“And then...” D’Orso encouraged him with a rocky voice.
“Then she got even worse, she was screaming out all the details, horrible details. She wouldn’t stop. It was clear she didn’t want to hurt me but hurt herself. I tried to calm her, but the more I talked, the more she went crazy. She looked like she was possessed, she was moving all jerky... I tried to stop her, to hold her by her arms, but she got loose and all of a sudden... she tripped. She tripped, Signor Commissioner, I swear to God. She fell back and hit her head on the statue. It all happened so suddenly... it’s incredible that someone can die like that...”
He broke down in tears.
“It was an accident,” said Sorrento, convinced.
“I know.” Tommaso D’Orso stared at the chair where, just a few moments ago, the kid had been sitting.
“Even if they believe him, his life is ruined.”
“And if they don’t believe him, they’ll put him away for murder. I know.”
“If we hadn’t noticed what Cini said about the red dress, he’d be in jail by now and the boy would be home licking his wounds... trying to forget.”
“But we did notice, both of us did.”
“If we could at least—” Sorrento started to say dejectedly.
“We can’t,” Tommaso D’Orso interrupted him, running his hands through his hair in a tired gesture. “You know very well we can’t.”
He closed the case file with a deep sigh. It was true that sometimes he didn’t like his job at all. Not at all.
The Playlist
by Geoffrey Thorne
Geoffrey Thorne is currently a writer-producer on the hit TV series Leverage; he has also written for Law and Order: Criminal Intent and other TV series. A successful career as a TV actor preceded his entry into the world of screenwriting, and as if those weren’t talents enough, his short stories have appeared in nationally distributed anthologies; he’s the author of the Star Trek: Titan novel Sword of Damocles; and he’s had several graphic novels out over the past couple of years in collaboration with artist Todd Harris.
Yeah. I didn’t buy it.
Oh, sure, I believed she was dead. They had the pictures — a pale, skinny brunette lying at the bottom of a stairwell in a pool of her blood. They had the name right — Jenny Charles, of the Harp Street Charleses. They had her age and address and a list of all her friends. They even knew where she’d been for all but two of the forty-eight hours that led up to her ugly end. They claimed they had a note.
It was Jenny, all right, and she was definitely dead.
But, a suicide? No. That wasn’t Jenny.
I was actually surprised when the cops showed up to interview me.
Just routine, they said. Just following up to make sure it really was what it looked like: Suicide brought on by depression and a lot of self-medication. Jenny. Closed book at twenty-two. Only, I didn’t buy it.
I mean, what was she doing in the Harkness Wing that night, by herself? She wasn’t a big reader of tomes and she sure as hell wasn’t the type to go for ancient Latin and Aramaic. Given that’s all the H-Wing had to offer, I just couldn’t see her going there alone, not even to do herself in, not with a knife or a gun or a rope and certainly not with a four-story jump.
The cops cleared me, of course. As far as they could tell I was just somebody on the periphery of Jenny’s little life — a casual notation in her to-do list. SEE JACK ABOUT THAT POSTER/WEDNESDAY, that kind of thing. Easy to track down and easy to rule out, right?
Wrong.
They didn’t know. Not about me and absolutely not about me and Jenny. Nobody did, really. I guess, in retrospect, she wanted it that way. I mean, I might not be as off-putting as I pretend to be (nobody could be that antisocial, right?) but that doesn’t mean people like her want it getting out that they actually like me. Or want to spend time with me. Or that they might find anything I’ve got to say worth saving.
But she did.
She caught me listening to an obscure live recording of Cannery Row’s “Vanishing” and just couldn’t believe somebody like me would be into their stuff.
“Somebody like me?” I said. I knew what she meant but I wanted her to say it.
“Yeah,” she said with that little twinkle. “You know: all gothy and mopey and grim.”
“I keep a summer place in Cancun, though,” I said. “So, you know, maybe you don’t know me as well as you think.”
“I guess not,” she said. Again with the twinkle. What is it with some chicks, anyway?
“So,” she said after just standing there on the other side of the counter long enough for me to get a whiff of her. Clean, sort of minty, that was her. “Any chance you could burn me a disc of that set?”
“Sure,” I said. “Come back on Friday.”
“Great.”
And that was the beginning of me and Jenny.
What, you were expecting some great love affair? Me and Jenny tearing up the secret sheets between her quartet recitals? Keep dreaming. We had a connection, that’s all. It was deep and she definitely kept it close, but not because of sex. I was a part of her life that she kept in a box. It happens like that sometimes.
Which doesn’t mean I didn’t love the little preppie; I did. You have to love a girl who swims in a world of Chopin and Brahms but dreams of thrashing to Bobby Crux and the Boonwillies every night.
Jenny. Jenny of the Secret Life. Jenny of the night. Jenny. Dead.
But not by her own hand. Never. No way.
Why was I so sure? How did I know that this girl I only saw when she had time, only to talk about unknown bands with tiny followings, couldn’t have done what everybody was saying?
Because of the lists.
We’ll get to that.
The point is, I knew something about her that nobody else knew and I had something from her that nobody else had. I couldn’t share it and it wouldn’t stand up in court, but it was enough for me to know. No way Jenny was a suicide. No effing way.
As soon as the cops crossed me off, but before her folks had a chance to plant her in the family plot outside Kenton Green, I decided I was going to look into whatever had left her at the bottom of those stairs in that ugly, lonely way.
And if it turned out to be a somebody other than herself who put her there...
Well.
There’s antisocial and then there’s antisocial.
When Claire Aprillo wrote “Drifting in the Ocean of You” she was talking about her ugly breakup with that actor whose name I can never remember. The one with the messy hair and the green eyes the girls all love.
She had this one line in the hook — Something’s wrong but it still feels true, drifting in the ocean of you — that makes the girls who listen go all teary and aggressive and the guys get tongue-tied and shifty.
Me, I just love the way the guitar trips along underneath the words, making you feel what a complete dick the actor must have been and all the lies he must have told her before she showed him the door.
Her lyrics were in my head for two reasons. One, the guy I was watching at the far end of the library looked a lot like the green-eyed actor. I could tell he knew it too.