Girls' Night Out (3 page)

***

We parked his car under his building—luckily Ellen had remembered that much of her evening—and took him up in the elevator, our arms wrapped around him like two women who couldn't wait to get the guy upstairs for a good time. Just in case there were cameras in the elevator, we talked to him, nuzzled him. Giggled. We didn't see a soul and the whole place was as still as—well, as still as death.

My heart's thump was loud enough to wake the building. I was glad to have Tess there. She was as cool as ice. Coolly tucking the covers up to his chin and smoothing the sheets. Coolly rolling his socks up and putting them in his shoes. Coolly putting his shirt in the pile in the closet to go to the laundry. Coolly brushing any residual hairs off his jacket and slacks and wiping our prints from the doorknobs.

We both wanted to search his place for pictures of his victims, thinking he might have brought them back now that the trial was over. We didn't dare take the time.

A few blocks from his house, Tess suddenly pulled over to the curb, put her hands to her head, and started screaming.

***

I was painting pale peach roses, a peach so pale there was only a breath of color. A small picture for Suzan's daughter's bedroom. Her daughter was named Aurora after me, and I'd been meaning to do this picture for months.

I had Palestrina playing, soothed and succored by the moving combination of peace and inspiration in those lovely voices. For the first time since Ellen had called, her speech broken and shaking, to report the incident with Jay Hanrahan, the world felt good. Orderly. Not tinged with gray around the edges. I felt as though I could take full breaths without a catch, without that constant pit of anxiety that I'd been living with.

Cliché or not, the expression that fit was “today is the first day of the rest of my life.” Not that every day wasn't. But today felt clear, like a weight had been lifted off my life. I must be a horrible person, because Jay Hanrahan was dead and I felt good.

Then, at 4:00 in the afternoon, just as I was struggling to get deeper apricot shading on the underside of a petal, someone rang the bell and then pounded on the door. My heart jumped and for a crazy moment, I imagined opening it to find Jay Hanrahan on my doorstep.

Carrying my brush, I went to answer it.

A tall, stern-looking policeman, badge shiny and belt weighted with equipment, stood on my steps.

“Aurora Dillon?”

“Yes.”

“I'd like you to come down to the station with me, ma'am. Chief wants to see you.”

I tried to keep worry off my face and breathe normally, even as panic flooded through me. “Can you tell me what this is about?”

He shook his head. “Sorry, ma'am. I was just told to bring you down to the station.” He didn't say it was urgent, but the way he shifted restlessly from foot to foot said it for him.

“I just need to finish this petal, then I'll drive myself down.”

“Sorry, ma'am. Chief said I was to bring you.” He'd paused to answer and now resumed his metronomic shifting.

I looked at the paintbrush in my hand. The perfect color. Thought of the unfinished painting. Kissed my incredible feeling of lightness good-bye. “I'll get my shoes.”

***

It's a power thing, I suppose. That's why they make you hurry, then keep you waiting. Never mind the drying paint and stifled creativity, years were peeling off my life like calendar pages in an old movie. When the police call, if you're a good citizen and not a bad guy, you show up.

It felt like I had a lead ingot in my stomach. Lead in my gut and whirling in my brain, wondering whether I should have gotten some advice from Georgia last night. What would they ask and what would I say? How had they found me? What did they know? Was Tess here, too, sitting in another room, asking herself the same questions? Would she stick to the script? I wished I knew as I sat in a room no bigger than a closet, with only a table and one other chair for company. No color, no pictures, no texture. Nothing to look at. Must be hell for some people. I was fine. I didn't need the outside world to entertain me. I could look at those walls and project my own pictures..

The officer who'd delivered me here had asked if I wanted anything. Water? Coffee? A soft drink? I hadn't wanted any of those. There was nothing worse than waiting or being interviewed when you had to pee.

