Friends Like These(59)

Whenever she’d died exactly, Crystal’s skin was an awful shade of gray now, her limbs splayed awkwardly. I leaned against the wall and swallowed back bile.

“Oh my God.” Jonathan had appeared in the doorway.

“She must have OD’d,” Maeve said, stepping away from the bed. “Right, Keith?”

Keith shook his head, moving his hand to his cheek. “I guess, I don’t know.”

“You guess?” Jonathan asked, taking a step closer to Keith. “If she didn’t OD, what else could have happened to her?”

“I don’t— I don’t know.” Keith was tugging his fingers through his hair as he stared at Crystal. “We came up here. We used . . . She was keeping up with me. I’d been crashing for hours so I almost overdid it. And I’m much bigger. Maybe it was too much for her. But we had sex after . . . I don’t know what happened then. We fell asleep, I guess. I think maybe I heard her coughing once.”

“I’m calling the police.” Stephanie pulled her phone out of her sweatshirt pocket.

“Stephanie, wait— ” Maeve turned to Keith. “You heard her coughing? And you didn’t do anything?” Maeve looked again at Stephanie, more pointedly. “Isn’t that, um, a problem? Couldn’t that make Keith . . .”

“I don’t think so,” Stephanie said, her trembling hands clumsily tapping on her phone.

Maeve looked stricken, and I shook my head sympathetically.

“Keith, why don’t you back up and tell us exactly what happened,” I said. “Start from the beginning.”

Peter was in the doorway now. “Jonathan, are you— ” He gasped when he saw Crystal. “Oh my God.” We ignored him.

“We started talking in the bar. Crystal offered to pay for the drugs if I bought them. She said she had some kind of conflict with the guy dealing at the Falls. So I bought the drugs, and— ”

“Wait, what?” Stephanie interrupted, pulling her phone down from her ear. “Keith, you bought the drugs?”

“Yeah,” Keith says. “It was her money. But I bought them. Why?” His eyes were darting around wildly now.

“What difference does it make?” I asked.

“When people OD on opioids, they’ve been charging the supplier with homicide,” Stephanie said. “It’s a new war-on-drugs thing.”

“But he didn’t supply them,” Jonathan insisted. “All he did was— ”

“Supply them,” Stephanie finished his sentence. “Keith doesn’t have to have charged her for them, doesn’t matter that it wasn’t his money. I’m not saying that he would be prosecuted, but he could be. It’s at the prosecutor’s discretion. They don’t do it in New York City, but they do on Long Island— parts of it. It’s controversial. There was this big thing about it in the New York Times a couple weeks ago that— ”

“Yeah, I read that, too,” Maeve said, biting her lip and nodding at Stephanie. “And up here— where the opioids are out of control . . . What do you think they’d do?” She turned to Jonathan, wide-eyed. “You said they don’t like weekenders . . .”

Jonathan stood silent for a moment, then gave a slow shake of his head. “They don’t.”

“She was fine when we fell asleep.” Keith stopped pacing between the bed and the window, and looked at Crystal. “She was going to go back to her parents’ house next week, to try to get clean.”

“I don’t understand what you’re debating,” Peter burst out. “You need to call the police.” Nobody responded. “This is your house, Jonathan, and these are your friends, but I’m not going to be a part of this.” Peter shook his head in disgust and disappeared out the door.

“She was a runner at Syracuse, you know,” Maeve said, staring numbly at Crystal. “She told me about it last night when I said I was going to be up early for a run. This is . . . it’s just . . . tragic.”

“It should have been me,” Keith said.

“You’re lucky it wasn’t,” I said sharply. “You should remember that.”

We were silent again.

“We’re not going to do this,” Keith said finally. “Not again. Call the police, Stephanie. Maybe jail will be good for me.”

“How is you going to jail going to make anything any better?” Maeve protested. She motioned to Stephanie. “Tell him! Something like this— it’s not like for a few months.”

Stephanie crossed her arms. “Potentially, it could be very, very bad, Keith. Especially if there’s other evidence in your life of drug use. Something back in your apartment, people you called, maybe.”

“You mean like my dealer, forty-three times yesterday?”

“Yeah, like that,” Stephanie went on. “They could try to claim you’re working for him.”

“Sure they could. Maybe they even will,” Keith said. “But you guys can’t— ”

“Let us decide what we can and can’t do,” Jonathan said. “I’m not thrilled about having the police here for my own reasons. And I can’t imagine the partners in your law firm would like you being mixed up in any of this, Stephanie.”