And too important to her career?
I said, “I get it. You need the journal back. Even if it means paying. Even if this payment is only the first of many.”
“Yes. Though now that we have our shortlist of suspects…wait a second. Whoever wrote this email knows Pauline’s house pretty well. Doesn’t that mean we can rule out Kristi and Carmen? Since they’re new to the choir this season?”
I had to think about that, review what I knew. “No,” I said, after a minute. “We can’t take them off the suspect list. They’re friends with Pauline. She’s the person who told them about the choir in the first place. The odds are good they’ve been inside her house before.”
“Okay, fine. We still have four suspects to watch on Saturday. But can we expose the blackmailer and get the journal back?”
“We can try.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Our plan to unmask the blackmailer at the sectional depended on four things. One, Anna and I had to seem as if we weren’t close. We couldn’t arrive or leave together, or sit next to each other, or talk to each other much. My role was to watch the suspects and catch one of them in the act of switching the envelopes. I could do that best if the blackmailer didn’t think that Anna had confided in her new best friend.
Two, I needed to be in a position where I could see who went into the bathroom. Anna had explained that it was located off the front hall. The door to it could be seen from one end of the living room where Pauline held the practices, but not from the other. So I had to find and take a seat near the right end of the room.
Three, I had to remember to bring a big water bottle and drink from it throughout the practice. So I’d have an excuse to make frequent bathroom trips.
And four, the miniature spy camera hidden in the tissue box that Anna placed on top of the toilet tank had to work.
That’s right. We put a miniature spy camera into play.
I thought of it as soon as I read the email about making the drop in the privacy of Pauline’s bathroom. There was a gadget store in my mall. I went in there sometimes to look for gifts for Nathan. He was into gadgets. And the store had a section devoted to spy stuff.
The tissue-box spy camera cost over three hundred dollars, but the salesman at the store told me they had a two-week-trial policy on their more expensive items. So I bought one and kept the receipt. Anna’s job was to set it up in the bathroom when she arrived at Pauline’s house. At the same time as she placed her envelope full of cash under the radiator cover.
It might get awkward if Pauline went into the room during the practice and wondered where the new bathroom accessory had come from. But we figured hostesses don’t have time to use the bathroom when they’re entertaining. Or are distracted if they do.
Anna arrived twelve minutes before the sectional start time to do her drop and to set up the camera. I got to Pauline’s house—a semi-detached two-story near the church— three minutes before one o’clock. Pregnant was on the front porch when I drove up. And I could see Carmen and Tall Guy coming down the sidewalk half a block away.
The first few minutes after I walked into the house were hectic. There was a lot of Hi, how are you? going on, and That looks delicious! The last part being about the food we’d been instructed to bring. When I’d broken through the crowd and placed the lemon loaf I’d purchased on the dining table, I looked around for Anna. She was on the other side of the room, helping Pauline set up chairs. She didn’t glance my way, but she gave the signal we’d agreed upon—she scratched her elbow. So far, so good.
I asked Pauline where the bathroom was, as if I didn’t already know, and went inside.
All was in order. The envelope of cash was still under the rad cover—I checked. The tissue box was on top of the toilet tank, pointing its secret camera at the rad, ready to be tripped by motion.
As per plan, Anna had placed a sweater on the chair that offered the best view of the bathroom door. When I sidled over there, she picked up the sweater and moved across the room to another seat.
I sat, tried to breathe slowly and took out my music binder. I counted heads without moving my lips. We were all present, sixteen of us, including the four suspects. I noted their positions. And that none of them looked nervous or sweaty.
The accompanist set up her keyboard, and the practice began.
The sectional was scheduled for two hours, with a fifteen-minute break in the middle. I didn’t think the bathroom would get used much in the first hour, but I kept an eye on it anyway. By 1:50 pm, three people had visited it—two from our non-suspect list, and me. I’d decided in advance that it would look too obvious—and weird—if I went into the bathroom and checked the hiding spot after every single visitor. That’s what the camera was for. But I couldn’t resist checking that one time. I didn’t need to—the money was still there.
When the break was announced, I stayed put. Smokers, including Oscar and Brandon, went outside. Hungry people swarmed the food table. Anna went to help Pauline in the kitchen, and—aha!—our suspect Carmen went to the bathroom. Followed by two other non-suspects. After the second, I took a big gulp of water from my bottle and took up a waiting position in the narrow hallway. When Old Hippie came out, I smiled at her, slipped inside and locked the door.
I waved at the tissue box, went straight for the rad cover and lifted it up. The envelope inside looked an awful lot like Anna’s envelope. In fact, it was Anna’s envelope, untouched, with the money still in it.
So Carmen was in the clear. I swore and replaced the rad cover. The blackmailer had to be Oscar, Brandon or Kristi. Unless our reasoning sucked, and it was someone else.
I flushed the toilet. I would not pee on camera, even if all the camera would film was my upper back. I washed and dried my hands, opened the door and came face-to-face with Brandon standing in the hall, his man-purse slung over his shoulder. As usual, he smelled like cigarettes.
