Die for You: A Novel

by Lisa Unger

  “Today, Crowe,” said Breslow impatiently. “I’ve got to pick up Benjy at three in Riverdale.”

  “The doorman,” said Crowe.

  “Who? Shane?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Never showed up at his apartment today.”

  “Let’s get a warrant and search his place first.”

  “I don’t think we’ll get a warrant just because the guy didn’t turn up at home after work.”

  “He had opportunity to let the intruders in, he left his post before the next guy showed, and he withheld information. Let’s try.”

  She raised her eyebrows at him and gave a quick nod, took her phone from her coat. She always made these kinds of calls, had more finesse, more relationships and less of a temper. Things just always seemed to go easier when Jez handled them. Crowe found he could rub a certain kind of person the wrong way. He had no idea why.

  His ex had called the night before last. He knew it was her when he heard the phone ring, though she hadn’t called him in months. He’d just finished working out on the weight bench he kept in the basement of the Bay Ridge row house they’d shared.

  “Keep it, Grady” she’d said of the house when they were splitting up assets. “I hate Brooklyn. And I hate this house.” They’d inherited the house from his grandparents and hadn’t been able to afford to change much. So they walked over the same linoleum floors his father had as a child, endured the same pink-tiled bathrooms, and climbed the same creaky steps. But he loved that house, and it was theirs free and clear—paid off long ago, taxes insanely low. So we sell it. Buy something that’s ours. He wouldn’t, couldn’t sell the house where his father had grown up, where he had, too, essentially. Their first and angriest arguments were about that house.

  He was breathless, his shirt damp with sweat, when he heard the phone ringing. Something about the way it traveled through the house, how he heard the ringing through the floorboards, made his palms tingle. He took the stairs two at a time and got to the phone, an avocado-green wall unit, by the third ring.

  “Crowe,” he answered.

  Just silence on the line. But it was her silence. He’d know the sound of her anywhere.

  “Clara. Don’t hang up.”

  A round release of air, as though she was trying to cloud cold glass with her breath. When she spoke, her voice was taut. “How did you know it was me?”

  “Every time the phone rings, I think it’s you. I just happened to be right tonight.”

  “Stop it.”

  “I miss you. Clara,” he said, and it sounded like a plea, “I could die from how much. I keep thinking about the last time.”

  He heard the sharp intake of breath that he knew meant she was going to cry, and he felt close to tears himself, a thickness in his throat.

  “Come back to me.” It wasn’t the first time he’d begged.

  “I have to go. I shouldn’t have called you.”

  “Wait,” he said quickly. She hung up and he leaned his head against the wall. “Wait,” he said again into dead air. He drew his fist back and punched the wall hard. The plaster buckled in a near-perfect circle and he brought his hand back fast to his chest. The pain started dull, slow, then radiated up his arm, his knuckles split and bleeding.

  “Fuck,” he whispered, though he wanted to scream. The pain felt good. He’d rather have physical pain than the raw gnawing he’d had in his chest since Clara left. Unfortunately, now he had both.

  “I’VE BEEN MEANING to ask what happened to your hand,” said Jez as they sped up the Henry Hudson, the dirty river glinting to their left, the city rising to their right. The warrant issued through some magic on Jez’s part, they were headed to Charlie Shane’s Inwood address.

  “Bar fight.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “What?”

  “Let’s just say I see you more as a lover than a fighter.”

  “Nice,” he answered, slightly offended. They were partners after all; supposed to have each other’s back. Did she really think he couldn’t hold his own in a brawl? He stopped short of asking.

  “Seriously.”

  “Hurt it working out. Punching bag.”

  She nodded, looked skeptical, but didn’t say anything else. She had that motherly way about her, always with a tissue in her purse and a nose for bullshit. She always had snacks, too—peanut-butter crackers or granola bars.

  “I know it’s not easy,” she said finally, looking out the window and not at him, almost as if she was thinking aloud. He didn’t bother pretending that he didn’t know what she was talking about. They took the rest of the ride in silence.

