It's a Crime (5 page)

“Neiman Marcus, fifty percent off.”

Brenda always talked like that; it wasn’t just because the Cerises had lost their money. As a kid she’d probably been more interested in ferreting out a deal on a bike than in riding one.

Pat wondered what in her own past could have spawned this bewildering present. She and Frank had often teased each other about their youthful recklessness. Pat would say, “Tell me again. What percentage of your time was spent on the slopes?” Skiing, of all things—a rich boy’s sport. But Frank, who had received a scholarship to Syracuse, not too far from Song Mountain and Greek Peak, was simply good at it. And he got along well with the thoughtless, cocksure boys who drove from the campus to the resorts. They were the precursors of the High Risk boys.

In the courtroom Pat imagined a young Dominic venturing forth eagerly into the world, saying, “And someday if I’m lucky, I’ll
get to turn state’s evidence.
”

Maybe Brenda, years ago, gazed out from under her wedding veil, beyond the full skirts of her new wedding gown, and over at her newly betrothed and thought, “What a tall, handsome, twinkle-eyed, rough-lipped, strong-armed, fine-browed, straight-backed
future defendant
I have united my life with.”

Everyone rose for the judge, who sauntered to the bench, staring straight ahead. Instead of looking at the lawyers or the defendants or the audience, he gazed at his papers or off at the wall, hooding his eyes. All you could really see was his mouth, which was stiff but not unkind, Pat was sure.

Dominic’s case was first. He began by pleading guilty to two counts of filing false financial statements. Then he tried a short allocution: “Senior management directed me to apportion—”

“I took a look at some of the LinkAge statements,” the judge interrupted, his eyes fixed on the doors to the hall. “I read the footnotes over three times and couldn’t find a lick of sense in them.”

Dominic stood there, still straight and tall in his gray suit, but now evidently uncertain what to say. Finally he tried, “No, Your Honor.” He turned briefly to his lawyer and then began again, “Senior management directed me to—”

“Are you using them as some sort of excuse?” said the judge.

“No, Your Honor.”

Next time Dominic started, he got through his entire statement. The judge said, “Did you know what you were doing was wrong?”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

Looking at the papers in front of him, the judge spoke at length about his “search for balance.” On the one side was the gravity of the crime and the need for deterrence. On the other was Dominic’s cooperation and the necessity of sending the right signal to other cooperators. “Because of these considerations, I feel a much shorter period of incarceration than the guidelines recommend is called for. I hereby sentence you to a period of five months. A fine will be waived, pending the outcome of the civil suit. I will not demand restitution because the identity and monetary loss of the victims is impossible to determine.”

Brenda was rigid. Pat touched her desert-colored sleeve.

Five months? What did that mean? How could Dominic be going to jail? Did he say the wrong thing? Didn’t he help track down figures the way Frank had?

There was a general stir in the courtroom. Pat decided that this must be some formality that the judge was then going to set aside.

After Frank pled guilty to the same counts Dominic did, he stood and read, automaton-like, from a piece of computer paper. He’d let down his family, he’d exposed them to risk, and he would never forgive himself. Pat had read the statement at home several days earlier and had been moved by it. Now it was hard to figure out exactly what he was apologizing for.

His sentence was twelve months and a day. Pat was stunned. How could Frank be sentenced to jail after he had done everything requested of him in return for probation?

The judge asked if there was any legal reason that he should not pass this sentence.

Lou Lugano stood. “Not really,” he said, gasping. Frank sat down suddenly, as if someone had hit him on the head.

Outside the courtroom, at the elevator bank, Lou told the print reporters that he was disappointed in the outcome and that he was going to consider an appeal. Pat said with a single, surprising sob, “Frank is not a bad man. He never meant to hurt anybody.”

Then the convicted felons, their lawyers, and their wives crowded into an elevator hung with pads to prevent damage to the fine wood interior. It was dark and claustrophobic. The lawyers decided that the group should split up in order to minimize contact with the TV cameras and newspaper photographers. The wives would leave first and retrieve the cars. In five or ten minutes Frank would go out the front entrance, and Dominic, out the side.

Pat and Brenda wove their way through the meandering white corridor of the basement to the side door. They did not falter because each assumed that the other knew where she was going, and in fact they ended up within sight of a pair of heavy double doors and an idle security guard who, while he did not have to monitor the metal detector, was leafing through a real estate guide to Sullivan County.

How curious that Pat and Brenda should share the same awful fate. Maybe exulting over a new Chinese redbud wasn’t all that different from exulting over a new red couch.

They paused before the doors. “Do they really have to go to…jail?” said Pat.

