The Accident (15 page)

Isabel herself had never been especially political, but she was embarrassed—she was humiliated—when the seemingly apolitical man she’d married started veering sharply to the right. Luckily, he wasn’t the only one in town. As bank accounts ballooned in the nineties and aughts, a lot of New Yorkers leaned away from their youthful ideals, their philosophical intentions. Personal politics raced to catch up with the practicalities, rationalizations to catch up with greed.

She stops in front of the number for Alexis’s building, but this can’t
be right. Isabel looks again at the building, then back at her phone, then up again. At the sloppily painted steel security door with the ripped locksmith stickers, at the security-gated windows with the reggaeton spilling out, at the scrawls and the soot and the screwed-on signs prohibiting loitering and drug use and solicitation. At this mini-slum.

Isabel peers at the aluminum panel of the intercom:
MAURIER, 1F
. Sure enough. Isabel knows from 1F: the very worst apartment, bottom floor front, down at street level, windows facing the garbage cans, the big industrial rat traps, the baggies filled with scooped-up dog shit that people toss in the general direction of the bins, often missing.

Poor girl, in her poor crappy apartment. This is the opposite of what Isabel was expecting, and she feels embarrassed at her own ungenerous assumptions, chastened.

She presses the wide horizontal button. No answer.

She waits a half-minute, and presses again.

Isabel was hoping to recruit Alexis now. To take the girl along in Isabel’s flight from ATM, to help open up the new agency, in exchange for sincere promises of equity, independence, fast-track advancement. Isabel doesn’t want to do this completely alone; she can’t. There will be a lot of work, a lot of hustle, a lot of calls. It will all start today.

She buzzes a third time, waits a few seconds, but finally gives up, starts to walk away.

Then something occurs to her. Isabel turns back to the building, opens the gate to the dry moat, walks past the garbage cans, to the thick iron security bars at what she presumes is the 1F window. She opens her phone, hits redial. She holds the phone down at her stomach, pressing the earpiece against her body so she can’t hear the digital ringing through the device, straining to listen for ringing in the physical world.

Ring
.

From inside the apartment, through the half-open window, past the fluttering drapes.

Ring
.

Isabel leans forward, holding the black iron bars, and looks inside. The glow of a newly ignited electronic screen catches her eye. The girl’s phone is lying on the floor.

Ring
.

Then something else catches her eye.

I
sabel is having trouble breathing. She grips the bars tightly, the rusty flaking iron scratching her fingers and palms, struggling to hold herself upright on wobbly knees.

She turns away from the horror on the other side of the parted curtains, stares at the building’s walls, at the vulgar graffiti, the mottled discolored stone. Her mind reels with the implications of this situation for herself. She tries to grasp, firmly, the reality of what’s going on, but her thoughts keep sliding away from her, slipping toward irrationality.

She needs to calm down, to think.

In an instant it’s now clear to her that the manuscript is, without a doubt, true. It’s an accurate account of Charlie Wolfe’s life and career, and the shocking activities of Wolfe Worldwide Media, written by someone in a unique position to know. If this information is published, if it’s brought to light in any way, it will bring down Charlie Wolfe, and initiate a tremendous scandal implicating multiple American presidents and CIA directors, and create a crisis of confidence in one of the most visible media companies in the world. A shitstorm. No question about it.

So there are a lot of powerful people who would want to suppress it, if they were aware of its existence. The author would of course anticipate this. So he would write a book like this secretly, and possibly anonymously. He would hide somewhere as he wrote, and he’d probably stay hidden until it was published, and hope that the publicity kept him alive. Maybe he’d stay hidden forever.

And of course it would make sense—it would be practically inevitable—that he’d entrust his manuscript to Isabel.

But what if he wasn’t able to keep his project a total secret? What if someone—Charlie Wolfe, or the CIA director, or maybe even the president of the United States—found the author? Knew what he was doing? Discovered that he’d sent this manuscript to Isabel?

What would they do?

Isabel turns her head back to the window, looks inside again, at the girl lying in a pool of her own blood, a gaping hole in the middle of her forehead.

They would do this.

CHAPTER 19

S
he should call the police. Isabel feels it in her bones that she should, while at the same time that she shouldn’t, terrified …

She needs to be deliberate. To articulate to herself:
why
precisely call the police? It won’t help Alexis. There’s no way the girl is alive, with that hole in the middle of her head, lying in that pool of blood. No phone call is going to save her.

Isabel stands on the sidewalk in front of the dingy building, and fumbles out a cigarette with trembling hands, manages to ignite the lighter after five tries, takes a long desperate drag of nicotine. She’s flooded with nausea. A convulsion begins deep in the pit of her stomach, works its way quickly up through her alimentary canal. She drops the cigarette to the pavement, and closes her eyes, trying to will the queasiness into submission.

She feels her phone begin to vibrate an instant before the audible ring. It’s her office’s main number, probably Meg, almost certainly calling to fire her, explicitly and vociferously. She hits Ignore.

If she dialed 911 right now, the police would want to know who she was. She’d be questioned, maybe even detained. Could Isabel herself become a suspect in Alexis’s murder? Of course she could. Then she’d have to explain everything: the manuscript, the subject, the probable
author. And as implausible as her story sounded, the police would have to consider her explanation. Then what? Then they’d call someone in Washington. And then …?

And then she’d be ushered into the back of a tinted-window SUV, and that would be the last anyone ever saw or heard of Isabel Reed. Because if they were willing to kill Alexis Maurier, they wouldn’t feel constrained to stop there.

