(Start Reading the Novel from the Beginning: The Dead Writer)

(Previously: Shepherd’s Pie)

Ezmerelda Gibbons was hungry and phoneless. The sun drifted beneath luxury building blocks and strip malls and gaudy fast food signs competing for roadside attention while the ocean sift roared in the darkening blanket of water just southwest. And she walked in her short skirt, enduring a few loutish horn honks and gruesome woos along the edge of Kings Highway. Her heels clacked faster. Cabs had passed her by when she hailed them. So she walked. She could walk four miles in her heels if she had to, although anything more than that would blister her feet, which were already on thin suppurating ice (hence, the pedicure appointment, long ago canceled). And she needed her feet for the fetishists. Well, they’d have to wait. They’d all have to wait. Hopefully, they’d keep. And maybe even weep over small-minded fantasies that were not now on demand.

Because one of her needs was directly related to her ability to pay rent, she persuaded herself — as the roars of the passing cars striated and impaired her ruminations — that she would rather starve than miss out on an opportunity to send a scandalous photo to one of her clients. Sure, she had the webcam and the desktop at home. And she had backups of everything and a one week storehouse of unpublished poses in case anything happened. She was no fool. But this meant that she would be tied to her bedroom, not that she hadn’t tied herself up before to placate her kinkier regulars.

It was the freedom that Ezmerelda lamented. Although what did “freedom” actually mean? Her credit card had the word “Freedom” on it, but how were you free when you were so easily persuaded to plunge further into debt? Her people had escaped slavery a century and a half before. And now they wanted to enslave everyone. If white people understood that, maybe they wouldn’t be so fucking racist. Maybe the Karens would stop calling the cops on Black people. Maybe the Kanyes and the Kyries wouldn’t lose their goddamned minds? Or maybe not. It was far easier for white people to buy into the illusion that everyone was middle-class rather than be honest about their personal spending problems and the fact that they were always short-changed when they tried to buy VIP passes that would untie the velvet rope.

She had two years of savings and it was because she refused to gyrate naked for peanuts. She had too much dignity and self-respect not to name her price. If a lonely man in Topeka wanted to see her hoochie moves, well, he’d have to pay her bare minimum, not minimum wage like the others. And he’d have to wait to hear back from her by DM. He’d have to pay for Snapchat access, where she often posted stories in which she was topless and contorted, rounding the outline of her mouth with her tongue, a move that was always good to keep these easily seduced men (and some women) hanging onto every carnal cadence.

The cops would surely crack her phone’s keycode. Four digits gave you no more than ten thousand possible combinations. And she knew that the more well-funded branches of the fuzz had software that could speed through all the four-digit options and bypass the “too many attempts” lockscreen. There, they would have access to her photos, her videos, and her contacts — that is, if they could crack the additional passwords she had put on there.

The police regularly underestimated the tech savvy of sex workers. This was one of the underlying reasons why there were so many brutal crackdowns: when you combined ignorance, entitlement, and male resentment and it came from dull specimens who looked like pork chops when they squeezed their heavy pinkish bodies into blue uniforms, you couldn’t very well elude the frustrations from those who remained in denial about their true mediocrity.

But dodging this toxic authoritarian temperament — the societal degradation of her smarts — was nothing new for Ezmerelda. Back in Canarsie, she had taken the subway to affluent neighborhoods to examine what white people had left on the sidewalks. This was how she had built up a surprisingly choice collection of classic mass market paperbacks that weren’t even available in her local library. She walked past brothers who mocked her for reading and propositioned her for illiterate acts in the dark. But after she gave one of these cat-calling assclowns a black eye, they left her alone and even showered her with respect. (“I never liked that nigga anyway,” laughed a prominent gang member two weeks after she clocked that brotha. “Thought he was a hustlah, but that ass-beating from you made my boy wack.”

