Laura Lippman - To The Power Of Three

“What is it, honey?”

“I don’t want to talk to the police anymore. Do I have to?”

The good-looking one, Infante, stood. He was over six feet, and his five o’clock shadow gave him a menacing look, but his intent was clearly to charm. Hey, flirt with me, Dannon wanted to say. She’s taken, but I’m totally available.

“It’s always better for people to cooperate, ma’am. It’s a mistake for innocent people not to talk. Makes them look guilty.”

“Dannon isn’t guilty of anything.”

“So he should talk to us, don’t you think?” The detective continued to try to ply his handsomeness, but Dannon’s mother was indifferent to conventional charm tactics. She had said no to a lot of men before her second husband came along, and his main charm seemed to be his earning power. “You can sit in, ma’am, if it would make you feel better.”

“I don’t want to talk to them at all, Mom. I…I…” Dannon clutched his stomach, groaning. Oh, yes, he had missed his calling, staying behind the scenes. “I’m having that stomach thing again. You know how I get. I gotta go. I gotta go, or I’m going to shit my pants right here.”

He ran from the room, dashing into the powder room in the hall, where he didn’t turn on the light because it would trigger the exhaust fan, and he wanted to hear what was going on in the living room.

“He does have a sensitive tummy,” his mother said. “Always has. Dannon’s very sensitive. But I’m sure he doesn’t know anything about what happened at the school, close as he and Perri were. If he did, he would have confided in me. Dannon tells me everything.”

I did once, Mom. When had he stopped? Upon her remarriage? When he had finally come out, at least to himself? No, earlier than that, back in middle school, when a cruel girl had mocked him for having boobs. A girl who happened to be named Perri Kahn. That had been the day that Dannon realized there were things in his life his mother could not fix and that confiding such problems in her would only serve to make her feel sad and ineffectual. He had sucked it up, endured what a fat gay boy had to endure, made it through middle school and into high school, which was marginally kinder. By high school the groups had solidified, the territory had been meted out, and the warfare had subsided. High school had been fine for everyone but the most obvious misfits, the ones who courted trouble. Dannon kept his head down, his profile low.

And then one day Perri Kahn had arrived in his life-a whirlwind, a benediction. At first he thought it was only because she needed an ally to get Old Giff to pick Anyone Can Whistle as the fall musical. When that battle was fought and won and then lost, he assumed that Perri was still hanging with him because she had divined his talent for eavesdropping and wanted to know things he might have heard or overheard, in places she could never go. But no, she was a genuine friend.

He had never had the nerve to mention how mean she had been, back in middle school. He was scared that she had forgotten he was once an object of scorn; reminded, she might drop him rather than confront her own cruelty. He accepted Perri as she believed herself now to be, a disciple of fairness, bordering on self-righteous. Perhaps Perri had sought him out as a penance. She had been trying to set a lot of things right in these past few months, reaching out to all sorts of people she had once wronged. But he was the only one she had befriended. He was the one she had hung out with-not Skeevy Eve Muhly, not Fiona Steiff, not Binnie-the-Albino Snyder. Just him, Dannon. Only he was sufficiently cool enough to be Perri Kahn’s friend, and he would protect her as long as he could.

Just a little rumpus, she had promised him, holding the gun to her cheek. No big deal.

“He knows something,”Lenhardt said as they headed out of the cul-de-sac and onto one of the long, looping drives that ran along the spine of Old Town Road. “He didn’t have the balls to lie to us, so he bolted. But he wasn’t smooth enough to cover his panic.”

“Smooth? By his own testimony, he literally almost shit himself.”

“Would you have known? If we hadn’t known going in, if he hadn’t made a point of telling us?”

“Known what?”

“That he was a fag.”

“Oh, yeah, he’d suck a dick.”

Lenhardt had felt sorry for the kid. Not because he was gay per se, but because he was so obviously, painfully gay, a pudgy little stereotype who might as well lisp through life with a “Kick Me” sign affixed to his back. It was one thing to be swishy and arch within the safe boundaries of Glendale High School, with its “No Hate Zone” sign in the front hall. College would be another version of the same bubble world. Eventually, however, this kid was going to take up residence on a planet where everyone didn’t get all warm and fuzzy at the sight of some gay guy, inviting him in and asking him to play fairy godfather with their lives-redo the furniture, restock the fridge, rearrange the closet.

His cell phone buzzed, and the caller ID showed a name that didn’t register, not at first: A.CUNNING.

“Lenhardt.”

“Sergeant? It’s Alexa Cunningham from Glendale High School. There are some things going on here, odd things. A theft…well, I’m not sure how to explain it over the phone. It’s terribly complicated. But it just struck me that it could be key to your investigation. Could you meet with me?”

He sighed, looking at his wristwatch. He had promised to try to make Jessica’s swim meet tonight.

“Could this wait until tomorrow?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Should I come up to the school?”

“No, I think it’s better if I’m not seen talking to you, as what I’m doing might be considered insubordinate. Is there some place we could meet, sort of off the beaten track?”

“There’s a place on Joppa, called Wagner’s. Can you swing by there about five?”

“Absolutely.”

He studied his phone. He could call his wife and tell her he was a likely no-show at the meet, or he could not call and hope the gods were merciful, that he would slide in toward the end and never be missed.

He did the chickenshit thing and left the message on the home phone, knowing that no one was there to pick up.

It was his mom’s ideato cut flowers from her garden when Peter said he was thinking about visiting Josie Patel, see how she was holding up. “This is so thoughtful of you,” she said, arranging the purplish flowers in bright tissue paper. Peter was a little humbled by his mother’s pride, given that he wouldn’t have dreamed of making such a visit without Dale Hartigan’s encouragement. Peter had never been particularly fond of Josie, and he liked to think he was not a hypocrite. Show business required so much phoniness that he worked hard not to make it a habit in his real life, insofar as it was possible.

To Peter, Josie Patel was nothing more than Kat’s pesky shadow, and there had been countless times that he had wished he could shut her in a drawer, just as Mrs. Darling had captured Peter Pan’s dark twin. The summer that Peter and Kat had dated, Josie had come to the pool with Kat every day, then gone to movies and restaurants with them, even to the parties where she was clearly out of place. Because while Kat looked so much older than she was-Peter had no idea she was fifteen until he was already head over heels-Josie looked like a middle-schooler.

Perri had tagged along, too, once or twice, but she was smart enough to realize she wasn’t wanted. Josie never seemed to get that. Or if she did, she didn’t care. She rode in his backseat, the little chaperone, and he began to suspect that it was at Kat’s invitation. Then there came a July day when Josie simply stopped coming along, and Peter understood that this was Kat’s signal that she was ready to be alone with him, to allow more than the tentative good-night kisses she had allotted up to that point. They spent the rest of the summer looking for empty houses, hidden spots along the Prettyboy Reservoir, anywhere that Kat could cocktease him into oblivion.