JM03 - Red Cat (36 page)

“That’s right, counselor, sit him down— that’s good advice you’re giving. And you explain to him that next time— if he’s so foolish that there is a next time— pulling his license is just for starters. There’ll be charges, civil and criminal both, if my office has anything to say about it, and I won’t care if he’s captured Jack the fucking Ripper.” She looked at me, and her eyes were like nail heads. “You get that, March?” I nodded. “Great. Now clear out while I talk to your boss.”

I got up and took a long look at McCue, and hoped it would be for the last time. I had no doubt he was hoping the same. As it happened, we were both disappointed.

I waited for Mike on Pitt Street, under stony skies, in the penetrating cold. He came out smiling, and patting his overcoat pocket.

“You got it?” I asked.

He nodded, and slipped the disk out of his pocket and handed it to me. “Flores promised there were no copies.”

“Do you believe her?”

“I believe that if we keep our end of the deal— to keep quiet and keep away from the press— we won’t have to find out.”

“What about Werner?” I asked. “Are they going to go after him for the assault?”

Mike shook his head. “I tried,” he said. “But with no witnesses, no evidence, and only your coerced confession to go on, it’s a nonstarter for them.”

“He beat the shit—”

“It’s a nonstarter, John.”

I sighed and nodded my head. “So we’re done?”

“With these guys. You’ve got some trips to New Haven in your future.”

“What do you think will happen with Nicole?”

He shrugged. “I imagine her lawyer is thinking about some sort of diminished-capacity argument, and I imagine the state’s attorney has figured that out too. My guess is they’ll deal it down, but how far, I have no clue.”

“She didn’t seem all that diminished to me,” I said. “Mostly, she seemed pissed off.”

“Having your husband fuck your sister and then shoot her dead has that effect.”

“I don’t think it was the shooting she minded.”

40

Clare was at the table when I got home, finishing her breakfast and looking through the real estate listings. I hadn’t seen much of her in the past few days— she’d been all over town, and Brooklyn too, looking at apartments— but she’d waited up for me on Sunday night, rigid and white-faced on the sofa when I came in.

“There was news on TV,” she’d said. “A guy shot in Wilton.” She slipped her hands under my shirt. They were smooth and freezing. “They didn’t give his name.”

“It wasn’t me,” I said.

“Your guy, though?” I nodded. “I had a feeling, I don’t know why. Did you…?”

“I was a witness.” I put my face into her pale hair. Soap, perfume, and underneath, something warmer. “I should’ve called you,” I’d said.

“I wasn’t asking,” she’d whispered.

“Still…”

Clare tapped the newspaper— the Metro section— and slid it across to me. “Another thing about your thing,” she said.

I scanned the article. It was the fifth story that week, and mostly a rehash of other reports: another portrait of the Williamsburg Mermaid as a troubled young hipster, actress, and failed playwright, and liberally seasoned with rumors of sadomasochistic sex tapes. Cassandra Z was mentioned yet again. I looked at my backpack, sitting in the corner and bulging with DVDs and backup disks.

“You want to come to Brooklyn?” Clare asked. “Check out some apartments?”

I shook my head. “I’ve got chores.”

I spent the afternoon erasing Holly’s backups and breaking DVDs— not easy to do with splints on. In between, I fielded phone calls. The first was from Ned.

“I’ve followed the story in the papers,” he said.

“They’re getting it about half right.”

“It sounds like this Holly was quite a disturbed person.”

“She was a lot of things,” I said. “Disturbed was one of them.”

“David’s lucky this worked out. He’s lucky he had you to help him. He owes you a huge thanks.”

I laughed. “I’m sure he’ll get around to it.”

“He hasn’t—”

“Don’t worry about it. Is he back at work yet?”

Ned was quiet for a moment. “He didn’t tell you?”

I sighed. “Tell me what?”

“David is taking a leave of absence. Six months.”

“Whose decision was that?”

“I thought it would be a good idea, and Stephanie agreed.”

“And David?”

“He came around eventually,” Ned said, and I laughed again. “Speaking of which, I’m hoping you’ll come around too— literally, I mean. Your nephews miss you, and so do Janine and I.”

“Sure, Ned, once things settle down, we’ll see.”

“I want to do more than see, John. I want you to come over.”

I took a deep breath. “Sure,” I said, and hung up.

