In the past year, after becoming a new mother, she’d quit working in theater and turned to graphic design, something she could do from home. She’d been successful at it, too. Too successful. It was enabling her to buy a house in the country and leave the city, and everyone still in it, behind.
Part of my discomfort over losing Tigger was selfish: I used her on a regular basis as a sounding board and procurer of information. She was my Huggy Bear. She knew parts of this city I didn’t know existed and the sort of people who inhabited them. I would miss that almost as much as I’d miss her.
To make up for that impending deficit, I was going to wring as much out now as I could.
She must have seen the greed in my eyes.
“
Is this for a case? Finally got a client?”
A client? Just to show her up, I gave her a tally of my clients so far that day. Four in all. If she was shocked, her face didn’t betray it. She was the quintessential New Yorker, never batting an eyelash. Though she did squint hard when I was telling her about Mr. and Mrs. Dough knocking my stuffing out and interrupted me to ask, “Wait, is this
true?
”
“
Dunno, I’m just telling you what happened.”
I stopped giving her the rundown of my day at the point where Matt walked out, for fear of lapping myself.
“
Four clients in one day,” I said. “That’s more than I’ve had all year. And it all started with George Rowell. Everything that’s happened…there’s got to be something that connects it all. I can’t chalk it up to coincidence.”
I got no argument from her. I was a little disappointed. Never could anticipate what her reaction was going to be, but usually she was contrary.
This time she said, “You’re right. There is something that connects all these things. Links all of them together.”
That tone of voice—complete conviction, complete self-confidence…she saw something, she knew the answer! I could feel my heart start thudding like a boot kicking the back of my chair in study hall.
I asked, “What is it?”
“
It’s you, Payton,” she said. “You’re the connection. Your perception frames them all and imposes a pattern, which precludes you from ever perceiving them as what they might well be, merely a random set of unrelated events.”
“
Oh,” I said. It was a letdown. “Well, thank you,
sensei
. But that doesn’t really help me.”
“
I call ’em as I see ‘em,” she said, and leaned back in her rolling chair. “So let’s get to the important part: Which of these women is it that’s got you panting?”
“
What?”
“
Come off it, I’ve seen that look in your eye before, like the pilot light’s gone on. You don’t get that look over a man. Only a woman. And not an ugly one either. So give—is it Little Miss Pilates with the nice bum and the fake name or is it the Suicide Girl with the
Ninotchka
accent and the scars?”
I gave. “Neither,” I said. “It’s the bad guy.” I’d told her about following Sayre Rauth from Yaffa and then speaking to her outside her townhouse, but I’d confined myself to the what, where, and when. This time around, I added in the how. And what a how it was. I hadn’t realized how much she’d made my blood boil or how obvious it was that she had. Tigger smiled as I told her of the effect Ms. Rauth had had on me.
“
Who’d’ve thought one of the city’s hottest women would be working as a realtor?” she said. “Not one of your top ten sexiest jobs. Which firm did you say she’s with?”
“
I didn’t say. She’s got her own, Rauth Realty. That’s what the townhouse is, their office.”
Tigger’s smile vanished. “No such company.”
I grinned. “Sez you. I was there a few hours ago.”
Tigger shook her head resolutely. 99% of the time there was no arguing with her, because 98% of the time she was right.
“
I know all the registered realtors in the area. Trust me, for the last year I’ve been talking to half of them, the other half I e-mailed. And I never heard of a Rauth Realty, at least not here in the city. Certainly not in this neighborhood.”
“
Oh. Well, maybe I got the spelling wrong. Or maybe she’s not registered.”
“
Uh-huh. You want to tell me a little more about what she’s like?”
“
I…she…”
“
Oh, so it’s like that, huh? Well, be careful, Payton, you know how you get. Don’t stick your neck out too far over her—or any of your other parts that are liable to get chopped off.”
“
Don’t worry. I think she’s okay.”
“
So you think this Elena’s just lying about her?”
“
Not lying, necessarily—but not telling the whole story.”
“
Sure you aren’t just thinking with your dick again?”
“
And what’s wrong with that? It’s my divining rod.”
Tigger snorted and turned to one of her computer screens. “More like a compass needle.”
“
Pointing dewy south.”
She laughed. While I had her in a good mood, I started asking her what she knew about some of the other people and names I’d come across. “You ever hear of a girl named Michael Cassidy?”
“
Hear of her?” Tigger said. “I saw her last night.”
“
Excuse me?”
“
Michael Cassidy: red hair, green eyes, famous daddy, fourteen minutes into her allotted fifteen? That Michael Cassidy?” I nodded. “She was at that premiere afterparty where Craig Wales overdosed.”
“
You were there?”
“
I set up the lights, favor for a friend. Left before the big foofaraw went down, but I’ve been checking it out this morning on the web.”
She rode her swivel chair like a magic carpet over to her desk and the bank of computer monitors. There were three. They shared the same screensaver, an elaborate Lionel Train set-up with tracks that extended across all three monitors. When the engine passed from one to the next, it entered a mountain range and disappeared, a suspenseful moment as it traversed the empty gap between screens, only to appear finally on the next one over, chugging renewed puffs of greasy smoke. Tigger rattled the mouse and the little world of perfection vanished from the monitors.
