What You Want to See

by Kristen Lepionka

  I tapped my thumb impatiently on the steering wheel. I was only to Ackerman. Neither Catherine nor Tom was calling me back.

  “Then things get even weirder,” I said, to keep my mind off the worst-case scenario. “Something happens to spook Marin badly enough that Arthur thinks she’s having an affair. He hires me. She buys expensive pens for a week and does nothing suspicious at all while I follow her.” I thought about what Leila had told me earlier. Marin had thought someone was following her, and had been avoiding Agnes’s house. Either Marin was very, very good at spotting a tail, or I wasn’t the only person following her. Maybe that could explain the behavior that tripped Arthur’s detector. But who?

  Vincent? Derek? The latter was clearly no stranger to criminal activity. Leila had told me that Vincent and Marin had been an item in the past. Maybe Derek was deeply protective of his mother? I frowned—that seemed like a stretch, especially since that particular affair had been over for a while.

  What have you done, the man’s voice had said in the alley that night.

  What had Marin done?

  After everything I’d learned, I still didn’t understand Marin’s death.

  From the sound of it, she was the most innocent out of everybody.

  Which wasn’t really saying much.

  I finally hit I-70 and went east as fast as rush hour would allow.

  * * *

  Catherine opened the door on the third knock like nothing was wrong. I said, “Jesus, I was worried. You didn’t answer your phone.”

  She pulled me inside, brushing raindrops off my shirt. “Sorry,” she said, “I told you, I’m bad at phones. It’s probably upstairs. We were watching TV.”

  I let out a long breath. “Ah, so you’re BFFs now.”

  “No,” Catherine said, “she’s zonked on Demerol and not much for conversation. We were just watching a documentary. About fonts.”

  “Fascinating.”

  She slid her hands down to my hips. “Yes.” She kissed me. “It was.” Another kiss. “I was thinking of ordering pizza for dinner, if that’s okay.”

  I nodded, but then remembered I was supposed to be at my mother’s house for dinner tonight. “Fuck,” I said.

  Catherine raised her eyebrows. “What’s wrong?”

  I pulled out my phone to text my brother. “Nothing. Family dinner at my mother’s house tonight, but I think this situation trumps regular obligations.” I saw that I had a message from Andrew already:

  Where are you?

  I typed

  Something came up, please make a good excuse for me and put the phone back in my pocket.

  * * *

  Leila was lying on the couch, paging through a magazine, and she glanced up when I walked into the room. I said, “It’s later. Let’s discuss going to the police.”

  She bit her lip. “Nothing has changed from this morning.”

  “So what’s your plan? We already established that letting me nurse you back to health, then riding off into the sunset was an unfairly cynical accusation.”

  “You’re all business today.”

  I sat down on the edge of the coffee table. “I’m stressed,” I said, “because you put me in the middle of a bad situation, and I can’t just do nothing. Nate is still out there, and who knows what scheme he’s planning next.”

  Leila shook her head. “He doesn’t have any other schemes. He isn’t that smart.”

  “He’s smart enough to do this much damage. So I’m not going to take any chances. Don’t you want to stop him?”

  She closed her eyes for a second. “Of course I do. In the morning.”

  My phone buzzed in my pocket. I got up and paced the length of the room—she had that effect, of frustrating me to the point of pacing. But I stopped cold when I read the text from my brother Matt, who texted me about once a year.

  You need to get over here. Something’s happening.

  * * *

  I felt sick as I walked up the front steps to my mother’s house. There were two unmarked police cars parked at the curb, and the front door was closed. Usually in the summer, the door was open to the screen almost constantly, even in the rain. And speaking of which, it was raining even harder now, the sky a bruised greyish blue. Inside the house, I found my brother Matt sitting in the living room, watching Pawn Stars. My mother’s voice echoed from the dining room.

  “Matthew Weary,” I said, my hands on my hips in front of the television, “what the fuck? You can’t text me to get over here ASAP and then not explain what’s going on.”

