The Accident

by Chris Pavone

“I’m sorry to say we have some bad news.”

  Stan waits, but the officer doesn’t continue. “Yes?” he asks, leaving the dining room, on his way to his office.

  “Mr. Balzer, Ms. Browning died tonight, in a car accident. Glyndon-Browning, that is.”

  Fuck.

  “Mr. Balzer? Are you still there?”

  “Um, yeah,” he croaks out. “I’m really sorry to hear about Camilla.”

  “Do you know of anyone who would want to harm her? Or why?”

  “No. But didn’t you say it was an accident?”

  “We still need to investigate. When did you last see Ms. Glyndon? Ah, Browning?”

  “A few hours ago,” Stan says. “We had a meeting. In my office.”

  “What was it about?”

  Stan furrows his brow. “Our meeting?” Why would a cop care? Is it because the cop suspects Stan of something? “It was about a film project.”

  There’s no answer for a moment, and Stan is about to repeat himself, when the guy asks, “What was the project?”

  Oh God. That is absolutely not the business of any cop. No cop would ever ask that question.

  Stan had begun to worry that he wouldn’t be able to make the picture without altering all the identifying details. In fact, he had the creeping feeling that he wouldn’t be able to make it at all. It would get quashed by some arm of the government. By lawyers.

  But now he realizes that if this manuscript is really true, he’s facing problems far more serious than lawyers.

  Stan holds on to the banister, steadying himself before descending the four steps to the hall that leads to the east wing. This house was designed to echo the rolling terrain, with every room on a slightly different level, so you’re constantly on stairs, up and down three steps, down and up two steps, to get anywhere. The guy who built the house was a famously unhinged character actor who enjoyed a remarkable run of steady work in the fifties, sixties, and seventies. It was in this last decade of his success that he directed the design of Casa Mariposa, named for one of his many insane obsessions, butterflies. He designed all the landscaping to attract butterflies. It’s like a fucking war zone out there, all those damn things dive-bombing around.

  Stan is trying to think, quickly. Quick quick quick: what to do? He takes a deep breath, and continues to the office, to the desk that’s built into the wall under the windows that face down the hill and its driveway toward the road in the distance, the road that snakes through the canyon. The road to town, to the airport, to his plane, to wherever he might need to go.

  “What did you say your name was?” Stan sputters out. “Dryden? With the Beverly Hills P.D.?” His hand is shaking as he jots down the information. “And your number, please? Someone’s at my door. I’m going to have to call you back.”

  He realizes he’s been standing for this whole conversation, his legs increasingly unsteady, now trembling, about to stop functioning. He pulls out his chair, collapses into it, weight pushing down on his chest, through his temples, into his eyeballs.

  Whoever murdered Camilla is going to try to murder him, and that person may have just been on the other end of his phone.

  Stan ignores the phone number he jotted down. Instead he dials information for the Beverly Hills P.D. Gets connected. A chipper voice answers, “Beverly Hills Police Department. How may I direct your call?” Stan wouldn’t expect such a lively, friendly answer from the police, at night.

  “Hi,” he says, then takes a deep breath. “I’m calling for Detective Dryden.” Please please please please. Please be there; please be real.

  This situation, he thinks, can be assigned values on a continuum that ranges from pretty bad to extraordinarily horrible. As he hears the clicks from a keyboard, he knows he’s about to find out where, exactly.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” the operator says, sincere apology in her voice. “There’s no Detective Dryden with the Beverly Hills Police Department.”

  “This is Brad McNally.”

  “Hi Brad. Stan Balzer calling. Do you remember me?”

  “Of course. Hi Stan.”

  “Listen, Brad, I’ve got bad news for you, about Camilla Glyndon-Browning. A few hours after she left my office, she was in a car crash. She’s dead.”

  Silence.

  “I’m sorry, Brad. And I’m sorry too if this sounds uncaring, but I have to ask: Do you know anything about the project she was pitching me?”

  Brad doesn’t respond for a couple of seconds. Then, “What did she pitch you?”

  “Something that I’m not sure you own.”

  “I think I know what you’re talking about.”

  “Have you read it?”

  Another pause. “No, not really.”

  Stan is about to ask for clarification on that, but he doesn’t really care. “Listen, Brad.” He pauses, trying to make sure that anyone who’s listening—and he’s absolutely positive that this conversation is being monitored—will hear this part, this lie, loud and clear: “Camilla didn’t give me a copy of this manuscript. But if you have one, I strongly suggest you destroy it.”

  CHAPTER 43

  Jeffrey finishes with a gasp and a grimace, his eyes clamped tightly shut, his mouth gaping open, as if he’s witnessing something awe-inspiring. Then he exhales slowly, and Isabel feels him shudder a final time inside her, an aftershock.

  She rolls off him, catching her breath, her chest rising and falling, staring at the ceiling, the fan spinning slowly round and round.

