Ghostheart

by R.J. Ellory

  Sullivan slowly turned the last page over.

  He sat quietly at the kitchen table for some time.

  ‘Something,’ he said to himself. ‘Something …’

  He rose slowly from the chair, put the pages into a neat pile, slipped them back into the envelope, and then he left the kitchen and walked across Annie’s front room.

  He paused at the door, looked around the room he was so familiar with, a room where he’d shared a thousand days and nights with this woman, a woman who had reached him more deeply than anyone he’d ever known. He closed his eyes for a moment. There was something about those pages, sitting innocuously inside their brown envelope on the kitchen counter.

  He shook his head slowly, opened his eyes, and crossed the landing to his own apartment.

  He wanted a drink. God, how he wanted a drink. But he’d made a deal, and Annie was even now fighting to keep her half of the bargain.

  If this David Quinn hurt her …

  Sullivan stood for a moment, his right hand rubbing his left forearm, and then he walked across the room and switched on his computer.

  THIRTY-THREE

  ‘Gone,’ Annie said as she came through Sullivan’s apartment door.

  Sullivan turned from where he was staring intently at the computer screen. ‘What has?’

  ‘David,’ she said. ‘The apartment is empty. Left behind nothing but the books I sold him the first day we met. And a book I lent him … Christ, I can’t bear to think how I would have felt if he’d taken that. And there was an old man there, said David had been gone two or three days …’

  ‘But he did say David was there?’ Sullivan asked.

  Annie crossed the room to where Sullivan sat. She balanced herself on the arm of the couch. ‘Said someone was there, but the name David Quinn meant nothing to him, and whoever the hell it was he was there for a couple of weeks, that was all, and he left in a hurry and lost a thousand dollars deposit.’

  ‘Private or agency?’ Sullivan asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The building where he had the apartment?’

  ‘The old man said his son took care of things … why?’

  ‘Means it was more than likely private. With private accommodation there aren’t references and credit checks, there’s just money. Have enough money you can be the Son of Sam and move into a penthouse suite on Broadway.’

  ‘And what’s this?’ Annie said, indicating the computer screen.

  ‘The last of the insurance companies that hold offices here and in Boston. I’ve gone through Mutual Consolidated, Trans-Oceanic, Atlantic Cargo Insurance, Providence Shipping Lines … God knows how many. Pulled up their employee listings and there’s only one David Quinn amongst the lot of them.’

  ‘And?’ Annie said, shifting closer towards Sullivan.

  ‘And that David Quinn is a major shareholder in Trans-Oceanic, fifty-three years old, lives in Baltimore.’

  ‘Which means?’

  Sullivan shook his head. ‘There must be hundreds of insurance companies Annie, but as far as those who run offices out of New York and Boston your man is not employed in any of them.’

  Annie frowned, anxiety entering her myriad other thoughts. ‘So who the hell is he?’

  ‘More to the point, who the hell is Robert Franklin Forrester?’

  ‘Forrester … what the hell has this got to do with Forrester?’

  ‘Too many coincidences,’ Sullivan said, ‘and it wasn’t until I read the last chapter you have in there that I started to think about it.’

  ‘Think about what?’

  ‘This Harry Rose and his friend Johnnie Redbird.’

  Annie shook her head. ‘I’m not getting it.’

  ‘Maybe there’s nothing to get,’ Sullivan said. ‘Maybe I’m reading something into this that isn’t there, but there’s too many things that seem too close –’

  ‘What the hell are you talking about Jack? Too close to what?’

  Sullivan looked away towards the window. He shook his head. ‘I don’t –’

  ‘Too close to what Jack?’

  Sullivan turned and looked directly at Annie O’Neill. ‘I don’t know Annie …’

  ‘For Christ’s sake Jack, stop saying you don’t know. What are you getting at?’

  ‘The way it all fits together, or at least could fit together if you look at it from a different viewpoint.’

