The Tell-Tale Con

by Aimee Gilchrist

  She shut the door practically before we were out of it and left us standing in the courtyard. I shivered, but didn’t say anything until we were down the street. We opened the doors to the car, and Harrison immediately whipped off the sunglasses and replaced them with his regular pair.

  “What the hell was that?”

  “Which part?” I considered whether or not to bother changing into my normal clothes. Guess it depended on who we were going to see next. Honestly, this was getting a little boring and was starting to feel pointless. And, in the last case, kind of freaky.

  “That was the craziest place I’ve ever been. Good lord. Did you see the pile of stuffed taxidermy animals stacked in the corner? Again I say, what the hell?”

  “I didn’t see it. Frankly, I’m surprised you could see anything in those sunglasses. It was like midnight in there.”

  I decided not to bother changing and belted myself in, readying for the drive to the next place. He started the car.

  “I have very good night vision, but even if I didn’t, I don’t know how a person could sit in a room with a pile of dead animal heads and fail to notice.” He glared at me accusingly, like this was some kind of reflection on me on as a person.

  If only he knew how many other rational things he could easily judge me for.

  “There was a lot to take in.” I fiddled with the radio until we were back on the highway. “What do you think? I mean, if Vickie Bridges doesn’t leave the house, it isn’t her. That nurse, though her creep factor was about two thousand, was not the person who shot you. I got a good look at her, and that was not her.”

  He kept his eyes on the road, his mouth pressed into a thin line. “I’m not sure how much this is helping. I mean, I guess there are people we can cross off the list. But if we talked to the person who killed Nate, would we know it?”

  I thought that I might. But only because I was so good at seeing people for everything they loved and hated and secretly were on the inside.

  Clearly, I wasn’t Starsky, and Harrison was no Hutch.

  We were sucky detectives.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Rules of the Scam #8

  When you’re having trouble controlling the mark, silence can be golden…

  I tapped the paper he’d placed in the slot between the seats. “Do you have numbers for these people? Even the ones out of state?”

  “I don’t right now. But I can get them.”

  I nodded. “I think I’m going to try calling a few people. Maybe that will work better.”

  I didn’t think I could stand to question one more weirdo on Harrison’s behalf.

  “So you want to go home?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Who’s left on your local area list?”

  Harrison pulled out the paper and darted a glance between it and the road. “Ginger Naranjo. She was Dad’s last personal assistant. I know her, though. So it will have to be you alone.”

  Sigh.

  “Okay, I have to plan. What’s she like?”

  Harrison slid the paper back and drummed his fingers against the steering wheel. “How do you do that? Just…change? It’s so weird. I mean, it’s freaky and cool, but I don’t understand how you do it.”

  “It’s only acting.” I kept my voice low and steady, giving nothing away. “I noticed you’re pretty good at it too.” I didn’t like the idea of him judging me, though I shouldn’t have cared.

  He shrugged, defensively, as though our short conversational detour had been a violent argument instead. He returned to the original subject so quickly, it took me a moment to reconnect to what we were talking about. “I don’t know. Young, inquisitive, hot, very organized. She was so pissed at Dad when he fired her.”

  Young, hot and organized. Sounded like Harrison’s dream girl. “Why’d he fire her?”

  “I don’t know. She was good at her job, but she was always talking back. Most job descriptions don’t include “mouth off to the boss.”

  Yeah, bosses tended to hate that. But I had a hard time believing Van would fire a good assistant simply for being annoying. I had seen him in action, and he seemed to like yelling, but no action followed. Of course, on the other hand I had a buttload of people on a piece of paper whose lives he had ruined. So it might have depended on how he was feeling that day.

  I considered it for a long moment and then asked, “Can I call her, too? I have a plan, but I need to call. I don’t think it will work in person. Especially not with you around.”

  He smiled at me. “Now I’m dying to know.”

  “It isn’t a secret,” I laughed. “I’m going to tell her I’m your girlfriend and I think your dad is a creep and I heard she might know something. I think it would be better if I wasn’t face to face with her for this one though. At least, not without calling first. Since she isn’t an old man or a shut-in, she likely won’t be home anyway.”

  “That makes sense. You hungry?”

  I hadn’t been paying attention to my physical state, but now that he mentioned it, I was getting a little hungry. “I could eat.”

  When we passed through the East Mountains, I found myself looking for the road that Nate had lived on. I didn’t want to see it, but I couldn’t help watching for it anyway. Of course, I didn’t recognize it. I’d only been there once, and I’d been half asleep on the way up and stunned on the way back.

  Harrison pulled off on Tramway, the first major street in Albuquerque, and headed for a small, local Mexican place well known for their salsa. It was a little late for lunch and way too early for dinner, but the parking lot was still packed. He brought the paper with him, and while we waited for our food he called Ana and asked her to get the numbers for everyone on the list.

  He was lucky if she didn’t ask what he wanted with the numbers of all the people that Van had ever slighted. Actually, I kind of thought he was assuming a lot that she wasn’t the one trying to kill him. But that was for another day.

