An Exaggerated Murder: A Novel Read online

  It was a big, noisy, chaotic crime scene, so the conveyor belt slowly impinged on the portion of his brain paying attention to where he was going. He didn’t notice Lola until she was right in front of him.

  Lola stood on the sidewalk by Trike’s car. She wore sneakers, shorts, and a long-sleeved running shirt. Her hair was in a ponytail and she wore a white headband. She was an inch and a half taller than Trike, with yellow-gray eyes. You could tell by the way she stood, by her muscles, and by her breathing that she was a runner.

  But if she were standing there in scrubs you assumed she was a doctor. And if you saw her in an evening gown on her way to a wedding reception, you’d wonder if you saw her in that new movie or maybe in a magazine ad. Pick your outfit and she looked like a natural whatever it was. And this is all before she did anything. Trike never had a chance.

  “Lola? What the fuck are you doing here?”

  “Well, I—quit moving your hands around like that.”

  “Sorry.” Trike stuffed his hands into his pockets. “They think they’re holding a cigarette.”

  “And now you’re digging around in your pockets.”

  “Sorry, there are a lot of unconscious drives going on here. Probably would’ve smoked half a pack without noticing if someone hadn’t broken into my house and replaced all my cigarettes with nicotine patches.”

  “You asked me to.”

  “The original question. Let’s not get sidetracked by the state of my addiction. What the fuck are you doing here?”

  “I called Max to check in this morning and he said he was just about to call you with a case. Then I heard on the radio that this Joyce character had gone missing and figured I’d jog by here to touch base with you.”

  Trike scrunched his eyes in concern.

  “You heard it on the news,” he said. “When did you hear it on the news?”

  “The nine-thirty news bulletin on the radio. Didn’t say anything else, except that Joyce had been reported missing.”

  “Okay, teaching moment,” he said, “and this one doesn’t involve an almost inhuman ability to observe and remember.”

  “Well, that’s a comfort.”

  “Based on the information you just gave me, what is the best question to ask?”

  Lola looked toward the house.

  “Don’t look at the house.”

  Lola looked around, up and down the street, over at the little white house, at the garage.

  “You should have seen it already.”

  “How did the news get out so quickly?”

  “You approach, but have not arrived.”

  Lola folded her arms across her chest and tapped her left sneaker on the sidewalk.

  “Where are the news trucks?” she asked.

  “Where the fuck are the fucking news trucks?” Trike shouted. “Eccentric billionaire vanishes leaving behind only a pool of blood to mark his previous presence, baffling the proper authorities so catastrophically that they immediately turn to the brilliant but abrasively arrogant internationally renowned private detective Trike Augustine for help, and there are no news trucks, news crews, crime journalists, or cub reporters scratching out notes to this building sensation. Not even a fucking intern from the free weekly. It’s one thing if the cops hadn’t leaked the story yet, but if it’s been on the morning news, it’s leaked, so …”

  “Where are the news trucks?”

  “Exactly.”

  “That’s really weird.”

  “The reward money for the last case fell through.”

  Lola’s arms fell to her sides. Her jaw dropped. Perfect again.

  “What do you mean the reward money fell through?” She flailed her arms to the cadence of her anger. “We were hired to find the kid and we found the kid.”

  “Parents have refused to pay.”

  “Trike, they can’t do that. They signed a fucking contract. We can sue them.”

  “Already talked to the lawyer. We could sue them, and probably win, but we’d be out way more than we can afford if we lose.”

  “Trike. This is a fucking problem. I need that money for rent.”

  “Like I’m independently wealthy. This Joyce Case is a police department thing, so we’ll start getting our stipend on Thursday.”

  “You know that’s not enough. Trike, what the fuck am I going to do?”

  “I don’t know. Finish that Waterhouse copy. Grab a weekend shift at the Utrecht store, or that bookstore downtown where that guy is always giving you the eye. Start teaching self-defense classes at the Y again, accept one of those junk credit-card offers, or, I don’t know, marry a hedge fund manager and kill him in his sleep. That one’s a win-win for society.”

