by Saul Black
“I’m going home,” Will said. “You?”
It was dusk. Outside the office windows an evening of deepening blue, accompanied by the city’s simmer of preparation for the night’s crimes and misdemeanors.
“Yeah, in a minute,” Valerie said.
Will put on his jacket and pocketed his phone. “This gig’s no fun now I’m not interviewing escorts,” he said.
“Work Vice for a month, see if you like it.”
“It’s not that they were hot. It’s that they were nice. You know, charming. Especially the Eastern Europeans. They really seemed to like their work.”
“Imagine sucking Ed’s cock,” she said. “Imagine rimming Ed.”
“Jesus.”
“Still think they like their work?”
“There’s no talking to you. You’re a pathological ruiner. I’m going home.”
In sheer dull desperation, Valerie was going through the entire case file on Adam Grant, rereading every statement and fine-combing every financial document culled from the computer hardware. Currently she was halfway through the DMV output for license plates the exit traffic cams had registered leaving On-the-Go at the Orland rest stop. Ed Perez had already done this, but Valerie was at the stage where she’d decided to trust no one’s scrutiny but her own. Jenner was not the registered owner of any vehicle, nor had he hired one—at least not with his own credit card. Kyle Cornell’s Ford wasn’t on the footage, nor, according to Ed’s report, were any of Dwight’s known family or acquaintances. But the fact remained Jenner had been there, and he couldn’t have been there except courtesy of a vehicle, even if he’d hitchhiked—and Christ, surely in these paranoid times no one did that anymore?
Licenses, registrations, and photographs (invariably terrible) of drivers. Valerie was so bored she found herself trying to imagine the characters and lives behind the names and images. Drake Lennon was thirty-two last birthday. African American. Plump face, disastrous cornrows. Valerie imagined him cooking up doomed business ideas, entrepreneurial zeal turning to annoyance, then a sense of deep betrayal. Jessica Reynolds, forty-five. Ash blond with green eyeshadow. Good-time girl who’d made too many bad decisions. Never quite had what it took to get out of waitressing. Sadness creeping in. Rick Chesney. Thirty-eight. Boyish dark hair, blue-eyed and gaunt, with a little artistic righteousness burning away. Independent filmmaker, with nothing actually made—
Holy fuck.
She stopped. Read the next name again. Looked at the photo ID. Are you kidding me?
She took the printout sheet over to Ed’s desk. Had to wait a moment while he got off the phone.
“Qué?” he said.
“No gold star for you this month, Eduardo.”
“What? Why?”
She handed him the sheet. There were a dozen licenses per page. “Look again,” she said. Then observed while Ed scanned the page. It still took him two attempts.
“Oh,” he said. “Fuck me. Fuck me.”
“Not after this performance,” Valerie said. She checked her watch. 8:03 P.M.
Still early enough to go and see Rachel Grant.
30
“I told you, you can’t see her,” Rachel Grant said. She had come downstairs after Tala had gone up to tell her Valerie was here. “I thought I made myself clear. Don’t you think she’s got enough to deal with?”
As before, they were in the kitchen. Tala, Valerie assumed, was keeping an eye on Elspeth. Suicide watch.
“I’m not here to speak to Elspeth,” Valerie said. “I need to ask you something.”
“For God’s sake, what?”
“Traffic cameras at the Orland rest stop record your vehicle leaving there on the night of July thirty-first. Were you there?”
Again, the question baffled Rachel. Not its content, but the bare fact that she was being asked.
“What?” she repeated.
“The same place we know Dwight Jenner was spotted. The same night. Within minutes. It was when Adam was in Los Angeles for the symposium.”
Rachel’s face said she was working it out. “Was he following me?”
“So you were there?”
“Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ.”
In what Valerie saw had become a reflex action, Rachel wrapped her arms around her middle. All the questions livened the wound Jenner had left there.
“I was … I stopped there on the way up to the house.”
“The Campbellville place?”
“I can’t believe he…” She shook her head. Valerie had seen the look on the faces of countless victims, the one of dawning realization: You went about your business without a clue that close by a criminal was going about his. A criminal for whom you were the business.
“I’m sorry to tell you this, but we’re pretty sure Jenner was watching the house.”
Rachel just stared at her.
“It’s possible he followed the car thinking it was Adam.”
“My God.”
“We found his wristwatch by the lake.”
Rachel raised her hand to cover her mouth for a moment. The sickness of discovering you were the hapless object of someone’s surveillance. The feeling of invisible assault.
“You’re sure you didn’t see him? At the rest stop? In the store?”
Rachel shook her head. “I didn’t go in. I just … I only stopped for a minute. I realized I’d left my phone in a bag in the trunk. I just got out to get it.”
“Was Elspeth with you?”
“No, she was at camp. The summer camp.” She looked like she might throw up. “I was there by myself.”
Yes, you were, Valerie thought. Crossing the windows. Walking in the grounds. Getting undressed. Sleeping. And now you know he probably watched it all. Amazing, isn’t it?
“I take it you and Adam didn’t always go to the Campbellville house together?”
