find out why she’s gone, what happened to her, I’d be fine. I could sleep.”
Ford leaned closer to her: “If you want my opinion, it was a money deal.”
“A money deal?”
“You knew her pretty well?” Ford asked.
“I did,” Fairy said.
“Then you gotta know she was rich.”
“I knew she was well-off.”
“Rich,” Ford insisted. “She told me that when her father was killed, she inherited, like, two million. She already had money from trusts her parents set up when she was small. She said they put in, like, ten thousand each, every year; during all those big stock market boom times in the nineties, she had a million of her own, before she inherited. So I know she had that much.”
“A lot more than I knew,” Fairy said.
“We joked about starting a club,” Ford said. His eyes drifted away, seeing another reality. “She’d back it, I’d run it. We’d bring in some dark music; change the scene around here. It would have been a moneymaker. ”
“Sounds wonderful,” Fairy said.
A rueful smile: “Yeah: she gets killed, and my life flashes in front of my eyes.” Ford looked at his watch: “Shoot. I gotta go, I’m late for work. Are you going to be around? Mary Janson?”
“I’ll be around,” Fairy said.
He leaned closer again. “You smell wonderful.”
She twiddled her fingers at him, and went on her way. “I’ll see you at the A1.”
Loren had been leaning against an old elm, listening. He caught Fairy down the sidewalk and said, “You smell wonderful.”
“I do.”
“You heard what he said.”
“Money,” she said. They seemed, now, to pick things out of each other’s minds.
“She must’ve talked it around,” Loren said. “You know how she liked to talk—and so, what happened is, she got some of these people all cranked up about starting a club, a new scene, but you know how conservative she really was; so it comes to the moment when she has to produce the cash, and she backs away.”
Fairy frowned: “How do you know so much about her?”
“Why, from you,” Loren said. “All you do is talk about her. All day, all the time.”
Back home, in bed, they made love in his cold, frantic way. Loren’s fingernails were an inch long, left scratches on her rib cage and thighs. And afterward, she said, “Ford knows.”
“Yes, he does. We should see him again; and some of the others. Patricia . . .”
“I don’t think she’d be involved,” Fairy said, tentatively.
“She’s involved,” Loren said, sitting up, the sheets falling to his waist, showing off his rib cage. His body was slender as a rake. “I can feel it. She was jealous of Frances. Her parents broke up, they don’t care whether she lives or dies. She’s over there by herself, nothing to do, no place to go. Frances had two parents who loved her, and the money. So the fat girl gets involved in this club thing, she’s going to be cool, she’s going to be a club owner, or operator, hang out with the bands . . . and Frances finally says she can’t have it. Can’t have any of it. Jealousy and hate.”
“Maybe.”
“For sure,” Loren said. “As far as I’m concerned, she’s on the list.”
“We have more scouting,” Fairy said. “We have Dick Ford, we have Roy Carter, and Patty . . .”
“So we take a week, and think. Then we move again. If we don’t, the energy will fritter away. Just fritter away.”
She talked to Ford again, for ten minutes, at the A1, passing through. And finally, a third time, just at closing. Went to the bar, drank a beer, and he touched her hand, and touched it again, and the knife was like the Sword of Freya in her belt. When she finished the beer, as Ford was calling to the patrons to “Drink up and go home,” she drifted out the back door and looked back, caught his eyes with hers.
The alley was paved with red bricks, covered with the grime of a century of wear; she wanted to lean on something while she waited, but everything was dirty, so instead, she