14

Untapped Books & Café @untappedwilliamsburg ∙ July 14

Don’t sweat it! We’ve got cold A/C and hot, hearty meals. You know you want to see what Parker’s got cooking in the kitchen today! #Breakfastchili #yummy #Williamsburg

Parker crossed his arms over his chest. “We’ll figure something out. No way can you leave on Wednesday,” he said. Like me, Parker had a slight build. He did not look intimidating, even when he scowled and brandished one of his enormous chef’s knives at anyone who wandered into his kitchen if they didn’t belong.

“I know, it sucks.”

“It more than sucks,” he replied. “Wednesday’s my birthday. I’m planning a little get-together and I thought you’d join us. There’s a new Italian café over on Montrose that I’ve been dying to try. I heard they have a terrific crab and goat cheese ravioli, and they make a divine Limoncello cake.”

“Oh no, Parker. I didn’t know your birthday was coming up. My aunt could not have worse timing.”

“Can’t you convince her to let you stick around for a few more days?”

“I already tried,” I told him. “She’s not used to having someone sharing her space. I think she wanted me out yesterday but is too Southern to say so. If I can’t find something fast, I’m not gonna have much of a choice.”

“Come crash with me until you can find your own place,” he urged.

“Thanks for the offer, but you’ve told me horror stories about your apartment, remember? The cockroaches the size of dinner plates?” I held my hands out a foot apart. “What did you name them, again?”

“Randy and Jose,” he said.

“And don’t you have like a dozen roommates?”

“Two. Only two. But Suz is hardly ever home and Tony’s real quiet. Sometimes I forget he’s even there.”

“You’re awful sweet, but I’m pretty sure your roommates don’t want another person in the apartment. Besides, what would Hazel think?” It broke my heart to have to leave Brooklyn, but I couldn’t imagine putting up with the kind of living arrangements all my friends seemed to take for granted.

“Hazel wouldn’t mind. But you’re right, my roomies would,” he assured me. “We’re packed in like sardines as it is.”

“Nothing is set in stone yet,” I assured him. “I’ve still got a few days to come up with something, and Izzy said she could find us something. I don’t know if she can do so on such short notice, but she’s surprised me before.”

“That’s the spirit,” he said with a wide grin. “Hey, how about we go try that Limoncello cake right now? We can pretend it’s my birthday today.”

“I’d love to, but you’re working, and I’ve got plans with Izzy. Another time. Promise.”

I had seventy-two hours to come up with an affordable place to live in Brooklyn, not to mention solving Vickie’s murder. I had enough on my plate, but Parker’s birthday celebration needed to be more than a dinner with a few friends. Who didn’t love a surprise birthday party? I could arrange the whole thing, with Izzy’s help. She was the absolute bomb at throwing parties. She once organized a wake that had gotten so packed, we had to turn people away. If she could do that well with a wake, imagine what she could do with a birthday.

I patted Parker’s arm. “Chin up. It’ll be all right.” I pulled a few crumpled bills out of my wallet and laid them beside my plate to cover the beer and tip.

Izzy wasn’t out front in the bookstore, in the tiny restroom, or out back by the dumpsters. I stuck my head into Todd’s office on the offhand chance that she was in there. It was a dark, dank room with no windows, filled with an old army surplus desk and the overflow of stock or inventory that didn’t fit in the storage room next door. On the desk was a computer that hailed from the era of beige cases and big, clunky monitors. From the doorway I could hear its fan running.

Todd’s desk ran along the wall. Since the computer no longer had a working Wi-Fi card, it had to be physically plugged into the router mounted above his head. I’d once asked Todd why he never locked his office door, but he’d just laughed at me and said anyone so hard up that they would steal his sweet setup was welcome to it. That might have been the most magnanimous and humanitarian thing I’d ever heard him say.

“Knock, knock,” I said, even though the door was open.

He glanced over his shoulder at me before returning to his keyboard. “Odessa, you’re not on the schedule.”

“Nope. Have you seen Izzy?”

“I’m sure she’s around. She always is. Hey, since you’re here, something came for you.” He rifled through his desk and came up with a padded mailer. He tossed it to me. “Shut the door on your way out.”

