Pretty as a Picture

by Elizabeth Little

  For the first time since she entered the room, Valentina removes her Juul from her lips. “Not Chris,” she says.

  “No,” Anjali says, “The 2nd AD.”

  “Phil?”

  “The first 2nd AD.”

  Gavin drops his face into his hands. “Ryan,” he mutters. “She’s talking about Ryan. Fuck. Even I know that.”

  Nick taps his pen against his notepad, looking distinctly unimpressed. “You got a last name for this guy?”

  “Kassowitz,” Anjali says. “He was mostly in charge of getting the actors where they needed to go. He was also responsible for communicating with the background players. The extras, I mean. But it wasn’t a good fit, and a couple of weeks ago we had to let him go. He was pissed; it got ugly. I had to have him removed from the island.”

  “Problems?” Nick asks. “Could you be a little more specific than that?”

  Anjali chews on her lip and glances sidelong at Tony. “Well—he kind of assaulted an extra.”

  Tony leans forward. “You didn’t tell me about this.”

  Anjali nods, a pained expression on her face. “We’ve been having things go wrong on set ever since he left—it could be a coincidence, but I didn’t want to take the chance. That’s why I brought Isaiah and his team on board.”

  Nick looks at Isaiah. “You have a team?”

  “I run a small private security firm,” Isaiah says. “I have five employees here on the island with me.”

  Nick raises an eyebrow. “This probably isn’t going to help your Yelp rating, you know.”

  “Murder wasn’t exactly part of our brief.”

  “Indeed.” Nick makes a note. “Do you happen to know the current whereabouts of Mr. Kassowitz?”

  “As of yesterday at noon, he was with his mother outside Philadelphia.”

  “Do you consider him a threat?”

  “I consider everyone a threat.”

  Nick blinks a few times. “I’ll have my guys look into it. Is there anyone else we should know about?”

  Anjali laughs, and it almost sounds genuine. “I mean, Tony’s pissed off so many people, they probably have their own Facebook page.”

  Tony grimaces. “Thank you for that, Anjali.”

  “Has there been anyone else who’s seemed at all suspicious?” Nick presses. “Anyone unfamiliar?”

  Anjali shakes her head. “Not that I can think of.”

  “None? Not anyone?” Nick’s gaze goes sharp. “Not even Billy Lyle?”

  “Absolutely not,” she says.

  “So you’ve never seen him in or around the hotel?” Nick asks.

  Anjali’s jaw tightens. “Not as far as I am aware.”

  “Or on set?”

  “Not that I can recall.”

  “But surely you’ve seen him.”

  Gavin slams his hand on the table. “For fuck’s sake,” he says. “Billy had nothing to do with this.”

  Nick turns to Gavin for the first time. The corner of his mouth twitches down, a glimmer of distaste. “And how do you know that?”

  “Because he was with me. I was interviewing him. For research.”

  “Well, that’s fascinating news.” Nick turns to a new page in his notebook. “Were you on his boat?”

  “No. We met—” Gavin’s mouth goes soft all of a sudden, a divot forming in the middle of his chin. “We met down on the beach.”

  Nick nods. “And you were together until what time?”

  Gavin sucks his lower lip between his teeth. “Well, I’m not exactly sure . . .”

  “Why don’t I rephrase that: Were you still with him at the time the body was found?”

  Gavin looks down at his hands. “No.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  A uniformed officer pushes through the door. “Nick, you’ve got to see this.”

  Nick tosses his notebook aside and shoves a hand through his hair. “Yeah, what is it?”

  The officer comes around the conference table and hands him a small plastic evidence bag. I’m close enough that I can see what’s inside: Caitlyn’s school photo. The same one Billy showed us earlier today.

  Nick lets out a low whistle. “Where did you find this?”

  “On his boat,” the officer says. “No sign of him, though.”

  Nick looks over at Anjali. “I want all your people in their rooms, now. We need to start searching this hotel. This guy is still out there, and I’m not letting him get away with it again.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  Why are you doing this again?”

  “They were rolled the wrong way.”

  “They look the same as your other pants.”

  “They look nothing like my other pants.”

  “Then why didn’t you fix them before?”

  “So I could prove someone had been in here!”

  It’s possible that right now any conversation would seem this absurd, this outlandish, this malapropos, the corporate Twitter feed that forgot to pause its automated queue after a national tragedy.

  Still, I can’t quite believe I’m talking about this. Folding really does feel like a bridge too far.

  They held us in the conference room for another hour once the police started searching the grounds. When they told us that our rooms, at least, were clear and that we were dismissed for the night, Isaiah announced he was coming with me to mine.

  “Out of an abundance of caution,” he said.

  In a truly shocking turn of events, Anjali agreed with him.

  “You’re the only eyewitness,” she said, dimly. “You’ve seen enough movies to know how this goes.”

  Outrageous, I thought then.

  Ridiculous, I think now.

  You might imagine that seeing a corpse up close would make a person fear death in a real, immediate way—and three hours ago, I would have said that, too—but somehow, it’s had the opposite effect on me. This has been the most dramatic evening of my life, and yet somehow I was still just incidental to it all. Death now seems even more like something that only happens to other people.

