The Better Sister

by Alafair Burke

  I was unlocking the front door in preparation for Guidry’s imminent arrival. “Maybe cool it with the colorful humor for a second. The homicide detective’s coming up.”

  Guidry didn’t arrive alone. Detective Bowen was with her, and I wondered if he was also obligated to appear for whatever “DA thing” had brought Guidry into town on a Sunday evening.

  They both declined my offer of water, tea, coffee, anything. While Guidry was asking me how Ethan and I were holding up, Bowen’s eyes scoured my apartment, as if he were a contestant on the Manhattan real estate version of The Price is Right. If I told him we paid $4 million and had a terrace with a view of Washington Square, would that make me a murderer?

  I had already asked Ethan to wait in his room. Nicky scrambled to her bare feet to introduce herself.

  “I’m Nicky Macintosh,” she said, shaking Guidry’s hand. Nicky never changed her last name back to Taylor, and it had seemed petty to fight with her about it. “We spoke on the phone.”

  I offered them spots on the sofa and took a seat in Adam’s favorite chair, a white leather recliner from Design Within Reach. I said nothing when Nicky decided to join us in the matching chair next to me rather than give us the room. Once we were in place, I asked the detectives if they had any leads in the investigation.

  “We’re looking into every possibility,” Bowen said, fiddling with the piping on the sofa cushion beneath him. “But we have a few questions that might help us target our efforts.”

  I told them both I’d help however I could, still wishing that Nicky were somewhere else. She always had a way of saying something to make a situation even more awkward.

  Guidry launched the first question with no introduction. “Why wouldn’t Adam go for the gun?”

  I felt my eyes blink, but couldn’t get any words to come out of my mouth.

  “Your gun. Or Adam’s gun, at least. He has a Smith & Wesson nine-millimeter registered to the sheriff’s office in Riverhead.”

  I remembered the weapon, that was for sure. “We don’t have it anymore.”

  “Well, where did it go?” Guidry asked. “It wasn’t on your list of items missing from the house. And yet if it had been in the house, I would have thought that Adam might have retrieved it when he heard an intruder. It’s a very popular gun, precisely because it’s useful for self-defense purposes.”

  “Adam bought it”—I paused, pretending to search my memory—“maybe a year ago. I told him I wasn’t comfortable having a gun in the house and insisted that he get rid of it. My house rules are more Use Your Words than Stand Your Ground. I even went to the march after the last school shooting—well, the last one big enough for people to even notice anymore. Sorry, you can tell I feel strongly about it.”

  “So where is the gun now?”

  I shrugged. “I have no idea. I didn’t want it under our roof. I made that quite clear, and he said he understood. I assumed he took it to work or sold it or something.”

  The silence that followed told me nothing, but I hoped that I had checked one item off her internal list.

  “That’s helpful. We also want to make sure we know for certain what your habits were with respect to the security alarm at your house.”

  “I told you, we never set it except when we were gone or if I were out there alone.”

  “And when it was set, who knew the code?” Bowen asked.

  I gave him what was a short list: us, the housekeeper, and her husband, who did handyman work when we needed it. “But the password is our son’s birthday. In theory, it was guessable, I suppose. Speaking of which, are you able to get into Adam’s emails? I’m still trying to figure out where he was on Thursday and Friday.”

  “His client meeting near the airport,” Guidry said. “You mentioned it yesterday. We’re looking into it.”

  I could tell from Bowen’s blank expression that this was the first he had heard of the subject.

  “I looked at our Uber account, and he didn’t go to the airport. Or even to a hotel, from what I can tell.” I handed her the ride trip receipts that I had printed out. “I asked Adam why his well-heeled client wouldn’t stay at a Manhattan hotel instead of an airport crash pad. I even offered to get them dinner reservations and theater tickets, because I knew how important client development was to him as a relatively new partner. He said something about how they might need to take an emergency flight to a country that wouldn’t extradite them back to the United States if things went bad. In retrospect, I think something was wrong, but I don’t know why he’d get dropped off at a train station.”

