Документ Microsoft Word Page 10

My father chuckled. “He’s finding his way. He’s only fifteen, after all.”

  “He’s sixteen, and as far as I can tell he’s not finding a goddamn thing.”

  “Must everyone in this family grow up to be a banker?”

  Then there were footsteps in the hallway, and David’s voice. He was at Columbia by then, but kept turning up at home, looking for a meal or clean laundry or something. He was going on about the dean’s list and about sitting in on someone’s graduate seminar, and the sound was bright and penetrating. There was a silence when he finished, though not a long one; then my parents took up just where they’d left off.

  “Apparently, not everyone must be a banker,” my mother said. “But must they be undisciplined and immature? Must they be so goddamn self-indulgent?”

  My father’s laugh was grim. “And who, exactly, are we talking about now?” His words hung there for what seemed a long time. Then I heard more footsteps and figured everyone had retreated to their corners, but I was wrong. There was a shuddering sigh in the hall, muttered words, and a single curse.

  “Asshole,” David said.

  I’d stared at the ceiling for a while, and when it was clear there’d be no more sleep, I’d wandered into the kitchen. I was reading the paper and eating burnt toast when David came in. He wore a coat and tie and his hair was freshly cut, and he looked like a poster boy for some Bible-belt college— the debate captain, maybe. He made a show of checking his watch.

  “Up early, I see,” he said. “Busy day, I guess. Plenty of TV to watch, lots of dope to smoke?” I ignored him, and he smirked. “What, no smart remark today? Maybe you’re a little fuzzy still— still buzzed from last night.”

  “If I was, you just killed it.”

  David’s laugh was chilly. “There it is, that winning attitude that’s done so much for you. Keep it up, Johnny, it’ll take you right to the top.” I shot him the bird and he laughed. “Keep that up, too— it’ll help when you’re interviewing for those burger-flipping jobs.” I ignored him some more, but David kept at it.

  “How long do you think before they bounce you out of this school? Another semester? Less? And that’ll make how many? I keep telling Mom she’s throwing good tuition money after bad, but—”

  “But she doesn’t listen to a fucking word you say, David— neither one of them does. Yet you keep on talking. And here I thought you were such a smart guy.”

  David’s face darkened, and he tugged at the skin on his neck. “Smart enough not to get caught three times.”

  I laughed. “Caught doing what? With all that ass-kissing and back-stabbing, you’ve got no time for anything else.”

  “You’d be surprised,” he whispered, and he balled his fists and stepped toward me. I stood up. He had half an inch on me then, and twenty pounds, but I didn’t care. “Faggot,” he hissed, and brought up his hands. He dropped them when our father came in.

  His hair was rumpled and his smile vague. He was still in his pajamas. “Am I interrupting?” he asked. David’s face tightened, and he turned on his heel and walked down the hall.

  Where had it come from, whatever drove David to these assignations— grown from what kernel, planted where? We’d slept under the same roof— David and I, Ned, Liz, and Lauren— and eaten at the same table. Had this weed been growing in secret even then? Were we so self-absorbed, so intent on keeping low in the crossfire between our parents, that we’d somehow failed to notice it taking hold of David? Or were we necessarily blind to it, because the same dark vine had wrapped itself around us all?

  “You want coffee?” Clare asked, and brought me back with a start from thoughts of body snatchers and damaged goods. “Or maybe you’re jumpy enough.” She smiled but there was concern in her eyes.

  “I’ll have some.”

  “You find that girl you were looking for?” she asked.

  “More or less.”

  “She all right?”

  “I wouldn’t describe her quite that way,” I said after a while.

  “No?” Clare gave me a questioning look and for an instant I was tempted to tell her about it— about Holly, and David, and the videos: all of it— and to ask what she thought. To ask her to make sense of it for me. The impulse took me by surprise, but I kept my mouth shut, and Clare scowled when I didn’t answer. She went back to her newspaper and left at noon, with barely a goodbye.

  By one o’clock a lethargy had settled on me, along with a headache. I ate some aspirin and lay on the sofa and waited in vain for the edge to come off. The afternoon passed in a dozen books whose first chapters I couldn’t finish, and a dozen albums I changed before the second track. It was a familiar listlessness, a sort of post-case hangover that had grown worse as my cases had grown less frequent. Investigation over, at least for now. Reports written, i’s dotted, t’s crossed, nothing left but to meet with the client. Nothing to do. Nowhere to go. Nowhere but my own head. No, thanks. At some point I drifted into useless sleep.

  My phone stayed quiet until after ten, and I was in bed when it rang. It was David, headed home from JFK. He was hoarse and weary but he brightened when I told him I’d found what he was looking for.

  “Morning’s booked solid,” he said, “but I’ll try to make it after lunch.” As it happened, it was sooner than that.

