Graveland: A Novel (15 page)

Howley draws the folder in again and puts it under his arm. He stands up and looks around. What the hell is he doing in Central Park anyway? He needs to get back to the office. He needs to get this thing under lock and key—or, better still, back into the hands of Jacqueline Prescott.

Walking fast, he heads south. Before long, and as he glides under the shadowline of the skyscrapers on Fifty-ninth Street, Howley comes to the (perhaps now obvious) realization that he was never really going to be in control of this process.

How
would
he have been?

Across from the Plaza, he stands at the lights, waiting. He could hail a cab from here, but the Oberon Building is only a few blocks away. He’ll enjoy walking toward it, approaching and falling under
its
shadowline.

The lights change, and he moves.

Vaughan wanted to get this handover out of the way fast, so that’s what they’ll do. Tomorrow’s Friday. They’ll hold a press conference in the morning, get it done before the weekend.

Ba da bing.

As it were.

He should text Angela.

He takes out his phone and turns it on. He looks at his watch. He might even make it back in time for that ten-thirty meeting.

*   *   *

Watch what it does overnight.

Val Brady was certainly right about that. Thursday morning and it’s everywhere, hysterical banner headlines screaming
LOOK OUT WALL STREET!
and
MANHUNT!
and
WHO’S NEXT?
It’s the lead story in most major newspapers across the world. And why wouldn’t it be? Investment bankers being targeted for assassination? Summary executions on the sidewalks of Manhattan?

Ellen puts on a pot of coffee. She then turns on her phone and checks for messages. There are four, and all of them, to her surprise, are about the Ratt Atkinson piece she did for
Parallax
. She’d forgotten, the magazine is out today, and already, apparently, her piece is causing something of a stir.

Just as the coffee is ready, another call chimes in. She lets it go to message.

“Ellen, hi, Liz Zambelli, great piece today, I think there’s going to be quite a buzz around this, give me a call.”

Liz Zambelli is a booking agent for a couple of the talk shows. One of the earlier voicemail messages was from someone on
The Rachel Maddow Show
.

But Ellen’s puzzled. What is it? She’s been so preoccupied with this other story for the last few days that she barely remembers what she wrote in the Atkinson piece. She’s about to check online to see what people are saying when her phone rings again. This time she picks it up.

“Max.”

“Hi, Ellen.”

She waits. When he doesn’t say anything immediately, she sighs. “What is it, Max? I haven’t looked yet, but there’s obviously something there, something significant.”

“Well,
that’s
debatable.”

Ellen rolls her eyes. “Oh, just
tell
me.”

It turns out that what has caught people’s attention is a passing claim in the article that Ratt Atkinson has been exaggerating his popularity on Twitter in order to make himself look good in the eyes of a potential electorate. She quotes one source inside Atkinson’s own campaign as saying that 89 percent of the former governor’s followers on the site are fake, and that up to half a million either inactive or dummy accounts have been set up, and maybe even paid for, in a spectacular act of what has now come to be known as “astrotweeting.”

“
That’s
the takeaway? Nothing about…” She pauses, thinking. “Nothing about his … tax arrangements? The state contracts thing? No mention of that stuff about his wife and the soccer coach even?”

“Nope.”

“Jesus, that’s depressing. Twitter trumps sex as material for a scandal? I wasn’t even going to include that bit. If I hadn’t been in such a hurry I would have cut it.”

“But it’s kosher?”

“Oh yeah. It’s all been fact-checked. Talk to Ricky. And I’ve got tons more about it, too, quotes from the search agency that crunched the numbers, there’s a whole breakdown of his follower stats, but I dropped most of it, because … I just didn’t think anyone would
give
a fuck at this point.”

“Well, a fuck they most certainly
do
give. I’ve had a dozen calls so far today. Listen, this may not be the Pentagon Papers, but it’s exposure for us, okay, and we could use it.”

“I don’t know, Max.” She looks over at her desk. It’s strewn with loose pages, printouts of different typefaces, hundreds of them. She was up late again last night, chasing this … she hesitates to even call it a lead—especially since it led nowhere—but at least it felt like she was doing something serious. She did suspect she’d be giving up on it this morning, but if the alternative is appearing on cable news shows to talk about Twitter accounts with odd usernames and no profile photos, she’s not so sure. “I’m working on something.”