  By the time the waitress seated us, Harrison was hanging up. He passed the paper across the table with all the numbers scrawled next to the names. He had, possibly, the worst handwriting I had ever seen. “I hope that you want to be a doctor.”

  It took a moment for the comment to have a meaning for him. Then he smirked. “So does my mother. But my handwriting is better than it used to be. My mother made me practice every day. I have copied the contents of entire books before.”

  I couldn’t imagine my mom caring how bad my handwriting was, unless it stopped her from being able to cash a check. I ordered and then looked at Ginger Naranjo’s number before leaving the table. I found a quieter corner and dialed from memory. As I had expected, Ginger wasn’t home. Neither was the Skipper or Maryanne.

  After the beep, I put on my guise of hesitant and confused.

  “Um, hi. This is…I mean, my name is Talia. Jones. I was calling to talk to you about Harrison and Van Poe. Um…okay. Can you call me please?” I rattled off the number and hung up, satisfied. If her interest wasn’t piqued I didn’t know my inquisitive, organized and bitterly resentful librarian types.

  Back at the table I waited until the food came and was partially eaten before I touched on the difficult subject at hand. He needed to talk to Mark and Ana. This was an area in which I’d be of almost no use. At least in the talking department. My only contribution would be the ability to discern if they were lying when they answered Harrison’s questions. It wasn’t much, but it was what I could do.

  But first I had to make him ask the questions.

  “So when are we going to see Mark and Ana?” I didn’t relish seeing Ana again. She was formidable, for sure.

  He pushed his half-eaten burrito around his plate listlessly. “This afternoon, I guess. But maybe I should do it alone.”

  I sighed. Harrison didn’t want to see them as potential foes, and that made him weak. “Let me ask you something, Harrison. I know you don’t want to hear it, but what if one of them is in league with the person who shot you? Do you want
to be talking to them alone?”

  He stared at his plate for a long second.

  This was the moment I would understand what Harrison was made of. If he was a guy who valued his relationships over anything else, he would not take my threat seriously. He wouldn’t believe his friends could hurt him. If he was someone who valued logic and the brutal truth more, he would agree to my accompanying him with a cool eye towards getting the truth. If he was someone who believed in those he loved, but had a brain, he’d let me do my thing, but he wouldn’t be happy about it.

  He blew out a long, slow breath. “Fine, you can go. But I do all the talking, and don’t you dare say anything to let them know you suspect them. I don’t want to hurt their feelings.”

  He was picking door number three. A sensible choice. I was proud of him for it. Although, I still wasn’t certain enough of his rationality to tell him I had my money on Ana.

  We finished up lunch and headed home. I wanted to surprise both Ana and Mark at home, so Harrison and I agreed we’d meet around dinner time and see if we could catch them unawares. In the meantime, I had some things I needed to do.

  In my room, I dug around in the closet until I found an old corkboard and then raided the junk drawer in the kitchen until I found 3x5 note cards and some push pins. I also grabbed a badly spooled, lumpy ball of red yarn. Mom was with a client, and I didn’t want to bother her, so I didn’t go out into the other room for the highlighters I wanted. Instead, I took everything back and spread it out on my bed.

  I took each card and made note of all the people we had seen since the beginning. Including the woman who’d had her car stolen and the cops and anyone else who had crossed our path. I couldn’t remember most of their names, so I gave them my own monikers, ones I knew I would remember. Like Loud House Car Woman and Crazy Actress. So, even if no one else could tell, I would always know what I was talking about.

  On each card I wrote my perceptions about the person and how I felt they were connected to the case. Of course, I had to note why each of the people Harrison had indicated was unlikely to be guilty. Unfortunately. Then I wrote Harrison’s name on a card and then Van’s on the card above it and pinned them to the center of the board. Under Harrison I pinned a card for Nate with a few words on what I knew about him.

  When I had all the cards pinned to the board, I took the red yarn and started tracing the connections. Eventually, I decided red yarn alone wasn’t good enough, and I went back to the kitchen. Only there was no more yarn. So I ended up using blue painters tape and a long piece of abandoned elastic. I traced Harrison, Nate and Van, connecting each person back to anyone they had encountered. I found a spool of white thread in the bottom of my closet and used that to try to connect the suspects to each other as well as to Harrison, Van and Nate.

  When I finished, I stepped back and examined my board, which was a hot mess. I didn’t need to worry about someone guessing that I was on to them if they walked in on this thing. I could barely make heads or tails of it, and I knew what it was supposed to be. But it did illustrate that these people were way more connected than I had originally considered and that, though Nate was not related to Van, it was not impossible that they knew many of the same people.

  I didn’t know what all of it meant, but I was happy to see it because the order helped my brain to process, even if I didn’t yet have the answers. The phone rang, and I saw the number was Ginger Whatsherbutt’s. Van Poe’s fired assistant might be a good source of information, if not a good suspect.

  I cleared my mind and thought of someone who was nervous and fragile before answering. “Hello?”

  Ginger’s voice was strong, clear and decisive. There was no hesitation in her words, just crisp business. I knew immediately that this was not the person we were looking for. Not that I really thought it would be. Somehow we were missing the point with this list of people we had.

