Into the Dark Page 21

  Kevin squinted at her. “Uh . . . we aren’t really what you’d call a family hotel.”

  “No, no,” Brenna said. “Maya is just helping me out.”

  Maya, who clammed up with most strangers—let alone an old, greasy-haired desk clerk with enormous pores and hairs poking out of every visible orifice—said absolutely nothing. But to Brenna, there was something comforting in his presence—the reminder of why she was here, what was at stake . . .

  “Before we start,” Brenna said, “I just want to make sure of something.”

  “Yes?”

  “When you told me about the woman with Mr. Ludlow . . . you weren’t pulling my leg, were you?”

  He screwed up his face to such a degree, Brenna was worried he might get a cramp. “Of course not,” he said.

  Brenna was glad she asked—she was ninety-five percent sure he was telling the truth. She looked at Maya. “You okay with this?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Yes, Mother. I’m okay.”

  Brenna sighed. “Maya here is a composite artist.”

  “She looks awfully young to have a job like that.”

  “No, no. What I mean is, she’s going to be acting as one now. For me—that is, if you don’t mind describing the woman you saw.”

  His eyebrows lifted. “Seriously?”

  “I know it sounds strange,” Brenna said. “But Mr. Ludlow was a private investigator, and I was working on a case with him, and I’m thinking that this woman you saw may have had something to do with it.”

  “With what? The case?”

  “Yes.”

  He let out a guffaw.

  “I’m serious.”

  Kevin stepped closer. He smelled of ointment. “Okay, listen,” he said. “I don’t want to talk about this in front of your daughter, but I’m sure those two didn’t even know each other. I mean, outside of in the biblical sense. Wink, wink.”

  Maya grimaced.

  Brenna put an arm around her. “Why do you say that?”

  “She was here for one hour. I’m talking to the minute,” he said. “Personal friends don’t punch clocks.”

  “Even so. I’d love to know what she looked like.”

  He frowned at her. “What’s your name again?” he said. “And what is this case that you’re working on?”

  Brenna started to try and explain, but then her gaze drifted over his shoulder, to the open door of the office behind the front desk. An old movie poster on the wall. Something starring Jimmy Cagney . . .

  Brenna closed her mouth, leveled her eyes at him, gave him her best Barbara Stanwyck half smile. “ ‘What do you want, Joe, my life history? Here it is in four words: big ideas, small results.’ ”

  Maya stared at her as if she’d just gone insane.

  Kevin broke into a huge grin. “Clash by Night,” he said.

  “Yep,” Brenna said. “I’ve probably seen it twenty times. I’m a big fan.” It was half true . . . Okay, maybe a quarter true. She did like Barbara Stanwyck. But Brenna had seen Clash by Night only once—on March 30, 2000, when she was laid up with the flu and they played it on Turner Classic Movies. She’d sneezed and shivered throughout most of it and fell asleep three quarters of the way through. But she had liked that line.

  Kevin was beaming at her. “You’ve got good taste in movies.”

  “They really don’t make ’em like that anymore.” Brenna sighed, the fever from nine years ago still rippling in her cheeks. “You know what I miss? Those big, gorgeous movie palaces. The revival houses, where you could see a classic noir, or maybe a fifties Technicolor movie on a big screen . . .”

  “I love early Technicolor.”

  “Yep,” she said. “Now it’s all this CGI crap. Movies don’t have heart anymore.”

  His eyes widened. “Yes, exactly,” he said. “Say, do you like classic TV?”

  “Well yeah, of course,” Brenna said. “But I can’t stand it when people talk about classic TV as coming from the seventies or eighties. Sid Caesar. Now that was classic TV.”

  “I own the Your Show of Shows box set!”

  “Oh my God. Me too!”

  She could feel Maya gaping at her, no doubt this close to mentioning that the only DVD sets Brenna owned were the first eight seasons of 90210 and A History of Glitter Rock. Brenna gave her a quick, sharp look. “Something wrong, honey?” She locked eyes with Maya, then cast a deliberate glance at the movie poster in the office.

  Maya’s gaze followed hers. “Uh . . .”

  “It’s nice to meet a young person with such great taste in entertainment,” Kevin said, Maya gaping even wider at the description of her mother as young.