Chaz Monroe called me not long after. He, too, had been following the stories in the papers, and there were sly undertones in his raspy voice. “I didn’t think you were really a buyer,” he said. “But not to worry, I forgive the lies. And at least yours were in the line of duty or something.”

“I’m relieved.”

“Indeed.” He chuckled. “So, it turns out she was an actress. Well, that’s no surprise, and neither is the fact that she was a playwright. I’m just amazed she never had more conventional success— she was fucking remarkable.”

“She had other things on her mind, I guess.”

“Apparently. And so do I, of course. These stories have brought buyers out of the woodwork, and I guess it’s more than Don Orlando can handle— or wants to handle— because my phone’s been ringing off the hook. So, if you know of anyone looking to sell—”

“I thought you knew all the owners of Cassandra’s works, or knew of them.”

Monroe hesitated. “I was thinking more of undocumented work— anything you might have stumbled across…. Prices are only going up.”

I almost laughed. “I’ll keep an eye out,” I said. I hung up and snapped another DVD in two.

I was erasing the last of Holly’s backup disks when Orlando Krug called. He sounded old and tired, and his accent was more pronounced. “It was really her brother-in-law?” he asked.

“It was,” I said.

“The police are sure? It wasn’t Werner?”

“It was Herbert Deering, Mr. Krug.”

“But why? The papers hinted at some sort of affair…” I didn’t say anything, and Krug got the hint.

“I understand, you can’t speak of it. It’s just that I read the newspapers, and the person they describe…it’s not the Holly I knew.”

“They don’t know her. They have column inches to fill, so they write things.”

I heard Krug sip at something. “I’ve wondered lately just how well I knew her myself.”

“You’re the one who told me that she wasn’t easy to know. She was complicated— not just one thing.”

“She was very unhappy,” he said.

“And angry, and lost.”

“And cruel, Mr. March. Not to me— never— but what she did to those men…”

“She was talented, too— maybe brilliant. And driven.”

Krug’s laugh was bitter. “ ‘Obsessed’ is a better word, or perhaps ‘mad.’ She just couldn’t let go.”

“She told Jamie Coyle there was a story she wanted to tell, and questions she wanted to answer.”

“Do you think she found her answers?”

“I’m the wrong guy to ask about closure, Mr. Krug. But I think, sometimes, for some people, the questions come to loom less large. The answers don’t matter so much.”

He sipped his drink again. “I wonder if Holly would have reached that point,” he said.

“She was happy with Jamie, I think. Maybe she was getting there.” It was the only comfort I could offer. We rang off.

I didn’t know if it was the fallout of Krug’s sadness and fatigue, or my own string of sleepless nights, or simply the dull light in the low, beaten sky, but a tidal weariness swept over me and filled my limbs with lead. I listened to the whirr of the disk drive— Holly’s work being whisked away— and looked at the shiny plastic shards in my garbage pail. Holly, Wren, Cassandra— all that anger and sadness, all that cruelty and control, all the searching, and for what? I lay down on the sofa, and as my eyes fell shut, I thought of something else Jamie Coyle had said: “Everybody does their own time, and they do it their own way.”

As I had every day since Sunday, I dreamed of Deering’s body. He was lumpy and twisted on the bricks, like a gutted scarecrow, and there was a terrible intimacy to the sound he made as he hit the floor. His face was deserted; the fear and surprise and everything else packed up and gone. Nicole’s words were the only lyrics—“It’s taking too damn long”— but the voice in my head was Holly’s.

* * *

Clare’s voice woke me. She was in the kitchen, talking on her cell phone and putting takeout in the oven. She spoke softly, but firmly.

“I said I’d think about it, Amy, and that’s what I’m doing.”

I went into the bathroom and splashed water on my face, and when I came out she was off the phone. “Your sister?” I asked, and she nodded. “How was Brooklyn?”

She shrugged. “Far. I’m looking at some places in TriBeCa tomorrow.”

“No rush,” I said, and Clare nodded again.

Jamie Coyle called after dinner. I recognized the soft voice immediately, though his reason for calling took me by surprise.

“I wanted to say thanks,” he said.

“For what?”

“I been reading the papers, and reading between the lines, and it seems like that asshole would never have got his if not for you.”

“I got lucky,” I said. “The cops would’ve found him eventually— they just wasted time looking in the wrong place. I did too, for that matter.”

Coyle snorted. “You were the guy working at it, though. So, thanks.”