  “Trike, that’s not funny.”

  “Frankly, Lola, it’s still two hours before I usually wake up, these fucking patches are giving me fucked-up dreams, and I can’t seem to control my hands. I’m not even sure I was telling a joke … though past evidence would imply it was half a joke at best.”

  “Trike, what the fuck am I going to do? I’m not going to make rent. Again.”

  “I don’t know, pay what you’ve got now and ask for an extension. If need be, we’ll send Max over. Max’ll convince your landlord of, you know, whatever. And I’ve got practically an entire floor open in my house if you need it. We’ll work something out.”

  “Yeah, well, even if I lived on the second floor of your place, I’d still have to risk my health and well-being walking through the first, and yes, an outdoor ladder is out of the question.”

  “Batpole?”

  “What do we do now?” she said with the malevolent cool of a sniper.

  “I’m going to head back to the office, where Max’ll make sure I don’t smoke, and wrap my brain around the crime scene. Then I’m going to talk to The Butler.”

  “There’s a butler?”

  “Welcome to lives of the rich and rich. You go ahead and finish your jog. It’ll be at least an hour before we get in touch with you. And keep the weirdness of the news trucks in your head.”

  “Okay. Talk to you then.” Lola took off jogging.

  Trike started toward his car but stopped after a step to turn and watch Lola jog away. He saw her for 2.7 seconds before the curve of the road took her out of sight.

  Trike walked around to the passenger side of his beige 1993 Nissan Stanza. He leaned all his weight on the joint of the front passenger door, lifted the handle, and tried to pull the door open. The physics of the ordeal required a precise balance. Twice the forces diverged with such vigor that Trike almost toppled to the ground. Eventually he got the door open, but only wide enough for him to reach his arm to the inside handle on the back passenger door. He popped that door open, crawled through it to the front seat, slammed both passenger side doors closed, started the car, and drove to the office.

  ROOM IN BROOKLYN AT NOON

  Lola jogged home from the Joyce House. Showered. Dressed. Ate breakfast. She planned to spend the time between her jog and meeting Max for coffee and a shake working at the cafe, on the sweater she promised Janice for her birthday. But with no reward money, she couldn’t spare the eight to twelve dollars for tea and baked goods. Lola thought in blocks of time the way Trike thought in step-by-step plans. A disrupted block unsettled her. Here was a three-hour disrupted block.

  She also had three unfinished paintings to work on: a Waterhouse copy her boss at the art supply store she stopped working for when reward money was coming through assured her would sell for four hundred dollars at least; an experiment attempting to merge Rothko’s pulse with Mondrian’s line into a singular expression of the sexual tension between reason and intuition; and another exploration through combination, combining the color palette of Van Gogh with the composition style of Hopper.

  A small table came into the painting from the bottom left edge. A woman in a chair faced away from the viewer. Her right hand rested on the table. Her left hand was in front of her face. There was a solid sink in the background to the right
side of the table and an undefined rectangle in the background above the woman; could be a cupboard, could be a window. The rest of the canvas was empty but for indications of erased charcoal lines.

  Lola started it in a fury, consumed by an image raging through her consciousness like a neglected tengu. As it careened through the contents of her mind it picked up yokai of Hopper’s Room in Brooklyn and Van Gogh’s Noon: Rest from Work (After Millet). By two a.m. the canvas was blocked. She was up at nine the next morning, and by the time she was completely exhausted at six, she had the table, the figure, and the sink.

  And then a case came up. The Case of the Usher’s Abode or Mr. Allen’s Estate Wine or some other long case. For six months, she could only chip away.

  After the case, stuff came up, though she couldn’t say with any certainty exactly what composed said stuff. Ephemeral traces of the tengu haunted her thoughts, but never when she sat around at home with nothing to do. And then the painting was two years old.