  Brenna said, “That’s funny. I was about to say the same thing about you.”

  “Unbelievable,” Maya whispered.

  Kevin grinned—a wide, giddy grin that split his face in two. “I’ll describe the young woman for you,” he said. Just like that. He didn’t even mention the fact that, even though he’d asked her for it, Brenna had never given him her name. A kindred spirit. If you were lonely enough, there wasn’t anything you wouldn’t do for just a few minutes with one. Brenna knew this, because she so often felt lonely.

  “Oh thank you so much!”

  “We can talk in the office,” he said. “Let me just straighten it up a little.”

  He headed back behind the desk, and Brenna and Maya followed.

  As they walked, Brenna turned to her daughter, now looking at her with something that seemed close to admiration.

  God, Brenna needed to work on her parenting skills.

  Twenty minutes later, Kevin was directing Maya as she busily sketched. “Make the lips a little fuller. Great . . . Okay, and the neck is longer than that. Maybe you could add a shadow, under the chin?”

  Brenna couldn’t look. She could barely listen. It struck her that Clea, her Clea, would be forty-five years old now. Not a smiling teenager in a class picture or a coltish ten-year-old, clutching the handlebars of a bike. A forty-five-year-old woman with a gift for destruction. What did that look like? Brenna’s sister. Brenna’s living, aging sister . . .

  Maya’s pencil flitted across the pad, and for several moments, there was nothing in the room but the sound of her daughter, drawing . . . Clea at forty-five . . .

  “How’s this?” Maya said, tilting the sketch pad so Kevin could see.

  Kevin said, “A . . . very impressive likeness.”

  Brenna held her breath. Maya held up the pad.

  Brenna’s eyes went big. It wasn’t Clea on the sketch pad. It wasn’t a forty-five-year-old. “Diandra.”

  Kevin said, “Huh?”

  Brenna rubbed her eyes. “Sorry. It’s been a long day.”

  “You’re an incredible artist, young lady,” Kevin was saying to Maya. “Do you mind if I make a copy of this? The Xerox is right over there.”

  “Uh . . . Sure.” Maya actually looked pleased with herself.

  Brenna smiled, a vague dread creeping through her. She tried swatting it away. So Diandra slept with Errol. That isn’t a crime. He could have died hours later. “I have to make a quick call,” Brenna said.

  Maya gave her a puzzled look. “Okay . . .”

  Kevin said, “Maya. That’s your name, right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “All right, well, listen. I’ve got these charcoal sketches of Joan Crawford I did for this extension course. I’m wondering if you could give them a quick look and tell me if they’re any good.”

  “Sure, I guess.”

  Brenna stepped into the doorjamb as Kevin removed a sheath of sketches from his desk. “Now what do you think of this one?” he was saying. “Did I get the eyebrows right?”

  Brenna put her back to Maya and Kevin and closed her eyes, hoping she could do what she needed to do, even with distractions.

  What Brenna had said to Trent back at his apartment hadn’t just been lip service. It was true. It was amazing what a small world it was, but you could only really see it—and use it—if you had
a perfect memory.

  Kevin was telling Maya how he tried to capture Joan’s quiet strength in Johnny Guitar. Brenna took a deep breath and pushed the colliding thoughts out of her head—thoughts of Diandra and Trent and Errol. And Clea. Why had she told Kevin that her name was Clea? Brenna pushed away the phone call she’d received last night from Errol, his last phone call in life. She pushed away his cheery voice ( Ta-ta!) asking her if she’d heard from Gary Freeman’s wife. Why would I have heard from Gary’s wife? She pushed away panicky Diandra, stumbling out of Trent’s apartment on her pink high heels, tossing her hair into her eyes when she caught sight of Brenna. Hiding her face from me. Why?

  She pushed all that into the back of her mind along with Kevin’s droning voice and threw her focus onto June 10, 2006, the day she’d been lurking around the edges of a crime scene—a murdered co-ed turned prostitute who called herself Marjorie Morningstar, but whose real name had been Kara Wheeler. Hired by Kara’s parents, Brenna was unwanted at the crime scene and didn’t stay long. But of course she remembered everything about it. The heat in the Lower East Side walk-up where Kara’s strangled body had been found, the walloping death smell as she entered the tiny studio apartment, the lumpy crime scene tech, pushing her out of the way, his phone dropping to the hallway floor and clattering down the stairs as he hurries in, Brenna thinking, Would it kill you to watch where you’re going?