White people were cavalier about what they threw away. Sometimes, they’d toss out their flashy Xmas gifts before summer. And these were often the latest electronic models. Expensive. Extra features that the white people never learned about because they were so fond of junking their unread manuals. They even disposed of their fully functioning high-def sets and sometimes Ezmerelda would call her friend with the pickup to liberate it from its junkyard fate, cutting him in for a piece of the pie when she unloaded these second-hand goods on Craigslist. And because she became so accomplished at scavenging, she was able to put together a desktop in her bedroom, gutting beige cases for their components and trading up with a skeeze stringy-haired dude at the flea market who always showed up with six bulging buckets of computer parts. She even found a functioning printer, although it took her another week to collect the dimes for the pricey toner. And Ezmerelda was not someone who learned things halfway.

So she became a power user, hitting IRC channels and sometimes pretending to be a white guy, where she noticed that she got more attention and more replies to her tech questions than under her real identity. And she became so knowledgeable about dip switches and PCI slots and the ideal DIMM sticks for an overclocked mobo that she was starting to get invites for pizza parties in small Connecticut towns, which she politely declined while quoting from the Grant Morrison comics that these honkies were so enamored with. Drop a line from The Invisibles onto an oh-so-white screen of upwardly scrolling text and these slavish geeks would believe that you were delivering a sermon from the mount.

And because her side hustle had ushered in a modest income, she registered a domain, paid for web hosting, and started a password-protected site where Black people, and only Black people, could share their stories (after a verification process) without having their narratives hijacked or appropriated by white liberal do-gooders. She hooked up her people with the new tech. And everyone realized that this was a place where they could be welcomed online as heartily as they were for a real-life block party.

Then she decided to go public. And that’s when everything went south. Quite literally. The hayseeds found her and graffitied the message boards with Confederate flags and Nazi symbols. And she had to shut it all down. You gave white people an inch and they somehow misinterpreted your invite as a Homestead Act stampede no different from the white supremacists who had could claim their 160 surveyed government acres when you only had forty.

She heard the idle of a car drifting beside her. And was that the music from Benny Hill playing?

She looked back. A dusty Ford Escort with a blue stripe running along the side. The car was in need of a wash. And behind the wheel? That woman who had talked her way into the Van Kleason manse.

“Yoo hoo!” said Ali Breslin, who was craning her head as far as she could to the passenger side and sustaining a frightening level of intense eye contact.

“Go away.”

“But I want to talk with you.”

“Subscribe to my OnlyFans page.”

“I already did.”

She stopped. Ali flashed her a smile and held up her phone, where a video of Ezmerelda twerking to Big K.R.I.T. was playing.

“Great moves. Did you ever learn tap?”

She had, in fact, taken tap dancing lessons at the age of sixteen. Along with flamenco and sneaker jazz. Until her white instructor took a shine to her that was too close for comfort and only a smidgen short of filing a police report.

“I did take tap.”

“So did I! I was really impressed with your one-legged wing. It took me months to get that down with a shuffle.”

“Nobody else noticed.”

“Maybe they were busy with their hands.”

“They were,” said Ezmerelda, who loosened the beginnings of a laugh before remembering that this white woman was trying to inveigle her.

“Didn’t you get what you needed back at the crime scene?” asked Ezmerelda, returning to business.

“No, I didn’t. Where are you heading? I’ll give you a lift.”

“If I wanted a Lyft, I’d summon one from my phone. Oh, but I don’t have my phone, do I?”

“I can help you with that,” said Ali.

“Oh? How?”

“I have some pull with Teddy. You may have seen our little Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan act.”

“Why you be fucking a cop?”

“He’s actually not bad in bed, although cops are a little rough in the sack. As are lawyers. That’s the funny thing about law and order types. They always seem to like it hard and rough.”

“Yeah,” said Ezmerelda, “tell me something I don’t know.”

“I’m not your enemy.”

“I don’t know if you are.”

“The police will be dropping their investigation tomorrow.”

“Why?”

“There’s something else going on. That’s why I need to talk with you.”

“I don’t have a lot to say. I was a topless maid for Paul. If you pay me the right price, you too can see me shake my titties while I clean your toilet.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I know the business I’m in. Do you?”

“Actually, I do.”

“How?”

“I spent one summer in college dancing at a strip club.”

“What?”

“Not too many people know this, but I did. And I’m telling you because I’m an ally.”

“Right. Just like Rachel Dolezal. No thanks.”