“Hey,” he said and stepped past me, went inside, closed the door.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket. It was 2:08 pm. I walked backward to my chair, sat down, and without taking my eyes off the bathroom door, wrote the time on the edge of my sheet music. And waited.
At the dining table, Pauline said to Green Hair, “So it seems there’s a pickpocket in the choir, have you heard?”
I pricked up my ears but kept my eyes focused on the bathroom door.
Green Hair said, “No! Really? Someone’s stealing?”
“Apparently. Several people noticed small amounts of cash missing from their wallets after practice. Ten dollars here, twenty there. No credit cards, just bills. No one thought much of it until word got out several people had misplaced money.”
“Hey, that happened to me,” Pregnant said. “I was twenty dollars short one night but I thought I must have spent it. Are you telling me someone in the choir stole it?”
“Crooks are everywhere,” Oscar said. Because it took one to know one?
“That’s awful,” Green Hair said. “Who would do that?”
“Someone desperate,” Pauline said.
I set back my mental dvd to break time at the first choir practice I’d attended, and saw it all. Kristi and Carmen leaving their pew to go sign up for the solo auditions. Me, standing up, looking around the church. Anna in the corner, writing in her journal.
Brandon moving around in the pew behind me. Acting awkward when I spoke to him. Right after he must have helped himself to money from Pregnant’s purse.
Or had Kristi stolen it? She’d had access too. So had Oscar.
By the time Brandon came out of the bathroom at 2:13 pm, the practice had resumed. He didn’t look guilty when he returned to his seat. Or no more than usual. But it killed me to wait the ten minutes I thought were long enough to make my next visit to the bathroom look innocent.
After nine minutes, I muttered, “I’ve drunk too much water today,” ran down to the bathroom, nipped inside. I locked the door, put down my bag, held my breath and lifted the rad cover.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I removed the notebook from the envelope, flipped it open, and made sure it was Anna’s original one. Sure enough, I found her last entry, the word SPICIER. I placed the notebook in my bag. We’d agreed beforehand that whoever got to it first should take it for safekeeping. I stuffed the tissue-box camera in my bag too.
When I came out, I had a sudden fear that Brandon might have left while I was inside, and taken the money with him. But he was in his chair, singing “Sunny Days.” I’d sunny day him. I pulled a hair clip out of my bag and put my hair up—my signal to Anna that I had the notebook. Smooth operator that she was, she had no reaction other than to scratch her elbow again.
I joined in singing, and somehow got through the next forty minutes. As soon as the practice ended, I jumped up from my chair and waylaid Brandon. “Can I talk to you privately?” I said. “Outside. You can smoke.”
The panicked look in his eyes told me he knew he was nailed. But his voice was calm. “Sure,” he said. He stood up, pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his bag and held it out to me. “Want one?”
I said no thanks and led him out to Pauline’s back garden. I picked a spot to stand in that was a good twelve feet away from the door, next to some bushes. I took a deep breath and used my manager voice. Like he was a shoplifter I’d caught in my store.
“I know what you did. So unless you want to be reported to the police, arrested and charged with extortion, I suggest you give me back the cash. Right now.”
He didn’t say anything for maybe thirty seconds. He just stood and took a drag on his cigarette, and looked past my head at the yard next door.
“Hello?” I said.
“What’s it to you anyway?”
“What?”
“Are you Anna’s agent or something? Her manager? Her personal assistant?”
“I’m her friend. Are you going to give me back the cash or not?”
“How do I know you’re not going to run off with it?”
“She’s waiting for me down the street.”
“So you say.”
“You want me to get her back here?” I pulled out my phone. “I’ll text her right now and tell her you want to talk to her. Explain why you blackmailed her.”
“Fuck it.” He reached inside his bag, pulled out the envelope, handed it over. “Here. Happy now?”
My hands were shaking a little. I opened it, checked inside. It looked like the cash was all there. “Yes, I am. Thank you.” I tucked the envelope into my bag. “So, why did you do it?”
He exhaled a long plume of smoke. “Because I’m broke. I got laid off from my shit job and I can’t make my rent and I don’t want to move back in with my parents. Not after they supported me all through graduate school. I knew Anna was making big bucks on television. I figured she could afford to spread some wealth around.”
“This is how you justify blackmailing someone who’s been nice to you?”
“Look. I thought I could make some quick cash easily if I wasn’t too greedy. If I didn’t ask for too much. I gambled and lost, that’s all.” He dropped his cigarette on the ground and stepped on it. “What’s crazy is that I didn’t even steal the goddamned journal. I found it in my bag when I got home from practice that night. Anna must have slipped it in there by mistake when she was sitting next to me. We both had black canvas bags on the floor and they look pretty much the same.”
“Come on.”
“I’m telling the truth. All that ruckus at practice about a missing notebook. Then I get home, unpack my bag, and there it is. After she’d said how important it was, I had to read it.” He pulled out another cigarette and lit it. “It took me a while to see why she cared so much. Most of the entries were boring as shit. When I finally came to the part about her affair with that anchorman, I was disappointed. I thought there’d be something juicier. Like racist rants or kinky sex stories. Though there was enough dirt to make her pay up.”
