The Bright Spot Read online

  “How do you do,” I said. “I’m Nick Bainbridge.”

  “Deena Kennemeyer. It was so nice of you to come on such short notice. I’ve been desperate to talk to you. You were the last person to see poor Ed alive.” She didn’t shake my hand. She took it. Her long fingers laced through mine, and there we were, hand in hand. The She-Creature couldn’t have done it better. She was my height, a little over six foot, and smelled like she might’ve just stepped out of the shower. Her hair was rumpled, still damp at the roots. I wonder how many miles she’d run to get here.

  She smiled a smile of dismissal at Murphy and Jackson, and they practically evaporated before I figured out they were leaving. They were just my ride. I was being summoned by a woman who used the police as a limo service. If she asked them, they’d probably do windows. With her running on the other side, there’d be no shortage of volunteer squeegees.

  “Thank you so much, Officers. I’ll see Mr. Bainbridge gets home safe and sound.” Hand in hand, we ascended the remaining steps—six of them, big broad ones, one in each of the pastels. I wasn’t even in the house yet, and I was already in over my head.

  Murphy trudged back down to the cruiser, the soul of discretion. You had to admire him. He’d actually used his chauffeuring time to do a little police work. If his bosses found out, he’d probably be in a world of trouble. Didn’t he know cops didn’t bust people in this part of town—where they stole millions? That was on my side, his side, where thieves were lucky to get a hundred bucks out of a wallet and businesses went under before they were worth knocking over.

  Jackson couldn’t resist a parting wistful glance over his shoulder. I was living his dream: The lady of the house wants to meet the peeper. I’ll have to tell him all about it, I thought, if I get out alive.

  The place was so massive the big hexagonal foyer was built for indecision, with lots of room to mill around while you tried to figure out which doorway led where and why it was you cared. My hostess let go of my hand and stepped out into the foyer so I might have a better look at her. I halfway expected her to twirl around. She didn’t really have to try so hard. Compared to her, there wasn’t much to look at. There was a chrome hat rack without any hats, or maybe it was a sculpture. Big squatty plants. Chairs nobody ever sat in. A light fixture that hung down at all different lengths from a ceiling a few miles up there somewhere. Some big paintings worth a few million each by painters you’ve actually heard of. What was needed was a signpost to show you where in the hell you were going.

  “Coffee, Mr. Bainbridge? Breakfast?”

  “Coffee’s fine. I haven’t had breakfast in years.”

  “A diet?”

  “A cost-cutting measure.”

  “We have everything.”

  “I’m sure you do. Just coffee. I really can’t stay very long. I have to get to work. I’m a little puzzled why you asked me out here, Mrs. Kennemeyer. The cops didn’t say.”

  “Dee. Everybody calls me Dee.” She fixed me with a look to suggest that not just everybody could call her Dee the way I could if I took a notion.

  “Nick,” I said. “Everyone calls me En.”

  She laughed too hard at that. Nervous, I guess. Stage fright. I was a pretty good-looking guy, but I didn’t buy her interest in me for a second. Even if she did run naked in front of a high window every day, she also threatened any audience with death. Either she was a nut, or she was putting me on. Or both. “Are you always like this?” she asked, seeming to mean witty and charming.

  “Almost never.”

  She didn’t know what to say to that, so she gave me what was supposed to be a vampish smile. I don’t know why she was so bad at it. Maybe, looking like she did, she’d never had to play offense before. She went up on her tiptoes and pointed the way, a cheap but effective move. “There’s coffee things in the solarium, is that okay?”

  “If you say so.”

  She led the way down a corridor, and I followed. She made that about as enjoyable as she could without actually shimmying, bending over, or taking off the few clothes she had on. I wondered if she’d ever worked Vegas and thought it likely. That would explain her rushed performance. In Vegas you don’t have to warm an audience up. They come that way straight off the plane, full of fantasies and liquor and credit cards. I, on the other hand, was a guy who’d had one cup of coffee and was already late for work. But she was relentless. By the time we were sitting on a loveseat in the solarium, drinking our coffee and looking out over the pool, she’d smiled and touched and bumped the point across that she was one hot, lonely woman, and I could have my way with her if I was so inclined.

