My Favorite Suspects: Part 8

"Why, exactly, did you think I was Ghost?" Luna said.

In this cozy noir, amateur sleuth Terry Perez revisits his first case in which he investigates a series of crimes at his supermarket. Can he solve the mystery before he loses his job at the store? Who in his circle will turn out to be the criminal?

A week passed. I remained jobless. Everyone who could recommend me worked at the supermarket, so I had no references.

I hadn't told my roommates yet. I lied and said that I'd been switched to days so they wouldn't be suspicious of my schedule.

The temperature hovered uncharacteristically in the mid-nineties. During the day, the rambling Victorian house I shared became a sauna with fancy crown molding. At night, the cheap window AC unit in my bedroom couldn't keep up with the humidity. Rochester was a city built for snow and rain, not heat.

I spent time with my brother. The group home, where he lived while the state and I sorted out his future, had central air. We played games on a Playstation someone had donated to the home. I explained my job situation in between him telling me about the buses he'd been riding. He said that he wasn't surprised and that Mom always said I was too trusting.

I guess he had a point.

Mostly, I hung out at the Rundel Library and used the computers there to search for work. On Thursday evening, I left the limestone columns and art-deco-y façade of the Rundel behind and passed up the bus stop, walking instead south toward Woodbury. I felt like splurging on a coffee at Café Rio.

When I reached the corner, I noticed a woman standing outside of the Backstop Bar at the other end of the block, down by the ramp for 490 East. Something about her looked familiar, but she was out of context and I couldn't identify her. My short walk left me feeling like a stale order of fries left under a heat lamp, but out of curiosity, I pushed myself down the block toward the woman.

I called out when I was close enough to be heard over traffic. She turned. It was Luna. In the daylight her eyeshadow was raccoon-heavy and her acne was visible under a thin layer of foundation. She wore a soft blue blouse over casual white shorts and shoes that later on I'd learn were mules. She had a thin hoodie tied around her waist, a small purse with a narrow strap over one shoulder, tortoiseshell Wayfarers pushed up on top of her head, and her bangs all over the place. She looked around, as if for a place to escape, and settled, frowning, on her current spot.

"I didn't expect to meet you here," I said.

She took a sip from a straw that was in a large wax paper 7-11 cup. "Everyone's gotta be somewhere, Price Check. What're you doing downtown?"

"Looking for a job."

"That explains why I haven't seen you at the supermarket."

I got the impression that I'd interrupted her in the middle of something, but I couldn't figure out what that might be. She bounced on the balls of her feet and her attention seemed focused on the glass entry door to the Backstop. It was a decent cocktail bar that business people hit after work, and she was about an hour early for that crowd. Or any crowd, really. Only a few cars simmered in the parking lot.

"Waiting for someone?" I said.

"Something like that."

She pressed the lip of the paper cup against her lower lip, almost chewing on it, and looked over at the door to the Backstop.

"OK, well… I'm going to hit the Rio and…" I made the swooping, two-handed ASL sign for "leave." My brother had a deaf roommate and I'd picked up some words. I made to turn for the café.

She grabbed the sleeve of my T-shirt.

I stopped. I looked at her hand, then back at Luna. She had a surprised expression, as though she didn't think ahead to what she would do next.

"Actually," she said.

"You want to…?"

She glanced furtively at the Backstop and flicked her tongue over her lips. "Coffee sounds good," she said. "Maybe iced, yeah? It's freaking hot."

"Why don't you let go of my shirt and we can walk over there?"

Luna laughed self-consciously and apologized. She patted my shoulder. "How far is it?"

I turned my back to her and pointed out the sign. "Up that way. See it?"

I felt icy liquid splatter against the back of my pants.

"Sorry!" Luna said as I turned around.

She had one hand inside her purse and the other held the now-empty cup. The straw and plastic lid rested on the sidewalk between my feet. She cursed herself. "I went to check my phone, and… I'm really clumsy today. Sorry."

I tugged at my clothing and angled my neck to assess the damage. It looked like my pants got the full 32 ounces of whatever she'd been drinking. A dark stain ran from my butt to the backs of my knees and liquid dripped onto my sneakers.

"Are you all right, Luna?"

"Totally fine. Why?" She winced. "Let's go to my apartment and I'll clean that up for you."

We rode the bus without speaking. She wrapped her arm around mine and I got the sense that she was using my weight to hold her down. She stuck close to me on the three-block walk from the bus stop to her apartment, almost pushing me along. She said she didn't feel safe. I thought that was odd for someone who practiced Krav Maga and had a grip like a construction worker.

When we got inside her apartment, she quickly closed the door and threw the locks into position. She rested her forehead against it like she was greeting a long-lost lover.

"Thank you," she said. "I owe you one."

"For what?"

"I said I owe you one. Let's leave it at that."

First impressions: Luna had a nice place. A short entryway with a closet and shoe cabinet opened into a living room. A peek around the corner revealed a contemporary couch, low glass table, and a credenza that had been set up as an entertainment center under the picture window that looked over the parking lot. She'd set up a row of ferns that took in light from the window.  A few hardcover books were placed just so on a wooden occasional table. Everything matched and had been set up in an orderly and visually pleasing fashion to indicate the person living there had a certain level of taste and education. Like, I thought, a movie set.