Ezmerelda started walking faster up the sidewalk.

“I want to help.”

“Because you want a story.”

“Not going to deny it. Paul Van Kleason was a semi-prominent figure. And I’m the only journalist who is going to tell you that I’m hoping to crack the iron gates for my own gain.”

“Yeah, I thought so.”

“There’s a lot more to this.”

“Look, I cleaned his house. He never tried to fuck me, but he liked having me around. Just like many white men go to the store and buy a pint of chocolate fudge brownie. End of story.”

“Actually, it’s just the beginning of the story. Did you know about his wife?”

“What Paul and Sophie did was none of my business.”

“Did you know about the videos?”

Ezmerelda stopped in her tracks.

“What videos?”

“Let me give you a lift and I’ll tell you.”

Ezmerelda stopped.

“Okay, but you’ve got to turn that Benny Hill shit off.”

“Fair enough. I was just trying to lighten the mood.”

“White people always do. That’s part of the problem.”

“When you see what I have, you’ll understand why. Come on. It will only take fifteen minutes.”

Ezmerelda opened the door and got in the car.

(Next: Soldiers with Broken Arms)

(Word count: 16,415/50,000)

(Start Reading the Novel from the Beginning: The Dead Writer)

(Previously: Shepherd’s Pie)

It was Tuesday night and the MBPD hadn’t yet conducted the promised press conference. The investigation was ongoing. No news was good news, although Paul Van Kleason had spent much of the afternoon as a trending topic on Twitter.

They set up the war room at the Easy Breeze Resort: a towering high-rise serving as hotel and business center (a real business center, not one of those windowless rooms you find in Westin joints with stale complimentary croissants and slow desktops running Windows 98) just southeast of Kings Highway and only a few blocks away from the ocean. Three publicity men from Atlanta — all of them on retainer with Coca-Cola, but with contracts that allowed them to freelance for other clients — had made the six hour drive that morning. One of them — a well-groomed thirtysomething with an aquiline nose and a purple bowtie — had somehow prepared a PowerPoint presentation along the way. Or maybe he had had his assistant do it by way of fierce dictation on the road. Nobody knew for sure. They only knew that Chris Wilde was once again in charge of this reputation management campaign. That is, until the New York people flew in.

The two other men were chain-smoking luxury Canadian cigarettes and blowing out smoke through the open window. Despite the Italian cuts of their immaculate suits, they still had the telltale racoon eyes and numb noses of men who had been summoned out of bed after a 3AM coke bender. The rampant drug use among Coca-Cola men was an open secret. Many of them hoovered up lines from ruddy placemats reading “Enjoy Coke!” and “Things go better with big, big Coke!” They had ideas, but they were not known for their subtlety, which is why Chris Wilde, whose primary addiction was stress-eating vast quantities of expensive cheese after midnight, was running the show.

The man in the fedora and the bland burgundy tie stood near the door: a solitary figure who blended in anywhere by keeping his trap shut. He had introduced himself to Sophie as Nick. No last name. When she wasn’t catatonic over the vile truths that the videos had revealed, Sophie had tried Googling Nick. She needed something to do other than sob over the disturbing possibility of becoming publishing’s answer to Ghislaine Maxwell. But there was no online trace of Nick anywhere. He was the human answer to the dark web. A conseigneur who clearly existed, possibly in a quasi-criminal capacity, and whose very presence suggested decades of experience cleaning up big messes — quagmires that Sophie could not have imagined at her most perverse — but who couldn’t be found anywhere other than here. Nick had said only a dozen words since the men in Atlanta had arrived. And she didn’t know if he would say anything more. He had dressed her down back at the Atlantis. Fiercely and indefatigably. Peremptory. Fuck around and find out. Even when she was shaking over the news of her husband’s death and the secret Epsteinian life that she had somehow not known about. The behavior made her kinky escapades look like a G-rated movie.