  I guess that’s why I still care about folding.

  “Look,” I say to Isaiah, pulling out my spare pair of jeans to show him. “First I fold my pants in half longways, and then I roll them from the waist down.”

  “I’m still not seeing the problem.”

  I point to the offending pair. “I always face the right side of the pants out. On these, the left side is out.”

  “Why do you roll them that way?”

  “Because I’m right handed.”

  “What does that have to do with your pants?”

  “I don’t know, that’s just how I like them! And if they’re not, I can feel it. I know they’re wrong. It’s like a—” I wave a hand in the vicinity of my neck “—it’s like a tightness, you know? A silent alarm sort of thing? Like when you’re in the airport and you see an unattended bag, and, on one hand, ‘see something, say something,’ right? But what if you do say something and Homeland Security takes the bag, but it turns out to belong to some nice old lady who had to run to the bathroom because she has bladder control issues, and she was going to be right back, really, it was just going to take a second, but now she’s being interrogated by the FBI and oh, look, you’ve ruined her trip—and, by the way, she has hypertension. So all the stress gives her a stroke and she dies and now she’ll never get to hold her grandchild.” I take a breath. “Or it really is a bomb, but you don’t say anything because you’re a maladjusted weirdo who worries too much about imaginary grandmothers, and as a result a hundred fifty people die, horribly. You’re on all the national news, disgraced, forever.”

  Isaiah takes this in. “You think about all that when you look at a pair of pants?”

  “I think about all that all the time,” I say, rerolling the
pants and tucking them back into my suitcase.

  I lower myself into the chair with a grimace. I should have asked the doctor to take a look at my knees, but my jeans don’t pull up past my calves, so I would have had to take them off, and I simply didn’t have it in me. The blood has dried now, and I can tell the scabs will tear away when I change for bed.

  Maybe I’ll sleep in my clothes.

  Maybe I’ll sleep in my clothes for the rest of my life.

  I smother a yawn with the back of my hand. “Why are we talking about this again?” I ask.

  “Because I brought your suitcase up here myself. If someone’s searched your suitcase, someone’s been in your room.”

  “Oh. You’re saying a murderer might have a key to my room.” I give the thought a moment to sink in—but it doesn’t. It floats instead on the surface of my thoughts, stubborn and undeniable, like that island of garbage in the Indian Ocean. A slow-moving indictment of all the ways we’ve gone so horribly wrong.

  I wonder idly if my panic will be visible from space, too.

  “Should I change rooms?” I ask, faintly.

  Isaiah considers this. “You could.”

  “I’m also happy to change hotels.”

  “There’s another option,” he says, crossing to the door. “Because he can’t come in while you’re here—not through this door, anyway. Even if he has a key, he won’t be able to get through this.”

  He turns the deadbolt and swings the security latch into position.

  “I could also be convinced to leave the state,” I point out.

  “But let’s say he does get in.” He walks past me and goes over to the window. “I’ll make sure he won’t get very far.”

  He closes the curtains and flops down on the loveseat, sending two of the needlepoint pillows flying.

  “Absolutely not,” I say.

  He stretches his arms out along the back of the loveseat. His fingers drape over the sides.

  “Anjali’s right,” he says. “You need protection.”

  “Then you have to find another way to do that, because you’re not keeping watch while I sleep. That’s not a plan. That’s a bad romantic comedy.”

  He pretends to think about this. “Who would they cast as me, do you think?”

  “Depends on the budget. Probably Terry Crews. Stop distracting me. Why can’t you post someone outside the door?”

  “What if he doesn’t come in through the door?”

  “Who, Terry Crews?”

  “The killer.”

  I suck in a breath. “Do we really have to call him that?”

  He gives me a steady look. “It’s what he is.”

  I press the heel of my hand against my forehead and let out a growl of frustration. How am I supposed to put this in a way that doesn’t make me sound like a jerk? On a bad day, what I need—all I need—is to be left alone. My parents understood this. Amy understood this. Even my college housing office understood this. My freshman year I was one of eight students in the whole class to be given my own tiny room—what everyone called a “psycho single,” and wasn’t that a good joke to roll around in my mouth at night while I was lying between cool cotton sheets, blackout curtains drawn, white noise machine set to “Rainforest Harmony.”

  I don’t care if I’m in literal mortal peril. I need a moment to myself. I can only bear to be around others if I know the situation’s temporary.

  Isaiah’s staring at something near my hip. I look down. My right hand is twisting furiously at my belt loop. I untangle my fingers and curl my arm around my stomach instead.

  “I make you uncomfortable,” he says after a moment.

  “Everyone makes me uncomfortable.”

  I sit down on the bed and try not to look like I’m upset. I’m being managed. And I hate being managed. Because it means not only that I’m being belligerent and stubborn and unpleasant, but also that I’m going about it in such a sad, pathetic manner that people feel bad for me. I can’t even lash out like a regular person.

  I close my eyes and try to come up with a good get-out-of-jail-free phrase for when you’ve been an asshole but also really meant what you said.

