Dust

24

Alone inside the bay, we head to the small round plastic table and two chairs that Rusty and Harold have christened La Morte Café. On temperate days they drink coffee and smoke cigars with the door rolled up, waiting for the dead to arrive and be taken away.

I set my fanny pack on the table and Lucy picks it up. She unzips it to check what’s inside. Then she zips it back up and returns it to the table.

“Why?” she asks.

“It probably was my fever and having too much time to think.”

“It probably wasn’t.”

“Something didn’t seem right. I assumed it had to do with my bout of bad health and taking Sock out.” I don’t want to get sidetracked right now by talking about the person who may have been spying on me because it will send Lucy on the warpath.

I don’t want her looking for Haley Swanson or someone else. She already has enough trouble with Marino.

“You should come over and go on the range with me at least.” She watches me carefully. “When’s the last time you practiced?”

“We will. I promise.”

I place a pod in the Keurig set up on a spraddle-legged surgical cart with rusted seams and bent wheels. Its decrepit condition has been draped with a French country vinyl cloth, red and yellow vent du sud and there’s an arrangement of plastic sunflowers and a Bruins ashtray on it.

“I’m sure you must feel slammed. Out of the office since Friday and returning to this.” Lucy stands behind a chair with her arms crossed. “You look pale and tired. You should have let me come over.”

“And catch the flu?” I open a pack of cheap paper towels, the type found in public restrooms.

“That could happen anywhere, and I’d never leave you alone because I’m afraid of what might happen to me. Janet and I would have brought you to the house and taken care of you. I should have come and gotten you.”

“I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.”

“It’s not a chore like with my mother.”

“Chore isn’t the word that comes to mind with Dorothy.”

“I’m just saying.” Her green eyes are intense on me.

“I know and I’m sorry if I didn’t seem grateful.”

She doesn’t make an insincere effort to reassure me. I’m not good at seeming a lot of things and both of us know it, and I’m reminded again of what I don’t like about myself.

“It’s not about being grateful,” Lucy then says. “You wouldn’t let me stay alone if the situations were reversed, if I’d just been through what you had and then got sick. Especially if I were scared enough to carry a gun everywhere.”

“You’re never scared and you do carry a gun everywhere.”

“You’d be camped out and showing up every other second with the thermometer.”

“I admit I have ways of doing things that aren’t easy for others.”

Brewing coffee spews into a brown paper cup with a fish icon, Navy surplus that Bryce orders by the pallet.

“Creamer, sugar? Or the usual black?” I ask.

“The usual. Nothing’s changed.” She looks at me with a face I love, angular and strong, more striking than beautiful.

I remember when she was a pudgy little know-it-all too smart for anyone’s damn good and missing the genetic piece responsible for boundaries and rules. As soon as she could walk she followed me from room to room, and when I sat she was in my lap. It would infuriate her mother, my selfish, miserable sister who writes children’s books and has no use for her own flesh and blood or for anyone, really, only characters she invents and can control and kill off. I haven’t talked to my family in Miami for a while and for a second I feel guilty about that, too.

“Bryce is ordering pizza. I might eat an entire pie by myself.” I set a coffee and a paper towel in front of Lucy.

“These cups suck.”

“They’re biodegradable.”

“Yes. They fall apart while you’re still drinking out of them.”

“They don’t damage marine life and are invisible to spy satellites.” I smile at her.

“You need to eat an entire pizza and then some.” Lucy scrutinizes me, arms crossed stubbornly. “Bryce is telling everyone you’ve turned into a skeleton.”

“The first time he’s seen me was five minutes ago on a security monitor. Please sit down, Lucy. We’re going to talk.”

I start a second cup, the aroma overpowering. My stomach feels inside out it’s so empty and Marino’s calling me at four a.m. seems a year ago. It doesn’t seem like it happened.

“The pizza’s not here yet and she can wait.” Gail Shipton can. “What I’m most concerned about at the moment is you,” I say to Lucy, “and I do care what I hear even if you don’t. I don’t want either of us compromised. Or anyone else.”

She stares at me and I can tell she knows I’m referring to Benton.

“Compromised?” She pulls out a plastic chair.

“I don’t want to know anything illegal.” I’m that blunt.

“There’s nothing to know.”

“By whose definition?” I carry my coffee to the table and sit across from her. “I have some idea what you’ve been doing. Marino is aware that whatever was on Gail Shipton’s phone isn’t on it now. He’s told me that and maybe told other people.”

“It’s not her phone.” Lucy props an elbow on the table and rests her chin in her hand and the table rocks because the plastic legs aren’t even. “I should say it wasn’t. And what happened to her has nothing to do with what in fact is an extremely unique device and Marino has no right to it because it wasn’t hers,” she repeats.

“Then whose?”

“The technology’s mine but I’d gotten to the point I didn’t care anymore.” She wraps her hands around the coffee.

“You don’t sound like someone who doesn’t care.”

