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.