  I crack open an eyelid. “It’s been a long day.”

  Isaiah laughs like he knows exactly how I got to that sentence, and there’s no stopping my scowl now.

  “Tomorrow will be even longer,” he says. “Trust me.”

  “Because the shock will wear off, you mean? Is that when all this will finally start feeling real?”

  “Oh, no, that’s months and months away. I just meant we have a lot to do if we’re going to catch Liza’s killer.”

  My eyes fly all the way open. “What?”

  His smile is faint. “You don’t think I’m going to leave this investigation in the hands of Percy Weasley down there, do you? I don’t have three and a half stars on Yelp for nothing, Marissa.”

  “But—me?”

  “Yeah, you’re going to be my sidekick. It’ll be a—what do you guys call it? A ‘two-hander’?”

  “I really wish you would stop trying to distract me with inappropriate humor.”

  He leans down until his eyes are level with mine. “I’m serious. I want you to help me track this guy down.”

  “No,” I say.

  He goes on as if he didn’t hear me. “I have my team, but they don’t know much about movies.”

  “I’ve been here a day. Ask Tony or Anjali instead.”

  He shakes his head. “I’d rather not involve them until I absolutely have to.”

  It takes a moment for the implication to settle in. Then my mouth rounds into an O. “You think they might have had something to do with it?”

  “I see no reason to rule them out.”

  “No loyalty whatsoever, huh? No wonder Anjali hates you.”

  “Hold on, I wouldn’t say she hates me—”

  “So she does want to sleep with you?”

  Isaiah laughs. “Anjali? And me?”

  “What? There was banter.”

  “That wasn’t banter. That was two smart-asses talking over each other. Unless I’m very much mistaken, Anjali’s interests lie elsewhere.”

  My lip curls. “You mean Tony?”

  “No—Valentina.”

  “There you go. That’s why I’m the wrong person for this. I can’t read people, not in real life. And apparently I have some extremely heteronormative assumptions to work through.”

  Isaiah reaches out, the tips of his fingers grazing my injured arm. “Marissa, you’re the only person I’m certain had nothing to do with this.”

  “I can think of wilder twists,” I say. “Ever seen Angel Heart?”

  His expression softens. “Let me put it this way,” he says. “You’re all I’ve got.”

  I sneak a glance at his face, and when I catch the shape of his lips, I stifle a groan. I can read the intention there.

  “No,” I say. “Don’t do it.”

  He draws a breath.

  “Don’t say it.”

  He holds out his hands.

  I clamp my palms over my ears.

  “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You’re my only hope.”

  I grab a pillow and throw it at his head. “No more jokes. I mean it. I know that you’ve probably seen hundreds of dead bodies and that this is a coping mechanism—and maybe it’s a good coping mechanism, I don’t know, who am I to say. But I don’t like it, okay? I’ve spent my whole life training myself to laugh at other people’s jokes so they wouldn’t realize I can’t keep up with a conversation, and it’s too late to change that now, even though I really, really, really don’t feel like making myself laugh at the moment. It feels wrong. I feel wrong. Liza is dead. So quit asking it of me.”

  He draws back. “You’re right. Force of habit.”

  I b
link back an appalling wetness in my eyes. “I’ll help you, okay? Obviously I’ll help you. But I’m not sure what good it will do. I’m not exactly a natural detective.”

  He shrugs. “You’re a movie lover. I’m sure you can come up with a role model or two.”

  I snort. “I’m no Nora Charles.”

  He squints at my face and tilts his head to the side. “No—I was thinking Marge Gunderson.”

  This shocks an honest laugh out of me, but I clamp my mouth shut almost immediately because, God, I was so obviously surprised, and what if he thinks I think he doesn’t know much about movies, that I’m one of those people who’s always like, well, if you know so much about cinema, let’s see you spell Koyaanisqatsi without googling it, that I’m a snob, an officious gatekeeper, that I think Fargo is some kind of cult movie when in fact it’s a pretty mainstream hit, when really the truth is I just can’t quite believe someone’s teasing me and not trying to be mean about it.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The compromise we hash out is this: Isaiah gets Wade to give him the key to the adjoining room, and I agree to leave the connecting door ajar. Even though the sight of an open door gnaws at me, I can’t justify putting up a fight about something so small. It’s a terrible line for an obituary.

  Marissa Dahl, 36, died this week, murdered because she insisted on closing a door.

  I’ll just have to settle for closing the bathroom door an extra time or two.

  I turn on the taps in the shower and wait for the water to get hot. Never have I been more grateful for my routine than I am tonight. One of my high school English teachers recommended we memorize poetry in case we ever find ourselves locked in a dungeon and needed something to keep ourselves sane, and though I suspect her tongue was firmly in her cheek—it can’t have been easy to teach the Romantics to a bunch of engineering faculty brats—at the time I took it quite literally. To this day, a single line of Keats is enough to make me break into a cold sweat and map out a path to the nearest exit.

  But now—now I get it. Because the only thing tethering me to the earth is the familiar rhythm my body’s moving through all on its own, no matter how unfamiliar the accompanying thoughts may be: