The Case for Jamie (Charlotte Holmes #3)(40)

There was the matter of the acting. Any good detective worth her salt knows that to winnow information out of someone, you need to play a part. The all-consuming roles I’d been playing, like Rose, the fashion vlogger, were the extreme version of this; as I didn’t have a badge and so couldn’t compel answers, I had to resort to more underhanded ways of learning information. But even when being “themselves,” a good police detective needed to know when to intimidate, when to cajole, when to make promises, when to lie.

I’m also sure that if you asked those police detectives late at night, when they were wistful and a little bit drunk, if they thought they’d do a bang-up job at some Shakespeare given the chance, the majority of them would say yes. (I’d often thought I’d make a good Cordelia. But I digress.)

The other girls at poker night were doing something I’d always longed to do. They could play poker passably well. They were very beautiful and rich and no one wanted to kill them, at least not that I knew of, and so yes, I was a little jealous.

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.)