“Fucking cool party trick,” my brother adds. “Do your kids know?”
Simon shudders. “I prefer my head to remain on my neck, and it would not if their mother knew that they knew.”
“But if not for their mother?” I ask.
“We would play hide-and-seek for hours and I would have to replace my security agents every other week because of their frustration with us.”
He turns away from the photo as a couple I only know a little bit heads our way from the sunken living room. “There aren’t any clues in there,” the man reports. “I need a better look at that body. Hey. What does your sheet say? Do you know who Lana was having an affair with?”
“I know who you’re having an affair with,” I reply. “In the script. In the script, I mean. I know about your affair in the script. Not real life.”
His wife is grinning at me as she gasps in mock horror. “Gerald! How could you!”
She pretends to slap him.
“Brava,” Simon murmurs.
“If you weren’t such a cold fish, Nancy, then maybe I wouldn’t have had to find comfort in Lana’s arms!” he bellows.
Simon beams at both of them as more people come running.
“Gerald was cheating on Nancy with Lana,” someone says.
“You bitch!” Quincy screams at him. “She told me she was only sleeping withme!”
Wendell gasps. “You cheated on mewith a woman?”
“It was your snoring, Wendell. I cannot live with your snoring anymore. It makes me want to plunge a knife into your body the same way I plunged it into hers to get you both out of my life!”
“Are you fucking serious?” Daphne says over the intercom. “Quincy. You’re not supposed to confess.”
“Maybe I’m not confessing! Maybe I’m not working alone! Maybe I’m so brokenhearted that my lady boo was snatched from me by this Neanderthal that I’m speaking in overemotional metaphors!”
“You know this is why they never let you be the killer at the business association murder mystery,” Wendell says.
“I did not know that,” Simon murmurs to me.
“Could’ve asked.”
“Next time.”
“Is he really the killer?” Hudson asks Simon.
“I think he is,” I answer. “The killer’s left-handed. You can tell by the knife angle.”
Simon lifts his brows at me. “Truly, you figured that out?”
“She’s watched too many of those shows where an amateur detective helps the police solve crimes, and dude, the left-handed killer thing is really too easy,” Hudson says.
“I thought that too, but I didn’t know if the knife angle was intentional, or if any of us were supposed to be pretending to be left-handed,” one of the women says.
“Also, Lana was sleeping with me as well,” Torrence says.
“And me,” another man adds.
“And your wife,” Lana herself says from the doorway. “I was actually sleeping with half of you.”
It’s creepy seeing her coated in blood with a knife sticking out of her dress but still walking around fully alive.
