Chapter 17
“Detective, uh, wants to ask you some questions,” Alex said.
“Aycock,” the cop said.
There was a pause as we all absorbed this information.
Quin spoke up. “Maybe in the office, Alex? For, uh, privacy?”
Alex looked around, surprised to find customers still scattered among the tables and booths, all of them watching us.
“We’ll keep an eye on the till,” Quin said, gesturing toward Lumpy Jim, who had returned to his stool to watch the proceedings. Maybe he’d never left his stool.
In Alex’s office, the detective took the seat behind the desk, presumptive.
But then he seemed reluctant to put his elbows down on the desk.
I sat across from him in the seat Sicily had cleared.
From a pocket inside his jacket, the cop pulled out a small notebook and a business card. He slid the card across to me.
Detective Vince Aycock, sure enough.
“Divine, then?” His voice took on an official tone, letting me know we were definitely heading into notebook territory. He slapped at his breast pocket until he located a pen. He clicked it a few times in his thick fingers and then appraised me with raised eyebrows. “Divine? I’ve got that right?”
“D-E-V,” I said. “Like Ott Devine.”
“Who?”
“He, uh…” I said. It never seemed worth the effort to explain. Sometimes I wished I’d just chosen something else. But it sounded great, spoken into a microphone. “Ott Devine made Patsy Cline a member of the Grand Ole Opry.”
“Your granddad or something?”
“No,” I said. “He worked for the … Patsy Cline, the first woman to join the…? Never mind.”
Alex, hovering near the door, spoke up. “Just a name she liked. From country music.”
“So it’s a name you go by? An alias?” the cop said.
I didn’t like the turn this was taking. “It’s my legal name,” I said.
“All right,” the cop said. “Dee. Vine.”
Aycock, wasn’t it? He’d never once wanted to change his name?
“And you discovered the victim, Miss Dee-vine?” Aycock said. “What were you doing in the alley?”
“I saw someone lying back there.”
“And?”
“And went to see if I could help.”
“Mother Teresa, right here in Jefferson Park,” he said. Only he said it like she was some broad who worked a spaghetti house down in Little Italy.
Was there someone else I could talk to? I glanced at Alex, but he was stoic, as usual. “It was freezing out,” I said, “and there are places the unhomed can go to get warm—”
“You really shouldn’t be approaching the vagrants, miss.”
He made it sound like I was poking a stick through the cage at animals in the zoo. “I thought I could help. I guess it’s good I did.”
Aycock eyed me an extra second. “When did you realize you were acquainted with the victim, then?”
Joey’s gray face. I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes and recounted how I had pulled back the blue fabric.
“So you’re telling me you messed with a crime scene?” He was scribbling in his notepad. “Do you not watch even the worst version of the CSIs?”
I sat up, confused. “The … TV shows?”
“Not a Nancy Drew, then?” he said. “Just the do-gooder not already freezing her own chicklets off, with all the time in the world to check in on the poor and downtrodden?”
I had really lost track of things here. What were chicklets? Why was he being mean to me? Was he being mean, or was I just in some kind of fog, where all the words coming at me seemed like a fire hose of nonsense? “I don’t know what you want me to say,” I said, finally.
“And this is your boyfriend, your da says.”
“He’s not my…” I stopped. That was too many layers of incorrect to unpack at once. “Joey is my ex-boyfriend—or maybe … maybe not. Oh, God.”
“Explain,” the cop said.
“He disappeared,” I said. “He was gone, and the rent money, too. So I thought … He got us evicted, and he wouldn’t answer his phone.” With Alex standing there, and Quin probably just behind him, I didn’t want to admit how many times I had tried calling.
“When was this? No contact with deceased since when?”
Deceased. I swallowed hard and counted back the days.
“You got evicted that fast?” he said. “You might have a case against your landlord.”
“Joey never had a lease,” I said. “And we had a … fraught relationship. With the landlord.”
He looked me up and down. “I bet,” he said. “But not with each other? You and the deceased were on the outs. You fight a lot?”
“Hang on,” I said.
“He seeing other girls?” Aycock said. “Couldn’t commit?”
“The opposite, actually,” I said. “Look, I wouldn’t hurt him.”
But I had joked about killing him, oh God. He’s a dead man.
“He … he just wanted,” I said. “He wanted something we weren’t going to have. I thought he was at his sister’s. Was he not?”
“I’ll need that information, for the sister,” Aycock said. “Now, can you think of any reason someone might want to harm Mr. Hartnett?”