“I have to see my wife!” whimpered Mike Harvest in the corner. Nick had paid off Chris or Jim with a cool two thousand back at the Atlantis and had persuaded him to sign an NDA so that he would never shoot his mouth off about what he had just heard, but the puling book critic was a different story. As a parasitical media figure of some influence within the publishing industry complex, Harvest was compromised — not only by the waning news of his involvement with the Jakester, but also because he had been directly involved with Sophie. Moreover, he was still in a position to persuade people about how Paul Van Kleason was a true American original and a bona-fide innocent. But Christ, he was such a whiny little fuck.

“You’ll see her again,” said Nick.

“When?”

“This guy?” asked Chris. “Really?”

“I was once considered for the Pulitzer!” shrieked Harvest

“Did you win it?” said Nick.

“No.”

“So you’re just a book critic then.”

“Yes,” whispered Harvest. “But I have written one book!”

Chris dropped a hardcover with a blinding typeface on the oak table before Harvest.

“This one?” he said. “Harvest’s Photographs?”

“You found it!”

“Let me ask you something, Mr. Harvest. Did you take these photographs?”

“No.”

“Then how can they be your photographs?”

“What?”

“If I stole a loaf of bread that you baked, would it be my bread?”

“Maybe.”

“God, you’re an arrogant fuck! This guy? Really? This? Fucking? Guy?”

Mike walked up to Chris and placed his palm on his shoulder.

“Chris,” said Mike. “He’s important.”

“He’s a dope!”

“Chris,” repeated Mike. “We’re professionals.”

“I’m important!” beamed Harvest. “I’m important!”

Nick spun around and aimed a Stoeger STR-9F at Harvest’s head. Harvest raised his hands up in the air and begin to whimper. The pistol had emerged in his hand much like an expert magician pulling a long line of scarves from an unlikely crevice.

Sophie screamed. Yes, Harvest was annoying, but even annoying people deserve to live. Well, most of the time.

“Please don’t kill me! Please don’t kill me!”

“Relax,” said Nick. “I just wanted to test your reflexes.”

There was a telltale splotch of burgeoning urine soaking the front of his pants.

“You’re important, but only for this operation. Not important enough to murder. Remember that.”

Nick snapped his fingers at one of the smokers near the window.

“Get him cleaned up.”

One of the associates stubbed out his cigarette in a Myrtle Beach mug that was now serving as an ashtray, walked up to Harvest, offered his hand, and ushered Harvest out of the room like a teacher escorting a ninth-grader to the principal’s office shortly after he had been caught tugging the pigtails of the homecoming queen.

“Okay,” said Chris. “Are we done with the theatrics?”

“Yeah,” said Mike, who returned to his stance near the door.

“Okay,” said Chris. “Okay.”

“Do you have to say okay all the time?” asked Sophie. “It’s not fucking okay.”

“It’s the way he talks,” said the remaining smoker. “I don’t like it either.”

“Okay,” said Chris, who believed deep down that saying “okay” and “right” all the time meant that everything would turn out okay and right, evidence to the contrary. “So let’s look at the three scenarios.”

“Just three,” said the smoker.

“Okay, there are obviously more scenarios than three, okay? But these are the three likeliest scenarios, right? Okay, we have Scenario A, where all the Van Kleason videos are publicly released, right? Van Kleason’s latest book tanks. There’s a boycott campaign directed towards the house, okay. Because no one will want to do business with them — especially when they find out what he did with the eight-year-old, okay? Authors pull their books, right? And, okay, this could be pretty financially devastating.”

“Why would they blame the house rather than Van Kleason?” asked the smoker.

Chris clicked to the next PowerPoint slide.

“Because of her.”

There was a photo of a Malaysian woman just beneath a Powerpoint heading that read “The Attention Economy.” A supercilious smile, irrepressible smugness in her eyes, and, most preposterously, the knuckle arrogantly arched just under her chin. The telltale pose of someone who had pretended to be important for years, hoping that people would eventually buckle under her indefatigable presence. An influencer type who falsely believed that she was a deep thinker, an essential figure, a woman who moved mountains and who still wouldn’t be satisfied.

“And who is she?” said the smoker, puffing blue smoke out the window.

