THIRTY-ONE
Joe and Cindy Javonovich lived on the northeast side of the city in one of those Gahanna subdivisions where the houses all had three-car garages that were at least one-third full of junk. Theirs was a vaguely mauve-ish stone affair with a two-story entry and a large wooden table that featured a bowl of blown-glass fruit just inside the door. I complimented the fruit as she invited me in, mostly because she seemed to expect a compliment of some kind.
She was tall and artificially blond and wearing a leather blazer and heeled ankle boots in her own home, so it was pretty clear that we were not going to be compatible as people. But she made a mean cup of Earl Grey and she had the air about her of someone who was very willing to dish.
“I thought about murdering him,” she said. “I mean, not seriously? But sort of seriously. A little rat poison in his green smoothie? Ha!” She laughed. It was not apparent how serious she was, exactly. “But he never met her, never even talked to her on the phone. It was all just in the stupid app. The worst part? My brother-in-law works for that stupid start-up, too.”
“Um,” I said.
Addy Marie’s profile was up on my phone, between us on the kitchen table. This one didn’t have any blown glass on it.
“I found their little conversation by accident. The accident being that I thought it would be a good idea to snoop through his phone. My therapist told me to be honest about that. The accident part.”
“That’s healthy.”
She sighed.
“So you accidentally thought that looking through Joe’s phone would bring you peace.”
“Yes! That’s all I actually wanted. Peace. See, you understand. Why is it so hard for everyone else to understand?”
“What happened then?”
“Well, I read their whole dirty conversation and saw the pictures they were sending each other. And she’s—okay, so she’s young. But there is no way she’s prettier than me. Hips like a crinoline. Joe never got to fuck a greaser in high school so all I can figure is that’s what it’s about.”
She was a lovely, lovely person. “Okay, what then?”
“I told him what I saw, of course, and he swore up and down it was nothing, it was just the stupid app, that she contacted him and he was just playing a game and got caught up in it. But I called bullshit on that. He gave her money. And one thing you should know about my husband is that he doesn’t part with his money over nothing. Throwing money around makes him feel better than everybody else,” she said. I suspected the same could be said about her. But maybe that was why they were so perfectly miserable together.
I said, “What was the money for?”
Cindy waved a hand like a swarm of gnats had alighted from the table. “Her rent, is what she said. It’s not like Joe would actually ever help someone in need but a pretty girl says she needs help with her rent and suddenly he’s St. Francis?”
“Your metaphors are very creative.”
“Thank you.”
“But he never actually met her.”
“No.”
“Spoke on the phone?”
“No. Just chatting in the app.”
“When was the last time?”
“The minute I found out, I made Joe swear he would never use the app again. I made him delete it off his phone. And I check it on the computer sometimes, just to make sure.”
“And he didn’t, I don’t know, create another account without you knowing?”
“No,” she said firmly. “Besides, even if he did? There’s no way she’d ever talk to him again.”
“Why’s that?”
Cindy gave me a tense little smile.
I thought about the seemingly disparate clues I had so far, trying to find something that would fit. With Joe’s name appearing on Addy Marie’s list of recent connections, that meant that they’d talked as recently as two weeks ago. “Would you be willing to show me the conversations with her?”
Cindy was more than willing; she got out her iPad and gleefully logged into Joseph J’s account. “I’m going to start dinner. Joe will be home soon.”
“You still make this motherfucker dinner?” I said as I skimmed the messages from about three months ago, which was when the majority of them had been sent.
Joseph J: I’m rock hard just imagining it
Addy Marie S: Imagining what?
Joseph J: You sitting on my face
Addy Marie S: 
Cindy said, “My marriage is not a failure.”
That didn’t answer the question, but at the same time, it did.
The mystery of the recent communication between Addy and Joe was solved with a series of messages from Cindy via Joe’s account:
Joseph J: Slut
Joseph J: Slut
Joseph J: Slut
It appeared she sent them once a week, and that Addison was smart enough not to respond. The point at which Cindy had wrested control of the account was obvious; at the beginning of January, I found this exchange:
Joseph J: Hey where are you
Addy Marie S: At home, why?
Joseph J: Lying slut. I’m standing right behind you
I said, “You went to the nightclub, didn’t you?”
The woman that Wyatt had poured into a cab after she lost her mind at Addison.
“Yes,” Cindy said. “And you know what? I’m not sorry. She deserved it. I wasn’t about to fall for her little ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about’ act.”
“That’s what she said?”
“Isn’t that what you’d say?”
If a drunk and angry stranger accosted me while I was at work? Probably. Cindy was chopping asparagus with violence in mind.
“But she never sent another message after that, so clearly she did know,” she added.
An expensive engine pulled into the driveway—because the garage was full of crap, I assumed—and Joseph J himself entered through the front door, dropping his coat and briefcase on the table with the fake fruit. “Cindy, there’s a car on the street—oh,” he said when he saw me. His BusPass pictures were clearly of a younger Joseph J; in the present era, he was puffy and greying and wore a yellow-and-grey striped tie with a blob of mayo on it. He looked at me nervously. “Cindy?”
“This is Roxane, and she’s a detective, and you’re going to tell her all about the slut from the dating app,” Cindy said. She kept her voice amazingly even.
Joe glanced at his wife, then at me, then back to Cindy. “A police detective?”
“Yes,” she said.
Everyone was interested in making me seem more important than I was this week, but only to further their own agendas.
I nodded gravely.
Joe spluttered, “I haven’t talked to her! Cindy, you know I haven’t. I haven’t! Did she say I talked to her?”
It was pretty clear to me that while the man had terrible judgment, he was being truthful now. So I left them to their dinner of root vegetables and marital discord and sat in the car on their dark suburban street, which felt like every other suburban street I’d ever sat in the car on. That was either what was wrong with suburbs, or it was what people liked so much about them.
I cranked the heat and thought about the days when I kept a flask in the glove box along with my gun. Not exactly a better time, but a shot of whiskey sounded good right about now. I was cold and discouraged. Addison Stowe didn’t make any sense to me. From what her friends had told me, she wasn’t the attention-seeking type. Intensely private, it was hard to imagine her sending the cat-face/tongue emoji combo to someone she hadn’t met. And even if she had, would she really continue down this path of flirting with men online even after the spectacle at Nightshade when Cindy Javonovich showed up?
Anyone was capable of anything.
This was something I had to make a point of reminding myself on the regular.
I checked my phone to see if there were messages from Addy Marie’s other chat mates.
Rajit M: Hi, sorry, meant to change my relationship status! Seeing someone right now. Good luck!
A curiously polite response, given the general level of sleaze that seemed to abound in this app.
BD E: What are u drinking tonight?
The message was accompanied by a picture of a bottle of Yakima Fresh gripped in a rough, blunt-fingered hand that floated above a granite countertop, grey, with a herringbone tile floor in the background.
I thought it looked familiar, in the anonymous suburban way I was just contemplating.
It could be anywhere.
Then I realized that it was familiar, actually. I’d spent quite a bit of time the other day at that counter, while Elise Hazlett folded laundry.
“Brock, you dirty dog,” I said.