  * * *

  It was just past dawn when the intercom buzzed, and at first I thought I’d dreamed it. A rain of ice was falling against the window glass, and the sound of it made a fine case for pulling the covers over my head. I had just closed my eyes when the intercom erupted again. My brother was gray and hunched on the little video screen. His head was bare and the collar of his overcoat was up, and he was clutching a newspaper to his chest.

  “Let me in,” he said, before I could speak. I pushed the button and opened my apartment door and in a moment I heard footsteps in the stairwell. He came in with head bent, and cold air clinging to his clothes.

  “What happened, David?”

  “I was on my way to the office,” he said. His voice was choked and his skin had a drowned look to it. So did his eyes. “I almost never buy the News, but today I bought one. I don’t know why.” He put the newspaper on my kitchen counter.

  “What happened?”

  He opened the paper three pages in, and I followed his shaking finger down the columns. It was alongside an article that bore the headline “Woman’s Body Pulled from River,” and it was murky: a photograph— an extreme close-up— of a red cartoon cat standing on its hind legs and grinning insouciantly. Enlargement made the image grainy and washed the color out, but still you could tell that the cat was a tattoo, inked upon a patch of gray, dead-looking flesh.

  13

  The Post named her the Williamsburg Mermaid, because her body had washed up under the Williamsburg Bridge, at the west end. That bit of poetry aside, the article contained nothing I hadn’t read in the Daily News. She’d been found on Sunday evening by a man collecting bottles, and she was, so far, a Jane Doe. The police described her as white, aged twenty-five to thirty-five, slim, with reddish-brown hair and a distinctive tattoo on her leg. As to time of death they were still uncertain, but noted that she’d been in the water “for a while.” As to the circumstances and cause, they said only that these were “suspicious.” A search of missing persons reports for women matching her description was under way, but detectives from the Seventh Precinct asked that anyone with information call the toll-free number.

  I looked at the Post’s photo of the red cat; it was identical to the one in the News. The cops hadn’t yet released any pictures of her face, not even sketch work, and I wondered about that, and about how long she’d been drifting in the East River. I closed the newspaper and tossed it on the big oval table. David looked at me for a moment and resumed his pacing. I sat back in the soft leather chair and drank some of the soda water that Michael Metz had left us when he’d asked us to wait in his conference room.

  Mike is a senior partner at Paley, Clay and Quick— a very good and
pricey lawyer at a very staid and pricey firm. His well-deserved reputation as smart, tough, relentless, and icily calm in the face of chaos keeps his calendar perpetually full, but he’d made time for David and me that morning— not only because he was my frequent client, but also because he was my oldest friend. The only one left from college, and that despite all the calls I hadn’t returned.

  I’d more or less dragged David to Mike’s office, though shock and fear had taken any serious fight out of him. It was only in the taxi, locked in traffic on the way to midtown, that he’d come around enough for the anger to bubble up.

  “Fuck this!” he’d shouted, and hammered on the Plexiglas partition. The driver glanced back and shook his head. “I have no time for this crap,” David said. His voice was shaky. “I’ve got to get to the office.”

  “The office will wait. You need to talk to someone about this.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t need shit,” he said, and he reached for the door. I put a hand on his arm.

  “You need a lawyer, David.”

  “Bullshit,” he said, and shrugged off my hand. But he sat back, and for the rest of the ride had peered silently out the window, his eyes full of nothing.

  In Mike’s conference room, ignoring the view of office towers shrouded in cloud, and wearing a hole in the expensive carpet, David found his anger again. “She was making fucking movies?” he said, and made it sound like my fault.

  I’d gone over my report with him three times and was getting tired of repeating myself, and anyway it seemed beside the point now. “Videos,” I said. “She made videos. But we’ve got other things to think about.”

  “Whatever.” David shrugged and crossed the room again. I took a deep breath. There’d been questions buzzing in my head since I’d first seen the photo of the tattoo, questions I wasn’t eager to ask my brother, but had to nonetheless.

  “When’s the last time you spoke with Wren?”

  He stopped pacing and squinted at me. His mouth got tight. “We went through all that last week. Nothing’s changed since then.”

  “Everything’s changed. Did you hear from her after you hired me…or see her?”

  He gripped the edge of the conference table, and his knuckles turned white. “What the fuck are you implying?”

  “I’m not implying anything, I—”

  “The hell you’re not!” He slapped his palm on the tabletop. “Next you’ll want to know whether I’ve got an alibi. Jesus, I thought you were working for me.”

  “I am, but I need to know where we stand. Mike will need to know too.”

  “Then don’t dance around it— you think I had something to do with this.”

  “That’s not what I was asking,” I said, but I wasn’t sure it was true. David was sure it wasn’t.

  “Bullshit,” he said. His shoulders slumped and the air went out of him, and he turned to the window. “I haven’t heard anything from her since before I hired you. I had nothing to do with this.”

  “Where were you this weekend?”

  David made a sour laugh. “I knew we’d get to that.”

  “I’m just trying to build a timeline.”