  I could tell Guidry was unconvinced. “I appreciate that you’re trying to recall anything unusual, Chloe, but that sounds like your husband was making a joke?”

  I realized how random my comments sounded, and tried to offer more specific grounds for my concerns. “He was never comfortable with this client,” I said. “Adam used to be a federal prosecutor—a really good one, in fact, in the Southern District. And of course he knew that when he crossed over from one side of the aisle to the other by joining Rives & Braddock, he wouldn’t always be wearing a superhero’s cape or the white hat, so to speak. But I could tell that the Gentry Group made him feel . . . dirty. I don’t know the details, but something weird was going on. I think he was meeting with them but didn’t want the law firm to know about it for some reason. Apparently he didn’t even bill his time to the client, according to his time sheets. And he used Uber, which gets billed to our personal card, instead of the law firm’s car service.”

  Guidry was nodding along as I spoke, but she chose her words carefully in response. “If he were meeting a client, wouldn’t he have simply entered the name of the hotel as the destination instead of a train station? And I don’t know much about lawyers, but I’ve never heard of one who spent two days with a client without charging them for it. Isn’t it more likely that he went somewhere else and didn’t want either you or the law firm to know about it?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking you to follow up on it.”

  Bowen caught Guidry’s eye and then asked the next question. “Do you think your husband was cheating on you, Ms. Taylor?”

  “No!” I was surprised by the certainty in my own voice. “I’m telling you: there’s a reason he didn’t want anyone to know where he was for two full days, and it has to be connected to his murder.”

  “Okay, okay,” he said, scribbling notes in a spiral pad, even though there was nothing to write down. “We’re going to look into this, but please understand that certain questions are routine in every homicide case. We don’t enjoy asking them.”

  “My husband wasn’t cheating.”

  “Got it, and to be clear, there’s no third party in your life, either? We have to ask, if only to exclude that person or persons as a suspect.”

  “Persons? Plural? No, no third party. Or parties. Just a boring married monogamous couple. It does happen, detectives.”

  Bowen smirked as he glanced at Nicky. I wanted to take one of her earring hooks and jab it through his hand.

  “And had your son and his father been getting along okay lately?” Bowen asked.

  “Of course,” I said. “They’re very close.”

  I had a sudden image of Adam’s face turning red, the veins bulging in his neck, as he screamed at Ethan in the car outside the school. A woman walking by heard him even through the closed windows. I had mouthed “It’s okay” and implored her with a hand wave to keep going on her way. It was that stupid gun.

  “Unusually so,” I added, “given that Adam was his primary parent.”

  I looked at Nicky. She nodded and reached over to give me a supportive pat on the arm. “She’s right. I wouldn’t have allowed Adam to raise my son here without me if there had been any problems. I know it’s not a traditional family arrangement, but Adam and Chloe have given Ethan an amazing life.”

  “So, then . . . no problems at all between them?” Guidry asked.

  “I mean, he’s sixtee
n years old,” I said. “His room’s a pigsty, and he’s constantly in front of one screen or another. But no, nothing you’d call a problem. You can’t seriously be suggesting . . .”

  Guidry softened her expression. “Of course not. We just have to ask. Maybe we can speak in private with Ethan, and then we’ll be all set here.”

  I looked up at the ceiling and blew out a long sigh. “Fine, let me get him.”

  I was barely out of my chair when Nicky rose to her feet. “Huh-uh. We’re done here, at least as far as Ethan is concerned.”

  “We’ll be just a few minutes,” Guidry said. “Chloe—”

  “No!” Nicky held up a hand, blocking my view of the detectives. “Chloe isn’t his mother. I am. I have the legal documents if you need them. With Adam gone, I’m his legal guardian. And you’re not talking to my kid after asking two different times if he was having problems with his murdered father, while you’re obviously ignoring the evidence that my sister is trying to give you. This whole thing is disgusting.”

