Goodnight Nobody (23 page)

Thirty-One

When I dragged myself out of bed the next morning, there was no sign of Ben anywhere. His overcoat had vanished from its hanger, his briefcase had departed the closet floor, and his space in the garage was empty. There was, however, a note stuck to the refrigerator under a magnet reading "Number One Mommy." "Kate," it read, with an angry-looking slash after my name. "Don't do anything. Don't call anyone. I will try to answer your questions within the next week." No signature. No "love."

No thanks,
I thought, crumpling the note and shoving it into the pocket of my bathrobe, remembering the little-girl lisp he'd used the night before. I'll get what I need myself. Then I dialed the Red Wheel Barrow to tell them the kids would be absent and called upstairs to Janie to tell her we were going on a field trip.

It's amazing what happens to people's peripheral vision when confronted with two women and three kids on a crowded train. Suddenly, it's as if all those businessmen and women with briefcases and laptops can't see past their copies of the
Wall Street Journal
and volunteer to give up the empty seats beside them. Last summer, I'd taken the train to Boston with all three kids to meet my mother and drive up to Tanglewood. Sophie was walking, the boys were in a double stroller, and there was not a pair of empty seats to be found. After lurching through three cars, I ended up squatting with all three kids and their portable DVD player on the floor by the luggage bay. Once I'd gotten the boys out of their stroller and
Elmo's World
on the screen, the woman whose raincoat and attache case were sprawled over the empty seat beside her favored us with a bright smile. "What cuties!" she gushed. I returned her smile and bit back what I wanted to say, which was "You know what makes them even cuter? Somewhere to sit!"

I've lived and learned. That morning Janie and I got the kids onto the southbound train to New York and were confronted with the customary sight of lots of busy businesspeople taking up two seats apiece.

"Hmm," said Janie, scowling down the rows with her paper cup of coffee in her hands, teetering in three-inch-high heels (white kidskin, to match her utterly child-unfriendly coat and handbag). Her hair was in a chignon, and she was towing her little wheeled suitcase behind her. "Excuse me!" she said to the businessman on the BlackBerry to her left and the woman chattering on her cell phone in the seats across from him. "Hi. We're traveling with three small children, and I'm wearing really high heels. Would you two mind doubling up so we could sit down?"

The two of them looked at her, then at each other. Then the man looked back down at his BlackBerry, and the woman resumed her conversation. "Hel-lo!" said Janie. "Do you not speak English? Women! Children! Very high heels!"

"Not to worry," I whispered over my shoulder. "Follow my lead." I was dressed to impress, or at least, I was as impressive as I ever got. Janie had flat-ironed my hair into submission, and I was wearing my best black wool pants and a black sweater--size XL, so it fit.

"Okay, Sophie!" I said brightly--and loudly--plopping my daughter down in the raincoat-draped seat next to a red-faced man in a navy blue suit. "You sit right here," I said, winking broadly. "Mommy's just going to walk for a little while and find a place for Jack and Sam!"

Mr. Blue Suit was so startled that he actually hung up his phone. "Ma'am?" he said, with fear in his eyes. "You're not going to just leave her here by herself?"

"Oh, not by herself!" I said, pulling a juice box out of my diaper bag with a flourish. "Now, Soph, this is for you. Try not to spill it everywhere like you did last time."

With a noise that would be phonetically rendered as
harrumph,
Mr. Blue Suit gathered his newspapers, his briefcase, his raincoat, and his phone, and went to sit beside one of his fellow travelers. Janie caught on fast.

"All right, Sam," she said, parking him next to a guy in gray flannel. She handed him markers and a coloring book and gave him a big wink. "I know you're excited about those brand-new big-boy underpants, so don't forgot to call me if you think you have to go. I'll be sitting back there...somewhere..."

The gray flannel guy muttered, "Oh, Jesus," and practically ran to the club car. Janie grinned at me, and before we knew it, we had two entire rows of seats all to ourselves.

