After #2
When she turned, there was a woman behind the bar—she must have been bent over when Gretchen walked in.
She had fine, sharp features, flawless olive skin, and very short black hair.
Expensive-looking tank top, muscular yoga arms. Striking, but in a harsh way, complete with nose ring and tattoos—apparently a requirement for living below Fourteenth Street.
Gay, Gretchen surmised—nonjudgmentally, of course.
Though apparently it was offensive to jump to conclusions about people’s sexuality even when you were not judging.
How one was supposed to not come to such conclusions, she wasn’t sure.
But that’s what Becks had told her in no uncertain terms. Everything was “fluid” these days.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” Gretchen began. Her voice sounded strangled. “Can you tell me where I can find Thalia?”
“You found her.” The woman didn’t seem especially happy about this fact.
Gretchen was suddenly very aware that this slightly frightening woman was Frankie’s friend.
How close a friend, Gretchen didn’t know.
Certainly, she must be grief-stricken. And she probably wasn’t going to jump at the chance to help the wife of the accused.
But maybe, woman-to-woman, she’d take pity on Gretchen, if she phrased her questions the right way.
On some level, she probably wanted the truth, too, whatever it was.
“My husband has been maybe…” Her mouth was so dry, like it was stuffed with cotton.
She cleared her throat and tried again. “It’s, um, possible my husband was having an affair with your friend Frankie.
That would be on him, of course. This—Frankie didn’t do anything wrong.
She—he’s the one who’s married. But I’m just trying to find out if it happened. ”
“Recently?” Here it came. He’s the one who did it, isn’t he? The banker?
They were eventually going to get there. The only question was how long it would take. And whether Gretchen would make it out in one piece after this terrifying tattooed woman launched at her.
She braced herself. “Yes, in the past few weeks.”
Thalia narrowed her eyes. But otherwise, no outsize emotional response. She actually seemed…calm. Maybe they weren’t such good friends after all? “You have a picture of him?”
Gretchen nodded as she dug her phone out of her bag.
“To be clear—I am on Team Frankie. I love her like a sister. You hear me?” Thalia eyed Gretchen, waiting for an actual response.
“Yes, of course.”
“The only reason I haven’t thrown you out is because I have a bad feeling about him. If he’s the guy I’m thinking of.”
Have—present tense. Did she not know that Frankie was dead? That anything related to her was, by definition, past tense?
“Bad feeling?”
“Creepy.” She shrugged. “I get that he’s your husband—if it’s the same guy. But if you’re here, you must want the truth. It’s the creep factor—that’s why I don’t think Frankie should be seeing him. The whole married thing is your problem, not Frankie’s.”
More present tense. Without a family to call, maybe this was what happened. News stalled. And given that the police already thought they had their man, there’d be no reason for them to ask questions of Frankie’s friends, at least not yet.
Gretchen held up her phone. “This is a picture of my husband.”
Thalia made a dismissive clucking sound and shook her head.
“That’s definitely him. I mean, for the record, Frankie claims they’re just friends. But I don’t buy it and neither does Noah.”
“Noah?”
Thalia looked up from the phone. “Another friend of ours from college. He’s like a human lie detector.
He and I were just texting. Frankie’s been ghosting both of us.
” She paused. “She gets that way when she knows we don’t approve of a new boyfriend, which is basically always.
Although usually they are way younger, not way older. ” She paused. “No offense.”
“Maybe they were just friends?” Past tense. Shoot.
Thalia frowned. “Sorry, no, not just friends.”
“That’s a feeling you had or you saw something?”
Thalia rolled her eyes. “That would be anybody’s feeling within a five-block radius. He just seemed kind of…fixated. Stalker vibes.” She hesitated. “I’m sorry. I’m sure this is…but you should give yourself credit. Most people don’t want to know the truth, about anything.”
Gretchen nodded. “Okay, well, thank—”
“Shit, I forgot the most important thing,” she said. “He came back.”
“He came back?”
“Yeah, your…he…” She shook her head. “Frankie doesn’t even know this because she’s been dodging me the past few days. Or she’s away—I guess that’s possible.”
Thalia looked off into the distance. It wouldn’t be long before she learned that her friend was dead, Richard arrested. After that, there was no way she’d be talking to Gretchen again. This was her last chance to get answers, even to questions she didn’t want to ask.
“What do you mean he came back?”
“He left with Frankie,” Thalia said. “But then he comes back, like twenty minutes later. Alone. Asks me for her address.”
“Her address?”
“I don’t know if they got into a fight or something. Said he wanted to send flowers to her apartment.”
“Did you give him her address?”
“Are you fucking shitting me?” Thalia scoffed. “Frankie’s apartment is right around the corner. If she wanted him to know where she lived, she would have told him herself.”
—
Gretchen walked a couple blocks before texting Sam to pick her up.
She needed air. By the time she messaged him, it took her a minute to even figure out where she was.
Across the street was a little cluster of benches alongside a playground and basketball courts.
Be there in 10, he wrote right back. Traffic’s bad.
She sat down and watched a crew of shirtless young men jostling for the ball. She might be old now, but she wasn’t dead.
“I need to be sure we’re clear,” a voice right next to her said. He was standing behind her, but she didn’t need to turn around to recognize the voice.
Ten minutes—who knew what this man could do to her in that time? “Clear about what?”
He came around to sit on the bench next to her, but some distance away. Put a folded newspaper in the large space between them. When Gretchen turned to look at him, he motioned toward the street with a finger.
“I don’t like being dragged into situations like this.”
“Dragged in? I don’t know anything about—”
“The girl’s dead.”
When she turned her head back toward him to object, he shook his head. Just once. It was enough. She returned her gaze to the street. “Well, I know that, but I—”
“I don’t like it. I don’t want anything to do with it.”
“Okay, fine. Great,” Gretchen said more testily than was appropriate under the circumstances. But she really had had enough. “I don’t want anything to do with it, either.”
“You don’t seem to be hearing me.”
“I am—but, as you can imagine, I have quite a few things on my plate at the moment and—”
“Lady, you hired us to scare her. And when we show up, she’s already dead. What kind of game you playing?”
“Game? I had no idea she was dead. How could I have known that?”
“I’ve got no fucking idea. All I know is that you got us mixed up in this shit.”
“You want more money, is that it?”
He laughed. Then he was silent for too long.
“No.” He picked up his newspaper and stood. “But if anyone finds out about our association with this situation, I give you my word: Cassandra, Elizabeth, and Becks will all be dead by the next morning.”