The Girl on the Edge of Summer Read online

  That was the only secret her chest of drawers held, unless you counted one of her bras was a pushup bra in black lace, hidden behind her other demure white ones. Still, both it and the chocolate seemed almost innocent compared to what most adolescents were up to. No drugs or even booze as far as I could tell.

  Nothing under the bed save dust bunnies. Under the mattress was only less than tidy sheet tucking. While she wasn’t the neat freak her mother was—it may have been grief that pushed Mrs. Stevens into such obsession, but it wasn’t likely she was a slob before—for a teenager, she wasn’t bad.

  But it wasn’t my job to probe the family psychodrama. “Curiosity has killed much better cats than you,” I muttered under my breath, far too quiet to be heard over the vacuum. I started to gather the computer and phone but then decided I might as well finish this pointless task and search the rest of the room.

  Her bookcase was a disappointment, mostly in how few real books she had, shoved on a bottom shelf with the rest of it taken up with mementos of growing up, a trophy from a sixth-grade popularity contest, “most likely to make chicken soup for a sick friend”; with that as a category, probably every kid in the class got something. A signed picture from some boy from one of the boy bands, seashells from the family trip, albums of pictures, starting when she was six. But the pictures were the smiling ones. Its open shelves hid nothing, save how small her triumphs had been so far.

  The closet held the usual assortment of trendy teenage clothing, bright colors and patterns, much of it on the pink side, most of it made to last for about a year. Nothing too indiscreet. Even the stylishly ripped jeans (were those still in? Or had they been out long enough to be in again?) would show less than seen on a typical beach. Maybe the bra was the one thing that hinted at the sexuality behind the smile.

  On the second to top shelf, under a pile of sweaters, my hand ran over a large manila envelope. It had been pushed to the back as if to better hide it. But it was a hiding place meant only for those who would never look for anything hidden. Since I had to stretch to reach the top shelf, and I’m five-ten, I guessed that this was as high as Tiffany could go.

  The vacuum stopped. There was a brief moment of silence, then it started up again in a more distant room.

  I shook the contents of the envelope onto the bed. A flash drive, mercifully blue-gray, not pink, and several sheets of paper fell out.

  I turned one of them over. I hadn’t seen the picture yet, but my guess was this was a copy of it. If the young girl in it weren’t dead, it would have been almost laughable in its naïve attempt to be a sophisticated, sexy adult. She had on too much makeup, as if smearing a bright red over her thin lips was all it took. She posed on the pink bed; the rose spread covered her from the waist down, one arm under her budding breasts as if trying to pump them up, the other stretched out with the phone to take the picture.

  I wanted to grab her back into life and tell her this wasn’t worth killing herself over. No one would think it more than a brief, and in a few years, easily forgotten moment of foolishness.

  The photo was printed on cheap paper, the colors blurry. She didn’t have a printer here in her room, so I wondered where she’d made this copy.

  Then I looked at the back. There was a note in what was clearly not her handwriting. It said, “Hey, T, I like this pic of you. Why don’t we meet up for more?”

  No signature, of course.

  The next sheet was the same photo. Its note said, “Nice tits. How bout a blow job? I’ve seen everything that matters.”

  The third and, I guessed, the final one said, “Hey, bitch, stop fucking around. Either put out or I send your titty shot to my list. U want to cunt tease, U get what U deserve. Three days to respond.”

  No date, but Tiffany had clearly responded.

  I carefully put everything back into the envelope. My fingerprints would be on them, and Tiffany’s as well, but I wanted to leave as few marks as possible.

  If this was a crime. Yes, there was certainly an ugly threat there, but it seemed that he sent a picture she had sent to him to others. Was that a crime? The laws were slow to catch up to the technology. And even if they had, where did this fall? If she willingly sent the picture, where did that leave her?

  The vacuum stopped again.

  I put the envelope in my bag, hidden from view. I should show it to Mrs. Stevens, but I wanted more information—and to know what was on the flash drive—before having a discussion I suspected we’d both like to avoid.

  I picked up the laptop, cell phone, and pink notebook, heading to where I’d last heard the vacuum cleaner.

  She barely looked at me, as if ashamed she’d had to invite a stranger into her house, into her tragedy, to handle the messy cleanup, quickly agreeing to letting me take the computer and phone.

  She followed me politely to the door, managing another fake smile as we said good-bye.

  I didn’t look back at the house, didn’t want to see if she was still hovering at the door, quickly got in my car, deposited my bag and the items on the passenger seat, and pulled out.

  As I drove away, I mentally made a list of the things I needed to do. Call my lawyer friend Danny and ask about laws on sexting, to see if there could be any legal action to take. Pass the phone and computer to the computer grannies—several older women who had discovered they could hack as well as the boys and computers were a job that could be done sitting down, in air-conditioned comfort, and they could make their own hours. I liked using them because they had both the tech savvy of the young guns and the wisdom and compassion that comes with age.