  I could hear a clock I forgot we owned ticking from a bookshelf in the hallway.

  Guidry finally said, “Maybe you two could ask Ethan what he wants—”

  I shook my head. “No, my sister is right. The next time you want to speak to Ethan or me, you can call my lawyer, Bill Braddock.”

  20

  We waited until we heard the ding of the elevator before saying another word.

  “What the hell was that, Nicky? You’re his mother, and I’m not? They’re going to think we’re hiding something now.”

  She resumed her spot in the same white chair and lowered her face into her hands. When she looked up, I could tell that she was struggling to remain calm. “With all due respect, Chloe, why do you care so fucking much about what other people think?”

  I had no idea what she was talking about.

  “I couldn’t figure out why you were answering any of those questions, let alone letting them speak to Ethan. But then I realized: you were trying to please those cops, like you can keep them on your side if they just see how perfect and sweet you are.”

  “It’s not about me being ‘perfect and sweet.’ But I don’t want them to think we’re hiding something.”

  “I’d say that ship has sailed, baby sister. It’s obvious they’re looking to solve Adam’s murder inside your house. Don’t you see what they were doing? They were asking about Ethan’s relationship with Adam to trick you. Once they got him alone, they would have asked him about the dynamic between you and Adam. Who would have thought between the two of us, you’d be the murder suspect?” Her brows lifted in amusement.

  “I’m not a suspect,” I said.

  “Well, tell the internet that. The reason my phone was dying on the way here is because I was refreshing Twitter so much.”

  “You’re not taking this very seriously, Nicky. Adam’s dead. It’s not funny.”

  “‘It’s neither fun nor funny.’ Got it, Saint Chloe. Jesus, you don’t think I’m taking this seriously? I’m here, aren’t I? And who’s the one who told that cop to stay the fuck away from Ethan? But just because something sucks doesn’t mean you can’t find a glimmer of humor in it. Laughing at screwed up shit is how I’ve managed to stay alive after everything I’ve been through.”

  I steeled myself for a familiar round of all the ways fate had victimized Nicole Taylor, but the room fell silent instead. Nicky looked down the hall to make sure Ethan’s bedroom door was still closed. When she spoke again, her voice was low.

  “So how long were you cheating on Adam?”

  I grimaced and shook my head. “You’re unbelievable.”

  “I could tell you were lying when that asshole asked you about . . . ‘third parties.’” She used air quotes to mark the euphemism. “Don’t worry—you were always a good liar to everyone but me.”

  “I’m not a good liar, Nicky. Or a bad one, either. Because I wasn’t lying. Some people don’t lie.”

  “See?” she said, pointing an accusatory finger. “That’s your tell right there. You get all formal and clippish: ‘Persons? Plural? No third party. Or parties. It does happen.’”

  I didn’t appreciate the harpy, robotic tone she used for the impersonation, but it was hard to refute the point.

  “I could always tell when you weren’t shooting straight, Chloe. Remember when you discovered The Muppet Show in repeats? You’d bogart the remote control by telling Mom it was educational because it looked like Sesame Street. I’d tell Mom it was just puppets and that you knew all that shit anyway, and then I’d get in trouble for not being a good sister. I missed the entire last season of Remington Steele because of you. You couldn’t even resist smiling when Mom wasn’t looking, you were so proud of getting away with it. Or what about that time you got a UTI your senior year and let all your friends think it was because you finally lost your virginity? I knew it was because you worked so hard on your history paper you forgot to pee all day again, you OCD weirdo.”

  I felt an involuntary smile struggling to break out on my face.

  “See? Things can be funny even when the world sucks.”

  “And it really, really sucks. I can’t believe Adam . . .” My lower lip began to quiver as the enormity of it snuck up on me again. I did not want to cry, especially in front of Nicky. As much as she had deserved to lose him—and Ethan, too—she was the last person who should be expected to comfort me.

  Lucky for me, Nicky never was one to give comfort. “So who’s the guy?”