“I didn’t care about what the technology should be worth because I wanted to end the partnership and it was one of the things Gail and I talked about yesterday, not that it was the first time or all that friendly. She wins her lawsuit and buys me out.”

“There’s never a certainty anyone will win a lawsuit.” It surprises me Lucy would be that naïve. “Juries can be unpredictable. Mistrials happen. Anything can.”

“She felt sure it would settle at the last minute.”

“I can’t imagine Carin Hegel would assure her of such a thing.”

“She didn’t. She was ready for court and still is. But there won’t be a trial.”

“It would be difficult with the plaintiff dead.”

“There’s no case and there hasn’t been one for a while. That’s why there won’t be a trial.”

“Does Carin Hegel know she doesn’t have a case?” I’m baffled and disconcerted by what Lucy is saying.

“I was going to tell her when I could prove it, which would have been soon. Gail was sure she’d get money from Double S and her mistake was telling me that and promising to buy me out. I wasn’t asking for much but I had to ask something or it would have looked suspicious,” Lucy says dispassionately, coldly. “It was important to extricate myself from her with surgical precision in a way that didn’t draw attention. I was almost ready and now she’s dead.”

“It’s a good thing you were out of town when she disappeared.”

“I’m sure they’d say I had something to do with it.”

“With the way you’re talking right now I’m sure they would.”

Lucy has a reputation and Marino knows it all too well. He knows her history and capabilities in exquisite detail. While I’ve never known her to hurt someone gratuitously or because she has a grudge, she’ll do things other people won’t.

“The fact is I wasn’t here when she disappeared. I wasn’t here when she was killed,” Lucy says. “I’d just landed at Dulles and then was at a hotel and that can be proven.”

“You certainly don’t have to prove it to me.”

“You worry too much,” Lucy says. “I didn’t like Gail and ultimately had no respect for her but I certainly didn’t hurt her. But I would have eventually.”

“At the very least you sound more like a witness for the defense.”

“I didn’t want to be a witness for anyone but in a case like this it’s all about manipulation and big money. They found out we’d started working on a project together and next thing I was subpoenaed to be deposed.”

“That’s interesting. What you do isn’t exactly public information. Even I didn’t know about your relationship with Gail, professional or otherwise. So how did Double S’s attorneys find out?”

“That’s what lawyers do. They find things out.”

“Someone had to have given them information,” I reply. “Is it possible Gail did without intending to?”

“No. She didn’t do it without intending to. It was deliberate,” Lucy says.

“What did Double S want from you?”

“To be my friend.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I.” Rage makes her hard and Lucy has no trouble hating if she decides it’s earned.

When she trusts there’s no limit to what she’ll do for someone, but once crossed she won’t stop until she’s annihilated whoever it is. She has to because she can’t go after the worst offender in her life, her mother, who has sovereign immunity. Lucy would never harm the person who has damaged her the most, my ungrateful, loveless sister who sinks her teeth into the hand that feeds her and does so without warning or provocation. I’ve watched the syndrome for years and it makes me rather crazy. Dorothy commits her petty acts of cruelty because it gives her pleasure.

“When I was deposed I was asked a lot of personal questions about my work in computers and my law enforcement background, why I left the FBI and ATF and what I wanted in life,” Lucy is saying. “Their attorneys were kidding around with me, being nice. I played into it because I had a sense about what was really going on.”

“Does Carin have this same sense?”

“She thought they were being manipulative assholes.”

“Maybe they were hoping you’d take their side against Gail.”

“That’s what Carin said.”

I ask Lucy why she ever trusted Gail Shipton. “Because it doesn’t sound like it lasted long,” I add.

“In the beginning I thought she was one of these smart people who’s stupid in business and got screwed because she got tangled up with the wrong people, which I didn’t completely understand,” she says. “But I figured she was a techie with poor judgment, someone naïve as hell about the real world. If you really dig, the stories about Double S should give you pause although someone must be full-time PR for them, making sure anything negative is buried, and I suspect they pay freelancers to write fluff and spin whatever comes out.”

“You suspect it or you know?”

“It’s obvious they do. I don’t know it for a fact.”

I’m reminded of Lambant and Associates, of Haley Swanson.

“She didn’t check them out before she turned over everything, some fifty million, and then they supposedly lost all of it on bad investments,” Lucy says. “Unlike their other former clients, Gail decided to fight. She wasn’t a brave person or remotely confrontational, yet she didn’t back down when everybody else had in the past. You have to ask why.”

Lucy has gotten more animated as she talks, gesturing with her hands, light winking from the rose-gold signet ring she wears on her left index finger. Oversized, with a flying eagle and nature scenes, the vintage heirloom has been in her partner Janet’s family for more than a century, from what I understand.

“How long was Gail with Double S?” I ask.

