Fish Nets: The Second Guppy Anthology Read online

  My business lent itself to mingling in high profile circles, but on some days it had become best to fly under the radar. Those times, up to now, included spying, stealing, and sabotaging. I’m not particularly proud of the life I lead, but it seems I have a unique skill set that other people don’t, and said skill set pays the rent. The fashion business might be known as glamorous to most people, but a seamy underbelly of greed and corruption exists, and it’s my job to expose it—not to the authorities, who thought stolen designs were a ploy for publicity, but to the people who hired me, the true fashion insiders. Until today, I’d never encountered a dead body. Regardless of the confidentiality clause I signed, I felt compelled to notify the cops. With the fewest details I could spare, I told them who, what, where. I’d leave it up to them to find the body, determine the cause of death, connect the dots. My role as Good Samaritan was done.

  My next call was to my client.

  “You were right,” I said. “Quinn copied your whole show. The rose gold dress was his finale.”

  “Bastard.”

  “Britt wore it well,” I added. I toyed with the idea of telling him about Big Bird, but our agreement had said nothing about protocol in the event of murder, and the less I said about the body before the cops discovered it, the safer I was. In short, I needed the cops to get there, secure the scene, and conduct their investigation without having any possible way to connect me. I was innocent of murder but guilty of a lot of other things that started when I took the job.

  “How soon can you deliver the proof?”

  “I’ll bring the photos to your studio tomorrow.”

  “Tonight would be better.”

  “Give me a couple of hours,” I said. “Payment?”

  “When you deliver the photos.” He disconnected after we agreed upon a meeting spot in Central Park. I checked my watch. It was a tight schedule, but I could do it. I kept a darkroom at home for film development. Digital would have been easier, but harder to eliminate the evidence. I had just enough time to develop the photos, shower, change, and take a circuitous route to our meet. If only I didn’t have unfinished business.

  * * * *

  I wiped the phone clean of prints and took a taxi to the airport. I paid the driver, walked to another airline and caught a second taxi home. I returned to my small studio apartment, two floors above a mediocre Chinese restaurant, and developed the film. The picture of Britt in the rose gold dress was close to perfect. Not only had I caught her in the ensemble, but in the background, Big Bird stared directly at me, a scowl on his face.

  All eyes were on Britt, but his were on me.

  He knew that I knew.

  I developed the next four pictures that I’d taken in quick succession and blew up the detail shots. I zeroed in on Big Bird’s next action, and the motivation behind it scared me.

  He had sent a text message: She Knows.

  I tried to imagine how the next several minutes had played out. Big Bird tells Quinn that I’m there. That I recognized him. That I am in a position to put the two of them together and blow the whistle on their stolen designs. Quinn puts two and two together, too, and realizes that there are two people, not one, who can compromise his newfound success. Big Bird and me. I didn’t like the way things were adding up.

  I thought about the potential scandal. A fashion designer gets the kind of reviews that can make or break him, and in the same twenty-four hours, is exposed as a thief? Quinn would be ruined. He had to have containment. He killed one of the only two people who could tell the world what he’d done, which meant the only one left was me.

  I had to steer clear of anything involving Quinn, Big Bird, and Fashion week. I needed a low profile that took me out of the picture before Quinn could take me out of the picture first.

  The vintage Versace in the Ziploc bag was going to be a problem.

  * * * *

  Black. Turtleneck, leggings, sneakers, gloves, hat. The color of night. I belted on a khaki trench coat and hopped on the subway. Two stops shy of Bryant Park I exited, took off the trench coat, and balled it up. After stuffing it in a plastic bag from Duane Reed, I buried it in a public trashcan outside of an adult video store, and took up a slow jog, keeping to the shadows as I approached tent number five.

  A crowd of people stood by the dumpster, some in uniform, some not. Bursts of light from a flash pierced the darkness at uneven intervals. Chances were, the crime scene techs had emptied not only the contents of the dumpster, but discovered the dress underneath. If anyone connected me to that dress, they’d link me to the murder. The need for anonymity had led me to “borrow” it in the first place, and now, replacing a vintage Versace was going to be damn near impossible.

