“No,” one said. “I’m telling you ASU is going to be big this year.”
“I don’t know,” the other said. “That kid they got on point guard--”
“Hello, Mr. Irving,” a pretty blond receptionist looked up from her cell phone to greet me. “What can we do for you?”
I smirked that she recognized me, although I didn’t recognize her. It was bound to happen at some point.
“Yeah, I’m here to see Julianna Spencer,” I said.
“You want to see them both?” she asked.
“Both?” I responded.
“Juilanna and her boyfriend Gabriel were both arrested with homicide charges,” she said. “You representing them both, or just Julianna?”
“I can talk to them both,” I said.
“It’ll be just a minute,” she said.
She got on the phone while she printed a copy of the police report and handed it to me. I sat down in a row of orange plastic chairs and listened to the two cops drone on about college basketball, a topic I had no interest in, until one of them got a call on his radio and had to leave. The other one noticed me sitting there.
“Irving,” he raised his foam coffee cup to me.
“How’s it going?” I nodded. I couldn’t remember his name, but I recognized him as the officer that had arrested Shawn Drake, a drug dealer we had exposed in an embezzlement scheme.
“Can’t complain,” he said.
“How’s Shawn?” I asked.
He sighed and shook his head. “When that bastard goes to trial, and finally gets transferred anywhere but here, I’m going out for a steak dinner!”
I laughed. “That bad, huh?”
He rolled his eyes, and then the receptionist called out to me. “They’re ready for you, Irving.”
“Thanks,” I said.
I had been here enough times that I knew where the visiting areas were. The visiting room was small and cramped, a tiny room with a two-way mirror on one side. The rest of the room was bare white concrete white walls and a chipped table and gray padded chairs.
Julianna and Gabriel sat on one side, and they both looked beaten down. It was the first time I had seen Julianna in ten years, and I remembered her as a vivacious, bubbly redhead that was in every activity Sedona High School had to offer. Now, she sat in a blue jumpsuit, and she looked so small. Her long red hair was pulled back into a utilitarian ponytail, and without any make-up or proper sleep, her face looked full of shadows and pale.
She smiled sadly when I walked in. “Hi, Henry. Thanks for coming.”
“Hi, Julianna,” I sat down at the table. “Good to see you. I’m sorry it’s under these circumstances. And you are Gabriel.”
“I am,” he greeted me tentatively.
Gabriel looked to be of Hispanic descent, about the same age as Julianna and me, and he had a thick head of curly hair and huge dark eyes.
“Hi,” I said and skimmed the police report. I was there when it all went down, so I didn’t expect it to say anything new. “How are you guys doing?”
They both looked at each other and shrugged.
“As well as can be expected,” Julianna said.
I nodded. “Well, Julianna, they are saying that you stabbed Beowulf in the stomach with a dagger, and they believe Gabriel, you were an accomplice driving a getaway vehicle for Julianna to climb out the window.”
“That’s not true,” Gabriel shook his head vehemently. “None of that is true.”
“It’s not,” Julianna said. “I don’t know what happened. But, I didn’t kill Beowulf. And... what... climb out the window? That’s crazy. They’re just making this up as they go along!”
“Okay,” I nodded. “So what happened that night?”
Gabriel looked at Julianna, who looked down at her hands and then up at me.
“I don’t know where to start,” she shrugged. “I guess I’ll explain about Ghoti first.”
The word ‘fish’ rolled off her tongue with familiarity, even though I had a time reconciling the spelling with the pronunciation.
“I live in Brooklyn now,” she said. “Or did. I moved out there after high school to make it in New York. I did a lot of off-off-Broadway productions for a while. And then I met Beowulf, we call him Beyo. I met him… well, it doesn’t really matter. He asked me out for a drink.”
I raised an eyebrow. She was dating Beyo?
“So,” she continued, “We went out a couple of times, and he was a nice guy. Then, the next night he invited me to his show. I went to his show and saw him dancing with three other girls. Then, afterward he invited me backstage and very long story short, we all went back to this super cool loft where they all lived together, and we all had sex.”
I coughed with shock. “Well, that wasn’t how I expected that story to go.”
She smiled. “It’s weird, I know. Even being from Sedona I was a little shocked myself.”
“Okay,” I said. “So, then what happened?”
“Well,” she continued. “We all started hanging out, and they would do shows around town. Originally I would work crew, and then they invited me to be an understudy. I performed a few times, and then, at some point, one of the girls broke her ankle and quit. So, I became a full-time member, and I moved into the loft.”
I glanced at Gabriel’s reaction to all of this, and he didn’t seem phased by any of it.
“I did that for about five years,” she said. “The thing about something like that, is that being in an odd dance troupe, and living an experimental life like that, is a lot of fun… when you’re in your twenties. Then one day, you