  Annie opened her mouth to say something, then turned and sat on the couch. ‘Say what you mean to say Jack Sullivan.’

  Sullivan smiled, a kind of embarrassment in his expression. ‘Forget it Annie … just forget it. It’s just that I read this stuff and it really got me thinking.’

  ‘Well you can stop thinking about that and start thinking about how the hell we’re gonna find David.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why?’ Annie echoed. ‘Well, maybe it doesn’t matter a fuck to you Jack Sullivan, but it happens to matter a great deal to me. He’s more than likely taken an apartment under an assumed name, has swept through here like Hurricane Asshole, taken me for a complete schmuck, and now has the sheer fucking nerve to walk out on me and thinks I’m gonna forget about it. I want to find him just to slap him upside the head Jack, that much at least.’

  ‘Good enough. So where d’ you suggest we start?’

  ‘What’s with the we white man?’ Annie said. ‘You’re the goddamned journalist, the investigative reporter … you shouldn’t have to even ask where we start.’

  ‘The apartment block … I’ll go there, speak to the old guy’s son, see if he has any idea where he came from, where he might have gone when he left. I’ll pick up the books he bought as well –’

  Annie frowned. ‘The books? What the hell d’you need those for?’

  Sullivan held up his hand. ‘He’ll have touched them, and there’ll be prints.’

  Annie shook her head. ‘Along with about three thousand others don’tcha think?’

  Sullivan frowned, shook his head. ‘You’re right, screw the books. Besides I don’t know anyone who could fingerprint them and check them against records anyway.’

  ‘Christ Jack, you’re a fucking amateur at this aren’t you?’

  ‘Thank you very much Miss O’Neill. You have a better idea?’

  Annie cast her mind back to all the times she’d been with David. She thought of the trip to Boston, how everything had been paid for in cash, that they’d registered under Mr and Mrs Quinn, that he’d never given her a telephone number where he could be reached …

  And considering it from that point of view it was unnerving, as if he’d intended to leave no traces, nothing that could ever be used to find him if he decided to vanish. Perhaps he was nothing more than a serial lover. She smiled at the thought, smiled with her lips, but in her heart there was only emptiness and loss.

  She shook her head. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I have no better ideas. You’re okay to go to the apartment and check this out?’

  Sullivan nodded. ‘Sure I am Annie, no problem. You have the address?’

  Annie looked at him blankly. She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Not a clue, but I’d have no difficulty finding it again.’

  Sullivan rose from his chair. ‘Seems we’re out for a little adventure together then, eh?’

  ‘Seems so.’

  They left a few minutes later, took a cab across to the other side of Morningside Park, and all the while – with every revolution of the wheels beneath her, with every passing street and block and junction – Annie believed that perhaps she was following a ghost.

  Annie waited in the street while Jack went in and spoke with the old man and his son. For some reason she didn’t want to go inside. She could not have answered the question had she been asked why. There was just something about it, almost as if within this building someone had made a fool of her and she had no wish to be reminded of that fact.

  It was cold, and after a few minutes she went up the short flight of stone steps and stood inside the entranceway. Eve
ry once in a while she looked through the glass window in the front door. Waiting was not her forte, and each minute seemed to stretch on forever. She glanced at her watch – her father’s watch – and after looking at it for the fourth or fifth time she couldn’t stand the suspense any more. She went down the steps and walked to the end of the street, turned back and walked past the building a good fifty yards.

  She paced restlessly, agitated by the cold and the situation she had found herself in. She was searching Manhattan for a man with an apparent alias. She had really fallen this time, fallen good. This was not rising into anything.

  She turned and started back the way she’d come, and when Sullivan appeared from the entranceway she hurried towards him.

  He was shaking his head even before he spoke. ‘Doesn’t know a thing. Even fifty dollars and he doesn’t know a thing. He was more concerned that I might be from Rent Control or something.’

  ‘Did he tell you the name the apartment was taken in?’

