“Nice house,” Jane says. “You live here all alone?”
“Just me.”
“You never married, huh?”
“Nope, never married,” I say, clapping my hands on my knees.
“No live-in girlfriend?” she asks. “Or girlfriend, anyway?”
“No, I’m not dating anyone.”
She nods, as if it’s just idle conversation. It’s not.
“So, let’s get started,” she says, though we already did. “Do you know why we’re here?”
I can’t help but grin. “Jane, you know when you get pulled over by a cop and the first thing they ask you is, ‘Do you know why I pulled you over?’ I always hated that. I always felt like that was aMirandaviolation. It should be, if you think about it. You’re not free to leave, and the question is designed to elicit an incriminating response.”
“You were always a smart one, Simon,” she says. “You’re free to kick us out, obviously. But if you’d prefer, I canMirandizeyou.”
“That’s okay.” I sit back in my chair. “I can only suppose that you’re here for background on Lauren Lemoyne. I read about her death.”
Here’s my thinking: If I play dumb, if I act like I had no idea, then I’d have to put on a show right now of surprise when she tells me Lauren’s dead, and I’m not that good of an actor. I’m a pretty darn good director, but not an actor.
“Yeah? Where did you read about it?”
“TheTribune.”
“And what was your reaction?”
“I didn’t cry myself to sleep,” I say. “Lauren and I do not share a friendly history. I’m sure you know that, or you wouldn’t be here.”
She says nothing but holds my stare.
“How did she die?” I ask. “The paper said suspicious circumstances.”
“I can’t really get into details. When did you first realize Lauren was back in town?”
“I thought I saw her once last spring,” I say. “April, May, something like that.”
“Where was this?”
“Michigan Avenue, downtown. She walked past me. It looked like her, but it had been almost twenty years.”
“Did you talk to her?”
“No. I just saw her. I did a double take, for sure. You haven’t seen a person for almost two decades, you’re not sure. But it looked like her.”
“So what did you do?”
Well, let’s see. Several things: (1) I ran to Vicky and told her; (2) I started plotting with Vicky about how to kill Lauren; (3) we figured if she was going to play my “wife” for Nick’s sake, he might surveil her, so she’d have to pretend to live with me; and (4) I put up a privacy fence so she could come and go privately through the back entry, and nobody would ever see her.
You mean stuff like that, Jane?
“Well, later that day after seeing Lauren on the street, I looked her up on Facebook,” I say. “And I found her. It said she was living in Grace Village.”
If things get far enough, the police could search my work computer, and if a forensics team dug through it, they’d see that I looked her up. It would look better if I voluntarily fronted that information.
That was a mistake, looking her up like that back in May. But back then, when I first saw her on the street, I was in shock, disbelief. I wasn’tthinking about killing her. It took me a while, and some conversations with Vicky.