THIRTEEN
On Saturday, I called Kenny Brayfield and told him I had some follow-up questions for him. I was looking for something that could shut down the remote possibility of Brad Stockton’s involvement in Mallory Evans’s death so I could move on, although I kept this to myself on the phone. He invited me to drop by his house in Belmont and when I got there, I saw that house was a little modest. It was easily the largest single-family dwelling I’d ever laid eyes on—a huge stone McMansion with a long circular driveway and a three-car garage, all inside a dramatic wrought-iron fence. I pulled up to the gate and rolled down my window and stated my case into a speaker, thinking the gold-flake vodka business must be damn good. But when I pulled up to the house, I saw an older, better-dressed version of Kenny in the garage loading suitcases into the trunk of a late-model Lexus, and it all made sense: Kenny still lived with his parents.
Kenny was waiting for me on the porch. He was wearing velour sweatpants and a white undershirt and was barefoot and drinking a green substance from a tall plastic cup. “Hey, you found the place.”
“Hard to miss it,” I said.
“Well, come in, there’s breakfast. Quiche Lorraine, or you can try this, I’m doing this Superfood RX Herbal Smoothie.” He waggled his cup at me and the beverage made a pond-like sloshing sound. “It’s got that ginkgo stuff in it, boosts energy and focus.”
I held up a hand. “Another client of yours?”
He deflated a little. “Yeah,” he said. “Want to give it a try? It comes in a bunch of flavors.”
I said I’d just have a cup of tea and followed him inside. The interior of the house was all vaulted ceilings and plush off-white carpet, with double curved staircases arcing away from the foyer to a second-floor walkway. The kitchen was the size of a normal house’s lower level, with gleaming countertops that gave no indication food had ever been prepared in there. But a large glass baking dish of the aforementioned quiche sat on a silicon trivet, untouched.
“What do you think of the place?” Kenny said as he poured hot water from a one-cup coffeemaker. He brought it to me on a saucer, along with a tiny wooden chest of tea bags.
“How many people live here?” I said, taking a seat at the breakfast bar.
“Me and my folks, right now,” Kenny said. “And my sister’s moving back in a couple weeks—she’s getting divorced. Plus the housekeeper.”
“Cramped quarters,” I said.
He grinned at me. “You’re funny.”
Kenny’s dad came back in from the garage and, barely looking at me, said, “Okay, we’re taking off. We’ll be back Tuesday morning, so please no get-togethers in the house this time. Okay, Kenny?”
“Yes, sir,” Kenny said, straightening up.
His dad gave a slightly irritated smile and left again. Kenny seemed a little bit old to require such a warning. But maybe with money like this, you never had to grow up at all. Without missing a beat, he said, “I’m having some people over Monday night for the Browns-Steelers game. Around seven. You should come.”
I had to laugh. “Yeah, we’ll see,” I said.
“We have an indoor pool, it’s heated to eighty-five degrees. When it’s cold out, damn, there’s nothing better. It’ll be chill, just some old friends. I mean it, if you’re around, you should come.”
“Indoor pool,” I said, “I bet that made for some wild prom afterparties.”
He sipped his pond-water smoothie. “Oh man, you know it. This house was the place to be. My folks were always so cool, they were down with us having booze, no problem. My mom knows how to throw a party, that’s for sure. She’s the one who got me started in the promotion biz—it’s like our vocation.”
I wasn’t sure that event promotion counted as a vocation. Rather than comment on it, I decided to use the subject to start talking about Brad. “Did Brad come to your parties?”
“Oh yeah,” Kenny said. “Brad’s, you know, one of those introverted-type people, and sometimes you could just see him going into this little room in his head where he could write his poems. But he was always down for whatever.”
“Who else was in your group of friends?”
“Danielle,” he said. “She was two years behind us in school but she could hang. And this kid Brian Zollinger, we were close with him, but he moved away junior year. We’d party with anyone, as long as they were cool as fuck.”
My ears perked up. Brian Zollinger was one of the other crossed-out names on the list in my father’s notebook. Plus, from what I knew about Mallory, she was a partyer too. This seemed like a good place to jump in with it. “What about a girl named Mallory Evans?”
Kenny’s face closed right up. So my instinct not to open with that had been correct, I thought with dismay. “Mallory. Wow, I haven’t thought about her in years.”
“Did you know her?”
“Sure, just from around.”
“Did Brad know her?”
He seemed uneasy. I couldn’t tell what, exactly, was the source of his uneasiness, but it was worth noting. “I guess. I don’t know.”
“She and Sarah,” I said, “they were kind of similar, looks-wise?”
“I don’t know. I guess.”
“You know what happened to her, right?”
“Yeah, that was crazy.” He set his cup down and spent a long time lining it up with the edge of the counter like a man trying to buy some time. “Why are you asking about her?”
“It’s just strange,” I said, “two violent crimes happening in a place like Belmont only a few months apart.”
Kenny nodded but didn’t say anything, even though he’d been the definition of chatty a moment earlier. I’d clearly hit a nerve.
“So Mallory and Brad,” I said. “Were they in any classes together or anything like that?”
“You’d really have to ask him that, I’m not sure,” Kenny said.
I could see I wasn’t going to get any more out of him about that, so I tried another angle, “Did you ever hear any rumors about what might have happened?”
“You know, I’m sorry to cut out on you but I need to run some errands, okay?”
I stared at him. This was an awfully abrupt end to the conversation, after the production he’d made of offering me the tea chest. “Are you throwing me out?”
“No, no,” he said, although he clearly was. He smiled halfheartedly. “I just have some shit I need to do. It’s not a big deal, right?”
“No, I get it,” I said.
But I didn’t. I had been hoping that Kenny would steer me away from the idea that Brad could have been behind Mallory Evans’s death too, but instead he steered me a little closer. He hadn’t told me much, but the change in his attitude said a lot.
*