I was there because I needed the money.
Jessa Genovese was hosting us in the junior suite she’d been living in while filming The Hollows, her new art-house horror movie. She’d moved up from the detergent commercials she’d been doing when I first met her, back when she was my roommate at Paragon Girls San Marcos. Jessa had been three years older than me, which I’d known from the orderlies letting her smoke, and she was an actress, which I’d known because, when she talked, she talked quite loudly and with her hands, projecting her voice, watching her plosives, scanning to see who was looking and changing her presentation accordingly, and she was Italian, yes, which would account for some of the volume and vivacity—I quite liked Italians, actually—but did not account for the way Jessa jumped at any small noise when she thought she was alone. She jumped also when she was reading and one surprised her, and as she was reading constantly, endless romance novels set in Scotland, she was constantly spooked. One might assume she had a quiet home growing up and was used to silence. But no—she smothered her reaction, kept it to a jerk of the lips, a stuttered hand on the bed.
As though she was habitually afraid of someone creeping up on her, and whatever they’d do to her then. As though she’d had to hide that fear in the past.
One night, stoned in our room, I’d told Jessa the full extent of what I’d learned just by looking at her. She cried. She told me some things about her mother. And then she began to sketch out a plan for how my abilities would keep me in cash and her from ever having to go back home.
Hence, the poker.
In New York or London, whenever Jessa and I overlapped, we would meet for a game. She would bring along some friends; different ones every time. I would win their money, slowly, and then very, very quickly. And Jessa would make sure they were having enough fun that they didn’t really care.
Then, after they left, I would tell Jessa every last scrap of information I’d gleaned about them that night, for her to do with what she wished.
Six months ago I had had quite a bit of fun pulling this scheme in London. Tonight . . . it made me feel a bit ill. But I was broke, and Watson was in danger, and there was currently two thousand seven hundred dollars on the table, and Penny Cole and Natalie Stevens, the two girls tonight, could leave whenever they wanted to.
And they didn’t want to. Jessa was seeing to that. She’d ordered champagne and chicken fingers and fries and foie gras, and she was playing the kind of cool-toned, echoing hip-hop that made one feel sort of sexy and important, and she was telling endless stories about bad behavior by musicians I hadn’t heard of but that made Natalie and Penny howl.
“Then he zipped up. And by zipped up, I mean the back of his unicorn costume. It was incredible.” I didn’t really understand this story, but I could tell Jessa was telling it well.
“And was that how you guys met?” Natalie was giggling. “At a show like that?”
“No, Charlotte and I go way back,” Jessa said. “Rehab.”
The girls shot each other a look. Penny had her own Disney channel sitcom. Natalie was a Lifetime movie veteran turned Christian recording artist. If Jessa and I were drug addicts and this night of ours went public, their public image would suffer.
“Eating disorder,” I said, to make myself seem like a safer prospect. It wasn’t exactly a lie. Still, I hated the implication that that was intrinsically “better” than the addiction, or “less my fault.” “I don’t really want to talk about it. I’m doing better now.”
Penny relaxed completely. “Oh, you guys,” she said, and it was genuine. “I’m so sorry.” But Natalie looked more troubled, a sort of troubled I was familiar with, and that put together with the state of her right index finger gave me more information for the file I was building on her in my head.
My phone chirped. I looked at it under the table; it was from my source at Sherringford. Things are getting worse for him, it read. How soon can you come to Connecticut?
I realized, dispassionately, that I would rather be nearly anywhere else. Even my old boarding school. But it was the final hand of the night, and I was closing in on my kill.
“The river,” Jessa said, while Penny dealt. The game was Texas hold ’em. “And it turns! Final bets, ladies.”
Penny raised, but she was bluffing; she was tapping her foot under the table, the way she had the last three times. Natalie had better cards than Jessa did, to be sure—she had a way of too-nonchalantly eating fries when she was sure she was going to win—but I had better cards than Jessa, too, who was big blind. Since she had to put money down, she’d stayed in. (And anyway, she’d split her winnings with me at the end of the night.)
My phone sounded again in my pocket. It would be poor manners for me to duck out now.
But I looked, despite myself. Jamie needs you, it said. It’s only going to get worse.
I gripped my phone under the table.
I needed to win this round rather desperately.
Natalie studied her cards. “Charlotte Holmes,” she mused. “That’s so funny. I’ve been thinking about this all night—you know, I loved the Sherlock Holmes stories when I was a kid.”
People liked to add that tag, “when I was a kid,” as though there was something childish about them. “That’s great,” I said, because while I didn’t particularly want to hand her secrets over to Jessa, I also didn’t care about her, or what she had or hadn’t read. I only wanted her to bet, so I could leave and contact my source in private.
I tried not to think about the implications of that last text. Watson, dead. On his dorm room floor. Watson dead, shot in the snow, like—
“You know, I met a Moriarty recently.”
My pulse quickened. No one noticed, of course, except for me, as I have a very good poker face. “It’s a common Irish last name,” I told Natalie. “You meet a lot of them.”
“No,” she said, and she tapped her cards against the table. “Like, a real, storybook Moriarty. I go to the Virtuoso School—you know, for working young actors and singers or whatever—and he was getting a tour. They had him sit in on my songwriting class. I guess he’d invested some money in the program.”
Lucien Moriarty’s consulting firm’s client list. The new additions: a large posh hospital in D.C. A wilderness rehabilitation facility for teenagers in Connecticut. And a Manhattan prep school for the arts.
“You gotta bet, lady,” Jessa said, sensing the turn in the conversation. “Then we can order up more champagne. Maybe I can call DJ Pocketwatch, see if she wants to come over.”
My phone chirped again.
“Did you ask him if he’d committed any crimes recently?” I asked lightly, but with just enough edge to let Natalie know I was bothered. It was a tone that drew people in, made them want to know the story behind your upset. It rarely failed.
It didn’t now. She leaned in, fascinated. “Whoa, do you guys still have run-ins?”
I shrugged. “Of a sort. What was he like?”
“Not very interesting. He had on a slouchy hat, like he thought he was cool. Big glasses. He liked the song I played.”
“Are there a lot of people in your songwriting class?” I asked. “I mean, anyone I’ve heard of?”
Natalie snuck a peek at her cards. “Not unless you follow folk-rock? I mean, Annie Henry’s a big-deal fiddler. Penn Olsen and Maggie Hartwell have been playing together for a while—”
“Come on, guys,” Penny said. The music had stopped, and she was staring at all of her money piled up in the middle of the table. “Can we, like, get this over with?”
I pulled my chips toward me, and I found I didn’t care about my winnings.
Maggie Hartwell.
Michael Hartwell was one of Lucien’s fake identities.