The Granite Moth (17 page)

“Eva and Ernesto seemed close,” I said. “Affectionate with each other. Would he risk losing that relationship?”

“Other theories.”

It wasn't a question, but the beginning of another brainstorming session. He jotted his own gambling debt idea down, and I tried to think about whether I had noticed anything unusual during the past few days. What hadn't been unusual would have been an easier question, but not as useful.

“V.P. threatened me,” I finally offered. “He doesn't want Meeza mixed up in my life.”

Ellis wrote down “V. P.—Warning?” and waited to see if I had anything to add.

“Do I need to go down to the station, make this interview official?”

Dread mixed unpleasantly with the coffee and toast in my stomach, but I didn't want to make Ellis's life more difficult. He rose and rinsed his cup out in the sink. As if inspired by my earlier inspection of his kitchen, he started loading everything into the dishwasher, and I envied the luxury of having a robot clean my plates. Even if I wanted to dip into my savings, there was no room for one in my tiny studio space.
A new drying rack
, I mused, humoring myself to avoid pitying myself. I could spare ten bucks with a ten-grand emergency fund. I hadn't
liked the circumstances under which I'd been awarded my monetary bonus, but I would take it. There was always the possibility that I would need to leave the country in a hurry.

Ellis's T-shirt slid up, revealing a pale stomach and blonde hairs leading into his jeans. I may have been staring when he spun toward me, so I turned my attention back to the newspaper. The words didn't make sense at first, but eventually I zeroed in on a headline about gay marriage being passed in Illinois.

“I'm off the Skyview case,” Ellis said to my profile, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “As of 0600 this morning when I called the sergeant at home with questions. He doesn't think I can be objective. I'm always objective.”

He had always been objective, true, but I had to side with the sergeant on this one. Which is why I found myself choking on coffee when Ellis said that he wanted to work with me instead. I was shaking my head, but coughing too hard to verbally refuse him. When I stopped, I noticed that I had splattered a few drops on page C2 and reached for a rag. That's when I saw the thin column about the Halloween parade explosion,
The Times
being too classy to call it the Drag Queen Disaster. The writer didn't have much new information, but he mentioned the hate mail that had been received by The Pink Parrot, a detail Big Mamma must have given to the press. She was clearly willing to get help wherever she could find it. If reporters wanted to sniff around, that was fine by me. I held up the page to Ellis, and he nodded, ahead of me as always and not one to be side-tracked.

“For what it's worth, you're not objective either. You like him,” Ellis began, using the ultra rational voice he had developed to debate classmates in our upper level criminology courses. I should have folded then and there, but instead I wasted ten minutes trying spur-of-the-moment responses to an argument he'd clearly mapped out before I woke up. In the
end, he won not only because he's the better arguer but because working two big cases at once had left me drained, especially since I couldn't exactly ask Meeza to do surveillance on her own boyfriend. Ellis offered to speak with V.P. so that I could go to clown school. That sounded about right.

A trapeze artist dangled by his knees as I approached the Amateur Acrobatics Club, an outdoor space along the waterfront. He was a good thirty feet above the safety net, calling out advice to a timid-looking woman on the opposite platform. She was holding the bar in her hands, but shaking her head no.

“Up and away,” the trapeze man shouted, swinging gently back and forth.

It was one of those fall days that make up for the dreary ones, but I wasn't feeling any more optimistic than yesterday. Blue, cloudless skies provided a backdrop for the small drama unfolding in front of me. The woman took a deep breath and jumped up, only to come thudding right back down to her platform, a little farther away from the edge if anything. Another expert crawled up the ladder to join her on the small space, and the original trapeze man somersaulted into the air to land with surprising force on the net. He flipped over the edge and onto his feet, grinning at me the entire time. What else could I do but clap?

He mock bowed and sauntered toward me, squinting pleasantly against the sun. His tan, ripped forearms were the kind you would want in front of you if hurling your body into the air. Apparently, the student was unmoved and going for another solo swing with her trainer's encouragement.

“You can lead a horse to water,” the man said in greeting.

“But you can't make her defy death,” I finished.

“
What must we do today to get you into a harness?” he asked, used car salesman-style.

Pay me
, I thought. “It looks like a lot of fun, but I'm actually more interested in juggling.”

He slipped into a sweatshirt and pulled the hood over his shaved head. The school name was on the front, but “Amateur” was scratched out and replaced with “Awesome.” I handed him a card with a fake name but a real number, and he wiped his hands off before grabbing a High Flyers postcard off a registration table and introducing himself.

“Simon Simpson,” he said, putting his thumb by his name and telephone number. “Reporter?”

“P.I.,” I said. It wasn't like me to announce my profession, but Ellis's desire to work with me had given me some confidence. Between him and Big Mamma, they would have me convinced I knew what I was doing.

The man tugged the strings on his sweatshirt until only his nose and eyes were showing. It was crisp out, but the sunshine made it feel warmer. I hadn't worn a jacket and figured Simon Simpson didn't need the hood. “This about the parade?” he asked.

“I want to talk to him. He's not a suspect.”

“Who's not a suspect?”

I shrugged. He had me there. I didn't know the juggler's name or really anything other than the fact that he was male. That's kind of hard to disguise in spandex. The woman from the hotline tip had said he was startled when someone shoved him from behind. Then horrified. He hadn't been at the emergency room, so he must have recovered fast enough to run away from the flames.