“Mostly we went together. Or sometimes, if he wasn’t free, Elspeth and I would go up for the weekend. Take one of her friends.”
“Adam ever go there by himself?”
“Yes, but not often.” Rachel met Valerie’s eye. “Often enough for what you’re thinking.”
Sophia. That had been what Valerie had been thinking. Why not? Clearly Adam Grant had fucked his mistress in the family home, but obviously the place in the country would have served him better.
Rachel looked at the floor. “It’s quite something, you know,” she said. “I don’t have what it takes.”
“What do you mean?”
“It should be nothing, shouldn’t it? I mean, compared to the fact that he was murdered—compared to the fact that he’s gone—it should be nothing that he was making a fool of me with some dumb cunt.”
Valerie started at the word. It went off between them like a gunshot. She was Police: It took a lot more than a sexual obscenity to ruffle her. But it was utterly at odds with the image of Rachel Grant she’d built through the interviews. For a moment she thought Rachel was going to catch herself, cup her hand over her mouth a second time as if she’d fallen victim to an otherwise suppressed Tourette’s. But she didn’t. She simply carried on staring at the spotless kitchen floor.
“I realize this is a stupid question,” Valerie said, “but have you talked to Elspeth?”
Rachel looked up at her. Another look Valerie had seen innumerable times before. It meant: What is wrong with you? Why are you making this suffering worse? Why can’t you just stop?
“I’m sorry,” she said. “But—”
“You mean have I asked her why she tried to kill herself?” Rachel interrupted. “What do you think? That I might not have asked? Just put it down to an adolescent mood swing and bought her a new Xbox?”
Valerie didn’t answer. Sometimes allowing someone’s anger to hang in the air diffused it.
Rachel sighed. Relaxed her shoulders.
“She said she didn’t know why she did it. She said she just got sad. She said she just couldn’t stand it.” Rachel smiled bitterly. “Isn’t that why anyone
does it? Because they can’t stand it anymore?”
“Yes,” Valerie said. “I suppose it is.”
“I deserved it. I wasn’t there for her. Lesson learned. I don’t need to be told twice. Everything will be different now.”
“Are you getting everything you need? Is she—”
“I’m not a fan of shrinks,” Rachel snapped. Then mastered herself again. “But yes, she’s seeing a counselor.” She softened. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know you’re just doing your job.”
And a lousy version of it at that, Valerie.
* * *
Unless of course she admitted the wilder hypotheses with which she’d been flirting. When she’d told Rachel Grant about the initial sighting of Jenner at the rest stop, Rachel hadn’t mentioned that she’d stopped there herself. Understandable, perhaps. Valerie hadn’t given her the date (July 31), and in any case Rachel might simply have not remembered pulling in just to get something from the trunk, especially given the state she was in during the interview. On the other hand, if Jenner was following the Grants’ car, why would he take the risk of losing it by waltzing into On-the-Go for cigarettes? So maybe he already knew where the car was going. No reason to suppose July 31 was the first time he’d been there. There remained the fact of his phone calls from Adam Grant. All of them, according to the records, less than two minutes in duration. Some of them barely thirty seconds. Rendezvous instructions?
Go a little wilder. Could it be Rachel the two men had in common, rather than (or as well as) Sophia? Maybe Jenner had had enough of sharing? He goes to the Grants’ bent on removing his rival (his nemesis, in fact) but Rachel leaps to her husband’s defense and ends up almost dead herself.
More than a little wild, dear Valerie. Certainly she could see Adam Grant with Sophia—but Rachel with Dwight Jenner? Hardly.
Very well. Forget Rachel fucking Jenner. How about good old-fashioned money? Valerie had assumed life insurance for Adam Grant, and the assumption had been correct. Given his profession and assets, enough to take care of Rachel and Elspeth for the rest of their days. Could Rachel have recruited Jenner to kill her husband for a cut of the payout? Since she’d admitted knowledge of Adam’s affair with Sophia she had double the motive.
That would make sense—except, again, Rachel had ended up a victim. If Jenner was getting a share of the money, he needed Rachel alive to give it to him. Dead, she was useless.
Rubbish. Bogus. Bad police. You worked with the evidence in front of you. This crap was to kid yourself you were thinking outside the box. Only cops on TV thought outside the box and solved the case. The fact was the box was just a depressing dentist’s waiting room. In that environment even People magazine felt like worthwhile reading.
Will called her with the results from the CSI sweep at the Grants’ country place: small amount of blood near where the wristwatch was found, matching the blood on the wristwatch. Scarring on the turf caused by oxygen bleach. Cashmere fibers, DNA clean. No signs of a struggle. If something had happened to Dwight Jenner by the lake, there was no telling what it was or whether it was fatal.
* * *
“Suppose it doesn’t happen,” Valerie said to Nick, later. He was in the bath. She was sitting on the floor next to the tub. He was drinking his second glass of white. She was still sipping her first, half of which (oh for God’s sake) was sparkling water she’d added in the kitchen. They had a lot of their tender conversations in the bathroom. The white wood paneling and one circular wall light always gave Valerie the feeling of being in a snug ship’s cabin.