No, Isabel won’t be safe in any police station, or in police custody. She needs to stay away from the police. But someone ought to find Alexis’s body. Someone should call the girl’s parents, tell her friends. She can’t just lie there,
rotting
, in her sad little apartment, ground floor with all the mice and the rats,
feeding
on her flesh—

There’s a pay phone on the corner. Do you need a coin to dial 911 from a public phone? It’s been … how long? … it’s been never. Isabel has never dialed 911, from any phone. She picks up the gray handset, then remembers the ubiquitous presence of security cameras, of surveillance cameras, of little globes integrated into ATMs, of traffic-safety cameras in sturdy boxes affixed to streetlamps, of good-old generic scare-tactic federal-government cameras … There are more than thirty million security cameras in America, aiming everywhere, recording everyone, all the time, producing hundreds of millions of hours of footage, every single day.

Isabel puts on sunglasses, trying to hide from whoever might eventually triangulate this audio with some visual, recorded from who knows what device, where. But it will happen.

It occurs to her that it may not be solely cameras that are watching her. From the privacy of her dark lenses, she scans the street life, taking mental snapshots. A man is standing across the street, leaning against a lamppost, talking on his cell phone. Across the avenue, two youngish guys are sitting in the front of a crummy-looking white Toyota sedan, both wearing sunglasses. A woman is standing in the gutter, as if to hail a cab, though plenty of unoccupied taxis seem to be passing her by, and her hand isn’t raised.

Isabel turns to the keypad, punches in the three buttons. “Someone has been shot.” She gives Alexis’s address, then replaces the handset without identifying herself.

She looks around again, standing in the semi-seclusion of the cut-off-at-the-knees phone booth, watching through the scratched cloudy Plexiglas, waiting for the stoplight to change on the avenue, for the heavy stream of downtown traffic to resume. The light turns green, and the cars pull away, one after the other, half of them occupied taxis, until she sees the telltale lit-up sign, then she takes a couple of long strides to the curb and off it, her arm shooting up, hailing the taxi.

She pulls the door shut. “Penn Station please.”

“You got it chief.”

She scrolls through the address book on her phone, chooses a contact, hits Call.

“Isabel! What a surprise!”

“Hi Dean. You in town? At your normal spot?”

“I am.”

“May I come talk to you, for a few minutes?”

“Oh for fuck’s sake, Isabel. Are they asking for their money back? Because I thought—”

“Can you see me?”

A pause. “Of course. Always.”

She hangs up as the car is pulling to the curb. She tosses a ten into the front seat and ejects herself into another dense crowd, swarming in and out of the hideous train station that’s burrowed under the unfortunate monstrosity of Madison Square Garden. She swipes her MetroCard, dashes up the stairs to the platform as an uptown express is pulling in. She hops onto the sparsely populated car, in the one situation when she’d prefer it to be packed to the gills, sardines, body odor and bad breath, the stench of McDonald’s, tinny treble leaking out of headphones, bicycles and strollers and backpacks and skateboards, too many people with too much stuff in too small a space.

But today it’s just herself and a dozen others. An overweight Italian-looking
guy wearing sweats and sneakers and a Mets T-shirt, gold necklaces and bracelets, reading the sports section of the
Daily News
, gives Isabel the up-and-down, and nods appreciatively, as if the sommelier just presented him with a taste of nice Barolo. Everyone else ignores her, and one another.

Isabel doesn’t ride the subway a lot, but it’s often enough that she carries a fare card. For a few years she’d sworn off subways and buses entirely, making a statement of it, if to no one other than herself. That was back when she started at ATM, when she finally got her first taste of living beyond paycheck-to-paycheck, with enough extra income to dispose of it with a weekly cleaning lady, and proper vacations in real hotels without agonizing over the cost of every poolside drink, and erasing her price-sensitivity on toiletries and groceries. Enough to take taxis instead of the dark, smelly, crowded subway. She had risen above the subway.

It took a few years to change her mind about public transportation, among other similar choices. She stopped trying to appear to have more money than she did, and started aiming for the opposite.

The subway pulls into Times Square, the doors open. Isabel steps onto the platform, then hops back into the car. Then as the doors are closing, she jumps out again.

She hurries up the stairs and across the mezzanine and down the stairs again to the downtown platform, a local arriving on the outside track. She boards this train, takes a seat on the hard gray plastic. She feels the vibration thrumming her thighs, the regular rhythm,
thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump
.

Despite the adrenaline, she feels exhausted, spent. She could go to sleep right here, like tens of thousands of people do every day. Simply close her eyes for a second, let her neck relax, head lolling to one side or the other or straight down, chin on chest, dribbling drool here on the Seventh Avenue IRT …

But she stands, and exits to another platform under another neighborhood, then the Greenwich Village sidewalk, striding to the curb, her
arm aloft again, beckoning another taxi to a screeching halt, another destination, another ten-dollar bill tossed across another bulletproof divide.

She looks through the Chevy windows, left and right, front and back. No, she thinks: there’s no way anyone could’ve followed her.

Isabel discharges herself onto a cobblestoned street in the Meatpacking District, another bustling rebranded neighborhood. This area hasn’t changed its name, but it has almost entirely relinquished its raison d’être, as well as the rough trade in transvestite prostitutes that accompanied the stinking bloody eponymous business.

A man holds open the discreetly labeled door to a private club, and she enters the cool dark lobby. A stunning girl at reception directs Isabel to the roof, and after the elevator she reemerges into the bright sunlight, a bar and couches and coffee tables, a decorative restaurant under giant canvas umbrellas, a small blue swimming pool occupied by a half-dozen model types. Isabel scans nearly the full 360 degrees before she spies the person she’s looking for, sprawled on a chaise in the far corner of poolside.