response was immediate.
I told you it would be and it is:) The alarm is on and she’s asleep. Stop worrying.
* * *
Then, a
few moments later, the same three dots she’d been sending for months.
* * *
Alecia Watson lived in a brick Cape Cod with bright, happy flowers out front. She answered the door with a stack of mail in her hand, expression hard. She wore hospital scrubs, light blue. She was clearly the same woman smiling in the photo in her husband’s obituary, only with nothing to smile about now. I wondered who had planted the flowers. “Can I help you?”
“Yeah, hi,” I said. “My name is Roxane. I’m a private investigator and I’d like to talk to you about your husband.”
She narrowed her eyes slightly behind her purple-framed glasses. “Do you have some ID on you?”
“Sure, of course.” I showed her my PI license, which she inspected with more care than anyone ever had.
“Sorry,” she said, handing it back to me. “You never know. I’ve had some real weird visitors. So you are who you say you are. What about my husband?”
“I’m sorry for your loss, first of all,” I said. She nodded curtly. “And I’ve read your blog, so I know that there hasn’t been progress on the investigation.”
Alecia drew in a slow breath. “No.”
“I came across A.J.’s name in the course of another investigation. Into something that happened to one of his clients, actually.”
She flinched slightly when I said her husband’s name. But then she tipped her head to the side and stepped back from the doorway to let me in. “One of his clients?”
I followed her into the kitchen. “A woman named Agnes Harlow,” I said.
Alecia shrugged. She sat down at a small round table and gestured for me to do the same. “He never talked about his clients by name. So this Agnes person—something happened to her?”
“She fell and injured a hip.”
“That’s terrible.” She looked at me. “What does that have to do with a private investigator though?”
“It’s kind of a long story. It boils down to the fact that she said something to me about your husband, that makes me wonder if he might have helped her with something. Found something for her.”
Her eyebrows pushed together. “He helped his clients with a lot of things. That’s what his job was.”
“Right,” I said. “Bear with me here. A real-estate thing. Does that sound familiar to you?”
“A real-estate thing for his clients? No.”
“He never mentioned anything troubling him?”
“Troubling him? What in the world are you getting at?”
I didn’t really know how to say it except to say it. “Agnes fell down a flight of steps on or around Easter Sunday,” I told her. “I think she was pushed down those steps, because she had discovered that her nephew had transferred ownership of her house into his own name. I talked to her about it, and she mentioned A.J. She said that she told him.”
Alecia studied her fingernails for a while. “Told him what?”
“About the house. That something was going on with the house. I don’t really know, but that’s my theory right now.”
She shook her head. “I have no idea about any house.”
I showed her photos of Marin, Nate, and Leila, but none of them looked familiar to her.
Alecia seemed a little frustrated. “So are you trying to say A.J. died because of something to do with this, or what? Because if that’s what you’re saying to me, I hope it isn’t just some wacky theory. A.J. was the kindest, smartest man I have ever met, and he only wanted to help people. It kills me every day to get up and act like everything’s all right, knowing the person who took his life gets to continue living theirs. So if you know who that is, you’re gonna need to tell me if you want to keep talking.”
I tapped Nate’s picture on the table. “Him,” I said. “Only I’m not sure how to prove it.”
She picked up the photo and studied it with the same focus she’d used on my license. “He looks like an Abercrombie model.”
“I know. But he’s already killed at least one other person.”
She put the image facedown. “How do you prove it?”
“Can you tell me about the days before he died? I know this is hard.”
“Well, I hadn’t seen him in four days. I was working nights, he worked long days what with his classes at OSU, we were never home at the same time anymore. It was only supposed to be for a while. I was moving to the day shift starting May first. But anyway, we knew we were going to have an ugly couple weeks, but we were hanging in. Talking mostly through texts. I joked that I was married to a chatbot.” She smiled, but it quickly faded. “I was working that night. Easter. Seven to seven. He’d gone up to Cleveland to see his mama, and he said he might swing by the hospital and bring some leftovers for me and Karen, my good friend who works with me. Since, you know, hospital food. That was going to be around ten. But by ten, the police had already come and told me. I didn’t even know I should be worried.” Then she bit her lip like she was remembering something. “A real-estate thing, you said.”
“Yes. The deed to a house in the Short North.”
She said, “He texted me that evening to ask for Karen’s husband’s number. I figured to make plans to hang out or whatever. I didn’t have his number and Karen’s shift didn’t start till nine. I told him, you can get it tonight. Since he was bringing the food. But then…”
I waited.