  11

  Fred was standing in the doorway when I reached the front step of the house. He wore an expression of concern as he watched the taxi depart. In his gray cardigan sweater and pressed navy slacks, he was solid, comforting, stronger than his seventy-five years.

  “Isabel Blue,” he said.

  He’d called me this since we first became friends, a few years after he married my mother. The timing of this coincided with my sister leaving for college. When she moved into the city to go to Columbia University, she took a lot of her anger with her. I’d always adored and worshipped my older sister and I grieved her departure from the house, but even I had to admit that the dynamics in our home shifted for the better without her.

  Like sand over ice, her absence allowed us to find firmer footing with each other. We were able to welcome my father’s memory home—hanging old photographs, my mother and I talking openly, fondly, about him and the good things we remembered. Linda had hated for anyone to mention him, had sunk into despair on his birthday, Father’s Day. For Linda, sadness had always been best expressed through anger. And her outbursts were frequent and passionate. With therapy and Erik, that had changed in her adult life. But out of loyalty to her—and not a little fear of her temper—I had kept my distance from Fred for the early years of his marriage to our mother.

  Fred always weathered the storms of Linda’s unhappiness with patient stoicism, as though he believed on some level that he deserved her anger. Maybe he did. I don’t know. With the fog of her unhappiness dissipated, Fred and I saw each other for the first time over the kitchen table. I was dressed for school, feeling sad, missing my sister. He said, “Isabel Blue.”

  I looked at him and he offered me a warm smile. “It’s not so bad, Isabel. She’s just a train ride away.”

  I didn’t have words for it then, the sad hollow inside me, the recognition that everything changes, that people die or they just leave you, and that you’re expected to move along in the current of your life as though nothing has happened. It seemed terribly unfair to me at thirteen years old. Why did people even bother with anything if it was all just going to fade away or be wrested from you?

  “My barn having burned to the ground, I can now see the moon.” Fred was fond of haiku.

  What a weirdo with his stupid sayings and those long, slow walks. How could she have married him? My sister’s nasty comments lingered in my head. But that morning I suddenly saw someone different. Now that she was gone, not always whispering something in my ear, I saw someone kind, much like my father, but someone present, mindful—not like my father. Even when my father was smiling, laughing, joking, I could sometimes see it behind his eyes—anxiety, unhappiness—flickering like a firefly in a jar.

  “What does that mean?” I asked. I liked the rhythm of the words. I liked the way each word fell to the ground with its particular weight but how the meaning seemed to hover somewhere just above me.

  “Think about it.”

  I did. I thought about it a lot.

  “YOUR MOTHER’S NOT here, dear,” Fred said, stepping aside and sweeping me into the house with a strong arm around my shoulder. I saw him looking at the bandage on my head, but he didn’t mention it, as though he thought that might be rude. “She’s off for some pampering with her girlfriends at Canyon Ranch.”

  “I know,” I said, letting him take my wrap, avo
iding eye contact.

  He laid it over the settee in the triple-height grand foyer. The entry was bathed in a sunny wash from the skylights above. The sunlight caught on the million tiny crystals in the chandelier and cast rainbow flecks around us on the floor.

  If my mother had been home, there’d be noise—a television, music, the sound of her chatting on the phone. The sound would bounce off the high ceilings, the marble floors, seem to come from everywhere and nowhere. She couldn’t stand a quiet house, or a dark one. There must always be sound and light. Today it seemed to echo with her absence with Fred’s thoughtful, quiet energy.

  “What’s happened to you, Isabel?” he asked finally, turning me gently to face him with hands on my shoulders. “Who did this to you?”

  “I—” I started, trying to think of a lie. But then I didn’t have the energy. “I don’t exactly know.”