When I went to get my shoes, I thought about calling Georgia, but we'd agreed—no cell phones. Cell phone calls can be traced. The time, the recipient, the caller's location. If they didn't know about the others, I wasn't about to tell them. I'd willingly gotten myself into this and I would tough it out, whatever that meant. Right now, it meant waiting. I was infinitely patient with my work, with however long it took to get a picture right, however many tries. I was fine with the blank walls. But I was horrible in situations where someone wanted to waste my time. Then I could feel time sliding like silk through my fingers, twining around them teasingly as it escaped. It was particularly hateful at this point, when I was so tantalizingly close to finishing a picture. Where the paint would dry and I'd have to re-create that color again.

When I'd been here before, they hadn't kept me waiting.

If only I'd brought my own car. I could go home. Tell them to call me when I was ready and I'd come back. Could a person really do that? Just walk out of the station when summoned by the chief? What was wrong with these people? That cop had made it seem urgent, and now nothing was happening. I hated game playing. I hated liars. I liked dealing straight up. I was about to
be
a liar. I already was one. Taking Hanrahan home last night had been the big lie. One I could never come clean about.

Breathe, Rory, breathe
, I told myself. I knew the chief well enough to know the game that was being played here. I'd seen it played to good effect. They wanted to make me anxious. I mustn't let them.
Breathe.
My heart was jumping like a trapped frog. The ingot kept getting heavier. Those silky skeins of time kept sliding. Sliding. If I didn't stop this, I'd be a hopeless mess by the time the chief got around to me.

I folded one leg up under me and thought about little Aurora's picture. On the surface, it was a simple picture of roses, delicate, pale peach roses in an opalescent vase, sitting on a shiny wood table. That would have been hard enough, getting the luminescence of the vase, the sheen of the table, the complexity of colors of the opening roses. But what I was trying to put into the layers of opening petals was possibility. The infinite opportunities for enrichment and beauty that lay ahead for Suzan's child. I was painting hope and mystery, life's amazing unfolding, its beauty and its fragility. If I could get it right, the picture would hold that special love women have for their dear friends' daughters, the hope that goes forward to the next generation.

I took a breath, inhaling the scent of those roses. I could almost feel the warmth and love I'd put on that canvas. I hoped little Aurora would.

I was so deeply into my thoughts that the opening door startled me. Chief Sheehan took the seat across the table.

“Rory,” she said, “how have you been?”

We knew each other, of course. You can't be almost killed by your own husband and not get involved with your local police.

“It's getting better.”

She nodded, then flipped open the folder she'd brought. “Jay Hanrahan,” she said. “You know him?”

“No.”

She raised an eyebrow. That's all. But it was an eloquent gesture. Dorothy Sheehan was a minimalist. Crisp hair. Quiet clothes. Even the frames of her glasses disappeared, leaving only the clean, hard lines of her face. She stared at me with her X-ray eyes.

“I met a man in a bar last night. He seemed nice. He told me his name was Dan McCarthy. Later, he drove me home. When we got to my place, he started feeling unwell. I said I'd drive him home and get a friend to pick me up. When I was taking him home, he told me his name was really Jay Hanrahan. I guess he figured I'd find out anyway.”

“You recognized the name?”

“I don't watch much TV, Chief, but I'm not totally isolated.”

“Your friend's name?”

Reluctantly, I divulged Tess's information. She and I had already agreed on the story.

“Wasn't feeling well…” She tapped her pen twice on the table. “Could you elaborate?”

Another piece of lead was pressing on my chest. “He took some pills at my place. Yohimbe, he said it was. It was shortly after that he said he felt sick. By the time we got to his place, he'd started sweating and kept pressing his hand against his chest. I asked if he wanted to go to the emergency room or if he wanted me to call 911. He said no, I should just leave. So I did.”

“Yohimbe. Do you know what that is?”

I knotted my fingers, then unknotted them. “When I got home, I looked up yohimbe. It's herbal Viagra.” I shook my head. “Herbal Viagra and Jay Hanrahan. Guy who date-rapes Ellen Corso thinks he's going to get lucky with me. I guess this is just more evidence that I have no judgment when it comes to men.”

A nod. Another tap. The pace of this was driving me nuts. I was sure she knew that.

“What time did you take him home?”

I shrugged again. “Sometime between 1:00 and 2:00, I think. What's this about?”