  He motioned me to get out of the path of the TV, which I refused to do. “I don’t know, it’s something about the lawyer’s office, Dad’s estate—she’s really upset. She sent Andrew to go pick something up for dinner. And Tom’s here now. So you know she doesn’t want to talk to me.”

  I felt myself grinding my teeth together so hard my sinuses ached. Of course Matt would view whatever crisis this was as an attack on his own ranking in the family likability poll. “What? Why?”

  “Would you move, please?”

  “Christ, I hate you sometimes,” I said. I left him to his show and went into the dining room, where my mother was sitting with Tom and an older guy I didn’t know, tall and heavyset, with thick black hair threaded with grey, and bushy eyebrows to match. My mother was crying—the gasping, red-faced type of emotion that I hadn’t seen since after my father died. I swallowed hard and said, “Mom, hi.”

  “Roxie,” she managed between sobs, reaching out her arm to me. I squeezed between Tom’s chair and the wall so I could give her a hug.

  “Mom, what happened?”

  “It’s—I’m—I’m so stupid,” she said, before covering her face with both hands and crying so hard she couldn’t speak. I rested a hand on her shoulder, my chest tight.

  Tom stood up and pushed his chair in. “Roxane, this is Rafael Vega, he’s a detective in Frauds,” he said.

  The older cop held out a hand. I shook it, stunned. “Frauds,” I said. I felt my mouth hanging open, a sour taste of bile in the back of my throat. For a moment I couldn’t speak.

  Frauds could mean a lot of things, I told myself. Just because my current case involved fraud didn’t mean that this was related.

  My mother grabbed for my hand. “I was at the lawyer’s office yesterday,” she said, her voice gripped with tension. “Signing papers. Afterwards, a young man from the office came by here with something I’d forgotten to sign. I signed it and went about my day. But it was—I told Rita and she—your father, everything he worked for, and I just signed it all away. Like an idiot.” She stopped there, consumed by tears again.

  Rafael Vega gently touched her trembling shoulder. “Mrs. Weary, it’s going to be okay.”

  I felt a wave of panicky emotion. This sounded all too familiar. “What the hell happened?” I asked Tom.

  He nodded toward the kitchen and I followed him there. Rain was pounding against the window over the sink. “Genevieve was telling your neighbor about it, this document she signed, and it raised a red flag to her.” He spoke quietly, almost a whisper. “The paper was a quitclaim deed, and the man from the lawyer’s office said it was to transfer the house to you and your brothers automatically in the event of her death—but that’s not how quitclaim deeds work. Your mother called me in a panic, rightfully so, and I brought in Rafael. He’s seen this kind of thing before. Someone uses deceit to coerce a homeowner—usually someone older, older than your mother, actually—into signing over the rights to their property. Effectively selling it without money changing hands— What?”

  “Tom, this is about Marin Strasser,” I said.

  His expression turned exasperated and a little bit concerned, maybe for my sanity. “What are you talking about?”

  “She had a son. His name is Nate Harlow, and he’s done this before. I tried to call you, like three times.” My sinuses burned. I was not going to cry in front of him. “I didn’t try, I mean, I did call you, and I left you two voice mails about t
his, and I just—forget it, Tom,” I finished, escaping to the steps so I could have my breakdown in private. Hot tears gushed down my cheeks as I climbed the stairs two at a time. Nate Harlow had been in my mother’s house. Nate Harlow caused her to feel this way. I caused her to feel this way. This was my fault. My thoughts spun to the conversation after the funeral, when he’d hissed you’ll see how it feels to me when he accused me of terrorizing Marin. This was an act of malice, nothing else. Malice toward me, enacted on my mother, who had nothing to do with any of it. At the top of the steps I pushed into the first doorway—my father’s office—and slammed the door behind me.

  This was only the second time I’d been in here since my father died, and the smell of him hit me in the face. Aftershave and whiskey. I bent at the waist, my forearms on my knees. I couldn’t breathe.