Tigger’s computer was already logged onto the Internet, constantly online. It was freakish, but in this regard Tigger was no longer the freak. Not that I’d ever dream of saying something like that to her face.
“
There, look.” She pointed at the center monitor.
A site containing a transcript of the late Craig Wales’ text-message blog accompanied by cell phone snapshots of the party that people had uploaded. In the background of one shot I could see Michael Cassidy arguing with a short woman with a deep tan and peroxide blonde hair.
“
That’s Coy d’Loy,” Tigger said.
“
Coy d’Loy? Sounds French.”
“
If by ‘French’ you mean made-up. She’s one of a current crop of It girls.”
“
What, you mean It, like popular young women of the moment, or
IT
, like Pennywise the clown?”
Tigger laughed. “Bit of both. She runs this rabid public relations firm called The Peer Group. Almost went under a few months ago—she was one of those who got taken in by that crooked money manager, Addison—but she took money from a silent partner to stay afloat, some bruiser with ties to the Russian mob.”
I was only half-listening. Another face in the background had gotten my attention, at first only because he looked so out of place. The crowd was mostly composed of people in their twenties, but this man was in his late sixties, a stubby old man with bulbous features and no chin, black hornrim glasses, and a stiff gray pompadour. I’d seen him someplace else and it bugged me I couldn’t remember where.
That image was the last picture of the night taken by Craig Wales, followed by his final live-blog entry, a message that he was going off with “MC.” “OMG, used to spank to her TTS. ML!”
Guess ML stood for “more later” but that was the last he ever note. Twenty minutes later, he was dead.
“
They went off to shoot up together,” Tigger said, “but he didn’t come back from it. Stuff was too pure or else it was doctored with something.”
A hot bag. Elena’s words echoed in my head. “Where did you hear that?”
She clicked over to a site called D-O-A.com. It linked to a leaked preliminary M.E. report on the death of Craig Wales. She printed it out for me. Then we skimmed a stream of blogs commenting on the actor’s death, from
Perez Hilton
and
Page Six
to
Smoking Gun
and
Hooded Armadillo
, but no one had picked up yet on Michael Cassidy in that photo.
It was exhilarating, knowing that little bit more than was being reported. It’s why I never trusted what I saw or read in the news. Not that what was reported was wrong, just nearly always only a sliver of the truth.
Now for part two of my little quest. I handed Tigger the iPod.
“
Can you take a look?” I said. “Supposedly Owl used it as a portable hard drive, sucking down info off Sayre’s computer.”
“
And you want to look at it,” Tigger said, “because nothing says love like spying on a lady’s files.”
“
I want to look at it because what’s on it might help explain how Owl wound up dead.”
“
Okay, then,” she said. “Let’s see what’s on it.” She plugged the iPod into a USB shell in front of the right-hand monitor and her computer began a virus check on the device.
Tigger flashed me a grin, her nose ring tinkling in contact with her two front teeth, giving off a silvery
ping
.
She said, “I feel like Nancy Drew.”
“
The Clue in the Crumbling Cock
,” I chimed in.
“
Get out, that isn’t one.” She laughed. I was a bad person, but still my bad jokes tickled her. Hell, I’d miss her.
After a few more seconds of chugging away, her computer gave the device an all-clear. We leaned our heads together as the contents of the iPod opened up on her screen.
Stacks of files folders appeared, 183 in all.
Tigger blew a feathery lock of hair from her brow.
“
So, you know what you’re looking for here?”
“
Nope.” I looked and looked and kept looking, reading the names of the folders one by one. Many were just meaningless series of characters like L77JPLEQIN.
Tigger said, “Look, I’d like to help, but my peeps will be waking from their naps soon, and I know someone’s going to want her snack.”
“
I hear you. Let’s take a shortcut,” I said. “Can you sort all the folders by date? Oldest first?”
It was done before I’d finished asking her for it. Tigger studied the screen and said, “Interesting. The two oldest are from 2001, but after that there are none that are older than last year.”
I had her open the first folder, the oldest one, dated 2 /4/2001. It contained one item, a single Excel file.
Tigger double-clicked on the icon and a spreadsheet opened up. The field headings were all in Cyrillic characters, except for a logo at the top: TWEENSLAND. The alphabetical entries in the columns below were written in English, though. Names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, e-mail and IP addresses. The names all looked to be male; the addresses covered some two dozen states. There was a column of dates (1999 through 2001), another showing durations in minutes, and one containing what appeared to be usernames, aliases like
yancy77
and
popeyespappy
. The final column was what looked like a comments field filled with tidbits like “school principal,” “deputy sheriff,” “doctor,” “seminarian,” and more, entries like “softball coach,” “scout master,” and “two boys, Mike & Joseph.”
It all looked so innocent, unless you knew what you were looking at. Which Tigger didn’t—I’d told her about seeing Elena, but not what Elena had told me about the childhood Owl had rescued her from. For all Tigger knew, Tweensland was second cousin to McDonaldland.