  I wasn’t. I figured that, like the cops, she labored under the delusion I knew something. The coffee was good, though. Damn good.

  The pool was still swarming with cops, feds by the look of them, with various tech types sprinkled in, but she hardly paid them any mind. “I’ve got it on one-way,” she said of the window. “We can see them, but they can’t see us.”

  “That’s reassuring. I don’t care much for the police. Have they been here all morning?”

  “Not all of them. New ones keep showing up all the time. They’ve sealed off the pool house. They won’t let me go anywhere near the place. I wanted to see to Ed’s things, and they just chased me away, so I didn’t know what to do. I thought you might help me sort this thing out.”

  “Like I told the police, I was just researching a role. I didn’t really know Mr. Kennemeyer before yesterday.”

  Her eyes shone. “A role. That’s right. The police officers said you were an actor in virtuals. Is that true?” She tried to sound breathless and starstruck, but she knew I was a nobody. With money like hers, she could have real stars for dinner. This whole routine was beginning to annoy me.

  “I’m missing work right now, as a matter of fact. I play a deranged genius with an insatiable sexual appetite. You should check it out. Sounds like just your thing.” I handed her a Billy and the Big Guy card. She gave it a puzzled once-over. “But I’m being insensitive. You didn’t ask me out here to discuss my acting career, but poor old Ed. Were the two of you close?”

  She froze for a moment. She hadn’t considered that questions were a two-way affair. “Oh yes. Quite close.”

  “Bounced you on his knee when you were just a little girl, I bet.”

  “Why, yes. He ... he was very fond of me.” Why didn’t she just tell me the truth? An amateur’s mistake— stuck in liar’s mode, making up everything whether it needs it or not. If you want to create an effective illusion, it pays to hang on to as much reality as you can. Now I’d caught her out.

  “I was under the impression he was your husband’s uncle. Were you and your husband childhood friends, or did old Ed just live in the neighborhood? When you were a little girl, he would’ve been, what? Sixty-five? Seventy? Why don’t you cut the crap, Dee? You’re a beautiful woman, and you’ve got truly incredible legs, and I enjoyed the hell out of watching you run naked, but I’m missing work here, and I doubt if I know anything worth seducing me for anyway. I suppose I could let you seduce me first and tell you I don’t know anything later, but that seems awfully low, and you seem like a nice enough person. So why don’t you just tell me what you want to know, and I’ll see if I know the answer?”

  Her face pinched, then she gave it up, just like that. This acting thing was harder than it looked. “I don’t know!” she wailed. “I don’t even know what I want to know! He just up and dies! Murdered by the pool guys! My husband just vanishes! Nobody tells me anything! I’m just the babe, right? I don’t need to know anything! Well, I know one thing—this is a big damn deal—Ed getting killed like this. Trey, that selfish bastard, didn’t keep Uncle Ed around because he loved him so much, I can tell you. They hated each other. That’s why Ed moved out to the pool house. They used to fight all the time—the little Trey was ever around. Now he’s dead, and Trey’s not even here to deal with it! The prick!”

  She had to catch her breath after that, but she
felt better for it, and it was the best move she’d made so far. I liked her better as herself. She’d dumped the perfume ad thing she’d been attempting with her voice, and when she got really mad a bit of a screech came out. A good, sincere screech.

  “Did you tell the police all this?”

  “Are you kidding me? Who do you think pays for this place? I don’t want Trey in jail. I don’t particularly care if he’s here, but I don’t want him in jail.”

  “What did Ed and your husband fight about?”

  “Nothing. Everything. Stupid stuff. I don’t think they ever fought about what really pissed them off. Trey kept Ed around to keep an eye on him. It was like Ed was in jail. He didn’t even have a bank account. Ed used to say Trey kept him on a short leash, but neither one of them would talk about it to me. Trey told me to butt out. Ed was nice about it, said there were things it was better not to know, and I didn’t have any problem with that. Until now. I mean, I’m stuck here in the middle of all these cops, and I don’t know a damn thing. I was hoping to find out something from you. Some femme fatale, huh?”

