Chapter 10. If Your World Tilts Sideways, Do You Fall Off?
If Your World Tilts Sideways, Do You Fall Off?
“What information about me?” I ask Inspector Tucci.
“I do not know yet. My source did not want to say too much.”
“Your source.”
“Yes.”
“Who is it?”
“That does not matter.”
This man is infuriating. “Of course it matters. How can I know if what you’re saying is trustworthy if I don’t know where it’s coming from?”
He stands up straighter. “It is coming from me.”
“You can understand why that doesn’t give me much comfort.”
“You have always misunderstood me, Ms. Dash. I am not your enemy.”
“You did want to put me in jail.”
“And yet here you are.” He raises his hand to his chin. “I am not the one who took up with criminals. Who continues to cavort with them.”
“‘Cavort’? Seriously?” I take in a deep breath. There’s no point in arguing with Inspector Tucci. And it’s distracting me from the point of this conversation. “Why would the dead man want information about me?”
“His name was Brian.”
I see a flash of his face. He looked young, innocent, and very dead. “Why would Brian want information about me?”
“I believe that he was looking for information to blackmail guests with.”
“Based on?”
“He would not have been killed for some petty thefts.”
“He was killed?”
Even though I was sure this was the case, it still has the capacity to take me by surprise.
Murder is like that. You never expect it.46
“I am fairly certain,” Inspector Tucci says. “For instance … the resort—it did not even inform the police of the thefts.”
“That’s interesting, though there could’ve been other reasons for that.”
“Such as?”
“Maybe they didn’t want to destroy his life.”
Inspector Tucci scratches his chin. “That is possible, I suppose. But it does not change the fact that he was searching for information.”
I think it through, but it doesn’t add up. “What information could he find out about me in the computer system? I hadn’t even registered yet. And Harper made the room reservation, or the conference did. It was public information that I was coming to the resort.”
“Your room assignment, for one.”
That stops me for a second. “But that wouldn’t be hard to figure out once I got here. All he’d have to do was ask around or follow me, if it came to that.”
“What if he wanted access to your room before you arrived?”
“Why?”
“To plant a listening device.”
My blood runs cold. Is there anything more violating than knowing someone’s listening when you think you’re alone? Safe?
Okay, sure, there are worse things, but you get what I mean.
“Is this all speculation, or did your source tell you this, too, Tucci?”
“It is basic deductive reasoning.”
“So this man, Brian, was trying to get information on me to blackmail me? About what?”
“You tell me.”
“That can’t be it. Maybe some of the other guests, the ones before me. But if he wanted access to my room, it was for some other reason.”
Inspector Tucci purses his lips. “To keep tabs on you, perhaps. To know your comings and goings.”
“But if that’s the case, then why kill him? I’m assuming you’re saying he was working with someone else.”
“Yes, that must be true.”
“Someone who killed him in my room to keep him from revealing something.”
“Yes.”
“Before I even got here.”
“Yes.”
“Are you hearing yourself?” I say. “That doesn’t track at all.”
“If you will just consider…”
I put up my hand to stop him. “No, Tucci. I know the impulse to make it seem like there’s something nefarious going on when weird things happen.
Believe me. But sometimes people do things we can’t understand.
It doesn’t mean they’re trying to harm someone else.
Whatever he was doing, he was caught. Maybe he felt trapped.
Maybe he didn’t believe they wouldn’t go to the police.
So, he took the only way out he could think of.
Perhaps he wanted to cause embarrassment or damage to the hotel.
But it doesn’t have anything to do with me. ”
Inspector Tucci considers me calmly. “Are you so sure of that, Ms. Dash?”
I’m not. I’m not sure at all. But expressing opinions with extreme confidence has worked for men for centuries, so I’m giving it a try.
How’m I doing?
I turn to walk away.
“Where are you going?”
“It’s dinnertime. I’m hungry.”
“I will accompany you.”
“I’m fine.”
I start to leave again, but his voice catches up to me.
“There is one more thing, Ms. Dash. His gun.”
I stop, my toes digging into the sand. “What about it?”
“Where did he get it?”
“People have guns.”
“No, Ms. Dash. Not in the Bahamas, they don’t. It is against the law to own any kind of firearm here.”
I turn around slowly. “But there must still be guns.”
“I’m sure there are. But this is not America, where you can buy a gun at a—how do you call it?—a Wal-Mart. That fact alone should have you questioning what you think you know.”
“I…”
“And it is not the first time that someone has had an unaccounted-for gun in your life.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Mr. Charles, in Italy. Do you remember? Where did it come from?”
I stare at him, wishing I could see inside the cogs of his brain. Is he playing with me or trying to help me? I can’t tell the difference.
“Didn’t Guy tell you?”
“I was prevented from interrogating him.”
This is news to me. “Why is this the first I’m hearing about this?”
“I cannot answer that, Ms. Dash. But I would warn you. He has some level of protection that I only see in certain circles. Do you know what I mean?”
“You mean the Mafia.”
“Precisely.”
“But there’s no Mafia in the Bahamas.”
He blinks at me with a slow smile that makes that tingle start at the back of my brain again. “Are you so certain of that, too?”
I stumble away from Tucci and back to the resort.
It seems deserted, the lights inside the pool highlighting the tranquil water, a bartender wiping down the counter without any customers. The pink snack truck is boarded up, and it occurs to me that this entire place has been rented out for the conference.
So I know where everyone is. Or at least, where they should be.
And yet still, I hesitate. Because I’ve felt this way before.