“Aayizah Cravemour, okay? The author of six books, right? None of them sold very well, okay. She was recently dropped by her agent — right? — after she sent a deranged email to Emma Silverburg, okay? But she’s the one who is likeliest to go after Van Kleason, right? She posts at least two hundred Instagram stories a day. She never stops, okay? She’s led smear campaigns before. She paints herself as a victim, right? This is one of the reasons why she has thirty-two thousand followers on Twitter. People relish in these character assassination campaigns, right, and they want to see what she’s going to do next, okay? There are long Reddit threads about her. Although with Elon’s recent takeover, and with many writers fleeing to Mastodon, there’s a good chance that people are exhausted from all this shit, right?”

“But why her?”

“Our algorithm has scraped the tweets of the top five hundred writers on Twitter, right? And her name shot to the top of the list, okay?”

There was a knock at the door.

Chris flipped off the monitor.

“Come in!”

Food service had arrived. The attendant dressed in white livery removed domed lids that revealed giant platters of cheese. Roquefort, Colby Jack, Asiago, stinky blue cheese, goat’s milk, Fontina, Camembart. It was all there. And crackers. Endless squares in every shape that seemed to consider every known cheese and cracker combination devised by humankind. More crackers than you would find in all the mental health clinics in America.

Chris began to jump up and down.

“Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy!” he said.

Mike grunted.

“I did warn you,” said the smoker.

“Yeah, but I thought he was bluffing.”

“When it comes to cheese, Chris Wilde never bluffs.”

Sophie watched this strange man — this guy who was apparently enlisted to guide her back to normalcy — moonwalk across the room like Michael Jackson before spinning in a piruoette and placing forty dollars into the food service guy’s hand.

“Thank you!” shrieked Chris. “Oh, thank you!”

He began to kiss the poor bastard profusely on the cheeks.

“I love you!” said Chris. “I love you so much.”

The cheese man left and he had the look of someone who had significantly undervalued his worth and was seriously considering returning the next day to shoot up the place.

“Now,” said Chris, “we can really begin, okay?”

“What the fuck is this?” said Nick.

“Why, it’s cheese! Lots of cheese! Fuel for the mind!”

“I’m lactose intolerant,” said Nick. “Get this shit out of here.”

“You can’t,” said the smoker.

“Why not?”

“It’s written into his rider.”

“It most certainly is!” cried Nick, who begin to stuff vast gobs of cheese into his mouth.

“Excuse me,” said Sophie.

“I’m eating, okay?”

Sophie stood up from her chair, walked over to Nick, and smacked him across the face, causing half-bitten wads of Jarlsberg to flutter onto the floor, along with a sticky remnant that landed on his purple bowtie.

“Listen, you flippant motherfucker,” said Sophie. “You may be hot shit at Coca-Cola, but my husband is dead and I’ve just learned that he was making snuff films with kids and animals while we were married. Now if you think that’s the kind of thing that should turn everyone in this room into voracious cheese freaks, then I don’t want you here, okay?”

She hated how contagious Chris’s “okays” were and took a deep breath. She noticed that Nick was smiling. The smoker indifferently fired up another cigarette.

“Now I want an actual fucking plan here.”

“I’ve got one, right?”

“Well, what is it?”

The phone positioned at the middle of one of the tables began to ring. Chris swallowed the rest of the cheese in his mouth — it took six rings altogether for him to do this — and picked up.

“Chris Wilde,” he said.

“Bill Flogaast. Boys, we’re going to have to speed up the timetable.”

“Why?”

“There’s been…a development.”

(Next: Yakety Sax)

(Word count: 14,508/50,000)

(Start Reading the Novel from the Beginning: The Dead Writer)

(Previously: The Atlantis Hotel)

They made Ezmerelda wait in the dining room without even offering her a cup of coffee or even a few words of commiseration. She had been there for hours, listening to the distant sift of the Atlantic surf striking against the sands. She kept mental note of the glacial downward crawl that the shadows of the blinds had cast upon a wall with a horrific painting with clashing colors of a horse galloping in front of a rainbow — the kind of grotesque and wildly overvalued art that bumpkins usually pay big money for at an estate sale. She presumed the painting had been Sophie’s choice rather than Paul’s.

“What a sad son of a bitch,” said one of the detectives.

“Not the way I’d want to go,” said another.

“How do you know? Barney found a sizable semen sample under his left thigh.”

