The Oxygen Murder (33 page)

I felt sorry for her, but there were still gaps to fill. “Then did you go back to the building later? Did you nearly knock me over in the alley?”

She nodded. “Zach made me go back. I told him one more time and that was it.”

You tell him, Dee Dee,
I thought.

“At least the next time there was no body. I was still freaked out, though. I made the switch between a movie and one of the Curry DVDs, but I couldn’t find a second one after all that.”

That missing DVD would be CURRY I, and Lori had had it in her purse to give to me.

“Why didn’t you just take the Curry DVD? Why the complication of putting a movie in its case?”

Dee Dee sat up straight and gave me a proud smile. “Zach had it all figured out. If Lori opened the Curry cases and found them empty, she’d be suspicious that someone stole them, but if she found movies, she’d think she just made a mistake and put the wrong DVDs in the cases.”

“But the movie cases would be empty. When she opened them—”

Dee Dee interrupted, clearly way ahead of me. “Who checks the cases before they bring them back to the store?”

I couldn’t answer that, primarily because Matt and I hardly ever rented movies. I went back to the more important question. “You’re saying that you don’t know what was on those DVDs that Zach had to have so badly?”

“I honestly don’t.”

Dee Dee might be the best liar I’d met lately or the most innocent, uncurious person. I took in the sight of the patient in her pastel wrap, her thin legs barely making lumps in the hospital-issue bedspread. I chose to believe Dee Dee had no idea of the content of the DVDs—however hard it was to accept the notion that a bright young professional woman would put herself in harm’s way acting blindly on the orders of her boyfriend.

When would there be a magazine article on that? I wondered.

“You told the police that you have no idea who attacked you in the park. Is that the truth?”

“It’s the truth.”

I’d reached my limit on the Dee Dee interrogation. I realized that if any of the hospital staff had been paying attention, I’d have been blamed for a great setback in her recovery process. Dee Dee’s hair looked disheveled from the many times she’d run her fingers through it while I grilled her. She’d drained her pitcher of water, and now her lips looked parched.

I thought of one more question. “Did Tina know about your little escapade to the loft?”

Dee Dee’s blue eyes widened. “Oh, no. She’d have been furious. She was raging mad at Amber when she found out what she was doing to our clients. In fact, I’m not supposed to talk about that at all. It’s bad for the agency image to even acknowledge it, Tina says. We’re just lucky there won’t be any more of it.”

Another image problem solved. Lucky indeed.

I was relieved not to see anyone I recognized on my walk back to the elevator. I had no time to stop to make notes, but I reviewed what I’d learned mentally so I wouldn’t forget.

CURRY I
was the DVD I’d just looked at, and other than the appearance of Zach in the background I’d seen nothing worth his feverish attempts to retrieve it. From Dee Dee’s story, I gathered Zach was now in possession of
CURRY II
, and Lori had a movie in its case.

The scales of my suspicions had tipped away from Dee Dee (it was hard to think of a woman in a peach bed jacket as a cold-blooded killer) and toward Billy (who may have fought with his sister while he was supposed to have been home in Kansas) and—a newcomer to my list—Tina (who’d lied to me early on about knowing Amber well, and lately about her knowledge of Amber’s schemes). Granted, Tina’s lies might be construed as professionally acceptable, in the interests of not broadcasting her agency’s business, and might be nothing to dwell on.

I wondered what the NYPD list of suspects looked like. Orders of magnitude longer than mine, I figured. What betrayed lover or unhappy victim had they discovered whom I didn’t know a thing about? What would they uncover from an exhaustive search of Amber’s work records, any of Tina’s files that involved her, and Amber’s friends and neighbors? I felt my efforts were like those of a scientist who’d been given only hydrogen, a single-proton element, to work on, when there were more than one hundred other elements in the periodic table.

I followed the yellow dots around the corner and suffered a slight panic attack when I saw no one waiting by the elevator.

So many people were passing by in the hallway. Was no one ready to go down?

Off to the side I saw a door marked
STAIRS. USE IN CASE OF EMERGENCY
.

Did my newly developed fear of being alone in an elevator car constitute an emergency? More important, could I walk down eleven flights of stairs and still be upright at the bottom?

I waited a few more minutes, reading the literature on a little table by a grouping of chairs. I learned tips for treating severe burns, acid reflux disease, bee stings (in New York City?) and knife wounds (I chose to think of these as resulting from kitchen accidents).

Finally I gave in to my fear and turned away from the elevator. I headed for the door to the stairway and went through it.

The heavy door closed behind me with a loud thud that echoed in the bare stairwell. Ahead of me were gray metal railings with matching steps and walls. Even the sound of my rubber soles hitting the treads made an echo.

The stairwell was creepier than an empty elevator.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-S
E
EN

T
his was a first for Lori. Up early on Thursday morning to go to a video store. She figured if she ran down and picked up the
CURRY II
DVD that ended up in the
Erin Brockovich
case, she could come back and review it before lunch.

She stuck the
CURRY II
case with the movie into her tote and headed out her door.

The weatherwoman said it wouldn’t be as cold today, but Lori still put on her thermal gloves before she left the building.

It was an easy walk to Red Carpet Video on West Fifty-first Street near Ninth Avenue. Lori enjoyed the overcast sky, the bare trees, the occasional puddle left by an overnight shower. New York was a Stieglitz photograph. A Hopper painting. A Woody Allen movie. She was into this now. A Frank Sinatra song. A Marge and Gower Champion musical. A Lori Pizzano documentary. Lori smiled and mentally bowed to adoring fans of the future.