Standing outside a door I know will change my life if I walk through. That’s how I feel right now. Like I’m in a Sliding Doors version of my life.
I could turn and leave and then I’d have one version. Or I can go where I’m expected and another will unfold. That’s true for everyone’s life. It’s not predetermined. Every step is a choice. Only some choices are harder to make than others.
And if I walk away, where am I going to go?
“What are you doing outside here all by yourself?”
I jump-scare for the second time tonight. When I get home, I’m having a thorough cardiac assessment.
A man with a dark face and a crisp blue shirt steps out of the shadows.
“Officer Rolle! I wasn’t expecting you.”
“While I have been looking for you.”
“You have? Why?”
“We have the results of the pathology reports and I wanted to let you know the results.”
“So soon? Guy said it would be forty-eight hours.”
“I’m afraid Mr. Charles doesn’t know our local procedures.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Are you not curious about the results?”
“It wasn’t suicide?”
He looks grim. “It was not.”
“How do they know?”
“The angle of the wound, for one. It would be extremely unlikely for someone to shoot themselves at that angle. And then there is the fact that he is left-handed and the shot is to his right temple.”
“No way.”
“Why are you so surprised?”
“Sorry, it’s just … isn’t that how fake suicides get discovered all the time in movies?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Seems like a basic thing to get right.”
His mouth turns grim. “Criminals often make mistakes, I’ve found. Which is how we catch them.”
“Not through detective work?”
“That is important. But usually, the perpetrator of a crime is obvious.”
“Do you have a lot of experience in murder?”
“We have over a hundred murders each year. And we are a small island, a small population. So I have a lot of experience, yes.”
And yet you were willing to immediately believe it was suicide.
“What was that?”
Oh, was that out loud? I do that sometimes.
Are you thinking I’m an idiot at this point? I am mostly an idiot. But I have my moments.
“I’m just puzzled by why you seemed to believe it was a suicide in the first place?”
“It fit the facts as I knew them at the time.”
“But not now.”
“No, Ms. Dash. Not now. There was also a subdural hematoma on the back of his head. He was hit with something to knock him out, then shot, and the body was staged.”
“So it was planned.”
“Yes.”
“Someone lured him to that room and then killed him.”
“That is what fits the facts.”
“Why?”
“We will discover the reason.”
We stare at one another, and it feels like a contest of wills. “Why did you want to tell me this?”
“It’s a matter of courtesy.”
“Because it was my room?”
“Precisely.”
No, my brain says. That’s not it.
“There must be something more than that. It’s Oliver and Harper’s room as well.”
“That is true.”
“You found something else, didn’t you?” I clench my hands together. “Inspector Tucci mentioned that Brian was trying to get into my room for a reason. That he was targeting me for something.”
He’s jaw tightens. “Where did he hear this?”
“He wouldn’t tell me. But he said he had a source.”
“I see.”
“So?”
“We did find something when we searched his room. It might be easier to show you.” He takes a phone out of his pocket and opens an app. He flicks through some photos and rests on one. He turns the phone to me, and it takes me a minute to figure out what I’m looking it.
Because it’s crazy.
Literally. It’s a crazy wall. Someone made an actual crazy wall about me. Like with pictures and string and newspaper clippings.
“Are you all right, Ms. Dash?”
“I … this was in his room?”
“Yes.”
“But it must’ve taken him a long time to put this together.”
“I agree.” He looks at me, reaching out a hand to steady me as I sway on the pool patio stones. “When did you agree to come here?”
“A couple of months ago.”
It was in the aftermath of everything that happened at Emma’s wedding.
But the days bled together. The shock, the fever of writing our book, the loss of so many things, the media attention.
It was too much. Too much to hold on to the details.
The conference seemed like a good idea. To get out of Dodge.
To go back to normalcy. To think about something other than myself for a while.
Ha ha ha.
I never do that, right?
That’s what you’re thinking.
And I get it. All you’re hearing are my innermost thoughts and insecurities. But there’s more to me than that.
“When was Brian hired?” I ask.
“Also a couple of months ago.”
“Where is he from?”
“His application said he lived in New York.”
“So he applied for a job here after I confirmed I was attending, and he put up his crazy wall?”
“Yes.”
I knew I should’ve run when I had the chance.
Would’ve, could’ve, should’ve.
Why do people always want to kill me?
“How did he know I’d be here? How did he get the job?” I ask.
“We do not have the answers to those questions yet. But we are investigating.”
“Was he stalking me?”
“We do not know.”
“Why would he want to harm me?”
“We will find out.”
“But he’s dead. Not me.”
“Yes,” Officer Rolle says. “I noticed.”
“No, I mean … If he was here to kill me. If he somehow arranged for me to be here or found out I was coming and got a job here to kill me, then how did he end up dead before I even got here?”
Officer Rolle strokes his chin. “He was working with someone.”
“Someone he pissed off?”
“Potentially.”
“Who?”
“I suspect you have an idea who.”
It doesn’t take my brain long to get there. “You mean Guy?”
“He, too, arrived at around the same time. That is … suspicious.”
“I agree, but everything Guy does is suspicious. And he’s known me a long time. Why kill me now?”
“Do you know something, perhaps? Something about his past that he’s worried is going to come out?”
Is this what Inspector Tucci was talking about when he mentioned Guy’s gun? Was he implying that it was Guy’s gun that killed Brian?
That Guy was the killer?
And if that’s the case, it can only mean one thing.
This fucking play is about us.