“I saw. Hope the family tips the sad son of a bitch who has to clean that sticky mess up before the funeral.”

“The guy was a horse.”

“Yeah, but he wasn’t hung like a horse.”

His colleague grunted.

“Ted, how many times do I have to tell you?” His voice became gentle, matching the tenor of a father telling his son about the birds and the bees for the first time. “You don’t want to kink-shame the dead. Show some respect.”

“He didn’t have a smile on his face.”

“Buddy, they never die with a smile on their face. Cadaveric spasms? Rigor mortis? Come on, I thought you got your MFS at Stevenson.”

“It was just a joke.”

“Work on your material.”

The trabeation between the living room and the dining room was, like most of the house, excessively high and wide. And it afforded Ezmerelda a vista of Van Kleason’s bare dead ass, the numbered placards gradually placed upon the floor, and the many men hunkered around the corpse measuring distances and collecting surrounding items into evidence bags.

“Hey Barney! Check this out!”

One smiling cop had lifted up Van Kleason’s dead head with one hand and had angled his phone for a selfie.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

“Come on, Barney. I’m just having a little bit of fun.”

“You’re contaminating the scene!”

“I’ve got gloves on, man!”

The horse motif was in full display throughout the dining room. A small shelf of Jane Smiley novels — the ones with the horses — was neatly installed just above the silverware drawer. There were metal pony figurines melting into onyx napkin holder bases. Salt and pepper shakers with horse head tops that could be screwed off. She recalled the disturbing morning when Van Kleason had torn off all of his clothes and followed her around the house on all fours while she cleaned, neighing and eerily resembling a Shetland pony from certain angles. She had never asked Van Kleason what his love of horses meant. She figured the answer would be worse than anything she could possibly imagine.

“She’s the only witness?”

“Yeah.”

She was losing potential income by the minute. And she certainly wasn’t going to demonstrate the physiognomical advantages of being alive. And if they didn’t question her and let her leave soon, she wouldn’t have time to prepare herself for peak daytime jerkoff hour on OnlyFans. The stay-at-home dads who wanted to stroke their jokes away just before they picked up their kids from school.

If these creepy cops were that committed to memorializing their desecration of the dead, maybe there was an untapped audience here. Take the idea behind that old website rotten.com and put a personal spin on it.

Barney slapped the camera-happy officer across the cheek.

“Ow!”

“Never again, Clark. One more selfie and I’m filing an internal affairs report.”

The police had sealed off the living room with yellow tape and the flashes of the forensic team’s cameras were so frequent and blinding that Ezmerelda regretted not packing a pair of sunglasses. She didn’t have a book. She didn’t have much in the way of distractions. They had taken away her phone. They had pressed her for her password, but she didn’t spill the four numbers. And she presumed this was the biggest reason why the detectives kept her waiting. But she wasn’t going to betray her online johns. Now two cops who were humanity’s answer to walking ground chuck (the three-day stubble of one of the junior detectives reminded her of Beef Stroganoff) were studying the lock screen from several corners, trying to figure out how to penetrate it.

“Do we have to call Oscar?” said Beef Stroganoff.

“He’s good.”

“He’s the only guy, but he’s a little prickly.”

“Even if she budges,” said his more confident and more sleep-deprived colleague, “we’ll need a court order.”

She hated it when people referred to her in the third person. Many white people did this. It was a subtle form of racism. Don’t address the Black woman, but don’t pretend that she isn’t there.

“Hey,” said Ezmerelda.

“Foul play?” said Beef Stroganoff.

“It’s going to take a day for the toxicology report to clear,” said Sleep-Deprived.

“I said, hey!” said Ezmerelda.

“Do you think she killed him?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I’m right here,” said Ezmerelda.

Beef Stroganoff loosened an exasperated sigh. He glanced at Ezmerelda, his eyes darting to her ass before returning to his colleague.

“Mike, I don’t want to call Oscar,” said Beef Stroganoff.

“Don’t you read comic books, Ted?”

