“The church,” Jane said. “Marion’s checking into why. You don’t need to call her; I’ll liaise.”
“That would save time,” Matthew said. “Thank you.” There was no point in both of them reporting to Jane and to each other if Jane considered the incident important enough to coordinate personally.
“Are you ready to tell me yet what you think it might be?”
Matthew stepped cautiously around the small courtyard, holding onto his don’t-notice-me, his hand cupped around the mouthpiece. “I was thinking cockatrice,” he said. “But you know, now maybe not certain. What drips venom, and can lure a retired nun to suicide?”
Jane’s breath, hissing between her teeth, was clearly audible over the cellular crackle. “Harpy.”
“Yeah,” Matthew said. “But then why doesn’t it fly?”
“What are you going to do?”
“Right now? Question a couple of local residents,” he said, and moved toward the Maxim-reading squatter.
The man looked up as he approached; Matthew steeled himself to hide a flinch at his stench, the sore running pus down into his beard. A lot of these guys were mentally ill and unsupported by any system. A lot of them also had the knack for seeing things that had mostly dropped otherwise, as if in being overlooked themselves they gained insight into the half-lit world.
And it didn’t matter how he looked; the homeless man’s life was still a life, and his only. You can’t save them all. But he had a father and mother and a history and a soul like yours.
His city, which he loved, dehumanized; Matthew considered it the responsibility that came with his gifts to humanize it right back. It was in some ways rather like being married to a terrible drunk. You did a lot of apologizing. “Hey,” Matthew said. He didn’t crouch down. He held out his hand; the homeless man eyed it suspiciously. “I’m Matthew. You have absolutely no reason to want to know me, but I’m looking for some information I can’t get from just anybody. Can I buy you some food, or a drink?”
Later, over milkshakes, Melissa glanced at Katie through the humidity-frizzled curls that had escaped her braid and said, “I can’t believe we lost him.”
The straw scraped Katie’s lip as she released it. “You mean he gave us the slip.”
Melissa snorted. On her left, Gina picked fretfully at a plate of French fries, sprinkling pinched grains of salt down the length of one particular fry and then brushing them away with a fingertip. “He just popped up. Right by me. And then vanished. I never took my eyes off him.”
“Some criminal mastermind you turned out to be,” Katie said, but her heart wasn’t in it. Gina flinched, so Katie swiped one of her fries by way of apology. A brief but giggly scuffle ensued before Katie maneuvered the somewhat mangled fry into her mouth. She was chewing salt and starch when Melissa said, “Don’t you guys think this is all a little weird?”
Katie swallowed, leaving a slick of grease on her palate. “No,” she said, and slurped chocolate shake to clear it off. Her hair moved on her neck, and she swallowed and imagined the touch of a hand. A prickle of sensation tingled through her, the same excitement she felt at their pursuit of Doctor S., which she had experienced only occasionally while kissing her boyfriend back home. She shifted in her chair. “I think it’s plenty weird.”
She wasn’t going to ask the other girls. Melissa had a boyfriend at Harvard that she traded off weekends with. Gina was . . . Gina. She picked up whatever boy she wanted, kept him a while, put him down again. Katie would rather let them assume that she wasn’t all that innocent.
Not that they’d hate her. But they’d laugh.
“What are we going to do about it?” she asked, when Melissa kept looking at her. “I mean, it’s not like he did something illegal.”
“You didn’t see the body up close.”
“I didn’t. But he didn’t kill her. We know where he was when she fell.”
Gina’s mouth compressed askew. But she nodded, then hid her face in her shake.
Melissa pushed at her frizzing hair again. “You know,” she said, “he left in a hurry. It’s like a swamp out there.”
“So?”
“So. Do you suppose his office door sticks?”
“Oh, no. That is illegal. We could get expelled.”
“We wouldn’t take anything.” Melissa turned her drink with the tips of her fingers, looking at them and the spiraling ring left behind on the tabletop, not at Katie’s eyes. “Just see if he has a police scanner. And look for his address.”
“I’m not doing that,” Katie said.
“I just want to see if the door is unlocked.”
Melissa looked at Gina. Gina shrugged. “Those locks come loose with a credit card, anyway.”
“No. Not just no.”
“Oh, you can watch the stairs,” Gina said, sharp enough that Katie sat back in her chair. Katie swallowed, and nodded. Fine. She would watch the goddamned stair.
“You want to finish?” she asked.
Gina pushed her mangled but uneaten fries away. “No, baby. I’m done.”
The man’s name was Henry; he ate an extraordinary amount of fried chicken from a red paper bucket while Matthew crouched on the stoop beside him, breathing shallowly. The acrid vapors of whatever Matthew hunted actually covered both the odor of unwashed man and of dripping grease, and though his eyes still watered, he thought his nose was shutting down in protest. Perversely, this made it easier to cope.
“No,” Henry said. He had a tendency to slur his speech, to ramble and digress, but he was no ranting lunatic. Not, Matthew reminded himself, that it would matter if he was. “I mean, okay. I see things. More now than when I got my meds”—he shrugged, a bit of extra crispy coating clinging to his moustache—“I mean, I mean, not that I’m crazy, but you see things out of the corner of your eye, and when you turn? You see?”
He was staring at a spot slightly over Matthew’s left shoulder when he said it, and Matthew wished very hard that he dared turn around and look. “All the damned time,” he said.
The heat of the cement soaked through his jeans; the jacket was nearly unbearable. He shrugged out of it, laid it on the stoop, and rolled up his sleeves. “Man,” Henry said, and sucked soft meat off bones. “Nice ink.”
“Thanks,” Matthew said, turning his arms over to inspect the insides.
“Hurt much? You don’t look like the type.”
“Hurt some,” Matthew admitted. “What sort of things do you see? Out of the corners of your eyes?”
“Scuttling things. Flapping things.” He shrugged. “When I can get a drink it helps.”
“Rats? Pigeons?”
“Snakes,” Henry said. He dropped poultry bones back into the bucket. “Roosters.”
“Not crows? Vultures?”
“No,” Henry said. “Roosters. Snakes, the color of the wall.”
“Damn.” Matthew picked up his coat. “Thanks, Henry. I guess it was a cockatrice after all.”
What happened was, Katie couldn’t wait on the stairs. Of course she’d known there wasn’t a chance in hell that she could resist Melissa. But sometimes it was better to fool yourself a little, even if you knew that eventually you were going to crack.
Instead, she found herself standing beside Gina, blocking a sight line with her body, as Gina knocked ostentatiously on Doctor S.’s door. She slipped the latch with a credit card—a gesture so smooth that Katie could hardly tell she wasn’t just trying the handle. She knocked again and then pulled the door open.
Katie kind of thought she was overplaying, and made a point of slipping through the barely opened door in an attempt to hide from passers-by that the room was empty.