“Figures,” Simon said, puffing himself out even more. “Listen, I don't have to answer your questions, and I'd rather not get my buddy worked up any more than he has been. It was an accident. He feels terrible. End of story.”

“
Not crying your eyes out over the dead, I see.”

“Why should I be? Now if someone died here, on my watch? Then I would be upset. Some strangers downtown, what difference does it make to me? No different than that punk kid killed in Queens yesterday, over buying some dope or something.”

I was uneasy with Simon's nonchalant tone, and the word “punk” didn't sit well with me. I hadn't seen that story in the morning paper, but I didn't need to. I knew that story by heart. A few bad decisions, and game over at fifteen.

“Listen,” I said, trying a different approach. “I'm working this case professionally, but one of the burn victims is a friend.”

At that, Simon sighed and looked up toward the sky as if asking God why he had to put up with such harassment. When he looked back at me, I thought he was grinning again, although his mouth still wasn't visible.

“Fifteen minutes in the sky, fifteen minutes with my friend.”

“What's his name,” I countered.

“After.”

I weighed the offer while watching the student come screaming down into the net. She bounced three times before crawling to the edge and ungracefully tumbling to the ground. She lay there for a moment catching her breath, and I wondered what deal she'd made for this torture. I hoped that it was better than mine.

The metal ladder was surprisingly warm, and I quickened my climbing pace to reach the platform some forty feet in the air where Simon was already waiting for me. If the height had looked intimidating from the ground, now it looked downright catastrophic. I started shaking before Simon winked at me in what I assumed was meant to be encouragement, but
the gesture seemed to be coming from a gaping tunnel to hell. Afraid of heights? Who, me? I wouldn't have named such a phobia on my long list of fears, but come to think of it the George Washington Bridge did give me the heebie-jeebies, and why was the platform moving?

“It's not moving, sugar. Vertigo?”

He winked again, and I swallowed, expecting a biting remark about his casually derogatory nickname—“I'm nobody's sugar, you glorified squirrel” or something—but instead gagged on my own spit and had to grip one of the poles to keep from falling. It dawned on me that Simon had been giving me instructions, but all I could hear was a faint buzzing noise. He put down his hood, and I could make out the words “swing and drop.” Easy peasy.

Simon brought the bar toward me, placing my hands about six inches apart, and I had flashbacks to doing pull-ups at the police academy, not my strong suit even as a fit twenty-two-year-old. What if I couldn't hold my own body weight and skidded down the platform, bumping limbs and head along the way?

“You'll be fine. Leap out,” Simon was saying and by his assertive albeit calm tone, he had already said that a few times. Not one to put off the inevitable, I tightened my hold and hopped into mid-air. There was a jolt in my shoulders as they adjusted to my body weight, but then I was soaring, cruising down then tilting toward the bright sky. I let out a whoop of delight as gravity pulled me back in the other direction. My bark of laughter almost drowned out the sound of something popping in the rigging, but not quite. I looked up in time to see the metal support beams cascading toward me.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

I
let go out of instinct, and the bar that I had been holding followed me down. I curled myself into a ball, ignoring Simon's previous advice to always land on your rear. And in the fetal position, I plunged into the safety net. It bounced me right back into the debris, and I shuddered as something hit me hard in the elbow. The whole mess, myself included, bounced one more time, then settled.

When I opened my eyes, I could see Simon scurrying down the platform ladder, and I rolled over, cringing at the pain in my arm. I didn't want him to get away without a fight, so I crawled toward the edge of the net and tried to dismount one-handed. Someone stopped me, and I lashed out in my panic, grabbing whatever was nearest and hurling it at the man in front of me. He was holding up his hands in the universal sign of “I mean no harm.” He didn't look especially trustworthy, though, his face covered in greasy purple paint with green rings around his eyes. When he spoke, I couldn't understand the words, but I could see that his tongue was forked, split in two down the middle.

He gestured for me to come toward him, and I scooted away. I could now see that Simon wasn't fleeing but instead running toward me, and my panic increased. One freak I could handle; I wasn't sure about two.

“Lady,” Simon was shouting as he appeared at the net edge beside the snake man. “Are you alright?” He gestured for me to come toward him, too, and I shook my head, tightening my grip around what appeared at a glance to be a pulley. Dense enough to cause a head injury, that much I knew.

Simon grabbed the other man's shoulder, pulling him away from the net. The snake person threw up his hands in defeat and headed back into the office, stopping long enough to cast one last disparaging look my way, then slamming the door shut behind him.

“He was trying to help.”

“Help what? Kill me?”

Simon chuckled, which is when my fear took a healthy step toward anger.

“Now it's funny when clients fall from the sky,” I said, bringing myself again to the edge of the net and dangling my legs over the side. I didn't trust my elbow to hold my weight, but I didn't want to forfeit my makeshift weapon either. “Step back,” I said, and Simon retreated a few yards, taking the opportunity to zip and tie his sweatshirt, hiding his mouth again. I dropped the pulley to the ground and used my good arm to maneuver myself awkwardly over the side, falling the last few feet and rolling when I hit the ground. I moaned and lifted myself, scooping up my weapon in the process.