Lulu Dark Can See Through Walls (18 page)

I hadn’t really thought about who, but when Helena asked the question, one name popped into my mind.

“Sally Hansen,” I said gravely.

“Sally Hansen?” Helena asked. “I love her line of nail polish. It’s chic yet affordable. But what does she have to do with Berlin?”

I gestured to Daisy. Dutifully she reached into her trench coat and pulled out my little Nikon digicam.

I turned it on and scanned through the saved photos until I found the picture of Sally Hansen I’d snapped the other day in the park. “Have you ever seen Berlin talking to this girl?” I asked, showing Helena the screen.

Helena thought hard, a long pink nail scratching her lower lip. “I don’t think so,” she finally said. “I’d remember a hot little number like that one.”

“Whatever happened to Berlin,
she’s
mixed up in it,” I insisted, pointing to the screen.

Helena laughed raspy and low. “Not a chance. This little Hooters reject wouldn’t be half a match for Berlin.” She turned to the hot dog man, showing him my camera. “Ever seen this tartlet, Bob?”

He squinted as he examined the picture. “Can’t say I have, Hel.”

“Well, if I ever catch you selling her a hot dog, we’re going to have problems. She’s on my enemies list, and so is anyone who helps her out.”

“Any enemy of yours is an enemy of mine,” the vendor told her, then handed her another dog. “Here. It’s on me.”

“Thanks. And if you see Berlin, please tell her to call me! When you get to be a woman of my age, you worry.”

Bob nodded and turned to his next customer.

“Come on, girls,” Helena said. “I have an idea.” She began to hail a cab, but I stopped her. We already had a car.

The drag queen was impressed by our classy wheels. “Now this is the ride I was born for,” she said, climbing in with us. “I’ve got to get myself a rich boyfriend like yours, Lulu.”

I let the comment slide. Charlie wasn’t my boyfriend, but I felt dumb having to remind people of it every five minutes.

Helena directed the driver to an address on the west side, then explained that we were going to meet Francisco Jackson, a fashion designer who had been dating Berlin before she’d disappeared. Maybe he would know something about what had happened to her.

 

When Francisco Jackson opened his door to us, he was nothing like I imagined. When you think of fashion designers, you imagine them to be, well, fashionable. But Francisco was the biggest mess I’d ever seen. Even at his worst, Charlie at least showers and sprays on some deodorant. But at two in the afternoon on a Sunday, Francisco was still in his pajamas, hair a wreck, with at least three days of patchy stubble and a serious case of body odor. He was emaciated, pasty-faced, and blank-eyed.

This guy must be really,
really
rich,
I thought. There’s no other way that Berlin would ever date him.

“What do you want?” he growled.

Francisco clearly thought he was intimidating, but how scary is a man in a ratty bathrobe and fuzzy slippers? I knew in an instant that steely resolve was the only way to deal with this character.

Wordlessly I pushed my way past him into the apartment
.
Daisy and Helena followed close behind. I plopped myself down on the couch and crossed my ankles on the coffee table, which was piled high with old
Vogue
s and
W’
s.

“We want to know what’s the what with Berlin Silver,” I snapped. “And don’t try to give us the runaround. We can make you talk if we need to. Daisy here has a brown belt in karate—and I have a black belt in ka-
razy.
” I could get into this, I decided.

To my right, Helena stifled a laugh. I guess my steely side had taken her by surprise.

“Berlin? You want to know about Berlin?” Francisco snapped. “She’s a monster, that’s what’s the what.”

Helena and Daisy stared wide-eyed at Francisco, who began pacing the dark room. Back and forth, back and forth in jittery excitement. All the while he ran his fingers obsessively through his hair.

For a moment I considered the notion that I was wrong. Francisco
could
be intimidating. Not because he was physically strong, of course. But because something was off about him. Very off.

“Berlin Silver broke my heart!” he yelled, stalking toward me. “She ripped it out and stamped on it!”

I tried my best to remain calm. “Is that why you killed her?” I asked.

I was pressing my luck, but I didn’t care. I had backup, and if I was going to solve this mystery, there was no time for pussyfooting around the big issues.