"I can't believe that," Janie said, shaking her head. "What is wrong with these people?" She raised her voice and got to her feet. "Women and children, people! Women and children get seats first!"

"Janie."

"Didn't any of you see
Titanic
? Honest to God!" She sat down, took a deep breath, a sip of her double espresso, then got back to her feet. "Shame on all of you!" she yelled, as the car's passengers flinched and shoved their noses a few inches deeper into the morning papers. I tugged Janie back down beside me.

"Okay, we appreciate that, but we have to concentrate now." I passed Sophie a compact, a blush brush, and my iPod, and pulled the Fitch file out of my purse.

"So," said Janie, taking another sip of coffee. "We can skip that list of names, 'cause we think Ted Fitch did it."

"He's a definite possibility. He had a motive," I said. "Or at least we know that Kitty and Ted knew each other, which meant that he'd be familiar enough for her to open the door and let him in. He had opportunity," I continued. "I checked his schedule. The day Kitty died, all he had was a dinner event. Hundred-dollar-a-plate fund-raiser with the Kiwanis in Westchester."

"A hop, skip, and a jump away from Upchurch," said Janie.

"History of violence," I said. "That Sandra Willis he...um." I looked at my kids. The boys had their curly heads bent over a coloring book. Sophie had the earbuds stuffed in her ears and was brushing sparkly powder onto her cheeks. "Interfered with."

"Charming fellow," Janie said. "I am so not voting for him." She pressed her freshly painted lips together as the train rattled along the tracks. "Motive," she said. "Say he was upset about something Laura Lynn had published and Kitty had written. No matter how angry he was..." She checked her reflection in the scuffed plastic of the window. "I mean, would he interfere with her, or just write an op-ed?"

"He'd actually have one of his staffers write it," I said absently. "But maybe he wasn't about her writing."

"Maybe it was a crime of passion!" Janie's eyes lit up. "Ooh, ooh, this is good!" She reached into her bag and removed a notebook--an official reporter's notebook, I saw with a pang--and started writing. "They were having an affair!"

I lowered my voice, hoping Janie would follow suit. "Let's not get ahead of ourselves."

"We know she liked older men, right? So they were having an affair," she continued, "and he told her he'd leave his wife, but then he changed his mind and Kitty wouldn't take no for an answer and that's why she was crying in the restaurant, and he said,
Just lay low until the election is over,
but she said,
No, I can't lay low, I won't live a lie, I'm having our baby, Ted--"

"Janie, the kids," I whispered, starting to laugh in spite of myself.

"A little Fitch! A Fitchlette!"

"I bet that's the kind of thing they would have noticed in the autopsy," I said. To no avail. Janie was on a roll.

"
I won't be ignored, Ted,
she told him.
You have to give our baby a name,
she said, and when he realized that she wasn't kidding, that she was going to take her story to the tabloids--"

"Or
Content.
" I said, caught up in Janie's tawdry tale in spite of myself. "She wouldn't have to go to the tabloids. She could've just written her own story for
Content.
"

"Or maybe," Janie said, pausing dramatically, "she was going to tell
you.
That's why she called you that night! That's why she wanted to see you! She knew you were a writer and," Janie said, pausing at last for a breath, "she knew that you knew me."

"How did she know that?"

Janie wrinkled her nose. "You don't speak of me constantly?"

"I do," piped Sophie.

I stared at my daughter, suddenly realizing that she'd probably heard every word we'd said and understood most of them. I made a lip-zipping gesture to Janie, who nodded but kept scribbling notes.

"He killed her," she whispered, once Sophie appeared to be engrossed in her makeup again. "And his unborn son--"

"Or daughter," I chimed in.

"And he thought," said Janie, "that the secret had died with her--"

"Until Kate Klein, ace investigator, cracked the case and sent him to the electric chair!"

Janie high-fived me, then wrinkled her nose. "Of course, if he goes to jail, Ben's going to lose his biggest client. But I'm going to get a great story."