  The steps creaked as Tom walked up to the second floor of the house. He said my name gently, the way you talk to a crazy person. He tapped faintly on the door to the office. “Can I come in?”

  “No,” I said. I straightened up, wiped my face, tried to get a grip.

  “Please?”

  “No.”

  He sighed. “Listen, I didn’t see your calls. I dropped my phone on Monday and haven’t had a chance to replace it yet.”

  I sat down on the edge of my father’s desk and ran my fingers over the fake wood on the front edge, where the finish was warped from years of a glass of melting ice sitting in the same spot. With the lamp off and the thin, grey light from the window, the room was ashy and dim. “But my mother called you and you answered.”

  “Yes, at my desk.”

  “You weren’t ignoring me, then.”

  “Of course not, Roxane, I wouldn’t do that—look, can I come in?”

  I didn’t answer. I was thinking about the fact that my mother called Tom, instead of any of her kids. Instead of me. Not that I would’ve been any help, especially since this was my fault. He waited a few seconds before pushing the door open. In the dark, I saw his jaw bunch as he looked around the room, which somehow belonged more to my father than it ever did even when he was alive. I said, “I’m pretty sure it’s haunted.”

  Tom sat on the edge of the desk next to me. “Tell me what’s going on.”

  “Are you just humoring me?”

  “No, I’m asking you to explain. We have Marin’s cell phone, and the number she called most often was saved under Nate. Please, tell me.”

  There were footsteps in the hall. “Hey, Rox?”

  Andrew pushed open the office door. “I got Chinese,” he said. “Oh, sorry—um, I didn’t know you were busy. Hey, Tom.”

  Without meaning to, I moved a few inches toward the window to put some distance between Tom and me. “We’ll be down in a bit,” I said.

  * * *

  Tom turned on the lamp that sat on my father’s desk so he could take notes. I told him the whole story, from my complete failure to stay out of it on Friday, to the Harlow family, the Kinnamans, Bobby Veach, Vincent Pomp and his son, Leila, right up to the drama of last night. As he wrote I saw that he was left-handed, which I had never noticed before. Absurd that you could know someone intimately without ever seeing them write something down, but there we were. “I’m going to reach out to the Ds on the shooting last night, to see where they are,” he said when I was finished. “And I need to talk to Leila, either bring her downtown for a formal interview or, if she needs a hospital, we can do it there. Plus Sanko, and we can loop in the rest of the Frauds team too.” He reached into his pocket, came up empty-handed. “Dammit, I don’t have a phone. I keep forgetting.”

  I offered him mine, but he shook his head. “I rely on it so much that of course I can’t remember anyone’s number. Vega will have it, though. We’re going to get this guy, okay? Your mom is going to be fine. Probably we can intercept the paperwork before it ever even gets filed with the county, which would make it basically like it never happened. But even if we can’t, there’s exactly zero chance of a judge letting his claim on the house stand.”

  I turned away from him, my eyes welling again.

  He reached out a hand, skimming it across my shoulder blades. “Hey, no, no, it’s okay. I promise.”

  “I don’t need to be comforted,” I said, “I’m pissed off. And you know you can’t promise that.”

  But he kept his hand there for a while and I let him.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  In the dining room, Vega and my brother had calmed my mother down to the point of being able to push lo mein listlessly around her plate. Tom motioned Vega into the kitchen, where they had a whispered chat. I sat down at the table with Andrew and my mother, shaking my head at the offer of a plate.

  “Mom, I’m so sorry this is happening,” I started.

  She looked up at me. Her eyes were dry now, her features tense and stunned. “I don’t want to talk about it any more, dear.”

  She got up from the table and squeezed past me, and a few beats later the bathroom door slammed.

  I dropped my head into my arms. Andrew said, “So, do you have anything you want to tell me?”

  I wiped my nose on my forearm and looked up at him. “Such as?”

  He lifted one eyebrow. “It looked like you two were having kind of a moment, upstairs.”

  “What?”

  “You and Tom.”

  “A moment?”

  “You were sitting awfully close.”

  I put my head back on the table. “No. There was no moment.”