Francisco didn’t even notice the accusation. He marched toward Daisy and Helena. “She tells me she loves me, tells me she wants to go to Las Vegas and get married. And I believe her. God! That’s the last time I ever trust a woman.” He paused, then whirled on me accusingly. “You only lie when your lips are moving. You say you
love
someone, as in,
in love,
but what you really mean is that you want free clothes from the fall line and a seat next to Lil’ Kim at the Jeremy Scott show. Well, I’ve had it. I’m never trusting anyone with a uterus again!”

He hunched over and clutched his belly in psychic pain. His body shook as he cried in big, silent heaves.

“So, um, are you saying that you haven’t seen Berlin?” I ventured.

“Seen her?” He looked up at me from his crouch, his face puffy and wet. “Seen her!? I don’t even know her number! She disconnected her cell phone, didn’t tell me where she was going. She’s the cruelest, most heartless person in the universe.”

I ignored his histrionics.

“Okay, tough stuff,” I said, my voice dripping with sarcasm. “If you hear anything from Berlin or remember anything about her, give me a call.” I tore a page from my notebook and jotted down my number. He snatched it out of my hand and angrily crumpled it into a tiny ball, which he then shoved into the pocket of his ratty, plaid pajama pants. I looked at him pointedly and rolled my eyes in the most over-the-top manner possible. We left the apartment.

“Now I’m
really
worried,” Helena said as we descended the dark staircase to the lobby. “I hate to say it, Lulu, but you may be right. That man did not inspire optimism.”

“I thought you said Berlin was too tough to have been murdered,” Daisy argued.

“Yeah, but Francisco Jackson is the sneaky type. The type that might have poisoned her drink or snuffed her out in her sleep.” Helena nibbled nervously on one of her fingernails. “I do not have a good feeling about this, girls; no, I don’t.”

I was feeling pretty unnerved myself. No doubt, Francisco was insane. Still, in some far corner of my brain there was a gnawing certainty that this just wasn’t how it happened.

I dug into the pocket of my shorts and ran my fingers over the rough, jeweled surface of the necklace we’d found in Berlin’s room. I had been carrying it with me since we’d found it.

Hattie,
I thought.
Who is Hattie?
Since my tarot card reading, I’d become sure that the key to unraveling the mystery had something to do with her . . . whoever she was.

As we made our way to the limo, the possibilities were overwhelming me. Weren’t mysteries supposed to get
less
complicated the more you investigated them? I thought the idea was to start with a bunch of suspects and narrow them down.

Instead this whole mess had begun with something simple—a stolen purse—and gotten more and more confusing as I’d gone along. No amount of Nancy Drew reading could have prepared me for this madness.

The driver opened the door and I slid into the leather seat that faced backward. I stared out the tinted window at the towering peak of the Halo Building. It’s the tallest building in the city—the North Star on the Halo City skyline. As the car began rolling forward, from my seat the scenery was only receding. Soon it would disappear—along with my hope for finding out what
really
happened to Berlin Silver.

SCHOOL ON MONDAY WAS PURE torture. Chinese water torture, specifically, in the sense that it didn’t seem that bad at first. But then it kept going and going and going—drip, drip, drip—endlessly wearing down my resolve with every passing second.

During history I considered messing with the teacher, which had never before failed to cheer me, but I didn’t have the heart for it these days. All I could do was think about Berlin.

To add insult to injury, Charlie wasn’t speaking to me. After the (fake) bombshell that Genevieve had dropped the other night, he decided that he would rather just hang out with his guy friends. Although I swore up and down that the rumors about me and Alfy were untrue, it didn’t seem to make much difference to Charlie.

Daisy tried to perk me up at lunch with a constant stream of high jinks. She went all out; it was sweet of her to care. But even watching her toss strawberry Jell-O at the back of Blair Wright’s white tennis skirt didn’t do the trick. I tried to laugh, but it just came out a weak little gurgle.

How could I laugh when Berlin Silver was missing and no one seemed to care?

I couldn’t wait to get out of school so I could continue my investigation.

Yes, okay. I called it an investigation.