“Not really,” said Ted, who knew that he had perhaps one day left of not shaving before someone would call HR and complain. Because Ted always looked repugnant with facial hair. He had once grown a moustache for Movember in his early days as a traffic cop and everyone in the precinct had given him hell. So he had shaved it off. But that hadn’t swayed him from seeing November as the month devoted to massive endeavors. I mean, total strangers on the Internet were spending the weeks before Thanksgiving writing hack novels, weren’t they?

“Well, summon a bit of that knowledge. You know the techies. Get them talking about the Annie Nocenti run on Daredevil and they’ll do anything you want.”

“Maybe you should call them.”

“I’m more of a DC guy.”

“Wonder Woman and her golden lasso?”

“Barry Allen, motherfucker. Better than Gilpetperdon any day.”

“Elders of the Universe? That was some of the worst shit imaginable.”

Mike rolled up his gloves and tossed them onto the floor. “You want to get into it right now, brother? Because I will fuck you up right now if you talk any more shit about The Flash.”

Ted laughed and slapped Mike on the shoulder. “Relax, Mike. I’m just busting your balls.” He turned away, darting a quick glance at Ezmerelda’s legs before returning to Oscar. “Although that Final Crisis shit? They should have stuck with Grant Morrison. That never would have happened at Marvel.”

“Why, you fucking asshole…”

Mike’s face turned beet-red with fury. He was prepared to jump Ted right then and there, but two of the guys held him back. They told Mike that if he would calm down and concentrate on the investigation that there would be nachos and margaritas awaiting him at the end of a long day.

“Yo! I’ve got places I need to be,” said Ezmerelda.

Ted walked to the long refectory table where Ezmerelda was sitting: the footfalls of his Cole Haan patents echoing against the high ceiling. Van Kleason had told her that she was never to sit there. It was a fantasy he developed after reading about how Jeff Bezos had prohibited his cleaning staff from using his bathroom or eating lunch anywhere in the house. And while Paul Van Kleason had often pretended to be a sensitive leftist, he was — like many of Ezmerelda’s clients — an aspiring tyrant bucking the belabored Leo Buscalgia sensitivity he had practiced online. Most men who longed to be tops were bottoms in their regular lives. When he had been alive, Van Kleason had told Ezmerelda that his marriage had been on thin ice and that he had not fucked his wife in years. But so long as they entered their credit card numbers into Stripe, Ezmerelda would pretend that their aloof alpha pretense was persuasive.

“When do I get to leave?” said Ezmerelda.

“You’ll leave when we say you leave. This isn’t a fast food joint. It’s a crime scene.”

“My phone.”

“I’m sorry, but that’s evidence.”

“It’s my livelihood.”

“Yes, your livelihood. What is it you do exactly? Dressed like that?”

Ezmerelda stretched the very short hem of her miniskirt as far down as it could go.

“What I do is perfectly legal.”

“Was the deceased one of your clients?”

“Yes.”

“How many times did you meet with him?”

“Once or twice a week. It all depended on whether he was alone.”

“He still lived with his wife?”

“Yes, but she’s often away during the day.”

“Did you know his wife?”

“No.”

“And where were you before you discovered his body?”

“I was getting ready to come here.”

“Do you have an alibi?”

“Are you serious?”

“We have to consider every possibility. You live alone?”

“Yes.”

“Did you harbor any jealousy towards Mr. Van Kleason?”

She laughed. “Jealousy? Are you serious? He was a client. He had nothing. Nothing more.”

“But a prominent one. An author of twenty-two books.”

“What kind of books?”

“Fantasy, speculative fiction. Really, just Google the dude.”

“Did you read any of his books?”

“No, they were impenetrable.”

“Did you know anyone closely related to Mr. Van Kleason?”

“No.”

“His friends? His family?”

“No, I was just the maid.”

“But more than a maid? Did you and Mr. Van Kleason have sexual relations?”

“That wasn’t our arrangement.”

“It’s a simple yes or no question, Miss Gibbons.”

“No then.”

At that point, Ezmerelda noticed a smiling woman in her mid-thirties just outside the French doors leading to the backyard. She was taking pictures of her and seemed to be having a blast. A reporter’s notepad dropped out of her coat. She picked it up, fluttered the pad to the right page, jotted something down with a pen, loosened a chortle, and then carried on taking pictures.