  Well that could’ve been a lot worse, and these days it often is. In the half-decade between when Isabel started dating her husband and when she started sleeping with other men, her field of choice narrowed dramatically. Men tend to want women who are younger than they are, and Isabel is not exactly young. Plus the book-publishing business is disproportionately gay, especially in the editorial realms that constitute her day-to-day universe, and nearly all the rest of them are married. Or they’re inappropriately young, or inconceivably old. So perhaps one in a hundred is single, straight, and in her age bracket, where she has discovered that this population tends to have more issues, more challenges, more performance-enhancing pills and unappealing personal proclivities, than the men she’d had in her twenties and thirties.

  Isabel has downward-adjusted her expectations. “That was nice,” she says. Because in the overall scheme of things, it was.

  Jeffrey doesn’t say anything.

  She pulls herself out of bed. “Thirsty,” she says. Isabel isn’t sure that she wants to traipse across this moonlit room naked, but nor does she want to yank a sheet off the bed, and wrap herself in it. That seems too un-intimate. “You want some water?”

  “Sure. Thanks.” There’s a bit of an edge to his voice, something that doesn’t sound quite right. She probably shouldn’t have used the word nice.

  She hands him a glass of tap water, and settles into bed beside him, her head on his shoulder.

  “You should’ve gotten me into bed years ago,” she says, trying to compensate for nice. “Decades ago.”

  The first time they kissed was nearly twenty years ago, when everyone was so young—one, two years out of college, lowest rungs on the totem pole. On weeknights they’d go to readings in bookshops—some of them even had part-time jobs, nights and weekends, in the same stores—and afterward to loud places with bar-size pool tables, short stacks of quarters placed on the bumpers to indicate who was playing next, Nirvana and Elvis Costello on jukeboxes, pitchers of Pabst Blue Ribbon or Molson Golden, sticky floors and plywood doors.

  “Fielder,” she said, turning to him there in one of those back rooms, everyone else somewhere else. She used to call people by their last names. “Are you ever going to kiss me?”

  So they made out, standing up in a bar amid the beer lights and the bar stools, on a rainy Thursday night in April, a long time ago, back when she could simply make out with someone in a bar, and leave it at that.

  The next day in the office, they didn’t happen to run into eac
h other until late afternoon, and neither had the confidence to seek out the other. Their cubicles were at opposite ends of a full floor in a big building.

  “Want to do something later?” he asked. They were in the brightly lit main hall, around the corner from a conference room.

  “I can’t, not tonight.” She was having dinner with her mother, who was in the city for a doctor’s appointment, never having given up her Manhattan doctors, never replaced them with physicians in the small town where she actually lived, never admitted that the move upstate was full-time and permanent. Isabel didn’t want to explain all this to Jeffrey, so all she said by way of explanation was “Sorry.”

  He nodded his understanding, but he didn’t understand. He misunderstood. He thought he was being rejected, and she never mustered the nerve to disabuse him, so he never asked again.

  But now here they are, two decades later, just as she always presumed they’d end up, sooner or later.

  “I didn’t even get you into bed tonight,” he says. “Did I?”

  She shifts her body, turns her face up to his, plants a kiss on his lips, ready to start up again, wondering if he is too, or could be. “No.” She plants a kiss on his chest. “I guess not.”

  Then they’re both seized by the sound, terrifyingly loud in the dark quiet house: Ringggggggggg.

  The possibilities run through Isabel’s mind—wrong number, an old boyfriend calling for Naomi, a live solicitation, a robo-call …

  Ring—

  Isabel reaches across to the night table, picks up the handset mid-ring, cutting short the shrillness. “Hello?”

  “Hi,” an unfamiliar voice, male. “Is this Isabel Reed?”

  All her muscles tense. “Who’s calling?”

  “Isabel?”

  She doesn’t confirm or deny.

  “My name is Stan Balzer,” he continues. “You know who I am?”

  She still doesn’t respond.

  “I got this number from Naomi Berger, whose number I got from Brad McNally, who thought it was possible that you’d be in Naomi’s house. You two are close friends, I gather.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I’ve made a big effort to find you.”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “I’m a film pro—”

  “I know who you are.”

  “Okay. This afternoon I met with Camilla Glyndon-Browning, the sub-rights director at McNally & Sons, who was pitching me a project: an anonymous unauthorized biography of Charlie Wolfe. Do you represent this?”

  Isabel pulls the sheet up to her breasts, but doesn’t say anything.

  “Anyway, soon after leaving my office, Camilla was killed.”

  Isabel gasps, and her free hand instinctually shoots to her mouth, and the sheet slips down, exposing her, once again.

  “It was supposedly in a car accident.”

  Jeffrey is sitting up in bed, watching her, listening. She wonders if he can hear through the earpiece, the man on the other end.