 

Precalculus, my last class of the day, seemed to flip a switch in my mind. There’s something intensely therapeutic about watching Mr. O’Neil scribbling on the blackboard, even if I have no freaking clue what any of it means. The lines and shapes and elegant, unintelligible formulas—it’s all just dust on the slate. But to me, it’s like performance poetry in another language, which makes it perfect for spacing out and thinking about my own crap.

Everyone with half a brain knows that higher math is pointless unless you want to be a math teacher, but math
class
is a different story. It’s almost as good as those guided meditation tapes that Theo is always telling me I should listen to. You never know what part of your subconscious it’s going to unlock.

I’m always surprised to look down at my notebook after precalc’s over and see the doodles I’ve been unwittingly drawing—stuff I never even knew I had in me. Intricate, obsessive patterns; strange, other-worldly machines; mysterious faces . . .

That day Mr. O’Neil was talking about angles and arcs. Drawing wide curves on the board, scribbling like a madman. Sines and cosines and tangents. As he droned hypnotically, Berlin was dancing in my mind’s eye, numbers and lines and triangles flying around her like reflections from a disco ball. In my daydream she was bouncing and shimmying in her distinctive sparkle tube top, tossing her hair, wilder and more carefree than she ever would have been in life, where she was always trying, and failing, to be cool. She was wearing dark sunglasses and whispering in a singsong voice, “Hattie, Hattie, Hattie is as Hattie does.”

“Who is Hattie?” I wondered.

Tamika Danforth, who sits in front of me, turned around and looked at me like I should be committed. I was so gone that I was unaware I had actually said the words aloud.

Whatever. Tamika Danforth is the one who needs help. What kind of person actually pays attention in precalculus?

A second later I was back in my daydream, watching Berlin again. “Who is Hattie?” I asked her again, this time without moving my real-life lips. She didn’t say anything, just smirked, unreadable behind her dark glasses. She jiggled and shimmied and reached into her tube top, pulling a manila folder from where there hadn’t been one before. She handed me the folder and turned around with a sassy bounce, dancing off into the ether. BERLIN SILVER, the folder said.

Of course! The records! The ones we’d stolen from Mrs. Salmon—they were still sitting in my room! I hadn’t even looked at them since the day we’d visited the Primrose attempting to find my purse. There had to be a clue in the folder.

I could have slapped myself for forgetting it. The old Lulu would have at least taken the time to peek at the grades.

As soon as class was over, I ran home as fast as I could, sad that Charlie’s dad had called a halt to my limo service. I guess nothing good lasts forever. In my room I struggled to remember where Berlin’s folder was hidden. Finally, after ten minutes of searching, I discovered the records under a huge pile of laundry. “Yes!” I shouted, even though no one was home. With a joyful pogo, I flopped onto my bed and opened the folder eagerly.

The first page in the file was Berlin’s report card. There was only one set of grades from Orchard—from the January quarter. Amazingly enough, the marks were fairly decent—a few A’s, mostly B’s, and two scattershot C’s, one of which was in gym and therefore didn’t count.

With annoyance I realized that Berlin’s GPA was, in fact, better than mine. I’d gotten
two
C’s and a D—thanks in no small part to my fink of a Latin teacher.

I flipped the page to see Berlin’s transcript from the rest of high school—before she’d transferred.
Whoa,
I thought. Orchard Academy had clearly done a good job with her. Before this semester all she’d scored were D’s—not to mention the occasional F.

Adam Wahl was right about his ex, too. Berlin had attended five different schools before ours, including a boarding school in France. I could see why none of them wanted to keep her. Her disciplinary papers showed she was a real screwup.

I moved on to the medical records. I was hoping for a clue there, but it was pretty run-of-the-rich-girl-mill. I noticed that Berlin had severe allergies to shrimp and nuts. The well-bred always have that kind of thing. In case you’re wondering, I have no allergies whatsoever.

Finally my eyes made their way to the bottom of the page. I let out a long laugh at the last note:
Unusually large third nipple.

There was no question about it. Berlin was the product of upper-crust inbreeding. People make fun of West Virginians, but it’s really the very wealthy who have the problem. They only marry other rich people, and eventually the gene pool’s gotta dry up. Everyone’s a cousin!