  I focused on the concrete because I didn’t want to think about the intangible. The tangible action steps I could control. But a young woman had died by her own hand because of a stupid mistake, a wrong turn in how to be an adult. She sent the picture to an ugly person, a brutish thug interested only in his sexual gratification. Why couldn’t he have just masturbated? That was all it would be in any case. Tiffany Stevens was as much of a person to him as any blow-up doll would have been.

  Traffic was kind on the way back to my office. Just as well; I was close to rage, and the road isn’t a good place for it.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I got back to my office shortly before noon and put in a call both to the grannies (since they weren’t on the second floor in their not-often-used office) and to Danny. I had to settle for leaving a message for both.

  Then I decided the turkey sandwich (on whole grain, mind you) wasn’t an adequate lunch after this morning. To remain on the not-too-outrageously unhealthy, I settled on takeout from one of my favorite sushi places on Frenchmen Street. I needed the distraction, the movement, to concentrate on the mundane and important act of deciding what I wanted to eat. We get through our days one small decision / act at a time. Groceries, laundry, going from one place to another, nothing memorable, but there are times these buffers of normal and routine pull us through the days. Driving from my office, picking up the sushi, all worked for me, kept me from thinking about a young girl and her early death.

  I doubted even the fierce vacuuming and superhuman cleanliness helped Mrs. Stevens.

  I just decided I had ordered too much and could save some for dinner, when my downstairs buzzer rang.

  I now own my office building. When I first moved in, as a renter, it was a down-at-heel working-class neighborhood. I had stayed, coming back after Katrina, probably because I was too bewildered and overwhelmed to do anything except return to what I knew. This area hadn’t flooded, so it was easier for me to come back. About two years ago, my landlord decided he wanted to get out and offered me a reasonable enough deal that I said yes. It wasn’t that I wanted to be a capitalistic bastard land baron, but I knew if he sold to someone else I’d either have to cough up a lot higher rent or be looking for someplace to move to in a rapidly gentrifying city. The only option was to buy. It meant having two mortgages, one for my house and one here, but between a little hustling and being capitalistic bastard eno
ugh to rent the bottom floor to a coffee shop / café that was too chi-chi for me to patronize, I was able to make ends mostly meet.

  The computer grannies had the second floor at a more-than-reasonable rent, but they were as likely to work from home as not. I had taken over the third floor. It had once been divided into two offices, but in a tear of renovation last year, I’d opened up the space, creating a proper, though mostly unused waiting area, a small conference room, a small separate office for when I worked with other people, and a decent-sized break room with a microwave, toaster oven, and full-size refrigerator. High on the hog.

  There was a separate entrance for those of us on the upper floors, with discreet brass name plates, M. Knight Detective Agency and Computer Solutions for the grannies. Neither of us encouraged walk-in clientele, so I guessed the buzzer was either someone lost (how did tourists find themselves all the way down here—oh, right, gentrifying, and now the ’hood was hip enough for the coffee shop to be able to afford the rent I charged) or a friend with drop-in privileges. The former would be a quick distraction and the latter a welcome one.

  I buzzed the downstairs door open, then sauntered to the landing outside my door where I could see down to the second floor, to wait just in case it was a lost tourist.

  The man who came into view was too well dressed to be a tourist and no one I knew.

  “Can I help you?” I asked as he rounded the stairs.

  He was tall, handsome in a way straight women would probably like, brown hair just a tad shaggy, a clearly deliberate scruff of beard, strong, almost too big chin, but with a dimple that softened it, and wearing a suit that looked to be tailored especially for him. No tie, an open-collar white shirt, also expensive looking. I guessed either late thirties or early forties. The kind of man who expected life to open its doors to him.

  He seemed surprised to see someone above him on the landing, but he showed little concern, instead came across as unworried he had anything to fear.

  “I’m looking for the M. Knight Detective Agency,” he said. He had a deep baritone voice, smooth with an accent I guessed to be somewhere from the northeast.

  “Who sent you here? We don’t usually take walk-ins,” I said.

  He continued up the stairs. I remained outside my office.

  “Sorry,” he said in a way that told me he wasn’t. “I’m in a hurry, only in town a few days and needed to move things along. Scotty Bradley gave me your name. Said my case sounded fascinating, but he was about to leave for two weeks in the south of Italy.”

  Scotty was a PI I occasionally worked with, more occasionally met in French Quarter bars. I did recall him saying “ciao” the last time we talked and mentioning an upcoming journey. I’d check later. I knew Scotty was a decent enough sort that if this guy turned out to be a real asshole, he’d bring a nice bottle of Italian wine back for me.

  The man joined me on the landing.

  “How can I help you?” I said, still making no move to go back into my office. If this was a quick “sorry, can’t do anything for you,” there was no point in wasting more time and energy.

  “And you are?”

  He hadn’t answered my question.

  “I’d like to talk to someone in charge,” he continued.

  “You are.”

  “A woman. I like that.”

  “Does that matter to you?”

  “Not really,” he answered smoothly, “but it might be helpful in this case.”

  Much as I wanted to, I didn’t sigh. If this guy turned out to be a serial killer of female private detectives, Scotty would have to learn to pick olives on the olive oil farms, because it wouldn’t be safe for him to return to this side of the Atlantic.

