SoHo Sins

by Richard Vine

  The star witness looked a bit surprised, briefly, as she pulled on her coat.

  “Whatever,” she said. There was something diffident, almost apologetic, in her manner. “I had to say something up there.”

  And then, with a few quick, long-legged steps, Melissa was on her way down the green corridor, back to the Bradford School, back to her Wooster Street loft—that stylish SoHo refuge from which Angela was now increasingly absent, tending Philip regularly as he submitted to a hospice routine of clean bed linens and morning sponge baths.

  60

  The medical staff was surprised at how quickly, how completely, my friend faded after that. The flesh of Philip’s arms and legs collapsed against the bone, leaving his limbs like long depleted tubes; his impossibly thin neck protruded from a chest sunken above a popped belly. By then, he probably had no idea where—or who—he might be anymore. At least he was spared the small horror of knowing his fate, or outliving his money.

  The last time I saw Philip alive, he looked at me wonderingly, his whole face a plea. His expensive flannels and gabardines had been hung pointlessly in a closet; he was dressed in cotton pajamas, striped pale blue and white. I stared into his eyes for a while—or, rather, let him stare wildly into mine. I had come aching for one last glimpse of the old Philip, dreaming that we might somehow joke about the old days, like the night Claudia danced on the bar at the Stockyard.

  Instead, he rasped and mumbled to me repeatedly, “What am I worth?” as though I were Carl Marks with laptop in hand.

  Each time I responded, “All your accounts are in order, Philip. Everything paid in advance.”

  He nodded vigorously, clutching my arm with more force than his shrunken limbs should have permitted.

  Yet a few minutes later, he started drifting into sleep, surrounded by a chorus of impersonal beeping machines. I thought about the financial data that used to pour constantly into my friend via his computer screens. Now everything was flowing out: heart rate, temperature, brain activity, breathing. Philip himself had become little more than a stream of information, a sad message.

  There was no more for me to say or do. Rising from the bedside chair, I touched his fragile shoulder, spoke his name once—a last time—and left.

  Later, I found myself, to my great surprise, prominently named in Philip’s will—not as a beneficiary but as Melissa’s legal guardian in the event of Angela’s death or “permanent maternal incapacity.” I wondered how such a phrase, and such a peculiar thought, had come into Philip’s head. But, or course, quite a number of bizarre ideas passed through his mind as his dementia grew.

  By the time the trial ended, Philip, skeletal and hairless, had forgotten Claudia as though she never existed: it was his last gift to his mistress. She was free to go. The girl, making her farewell visit, wept in Angela’s arms. To comfort her, the older woman used a word in Italian that she heard from Philip’s lips during one of his feverish monologues. It was his favorite teasing endearment when he and Claudia were first together, passionately and in secret, while Mandy was still alive. The girl wailed once and fled.

  From then on, only the two former spouses remained in the room. Philip’s mutterings were mostly nonsense by that point, or reduced to sharp howls of fear. The nurses stopped by briefly for linen changes, morphine shots, and thrice-daily vital signs. Otherwise, Angela kept her vigil alone, at all hours, for five desolate months. It was then, I suppose, that my feelings for her deepened beyond the bounds of reason or law.

  At the end, like many a dying man, Philip tried to strip himself naked, convulsing in the bed and tugging at his pajama bottoms as though he wished, in the final instant, to lay bare the now shriveled source of his grief. The sounds he made, for the most part no longer human, occasionally coalesced into a word or phrase. Most were banal or incomprehensible: “snow cold,” a monotonous “night, night, night.” Only one outburst stayed with Angela afterwards, chiming in her mind and letters for years to come.

  “Mercy,” he shouted, with the striped fabric bunched at his knees. Then, his legs thrashing, his breath rasping and failing, as pink saliva bubbled at the corners of his mouth, he barked a final unappealable judgment: “Not true.”

  61

  A week later, they came to arrest Angela around ten in the morning—not for Amanda’s murder alone but for Philip’s as well.