Brenda looked at her suspiciously. Then she opened the right door and let in the blinding sunlight. There were a few overeager flashes, but the dozens of pairs of eyes were straining to see behind them. The two women were watched, not photographed, as they strode self-consciously down Pearl.

“We’d better hurry,” said Brenda. She and Dominic had found the better lot. Pat’s was farther away. Once she was in the car, she had to circle around to get to Worth, a side street uptown from the courthouse, where she got stuck behind a delivery truck. She could see Frank walking up Centre Street in her direction, trailing photographers. He half hoped to shake them, but he also expected her to drive up behind him and so kept looking back for her. At first the cameramen clicked feverishly, but one by one, they gradually left. The departures were worse than the assault, implying an embarrassed pity. The lone remaining photographer started to take his camera from his face periodically and direct his gaze back in the direction Frank was looking, uncertain whether to continue. The energy had dissipated, and at last he put his equipment away. By the time Pat reached Frank, he was alone on the sidewalk.

CHAPTER
5

Y
outh is full of fits and starts. You can be jerked this way and that way and then six more ways you’d never even heard of.

When Pat staggered out of the bar on the night of the Edgar Awards, leaving Lemuel Samuel with Mr. Hollywood, she returned to Penn Station via a flashing, streetlamp-lit sequence of empty sidewalks, scattered couples, man with dog, man in a sweatshirt. Possible threat? Doesn’t matter. Walk, walk, walk through the dark, and never stop. At last a huge harshly bright three-dimensionally confined space opened up around her: Penn Station. All the newsstands and shops were shuttered. The floor was dingy with abandonment. Pat’s footsteps echoed eerily. And sprawled on a banquette near the departure board dozed a familiar figure under an alien puff of hair.

“Ginny,” said Pat stupidly.

Ginny was instantly alert. “You don’t have the money for the train, do you? I have it all, remember?”

Pat looked down vaguely at the tiny camouflage shoulder bag flung crosswise from her shoulder to the opposite hip. “Oh, right,” she said.

“I realized when I got to Hart Ridge, so I took the next train back,” said Ginny, jumping to her feet.

“We didn’t get to go to the Chelsea Hotel,” said Pat.

“Oh, well, all I wasted was the two fares, out and back,” said Ginny.

“You’ve been waiting?” said Pat.

“I bought
Follow Me,
” said Ginny, waving her copy. “It’s great.” She looked at Pat with uncharacteristic curiosity. “What happened to you?”

Pat just shook her head. “You have saved me, Ginny,” she said.

Ginny examined her sideways for a moment. But all she said was “Let’s go. Otherwise we’ll have to pay a surcharge for buying tickets on the train.”

On board Pat said, “If you could do one thing without consequences, what would it be?”

“Die,” said Ginny.

The next morning, when Pat read in
Follow Me
that private eye Bud Caddy ordered a drink in a bar, she promptly threw up. Then she returned to the extravagant, gaudy, exhilarating loop-de-loops of Lemuel Samuel’s prose. What bliss, to be one of these rubber-skinned characters who bounced right back up after a sock in the jaw. They all drove around madly, from bar to bar and suspect to suspect and beating to beating. Everyone, win or lose, enjoyed the fisticuffs. The complaints about bruises and wounds sounded like boasts; the dead were strewn about like actors.

Next Pat bought
Road Kill.
It was the first hardback she’d spent her own money on. She and Ginny agreed that it was almost as good as
Follow Me.
Pat liked to study the jacket photo. One of Lemuel’s cheeks was deeply creased, the other less so, which gave him his smirk. That half smile of his must not have been a reaction to her, but an old scar. Still, lots of teenage girls wandered through his mysteries, and Pat imagined herself first as one, then as another.

Every little twist and crisscross of the plot reminded her of her joyous dread in the hotel, a feeling that had already started to dwindle in her mind. She wanted to keep hold of it, palpate it. What had she been so excited about? So scared of? Why hadn’t she stayed at the bar? Her mother hadn’t expected her home. Would she have ended up in California with famous author
Lemuel Samuel
?

As Pat was leafing through
Life
magazine the next month, she came across a photo feature on Lemuel and his movie deal for
Follow Me.
One of the captions read: “What clinched it was the story I told him about passing counterfeit money,” says Samuel dryly. “You know how crazy Hollywood is about money.”

After her heart leapt in recognition, she felt a wave of fear.
What if nothing ever happened to her again?