Once I was back in the hall, I ripped open the envelope and upended it. An Untapped Books & Café name tag fell out into my hand. I’d been wearing temporary stickers ever since I started—had it been less than six weeks? It felt like a lot longer—but now I had a legit plastic name tag with my name on it and everything. If I believed in signs, I’d think this was the universe’s way of telling me everything was gonna work out.

A man I didn’t know was waiting for me as I emerged from the hallway into the bookstore. “Odessa?” he asked. He was tall, close to six foot, maybe a hair over. He had a neatly trimmed goatee and whiter-than-white teeth. Toothpaste commercial white. His dark, almost black, hair was slicked back so it was hard to tell how long it was. He wore a soft-looking ringer T-shirt with the silhouette of a bigfoot under the logo for a summer camp. Both arms were covered in black-and-white tattoos down to the wrist.

I’d never seen him before in my life.

To the best of my knowledge, I didn’t owe anyone any money, so he wasn’t a bill collector. He didn’t live in my aunt’s building and he wasn’t one of the dozens of friends Izzy had introduced me to. I hadn’t waited on him before—I would have remembered him—but he could have been at one of the other tables and escaped my attention if it had been busy, and he could have seen my hand-lettered stick-on name tag. Part of my brain screamed, Stranger, danger! but my curiosity was piqued.

“Do I know you?” I asked.

He pointed to himself. “Raleigh.”

“Nice to meetcha, Raleigh, but my friend’s waiting for me.” I was half tempted to stick around and get to know this Raleigh fellow a little better, but I had things to do. “I’m off this morning, but you should go ask the cook for an order of breakfast chili. Trust me.” I caught a glimpse of Izzy’s silhouette outside the door, and continued, “Sorry, but I gotta go.” I hurried out the front door onto the sunny sidewalk.

“Morning,” Izzy said as soon as I stepped outside. “We need to dash or we’ll be late.” Her hair was still aquamarine, but now there was a bold white streak that ran from the middle of one eyebrow to the back of her head.

Izzy started walking. I let her lead the way because, as usual, I had no idea where we were going. I could find my way around, and I’d gotten pretty good at navigating subway lines and city streets, but I didn’t even know what neighborhood we were heading into, much less Amanda’s address.

“I texted you to let you know I was on my way.”

“My phone’s out of minutes.”

“That explains why you didn’t pick up the phone last night when Castillo tried calling you from my phone, but you should still get texts.”

She shrugged. “I’m out of data, too.”

I pulled my phone out and checked my account balance. I had exactly $21.32. I used PayPal to send her $20. “I’ve got a little extra this week, so I contributed to recharge-Izzy’s-phone fund.”

“You didn’t have to do that,” she insisted. “Save your money. We’ll need it for our new apartment.”

“About that, I talked to Aunt Melanie last night and she doesn’t want me sticking around.”

“Did she say that?” Izzy asked.

“Not in so many words, but she offered to buy me a bus ticket back home as long as I leave by Wednesday.”

Izzy frowned. “That’s not very long from now.”

“I know,” I agreed.

She flapped her hand in a dismissive gesture. “Don’t worry, I’ll come up with something.”

“In three days?” I asked skeptically.

“Have I ever let you down? I’ve got this. And seriously, keep your money.”

“Too late,” I told her. “And I know you won’t transfer it back, because you don’t want it getting eaten up in fees. Use it to buy more minutes for your phone and then you can call Vincent.”

“Maybe I don’t want to call Vince,” she said.

“He’s worried about you. What’s going on with you two?”

“I don’t want to talk about it. But what was he doing calling me from your phone?”

I shouldn’t push. It was none of my business. Well, it was sorta my business, in a roundabout fashion. They were my friends. Plus, Castillo was a good guy. I didn’t want to let the subject drop, and was glad that she’d finally opened the door a crack by asking about him. “I bumped into him last night.”

“Oh, you did?” Her tone of voice sounded bored, but I could tell by the way her shoulders stiffened and her pace slowed by a hair that I had her attention.

“He was moonlighting as a security guard at an art gallery that my aunt took me to.”

