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“I PROBABLY SHOULD SIT down if I’m going to sit through more of Melanie Polewski’s prose stylings,” I said. “Where?”
“Oh yeah.” Emma got up from my yoga ball. Then Pat vacated the visitor chair and perched on the desk. Emma moved into the visitor chair. I went behind the desk and took my rightful position on the yoga ball.
“Ready?” Without waiting for an answer, Emma began to read aloud.
“Melody realized at last that Dolly was trying to kill her. Nothing was beyond her. Why was Melody too trusting, like a child with it’s favorite toy? How she regretted it! Dolly had snuck that poison into Melanie, and now she was going to die a terrible death in agony. Dolly cackled her evil laughter. The betrayal hung thickly in the air like fog in a witch’s enchanted valley.”
“Great. That must be where they got the idea I poisoned her with my shoes. Thanks a lot, Melanie.”
“Yeah, I bet that’s how come they arrested you,” Emma said.
“That, plus the police know that you knew about her allergies,” Pat added.
“I do not cackle,” I insisted. “And she should have written the betrayal hung in the air like smog in the San Fernando Valley or something. At least smog in the air would’ve lent a little Chandleresque flavor to it. Okay, I’m going to email Honey and tell her about this. She might have already seen it, but just to be on the safe side. So after ‘Melody’ gets poisoned by the treacherous ‘Dolly,’ does she manage to survive?”
“Of course,” Pat said. “She’s saved at the last minute by—”
“Oh, wait, let me guess. Knowing Melanie, I’d bet some thinly-disguised version of Donnie Gonsalves comes to save her and confesses it’s Melody he’s been in love with all along, right?”
“Amazing,” Pat chuckled. “Are you sure you haven’t seen the movie? Or are you just psychic?”
“That’s nothing.” Emma set her coffee cup down. “The story doesn’t end there. You should see what ‘Melody’ does afterwards. Or, should I say, who ‘Melody’ does.”
“Whom,” I corrected her. “So you think the prosecutor is really taking all of this at face value? Don't they realize it’s all complete fantasy? I mean, come on.”
“I never knew Melanie played for both teams,” Pat said. “I guess she really liked people.”
“I think she didn’t like anyone but herself. She loved to go around saying she was about the Inner Person, and she was above mundane details like sex and gender, but the thing she was really attracted to was the image of herself as irresistible. She liked to think of herself as this pulsing lodestar of sexual magnetism at the center the universe.”
“Pulsing lodestar of sexual magnetism. Nice.”
“It’s not nice, Pat. Don’t encourage her. When she says stuff like that, she just sounds some alien with a giant head.”
“And you know what a giant-headed alien sounds like because...?”
A rap on the door frame interrupted us. The man standing in my doorway had an indoorsy pallor and scruffy auburn stubble. He was kind of nice-looking in a nerdy way.
“Amalia Barda?” he asked.
“Right here.”
“Hi. I’m from the IT department. I need to talk to you about some unusual activity in a flagged user account.”
Pat and Emma cleared out so fast they practically left their coffee cups hovering in midair. The man watched them leave and then turned back to me.
“May I come in?” he asked.
“Of course. Yes. Please sit down.”
He pulled out the visitor chair and sat down across from me and I braced myself for a scolding.
“My name’s Atticus Marx.” He held up his ID badge for confirmation and blinked, probably adjusting to the dim light in my office. My two remaining fluorescent tubes had started to buzz and flicker, so I usually kept them switched off, relying on whatever illumination might filter through the window. Today the weather was overcast and drizzly, which gave my little office the ambience of a spider hole.
Then a broad grin lit up his face. It was the kind of smile you would give an old friend, which was odd. I was sure I had never met him before.
“So what is this about?” I tried to sound not defensive, and above all not guilty.
He leaned back in my visitor chair, beaming. “Someone’s been in Melanie Polewski’s user account. I think it was you.”
He certainly didn’t seem too bothered about my breaking into Melanie’s email.
“Melanie Polewski,” I said solemnly. “That was a terrible tragedy.”
“You were arrested for her murder,” he said cheerfully.
I couldn’t think of an appropriate response, so I pasted on a weak smile, hoping it didn’t make me look like a psychopath.
“Hey, arrested isn’t the same as convicted. You’re innocent until proven guilty.”
“It’s true. I was arrested. But they released me on my own recognizance. I’m a low flight risk, apparently. Also, since you brought it up, I didn’t actually commit the murder.”
He didn’t reply, apparently content to sit and beam at me. While in theory it might have been pleasant to have a nice-looking man gazing at me, under these circumstances it was a little unnerving. I pulled open my coffee drawer and saw Emma and Pat had indeed restocked my supply.
“Would you like a cup of coffee?” I asked.
“Amalia, if I were in your situation, I would do exactly what you did.”
Atticus Marx really was quite good-looking, I realized. Or perhaps I was simply dazzled by his correct use of the subjunctive.
“You would do what I did? What did I do, exactly?”
He laughed. “I would look through the victim’s email to see what I could find. It was clever of you to ask for the directory updates. If you’d just asked for her information, it would’ve seemed suspicious.”
“Not clever enough, obviously. So...am I in trouble?”
“No. I mean technically I guess you broke some rules, but like I said, I would’ve done the same thing. I’d try to find out what else had been going on in the victim’s life. So what’d you find? What do you think happened to her?”
“I don’t know. Melanie was impulsive, but... Listen, I better not talk about it. My lawyer told me to zip it.”
“I understand. Hey, coffee sounds great, thanks for the offer, but you know what? Let me get it. I’ve come in here and interrupted your day, scared your friends away and everything. I want to make it up to you. I think the café’s still open. You have a few minutes?”