Alecia took off her glasses and took a long time polishing the lenses on the edge of her shirt. “I don’t know if this has anything to do with anything … but Karen’s husband works for a real-estate attorney.”
* * *
I met the Kinnamans at Brighton Lake. Sam, Suzy, and I sat around a small table in the lobby while Molly and her daughter worked on a puzzle together in the common room. I placed a printout of the deed to Agnes’s house in front of them. “I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this,” I said. “I really am. But Agnes was conned into signing over the entire property to your cousin Nate.”
Sam blinked at me and said nothing. Suzy snatched up the deed and furiously turned the pages. “She signed this. That’s her signature.”
“Yes, it is.”
“She just signed it?”
“Yes. But she was misled as to what it was.”
Her face was growing red. “This—the house—can he do that? Just one piece of paper and it’s suddenly legally binding?”
“Suze, lower your voice, hon,” Sam said. “Is it really that easy? A signature and boom?”
“Unfortunately, in a case like this, yeah, it can be—”
“This is why,” Suzy said. She shook her head quickly. “This is why I said about the power of attorney. That house is how we’re going to pay for her care here, after the ninety days is up. That’s what the insurance covers. She doesn’t have any money left. She only has that house. Oh my God.” She stopped speaking abruptly, the color draining from her cheeks. “That’s what she was telling me.”
The rest of us stared at her.
“I thought she was talking nonsense. The dungeon of Machaerus, Herodias and Salome. The last time I saw her, at Christmas. She was saying it. They were back, she said. They were back. I thought she meant the—the delusions. And when I got to the hospital, right after. She kept saying they tried to take the house. They threw her into the dungeon. This Herodias thing, John the Baptist, it’s something she’s said off and on for years. I didn’t think. Dad,” she said, clutching her father’s arm, her eyes overflowing, “what did I do? Did they hurt her? Is that why she fell?”
As gently as I could, I said, “I think Nate caused your mother’s fall. Yes.”
Suzy turned and buried her face in Sam’s shoulder. “I am a horrible daughter.”
While Sam rubbed her back, he looked at me. “What can we do? There has to be a way to undo it, right? It’s fraud.”
I nodded. “It is. I have to tell you, I’m not an expert about this kind of thing. You’ll want to talk to an attorney, someone who specializes in real-estate law. And I’ll send the police y
our way, too.” I paused to check my phone, hoping for a callback from Tom. But there wasn’t one. My stomach hurt. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. But the important thing is that you know now. You can take steps.”
Sam nodded as his daughter wept into his shirt. “I hope you’re right about that.”
TWENTY-FOUR
Tom still hadn’t called me back. A little pissed off, I dialed his number, listened to his voice-mail greeting again, and left another message asking him to call me. This time, the message was rather terse. I called Catherine next, and she didn’t answer either. No one wanted to talk to me. As I drove back to Catherine’s house, I fumbled with the spaceship-like controls of my rental car, trying to get the windshield wipers to operate at a reasonable speed. Rush-hour traffic had taken hold of the city, and 315 was a parking lot. Every vehicle seemed to be personally standing in my way. I called Catherine again, and when she didn’t answer, I imagined Vincent Pomp somehow tracking her down, holding her hostage. No, stop it. I forced myself to breathe deeply and listen to the rain. But I didn’t want to do either of those things. What I wanted, I told myself, was a trip in a time machine back to the day I took on Arthur Ungless’s case. Maybe all of this would still have happened regardless, but it would’ve been someone else’s problem.
I could almost believe that, but not quite.
I crept along in my lane, counting out a chronology on my fingers to pass the time. One, Leila starts making and selling fake IDs. She brings her lover’s son into the business to help with production. The fake-ID business is booming, and Derek wants to expand. Passports. Leila thinks it’s a bad idea. Vincent Pomp offers to buy the shop from Arthur to get a piece of the forgery business, but Arthur isn’t selling. Six—was that six?—Derek finds a new partner in Bobby Veach, who cuts Leila out of her own scheme. Marin, meanwhile, falls in fake or real love with Arthur and they get engaged. She immediately commences stealing cash from him under the guise of wedding planning, because she’s the scorpion and he’s the frog. Nate gets out of jail and Marin hooks Leila up with him. Nate is full of ideas about how he can get his mother out of the world of small-time cons, and it all has to do with Agnes Harlow, who’s the one responsible for their fall from grace in the first place. They transfer the house into Nate’s name, but it’s harder than expected to sell a million-dollar house for cash. At some point, Agnes and/or A.J. figures it out, A.J. ends up dead, and Agnes is badly injured in a fall down her steps.
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