Ted’s eyes tightened into a vicious squint. He snapped his fingers and the two men who had held down Mike raced over.

“Looks like we have a press problem.”

The two cops opened the doors. And the ocean breeze was so cold that Ezmerelda shivered in her seat.

“Hi there, Ted!” said the woman, saluting him with a ironically deferential flourish of the hand.

“Ali.”

“Aren’t you going to invite me in? I brought a bag of bear claws for the boys.”

Ezmerelda had skipped breakfast. Her belly rumbled at the thought of a donut, although she knew Rollins would chew her out if she didn’t stick to her paleo diet.

“It’s a crime scene. We’ll be issuing a public statement later today.”

“Oh, Ted,” said the woman. “You’re no fun these days. Remember the Lish murders? Didn’t we have a lot of fun with that? That picture with you holding the axe? Well, it won you a lot of points in Yaupon Circle.”

“I’m sorry,” said Ezmerelda. “Who are you?”

“Ali Breslin. Crime reporter for The Myrtleist!”

“The Myrtleist?”

“It’s an online rag that gets a lot of eyeballs. And speaking of eyeballs, Ted, what’s the story with the stiff?”

“He died with a smile on his face,” shouted Mike from the living room. He had calmed down quite a bit.

“Shut the fuck up, Mike.”

“Hi Ali!” cried Mike.

“Hi Mike! Is Ted giving you shit about Barry Allen again?”

“Yup.”

“Ted, you’ve got to give The Flash another chance! I mean, we all know that Ezra Miller is such a disappointment off-camera.” Ali turned to Ezmerelda and whispered to her. “I wrote a little #metoo story about Miller that went viral.” She unzipped her bomber jacket, revealing a bright T-shirt with a Francis Manapul panel. “But fuck the TV show! The Carmine Infantino run? You’re really going to shit on that?”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell him, Ali!” cried Mike, who was newly galvanized by the appearance of his comic book ally.

“You know I can’t tell you.”

“You know I can’t go away.”

“Excuse me,” said Ezmerelda. “Can I go now?”

“Not yet,” said Ted.

“You’re Ezmerelda Gibbons, aren’t you?” asked Ali.

“How do you know about me?”

Ali held up her phone. “TinEye is your friend. Well, TinEye and a few other tools.”

“Ali,” said Ted gently. “We still haven’t determined the cause of death. And because the deceased is a public figure, we’d appreciate it if you kept this out of the headlines.”

“Oh, you’d appreciate it,” said Ali. Her voice shifted to a flirtatious murmur. “Well, Teddy, you should have thought about that before you ghosted me.”

“Wait,” cried Mike. “You two are fucking?”

Ted cleared his throat. “Not anymore!”

Mike laughed. “Wait until the boys here about this.”

Ezmerelda slammed her fist onto the refectory table.

“You’ve kept me here long enough,” she boomed. “I’m getting the fuck out of here.”

“Now, ma’am, you can’t do that.”

“The hell I can’t!”

Ted was prepared to put Ezmerelda into her face. That’s when he noticed Ali filming him with her camera. Fuck. The last thing the MBPD needed was another Ali Breslin hot take.

He cleared his throat and made the greatest possible effort to swallow his natural gruffness.

“Uh, thank you, Miss Gibbons.”

“My phone?”

“You’ll get it later.”

“Fuck.”

He handed Ezmerelda his card.

“You can contact us if you remember anything.”

“And how the hell am I supposed to call you if you have my phone?”

“You’ll figure something out.”

“That’s it?” said Ezmerelda.

“For now.” He turned to Ali’s camera. “You see, Myrtleist viewers? Consummate professionalism.” Then he put his hand up in front of the lens.

Ezmerelda picked up her purse and walked past the corpse to the front door. Ali followed her.

“Yoo hoo,” said Ali. “Miss Gibbons?”

Ezmerelda walked faster. The clicks of her heels dwarfed the bleak small talk that buzzed through the room like a hornet’s nest newly destroyed by a baseball bat.

“Miss Gibbons!”

(Next: The Physical Trainer)

(Word count: 8,691/50,000)