  She and I were having coffee together in her apartment, as had been our habit ever since Angela so kindly extended her daily invitation. She had a Braun grinder and a sleek Italian coffee machine with twin spouts. As I sat on the couch, I would hear the whir of the grinder once, twice, and then the sound of pressurized drips. Soon Angela—my nurse, as I called her when she delivered the caffeine—would glide carefully from the kitchen island to the seating area, holding her big mug and my small double espresso cup. The little red machine produced a brew that was dark, hot, and bitter. What more could one ask? Laced with sugar, the coffee tasted better than anything I could make for myself or find in the nearby SoHo cafes.

  “It’s Hogan,” the voice said when Angela answered the intercom.

  “How nice. I didn’t expect you. Jack’s here.”

  When Hogan entered through the loft door, McGuinn was right behind him, looking sober and a bit stunned by the experience of morning sunlight.

  “This seems very official,” Angela said when the two of them came in and sat down.

  “It is,” McGuinn said. “It’s official as hell.”

  I looked blankly at Hogan. The two men had not bothered to take off their coats. Underneath, I could see, they were both wearing their best polyester ties.

  “You might want to go easy on that coffee,” McGuinn advised.

  “Something wrong with it?”

  Hogan looked first at Angela, then at me. “Do you know how Wolfsheim’s Syndrome works?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “Basically, Jack, it rewires your brain. It blocks some of your neural pathways and overloads others.” He spoke a bit like a schoolboy reciting his lessons. “The circuits start making totally random connections, crazy hook-ups that come and go in a second.”

  “Sounds like my old dating life.”

  I waited for the joke to land, but Hogan remained stone-faced.

  “Actually,” I said, “I have no idea what you mean.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. That’s the point. Your brain gets starved and overwhelmed at the same time. Flooded like an old carburetor. You’re not aware of the damage until it affects your behavior and your own actions start to seem strange to you. You gradually lose control. In the end, your body forgets how to function.”

  “Hideous,” Angela said, her voice tense and brittle. “The way it happened to Philip.”

  “Except it didn’t just happen,” Hogan said.

  My eyes went to Angela, to McGuinn, to Hogan.

  “Someone made it happen,” McGuinn stated. “Or at least sped it along once it started.”

  We all sat in silence. Slowly, the loft seemed to tilt around me. Still no one spoke.

  “Is that what you were doing, Angela?” Hogan asked finally. “Helping nature take its course?”

  She stared at him in wonder.

  “You see, Jack, some kinds of toxic resin can do pretty much the same thing to your nerves as the disease. Resins like the ones Angela uses back there to patch up her dolls and statues.”

  “Especially when administered in small doses over time,” McGuinn added. “We had a long chat with some doctors about it.”

  The empty espresso cup was still warm in my hand.

  “How have you been doing lately, Jack?” Hogan asked. “Ever feel that your judgment is slightly impaired?”

  “Not until now.”

  “Not until you started having coffee down here every morning, you mean?”

  “What are you saying? That Angela has been poisoning me with this?” I extended the white demitasse, its interior streaked with coffee residue.

  At that, Angela laughed�
��sharply.

  “Ed, dear, you shouldn’t confuse Jack,” she said. “He has a lot of important things on his mind.”

  “More important than murder? What would that be—his painting inventory?”

  “He has Melissa to think about.”

  “So do you, Angela. In fact, you need to think about her very carefully right now.”

  “I have no idea what you mean.”

  “She’s going to be sort of motherless soon.”

  “You see,” McGuinn said, “we got a report. From Philip’s autopsy.”

  “It documents how the resin compound built up in his brain,” Hogan explained. “From the shots you gave him, between his toes, once a week or so at the hospice.”

  Angela, her face drained of color, glanced from one man to the other.

  “Once Philip was diagnosed,” McGuinn said, “no one ever questioned his breakdown. No one thought to look for an external cause. Not until Hogan started to question the speed of it. A process that would normally take years playing out in just months.”

