Blues for Zoey (22 page)

71

The Truth abou
t Zoey Zamani

She wasn't real.

72

The Girl Who Didn't Exist

“Who's the victim?” asked the woman behind the desk at the police station.

“Me.”

“How old are you, son?”

“Almost seventeen.”

She asked if I wanted a parent or gua
rdian to be there while I gave a statement, and I told her
no way
. She took me into a small, yell
ow room with a computer hooked up to a camera that recorded everything. Before I got very far with my sto
ry, however, she stopped me.

“There's another officer who'll want to talk to y
ou,” she said. “Someone from the fraud squad. Detective Singh.”

She left
me alone for a while, and when the door opened again,
this huge cop came in. “I hate to break
this to you,” he told me after I'd explained
much of my story, “but it's unlikely w
e'll get your money back. At least not
for some time.”

“Okay,” I said, speaking sl
owly, trying not to hyperventilate.

On the way to the police station, I had alr
eady braced myself for the possibility that Zoey would be untraceable, that I
might never see my savings ever again. If
that happened, I had a plan.

“Let's say it'
s really gone and we really can't
get it back. Do you know if there's
a reward for returning Shain Cope'
s instrument? Like maybe from his family?”

Singh shook his head. “We
can check, but I don't think it'll do
much good. I'm fairly certain that instrument
you have is a fake.”

“
A fake?
”

“This girl you met, Zoey—
she said she made it herself. I imagine she did. It's probably the one
true thing she told you.” He turned the computer screen to face me and clicked ar
ound until he brought up a bunch of scanned documents. “The Shain Cope robbery was cleared up years ago. Eve
rything was recovered, including two missing instruments, but the family didn't want to publicize the recov
ery because they thought it might encourage copycat thieves.”

Singh showed me photographs
of the recovered instruments. A saxophone made from plumbing pipes, and a second one—
shaped like a cross
. Stranger still,
it was tiny
. Compared to the object I knew as the “rood rattler,” the thing in the picture looked
like a child's toy. It was little
more than a maraca in the vague shape of a crucifix.

Next,
I scrolled through mug shots on the compute
r. We started with the women, but I didn'
t find Zoey. The men were next. It took almost an hour
, but I finally found him. Zoey's father.

His face was clean shaven and his hair was shorter and bleached white, but even without the sculpted goatee, I recognized
him. It was Andrew Myers. Only
that wasn't his real name. Just like Zoey Zamani, there was no such person. His
real name was Philip Konig. His file showed that he had a daughter named Zoey.

Z
oey
K
onig
.

“The fiddle con,” Detective Singh whispered.

“What?”

“It's an old con game. People pulled it se
venty or eighty years ago. The trick was to convince somebody
to buy a famous violin, which of course was a cheap fake. But if you can play it—I mean
really
play it,
really make it sing—then even a cheap fake can sound like a Stradiv
arius.” He puffed out his cheeks and exhaled. Stale, warm breath hit me
in the face. “
Amazing
. I didn't think anybody
pulled stuff like this anymore.” The look of utter stupefaction on his face told me what he really meant:
I didn't think anybody was dumb enough to fall
for something like this anymore.

Singh explained that Philip K
onig was a thief and a con artist. He'd spent hi
s life criss-crossing the continent—and much of the
world—staying afloat by pulling scam after scam. He'd been arrested
several times, along with his girlfriend, a woman named Evelyn
.
Zoey's mother
. The files contained
reports from social workers, too. Thes
e were from eight or nine
years ago, when Evelyn consulted with the
m while Philip was serving time.

E
velyn told the social workers she no longer wanted
to live life on the run, but that Philip would never stop, that he was addicted to the thrill he got out of swindling people. Evelyn claimed she couldn't affo
rd to raise a child on her own, so she left Zoey in a foster home and promptly
vanished. Later, when Philip got out, he was able to convince a court to release Zoey into his care.

“
The daughter takes over where the mother left off.” Detective Singh closed his eyes, massaging the bridge of his nose. “He pr
obably taught her everything he knows.”

Seeing the list of aliases made me think of something.

“
Wait
—I wrote the checks to Zoey
Zamani
. That's not her name. She shouldn't've been able to cash them, right?”

Singh took a deep b
reath. “They'd have a dummy account, opened with forged ID. Elementar
y stuff for someone with Konig's record.” He clasped his large hands
and set them gently on the desk. “What I
don't get is,
why you
? You're just
a kid. Konig goes after wealthy immigrants and retirees. Easy targets, people with money who don'
t understand the system.”

“I don't understand
anything
.”

“I hope you do now.”

“Maybe, but—
wait
. Immigrants!”

“So?”

“Dave Mizra.”

The detective was baffled. “I'm sorry,
who
?”

“A guy who sells jewelry across the street from where I work—where I
used
to work. His name's Dave Mizra, and we used to think he was the richest guy on our block.” Another piece of the puzzle was falling into place. “Oh, shit.
He's
the one they were after. They p
robably thought he was rich. They would've seen the
Shain Cope posters in his shop. This was
all about hooking
him
, not me. At least not at first.”