"Live here by yourself?" I said.

Luna gave me an expression that made me think she was improvising her way through a plan and now wasn't sure what to do with me.

"Yep. Shoes off, please."

She went into the kitchen. I kicked off my sneakers and left them on the mat by the door, and went into the living room, enjoying the pleasantly dry air, and wiped condensation from my eyeglass lenses with the tail of my T-shirt. From there, I could see her over the counter that divided the kitchen and living room.

"Do you feel safe now?" I said.

"Oh, you mean earlier, when I said I didn't feel safe? I feel… safer."

"Why don't you feel safe?"

"Can I get you something to drink?"

I decided to stick to my assigned role in her improv. "I could go for a beer."

"Don't have any. How about a pop or a soda?" She opened the door to her fridge.

"That's a shame. Heat like this, a beer would be perfect. Ice cold. Frosted glass. My dad used to mow the lawn on days like this and he would sit on the front step after he was done and have a Genny Cream in a glass that he'd put in the freezer. I used to do that after he died. Man, there was nothing like that first cold—"

Luna slammed the refrigerator door. "I said I don't have any damn beer." She banged a can of RC onto the kitchen table.

I entered the kitchen, which she'd decorated in the same manner as the living room, to give an impression. I cracked the top of the RC. It sounded like a firecracker in the silence.

"Take off your pants,'" Luna said.

"Sorry, what?"

She opened the door to a small combo washer/dryer that had been integrated into the cabinets by the dishwasher and pointed inside.

"Right," I said. I stripped off the belt. Emptied my pockets on the kitchen table. My ankles got caught in the cuffs and I had to struggle a bit to get the khakis off. Luna watched me with silent feline judgement. I gave her the pants. Luna chucked them in the washer and went into the bathroom.

Alone for a moment, I checked out the photos and notes stuck to the fridge door. There were selfies with people who might have been family, but there wasn't any familial resemblance. One had Luna standing outside the Bridge Church beside an older man with a salt-and-pepper beard. Other photos had young women: some from the club, based on the surroundings and clothing, and others at college. I recognized the tables inside the Brockport Student Union. Another selfie showed Luna with an older Black woman outside of St. Michael's, in the parking lot. I recognized the door to the chapel. There were notes, handwritten, that consisted of dates and times and locations. The dates fell at regular weekly intervals and the locations alternated between St. Michaels, the Student Union, the Bridge, and other churches.

Luna returned with a bottle of detergent and fussed with the washer. After she got that going, we sat at the table on comfy Ikea chairs.

"It's funny," I said. "For a while, I thought you were Ghost."

"Who's Ghost?"

"A shoplifter that's been hitting our store."

"What made you think I'm a thief?"

"Sitting here," I said after a thoughtful pause, "I wonder the same thing. I guess being on night crew warped my brain. It's not personal. I thought A.J. was Ghost, too."

"The only thing A.J. would want to steal is your soul," Luna said with a roll of her eyes. Other than the cigarette, she appeared relaxed. The cigarette gave her away. She'd taken a Tenet out of her purse and jiggled it between her fingers.

"On night crew,” I said with a confessional tone, “watching customers on the monitors, I played a game to keep myself interested. I tried to guess things about customers based on what I saw. Like Sherlock Holmes would look at the fabric of people's clothing and deduce that they're stone masons or nuclear physicists. The problem with the game is that I suck at it. I saw two people who wore hoodies and backpacks and smoked cigarettes and had aspects of their lives that they tried to hide and I made deductions. But I didn't make deductions. I made assumptions. And they were wrong. I was wrong."

"I do usually wear a hoodie and a backpack when I'm at the supermarket," Luna said, thinking out loud.

"And that's my point. I made two mistakes. The first had to do with surface details. The problem with surface details, like clothing, is that these days, lots of people wear the same kinds of clothing. The other mistake had to do with behavior. I assumed that hiding something means you're guilty of a crime. The problem with that is everyone is trying to hide something, so they try to cover it up in some way. I confused suspicious behavior—acting guilty—with actually being guilty of the thing I thought someone had done. I thought that A.J. might be Ghost because he was hiding cigarettes in his mother's garage. Turns out he's hiding his cigarette addiction because he's supposed to be the guy who only needs the Lord and shouldn't need cigarettes."

I paused to take a drink of cola. Luna watched me intently. Her cigarette sat, ignored, in a tray, the ash getting quite long. I felt pretty good about myself for holding her attention so well.

"I'm curious," she said, repeatedly stroking one eyebrow with her fingertip. "Why, exactly, did you think I was Ghost?"

"At first, I thought you had something to hide, too. But the surprising thing about you, Luna, is that you're so open about what you do, and how you do it, I realized that you weren't hiding anything at all. I mean, you let me look in your backpack. You explained your whole side business selling fetish stuff. You’ve got a web site, for Pete’s sake. And now I'm sitting in your kitchen. If you were hiding something, you're really good at it. You're like one of those characters in a movie that nobody suspects is an alcoholic until some accident reveals it. You might even be a thief." I started laughing. "It would be pretty funny if it turned out that you're actually a thief, am I right…?"

I stopped, the smile frozen on my face.

Luna wasn't laughing.

She stared at me in disbelief, as if I'd casually revealed her deepest secret.

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