  Brenna picks up the phone. I shouldn’t even give this back to him, she thinks, the smell choking her, making her eyes water . . . She starts to head back in and the phone vibrates in her hand. The theme from Weird Science explodes out of it. Brenna rolls her eyes. Cheesiest lab tech ringtone ever.

  She opens the phone, hits send. “Uh, hello?”

  A woman’s voice, “Hello. Who is this?”

  “I just picked up this phone, I . . .”

  “I need to talk to Mark.”

  “We’re at a crime scene, ma’am.”

  “Listen. I need you to tell Mark that Nora called. You got that? Please tell him I can’t pick Gracie up at school today. Mark Jr.’s soccer practice was canceled, and I have to get him, So he’s gotta get Gracie. Do you understand me? You’re breaking up. Service sucks around here . . .” And she’s gone.

  Brenna closes the phone. She starts to call out Mark’s name, but stops herself. First, she hits the button next to the screen, and the phone’s number appears on it. She stares at the number for several seconds, taking it in. You never know when you might need these things . . .

  “Four score and seven years ago,” Brenna whispered. The crime scene smell dissipated, replaced by the slightly (but only slightly) subtler pine-and-sulfur odor of the MoonGlow’s lobby.

  “I don’t know,” Maya was saying. “It seems like you could . . . like . . . soften these angles a little bit, so she doesn’t look so two-dimensional?”

  Brenna tapped Mark the lab tech’s phone number into her own phone and hit send, thinking, Please have the same cell phone number. This was going to be a little tricky, but as long as her voice sounded confident . . .

  He answered fast. “Yeah?”

  “Hey Mark.” She said it in a low, officey voice. “How’s it going?”

  “Uh . . .”

  “How’s Nora? I just ran into her and Gracie the other day at Gristedes. Did they tell you they saw me?”

  “Uh . . . yeah. Yeah, they did . . . How are you?”

  “Good. The knee still sucks, but I’m getting surgery on it next Friday. Hey, how’s Mark Jr.? Still playing soccer?”

  “Yeah.” His voice brightened a little. “They won state championship.”

  “Fantastic,” Brenna said. “Man, I don’t get to see you guys enough. I was just telling Ed we need to do something.”

  “Ummm . . .”

  “Sorry to bother you on a Sunday and all.”

  “Yeah.” He cleared his throat. “I’m actually at work.”

  Yes! She forced a sigh. “Me too. Sucks, right? Listen . . . I could really use your help right now.”

  “How can I help you,” he asked.

  His voice was laced with confusion. Clearly, he had no idea who she was but was too polite to ask. Brenna stifled a smile. “Well . . . I’m trying to fill out some paperwork for a recent death, but my computer went down.”

  “Bummer.”

  “I know. It’s like a conspiracy. So, can you do me a favor and look up Errol Ludlow for me? Died last night. Body found this morning at the MoonGlow on 108th and Second Ave.”

  Brenna waited.

  Maya said, “That really isn’t the best way to draw knees.”

  “It isn’t?” Kevin said

  “Well, see, I like to shadow this part.”

  Brenna crossed her fingers, hoping Mark couldn’t hear . . .

  Mark said, “Sure, one sec.”

  Yes!

  “How do you spell the last name?”

  Brenna spelled it. He asked her to hold, and came back on quickly. “Found it. What do you need?”

  “Status of the body, estimated time of death . . . The usual.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Looks like he died of a heart attack, but a toxicology report was ordered.”

  Brenna kept her voice neutral, bored. “And why is that?”

  “The deceased was fifty-nine, no history of heart disease, and the examiner noticed a bluish tinge to the skin, indicating possible reaction to drugs.”

  Brenna closed her eyes. Maybe Diandra didn’t know he’d died. Maybe they’d partied a little. (It didn’t sound like Errol, but whatever. Midlife crisis happens.) But maybe he was fine when she left the room. Diandra had only been in there with him for an hour, after all. “You have estimated time of death?”