“To kill him? There were a couple of guys at work he didn’t get along with,” I said. “But it wasn’t what you’d call a high-stakes career. Joey was … he was…”
I couldn’t think of what Joey was. When I thought he’d ditched me and taken the cash, I had let all the good stuff go, just shrugged it off like it had never happened.
In the last week, I had built armor out of the memories that made me grateful he was gone.
Now that I couldn’t be mad at him anymore, I didn’t have much else to offer.
“Well, that’s quite a eulogy,” the cop said, sitting back and taking in the surroundings. His eyes caught on the poster at his shoulder, my screaming face, mouth wide. “And he stole money from you.”
“The landlord, technically,” I said.
“But he got you both kicked out,” Aycock said. “You couldn’t have any bad feelings about that rent money.”
Alex took a step forward, but stopped.
“I sure did,” I said. “But I wasn’t even around to do anything to him.”
“Around when?” the cop said. “How do you know how long the victim’s been out there?”
I started to answer, but had to stop and think. How did I know?
I looked around the room. My eyes landed on the stack of mail Sicily had knocked over when we’d been watching the security footage.
“I saw someone lying out there yesterday when I got back to the pub from grabbing a few things from the apartment,” I said. “That guy—he had a beard—was gone this morning when I walked the dogs.”
“Dogs,” Aycock said. The pen in his hand slowed to a languid scrawl. “Dogs aren’t known to be great witnesses.”
“The alley was clear this morning when I walked the dogs,” I said. “But there was someone knocking at the door of the pub, and that person hijacked my whole day. I’ve been with her until nearly the minute I saw Joey in the alley tonight. She’ll tell you.”
He perked up. “Who’s this now?”
I hesitated, but only a second. “My sister,” I said.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Alex react as though someone had pinched him.
Neither of us had had the chance to fold the new reality around us, a world in which Marisa just dropped by after twenty years.
And I hadn’t had the chance to fill him in on her disappearing act, and how I knew about it.
All Alex knew was that sister meant mother meant Marisa meant trouble.
Yeah, none of us were going to be happy about this. My brand-new sibling was going to have to alibi me, first thing. And, as everyone knows, that was a sturdy foundation on which to build any relationship.
DETECTIVE AYCOCK—SERIOUSLY, HAD HE never considered changing it?—had a lot more questions for me, darting from topic to topic and back over things we’d already covered a million times and from new angles until my eyes crossed. Probably the point of it all, to confuse and catch me out.
Most of his questions I had solid answers for.
Where was I the night before I found Joey in the alley?
That was easy to remember: I was here, at McPhee’s, onstage.
A packed room of people could vouch for me.
And what about the night Joey supposedly dashed with our rent money and didn’t return, the week before? Same. Onstage.
Who knew country music would provide such a solid alibi?
“Why didn’t you report Mr. Hartnett missing?”
“I thought he ran out on me,” I said. “I have abandonment issues, okay?”
“With your dad right over there?”
“He’s not my dad,” I said. “Do you need my whole life story right now?” I caught a glimpse of Quin’s shadow lurking in the hall, taking in every word. “He’s my … landlord.”
Another convulsive twitch from Alex. He’d be looking for something to clean, but I’d only meant to keep the discussion high-level.
What should I have said? Benefactor? We’d never really had a good word.
“My friend,” I said uncertainly.
“Uh-huh,” Aycock said, his eyes dropping to his notebook. “Now what would Mr. Hartnett have been doing over on this side of town? Other than coming to this bar where you seem to live, work, and spend all your spare time? With your friend.”
Had anyone ever called Joey mister anything before? I imagined Joey giving the cop the finger.
“Is this funny to you?” Aycock demanded.
“No, I … Wait.”
I had just remembered the security camera. It would have caught some of what had happened along our street. Not just dudes flipping us off and pissing on the sidewalk, but maybe anyone coming or going into the alley. “We can look at the security footage,” I said. “Maybe Joey’s on there—”
“We can’t,” Alex blurted out.
“We can’t?” The alley camera was still broken, but the one out front …
“System malfunction,” Alex said. He had his hands shoved into his pockets and his shoulders up. “The whole week is gone.”
Had I messed up the system when I’d checked the video for Sicily?
“The cameras,” Alex said.
We all waited.
“They glitch,” he said.
Everyone looked at me, but I was still staring at Alex. I’d never seen him offer so many lies in a row.
I turned back to Detective Aycock. It wasn’t a tough choice.
“The cameras are a real drag,” I said. “They glitch, like, all the time.”