  “Because I’m pretty sure I saw a moment.”

  “Just stop. Please. I’m about to fall apart, here. This is all my fault.”

  “What is?”

  But I was spared from answering by a hand on my shoulder. “Roxane, hon,” Vega said, “mind stepping in here for a minute?”

  I joined them in the kitchen and leaned against the counter for support.

  “I filled Vega in,” Tom said, his voice low. “Sanko is on the way over, and we’re putting out an all-points on the Cadillac, and Vincent Pomp’s vehicle as well.”

  I nodded. This conversation should’ve happened days ago. I could’ve mitigated some of this by acknowledging I was in over my head sooner. Like, maybe, on Monday when I first realized how many people were involved and how much was at stake. By calling Tom yesterday, I’d tried. Sort of. If my mother was smart enough to try him at his desk in the case of an emergency, why didn’t I think of that? Some detective I was. I snatched a paper towel off the roll on the counter and dragged it across my face. I felt, and probably looked, like shit. But both Tom and Vega gave me the professional courtesy of not telling me so.

  Vega was saying, “Usually the types who run this scam, they’re strictly white-collar. Paper tigers, I call ’em. They can make a mess, but none of it stands up. This guy, though, he’s different. Unpredictable.”

  I covered my face as another round of tears sprang from my eyes. Just an hour or so earlier, Leila had said that Nate wasn’t smart enough to have any other scams. Maybe this was just more of the same, but my mother’s house was small and unassuming—nothing like Agnes’s. He hadn’t done this out of greed, but rather, specifically to hurt me. He’d probably followed my mother to the lawyer’s office and made up a story—a convincing one—to get to her. To me.

  Something else was needling at me, though. He’d been to my mother’s house yesterday. Yesterday afternoon, right after he talked to me. Before Leila ratted him out to Vincent Pomp. She’d said that she went to my apartment because it was the last place he’d think she’d go, that I was the last person he’d expect to help her. Why—because she knew about this?

  Because she was capable of far more than she let on?

  The icy panic that gripped me as I sat in traffic earlier wound its way around my heart again as I dialed Catherine’s number, listened to the flat tone as it rang five times before it kicked to an automated voicemail greeting.

  “I just left her there.”

  “What?”

  �
�Who?” Vega said, confused.

  “Catherine. With Leila. Oh my God.” I called her again. “Just because it was fine earlier doesn’t mean it’s fine now. I trusted her too much. I thought she was telling me everything but she wasn’t—no, she gave me just enough dirt on herself to make it believable, but—Tom, I need to go over there—”

  “First we—”

  “Please. Trust me on this.”

  He met my eyes for a long time, and finally said, “Right, of course. I trust you.”

  * * *

  We took Tom’s car, or the department’s car—a tan Impala with a bar of flashing lights behind the grille in front. He turned them on as we sped south on 71 and he used the radio in the car to talk to someone in Patrol, trying to get a unit to check on Catherine ASAP. But because her house was technically in Bexley, a tricky jurisdiction issue arose. It was a hard story to explain in the first place, and around Spring Street, he gave up. We were almost there anyway. I kept calling Catherine’s number, and she kept not answering. Nothing had been wrong earlier, but this was different. She’d had her phone when I left—she’d shown it to me before slipping it into the pocket of her robe. I pressed my forehead against the rain-dotted window and tried to breathe. But my insides hurt as I pictured her, long blond hair sweeping against the black satin that covered her thin shoulders. Catherine was no damsel in distress, but she was physically delicate, small. Leila was too—and she was injured—but she was also duplicitous and dangerous. I had been more worried about Vincent Pomp than I was about her, and that was my mistake. One of many. I unholstered my gun and checked the cylinder.

  Tom glanced at me but said nothing.

  The house looked just as I’d left it, lights glowing in the lower level and one upstairs bedroom, door closed, driveway empty. Tom parked in the street and turned to me. “Let me—” he started, but I was already out of the car, sprinting up the slippery grass to the front door.