She stopped for coffee and a muffin, sat at the café counter, and looked out at the street, already busy with people on their way to work or early shopping. Lori felt lucky to be here—and not in jail. She knew with a certainty that didn’t come often that she’d never succumb to anyone again the way she’d given in to what Amber Keenan offered. No amount of money was worth giving up her freedom to enjoy mornings like this.

Red Carpet Video was at street level, below tony apartments in one of the clay-brown town houses that lined the street. Lori pulled open the heavy glass door and entered a small buffer zone of a foyer. She
knocked on the inner door and got the attention of the clerk, who had to buzz her in. Lori had been in art galleries with less security. She figured the procedure was left over from when videos were new, hot merchandise and worth seventy or eighty dollars each. Uncle Matt had told her that back then you had to leave a large deposit, like fifty dollars, before you could take a videotape out of a rental store. Now—well, now you could get them for ten bucks in a store or two for five on the street.

Bzzzz. Bzzzz.

The buzzer sounded like her doorbell at home. Annoying. She pushed the door quickly so it wouldn’t sound again.

“Hey,” said a young guy with silver studs on his chin and the side of his nose, and hoops on his lower lip and eyebrow. He wore a brown Black Eyed Peas hoodie that looked new. Lori thought there might have been a concert recently.

“Hey,” Lori said. “I called last night about a DVD mix-up. I’m not sure who I talked to.”

“Uh, that’d be the night guy. Garrett.”

“Okay, well, the problem is I thought I was returning
Erin Brockovich,
but it turns out”—Lori pulled the
CURRY II
DVD case out of her tote—“I put the movie in this case by mistake, and you have a personal DVD of mine in the
Erin Brockovich
case that I brought back.”

The guy scratched his head and squinted.

He’s really trying to concentrate,
Lori thought,
but he has all those holes in his face.

“I could look on the racks out here, but it’s not a new release. Whoever it was got it for me in the back. So can you just show me all the
Erin Brockovich
es you have, and we can look through and find my DVD and I’ll give you this one? I’ll pay for the extra two days, of course.”

That seemed to get him thinking in the right direction. He held up an index finger and then disappeared into the stacks.

He came back with eight DVD cases. Lori and the brown hoodie each took four from the pile and started opening them.

Julia Roberts came up on all four of Lori’s and the first one (he was slow) of the clerk’s. Lori slid a case from his pile and opened it. The sixth case was empty.

Uh-oh.
Lori opened the two remaining cases. Julia again. And again.

“I don’t understand this,” Lori said. “Where’s my DVD?”

The clerk scratched his head, causing his oily black hair to fall close to the eyebrow hoop. “Dunno.” He took the
Erin Brockovich
DVD from where Lori had placed it on the counter and plopped it into the empty case.

“Well, can you look around? Maybe someone went through and checked and realized it wasn’t the movie in the case so they put my DVD somewhere else.” Not in the trash, Lori fervently hoped. She realized her voice was getting higher and louder. She knew she wouldn’t get anywhere if she showed anger. She took a breath. “Wouldn’t someone call me if they found the wrong disk in my case?”

“Uh, yeah. We’re supposed to call if anything like this happens, like if we get an empty case. I always do.”

Lori had a hard time believing he cared enough. She inhaled deeply. “I’m sure
you
would never let something like this get by you. Do you think you could check in the back, or under the counter here? Where would
you
put something like that if you found it?” She hoped she sounded utterly confident in this guy’s ability to handle unusual situations.

The clerk’s eyes brightened. “We have a lost and found. I’ll check there.” He disappeared behind a wrinkled fabric divider.

Lori waited, leaning against the counter, scanning the rows of movies. She remembered only a couple of years ago when videotapes predominated in this store and only about ten movies were available on DVD. Now Red Carpet displayed DVDs almost exclusively. She fiddled with a bag of M&M’s from a pile of candy for sale. One corner of the store was devoted to snacks and drinks. Popcorn, candy bars, chips, and giant soda bottles were stacked three deep. One-stop shopping.

Lori was tempted to buy some corn to pop while it was handy, but she knew it would be more expensive than in a regular market. She tapped her fingers on the counter. Where was Jewelry Man?

When he finally emerged from behind the deep blue curtain, he was empty-handed. Lori’s heart sank.

“No luck,” he said. “I left a note on the bulletin board back there. Maybe someone else knows where it is.”

Lori thanked him and left the store. Halfway down the block she realized the guy hadn’t charged her a late fee. She’d have to think about where that fell on the roster of crimes. For now, she walked on.

Lori stopped at the same café on her way back and got a coffee to go, more to steam her face than anything else. She considered her next steps. She’d look on her computer and see if Amber had left a file. She didn’t hold out too much hope of that, however, and the police still had Amber’s camera, she was sure. She’d check the other DVD cases that had been in use lately. Maybe Craig or Billy had been looking through her collection and misfiled some of them. Craig should know better.

Speaking of Billy—where was Billy Keenan? Lori wondered how the police talked him out of returning to her loft without telling him why. Had they found something else suspicious so they could charge him?

Her own feeble attempts to investigate had turned up nothing on Billy, but a big surprise in Rachel Hartman’s confession. She knew she had to tell the police what she’d learned, but she felt sorry for Rachel. She’d tell Uncle Matt first, and then he could filter it to Detective Arnold. Maybe they’d be more inclined to give Rachel a break that way.

Lori walked down Eighth and took a left on West Forty-eighth Street. Almost home.

Murder suspects, threatening letters, flimsy alibis—these weren’t her usual topics of meditation on her walks around town. She preferred thinking about how to list her videos on independent documentary sites, being sure she had all the deadlines straight for the film festivals, identifying concepts and themes that could be included in a curriculum study guide—something that would work especially well for her ozone project.