The public post-Election Day wound-licking known as the Rally for America was sponsored by two of New York City's biggest labor unions and the New York State Democratic Committee and was being held on the plaza across from City Hall. The five of us waited for a minivan taxi, which deposited us in a throng of bundled-up true believers, many of them toting red, white, and blue signs reading Voters for Change and presumably eager and willing to spend the next eleven months doing whatever it took to ensure that the Democrats wouldn't get their asses handed to them yet again.

The day was cold but clear. The sky above us was a pale blue, and the streets were filled with workers on their lunch break and holiday shoppers bustling off to the pre-Christmas sales. The air smelled like honeyed peanuts and hot dogs. Janie inhaled blissfully, and the kids followed suit.

I stared at the dais and picked out Ted Fitch immediately. He was nicely color-coordinated with the signs and the patriotic bunting: his nose was red, his hair was white, and his overcoat was a good, solid navy blue, a garment I'd bet that my husband had vetted with a focus group of female voters between the ages of thirty-four and fifty-four.

Ted was third on the roster, after Deputy Mayor Michael Suarez and the state's comptroller. The deputy mayor was, in my opinion, too handsome to waste himself on the people's business and should have gone into acting instead; the comptroller was a sixtysomething career politician who'd spent forty years of her life in Albany and, as a result, looked and sounded half dead. Janie and I shepherded the kids into the concrete basin, where a friendly ward leader gave them each a balloon. Janie tied one around each kid's wrist, I pulled out my notebook and a pen, and Ted Fitch launched into his standard stump speech.

"I
am
Ted Fitch and I
will
be the next senator from the great state of New York!" he boomed to a sprinkling of applause. I studied his long, angular face, his aquiline nose and thin lips, as Ted zipped through his talking points: the diversity of our great nation, the oppressiveness of the current regime, how a new day was dawning in America, and how he needed the support of true believers--true Americans, all over the nation--to make the dream a reality. "Thank you all for all of your support, and God bless America!" he concluded. There was more applause, a little more enthusiastic, as he collected handshakes and cheek pecks from the other dignitaries, high-fived the ten-year-old they'd procured to sing the National Anthem, and made his way offstage.

"Stay here," I told Janie. I shoved my notebook in the pocket of my black wool pea coat and threaded my way through the crowd to the line of Town Cars idling along the curb behind the stage. The drivers were leaning against the doors, smoking and talking. The first three I asked shook their heads, but I hit pay dirt with the fourth. By the time Ted Fitch had glad-handed his way down the stairs and his staffers were walking him back to his car, I was standing there waiting for him.

"Well, what a pleasant surprise!" he said, hugging my shoulders and giving me a hard, bloodless buss on the cheek. Up close, Ted didn't look as good as he did in his campaign posters, or as rested as he'd been at our party. Bags had bloomed underneath his eyes and there was white stuff crusted in the corners of his lips.

"Can I borrow you for a minute?" I asked.

"Of course!" he replied, in the bluff, hearty voice of a man getting ready to spend the next year shaking hands, kissing babies, and acting inordinately interested in everyone he met. "What can I do for you?"

I stepped close to him and said quietly, so his pair of fresh-faced staffers wouldn't hear, "Can we talk somewhere in private?"

Ted Fitch nodded, puzzlement spreading over his face. "Is the car all right?"

I didn't have time to regret saying yes until I'd slid awkwardly along the length of the big back seat and the door had closed with a heavy clunk behind me. I'd wanted privacy, but the tinted windows and black leather interior were making me feel like I'd locked myself into a crypt, with Ted Fitch beside me.

"Water?" Ted asked. I shook my head as he opened a bottle of his own and downed a fistful of pills. "Echinacea, zinc, vitamin C, ginkgo biloba," he explained. "Gotta stay strong out here!"

I nodded. He gulped, blinked, swallowed more water and more pills. "So, Kate! Is everything all right? Is this about Ben?"