  “Between six-thirty and seven-thirty.”

  “I wish I had my charcoals,” Kevin said.

  “You can just use a pencil,” Maya said. “Like this. See?”

  “Thanks so much, Mark,” Brenna said. “That’s all I need.”

  “No problem.”

  “Say hi to Nora for me!”

  “Will do.”

  Click.

  “Ms. Stanwyck, your daughter is a genius.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  Maya rolled her eyes. “Mom.”

  “Kevin,” said Brenna, “can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure.”

  “You mentioned that Diand— the girl who visited Mr. Ludlow . . .” She swallowed hard. “You said she stayed here at the hotel for exactly one hour, down to the minute.”

  “Well, maybe not to the minute. But close enough.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “Because I looked at a clock,” he said. “I always do that when a girl comes in—look at the clock before and after, guess in my head how much the guy paid . . . Helps pass the time.”

  “Okay,” Brenna said. “So when you looked at the clock and she was leaving . . .”

  “Yeah?”

  “What time did it say?”

  “Seven forty five.”

  Brenna’s mouth felt dry. “You sure?”

  “It’s a digital clock. Never wrong. Why?”

  Errol died between six-thirty and seven-thirty. Diandra was with him when he died. He had a bluish tint to his skin. Drugs. Errol hated drugs . . .

  “Anything else?” Kevin asked.

  “No,” Brenna cleared her throat. “I’m good.”

  Brenna put her arm around Maya, started walking her toward the door. “Thank you, Kevin,” she said.

  “Come back again sometime!” he called out after her as she hurried out into the twilight.

  “What’s wrong?” Maya asked, as soon as they got outside.

  “Nothing, honey.” Brenna hailed a cab with one hand, called Trent with the other. A cab pulled up quickly. After a few rings, the call went to voice mail. “Trent, listen to me,” she said into his phone. “You cannot see Diandra anymore. I don’t want to discuss this on a recording, but she is dangerous. Please call m
e as soon as you get this message,” she said, as they got into the cab.

  She hit end, told the cabdriver to take them to Twelfth and Sixth.

  The cab jolted away from the curb.

  Maya said, “Did Trent do something stupid?”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time,” Brenna said, “but I hope not.” She glanced at her daughter, staring down at the faint stains on her shoes. Talk about doing something stupid . . . “Maya, can you do me a favor, please?”

  “What?”

  “Please don’t tell your dad I took you here.”

  Maya nodded. “Sure.”

  On the seat between them, Maya’s sketchbook sprawled open. Brenna stared at Diandra’s face—the wide, unlined eyes, the full cheeks. Such a kid, beneath all that artifice. She couldn’t have been ten years older than Maya. Why had she bothered herself with Errol in the first place? Why was she so fascinated with Lula Belle?

  Is Trent right? Are you Lula Belle?

  Brenna closed her eyes, remembering the shadow on her computer screen, the sugary whisper of a voice wafting out of the speakers as she and Morasco watched . . . She thought I was crazy like my daddy. She thought I couldn’t take care of nothin’ without breakin’ it. Mama said that gift for destruction ran through my veins.

  The cab sped up the next block, then jolted to a stop at the red light. “Don’t be stupid, Trent,” Brenna murmured, as ninety blocks down and five blocks west, Trent was standing in his living room, his senses filled with pink angora and perfume and Diandra’s lush body against his, knowing full well how stupid he was being.

  Chapter 17

  Trent blamed the cat. He knew that probably sounded dumb, but ever since he found out Persephone wasn’t real, he’d felt so angry—self-destructive, even. He would have gone on a drinking binge, but Trent wasn’t really that good a drinker. Plus, he only liked sweet drinks with lots of carbs in them—rum and Cokes, mango mojitos, strawberry daiquiris—so a drinking binge would’ve not only given him the mother of all hangovers, it would have totally decimated his abs.

  Hotties, on the other hand . . .

  Yes, there was something going on with Diandra and Lula Belle, and yes, Brenna was suspicious and Trent was suspicious and if Diandra had looked like, say, Hulk Hogan, Trent would have been changing the locks on his doors and running a background check on her faster than you could say, “One-way ticket to Ward’s Island.”