  Now, Lola sat at home with nothing to do, and, of the three painting possibilities for her disrupted block of time, it was the only one she could imagine working on. She set it up on the easel and thought about it.

  Lola didn’t use words to think about a painting. She saw options and their assessments in unified images. She saw the range of blues integrated with their emotions, implications, and references, and she saw the paths of possible lines with their emotions, implications, and references, and she saw the depths of texture with their emotions, implications, and references, all in a warped-geometry stop-motion film.

  She considered the space that could be a cupboard or a window. A cupboard would allow her to use one color, something that could interact directly and boldly with the figure, especially if she went back to the figure and complicated its range of shades and hues. She could also reference the sky in Noon, or invert the reference top-to-bottom and use the shade of Noon’s hay. The Van Gogh blue was not far from the sky in Room in Brooklyn and there was something to the idea of encasing the sky in a kitchen cupboard. It could balance out the sink and create compositional permission to be bolder with form and color.

  A window could give her the same color, just with a different frame. She could even use Van Gogh’s brushstrokes there to contrast the Hopper of the rest of the painting. The question was whether she wanted the world of the painting to have an outside.

  She also had the space on the right above the sink. It could hold a slice of window, perhaps with the sky the color of the hay, if she made the cupboard blue. Or she could reverse the colors, since the painting, as yet, had no visual precedent for unexpected coloration. But choosing typical coloration would limit the impact of an already constrained composition. Was there something important about a scene of sitting and looking that excluded the exterior?

  If Lola shrank the length of the cupboard by a couple of inches, she could add a window frame with a small slice of atypically colored sky to the other side, making the exterior just a slice of color; the red of the outside buildings from Room or the bright yellow from Noon.

  The image satisfied Lola enough that she noted her decisions in charcoal on the canvas. If nothing else it was a starting point for the next phase of the work. She squared off the cupboard and wrote, “Cupboard, VG Blue,” in its middle. Then she ruled in the window frame. In the 1½ inches of the canvas enframed, she wrote vertically, “H. Building Red/VG Bright Hay Yellow.”

  The next step was creating the right blue. From Noon, she had a sense of it. As mixing went, it wouldn’t take long. She checked the time. She had less than two hours before coffee and a shake. It would be tight. Even if she nailed the color in her first few combinations, she never once opened a tube of paint without eventually needing a sponge and a shower. The painting had waited this long. She put it away.

  She turned on the radio and sat down on the couch with Janice’s sweater. She had time to make good progress on that. She made tea. Couldn’t find a station. It had been her plan to knit anyway. Tea. She’d been best friends with Janice forever. Turned on her computer for its music. It was the perfect pattern. Speakers were somewhere. It would look fantastic on Janice. Shuffle sucked. Where was the pattern? The completely wrong ambient noise. Wrong gauge.

  Sometimes. You just can’t do what you ought to.

  Lola put the sweater aside. She still had over an hour before coffee and a shake. She still needed to figure out the soldering iron before she could work on her sculpture made from old coat hangers, and figuring out a soldering iron was not something she wanted to tackle with a ticking clock. And she didn’t want to tackle the bike-frame-and-typewriter sculpture when unable to devote a full day to it.

  “The Joyce Case,” Lola thought.

  She got up from the couch and walked to the large full bookcase against the opposite wall, next to the small TV. She moved an old parking meter that she’d seen lying on the street and simply could not just have left there. Extracted Ulysses from the bottom of the pile next to the case.

  “Might as well start this,” she thought, bringing it back to the couch. “Trike’s been bugging me about reading it since he lent it to me, let’s say, two years, six months, three weeks, four days, seven hours, forty-two minutes, eighteen seconds, and thirteen nanoseconds ago. On a Tuesday. In the rain. And the Cubs won.”

  She sat down on the couch. “Said he just wants me to try it. ‘Won’t think any less of you if you don’t like it,’ he said, ‘Ulysses isn’t for everybody.’ Well, we’ll see.”

