City Of Lies

by R.J. Ellory

  ‘I hold you accountable for the truth,’ Harper said. He was angry. His fists were clenched. ‘I spoke to Duchaunak and he told me—’

  ‘Aah, what the hell does he know?’

  ‘More than I do, but not as much as you, right? How come it’s my parents we’re talking about, and yet I’m the one who knows the least about them?’

  ‘Because there are some things it is best not to know.’

  Harper shook his head. ‘I’m not thirteen, Ev. I’m not a kid any more. I went away and grew up. I did a whole load of things in the years I was away—’

  ‘But evidently failed to learn a very simple lesson.’

  Harper frowned.

  ‘To leave the past where it is, and to stay out of things that can do no good. You come back here—’

  ‘You insisted I come back here, Ev . . . you remember the phone calls you made to Nancy Young, and calling the newspaper? You remember doing that?’

  Evelyn didn’t respond.

  ‘You insisted I come down here, Evelyn, you made it almost impossible for me to refuse.’

  ‘I know, I know—’

  ‘And now I’m here, here at your request, you’re doing everything you can to send me back to Miami. You and the cop. So tell me, tell me why you are so goddamned frightened about what I might find out? Is it about Anne? Eh? Is it about my mother?’ Harper leaned forward. He felt tension in his stomach, anger rising in his chest. ‘Or is it about the mysterious, dying Edward Bernstein? Is that who this is really all about?’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about—’

  ‘Well, of course I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, Evelyn! No-one in this goddamned city seems to have a straight answer for anything!’ Harper banged his fist on the table and Evelyn jumped. For a split-second she looked afraid. Really afraid. Harper held his fist there for a moment, right there ahead of him, like if there had been something to hit there would have been nothing to prevent him.

  Evelyn looked back at Harper with a cold, hard glare.

  ‘Speak Evelyn . . . speak before I break something, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘You don’t want to hear what I have to say—’

  ‘What you have to say is exactly what I want to hear! Goddamnit, what is it going to take to get someone to say something direct around here?’

  ‘You know how long that cop has been after your father?’

  ‘Duchaunak? No, I don’t know, Evelyn. Pray tell me. How long has Frank Duchaunak been after my father?’

  ‘Seven years, a little more. November of 1997 he started gunning for Edward Bernstein, and in all that time, regardless of an apparent complete lack of support from his department, he has not quit. Evidently he had reason enough, don’t you think?’

  Harper watched Evelyn. She was animated, her words sharp and quick, directed right at him.

  Harper closed his eyes and shook his head. He could feel the tension and pressure, could see how his knuckles had whitened. He experienced a moment of clear and instinctive foreboding, an unmistakable, intuitive gut-reaction that told him to back up and walk away.

  ‘Reason enough?’ he asked, and even as he asked it he wondered whether he wanted to hear the answer.

  ‘Edward Bernstein has been Duchaunak’s raison d’être for the last seven years; that’s how it seems to me.’

  ‘Is that what he said?’

  Evelyn laughed. ‘No, of course he didn’t say that. Frank Duchaunak was appropriately obscure in everything that he said. He even lied to me.’

  ‘What did he lie about?’

  ‘About his motivation for following your father for all this time.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  Evelyn shook her head. ‘It was not what he said, it was what he didn’t say.’

  Harper waited for her to speak. She lit another cigarette.

  ‘And?’ he prompted.

  ‘I asked him how long he’d been after your father. He told me seven years. Told me he’d started back in November of ‘97. I asked him if someone had died, and he told me no.’

  Evelyn fell silent. For a moment she looked as if she wasn’t done, but Harper sat there for some seconds before he realized that nothing further was coming.

  ‘He told you no,’ Harper stated matter-of-factly.

  Evelyn nodded. ‘Right, he told me no.’

  ‘That no-one had died.’

  Evelyn nodded once again.

  Harper shook his head. ‘I’ve lost the thread here, Evelyn . . . I’m not sure what you’re saying.’