  I jogged past the crime scene, around the block, and back to the adult video store, where I fished my coat from trashcan, then headed to Central Park. Nothing else I could do.

  * * * *

  I sat alone on the park bench, surfing the web from my iPhone. Several credible fashion bloggers had updated their websites with a review of Quinn’s show. They agreed with me; it was a breakthrough collection. The kind that caught the attention of senior editors, that generated orders from respectable retailers. Thomas Quinn’s future, at least the near future, was set, thanks to what he stole from my client.

  Conversely, my client would be ruined. He couldn’t show a collection that mirrored Quinn’s from today, and canceling at this late date would start rumors circulating, rumors that would be hard discount. Absolutely nothing good could come from this for him.

  “You’re early,” said a hushed male voice from behind me.

  “Couldn’t be helped,” I replied. My client circled the bench and sat next to me. I closed my Internet connection and punched a couple of keys on the iPhone, behavior common among twenty-somethings sitting in the park. “Did you bring the money?”

  “Did you bring the photos?”

  “Money first.”

  My client pulled a thick envelope from inside his brown leather bomber jacket. I took it, glanced inside and thumbed over a wad of bills, and pushed it deep into the right hand pocket of my trench. I extracted a flat mailing envelope from the other pocket and set it on the bench between us. He reached for it but I pulled it out of reach. “There’s something you should know.” I stared straight ahead, at the path, where a squirrel had stopped to pick up an acorn. “It wasn’t Britt. It was your assistant.”

  “You know this for sure?”

  “Beyond the shadow of a doubt.” I tapped the mustard-colored envelope.

  “That’s too bad,” he said.

  There was something about the way his voice turned flat as he said the words that caused me to break cover and look directly at him. The lines of his face were hard, angular, tense. A rolled up copy of WWD sat on his lap and the barrel of a gun pointed at my left hip.

  “Quinn didn’t steal your designs, did he?” I asked, thinking out loud. “You stole from him. But why?”

  “I needed what Quinn had. A fresh perspective.”

  “What about Britt? Wouldn’t she know?”

  “Britt’s a wannabe actress who barely speaks English. Nobody’s going to listen to her.”

  “Your assistant—he knew what you were doing. That’s why he wore that crazy outfit—he thought no one would risk going after him in that getup. Too much attention. And when he saw me, he didn’t notify you, he notified Quinn.” I stopped talking, as pieces of the last twenty-four hours fell into place like a puzzle that completes itself. “But that means you were there, too. At the show.”

  “You’re right, my little pussycat. I was there. Close enough to take my own pictures and send them to the police. Pictures that expose a young woman in a very attention-getting blue Versace dress that may or may not have been stolen from a hip resale shop in SoHo.”

  My hand rested on a stun gun deep inside the trench coat pocket. I estimated that it was about an inch from his knee. I shifted position on the bench and hit the button. The shock popped his eye
s open and shook his body with convulsions. As quickly as I’d juiced him, I stopped. He slumped down on the bench, eyes half-closed. The newspaper slid off his lap, taking his gun with it.

  My morals are loose, but even I couldn’t leave a gun in the middle of Central Park at night. I picked it up with my hem and slid it into the plastic bag I’d used earlier to store my coat. Then I got the heck out of there.

  * * * *

  I traded taxi for taxi three times before arriving at a discreet payphone by the Hudson River. I called the cops anonymously, then hopped on the subway for home. It was after three AM. A vent of steam from the subway level filtered through a manhole cover, leaving a grey cloud next to a pair of stray cats who nosed through the trash behind the Chinese restaurant. Normally I would have stopped to pet them, but not tonight.

  I bypassed the four deadbolts installed on my front door and locked them behind me. After tossing the photos on a second-hand table, I thumbed through the money in the envelope a second time. Not nearly enough, considering what I’d been through in the past twenty-four hours, but I was lucky. If my client thought for a second that I would walk away with that envelope, I was certain he would have shorted my fee.