  Sullivan looked at Annie. There was something in his expression that said all he needed to say.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘David O’Neill,’ Sullivan said, and looked down.

  ‘David O’Neill?’ Annie asked, incredulous. ‘You gotta be kidding Jack.’

  ‘No, that was the name he used. David O’Neill.’ He came down the steps and stood facing her on the sidewalk. ‘Now tell me there isn’t something weird going on.’

  ‘Coincidence,’ Annie said, and even as she said it she knew she was fooling herself.

  Sullivan smiled, attempting perhaps to be sympathetic. ‘And coincidence is what?’

  ‘Bullshit,’ Annie said, burying her hands in her coat pockets and sighing. ‘Why?’ she said, asking herself just as much as she was asking Sullivan.

  ‘Who knows?’

  ‘David Quinn, or O’Neill or whoever the fuck he is, that’s who,’ Annie said.

  Sullivan started walking.

  Annie stood for a moment, lost in her own thoughts, and then hurried to catch up with him. She put her arm through Sullivan’s, and looking at them from the other side of the street they could have been a couple, perhaps a father and daughter, taking a walk, sharing time with one another. They did not speak, did not even look at one another, and three blocks down Sullivan stopped outside a coffee shop and suggested they go inside.

  ‘He did this thing about trust,’ Annie said once they were seated.

  ‘Trust?’ Sullivan asked.

  ‘When I went to his apartment he did this thing where he blindfolded me and told me to sit on a chair and do nothing for a minute.’

  Sullivan frowned.

  ‘He was talking about trust, about how everyone had learned not to trust anyone, that everyone suspected everyone else’s ulterior motives and vested interests, and then he told me he was going to ask me to trust him.’

  ‘And he blindfolded you?’

  Annie nodded. ‘Blindfolded me and told me to sit still and say nothing for a minute and I had to trust him, that he would do something or other and I just had to trust him.’

  ‘And you did it?’

  ‘I did … but only for thirty-seven seconds. I couldn’t handle it, it was nerve-wracking. You sit there for a minute in complete silence and darkness, trying to figure out what someone might be doing, where they might be from the sound of their breathing, and it really is very disconcerting.’

  ‘And what did he do?’

  ‘Well, he didn’t strip naked and stand there with a butcher’s knife and a hard-on.’

  Sullivan laughed suddenly, spilled some coffee on the sleeve of his jacket. ‘Well shit Annie, what a disappointment that must have been for you.’

  She smiled, took a napkin and mopped the edge of Sullivan’s sleeve.

  ‘No, for real … what did he do in those thirty-seven seconds?’ Sullivan asked.

  Annie shook her head. ‘He did nothing … absolutely nothing. He just sat there watching me.’

  ‘Just sat and watched you?’

  ‘Yes, that was it. And that was the whole point of the thing. He was basically trying to tell me that whatever I might fear was merely my imagination, that I would sit there and conjure up the worst possible thing, and that my fears were whatever I created.’

  Sullivan was nodding his head.

  ‘That was the thing Jack … that was part of the whole thing, whatever game he was playing to make me think he could be trusted.’

  ‘And you trusted him?’

  ‘I did … trusted him enough to let him take me to Boston, to not pressure him for a telephone number or an address. I think about it now and I actually don’t know the first thing about him.’

  ‘So what did you talk about when you were together?’

  ‘We didn’t do one helluva lot of talking,’ Annie said. ‘There were more important things going on most of the time.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Sullivan said, his voice quiet, tender almost.

  ‘Sorry? For what?’

  ‘That he was an asshole.’

  ‘I don’t know for sure that he was an asshole Jack … Christ, I don’t know anything right now. Seems to me there could just as easily be a perfectly rational explanation for everything that’s happened.’

  ‘Like really he was a CIA sleeper living under nine different aliases, and the terrorist cell he was trying to infiltrate got wind of who he was and so he disappeared in order to ensure that no harm came to you?’