“What? Not Lebrecht? Not the shootings?”

“Maybe.”

“Do you
have
something, Ellen?” Pause, no answer. “Because it looks like you were right about it not being a professional setup, but we all
know
that now. So what else do you have?”

“Nothing, not really, but—”

“Well, then.”

“Not
exactly
nothing. I need some time, Max. And I don’t want to stop. I don’t want to get distracted by this Twitter shit.”

He groans.

“Trust me, Max. If I get anywhere with this, anywhere at all, it’ll be a whole lot better for the magazine than some pointless story about an ex-governor who’s got no chance in hell of securing the nomination in any case.”

“That’s a big
if,
Ellen. Have you seen how the story has scaled up? Every news organization in the world is on this now. How do you compete with that?”

“I don’t. I only compete with myself, Max.”

“Well, I hope one of you comes out on top, because—”

“Look, give me a couple of days, okay? The Twitter story can wait, it isn’t going away. If I haven’t made a breakthrough on this other thing by the weekend, I’ll go on goddamn Bill O’Reilly for you.”

Max exhales loudly. “Fine.” He’d clearly like to know more about where she is on the main story, but he knows not to push it.

They’ll talk tomorrow.

Sipping coffee, standing at her desk, Ellen then glances over the stuff she printed out last night.

Hundreds of uppercase
A
’s.

Which was only a small sample of the literally tens of thousands she could have printed out if she’d wanted to. She’d still be doing it, of course, and that was the main reason she stopped.

Because what was the point?

The first half hour or so she spent researching the difference between a typeface and a font, then between serif and sans-serif, then the general history and development of typefaces, after which she just started banging them out, in different point sizes, five or ten to a page, all uppercase.

It took her another few hours to identify what specific typeface the
A
was.

Blackwood Old Style, apparently.

It was a meticulous examination and comparison process—tricky, hard on the eyes, exhausting—but she was pretty sure about it in the end. Reaching a conclusion felt good, too. But of course that was deceptive … because what did it mean? What did it
tell
her?

Absolutely nothing.

The typeface itself was designed in the 1920s by a former San Francisco newspaperman whom a local foundry had commissioned to come up with something they could sell to ad agencies. Not long after that, Blackwood Old Style made its first appearance—on a public billboard advertising the Culpepper Union Brewing Company—and over subsequent decades the typeface proved to be very popular.

But what was she supposed to do now? With drowsiness and near-paralysis taking hold, it occurred to her—as it should have done before she went off on this obsessive tangent—to make a list of categories where a typeface like Blackwood Old Style might be used in more recent times and then to search for examples. The most obvious one, given how young the two guys appeared to be, was colleges. Beers and breweries maybe? Rock bands. What else? Trucks? Automobiles?

But she was hanging on by her fingertips here, because even if she found something—a recent example of Blackwood Old Style—it would still most likely prove to be a dead end. The guy was just wearing a printed T-shirt, and the design on it was probably something totally random. It didn’t have to be significant. It didn’t have to be a coded message.

Conceding defeat, she went to bed.

But now this morning, feeling fresher, and spurred on by a desire to avoid getting caught up in this preposterous Twitter controversy, she reengages. She sits at her desk and reviews the categories she came up with for her search.

And then it all happens in what feels like a flash.

Because again, the category most likely to yield results, it seems to her, is colleges. So she generates an initial list, confining it to ten East Coast states and eliminating anywhere that doesn’t begin with the letter
A
.

Nineteen colleges.

She starts logging on to the Web sites for each of these, one after the other … and at number seventeen, she hits pay dirt.

Atherton College.

There it is, clear as day. Blackwood Old Style.

She stares at the screen for a few moments—at the typeface, at the initial letter—and it slowly dawns on her.

Fuck.

This
is
significant. It isn’t random. It’s a real lead. And why the hell didn’t she do this last night?

After a moment, she hears the ping of an incoming e-mail. The subject line is “Ratt/Twitter.” She ignores it.