  “Then I remembered your work here,” Hogan said to Angela, “all the things you showed me—including the syringes.”

  “You bastard,” Angela snapped. “You can’t use anything you took from this loft as evidence.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You had no search warrant. You’re not even a policeman.”

  “No,” Hogan replied evenly. “But the garbage you put out on the sidewalk is fair game. It sits right there in the public domain. Including your old syringes with their toxic residue.”

  I could see the thought register on Angela’s face.

  “Not the most considerate means of disposal, sweetheart,” Hogan said.

  In response, Angela’s voice fell—to a tone at once affectionate and pleading.

  “Ed, dear, do you remember what you said, what you promised? That first time you came home with me?”

  “No. Not the exact words, just the tune of it.”

  “You said you’d always be kind to me, Edward. In the way Philip should have been but wasn’t.”

  Hogan leaned forward, peering coldly into Angela’s face. “Oh, I’m being kind. You’ll see exactly how kind.”

  It felt like I was watching an argument in a dream, except that the confrontation was taking place in real life, unfolding there in front of me on the fourth floor of my Wooster Street building, my home, and not just in a chamber of my own poisoned mind.

  “I’m curious,” Hogan said. “Did you think screwing me was a free pass for murder?”

  “Don’t ask me that. You can’t, darling.”

  “All right, try a different one. Which made you feel better—poisoning Philip or shooting Amanda?”

  “What are you talking about? I didn’t kill Amanda.”

  “Don’t fight me, Angela. Everything will be easier, once you confess.”

  “Confess to Amanda’s murder? Are you mad? Why on earth would I do that?”

  “You better think carefully before you answer. You better calculate very, very well. Because you’re only going to get one chance.”

  “This is utterly vicious, a lie.”

  “Is it, Angela? I have a videotape that shows who entered the Prince Street building that day, and who left it shortly afterwards, clutching Amanda’s laptop.”

  Angela rose up. “Don’t bluff me, Edward. There’s no security camera over there.”

  We were all on our feet now, three men standing in a half-circle around one frantic woman—ensuring that she wouldn’t bolt for a door, a window, a gun.

  “No, there’s no security camera in the building. You can thank Jack for that,” Hogan said. “But there is a camera across the street, on the back wall of a very fancy little boutique. The lens points toward the jewelry counter.” He paused a moment to let Angela picture the scene. “And do you remember what’s next to the counter?”

  “A display window.”

  “That’s right. With a nice clear view across the street to the Olivers’ building.”

  Angela’s expression fell, and darkened.

  “The tape was long gone by the time I got there. The cops had impounded it, along with half a dozen others from the area, on the day after the murder. Of course, it takes friggin’ forever to watch those things, and McGuinn had no idea who or what he was looking for back then—except Philip, who didn’t appear. He put the tapes aside and didn’t touch them again until I asked him for a look. Then it was my turn to sit through the boring damn things. Boring until I spotted someone familiar, in the wrong place at a very wrong time.”

  “I see.”

  “We can all see now, Angela. That’s why you better play ball.”

  “Or…?”

  “Or I can give the tapes back to McGuinn, and he can do a big messy police investigation of the new evidence—freeze frame, image enhancement, that sort of thing. Followed, in a few months, by a trial where everybody, including Melissa, goes up on the stand. She’ll have a long time, between now and then, to decide whether to turn on you. Whether to testify against her own mother.”

  To my amazement, Angela said no more.

  “Take a little walk with me, Angela. We can go to Melissa’s room. Nice and quiet.”

  She stared at him desperately, sadly.

  “Stop, can’t you?” Her command had become a throaty plea.

  “Not yet. There’s something I want to show you. A couple things.”

  62

  McGuinn and I, left cooling our heels, slumped back in the chairs and made small talk. We were both used to Hogan’s private colloquies with suspects and witnesses. I had seen him apply the technique with J.D. Scratch in Paul Morse’s loft. McGuinn had witnessed—and benefited from—many such encounters over the years.