  Lola opened the book, finding a piece of card stock with a message in Trike’s barely legible scrawl. It said, she guessed, “This wasn’t written to be understood in a single reading, but to slowly reveal itself over many readings, the way the core and substance of an individual is revealed over years of friendship, but after the first read, at the very least, you realize why reincarnation is believable.”

  “Okay,” Lola muttered to the bookmark, “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  JUST BE PATIENT

  Trike’s office was on the third floor of a building on the limn of the financial district and the upper-middle-class residential district. Once a newspaper’s offices, it now housed lawyers, accountants, and consultants, as well as a violin repair shop, an online used bookseller, a Tarot card reader, and Trike’s two-room office.

  Max looked up from his desk in the anteroom when Trike walked in.

  Max was broad-shouldered and barrel-chested. He had a square jaw and wide palms with short, thick fingers. Though his physique lacked the definition modern aesthetics preferred, any experienced brawler worth his weight in medical tape would know to keep an eye on Max if things got ugly. He wore a navy suit, a white shirt, and a gray tie.

  “Hit me with the mail while I get my shit together, Max. We got a missing persons,” Trike said.

  As Max talked, Trike took off his hat and coat and hung them on the rack in his office.

  Max said, “Eight pieces of junk mail, an invitation to the annual municipal city ball, three death threats …” He took a good look at Trike slowly re-erecting himself from what might very well have been a toe-touch. “I’m going to tell them to just be … patient.”

  “Haven’t had enough coffee to deal with your lip. Dying for a cigarette,” Trike said, punching in the passcode on the locked cabinet of documents he chose not to memorize.

  Max continued, “Finally … a letter from the P. E. Allen O’Pine Memorial Conference on Detecting.”

  “I suppose I could be proud they spent the time and money to reject me twice, but I choose to be bitter and indignant,” Trike said, unlocking all the drawers in his desk.

  “This is an invitation—”

  “To spend five hundred dollars to socialize with flaccid theorizers regurgitating cowardly clichés while drinking overpriced house martinis and—”

  Max held up his hand. “To give your Purloined Letter presentation.”

  “No fuckin’ way.”

  Max shrugged. “Quote: ‘Due to a
n unforeseen cancellation, we humbly request your presence as a presenter at this year’s conference.’ End quote.”

  “Unforeseen cancellation? Max, nobody cancels on this conference. It is the most prestigious detecting conference in the country.”

  “Prestige is a … concern, now?” Max asked.

  Trike held himself up on a bar in the door jamb, with his feet out straight in front of him, while he talked. “Seventy-one-point-four percent of presenters are instantly promoted, obviously not a relevant fact to us, but thirty-two percent subsequently secure publishing contracts and twenty-one percent of those who publish become international consultants, which, well, we’ll revisit the issue of our relationship to prestige later, but, more urgently, one hundred percent of presenters are paid a ten-thousand-dollar honorarium. Either ‘unforeseen circumstances’ is a euphemism for ‘some unlucky motherfucker up and died right before his decades of thankless toil were going to pay off’ or something profoundly fucking weird is going on.”

  “Want me to decline?” Max asked.

  Trike dropped from the bar. “Shit, no. Ten Gs is ten Gs. And the conference is in town this year, so it’s not a potential detriment to our current case. Just make a mental note, that when something totally fucking weird happens, I totally called it,” Trike said, going to the coffee maker.

  “Noted,” Max said. “Speaking of the case, boss. How’s it look?”

  At the coffee maker, Trike grabbed the three-quarters-full carafe and filled a plain black mug. “I opened a secret panel in the study revealing a locked door and the FBI showed up and forbade us from investigating it.”

  Max’s face fell off a cliff.

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought. Anyway, I’m going to my desk to drink coffee, analyze the shit out of my current data, and try not to remember how crackerjack a cigarette would be. You start trying to figure out what the feds could possibly be hiding behind the aforementioned door. Looks like it’s the kind of thing where you gotta know a guy, and you, Max, you know guys.”