But toward the end of her senior year in high school, she went to another of Lemuel’s signings at The Black Cat, and this time Ginny came drinking, too. The three of them ran through the White Horse, the Corner Bistro, Chumley’s, the 55. The next night Lemuel asked Pat to come to the apartment in the Village. Just before he made love to her, he bumped his head on the frame of the borrowed loft bed. He kept groaning, whether from pain or pleasure it was hard to tell. After that he called her every few months. She never knew where he was in the interim. She moved around, too, but he could always find her through her mother, who seemed willing to give out her number to any lowlife who called, not that Lemuel was one of them.

Pat had graduated from Maryland and moved to Manhattan by the time Lemuel published another Bud Caddy mystery,
The Fleabag Massacre,
which sold more copies than either
Follow Me
or
Road Kill,
but wasn’t nominated for an Edgar. Lemuel said he’d pissed off the wrong people. He brought her to Fire Island for a long weekend, where they stayed in a white clapboard house that belonged to his editor at Black Cat Books. The property was riddled with poison ivy, so Pat was careful walking around while Lemuel did phone interviews. She didn’t mind that Lemuel never mentioned her. He had to appear footloose. Which God knows he was. That Tuesday he left for the Beverly Hills Hotel, where Mr. Hollywood was putting him up so they could work together on the script of
Follow Me,
half a decade after the project had begun.

Detective novels were changing. The hard-boiled “everyman” was making way for detectives who ran against type: female or old or deaf or homosexual. Bud Caddy was a bridge between the two. He was yet another half-romantic, half-cynical PI, but he was such an exaggerated, outsize version in
The Fleabag Massacre
that he’d become puffy and nearly incoherent with drink and drugs. It was hard to tell why he did anything. No detective devoted more time to intoxicants. No detective got into more fights for fewer discernible reasons. And no detective tore across a page the way he did.

Ginny Howley started writing short mystery stories, as Pat had always told her she should, given her name. Well, they were sort of like mystery stories. In her first, “The Red Door,” a detective tries to sneak past a variety of doormen and receptionists and security guards only to find that beyond them are more doors waiting to be opened. The story was bought by mainstream
Argosy
—not bad considering it had been repeatedly rejected by mystery magazines. Pat found a postcard of a church with a fancy red door, which she circled. “Cool!” she scrawled on the back. She sent it off to Providence, where Ginny had gone to college, and where she’d simply stayed, despite Pat’s perfectly reasonable argument that she could find crime for her stories anywhere, even in New York City. Pat sent a copy of the
Argosy
with Ginny’s story to Lemuel at the Beverly Hills Hotel, but received no reply.

Over the years Ginny’s tone had become more dispassionate and her conversation more lurid. Of Lizzie Borden she said, “She was forty, and she was tired of waiting to have a good time. Everyone knew she’d killed her parents, but the crime was too big and too awful to acknowledge. So she got off. Then she started to throw parties. Can you imagine getting an invitation?”

When Ginny left a message on Pat’s machine, Pat should have called her back right away. But she went to a solve-it-yourself theatrical event that night and didn’t try her until the next evening. By then it was Saturday, and Pat was in Hart Ridge, where her mother turned out to be reading “a book by that mystery writer you know with the funny rhyming name.” Pat didn’t reach Ginny until Monday morning.

It was hot, so hot for a September morning shortly after Labor Day that even at this early hour Pat could see the air shimmy off the train tracks at the Hart Ridge station. She was surprised at how bad it was possible to feel when you weren’t hungover. Her head pounded in the rising heat. At the end of the platform were two glass phone booths, each with a retractable door, a hard brown plastic shelf to sit on, and a Hart Ridge phone book dangling from a wire. Pat was sitting in the farther booth when she got Ginny. The door was open, and her forehead was pressed against the cool metal of the pay phone.

“I’m going to Maine,” said Ginny.

“Oh, I wish I were,” said Pat. “It’s so awful here.” Beside the steps to the platform were some shrubby roses that reminded her of the beach.

“I mean I’m moving there,” said Ginny.

“Really?”

“I’m not sure if I told you I got married.”

“Married!” exclaimed Pat.

“It’s not what you think. But I can’t talk about it right now.”

“Why not?”

“I’m afraid,” Ginny whispered.

“Of who? Your husband?”

“No, no,” she said with sibilant impatience. “Nothing like that. Maybe myself.”

The face of the black engine appeared around the bend just then, its clanks and hisses suggesting a drizzlier, cooler, cozier climate, maybe in black and white.

“Give me your phone number, and I’ll call you back when I get into Penn Station,” said Pat.

“I don’t have one. I have this idea of…of the dark woods,” said Ginny.

“Wait,” said Pat with the sense that the conversation had gotten away from her. “The train’s here,” she said. “But we’ve had such good times. Why go so far away? We have to stay friends, right? Right?”