  “Why don’t you come in and we can talk about it?” I said, stepping aside to let him enter before me. And avoid having my back to him.

  “Thank you,” he said with a smile. He’d won this round. Somehow I suspected that was exactly what he was thinking.

  Still, the expensive suit meant money, and a paying client helped with the mortgages.

  I ushered him into my office and even engaged in the usual pleasantries of offering coffee—he took his with a little cream, which got a fake apology from me that milk was all I had. Two percent milk at that, but I didn’t go there.

  I told him I was the M. Knight, even allowing the M was for Michele. Micky is for my friends, and he wasn’t one and I doubted he would ever be one. His name was Douglas Townson.

  Once we had sat down with a mug in front of each of us, I again asked my first question, “How can I help you?”

  “I need you to solve a murder.”

  I left a long silence because you don’t come to a private dick about a criminal case. There had to be more to this than his simple statement. However, he didn’t fill the silence and clearly he wanted questions, so I obliged him. “What can I do that the police can’t?”

  “Are you interested?” he countered.

  In whatever game you’re playing? Not really. Again, he hadn’t answered my question. But I didn’t say that. “As I’m sure you know, the police should be contacted and will take the lead for any criminal investigation. It’s only the TV detectives who don’t work within the law. Any evidence of a crime, I will take to them.”

  “I doubt this one will interest them,” he said.

  “There is no statute of limitations on murder.”

  “True, but this one took place in 1906, so I feel if the police were going to solve it, they would have done so by now. My great-grandfather. Killed when he was thirty-nine years old. My grandfather was eight at the time. He lived just up the river near Baton Rouge, doing well in farming with sugar and cotton. We had to sell and my great-grandmother remarried, a merchant from New Jersey, who bought some of his cotton. It took the family a while to recover.”

  I cut in. “The best I could do is find a grave somewhere. Anyone old enough to kill in 1906 isn’t around to put handcuffs on. And even that would be unlikely. If the police couldn’t solve it then, the evidence is most likely long gone.”

  He waved his hands at me as if I was telling him information he already knew. “Oh, I realize that. I fully understand how quixotic this quest is. But I’m a hedge fund manager, and I make enough money to blow it on unlikely quests. I want to know whatever can be known. All I’ve heard are tales passed down from the previous generations, some of them clearly wildly untrue. I want to clear the air, or I’d like to at least get the official record. It’s a tedious search; I could do it but I don’t have the time. I can certainly make it worth your while.”

  That explained his confidence. Looks and money are more than enough to make people overrate themselves. I don’t like all my clients, and if I could choose, I would leave all the asshole men out, but I rarely choose what cases to take on whether I like the client or not. This is a business. If I think I can help them and if what they’re asking me to do is legal and I have the time and resources to take on their request, I usually say yes. There have been a few people I so disliked—or disliked what they were asking me to do—that I turned them down. But if I only accept cases from the decent people of the world, I might not have enough business to stay open. It’s not usually the decent people who need my services anyway.

  A murder case over a hundred years old; that seemed easy enough. A few records searches would be about the sum of it. There would be no witnesses left to interview. No, I didn’t especially like Douglas Townson, but that hardly mattered.

  I brought out a contract, named the most outrageous fee I thought I could get away with, and he signed it without blinking.

  I led him through most of what he knew, admittedly not much, but enough for me to make a start. Great-grandfather was Frederick Townson. Frederick Kingsly Townson. Stabbed to death while on a buying trip to New Orleans from his estate outside the place we call Red Stick. No one was ever charged, and the family felt the police were incompetent or bribed, because for someone as important as Frederick Townson, the
murderer should have been caught. No, he didn’t out and out say that, but it oozed copiously between the lines. Most of the family repeatedly said he was a fine, upstanding gentleman, taken far too soon.

  The wild stories—after a prompting question on my part—were that a great-aunt said he’d given his wife the pox. That would be syphilis. Ah, that was the worm in the wood. Douglas Townson was too proud to have any such scurrilous rumors floating around about a forebearer of his. He was really hiring me to clear his great-grandfather’s name.

  He was leaving tomorrow but left me his contact information, both his NYC apartment and the beach house on Long Island.

  As he got up to leave (finally), he said, “You’re here alone?”

  My answer was, “Nope, I’m expecting one of my associates to be here any minute now. In fact, he’s about fifteen minutes late. Former Saints linebacker, washed out with a knee injury and needed something interesting to do with his life.” That took me to about fifty-five times I’ve told that lie.

  He smiled again, not winning this one, and headed for the door. I told him they had great coffee downstairs, especially the sugar cane spice latte.

  He thanked me for the tip.

  I watched him as he went down the stairs, mostly to make sure he continued all the way down. I noticed signs of life for the computer grannies on the second floor, and I wanted him gone before I went down there.

  I washed out our coffee cups; he’d barely drunk his—this was not cheap coffee—and then made a case file for him. That should be enough time for him to have ordered all the outrageously overpriced lattes he could possibly want.