Chapter 18
By the end of the interview, I was exhausted.
Detective Aycock had wanted access to the apartment I’d shared with Joey, but of course I didn’t have it to give.
I gave him Cam’s number and Heather’s, so he could notify her.
Joey’s sister was pregnant, and while I was imagining her having to take the call, Alex escorted the detective out.
From where I sat in the office, I heard Alex announce early closing and, in response, a few light complaints, chairs scraping.
Primary Jim—Quin, I guess?—hung back and leaned through the doorway. “You okay?”
“Not great,” I admitted.
“Thought you didn’t like that guy so much,” he said. “Joey.”
“I hated that he ghosted me,” I said. “And stole the rent. But now I don’t know if he did either of those things.”
“Tough call,” he said. “Whether to hate him or not.”
But I wasn’t thinking about that. When I didn’t answer, he finally shuffled off to the front.
What I was thinking about was the security system. I couldn’t have borked the remaining camera just by checking one video, right?
I scooted around the desk, checking the hallway, and took the chair on the business side. The computer sat dark but as soon as I moved the mouse, it was ready for service, the screen open to the security system files. The queue of footage was empty. The trash had been emptied, too.
I checked the download folder. The video I’d played for Sicily, the one tracking Marisa’s movements, was still there. Was it useful? Was it damning?
Damning who?
I could hear Alex bolting the door up front and then his footsteps coming toward the office. I moved the downloaded video into a random folder of old tax files just as he appeared in the doorway.
“I’ll shut that down,” he said. “You should get some rest.”
“Weird about the cameras,” I said.
“Yeah,” Alex said. His expression was flat, but then it always was. “Weird.”
AFTER A FEW HOURS IN bed, sleep still wouldn’t come. Or tears. For once I was glad my phone wasn’t working, or I’d have been thumbing sadly through old photos.
The green numbers of my alarm clock glowed too bright. Three in the morning was closing time at the bars, the time for gathering your things and facing up to your actual life.
But I couldn’t do it.
I didn’t want to. If I looked too directly at the situation—
Yeah. No, thanks.
I sat up and snapped on the lamp on the overturned crate next to my mattress.
Joey was dead.
I grabbed Peggy Lee off her stand and strummed her gently. I didn’t feel like singing by a long shot, but I quietly worked through a chord progression that had been turning over in my head for a while.
When I’d first taken up the guitar, my fingers had bled, but now I had calluses on my fingers like an old-timer. I riffled through the pile of stuff next to my mattress for a pad of paper, a pen, and took down a few lines of notation.
Somewhere else in the building a door banged open or shut. I could feel it more than hear it, though the walls were thick. Someone just going about their life, like nothing had happened. Wasn’t that the wildest part?
Dog tags rattled, then nails tapped along the hardwood floors. Bear, on patrol. He nosed my bedroom door open.
“Hey, old man,” I whispered. He lumbered over to me, put his head down, butt high, and extended his front paws. You were obligated to say big stretch when dogs did their yoga. It was the law. “Big stretch, buddy. You want to hear the very beginning of a baby song? How does this sound?”
Bear seemed to listen for a second, head tilting. He huffed very gently at a noise he could pick up that I couldn’t. Maybe Lemon in the kitchen? Or probably whoever was up at this terrible hour in the other half of the building.
I looked at the clock again. Why would anyone be over there right now?
Bear eventually gave up his patrol, stepped onto the mattress, and curled up next to me.
I sang him a few nonsense lyrics—about himself, of course.
I had written quite a few songs in ode to the dogs, dropping in references to things they liked—anything but the Wufers brand name.
The chorus was always the same: Who’s a good dog?
As I worked out a few more chords, Bear lowered his head, tucked his muzzle against a paw. His eyes were black, his eyelids heavy, then closed. Lemon would soon be in the door. They were a package deal.
I thought I’d known what that was like.
My hand stilled on the guitar. Alex had wiped the security footage—but why?
I ripped the page with new song notes from the pad, got out of bed, and went to my closet.
Way in the back my black Frye boots stood, ready.
I paused, thinking about the song the band and I were supposed to be writing.
Then I shoved the new notes deep into the right boot, with the rest of my misfires.
Lyrics that wouldn’t come together, lines of notes I would never make sing.
Pathetic. Maybe I should have left all my false starts in the apartment for Cam to toss.
Maybe instead of taking the boots, I should have taken the hint.
In the kitchen, I pulled down all the open boxes of cereal and constructed a multilayered parfait of loops and shapes and sugar crunch. When I opened the fridge, though, I learned that we were out of milk.
And I knew, without question, that I was the one who should have picked up some.
I grabbed a fistful of the dry cereal concoction and tipped my head back. I hadn’t eaten much all day, what with all that running around to the ends of the earth. What I needed was a vegetable that wasn’t in tots form. I wasn’t really hungry, though.
Finding your boyfriend’s body definitely killed your appetite.