The thing is, the guy was wearing a specific T-shirt. He was wearing a T-shirt with the name of a college on it.

Was it
his
college?

Before she starts shooting holes in this, which she could do pretty easily, something else occurs to her—or, to be more accurate, she remembers something.

ath900.

Holy
shit
.

The phone rings. She ignores it.

That was the name attached to the comment in that blog post she found, the one that talked about “popping the top guys.”

In shock, Ellen leans back in her chair.

Those two things combined … that’s more than a lead, that’s a …

Staring at the screen, she swallows.

That’s a …

She’s afraid to say it, or even think it, but that’s a grade-A, gilt-edged
scoop
right there.

Seriously.

She slides forward again and starts examining the college website, and as she’s doing this, over the next half hour or so, two things become clear to her. One, she’s going to keep getting phone calls and e-mails about this Ratt Atkinson situation, overtures that will only get harder and harder to fend off (especially if she remains here, in her apartment). And two, phone calls or e-mails
to
Atherton College simply aren’t going to be enough, not given the gravity—not given the delicacy—of the situation.

There is a logical conclusion to this, and she reaches it pretty fast. Atherton is in upstate New York, probably less than three hours away. She could get a train to Albany and rent a car from there.

She looks down.

She’ll probably need to get dressed first.

The phone rings again. As before, she ignores it.

Instead, she logs on to the Amtrak website.

9

L
IZZIE
B
ISHOP IS RELUCTANT TO ADMIT IT,
but this shit is addictive.

Beforehand, she’d have assumed that watching live coverage of a murder trial on TV would be like watching paint dry. Okay, more than likely there’d be occasional ripples of drama, but the sheer tedium of it, day after day—the proceedings, the lingo, all that
ipso facto
shit, not to mention the endless analysis—just,
No
,
I’m sorry
 …
no way
 …

Who could possibly be into that?

Well, as it turns out,
she
could.

Because as it turns
out,
there’s something sort of creepy and hypnotic about it, and from her curled-up perspective here on the couch—remote in one hand, can of Red Bull in the other—she’s finding it hard to look away, to take her eyes off this prosecution guy, for instance, Ray Whitestone … who’s not cute, or anything, Jesus, he must have type 2 diabetes, at
least,
but he also has a commanding presence. And weirdly enough, too—it seems to Lizzie—the more banal the questions (and answers, of course), the more hypnotic the whole thing tends to become.

And it’s not just Ray Whitestone, either. The witness on the stand at the moment, this doorman guy, Joey Gifford—he’s something else. Curiously compelling is what one of the talking-head commentators has called him a few times, and that about sums him up. He’s like a person you’d see on some ultra-tacky, cringe-inducing reality show, only more so.

Because this actually
is
reality.

“The awning, the one outside that covers the sidewalk,” Ray Whitestone is saying, “the canopy, that’s … that’s supported by four
brass
poles, am I correct?”

“Yes, brass … brass poles. I’m assuming it’s brass, that’s what it
looks
like … brass. It’s the right color.” Joey Gifford clears his throat. “I mean, I’m no, what’s the word,
metallurgist,
but—”

“Indeed, Mr. Gifford, thank you.”

Not that Lizzie ever really watches reality shows, or daytime TV for that matter.

But—

A commercial break comes on and the spell is broken. She looks around, studying the apartment, these unfamiliar surroundings, for the hundredth time this week.

The place is small. In this room there’s the couch she’s sitting on, the TV, a shelving unit, a desk in the corner, and a longish rectangular table on which she has her study things laid out, textbooks, laptop, notebooks, pens. There’s a window that looks down over a concrete yard with some scrubby trees in it and a dilapidated wooden fence that backs onto the yard of another, similar building. There’s one bedroom, the door of which is always locked—during the day, at any rate. The kitchen and bathroom are tiny, really tiny, their poky windows giving onto the building’s cramped air shaft, where all you can see is other mostly shuttered windows and red brickwork, darkened now and flecked by a century’s deposit of bird shit and soot. There doesn’t seem to be much soundproofing between the apartments, either, because she can hear muffled voices, noises, random thuds, as well as the incessant clanking and hissing of the steam radiators.