  ‘As good as any other explanation I’ve got,’ Annie said.

  ‘You just don’t want to face the fact that he was as spineless and immature as the vast majority of men in this city, that it all got a little too close for comfort and he ran for cover before you suggested getting married or something like that.’

  Annie shook her head. ‘No, I don’t want to face that possibility Jack …’

  Sullivan closed his hand over hers. ‘I didn’t mean that … that wasn’t necessary.’

  ‘Sometimes the truth has a way of finding you whether you want it to or not,’ Annie said. ‘Christ, what I would give for a cigarette.’

  ‘You don’t smoke,’ Sullivan said.

  ‘I can start, can’t I?’

  ‘You start smoking and I’ll start drinking again,’ he said. He edged his chair back and started to rise. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s get out of here. Let’s go home, watch some dreadful crap on the tube and eat a quart of Ben and Jerry’s between us.’

  Annie smiled as best she could and rose from the table. She put on her coat, buttoned it, tugged the collar up around her throat, and in leaving the coffee shop she took Sullivan’s arm once more.

  ‘Thank you,’ she whispered.

  He turned, frowned. ‘For what?’

  ‘For being there,’ she said. ‘Just for being there.’

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Annie O’Neill wondered if there could ever be anything good about losing. She thought of the Joni Mitchell line – You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone – but she didn’t necessarily agree. She’d had David, at least believed she had, and now he was gone. When he’d been there it had been good, and she had known what it was. It was the start of something, and she’d imagined what that something could have become. Even in Boston, spending those hours alone in a strange hotel room, it hadn’t been anywhere near as bad as it might have been because she’d known he was coming back. It was not that she craved company, she believed herself neither insecure nor lacking independence; it was simply that two was better than one. Two was definitely better than one.

  In silence she watched a movie with Jack Sullivan. She watched it but paid no attention to what the actors were saying to each other. When it was finished, she could not have told anyone what the movie was called, or who was in it, or what it was about. It was meaningless, because all that mattered to her at that moment were the thoughts inside her head, the feelings in her heart. Her heart was not broken; it was strained. Something had pulled it too far in the wrong direction, a
nd the healing process had not yet begun. Healing needed time, it involved crying sometimes, and waking in the small hours of the morning and asking questions that had no answer. And slowly the healing would do its work; and though it always took longer than you wanted, and though there would be moments in the weeks and months to come when she would be somewhere else entirely – a shopping mall or a vegetable market, her mind considering such things as salad with avocado or parmesan – and though David Quinn would be the furthest thing away … even at times like that there would still be moments when she would hear a name, catch a scent, perhaps see something on a shelf that would remind her, and in that split-second heartbeat realize that the healing was not yet done.

  Thanksgiving would be tough, Christmas in some ways tougher, but by then more time would have elapsed and, who knows, she might even be in another doomed relationship.

  She smiled to herself, a smile of contemplation, of something vaguely nostalgic.

  ‘What is it?’ Sullivan asked.

  She turned to face him. They were seated side by side on her couch, Annie with her legs tucked beneath her, Jack slouched back with his heels on the coffee table.

  ‘Relationships suck,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Sometimes they do, and sometimes having no relationship sucks more,’ he said.

  ‘But we always recover … apparently we always recover.’

  Sullivan nodded. ‘Never ceases to amaze me the amount of crap that a human being can tolerate and still come out the other side somewhat sane.’

  ‘Don’t know that anyone’s actually ever really sane,’ Annie said. ‘I think everyone’s crazy to some extent.’

  ‘But David Quinn has to be the craziest.’

  Annie nodded. ‘Most definitely … David Quinn has to be the craziest of them all.’ She leaned sideways until her head rested on Sullivan’s shoulder.

  He put his arm around her and pulled her close.

  ‘You wanna keep looking?’ he asked.

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. I’ll sleep on it, see how I feel tomorrow.’

  ‘You can’t let something like this stop you living life, you know?’