  I carried the money to the bathroom and knelt by the litter box, the surface unmarred by tracks. The no-frills plastic bin was nestled inside a second of the same size, stacked like they were in the store the day they’d been purchased. I pulled the top one out of the bottom and dealt small bundles of hundred dollar bills into the empty space, next to money I’d acquired from previous jobs. Credit cards told a story of what people do, where they’ve been. Sure, I had credit cards, in the names of each of my aliases. Katarina, Catherine, Cathy, Kat, and, on rare occasion, Claude. But none in the name I was born with. It was better that way.

  I sat in the bathtub and let the hot shower water pelt me from above. When I’d first started freelancing in the fashion industry to spy on designers, identify knock-off rings, expose greed and corruption among investors, it had seemed like fun. Glamorous, dangerous fun.

  And, I was good at it.

  But this job had gone further than the others.

  I locked the door behind me and went to my mentor’s vacant apartment where I picked the lock and fell into troubled sleep on his very expensive bed.

  * * * *

  The next morning, sunlight announced the start of a new day. I turned on the news. Murder Under The Big Tent, said the headline. A newswoman in a nondescript beige suit stood in front of the camera, while my client’s mug shot filled the screen. My anonymous tip had gotten the cops to the park in time to discover the stun-gunned designer, and I was no longer in danger. Only one matter of business remained. The vintage Versace.

  I spent close to what I made from the job on a replacement dress from eBay. Just as I clicked BUY IT NOW, someone knocked on the door.

  “Kitten Kowalski? It’s the police.”

  Some days it doesn’t pay to get dressed.

  SNARED, by Warren Bull

  Jesse Walters spat tobacco in the direction of the deputy sheriff’s disappearing unit. The car’s spinning tires kicked up dust and gravel as it sped away from his shack. Walters’ German Shepherd barked and strained against its chain. He calmed the animal before addressing the trim but muscular young deputy dressed in spit-shined shoes and an immaculate uniform standing across from him.

  “That fool don’t know it but you just saved his life.”

  Deputy Ted Anderson looked the unshaved middle-aged man dressed in stained overalls up and down. He noted that Walters crossed his arms and stared back at him. Walters had a not unpleasant odor of wood smoke and dog. His jaw worked constantly on the plug of tobacco in his cheek. Anderson waited ten seconds before responding.

  “How is that, sir?”

  “In this state a man’s home is his castle. If Deputy Johnson had busted his way through my door like he wanted to, he would have eaten a face full of buckshot. I set up a greeting for unwanted strangers when I left the house. It’s legal too.”

  “You might not be guilty of murder,” said Anderson, “but I bet a jury would go for a lesser charge if your trap killed a deputy. I’d be concerned that kids and dogs might wander in.”

  “Hmm, it would serve some sneaky kid right. There are too many punks hereabouts. They know better than to mess with me. The buckshot would go right over a dog’s head. Anyway, you kept Big Jim alive. His people and mine have been going at it for generations. His temper’s hotter than Tabasco sauce. He’d have gone ahead like a bulldozer if you hadn’t sent him away.”

  “We didn’t have a warrant and it didn’t seem polite to go bustin’ in,” said Anderson. “The sheriff wanted us to ask for your cooperation. You and Johnson acted like two pit bulls about to go at it.”

  “You sent him off with his tail between his legs. He won’t forget that you’re younger than him and an out-of-towner.”

  “We have other people to talk with too,” said Anderson. “The sheriff made me the lead in this case because of my experience with similar cases in the Military Police. I thought Deputy Johnson would be more effective with someone else. I hope you don’t mind answering a few questions for me. You’re not under arrest, Mr. Walters, and you have no obligation to answer.”

  “No, I don’t mind at all,” said Walters. “I’ll answer your questions. Being the fine upstanding citizen that I am these days. I’m reformed. I always like to help the po-lice. Ask anything you want. Just tell me first. What miserable son of a bitch got himself killed? I know that. ’Cause that’s when you law officers show up to question me. Every time some worthless piece of rancid dog meat takes a dirt nap, you think I maybe had something to do with it and come track me down again. So who was it?”