I heard a few crumbs hitting the floor and then a noise somewhere outside, loud and clanging.
Both dogs came charging out into the common space, one from each bedroom, huffing and ready for action.
“Don’t you dare,” I whispered. “Do not make a single sound. Clean up on aisle six.” Their noses fell to the floor to snuffle for dropped food.
But I’d heard that noise, too. I put down the bowl.
The apartment windows overlooked Milwaukee Avenue and the front of McPhee’s, but there was nothing to see in that direction. It was so late, it was early. The streets and sidewalks were clear.
But there it was again. Clang.
We didn’t have a window looking out on the alley, so I had to open the apartment door and take the stairs down to street level. The dogs came with me, of course.
At the door to the alley, I remembered the still gray of Joey’s face, and my hand faltered on the release.
Below me, Bear whined.
“He was dead, okay?” I said. “Give me a second.”
Anyway, I wasn’t dressed to yell at randos in the alley. In winter. At three in the morning.
I stood on tiptoes to check the peephole instead. There was definitely something going on out there. A truck running, maybe, red taillights glowing. The angle was bad, but I caught some human movement, too.
Another big thud, but instead of coming from out in the alley, it seemed to come from inside the building.
What kind of early-hours business could be going in next door? A bakery?
“God, I wish,” I said to the dogs. “I could murder a doughnut right now.”
But the word murder tasted terrible in my mouth.
I wouldn’t be going to sleep anytime soon. I watched out the peephole another minute, deciding. Then I turned toward the connecting door to the pub and led the parade to the office.
Alex had shut down the computer as promised, but it booted up with a reassuring washing machine churn while I yawned into the back of my wrist and sorted through the mail that Sicily had knocked over.
We’d been getting a lot of mail for some guy named Michael Jordan.
Funny! But not just Costco coupons, real documents.
Clerical error? Prank? Or was some dude claiming McPhee’s as his address?
Not that we shouldn’t charge some of these guys rent.
Lemon pressed herself against my bare leg. Bear’s nails clacked on down the hall to the pub. An optimist, our boy Bear. He always took the odds on dropped food.
And he might score, actually. With all the excitement, no one had swept the pub, second night in a row. No one, meaning me.
Once the computer was ready, I went spelunking for the tax file where I’d stowed the security footage from Wednesday.
I almost hoped it would be gone, and I would have to forget the whole thing.
But it was there, exactly where I’d put it.
I double-clicked the file and let it play at actual speed, scratching Lemon’s neck idly.
The footage was boring, just as Sicily had said—but from the vantage point of two days and one death later, it was also comforting to watch the day unfold just as you expected it to, or as I expected it to, since I’d seen it all before.
The bumper nudged, the car parked in by the beer truck, and the car’s owner seeking justice, blocking a prospective customer from coming in—a meaty guy who could have put away some beer, too.
I hated to admit it, but the guy stranded by the beer truck had a point, actually.
Kyler should have used the alley to deliver instead of double-parking on Milwaukee Ave.
With all the empty storefronts, we didn’t have all that many neighbors to complain, but eventually someone would, and we’d get a note from the alderperson’s office, reminding everyone to be mindful to keep our stretch of Milwaukee Avenue safe and clear of obstructions, blah blah.
I found a granola bar in a desk drawer. At the barest sound of crinkled wrapper, Bear came down to investigate, and both dogs watched me eat.
On the screen, Primary Jim—Quin—came out and turned to the left out of the frame.
Was he a smoker? He didn’t seem the type, now that I thought about it.
It must be a girlfriend, checking in. Or did he have some kind of remote job that required so little of his time that he spent all day at the pub?
Weird that he had, like, a name. An identity.
And then along came a slip-sliding chick dressed for a honky-tonk.
That idiot with a heavy plastic bag throwing off her balance didn’t have a clue what was awaiting her. Here was video evidence of the last time I was my regular self, before Marisa parachuted back into my life, with Sicily crash-landing behind her, before Joey—
I had been half watching people come and go from the bar on the screen—Bern off to get his cigarette, the dogs dragging me out of the alley and back—kind of almost forgetting why I was watching the footage at all.
But then I saw a flash of something at the alley. A blur, some of it wearing plaid.
I reached for the mouse and hit rewind, then play.
It was Alex, hustling someone out of the alley and down the sidewalk.
The reach of the camera cut out before I could see much more.
It was not rare that Alex might have to escort some drunk off the premises.
I hadn’t even bothered to slow the video from quadruple-time when I was watching it with Sicily.
But now that I was watching in real time, I could see details I hadn’t been looking for.
The set of Alex’s jaw. The shine of a leather jacket on the other guy, a beanie cap with hair curling from under the band.
Wait.
I rewound it again and progressed it frame by frame—
Sharp cheekbone. Curling hair.
Joey.
“Oh, Alex,” I whispered. “What did you do?”