  “Right,” he snorted. “I was in London. I left Friday afternoon and came back yesterday, and I was in meetings most of the time. Is that good enough?” It wasn’t, not until we knew when Holly had died, but I didn’t tell David that. I took another deep breath.

  “What about Stephanie?” I asked.

  He stiffened. “What about her?”

  “What does she know about Wren? What did you tell her?”

  “Why does that matter?” I looked at David and said nothing. “What— now you think she was involved?”

  “It’s a question the police will ask.”

  At the mention of the police he took a half step back. He ran a hand over his gray face. “I didn’t tell her anything,” he said. “We didn’t talk about it. I don’t know what she knows.”

  “She knew something, that much was clear when she came to see me. How could you not—”

  “We didn’t talk about it,” he said tightly, and turned on his heel to the window again. Mike saved me from asking more.

  He paused in the doorway, a tall, slender figure in impeccable gray pinstripe and a wine-red tie. Partnership had etched fine lines around his narrow features, but his face, still pink from shaving, was somehow still a student’s face, easier to imagine bent over some dusty tome than hypnotizing juries and scaring other lawyers. He ran fingers through his thinning black hair and glanced from me to David, and back again. A smile appeared.

  “Sorry to have kept you waiting so long,” he said, and put out a hand to David. “I’ve heard a lot about you.” David gave him a disbelieving look but there was no irony in Mike’s voice and nothing but sincerity in his smile. He was good at that.

  “I saw you on television a few weeks ago,” David said cautiously. “Court TV.”

  “A very slow news day,” Mike said, and smiled modestly. “And now, why don’t you tell me what’s going on.”

  And we did. David was hesitant at first, staring at the carpet or at the architectural prints on the wall, but he gritted his teeth and got the facts out. I went over what I knew, reciting once more the refrain: Holly, Wren, Cassandra. Mike listened closely and made notes on a yellow pad. He interrupted only a few times with questions, and all of those were about dates and times. David concluded with an exhausted sigh and sat back in his chair, looking at Mike and for a light at the end of the tunnel.

  Mike tapped his chin with long fingers. When he finally spoke, his voice was without emotion. “We don’t know the circumstances of this woman’s death yet. The police are calling it suspicious, which in theory could mean suicide, but…” He looked at me.

  “They’re being cute with their language,” I said, “and close to the vest about the condition of the body and the cause of death. And besides the tattoo, they haven’t given out any pictures. Reading between the lines, I wouldn’t bet on suicide.”

  Mike nodded. “I agree, and in any event we have to plan for the worst, which in this case means a finding of homicide.”

  “Jesus,” David muttered.

  Mike gave him a sympathetic look and continued. “If the circumstances were different, it might be possible to sit this out. After all, if media attention to the story remains relatively low, it’s entirely plausible that you could’ve missed the articles in the papers, or not recognized the descriptions they give, or the picture of the tattoo. In which case, you might just wait for the police to contact you. It wouldn’t win you a good citizenship award, but it’s not illegal and it would probably be the safest course of action. And I imagine it’s what the other men in her videos are doing right now— holding their breath, keeping their heads down, and praying. Those of them who saw the story in the paper and recognized the tattoo, anyway. But, unfortunately, that’s not our situation.

  “Our situation is that this woman was actively harassing you— calling, coming by your home, threatening you. And we must assume the police will learn this fairly quickly, if and when they identify the body.”

  “Learn it how?” David interrupted. “How the hell will they connect me with her?”

  I answered him. “Dumping Holly’s phone records will probably be enough, but they’ll also search her place, and who knows what they’ll find there. Her videos, I’d guess, and whatever information she collected about you.” I didn’t think David could get much paler, but somehow he managed.

  “To the police it will suggest motive,” Mike said. “Which means they’ll be keen to speak with you, and with your wife, as well. And they’ll look at you even harder when they find that you were disturbed enough by the harassment to hire a PI to locate Holly. If you were upset enough for that, they’ll reason, you might’ve been up for something more desperate. They’ll find it hard to believe that you missed the Jane Doe story in the press, and they’ll wonder why— if you have nothing to hide— you didn’t come forward
on your own.

  “That’s not an appealing picture, David, and that’s why I don’t think you can wait for the police to find you. You need to get out in front of this, and go to them.”

  “Go to the police?” David nearly jumped out of his seat. He went to the window and sank his hands in his pockets and rocked from one foot to the other. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered.

  “It demonstrates that you’re cooperative,” Mike said, “that you have nothing to hide. You lay out all the facts yourself and you defuse a lot of suspicion.”

  But David wasn’t listening. “ ‘If and when,’ you said—‘if and when they identify the body.’ There’s a chance they won’t.”

  “Not a good one,” I said. “Holly had family and friends and people she worked with. Even if she wasn’t close to any of them, they knew her. One of them will see the stories and make the connection, or get worried enough to file a missing persons with the cops, and they’ll make the connection themselves. And that’s without worrying about whether her fingerprints are on record someplace, or her DNA, or if there was a dry cleaning tag in her clothing. It’s just a matter of time.”