“About the time she started grad school. She’s always worked since she was a kid, not just R-and-D but basic programming, engineering, and database design. Double S hired her two and a half years ago to build a new database management system for them and that’s how it started. During the course of things they convinced her to let them take care of her money, and in hardly any time at all?” She wiggles the table, testing which leg is the problem. “She fired them and hired Carin Hegel.”

“They lost fifty million dollars that fast?”

“Yes, almost all of it, and Carin didn’t take the case on contingency. So you also have to ask how someone who’s lost almost everything could afford the legal fees. Maybe at first but not for long. By now the fees are well into the millions.” Lucy folds her paper towel into a small square, leans down and wedges it under the offending table leg. “Did it ever occur to you that in the world of white-collar crime technology is a valuable commodity? Take drones, for example. Imagine sophisticated surveillance devices in the wrong hands.”

“I can’t verify it yet but I believe Gail was murdered. You’ve probably already figured that out but I want to make sure you understand she likely was targeted and abducted.”

Lucy wiggles the table and it’s more stable.

“I wish I’d activated the video camera when it would have mattered,” she says as if that’s what bothers her most about what I just said.

Beneath her flat calm she’s agitated. She’s upset. I can tell.

“You had a way to control her phone remotely.” I remember to take off my coat and I place it in my lap.

“Her phone?” Lucy’s green eyes flash. “The chip stacking, the camera capabilities, the connectivity, the range of operating bands, everything’s mine and I have the tech specs, invoices, and copyrights to prove it.”

“Then what was it Gail had to offer?” I realize how badly I need coffee. It warms my throat and gets my blood flowing.

“Multimedia subsystems, packet data, fiber-optics with upstream speeds about ten times what can be done today, and search engines that match intent not just keywords. All the same stuff I’ve been really interested in and working on. Her promises sounded good over a couple of drinks.”

“I see. It sounds like at the end of the day she proved totally useless.”

“Not useless but weak, and then she turned. I didn’t let on that I was aware of it. I had one particular app and to give her credit she had some pretty ingenious ideas about it. Then she got other ideas that were fucking scary,” she says as I think of Benton’s remark about biometric software and its potential use with drones.

“You met her casually. Since when do you trust strangers?” I ask.

“About eight months ago.” Lucy sips her coffee and makes a face. “Generic Kenya that tastes like Kmart. Why the hell does Bryce have to be so cheap? Janet and I ran into her at the Psi Bar and we started talking. We run into a lot of MIT people and talk. They’re the kind of people I’m most comfortable with.”

“And you decided to work on a project together just like that.” Caffeine dulls the edges of a headache that’s lingered since Marino woke me up. I realize I need a lot of coffee badly and I push my chair back.

“I don’t know why.” She toys with her cheap cup, turning it in slow circles on the table. “Sometimes I’m stupid, Aunt Kay.”

“You’re never stupid but all of us have trusted people we shouldn’t.”

“I felt bad for her at first because it was a terrible story she told, growing up poor in California, her father an alcoholic who killed himself when she was ten. Her mother has early Alzheimer’s and is taken care of by a sister who’s mentally challenged. Then Gail trusted people to manage everything she has and next thing it’s gone.”

I get up to start a refill of generic stuff that right now tastes wonderful.

“I thought her areas of expertise could be helpful,” Lucy says. “Unfortunately I was basing my assessment on her having made a lot of money from really cool phone apps when she was a teenager.”

“You related because it sounded like you. A kid, a prodigy, who’s suddenly incredibly wealthy with everyone trying to take advantage including your own mother who was never there until you had money. You support her, and the more you do, the worse she is.”

“Who? My mother?” Lucy says sarcastically.

“That’s a lonely place to be.”

“She’s dating some rich Venezuelan twice her age. Did I mention that? Lucio something or other, owns a lot of Miami real estate, South Beach, Golden Beach, Bal Harbour, hosted some TV show when he was young, recently got a Lap-Band so he’ll look good for his new mujer fatal. It’s confusing. She calls both of us Luce.”

“The misfortune of having my sister as your mother.” It has left Lucy with a vulnerability that I don’t think will ever heal. She trusts completely, and when she’s hurt she goes after the enemy with an energy that’s dazzling.

“She’s not making much of a living anymore after putting a vampire in the children’s book before last and more recently a kid with magical powers who constantly recites these clunky rhyming spells,” Lucy says.

“I haven’t read them.”

“I do out of self-defense. She should write her autobiography. Fifty Shades of Dorothy. That would sell.”

“One of these days you’re going to give up hating her.”

“I think Grans is really getting old.”

“My mother’s been old for quite a while.”

“Seriously. She shouldn’t be driving. She goes to Publix with that huge white Chanel pocketbook that’s a hand-me-down from Mom and then can’t find her car so she walks around pushing her grocery cart and clicking her key until headlights go on. It’s a miracle she hasn’t been mugged.”

“I need to call her.”

“The word need is never good. I hope you never use it when you’re talking about me,” Lucy says.