Phantom Prey

bent, instead of a literary bent, they’d have become geeks.
    “I’ve always been more on the industrial side myself,” Del said, “but there were crossover clubs that had both things going at the same time. Sort of Gotho-Industrial.”
    “I understand all the words you just said, but none of the concepts, ” Lucas said.
    Del said, “Yeah. See, there’s this alternative non-jock universe that you wouldn’t know anything about. . . .”
    They talked about Goth for another fifteen minutes and came back to the murders only at the end. “How much money did Frances get?” Del asked.
    “According to her mother, a little more than two million. Some carefully calculated amount that she could get without anybody paying taxes. I don’t understand all the ins and outs of it.”
    “Okay. Two mil,” Del said. “Lots of people have been killed for a hell of a lot less. Maybe Mom’s a money freak.”
    “She says she doesn’t care about the money.”
    “Oh, bullshit. How many rich people you know who don’t care about money?” Del asked. “How about you? You’re rich. What would you do if somebody said, ‘Uh, shit, we just lost all your money in the market’?”
    Lucas grinned. “Well, hell . . . it’d be a shock.”
    “Yeah. You like your money.”
    “Alyssa may like the money, but she didn’t kill the kid,” Lucas said. “If you’d seen her, Alyssa, you’d know how this whole thing has gotten on top of her. She is seriously fucked up.”
    “So she didn’t kill the kid.”
    “I don’t believe so,” Lucas said. “She could be a psycho killer, and then it’s all up for grabs. But to me, she just looks like a hippie chick who did good for herself. And then everybody around her went and got killed.”
    “A quick nasty argument about Daddy—maybe the kid found out something?—one of them picks up a knife, there’s a struggle, the kid gets stuck . . .”
    Lucas shrugged: “Anything’s possible. But if that’s what it is, why is Alyssa campaigning to get more cops on the case? The whole case was dead in the water. And if she killed the kid, and if I’m right about all three being killed the same way, by the same person, then why did she kill the other two?”
    “Maybe somebody else figured out the connection?”
    “Aw, come on, man. A bartender and a twenty-something Goth?”
    Del nodded. “Okay. But I’ll tell you what, I don’t have that much experience with your basic upper-class crime.”
    “Being pretty much a proletarian yourself,” Lucas said.
    “A working man.”
    “A horny-handed son of the soil.”
    “You got me on the horny,” Del said. “Anyway, I don’t have that much experience with the upper classes, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a crime where there was millions of dollars floating around, where the money didn’t have something to do with the murder; especially if there was philately going on.”
    “That’d be philandering,” Lucas said. “Philately is stamp-collecting. ”
    “That’s what I meant—stamp-collecting.”
    Lucas scrubbed an index finger across his philtrum, then said, “You’re right about the money and fucking. And when you’re right, you’re right.”
    Lucas said, “Are they arguing?”
    Del looked across the street, where the old lady was jabbing her finger at Heather.
    “Looks like it.” Heather laughed and said something, and the old lady laughed. “On the other hand, maybe not.”
    Lucas said, “You’ve been grousing about your old lady. Everything okay?”
    “Ah, everything’s okay, but she’s been sick for a couple of weeks,” Del said. “Not enough to go to the doctor, but, you know. Doesn’t want to walk around much: her stomach is upset.”
    “Jeez, man, a couple of weeks? That could be something serious. You gotta get her to a doc.”
    “There are two kinds of nurses,” Del said; his wife was a nurse. “There’s the kind who think the sun shines out of a doctor’s asshole, and the kind that think most doctors are running a long-term hustle, and who don’t trust them any further than they could throw them. I got one of the second kind.”
    He turned his head to the window: “Old lady’s leaving,” he said. “Looks like it’s bedtime.”
    “She’ll be changing into her nightgown,” Lucas said.
    “Can I borrow the glasses?”
    “Get your own fuckin’ glasses.”
    Eric Clapton: “Willie & the Hand Jive.”
    After a restless night—disturbed a last time by Weather getting ready for