“You know, as you get older,” Nick said, “you’re developing a weakness for non sequiturs.”
“Suppose I never get pregnant.”
“Suppose you don’t. So what?”
“It raises the question, doesn’t it? Of whether we’ll be enough. Of whether just us will be enough. For each other.”
“That hadn’t occurred to me.”
“Really?”
“Really. This is another of your problems, things occurring to you, pointlessly.”
“How can it be pointless?”
“Because it’s not something you can know ahead of it happening.”
“So you admit it’s a possibility.”
“Yes, it’s a possibility. Unless of course you already know I won’t be enough for you. In which case it’s not a possibility, it’s a certainty. Let me finish my bath and I’ll move out. Move back in if and when you give birth.”
“You know that’s not what I mean.”
Nick didn’t answer. Valerie was past wondering at herself. She felt bleak and thrilled. She put her hand on her belly. The wrong place, she assumed, at this stage, but symbolically irresistible. Because there was no end to her madness, she imagined getting run over and killed in the next few days. Nick never knowing she’d been carrying his child. It was an appalling secret, but holding on to it gave her a perverse feeling of power. The loving part was that she knew how happy it would make him. She had this precious gold coin and wanted to choose exactly the right moment to spend it. The unloving part was that she still had the freedom to toss the same precious gold coin down the nearest drain—and none but herself any the wiser.
“Look,” Nick said. “You’re right. If we don’t have a kid it might turn out we’re not enough. If that happens, it happens. Jesus, it might turn out we’re screwed even if we do have a kid. That happens all the goddamned time.” He stood up. Stepped slightly awkwardly out of the tub next to her. Took a towel and began drying himself. The levity (and whose fault is that, Valerie?) had gone. “For what it’s worth I think you’ll always be enough for me,” Nick said. “So I guess you’re really only worried I won’t be enough for you. Well, I’ll take my chances, kid or no kid. I don’t want a kid because I’m scared we won’t survive without one. I want a kid because I think having it with you would be fun. Although at the moment every time I say the word ‘kid’ I go off the idea a little bit more.”
He walked out of the bathroom.
“Look on the bright side,” he called back. “If we don’t have one at least we can stop drinking sauvignon fucking blanc and get back on the good stuff.”
Well done, Valerie. Really. First class. Any amateur can deliver good, life-affirming news to a loved one. But to hold on to it, to let it turn to secret toxic shit—that takes a consummate professional.
I’m disgusting, Rachel Grant had said. I’m a fucking monster.
Yeah, Valerie thought, getting to her feet and sinking the remains of her feeble drink in one gulp, you and me both, sister.
31
September 6, 2017
She’d been at her desk the entire morning when Will called her.
“It’s your day off, William,” she said.
“That’s why you’re going to Exquisite. Spelled ‘X-q-u-i-s-i-t-e.’ Got a message from one of the dancers there, says she talked to Sophia three months ago.”
“Finally, Jesus. What’s the story?”
“Gina Johnstone, aka Gigi. The club’s at 301 Columbus, southeast of Little Italy. I’m texting you her number but I’m guessing she sleeps late. The message was she’s not a hundred percent sure from the photos, but it’s got to be worth a follow-up.”
Valerie tried Gina Johnstone’s number and got voice mail. She called X-quisite. “Gigi” was due in at 3:30 P.M. for the club’s opening at 4:00 P.M.
It wasn’t the first time the job had taken Valerie into the world of Adult Entertainment, and X-quisite yielded precisely the vibe she recalled from previous forays: the smells of dry ice and booze and upholstery, the ether of boredom and desire. Underneath it all a residue of sadness. A neon-lined bar with a silver counter ran the length of one wall, currently being prepped by two pretty girls in Lycra bras and hot pants. Dancer podiums either side of the main stage, maybe twenty tables. A lot of velour and leatherette. Smaller rooms off, for the private dances. Mundane thrills. A labored effort to cover ordinariness with glamor. A stripper she’d interviewed on
a different case years ago had said to her: In this business you’ve either got to really love men or really hate them. Anything in between and you’ll go off your goddamned head. It had stuck with Valerie, the lonely self-evidence of that insight.
Gigi hadn’t arrived, but was expected momentarily. The manager, Francis, looked as if he’d designed himself to defy the industry stereotype. Early thirties, boyishly handsome, and cleanly healthy in a khaki linen suit and crisp white shirt. Kind green eyes and a warm smile. He had a paperback copy of Wuthering Heights in his hand when he approached her. On top of these absurdities he was British, with an accent so charming she almost laughed. She asked him about CCTV.
“Well, yes, we do have it, but not in the ladies’ dressing rooms, and if I’m being perfectly honest it doesn’t quite cover the whole club. If we can get a date from you, obviously, we might be able to pull the requisite footage. It depends on whether Gigi can recall…”
“You don’t remember Sophia yourself?”
“No, I’m afraid not. I might not have been here. Or at any rate, not on the floor.”
Valerie didn’t know what to make of him. He seemed a sheer impossibility.