  “You don’t do so bad. I just don’t know much. Ever hear of Galatea Ritsa?”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s not a what. It’s a who. A woman Ed knew a long time ago.” I rattled off the list of Galatea’s suspected lovers, but Dee had never heard of any of them either. “What about another friend, James Dumfries—ever hear of him?”

  “No. Wait a minute. Is that Jimmy?”

  “Ed called him that.”

  She got a faraway look. I think she’d been holding the fact that Ed was dead and gone at arm’s length until then. She’d known for, what? Three, four hours. “Ed was all right, you know? We were both kind of stuck here. We used to have a few drinks, talk.” She sighed, shook her head. “He didn’t like girls either.” She cut me a look, but I didn’t rise to the bait. “It’s no secret I married my husband for his money, and he married me because, well, I look like this. But it doesn’t make any sense to me. I got what I wanted, I guess—there’s certainly nothing this dump doesn’t have—but Trey’s never here, never looks at me. I don’t even think he’s got my picture with him. I thought, you know, after a while, he’d like me. I’d like him. It’d get like that. Stupid. Anyway, Ed and me used to cry on each other’s shoulders. He had nice shoulders.” Her voice caught, and her eyes glistened. “Anyway, one of those nights—we were really wasted—he told me Jimmy was ‘the love of his life,’ but it hadn’t worked out. Later, Trey got super pissed. He told me not to drink with Ed anymore. I told him to fuck himself but did what he said like always. Ed didn’t trust me after that, thought I’d told Trey what we talked about, but I never told Trey anything.”

  “How did Trey know? Was he in the house?”

  She waved her hand over her head. “He listens. Remote surveillance.”

  “So he could be listening now.”

  She looked around the room. The cops might not be able to see us, but Trey apparently could. “Then maybe he’ll get his sorry ass home and talk to the cops!” she shouted. She wiped her palms across her damp eyes and smiled, cheered by her last remark, hoping the bastard was listening, watching, recording.

  I smiled vacantly into the air at my absent host, then back at Dee. There were tissues sitting on the table, so I plucked one and handed it to her. She acted like it was the nicest thing anyone had done for her in a while, not counting servants running on ’ware. “When you and Ed talked, did he say why things hadn’t worked out with Jimmy?”

  “He said Jimmy had a wife. She found out and made him choose. Turns out Jimmy and the wife got a divorce not too long after he broke things off with Ed, but there were too many hurt feelings to patch things up. Isn’t that always the way? You have one of those?”

  “A divorce?”

  “A wife.”

  “As good as.”

  “At least as good as a bad wife like me, huh? How far do you think this as-good-as-a-wife would let you stray before you got into serious trouble?”

  “We passed that point when you went running by through the air, and I didn’t look the other way.” I wasn’t exactly sure how she’d gotten to be quite so close to me in the last few moments, but there she was, very close, and then she kissed me.

  I confess I must’ve let it go on for a good ten or fifteen guilty seconds before breaking it off. The hot and lonely part was no act. But I didn’t care much for my role. Maybe I was virtuous, maybe I felt the eyes of Trey upon me, but when our lips parted, I reluctantly removed her arms from around my neck. “I can hardly believe it myself, but I have to say no.”

  “Maybe we could just make out awhile?”

  “A long while. But I really do need to get to work.”

  She studied me for a moment. “She’s lucky.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “The as-good-as-a-wife.”

  “I’ll tell her you said so.”

  “I’ll bet. If you’re an actor, you’re probably broke, aren’t you?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why is it the nice guys are always broke?”

  “I’ve often asked myself that question.”

  I stood up, and we made the trek back to the foyer with her in the lead. I gave myself a good talking-to the whole way and ignored the artwork I hadn’t already ignored on the way in.

  “I’ll let you know if I find out anything about Ed,” Dee said. “The cops haven’t been through his apartment yet, though there’s not much there but old stuff.”

  “His apartment?”