  I shook my head. I wasn’t going to confirm her suspicions, but I didn’t have the energy to fight with her over it, either. Eventually, we’d need to fight about what really mattered—what was going to happen to Ethan. I wondered if she had meant it when she told the police she had brought the legal documents with her.

  “Now I’m the one being serious, Chloe. Maybe you should tell the cops about whoever this guy is. I mean, you never know.”

  I resisted the urge to tell her that I was never the one who dated guys who might be capable of murder. “I already told them I had nothing else to say without a lawyer.”

  She took the statement as verification. “No wonder you’ve been walking around with a limp. A word of advice: if the sex is a pain in the ass, you’re doing it wrong.”

  I couldn’t help myself. It was so inappropriate, I started to laugh.

  “Remember: children in the back seat cause accidents, but accidents in the back seat cause children. Hey, what’s the difference between a G spot and a golf ball? A guy will actually look for a golf ball. Why did the chicken cross the basketball court? He heard the ref was blowing fowls.”

  How many times had I looked at Ethan, wanting to convince myself that he hadn’t inherited my sister’s worst traits? Yet I had to admit that one of the many things I loved about him was his take-no-prisoners sense of humor, which he certainly didn’t get from Adam or me. Nicky’s increasingly ridiculous jokes finally stopped when we heard Ethan’s bedroom door open. “Mom. You need to see this.”

  We both reached for the phone in his outstretched hand, and then Nicky deferred, sinking back in her chair. I took it from him and extended the screen so she and I could read it together.

  The article was only six minutes old, uploaded to the New York Post website: “Stab Victim’s Son Brought Gun to School.” According to the first sentence, “The sixteen-year-old son of slain attorney Adam Macintosh, husband of #ThemToo author Chloe Taylor, had previously brought a gun to school, sources tell the Post. Despite concerns from alarmed classmates and teachers, Taylor reportedly used her influence to prevent the son’s expulsion, chalking the incident up to a ‘misunderstanding.’”

  “A gun?” Nicky was saying. “You never told me about this.”

  I pressed my free hand against my forehead, willing it to stop pounding. “They’re blowing it out of proportion.”

  It had been yet another episode when Adam and I disagreed about whether and how to discipline Ethan. Most of what I’d told the poli
ce about the gun was true. Without even consulting me, Adam had bought the gun for the house in East Hampton shortly after the online threats against me became a regular part of our daily existence. Four months later, we got a phone call from Ethan’s school, saying that a kid had seen it in Ethan’s backpack after classes broke out. Adam acted as if Ethan was one step away from going postal on the student body. It had taken nearly an hour to get an answer from Ethan, but he finally confessed that he was trying to “seem like the cool, edgy kid” by letting another student catch a glimpse of it in his bag. It wasn’t even loaded.

  Had it been a public school, the hardline zero-tolerance policies would have meant certain expulsion. But I told the private school that in the shuffle of the city/East Hampton commute, the gun had ended up in Ethan’s bag, and he in turn had carried the bag to school without knowledge of its contents. I hinted at a lawsuit if they didn’t have grounds for rejecting our explanation. The way I saw it, if Adam hadn’t gotten all macho and bought a gun, none of it would have happened in the first place. Once classes ended, I used a bandanna to tie the stupid thing to a rock and sent it out to sea on my inaugural summer kayaking trip. Adam was furious when he found out, but I did what I needed to protect Ethan. Once a kid is labeled as trouble, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  Ethan’s phone buzzed in my hand. It was a text from “K.”

  Dude, why aren’t you calling me back? Cops were here again. I had to tell them that you

  I felt the phone being pulled away, and then Ethan quickly stashed it in the back pocket of his jeans.

  “This isn’t the time to start keeping secrets from me,” I said, thinking about the flip phone I had locked in my office desk the previous day. I wondered if whoever had texted him had tried to call the burner phone first. Cops were here again. The contact was simply “K.” Kevin Dunham, the friend he was with Friday night. “Was that from Kevin? What’s he saying?”