Losers Live Longer

neighborhood.”

“Oh. Well, maybe I got the spelling wrong. Or maybe she’s not registered.”

“Uh-huh. You want to tell me a little more about what she’s like?”

“I…she…”

“Oh, so it’s like that, huh? Well, be careful, Payton, you know how you get. Don’t stick your neck out too far over her—or any of your other parts that are liable to get chopped off.”

“Don’t worry. I think she’s okay.”

“So you think this Elena’s just lying about her?”

“Not lying, necessarily—but not telling the whole story.”

“Sure you aren’t just thinking with your dick again?”

“And what’s wrong with that? It’s my divining rod.”

Tigger snorted and turned to one of her computer screens. “More like a compass needle.”

“Pointing dewy south.”

She laughed. While I had her in a good mood, I started asking her what she knew about some of the other people and names I’d come across. “You ever hear of a girl named Michael Cassidy?”

“Hear of her?” Tigger said. “I saw her last night.”

“Excuse me?”

“Michael Cassidy: red hair, green eyes, famous daddy, fourteen minutes into her allotted fifteen? That Michael Cassidy?” I nodded. “She was at that premiere afterparty where Craig Wales overdosed.”

“You were there?”

“I set up the lights, favor for a friend. Left before the big foofaraw went down, but I’ve been checking it out this morning on the web.”

She rode her swivel chair like a magic carpet over to her desk and the bank of computer monitors. There were three. They shared the same screensaver, an elaborate Lionel Train set-up with tracks that extended across all three monitors. When the engine passed from one to the next, it entered a mountain range and disappeared, a suspenseful moment as it traversed the empty gap between screens, only to appear finally on the next one over, chugging renewed puffs of greasy smoke. Tigger rattled the mouse and the little world of perfection vanished from the monitors.

Tigger’s computer was already logged onto the Internet, constantly online. It was freakish, but in this regard Tigger was no longer the freak. Not that I’d ever dream of saying something like that to her face.

“There, look.” She pointed at the center monitor.

A site containing a transcript of the late Craig Wales’ text-message blog accompanied by cell phone snapshots of the party that people had uploaded. In the background of one shot I could see Michael Cassidy arguing with a short woman with a deep tan and peroxide blonde hair.

“That’s Coy d’Loy,” Tigger said.

“Coy d’Loy? Sounds French.”

“If by ‘French’ you mean made-up. She’s one of a current crop of It girls.”

“What, you mean It, like popular young women of the moment, or IT, like Pennywise the clown?”

Tigger laughed. “Bit of both. She runs this rabid public relations firm called The Peer Group. Almost went under a few months ago—she was one of those who got taken in by that crooked money manager, Addison—but she took money from a silent partner to stay afloat, some bruiser with ties to the Russian mob.”

I was only half-listening. Another face in the background had gotten my attention, at first only because he looked so out of place. The crowd was mostly composed of people in their twenties, but this man was in his late sixties, a stubby old man with bulbous features and no chin, black hornrim glasses, and a stiff gray pompadour. I’d seen him someplace else and it bugged me I couldn’t remember where.

That image was the last picture of the night taken by Craig Wales, followed by his final live-blog entry, a message that he was going off with “MC.” “OMG, used to spank to her TTS. ML!”

Guess ML stood for “more later” but that was the last he ever note. Twenty minutes later, he was dead.

“They went off to shoot up together,” Tigger said, “but he didn’t come back from it. Stuff was too pure or else it was doctored with something.”

A hot bag. Elena’s words echoed in my head. “Where did you hear that?”

She clicked over to a site called D-O-A.com. It linked to a leaked preliminary M.E. report on the death of Craig Wales. She printed it out for me. Then we skimmed a stream of blogs commenting on the actor’s death, from Perez Hilton and Page Six to Smoking Gun and Hooded Armadillo, but no one had picked up yet on Michael Cassidy in that photo.

It was exhilarating, knowing that little bit more than was being reported. It’s why I never trusted what I saw or read in the news. Not that what was reported was wrong, just nearly always only a sliver of the truth.

Now for part two of my little quest. I handed Tigger the iPod.

“Can you take a look?” I said. “Supposedly Owl used it as a portable hard drive, sucking down info off Sayre’s computer.”

“And you want to look at it,” Tigger said, “because nothing says love like spying on a lady’s files.”

“I want to look at it because what’s on it might help explain how Owl wound up dead.”

“Okay, then,” she said. “Let’s see what’s on it.” She plugged the iPod into a USB shell in front of the right- hand monitor and her computer began a virus check on the device.

Tigger flashed me a grin, her nose ring tinkling in contact with her two front teeth, giving off a silvery ping.

She said, “I feel like Nancy Drew.”

“The Clue in the Crumbling Cock,” I chimed in.

“Get out, that isn’t one.” She laughed. I was a bad person, but still my bad jokes tickled her. Hell, I’d miss her.

After a few more seconds of chugging away, her computer gave the device an all-clear. We leaned our heads together as the contents of the iPod opened up on her screen.

Stacks of files folders appeared, 183 in all.

Tigger blew a feathery lock of hair from her brow.

“So, you know what you’re looking for here?”

“Nope.” I looked and looked and kept looking, reading the names of the folders one by one. Many were just meaningless series of characters like L77JPLEQIN.

Tigger said, “Look, I’d like to help, but my peeps will be waking from their naps soon, and I know someone’s going to want her snack.”

“I hear you. Let’s take a shortcut,” I said. “Can you sort all the folders by date? Oldest first?”

It was done before I’d finished asking her for it. Tigger studied the screen and said, “Interesting. The two oldest are from 2001, but after that there are none that are older than last year.”

I had her open the first folder, the oldest one, dated 2 /4/2001. It contained one item, a single Excel file.

Tigger double-clicked on the icon and a spreadsheet opened up. The field headings were all in Cyrillic characters, except for a logo at the top: TWEENSLAND. The alphabetical entries in the columns below were written in English, though. Names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, e-mail and IP addresses. The names all looked to be male; the addresses covered some two dozen states. There was a column of dates (1999 through 2001), another showing durations in minutes, and one containing what appeared to be usernames, aliases like yancy77 and popeyespappy. The final column was what looked like a comments field filled with tidbits like “school principal,” “deputy sheriff,” “doctor,” “seminarian,” and more, entries like “softball coach,” “scout master,” and “two boys, Mike & Joseph.”

It all looked so innocent, unless you knew what you were looking at. Which Tigger didn’t—I’d told her about seeing Elena, but not what Elena had told me about the childhood Owl had rescued her from. For all Tigger knew, Tweensland was second cousin to McDonaldland.

Tigger started printing up the spreadsheet for me.

“Shit, Payton, there’s ninety-two pages of this. You’re going to owe me a ream.”