  She smiled, but the smile said something of bitterness and regret. ‘It’s not difficult, John. You’re a bright boy, always have been. Duchaunak started pursuing your father because of something that happened in 1997, November of 1997. I asked him if he started after your father because someone had died, and he lied. He told me no.’

  ‘So someone did die?’ Harper asked.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Evelyn replied. ‘Someone died alright . . . someone most definitely went and died.’

  Cathy Hollander stands in the front room of her apartment, receiver in her hand. Waiting.

  ‘Hi . . . yes, hi there. I was on hold . . . I think I got cut off. I called a minute or so ago. I was after—’

  Interrupted. Pauses. Listens.

  ‘Yes, that’s right, John Harper.’

  Waits another moment.

  ‘Right, okay. Yes . . . er no, no problem. Thanks for your help.’

  Shakes her head. Frowns. Hangs up. Lifts the receiver again and dials another number.

  ‘It’s me.’

  Glances left towards the window.

  ‘Gone out somewhere. Left a couple of hours ago.’

  Listens. Looks down at her shoeless feet.

  ‘No, I didn’t leave a message. I’ll come over to the house like you said. I’ll check after lunch.’

  Nods understandingly.

  ‘Sure thing Walt, sure thing. Okay, see you in a little while.’

  Nods once more. ‘Okay, goodbye.’ Hangs up. Sets the phone down on the counter. Pauses in the doorway for a moment. Expression pensive, uncharacteristically deep, and then Cathy Hollander leaves the kitchen and walks across the front room to her bedroom.

  Faulkner stands as Duchaunak bursts through the door of the office.

  ‘Where?’ Duchaunak asks.

  ‘Alleyway off of West Fifteenth and Seventh.’

  ‘Sure it was there? He wasn’t killed someplace else and moved?’

  Faulkner shakes his head. ‘Hell Frank, we don’t know . . . guy was so frozen they have to defrost him before they can do the autopsy.’

  Duchaunak frowns, angles his head to one side, starts laughing – kind of an awkward laugh precipitated by facts that seem wilder than fiction.

  ‘At a guess he was killed last night, we don’t know when, won’t know for sure until the coroner’s done his thing, but whenever it was, they left him in the alleyway all night and he froze solid . . . froze like a fucking popsicle.’

  ‘Aah, Jesus Christ, what the fuck is going on here?’

  Faulkner frowns.

  ‘This thing, this goddamned thing. We got Lenny laid up in Vincent’s, his son has disappeared, and now Johnnie Hoy, one of the only people who ever gave us anything that we could use on Bernstein gets knifed in the fucking eye and left out in the cold for some poor kid to find.’

  ‘You think that’s why he was killed?’

  ‘I don’t think, Don, I know that’s why he was done. Freiberg and Marcus are doing something, maybe separate, maybe together, but whatever the fuck it is there’s gonna be some housework.’

  Faulkner shakes his head. He sighs exhaustedly and sits down. ‘It’s going to be bad, isn’t it?’

  Duchaunak nods slowly. ‘As bad as it gets and then some, I reckon.’

  ‘I can take my annual vacation now?’

  Duchaunak laughs. ‘Sure, Don, sure . . . have a good time. Send me a freakin’ postcard okay?’

  ‘So now
?’

  Duchaunak opens his mouth to speak.

  The phone rings.

  He leans forward, lifts the receiver. ‘Yep.’

  Eyes widen, starts to frown.

  ‘Where?’

  Nods, snaps his fingers at Faulkner. Pen, he mouths.

  Faulkner leans across with a pen. Duchaunak takes it, writes something on the jotter ahead of him.

  ‘Pier 49,’ he says. ‘Good enough, Mike . . . many thanks.’

  Duchaunak sets down the receiver. Looks across at Faulkner.

  ‘Mike Donnelly at Despatch . . . just took a call for a black and white out near Pier 49.’

  ‘For what?’

  Duchaunak shakes his head. ‘Get your coat, we’re going out there.’

  Faulkner starts to rise. ‘But it isn’t ours, Frank. How can we just go out on some random call when we haven’t been given it?’

  ‘It isn’t a random call, Don.’ Duchaunak is by the door, turning the handle, opening

  ‘What, Frank? What the fuck is it?’