I remembered the night I stared in at the shadowy poster of Shain Cope. Zoey had snuck up on me.
P
lanning a robbery?
she'd asked.

She really had been.

Then there was what “Andrew Myer
s” had said on the phone.
If you ask me, this shit's
going fubar
. Fubar. I never made the connection,
but now I saw he was right. Right then,
it was a good way to describe my life: Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition.

In the computer files
Singh showed me, there was one pictur
e of Zoey. It had been taken when she
was twelve or thirteen, just after she was placed in foster care. In the photograph, she was standing in the midst of a fr
umpy family in some anonymous suburb. There was a mom, a dad, a
kid brother. Zoey's hair was different. It was a deep
, chocolatey brown, full of waves and ringlets. The wind had caught one wisp and
blown it across her forehead, just like one
of her dreads. While everyone else was looking at the camera, Zoey
's eyes squinted up at the sky. Her thoughts floated with the clouds, and I couldn't help wondering,
was she the same with me?

Every moment we'd spent together, had her mind been somewhere else?

73

“Claire de lune,” Par
t 2

On my way home from the police station, I couldn't get Zoey out of my head. The brightness of her eyes. The slight downward turn of her mouth. Her hair. Her throat. The tattoo at the small of her back. I'd never be able to forget any of it, no matter how much it hurt me to remember.

When I was almost home, I saw
A-Man was coming out of the Sit 'n' Spin, a bag of towels bulging under both arms.

“Told you he'd be back. B-Man, I mean.” He scowled into the street. “Some asshole hit Razor with his car.”

“I know,” I said. “I met him in the park.”

A-Man nodded. “Dog's dead. B's pr
etty down about it.”

“I'm pretty down myself.”

“Yeah, we
heard you got fired.” He glanced
back inside. “Would'ja believe John offered me the job?”

“He did?”

“I didn
't take it. Wouldn't be right. Anyway,
poor guy can't live without you. Giv
e him a couple weeks, he'll hire
you back.”

“You think?”

“Sure. Sit tight, you'll see.”

As I started up the stairs to our apa
rtment, a strange thing happened. I heard music—and not just any music. I heard the slow, unmistakable keen of
the rattler, its bow sawing across the strings.

“
Z
oey?
”

I really said her name out loud. The
song was “Claire de lune”—so it had to be her. But when I burst in, it wasn't Zoey playing the rattle
r. It was my mother.

“
Oh, Kaz! I love it!
”

Mom was sitting on the couch, the instrument propped betw
een her knees like a cello. “I can't
believe your friend could bear to part with it.
It's amazing
.”

N
omi knelt on the carpet at Mom's feet. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I know y
ou wanted to wait to give it to her
, but I thought it would make her happy, so … ”

It had worked. Mom hadn't played a single note in
years, yet here she was, doing just that. The
re was color in her face, and she looked strong and focused in a way I could hardly remember.

“Come,” she said, putting out one arm.

I sat beside her and she clutched me in
a one-handed hug. My arms were around her
waist, limp like a baby. I could smell the
musty wood and metal of the rattler on her other
shoulder.

“Thank you,” she whispered. “This
is the nicest thing you could have done for me.
I'd forgotten what it felt like to make music.”
Her voice had started to crack. “The
nicest, nicest thing.”

When she said that, I don't know why, but I cracked too. Two tears leaked out, taking me completely b
y surprise.

“Kaz, what is it? What's the matter?”

I just shook my head and let her
hug me again. How could I explain how badly
I'd screwed up? How could I tell
her that my savings were gone? How could I tell her that the strange instrument she'd just been
playing, the very thing that made her so happy, was at the center of it all?

“I
t's about your job, isn't it? John fired you.”

I sat
up straight, sniffling. Nomi was staring at us fr
om the floor, wide-eyed. “You know about that?”

Mom nodded. “I spoke
to Mr. Rodolfo today. Doesn't
seem like he's willing to re-hire you, but
don't worry—smart kid like you, you
'll find something else.”

“Maybe.”

Mom stared at me. “It's not just about that, is it? It's that girl, to
o.”

I didn't answer.

“If she's too dumb to see how wonderful
you are, then she doesn't deserve you.”

Maybe I was crying because I was happy.
Maybe it was because Mom looked better than I had seen her
in a long, long time. Maybe all she needed was to
play music again. Maybe, in a way, that was the cure.

“You look a lot better,” I said.

“I am.
Thanks to you.”

I stood up. “That's good,
but I'm pretty tired. I'll be
in my room.”

I don't remember falling aslee
p. When I did, it was black and bottomless. I slept all the way through dinner and didn't wake up until the next morning.

Mom was sitting on the bed beside me. S
he looked even better than the day before, smiling down,
stroking my hair like I was a baby.

“Wake up, sleepyhead. We're going to Beauhaven.”