“Yeah, he does that sometimes.” She slowed down enough that I could almost keep up with her.

With the difference in our heights, Izzy had a longer stride than I did. I usually had to jog to stick close to her heels whenever we walked anywhere. It was good exercise, I grudgingly admitted, but I was enjoying the brief respite. “He asked about you.”

“Uh-huh. And what did you tell him?”

“Nothing. I hadn’t seen you since work, and I have no idea where you’re staying.” I paused, but she didn’t take the bait and offer any new information. “I told him maybe your phone was dead, and that’s why you weren’t picking up.”

“Good thinking.”

“Except he’s a cop, Izzy. He’s nosy. You’d liked something on Twitter a few minutes earlier, so he knew you were online.”

“Oh.” She chewed her bottom lip.

“Just call him.”

“I can’t,” she said.

“Why not? What’s going on? Was he brusque to you when he was questioning us after the escape room? Because that’s his job. He did it to me, too. He can’t give you special treatment. He probably has to show the powers that be that he’s impartial or they’ll pull him off the case and whoever they replace him with would undoubtably be worse.”

“I know that,” Izzy said. “Being impartial isn’t the problem. He’s not calling to ask me out. He wants to talk with me. Like talk, talk. At the station.” She turned to me. The soft tissue around her bloodshot eyes was puffy and pink. A tear sparkled in the corner of her eye. “He wants to bring me in for further questioning, Odessa. And he told me to get a lawyer.”

“What?”

She nodded. “He thinks I had something to do with Vickie’s murder.”

I stood there flabbergasted in the middle of the crosswalk until a car honked at me. I sidled out of the way, but continued to stare at Izzy. “That’s just silly. Vincent knows you’re innocent.”

“Sure, Vince does. But Detective Castillo isn’t convinced.” She grabbed my elbow and propelled me back onto the sidewalk. “Doesn’t help that the last thing I said to Vickie was ‘Knock yourself out’ and then someone bashed her over the head with our trophy. It looks bad.”

“I can talk to him.”

“And say what? Remind him that it’s impolite to accuse your girlfriend of murder, even if her fingerprints are all over the murder weapon?”

To be completely honest, I wished we’d never won that silly trophy. So much had happened in the last few days, it felt like the cornhole tournament was a lifetime ago. “Well, I know I didn’t kill Vickie and I know that you didn’t kill her . . .”

Izzy interrupted me. “Oh yeah? How do you know?”

“First and foremost, you might be capable of killing someone, in like a life-or-death situation, but you wouldn’t murder anyone. Besides, even if you hated Vicki Marsh with every fiber of your being—and you’re not a hateful person—you had no idea we were going to bump into her on Friday. It was my idea that we invite ourselves along to the escape room, not yours. And practically the whole time we were inside, we were together.”

Although, to be completely honest, I couldn’t be 1,000 percent sure about that last bit. I’d been paying attention to the room, not the people around me. Could Izzy have slipped back into the library when no one was looking to kill Vickie? Maybe. Would she have? No way.

“And you told Vince that?”

“When he questioned me, I had no idea he considered you a suspect. I’ll talk to him. And you should, too. Dodging his phone calls and refusing to come in doesn’t exactly scream ‘innocent.’ ”

She glowered at me. “It’s hard to have faith in the system when even my own boyfriend treats me like a criminal. The only way I’m voluntarily stepping foot in that station is with hard evidence that I’m innocent.”

I nodded. No wonder Izzy was pushing so hard to get me to look into Vickie’s murder. She wasn’t just a concerned friend or a bored busybody. She was a suspect, a prime one if Castillo thought she needed a lawyer. “So how do we get proof?” I asked.

“You tell me. You solved Bethany’s murder, even before anyone else believed that she was murdered. The way I see it, that makes you more qualified to solve Vickie’s death than anyone at the NYPD. And that includes Vince.”

I had a bad feeling about this.

“My money’s on Marlie, but I think we should talk to Amanda to cover all our bases,” she continued.

“You just want Marlie to be guilty because you hate apartment brokers,” I said.

“True, but to be fair, everybody hates apartment brokers.”