  Duchaunak is out and down the corridor. Faulkner goes after him, tugging his coat on as he goes. Nearly loses his balance at the end, one hand against the wall, picking up speed as Duchaunak starts to run.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Harper was shaking his head.

  ‘You don’t want to hear about this, do you?’ Evelyn asked. ‘You want to hear about your father, what happened with him and your mother, right?’

  Closed his eyes. Tension was visible in everything about him. Wound up tight; watch-spring tight.

  ‘You going to say something?’

  Harper slowly shook his head again, eyes were open but he was looking at the floor. He found it hard to breathe, a tightness in his chest that was suffocating.

  ‘You want a drink or something?’

  ‘No Evelyn . . . just give me a minute will you . . . just need a minute or two.’

  Evelyn leaned back. There was something relaxed in her manner, almost as if telling the truth had taken the weight and tension from her shoulders and passed them to Harper. She did not seemed pleased that he was suffering, evidently suffering, but she did seem relieved that whatever she’d told him was no longer held tight inside her like a clenched fist.

  ‘What d’you want me to say, John? I kept all of this away from you. All those years I knew what was going on. I knew what he was like, the people he associated with. That’s why things were so difficult here. He sent Walt Freiberg over here; time and again the man came with things for you. Money, clothes, toys, things for your birthday, for Christmas. Keeping those people out of your life was a full-time job in itself. You don’t even know the half of it—’

  ‘So tell me,’ Harper said. ‘Tell me the half of it that you never told me before . . . for Christ’s sake Evelyn, tell me anything.’

  Evelyn looked fatigued, not just tired but fatigued; the bone-deep exhaustion that comes from carrying something that drains every ounce of strength from within, not only physically, but mentally and emotionally.

  ‘The late-night phone calls, the threats. Times I would go to collect you from school and Walt Freiberg would be there in the street, right there in the street standing beside a car, and in the car was your father watching every move you made. One time . . . one time I went to get you and they were there. I couldn’t see you anywhere, not in the street, not in the yard behind the school, and I was convinced they’d taken you, convinced that finally he’d persuaded you to get in the back of that car and they were just taunting me, letting me know that they had the money and the power to make anything happen the way they wanted. They scared the hell out of me. Those people really, really scared the hell out of me.’

  ‘I never knew any of this—’

  Evelyn laughed, suddenly, abruptly. ‘What could I have told you? Your mother died when you were seven years old. Your father left when you were two . . . I say left when you were two, but hell John, Edward Bernstein was leaving from the moment he found out Anne was pregnant. I knew who these people were long before your mother ever confronted the truth. She fell in love with whatever she believed Edward Bernstein was . . . she even convinced herself that he wanted you, that he would have stayed and raised a family.’

  Evelyn looked away. She was silent for some time. When she turned back there were tears in her eyes, heavy and swollen. She blinked, and those tears rolled down her cheeks. She took a tissue from the pocket of her housecoat and touched it to her eyes.

  ‘How did she die, Evelyn?’ Harper asked.

  Evelyn smiled, a sense of nostalgia and pain evident in her expression. ‘She died lonely and afraid, John, lonely and afraid.’

  ‘But how? How did she die?’

  Evelyn looked away once more, away towards the window. The mid-morning light was flat and clean, the sky clear. It gave the room a still and monochromatic atmosphere. She looked like a ghost of herself, a woman caught in the middle of something that could not have been worse had she tried.

  ‘Whatever the truth is—’ Harper began.

  Evelyn waved his words aside. ‘The truth is the truth,’ she said quietly. ‘It is not the truth that scares us, John, it’s the way we believe others will take it.’

  ‘So tell me,’ Harper said. ‘Tell me how she died.’

  ‘It was a Sunday . . . twelfth of October 1975. I don’t even remember where you were, maybe out with Garrett or something. You were seven years old, you had your own way of dealing with Anne’s episodes—’

  Harper frowned. ‘Episodes?’

  ‘That’s what me and Garrett called them, Anne’s episodes.’

  ‘Like crazy stuff?’