  “In the house. He’s only been living out by the pool for the last six months or so. It was his idea. He got tired of Trey spying on him, and I think he figured out how to mess with the surveillance in the pool house. At first he just hung out there a lot, then he moved in.”

  “Can I see Ed’s apartment?”

  “I thought you had to go to work.”

  “I can’t tear myself away.” It was supposed to be a joke, but it came out like there was something in it. There was certainly something in the smile it earned me.

  “It’s upstairs.”

  “You lead. I’ll follow.”

  “You better watch yourself.”

  “Everybody keeps telling me that.”

  I added my own voice to the chorus while I was at it, but I was only half listening. I was too busy not noticing the stairs—stone slabs suspended in some kind of clear plastic that glowed like a desert sunset. I couldn’t tell you how many flights. I was in good shape. I hardly noticed.

  Ed’s apartment was near the top of the pile. It was a self-contained unit with a bedroom, a living room–office thing built around a box and a terminal, a bachelor kitchen, and a bathroom. There wasn’t much left of Ed Kennemeyer about the place at first glance. It looked like a suite at a resort waiting for somebody to check in.

  We tried the living room–office first.

  She pointed to the box. “He never saw anyone. He could’ve linked with anybody, but he was always on his keyboard doing e-mail. I guess he had his little friends around.”

  “Yeah, like Snow White. Mind if I have a look?” I pointed at the terminal. I don’t know what I expected to find. Ed had erased all traces of himself from the terminal as far as I could tell. I suppose somewhere someone could sort through his e-mail if they worked in the right government agency or knew how to hack, but I couldn’t get at it. After all, it was Ed’s private information. It was nobody’s business but the cops’.

  We tried the bedroom next.

  “The maids cleaned it out already,” Dee said. “All his stuff’s out of here except a few clothes and boxes of junk in the closet.”

  She stretched out on the bed while I searched the closet. I had no idea what to look for. The clothes looked old, so I searched through the pockets for a while, hoping to find Galatea’s phone number on a matchbook for a seedy bar down by the docks where she sang the blues, or a key to a bus station locker containing a mysterious satchel
filled with clues. No such luck.

  The boxes had the heavy, dusty sag of old cardboard. They’d been packed a while. Hard-core nostalgia. There was a box of carefully wrapped World War I–vintage model airplanes. There was a collection of bar coasters. There were term papers, quaint little antiques in their own right, for every philosophy course ever conceived. Epistemological explorations. Hermeneutical circles. The Problem of Evil. The Cartesian Splits. It was all there. But no clues.

  Meanwhile, a bored Dee posed on the bed. I tried not to look at her, but there were mirrors everywhere— no door was complete without one—and it seemed every time I stole a glance, her eyes were waiting for me, saying go ahead and look. I think that’s why I found it, trying to look where those eyes weren’t. I hopped up and down to catch a glimpse of the topmost shelves of the closet. Way back in the corner there was a shoe box wrapped in twine I had to stand on a chair to reach. It said THEATER on the side.

  “You want me to hold you steady?” Dee asked.

  “I’ll manage,” I said.

  I slipped the twine and opened the box. Inside were memorabilia. An actor’s memorabilia. The Bright Spot had a box like this before he tossed it off a bridge—too melodramatic by half. This one was very neat and tidy with old rubber bands around each bundle that looked like they’d snap if you just looked at them cross-eyed. There were programs, photos, and, of course, reviews. Right on top. Must be good ones. I moved those out of my way and took out one of the programs from the middle of the pack, like picking a card out of a magician’s deck. Bits of rubber band clung to it.

  It was a production of A Doll’s House at the College of William and Mary. I checked the cast. Edmund Kennemeyer played Helmer, and James Allen Dumfries played Dr. Rank. I wasn’t so lucky that Galatea played Nora. She was played by Constance Watkins, who I’m sure did a fine job of it. I checked the date. Ed and Jimmy were undergraduates together, acted together, were more than likely, given what Dee had just told me, lovers together. I riffled through the rest of the programs, and apparently Ed had stuck with the acting for a while, mostly community theater, some semiprofessional.