  “Let’s sit you down somewhere,” he said, again moving me along with that strong arm. I felt myself rest against him, the weight of it all just too much suddenly. He brought me to the large plush couch in front of the fireplace, which was lit but dwindling to embers. I sank into the soft chenille, the cushions seeming to fold around me like an embrace. I told Fred what happened to me, withholding nothing, from Marcus not coming home two nights ago through my visit to the ATM.

  “I need to use the computer, figure out how much he’s taken from me. I need to try to do some research into this other missing Marcus Raine.”

  Fred sat on the hassock in front of me. He’d paced and frowned during my surprisingly calm and distanced telling of events, then came to sit there and put a hand on my arm.

  “What you need is rest, Isabel.” His tone was gentle but firm. “I’m going to call our lawyer and some people we know in the police department, and they’re going to handle this mess. You are going to take a bath and get into bed.”

  “Fred, I can’t do that—” I started to say. But the couch was so soft and the room was so warm. He lifted my feet from the floor and placed them on the hassock where he’d sat a moment before. I sank deeper into the cushions. The room around me started to get blurry and I thought of how that ER doctor had told me I needed to rest or suffer the consequences. I wondered if this sudden fading of will and awareness was what he meant. I felt the weight of a blanket on top of me.

  “Don’t worry, Isabel. We’ll figure this all out.”

  “I just need to use the computer,” I said, but it didn’t sound like my voice, the words thick in my mouth.

  “I’ll bring you the laptop,” he said. “We’re wireless now, after Trevor and Emily complained during their last visit.” I thought he might be humoring me but I suddenly lacked the strength to say so. The gray air darkened and swallowed me.

  WHEN A HARD, loud crack, like a thick branch snapping, brought me back, I felt myself swim up through layers of deep sleep before I broke into the bright light of the room. The sound still echoed in my head, though now there was only silence. I listened to the quiet noises of the house—the ticking of the clock, the hum of heat through the vents—my whole body tense and tingling, my breathing heavy.

  Like a honeycomb, all the rooms downstairs in Fred and Margie’s house connected by small hallways and pocket doors, creating a kind of circle of adjacent rooms around the foyer—the parlor led to the dining area, which flowed into the kitchen. Another exit from the kitchen led to a short, narrow passage that drifted into a massive library and study with a second-floor landing. That room reconnected to the foyer.

  The sliding doors that led from the parlor to the foyer were closed, but the doors that connected it to the large dining room were open. I heard a soft click, like the sound of a lock turning.

  I almost called out Fred’s name but something stopped me. Instead I slipped from the couch and let the blanket that covered me fall to the floor. I walked quietly over plush carpet toward the dining room in time to see three bulky shadows drift across the far wall. I felt a deep thump of dread in my chest, and suddenly the air around me, time itself, seemed thick and toxic with the energy of my own fear.

  I scanned the room quickly for anything I might use to defend myself, and my eyes came to rest on the wrought-iron fire poker on the hearth. I grabbed it too quickly, sending the stand and the other tools toppling loudly to the stone. In the aftermath of sound, even the house seemed to hold its breath. There was a deafening stillness where my mind raced through various options, none of them particularly appealing.

  I DIDN’T GROW up in this house. Fred and my mother moved here shortly after I left home to go to NYU. Until then we’d stayed in the other house, a large, rambling, rundown old place, because my mother felt we’d lost too much to leave the only home we’d ever known. The studio where my father died was torn down and replaced with a garden my mother tended with care. “She spends more time out there than she ever did with him,” my sister observed bitterly. It was true, of course. And seeing her out there, on her knees in the dirt, pulling weeds and planting new bulbs in the spring, was not a comfort to us as the gardening must have been to her.