  Evelyn shook her head. ‘She was in a bad situation, John, a real bad situation. She knew about your father, she knew what he was doing. Walt was around as well. Walt was friends with Garrett . . . not serious friends, more like acquaintances. They had the time of day for one another, you know what I mean?’

  Harper nodded. He shifted in his chair. He felt nauseous from smoking.

  ‘But that’s beside the point,’ Evelyn said. ‘We’re talking about Anne, right?’

  ‘Right, Ev, talking about Anne.’

  ‘So I was out somewhere, maybe went to the market or something. Anne was upstairs, had come to stay with us for a few weeks but ended up staying the better part of a year. She had her own room, you had a smaller room down the hall, and she used to sleep in in the morning. She always had a helluva time getting up, your mother.’ Evelyn smiled. ‘Anyway, I came back. The place was quiet, real quiet. I figured she’d maybe got out of bed, got dressed perhaps, gone out somewhere . . .’ Evelyn hesitated, sat motionless, silent, looking back at Harper for some seconds. ‘She was in her room.’ She glanced upwards, up towards the ceiling. ‘She was up there in her room . . .’

  Harper felt his breath catch in his chest.

  ‘I knew something was wrong when I reached the landing.’

  Harper wanted to move, felt he had to, but at the same time such a thing seemed utterly impossible.

  ‘I went along there like I was walking towards—’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t know what I felt, John . . . something like fear, something like a premonition. Whatever it was I knew there was something behind her door that I didn’t want to see, and then when I got there, when I tried the handle and it was locked . . . it was then that I knew.’

  ‘Knew what?’

  ‘I knew . . . hell, John, I knew she’d killed herself.’

  Harper didn’t move. Didn’t blink. Held his breath for seconds, minutes perhaps. Tears filled his lower eyelids, rolled lazily down his cheeks. He did nothing to stop them.

  ‘I don’t know what she took; I could see that she’d taken something.’ She paused. ‘I remember,’ she said, and looked at Harper. ‘You were out, out somewhere with Garrett, and when you came back I stayed downstairs with you while Garrett went up and covered her over. I had opened the door to her room with another key, and then I waited downstairs until you came home. I
told you she was sleeping . . .’

  ‘Why, Ev . . . why?’

  ‘Why did she kill herself?’

  Harper shook his head. ‘Yes . . . no . . . hell, I don’t know, Ev. Christ almighty.’ He closed his eyes and leaned his head backwards. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘Tell you? I don’t know, John. I meant to tell you. I meant to tell you about your father, especially after your mother died, but I could never bring myself to it.’ Evelyn smiled. She wiped her eyes with the tissue. ‘I held onto the idea of telling you for so long. Garrett used to fight with me about it, said that it wasn’t right for a child to grow up not knowing the truth about his own parents. And you know what I used to tell him?’

  Harper shook his head. It was an involuntary response to a question; he really had no idea what he was thinking, no real understanding of what he was hearing.

  ‘I used to tell him to give me a little longer, give me a few more months, a handful more weeks. I used to tell him that I just needed a little more time to make you feel as if you had a family with us.’

  Harper opened his eyes. He looked at Evelyn; she looked away abruptly, uncomfortably.

  ‘I used to convince him that before too long you would start to think of me and him as your parents. That’s what I used to tell him. He told me I was crazy, that you would never see us that way, and I s’pose he was right, wasn’t he, John?’

  Harper opened his mouth to speak.

  Evelyn raised her hand. She shook her head and smiled. ‘That’s not fair. I shouldn’t have said that.’

  Harper was speechless. He wasn’t expected to answer the question, but it didn’t change the fact that it had been asked. It seemed to hang in the room like a ghost.

  ‘Anyway, that’s what I used to tell him, and I managed to keep him from telling you himself, and then—’

  ‘He died too.’

  Evelyn nodded, bowed her head. Her hands were twisting together, the tissue rapidly disintegrating under the assault. ‘And then none of it mattered. Anne was dead. Edward was gone. Garrett killed himself.’ Evelyn looked up. ‘And it was just you and me, John, you and me against the world.’