  “It’s not a secret. You’d hear soon enough, sir, from your neighbors. Glen Mason was the intended target of a car bomb.”

  “Intended target? That means he lived?” Walters’ knees sagged. He took a step backward to regain his balance. “I guess God wanted to get his attention and tell him to change his evil ways. As many people as that asshole pissed off, you must have a list a mile long of people to interview. I’d be near the top of the list ’cause I know how to make a car bomb. I can tell you I didn’t make that one. If I’d of did it, Mason would be a crispy critter by now. The Sheriff wouldn’t have sent just two men out and you wouldn’t have sent Big Jim away.”

  Walters pulled out a pocketknife, opened it and slid it carefully between one side of the door and the doorframe roughly chest high until he felt a tug and heard a click.

  “Just a fishhook, an open-end eye bolt and twenty-pound fishing line is enough to set up a trap,” said Walters.

  “As long as one end of the line is tied to a shotgun trigger,” said Anderson.

  “Tell me, I’m curious,” said Walters. “Why didn’t Mason get blown to hell?”

  “He stood right outside the car, and used a remote starter,” said Anderson.

  “Oh, I get it. He must have been blown backwards. The car frame would protect him from most of the blast. He’d be bruised, scraped up and lose his hearing for a while, but that’s all. If he turns his ignition on before he gets in his car, sounds like he thinks somebody’s out to get him. Since his car blew up, I’d have to say he was right. You can tell him for me to be careful. Real careful.” Walters spat.

  “Do you have any idea about who could have constructed the bomb, sir?” asked Anderson.

  “Prettinear anybody,” said Walters. “I could have. Making a car bomb isn’t rocket science. Even dumb poor white trash like me can read and follow instructions. You can get directions from books.”

  “Anybody could have done it,” agreed Anderson. “Who do you think would have been willing to kill him?

  “Killing a man,” said Walters. “Now we come down to what you’re fishing for.” He spat. “Are you a Bible reader?”

  “Some, Mr. Walters,” said Anderson. “Maybe not as much as I should.”

  “Take a sea
t,” said Walters, pointing to a rocker and sitting down himself in another. “Tell me what happened when Jesus told his disciples to cast their fishing nets into the water, Mr. Lawman.”

  “They caught so many fish that the nets started to tear and sink the boat,” said Anderson.

  “That’s right, boy and how many fish did they catch?”

  “As I recall, a multitude,” said the deputy. He started to rock.

  “Right again,” said Walters, leaning back in his rocker. “Now, some of those fish were the sort people like to eat. Other fish were the sort that like to eat people. You’ve seen my records. You know I have killed. Didn’t bother me when I did it. Don’t bother me now. I don’t like people much. Besides, anybody I killed won’t be missed. I have my rules. Since I been grown up, I never killed an animal except for food. Never killed a child or a lady.”

  “Killing seems a little strange for a Bible reader, Mr. Walters,” said Anderson.

  Walters smiled. “Maybe you should read the Bible more. Remember Matthew 10:34 when Jesus said, ‘Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.’ Every once in a while there’s somebody who acts as the sword of God. I know that sounds loony, but I’ve studied on this. Was a time when I didn’t believe in God. Being in prison with lots of time to kill, I set out to prove to myself there ain’t no God. I read everything Biblical I could lay my hands on. There was some strange stuff too. Finally, I had to admit there was a God and I found out He had a purpose for a man like me. I know it sounds crazy, but I figured He sent me to prison to discover my reason for being alive. I am a sword of God like Joshua or Gideon was.” He set his chair into motion.

  “I don’t get it,” said Anderson, stopping his chair and raising his eyebrows. “Can you help me understand?”

  “Who was the first murderer?”

  “Cain,” answered the deputy.

  “Everybody knows that, Deputy. What is the mark of Cain? What did it signify?”