Eli asks herself: What if someone used this walkway to come up behind Roscoe? What if someone planned it? What if someone pushed?
She lets go of Zara’s hand. Ay, carajo. She crushed the girl’s fingertips. Of course she did.
She leads the way out of the Aurelia, tucks Zara safely into a cab, and starts walking. Eli needs to give the police one more chance, even though they haven’t earned it. Ten minutes later, she reaches the precinct, a gray slab of a building where they make her wait for hours. She spends the time in limbo scribbling equations about voltage. The Aurelia’s master electrician will help her wire whatever she needs, but first she has to show him that she’s not just some girl Roscoe took a chance on for no reason.
“Can we help you?” an officer finally asks.
“It’s about Roscoe. Gregory Roscoe.”
The policeman takes Eli to a little room where she waits in an even less comfortable chair. Another policeman comes in and faces her across the desk. She tells them about Roscoe’s final words. The angels on the ceiling. The details of the hidden walkway. “Did you see the hidden walkway?”
The uniformed man nods, but she doesn’t know if that means yes or I’m-nodding-so-you’ll-stop-now. “Thank you, Miss Vasquez. We’ll let you know if there are any new developments.”
Eli keeps trying to talk, but the officers are already leaving the room.
She spends the rest of her day collecting newspapers from various stands, even though she’s supposed to be on a train to Stamford for her niece’s dance recital. She sends a quick e-mail to her parents and brothers: Have to stay in the city. Mi trabajo. Tell Lia I’m sorry and give her un abrazo fuerte. Eli reminds herself that her parents believe in hard work, they’re proud she landed this job. And this is part of the job: caring about Roscoe.
Guilt knuckles down. It turns every step into a crush of regret. She should have been there when he fell. Why did she leave him alone?
When she gets home, she stacks up the newspapers and adds every online article she can find. There’s a surprising amount of coverage. Eli does her best to look past the staging for some new piece of truth. Around one in the morning she settles onto her bed, coffee in one hand, laptop balanced across her knees. She wades into the sewers of the online comments. That’s when she finds a mention of a man caught on CCTV outside the Aurelia and confirmed by witnesses — an older man in a dark-blue suit, with a mane of wild gray hair.
It’s quiet in her apartment. Too quiet for Washington Heights, which is always throwing sound in great big handfuls.
What if Leopold pushed Roscoe and paid off the cops? Leopold had access, but even a director as intense as Leopold Henneman wouldn’t kill someone over a bad lighting design.
Eli looks down at her own bad lighting design.
That night, she doesn’t get anything that looks or feels like sleep.
The next day is Roscoe’s funeral, and everyone from the Aurelia is at the wake — everyone but Zara and Leopold. No family. Roscoe didn’t have one, which makes Eli their stand-in.
The company mills around in little groups, reminding her that she barely knows these people. They’re surrounded by cheap fake flowers, the kind that smell like dust. The arrangement of lilies her family sent sings out in comparison. The funeral home’s soft lighting makes everyone look like wax versions of themselves.
Roscoe’s casket is closed.
Eli walks up to Toby. He’s the friendliest of the actors. They’ve never really talked, but he gives her that quick look of understanding that comes when you can tell someone else is a member of the Rainbow Club.
They trade hellos, and Eli plunges right in. “I’m putting together a memorial piece. Can you tell me how you spent Roscoe’s last day?” she asks, completely aware of how weird that sounds.
“Oh, love,” Toby says. “That day. I was upstate. Leopold said he needed time to think over the production, and I offered him my cabin. I have a little cabin, you know. You can find it on Google Maps and smell the pine trees. It’s lovely.”
Eli feels her stupid theory wither. “Thanks.” She crosses Leopold and Toby off her mental list. She walks over to the nearest group of Aurelia people. As long as Eli is prying, she might as well pry hard.
She asks everyone what they were doing that day.
Enna was in her high-end apartment building, complete with doormen who would know if she was lying. Carl went to a matinee at another theater. He even has the ticket stub in his wallet, which he offers to give her if she’s collecting mementos. Meg sat in on a series of meetings about Echo and Ariston merchandise. Kestrel was waiting for her new roommate, which she says as though Zara Evans is some exotic disease she picked up. Eli grits out a thank-you and moves on to Barrett, who spent Roscoe’s final hours sleeping with some girl he met at a bar. He provides the information with glee, like they’re both people who sleep with girls and therefore she should be proud of him: gross.
Everyone has a story.
Eli goes home and turns on all the lights in her little apartment. Roscoe never got a chance to see it, but without him this place wouldn’t exist. Eli would be back in Connecticut, her career over before it even started. She was going to invite Roscoe over here someday, for sandwiches and café con leche.
She sits down on the flowered couch that her mom insisted on and her brothers wouldn’t stop laughing at. She gets back to work on the lighting design. Because Eli can’t lose all this. Roscoe would hate to know, from beyond the grave, that she’d messed up the chance he gave her. Even if, when she closes her eyes and pinches them tight, Roscoe’s death is still the wrong color.
Gray: like a bruise. Like a storm gathering under the skin.