“And to you too, for the information. Without it—”

“Yeah, whatever,” Coyle grunted.

“What are you doing now?” I asked.

“Nobody’s looking for me for anything, so I’m back working for Kenny— but I’m not sure how long. A guy I know out in Vegas tells me there’s work there, and I can crash on his couch. I’m just waiting for the service…for Holly. She had a cousin down in Virginia that’s arranging it. I spoke to her yesterday.”

I glanced at the table, at the disk I’d made before I’d erased Holly’s backups: her hidden-camera interviews with Coyle. “I have something you might want— a keepsake.” He asked what it was and I told him. He was quiet for a while.

“I don’t know,” he said finally. “All I do is think about her. I get angry sometimes, and I get this pain…in my chest. It feels like someone carved me out with a spoon. I don’t know if I can listen to her voice.”

I thought of the hollow in my own chest, still there after five years, and of the gasping, suffocating feeling that still took me by surprise. I wasn’t going to tell him it would pass. “You might want it later,” I said.

“Send it, then,” Coyle said quietly. I mailed the disk that night.

* * *

On Friday, there were two more Mermaid stories in the tabloids, both featuring a come-hither headshot of Holly that someone had dug up from somewhere. One piece, relying on a leak from the coroner’s office, revealed that Holly had been beaten before she died, and that she had been pregnant. The other aired rumors that her sex tape costars had included some of the city’s more prominent real estate and financial types. No names were named, but it no doubt made a lot of people nervous.

I’d just finished reading the articles, and Clare had just left for TriBeCa, when my intercom sounded. Stephanie’s face appeared on the screen, with David fidgeting behind her. I buzzed them up.

Stephanie wore a sweater and yoga pants, and she carried a shear-ling coat on her arm. She was expertly made up, and her dark hair was tied loosely with a velvet ribbon. David was pale and freshly barbered, and he paced by the door with the naked, skittish look of a newly shorn sheep. A newly shorn sheep looking for a drink.

“We’re on our way to the airport,” Stephanie said. Her voice was tight. “We’re going away for a while.”

“Ned told me.”

David scowled and stared at me. “Ned told you what?”

“Only that you were taking a leave. It sounded like a good idea.”

“Swell,” David said, and tugged on a patch of skin over his Adam’s apple.

Stephanie colored and shook her head. She extended a nervous hand and squeezed my arm. “We wanted to say goodbye, and we wanted to thank you.” I nodded at her, and we managed a clumsy exchange of smiles.

Stephanie looked at David. He frowned and jammed his hands in his pockets. His eyes were on the floor. “Yeah, thanks,” he said, and a muscle twitched on his jaw. Stephanie pursed her lips.

“Where are you headed?” I asked.

“Vail for a few weeks, and then the islands.”

“Sounds nice.”

David snorted. “We wouldn’t be going anywhere if—”

Stephanie’s hand shot out and wrapped around David’s wrist. Her fingers were white and her nails were sharp, and David jerked his hand away as if from a flame. He glared at her, but when he spoke his voice was low and tired. “I’ll be in the car,” he said, and walked out.

Stephanie shook her head and sighed. “He doesn’t mean anything. He’s still upset over all this— in some sort of shock.”

“He should talk to someone, Stephanie. He needs help.”

She colored again, and her face stiffened. She nodded, too fast. “And he’ll get it. Some time off, a change of scene, a little fresh air and exercise— this trip will really help him.”

I shook my head. “He needs more than a trip.”

“And he’ll get it, John, don’t worry. David will be fine.”

“And what about you?”

Stephanie frowned and looked at her hands. They were perfectly manicured, the nails like pink pearls. “Me? I’m a little on edge still, but some skiing and a seaweed wrap and I’ll be A-okay.” She looked up at me, and her eyes were huge and shining. She squeezed my arm again. “Don’t worry about us, John, we’ll be fine. Even keel again in no time.”

I started to say something and stopped, and Stephanie looked relieved. And then she was gone— a nervous laugh, a brittle smile, and quick steps out the door. I went to the windows and looked down and saw David, standing near a black Town Car. In a moment, Stephanie appeared. She came up beside him, and put a hand on his back. His head inclined toward hers and his arm circled her waist, and they stood together for a moment. Then they got into the car, and the car pulled away. I watched it round the corner and I heard Jamie Coyle’s voice again. “Everybody does their own time.”