“You took him home and…?”

“He was kind of unsteady on his feet. We—Tess had come to pick me up so she helped—got him into his living room. He sat down on the couch. He was flirting with Tess in the elevator, but he was getting agitated and belligerent. He insisted he'd be fine. He told us to go. So we left.”

“How did you feel when you learned the man was Jay Hanrahan?”

“I expect you know the answer to that, Chief. I wanted to stop the car and roll him out into traffic. But I didn't. I couldn't bring myself to hit my husband hard enough to kill him, even after he'd slashed me with a knife and said he was going to kill me, and I didn't have the guts or the necessary meanness to dump Hanrahan in the street. Like I said, bad judgment about men. I'm too damned soft to be allowed out.”

Her eyebrow shifted again. “You looked like you and your pal were having a good time.”

So there was a surveillance camera.

We'd had a good time all right. But that was before he inconsiderately got dead. I looked at the chief and shook my head. “Just humoring him long enough to get him home, Chief. Like I said, he was getting nasty and belligerent.” I let it go a beat, then added, “If you'd seen me with my husband, you'd probably think I was having a good time then, too.”

Doing the abused wife's delicate dance. Reminding her that I was a victim. The chief knew all about that. But getting off this hook was not going to be easy.

She tipped her chin. “You're friends with Ellen Corso.” That was not a question. “When is the last time you saw her?”

“Wednesday. No. Thursday. I went to her office at MIT to see how she was doing.”

“And how was she doing?”

“She blames herself. Said she probably deserved it for being so gullible.”

Another very slight nod. “She's angry?”

I wasn't letting her put words in my mouth. “She's hurt. Damaged. In pain. What would you expect? She stood up for what was right and got totally humiliated.”
Careful, Rory. Don't overdo here. “
And anyway, what does that have to do with anything?”

“You met Hanrahan in the same bar where Ellen met him.”

Breathe, Rory. Breathe.

I didn't say what I was thinking—that a smarter predator would have changed locations. That this time the prey had been smarter. I just stared at her. “Ellen met him in a bar? Ellen doesn't go to bars. And I'm still waiting to hear what this is all about.”

She tapped her pen three times. “Jay Hanrahan is dead, Rory.”

Last night, dead hadn't meant anything except a situation to handle and friends to protect. I kept dead at an arm's length, having come so close. I would have been dead if I hadn't run bleeding into the street and flagged down a car. Now the weight of it hit me, and I let that creep into my voice.

“Hanrahan's dead?”

“Dead.”

She snapped the file shut. “I am not going to ask any more questions about last night, though I expect there's more to this than you've told me. Let's just leave it like this. We won't know until the toxicology results come back, but the ME believes that Hanrahan died of a fatal interaction between herbal supplements and illegal club drugs that stopped his heart.”

She gave me a level look. “Hanrahan had a bartender friend who helped him spike drinks. Under questioning by the Boston police, the bartender…a gentleman called Mad Dog Kelly…admitted that he had made two Cosmos for Hanrahan and an attractive woman and spilled the contents of a capsule Hanrahan gave him into the drink intended for the woman. He doesn't think he mixed the drinks up but admits it could have happened. Kelly claims to have no idea what the substance was.”

She pushed back her chair and stood. Six feet tall. Lean as a marathon runner. Her face utterly opaque. “It appears that Jay Hanrahan, with a little help from a clumsy bartender, accidentally caused his own death.”

At the door, the chief paused. “Go home, Rory. Paint beautiful pictures. Stay out of bars. There must be better ways to meet decent men. And just be grateful you weren't his next victim.”

As I walked out, I wondered. Was the quick twitch I saw as she left the room a wink?

1. Have you ever read about a crime and wondered what you'd do if it happened to you? Or have you experienced such a crime and thought about revenge?

2. Is there a situation you can imagine in which you might move beyond your normal moral boundaries and do something that might shock your more proper self?

3. Do you think the scene with Hanrahan and the ladies is over the top?

4. What did you think was going to happen when Rory was taken to the police station?