Pat sat on the left and more scenic side of the train and tried to picture Ginny married. She had always been alone in a way that Pat knew she never would or even could be. Not that Pat’s odd glancing association with Lemuel would have suited most people. Out of laziness or maybe lower standards, she put up with all sorts of nonsense. But it had sputtered along as other, more intense romances evaporated.

“Pat!” This warm greeting was from Frank Foy, a Hart Ridge classmate she hadn’t seen in years.

Pat looked up and said, “I warn you. I was shot at once on this train. Here.” She pointed to the bottom right-hand corner of the window near the seat in front of her.

“Really,” said Frank, sitting down easily beside her and leaning over for a better look.

“I don’t mean the shooter knew it was me,” said Pat. “I was just a person. He probably couldn’t see more than a silhouette. A head, maybe? Hair?”

“What did you do?”

“Oh, screamed. Not much. Just a little scream. It was more interesting than scary. There wasn’t time for my life to flash before my eyes or anything like that. Suddenly there was a crack, there was a bullet hole in the window, and there were slivers of glass on my lap. The conductor must have told me a dozen times that I was all right and that it was only a BB gun. I think he was afraid I was going to sue. The same thing happened to me once when I saw a caterpillar in my salad at a fancy restaurant.”

“You were shot at in a restaurant, too?” Frank was wearing a red and blue rugby shirt, his hair was tousled, and he was leaning in so close that Pat could see the sheen on his fresh, taut skin and the tension in the muscles underneath. Muscles are supposed to work two ways, one against the other, and for the first time in her life, Pat could believe it.

“Of course not,” she said. “I’ve only been shot at once. Isn’t that enough?”

“I’m so glad that I ran into you today,” said Frank. He was celebrating the successful pursuit of some sort of job. Pat wasn’t exactly paying attention, but there was such eager joy in his face, she happily agreed to meet him for dinner that night. She’d been aware of him all her life. He was a good Catholic boy like any other; she remembered him from the church basement, where nuns taught catechism to small groups of elementary school kids sitting on folding chairs. She knew the sort of home he’d grown up in: small and neat, with a print of the Annunciation in the hall—one step up from a crucifix. She knew the sort of parents he had: increasingly angry as the years went by, and bitter about liberals, but generous-hearted in their own way. She knew the sorts of friends and beer and sports and television programs he liked.

It was months before he mentioned catching her “on the rebound” from Lemuel Samuel. “I couldn’t believe my luck!” he crowed.

They were at a drive-in movie theater, waiting to see a spy movie. Frank was still living with his parents in Hart Ridge, but he had his own car, a red Firebird with taped-up seats, and they spent a lot of time in it. “What are you talking about?” asked Pat.

“I overheard you on the phone with him that day. The door to the pay phone was open.” Frank was spilling popcorn all over himself in his excitement. “I never would have had the courage otherwise.”

Maybe. Pat had never met a cockier fellow, actually. But she tried to piece together which conversation he could mean. “That was Ginny!” she said at last. “We were talking about her moving to Maine!”

“Oh, no, he mentioned marriage and you said you wanted to be friends. Friends! Ha! What a kiss-off!”

“Lemuel Samuel would never do anything like get married,” said Pat. But Frank got such a kick out of dating Lemuel Samuel’s old girlfriend that it was impossible to get him to understand that she and Lemuel could not have “broken up” because they had never been “together.”

“But we’re together, right?” said Frank.

“Of course,” she said.

Frank was so young. He hardly drank at all, except in sporadic bursts. He was always ready to make love, and he actually paid attention as he did it. He liked to have fun. He was just…regular. Pat started to wonder when she’d hear from Lemuel again. It had been several months, so it was about time. But he didn’t call. Then the leaves started to turn, even the oaks, and still he didn’t call.

Very early on another Monday morning, shortly after New Year’s, Pat’s phone rang. She woke in her dream, and it was Lemuel. Then she woke again. The room was black, but her mind was clear. It was Frank’s mother. Frank had wrecked his car driving back from Hunter Mountain. He and his friends were in a hospital in Kingston. At least one of them was supposed to be critical. But she had spoken to Frank. He sounded okay. He’d mentioned Pat.

During the drive north, Frank’s parents sat in the front seat, and Pat sat in the back. Eerie portents appeared: an untended fire in a metal barrel, dark twisted tree branches obscuring a green sign; bright, brittle light in the hospital lobby. Frank’s hair was deeply black against the white pillowcase, shadows had formed hollows under his cheekbones, his eyes glittered.