  “Hi, is this Talia?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Ginger Naranjo. You left a message on my phone earlier that you wanted to talk to me. About Harrison. And Van?”

  “Yeah. Um, the thing is, okay, Harrison is my boyfriend. It’s kind of getting serious. But…his dad…well, he’s kind of a creep. Then someone told me that you’d been his assistant and that he had fired you but, like, it wasn’t fair or something. I could ask the people who love him about the truth about Van, but would they give it to me? So I wanted to ask someone else who didn’t love him, you know. Like maybe I could balance the two and get the real picture. Because I’m scared of…well, I don’t want to be a part of a family if Van is kind of what I think he is.”

  Her audible sigh carried over the line. “Harrison is a nice kid,” she said noncommittally. That was true, but it did nothing for me. “Well, I guess he isn’t a kid anymore, is he? What is he, like, 18, 19, now?”

  I made a noise that could have meant anything since I wasn’t about to tell her we were only seventeen. Especially since I’d made it sound like we were on the cusp of getting married or something. “But what about Van? I mean, would I be sorry if I had to look at him across the table every Thanksgiving for the rest of my life?”

  “Look,” she paused, as if she were considering each word carefully. “Van is a piece of work. I took the job because he paid well and because I knew if I could handle him for six months I could write my own ticket in the world of personal assistants, on account of he’s such a pain to work for.”

  I waited patiently for her to continue, since people couldn’t stand it when there was silence and were almost always compelled to fill it with something. Often that something turned out to be just what I wanted to hear. Another trick I’d learned at my parents’ knee. When you had trouble controlling the mark, silence could make all the difference. She didn’t let me down.

  “Van fired me because I wouldn’t make him any more doctors’ appointments. He’d skip from one to another, in search of another prescription. The guy’s a junkie, which you probably already know.”

  “Yeah, I know.” My voice was soft, my sorrow for Harrison oddly sincere, and that made me very uncomfortable.

  “Anyway, he said I was difficult, and he fired me. But because he’s a total dicknugget doesn’t mean that you need to abandon all hope of a happy life with Harrison. Like I said, Harrison is a great guy. He’s…real. And smart. If you guys put your heads together and don’t let Van pull you into his games, you’ll do fine.”

  Dicknugget?

  She made the whole life sound so idyllic and poignant that she almost made me want to find some upstanding son of a jerk and make our way together in a cold world, with only each other and our dreams for company. Of course, that was a bunch of crap, but she made it sound good.

  “Well, okay.”

  She caught the hesitation in my voice. “But if I were you, I’d grab Harrison and move away. Don’t stay around Van. He’ll try to pull you under if he can.”

  She was not the person trying to kill Harrison. She liked him. I could hear the sincere admiration in her voice even over a phone line. “Thanks,” I said. And somehow I meant it, though I wasn’t sure exactly what I was thanking her for.

  Later, when I met Harrison, we decided to see Mark first, but I was pretty sure our reasons were different. Harrison no doubt wanted to avoid seeing the person he liked the most, and I wanted to dismiss Mark before seeing my most likely suspect. Either way, immediately after six, we loaded in Harrison’s car and headed for the Southwest Heights. It was the same direction we’d gone to get to the set of Van’s show, but we kept driving west.

  Harrison gestured out the window when we’d driven past the south valley and into a place where it looked like the subdivision gods had puked all over one side of the road and the other side was used for sheep grazing. “This whole area of town used to be nothing. Mesas and dirt.”

  I scanned the miles of cookie cutter stucco houses lining the roads. “Well, there’s plenty here now.”

  “Albuquerque is boxed in. Mountains and
reservations keep it from growing in almost any direction. Even out here they’re going to run out of space eventually. But this is one of the cheapest places to buy a house in town. It’s very popular with big families.”

  He sounded like he was writing a brochure. “Does Mark have a big family?”

  “Huge. He got divorced a few years ago but then he married this other woman and they started having two million kids. I think they’ve had one every year. Plus they adopted.”

  I had no idea what to make of that information, so I was reserving judgment. Liking children did not immediately release you from the possibility of also being a murderer. We turned into one of the nicer-looking subdivisions, one where there was at least a nod at trying to differentiate between houses. Harrison pulled to a stop on a street packed with cars. People were out, milling around, walking with toddlers in strollers, riding bikes and taking children to the park. I felt like I was in some kind of weird alternate reality. Downtown, not so much like this.

  I took a good look at Mark’s house before we knocked on the door. I hadn’t paid all that much attention when I’d met him the first time around because I’d had no reason to suspect him. That was before I knew about the accident and its true origin. I would pay better attention this time. But he was certainly a man who took care of his home. The exterior paint was flawless, the landscaping perfect, and pots of geraniums lined the walk. Nary a weed dared poke up through his xeriscaping.

  Harrison went to the door, and I followed behind, watching for any movement of the curtains inside or any sign of suspicious activity, but there was none. This was the kind of place where suspicious activity went to die.

  The door was opened promptly by a woman who was so short she would have looked about twelve years old from behind. From the front she was in her mid-thirties, with long, curly blond hair and dimples when she greeted Harrison. “Oh, hey Harrison. Come on in. I’ll get Mark.”