  “They won’t be long,” he assured me. “Hogan knows how to make a point.”

  He must have been playing the security tape for Angela. I was curious to see it myself. It couldn’t have been easy for Angela to watch the grainy black-and-white proof of her guilt, infinitely repeatable. How many times in the years ahead would it replay in her memory, the way the Virgin Sacrifice images ran persistently in mine?

  After about fifteen minutes, the pair returned—Angela, silent now, looking pale and stricken when they stopped in front of us. We got to our feet again.

  “Now listen good,” Hogan said, watching her. “If you were to confess, Angie, here’s how I think it might go.”

  She didn’t move or speak.

  “I imagine you must have driven into Manhattan, to SoHo, knowing that Philip was off in L.A. You were supposed to have a serious talk with Amanda. The two of you had already arranged it, by e-mail and phone. I imagine that you got there early, on purpose, and when Amanda didn’t answer, you let yourself in with Missy’s keys. You knew from your daughter all about the night table with the gun in the drawer.”

  Angela looked at him pleadingly. But Hogan went on.

  “When Amanda got home from shopping, she would have put her things in a closet and gone to sit in her favorite chair, listening to music as you came down the hall.”

  “I don’t want to listen to this.”

  “No, but you will.”

  “Please stop.”

  “Listen to it, Angie. All of it. Then repeat it for McGuinn.” Hogan’s voice softened. “Somebody is going to pay for killing Amanda Oliver. And it won’t be Paul Morse.”

  “But I…”

  “Just do it, Angela, and let all the craziness end here. Do it for Melissa’s sake. For Philip’s. For your own.”

  Angela crossed her arms, wrapping herself. She closed her eyes for a few seconds. When she opened them again, they were dull and fixed like the eyes of a corpse.

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “Tell us how you used your daughter to cover your tracks. How you got her to lie.”

  For a moment, Angela seemed to be considering her options. All the ones she didn’t have.

  “It wasn’t hard,”
she said finally. “They were just lies to men.”

  “That’s right,” Hogan said. “Melissa is a bright girl—a curious girl, full of questions. But she does what she’s told. So when you told her to lie about your time at home on that day, she lied. The two of you dreamed up yoga and gingerbread cookies.”

  “It was easy enough, like child’s play. After all, you were quite ga-ga over me. Jack was totally obsessed with Melissa and that Paul Morse business. And McGuinn, even sober, couldn’t think his way out of a corner.”

  “Watch your mouth, lady,” the big cop said. “I’m not in a goddamn corner here. You are.”

  “Forget it, McGuinn,” Hogan said. He addressed Angela carefully. “What matters is that once Melissa found Mandy’s laptop in your room, once she gave it to Jack, you panicked.”

  Angela lowered her arms. As her fingers spread at her sides, I could see that the nails were chipped. A working sculptor’s hands.

  “You knew what we’d find on the computer, with enough time and reading,” Hogan pressed. “Is that when you decided to frame Morse for the murder?”

  “That beast. He deserves his cage.”

  For some reason, I couldn’t stay out of it. “You liked him well enough once,” I reminded her.

  Angela wheeled on me. “And what about you, Jack? Didn’t you like him, too—some filthy little part of you? Isn’t that why it was so easy for you to entrap him? Easy to draw him in with your dirty pictures and your stories about all the rich pedophiles you know? Let’s not forget you’re the one who got him arrested. You’re the one who told me about the porn tapes and the party on Crosby Street. About his plans for Melissa.”

  “Yes, but after.”

  “After what?”

  “After you’d already seen through him,” Hogan interjected. “After you’d gone to his loft, maybe planning to kill him the way you killed Amanda. But his assistant was there with him, and you ended up planting the gun on his bookshelf instead. After asking to use the bathroom. Probably wiped the pistol down with Paul’s own hand towel. So your fingerprints wouldn’t be on the murder weapon anymore.”