I looked at his shifty eyes and down-turned mouth. So this was where his higher education had taken him. “You’ll quit the choir now, of course.”
“Do I have to?”
“I think so. Unless you want me to report you for stealing cash from women’s purses at practice.”
“Christ, you caught me doing that too?”
“Yes, I did.”
He shook his head. “You can hardly blame me for helping myself when all those women left their bags around, open. The cash was practically falling out of their wallets. And they could spare twenty or forty bucks, all of them. That’s what they spend on coffee in a week. But how’d you know I was the culprit? What are you, an undercover cop? A criminology major?”
“I have a videographic memory.”
“A what?”
“I saw you lifting money from a purse once. And I’m not a cop. I’m the manager of a retail store.”
“Yeah?” He looked me in the eye for the first time. “Which one? I could use a new shit job. Any chance you’re hiring?”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
After I told Brandon I wouldn’t hire him, no way, I left Pauline’s and walked to the car. I really was supposed to meet Anna down the street, but I took a roundabout route to get there. And on the way, I pulled over, opened the journal and skimmed it.
Like you wouldn’t have?
I had to agree with Brandon. Most of the thoughts and ideas Anna had recorded in the notebook were dull. And the details she’d written down about her private meetings with Tom Reynolds were more embarrassing than dirty. I won’t quote her. I’ll just say that she had pet names for some of his body parts. And for hers. And the words big and little might have been parts of those pet names.
Whatever. The most damaging information in the journal was not what Anna had written about the affair. It was that the journal provided proof of it. Proof that was worthless to Brandon, now that I could turn him in for attempted blackmail and theft anytime.
But could knowledge of the affair be worth something to me?
I put that question aside to ponder later, and drove off to meet Anna. I handed over the journal and the cash, and gave her a brief report on my talk with Brandon. She hugged me, and cried a little, and said I was a genius. I wasn’t, but it was good of her to say.
“I want to take you out for a nice dinner,” she said. “To thank you.”
I said sure, let’s do that, and we made a date to have dinner at Sterling the following Tuesday, before choir practice.
On the Monday, I returned the tissue-box camera as defective—it hadn’t taped a thing, stupid machine. And I told Joanne and Nathan an edited version of how The Mystery of the Missing Notebook had gone down. I said that this sketchy guy Brandon had picked it up by mistake and I’d figured that out. And Anna was taking me out to dinner to thank me for my help.
“That’s generous of her,” Joanne said and started to sing “I Gotta Feeling.” The line about how good my night was going to be. I cut her off. “It’s a dinner out, that’s all. No big deal.”
“Maybe Anna could shoot a segment of her show at Sterling,” Nathan said. “The angle could be our new menu that features local ingredients and wines. Can you find a way to suggest it to her?” Oh, Nathan.
On the night of the thank-you dinner, Nathan came by our table. He looked good in his work clothes: black dress pants, black shirt, skinny silver tie. He kissed me hello on the cheek, introduced himself to Anna and presented us with glasses of champagne. On the house.
Anna said, “Why, thank you! And champagne is perfect for the occasion, because I heard some more good news today. Noontime has been picked up for national distribution! Isn’t that exciting? In fact, we’ve got so much to celebrate—let’s order a bottle of champagne. Can you arrange that, Nathan?”
He said he’d be happy to, and I could almost see the dollar signs in his eyes when he walked away.
Anna said, “He’s cute. And I can tell he really likes you.”
“He
’s a solid guy. Sweet. And supportive. When I had to film that video audition for work? He did the shooting and the editing and everything. He did an ace job too.”
“I’d love to see your video sometime.”
“Really? Because I uploaded it to my Facebook profile. I could show it to you right now.”
“Oh yes, show me,” she said. And if she was faking interest, she faked it well.
I accessed Facebook on my phone and played it for her. The first minute of it anyway. I didn’t want to bore her with the whole thing.
“You look wonderful!” she said. “That outfit is so flattering. And the makeup. You sound good too, from what I can hear. Send me the link, will you? So I can see the rest?”
“Thanks, I will.” I put down my phone, picked up the menu. Looked at it like I hadn’t already decided what to have. “So, Noontime is going national, huh? You must be happy.”
“So happy.” Quietly, she said, “What with that news and getting the journal back, I’ve had a fantastic week. And when I think about how depressed I was last Wednesday at this time! What a difference a few days make.” She lifted her glass. “To friends who come through in a crunch.”
I clinked glasses with her and sipped the champagne.
“Everything on the menu sounds delicious,” she said. “I’m trying to decide between the duck and the scallops for the main course. What do you think?”
We talked about the menu. The waiter came over with a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket. We finished our first glasses and watched him open it. He poured us each a second glass. We ordered our food. And during all that, I thought about the gap between Anna and me. About how we must look sitting together at the table—the tv star and the nobody. About how with my lack of education and experience, I had little chance of making it to even her level of fame and success. Unless, of course, I decided to do a little blackmailing of my own.
Think about it. I had the means—I knew about the affair. I had a motive: not money, but the desire for a new job, a new future. In television, working with her, on the national version of Noontime. And when it came to opportunity, I could speak up right there, at the dinner table.
And Everything Nice Page 5
