With a groan Charlie opened his eyes. He was on the ground, and someone was leaning over him. An astronaut? He blinked, and the figure resolved into the gardener in his silvery-gray coat, the air tank his leaf blower. He was dabbing at Charlie’s nose with a crumpled tissue, now spotted with bright red blood.
“You want I should call the police?” the gardener asked.
“I am the police.” Charlie put his hand to his nose and gingerly moved it from side to side. He didn’t think it was broken. When that happened, it felt crunchier. He was just lucky that he had landed next to the walkway instead of on it.
Jared was leaning against the concrete wall with his head in his hands. Now he stared at Charlie. “Wait. You’re not Scott?” If he was acting, he was doing a good job of it.
“No.” He slowly got to his feet, ignoring how the world swayed and righted itself. The gardener stretched out his arms as if he were either going to catch Charlie or prevent him from hitting Jared in turn. Charlie pinched just below the bridge of his nose, but when he swiped the fingers from his other hand underneath, the blood already seemed to have stopped.
There was a way to mumble his name so it was a single blur. He did that now, since he wasn’t exactly here in an official capacity. “I’m Charliecarlson.” Then he turned to the gardener. “It’s okay. You can go back to your leaf blowing. Everything’s fine.”
“I’m really sorry, dude,” Jared offered, looking miserable. “Are you a real cop?”
Charlie started to nod, then stopped because he didn’t like the way it made him feel.
Jared shook his hand, winced, and blew on his knuckles. “I’ve never done anything like that before. It’s just that I thought you were the guy my girlfriend left me for.”
“Is her name Betty? Betty Eastman?”
“I called her Bets, but yeah, that’s her.” His eyes got wide. “Why? Is she in trouble?”
“Can you tell me where she is?” Charlie persisted.
Jared made a noise that was not quite a laugh. “I wish I knew. Awhile back she left me for some guy named Scott.”
“We’re looking for her because she may have witnessed an accident.”
“The last day I saw her was back in April. April fourteenth.”
Charlie blinked. That was the day Scott had died. “Would you mind if we went inside? I kind of feel like I need to sit down.” He also wanted to see the interior of the apartment for himself, look for any clues that Jared was lying.
“Oh, shoot, of course. I’m sorry, man.”
The small apartment was decorated in flesh tones—pinks and beiges and ivories. Everything was jammed together. They walked in through the kitchen, where gold-speckled linoleum peeled up at the corners. What passed for a dining room was a space about five feet across, just big enough for a tiny round table and two armless chairs. In the corner, a fake fern provided the only spot of color. The whole thing was fairly tidy. Messy, it would have been claustrophobic.
Jared offered him some water, which Charlie declined. They sat at opposite ends of a small cream-colored couch.
“How did you and Betty meet?” Charlie corrected himself. “Bets.”
“We had an anthropology class together. I told her I liked her laugh. Of course, I liked a lot more than that. But I figured ‘laugh’ was the best thing to say.” Jared smiled at the memory. He seemed as pretty as a Ken doll, but just as empty-headed. “Have you ever met her?”
“I’ve seen her picture.”
“It’s not the same. Sometimes she would talk to me and I wouldn’t be able to hear her.” Jared raised his knuckles to his mouth and absently kissed them. “I would just watch her mouth move and get lost.”
That certainly sounded like the basis of a solid relationship. “Why did you think she was with this guy you mentioned? This Scott?”
“He’s an accountant. She got a part-time job working for him. An internship. She said she was getting hands-on experience. Hands-on.” He snorted. “Now I know what that meant. And then she started sneaking around, being mad at me, pushing me away if I even tried to hug her.” His mouth twisted.
“Did she know that Scott was married?”
“She wouldn’t care about that.” He shrugged. “She’s very single-minded. Her full name is Elizabeth, but when she moved in with me she started calling herself Bets. She would say that with her, all bets were off. She said if you saw what you wanted, you should just go for it.” His ears reddened. “That’s how we ended up together. I sort of had a girlfriend, but Bets said she knew she wanted me. At the time she was dating her manager at Taco Time and he was married. When I met Bets, I kind of let her think I had more money than I did. After she moved in with me, she never paid for anything. She never even asked if she could. She was very good at getting people to buy her things.”
Mia had told Charlie that Scott had left her in debt. How much of that money had gone to Betty, gone on her back or in her mouth or, for all Charlie knew, up her nose?
Jared encircled one wrist with the thumb and middle finger of the other hand. “One day she came home wearing this diamond bracelet.”
“A diamond bracelet?” In his mind’s eye, Charlie saw the diamond ring go skittering across the floor of Mia’s basement.
“She got mad when I asked about it, where it had come from. Tried to tell me it was an old family heirloom.” Jared snorted. “Which was such a crock. I know she grew up with nothing and nobody. Just bouncing around from one foster family to another.”
Unexpectedly, Charlie felt a flash of sympathy.
“She started being gone a lot, and when she came home her mouth was swollen, like from kissing. And I’d see her talking on her phone and she would be all giggly and flirty, and then when she saw me she would hang up.”
“Did she tell you she was leaving you?”
“No. She just didn’t come home that night. And the next day she sent me an e-mail. She said she wasn’t coming back, that I should just forget about her, that she would only cause me unhappiness.” He snorted. “Like leaving me wasn’t going to hurt.”
“Have you talked to her since then?”
“No.”
“Communicated with her in any way?”
Jared shook his head.
“Let me ask you something,” Charlie said slowly. “And think about it before you answer. Are you 100 percent certain it was Bets who sent that e-mail?”
“Who else would know my e-mail address?”
“Just think about it.”
Jared was only able to keep still for a few seconds. Then the words tumbled out of him. “It sounded like her. She was always kind of dramatic. She should have majored in acting instead of accounting. But she said she liked accounting because it was about money, and she’d never had any.”
“Did you keep the e-mail?”
“No. I deleted it.”
That meant Charlie couldn’t look at the IP address, at least not without a warrant. And since this wasn’t an official case, he wasn’t going to get one.
“Did you e-mail her back?”
“I did a couple of days later, but it bounced back, saying it was an unknown user. She must have closed the account.”
“So she just packed up and moved out and left you nothing but an e-mail?”
“No. She left her things here.”
A chill went down Charlie’s spine. It was beginning to sound as if someone just wanted Jared to think Betty had left.
“In the e-mail she said I could just sell her stuff at a garage sale or give it to Goodwill—that she didn’t need it any longer.”
“And did you?”
“Not yet. I put it all in a box in the closet.”
“Can I see it?”
“Sure.” He got up and came back a few seconds later with an old banana box.
Charlie sorted through it quickly. Nothing but clothes, a few textbooks, makeup, a dozen photos of herself, both with and without Jared. Charlie lifted up a few pieces of clothing. They all seemed absurdly small. Although maybe on Betty they had been just right.
Jared held a blouse to his nose and sniffed deeply. “They still smell like her.”
Had Betty run because she was worried she would be next?
Or had she run because she was the one who did it?
Or had she been unable to run?