  My sister and I could have left that house easily, every room, every creaking floorboard, every water stain akin to some memory of my father. Maybe it was my mother who wasn’t ready to leave it behind. Fred contented himself with laborious repairs and renovations that he could have easily hired out. Over time, he managed to update the plumbing and electricity, replace the roof, strip and stain old floors. There was painting and wallpapering, new carpets. By the time Margie and Fred left, the old house was fully renovated and sold to a young couple starting a family who wanted to leave the city. Fred told me later that it was therapy for him to restore that old house. There were a lot of things my father left behind that he couldn’t heal, places in the other man’s wake where he wasn’t wanted. But that house responded to his ministration, let him patch and repair its broken places. Like my mother’s memorial garden, it didn’t chafe with the attention, didn’t struggle, rebuff, or withdraw.

  This house, this new house built to my mother’s specifications, was familiar but not native. I didn’t know which boards creaked. It didn’t have the hidden passages, old dumbwaiters, and storage cubbies. In this house, I couldn’t hide. I’d have to fight.

  Luckily, terror is a shot of adrenaline to the heart. I’ve never been more awake or more alert as I moved carefully toward the dining room. But as I turned the corner, poker raised like a baseball bat, I found the room was empty. I paused at the entryway and listened, wondering for a moment if I was being paranoid, imagined the things I’d heard.

  I moved quickly around the circle of rooms, wondering if I’d come upon a serene Fred sitting in his study. He’d be surprised to see me wielding a fire poker. But all the rooms were empty until I came to the foyer.

  It took a second for the scene to register. Fred, that kind and good man, who’d cared for us all with patience and respect, lay still and white on the marble floor, an impossible amount of blood pooling from beneath his head. His arms and legs were slightly akimbo, as though he was preparing to make a snow angel. I dropped to my knees beside him, let the poker clatter to rest on the floor.

  I didn’t have time to weep or scream. Those bulky shadows rose on the wall in front of me. I wasn’t alone. I spun around to see three men move into the foyer from the study. I realized that they must have been following me around the circle of rooms. I reached for the poker, but one of them kicked it away from me.

  In spite of his tremendous size—six foot four at least, and well over 250 pounds—there was something sickly and almost fragile about this man, something unwell around the eyes. He was pale to the point of being gray. He held a ridiculously large gun, which he raised slowly, almost reluctantly, in my direction. I held very still, tried to take in all the details.

  The other men, similarly armed, were slighter but just as menacing, shared his same unhealthy pallor. The two smaller men looked like brothers, each with sandy-blond hair and something weak about the set o
f their jaws. I tried to say something but the horror of my situation had made my mouth dry, filled my throat with gauze. I found myself inching backward, like a crab, on feet and hands. Every instinct in my body made me want to be away from these men.

  The large man raised his free hand. “Just stay still,” he said with a smile. “Please don’t move.”

  I recognized his voice instantly from the voice mail I’d heard. Ivan. But I was smart enough not to say so. I looked at each pair of eyes, searching for something I could relate to. But there was no fear, no remorse there. None of them even glanced in Fred’s direction, as if they were accustomed to being in the presence of violence and spilled blood.

  “Just tell us where he is. And,” Ivan said, shrugging and pointing to the door, “we leave.”

  I had completely lost my ability to communicate; this scenario was so far out of my frame of reference, something that I might have imagined and written. But nothing in my life had prepared me for this type of event. I looked over at Fred, then back at Ivan. He gave me an almost friendly smile but there was something terrible about it, something dark.

  “He’s not dead,” he said lightly. He pointed to Fred and then to his own square brow. “The head. It bleeds a lot, you know?”

  To illustrate, he walked over to Fred and gave him a soft kick in the ribs. I was elated to hear my stepfather groan in pain, see his eyelids flutter. I moved over to him quickly, felt his blood soak through my skirt. I put a hand on his forehead; it was cool and clammy. I looked up at the three men.

  “If you’re looking for Marcus,” I said, finally finding my voice, “I have no idea where he is.”

  Ivan regarded me carefully, seemed to size me up and consider my words. I became conscious of time passing quickly. My cell phone was in the pocket of my skirt. I wondered if I could press 911 and send without him noticing. Fred needed help fast.

  “He betrayed me, stole from me,” Ivan said, angry, almost petulant. “He tried to kill me.”