  “Then I received a call from someone impersonating a police officer. Someone who knew that Camilla and I had met. Someone who knew how to find me, and where, which I have to tell you is not that easy of a thing to do. Someone who wanted to know what we’d discussed, Camilla and I.”

  Isabel can hear this man breathing heavily, panting from exertion, or fear, or both.

  “So I’m calling to warn you that you’re in danger.”

  She can’t help but laugh, a thick meaty guffaw, a markedly unfeminine sound.

  “I guess you already know that,” he says. “I’m also calling to tell you that Camilla didn’t give me a copy of this manuscript, and other than her short pitch, I don’t know anything about it. And I don’t want to.”

  He pauses, seemingly waiting for some response. “Okay” is what she gives him.

  “I’m not involved, in any way. Understand?”

  She doesn’t, not really. This is an odd and horrifying phone call, in a day filled with oddness and horror.

  And then suddenly she understands what this is about: being overheard. This movie producer thinks that this conversation is being monitored, and he’s telling whoever’s listening that they have nothing to fear from him. That there’s no reason for anyone to hunt down and kill Stan Balzer.

  “I think I understand,” she says. “The truth is that I’m not really involved either.” No one is going to believe this, other than maybe Stan Balzer, and probably not even him.

  “Good luck,” he says, and the line goes dead.

  Isabel stares at the plastic handset with its long accordion cord, then replaces it to its cradle, a big chunky thing with a push-button keypad.

  “What was that all about?”

  She turns to him. “Did you give a copy of the manuscript to your sub-rights director? Camilla?”

  “No,” Jeffrey says defensively. “I didn’t even mention it to her.”

  “Well, somehow she knows about it. Knew.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She’s dead.”

  “What?” He seems to be scanning his memory. “She must’ve photocopied the manuscript when I was in a meeting. Oh shit. How was she killed?”

  “Car crash.”

  “Good God. Does anyone else have a copy of the manuscript?”

  She almost answers, It depends on your definition of have. But what she says is “Not from me. Did you give it to anyone besides Brad? Would he have given it to anyone?”

  “I doubt it.”

  Isabel nods.

  “So there aren’t any other copies in the world?” he asks. “Besides the two that we have with us here?”

  Isabel turns to Jeffrey, searches his face, wondering again how much she can trust this man in bed with her. It was her ex-husband who’d always lived by the credo that you should never completely trust anyone, and always be prepared for betrayal; you never know when it’s going to happen. Over the years this cynicism rubbed off on Isabel. In hindsight, this pervasive worldview was one of the things she didn’t like about being married to him. But like it or not, there it is: she doesn’t really trust anyone.

  “Not that I know of,” she says. “Though I’m assuming the author has a copy.”

  The idea of the author hangs in the air between them.

  “You know who it is, don’t you?”

  “Well, there’s certainly one obvious possibility,” she admits.

  Jeffrey nods.

  “But he’s already dead.”

  CHAPTER 44

  The morning air is crisp and clean, the wind blowing cool from the snow-capped Alps in the south, blowing across the deep blue lake dotted with sailboats and ducklings and ruffled with whitecaps, making the tree boughs sway, heavy with the season’s new green leaves. The gravel-covered dirt path feels springy under the cushy soles of his new high-tech running shoes, and his legs have grown rubbery, in a not-unpleasant way. He leans into his jog, his torso pitched forward, propelling him onward, toward the simple squared-off clock towers of the tidy little downtown.

  Although he slept only a few hours last night, he doesn’t feel particularly tired. He long ago became inured to sleeplessness; he can get by on three or four hours per night for weeks on end.

  The author turns away from the lake, off the gravel path, running now on the hard pavement of the street, far less agreeable to his soles and knees and middle-aged frame.

  His apartment is on the next block. He glances at the screen of the phone in his palm, the GPS-driven app that’s tracking his run, now at 7.8 kilometers. If he runs past his building, makes another lap around the block, that’ll get him past 8.0, a nice even number, a respectable goal.

  He doesn’t even glance at his front door as he jogs past it, throwing one leg in front of the other, the impact vibrating up his legs. He breathes in sets of two, a couple of short tight bursts of exhalation on consecutive footfalls, then a pair of shallow inhales on the next two strides, a mesmerizing rhythm that lulls him into a spaced-out zone in which he can almost f
orget all the things that keep him awake in the middle of the night. He wishes it was possible to sleep while jogging.

  So at first he doesn’t register the two men sitting in the car on the corner, facing his direction. A rental car, a pair of clean-cut American-looking heads. No newspaper, no phone, nothing to occupy their attention in the front seat of the shiny white Opel at eight o’clock on a weekday morning, parked on a quiet block in a residential neighborhood.

  Fuck.

  He continues jogging to the corner, and turns left, picking up the pace unintentionally, adrenaline spiking in his bloodstream, no longer feeling the impact of his strides, nor the soreness in his quadriceps, his muscles growing stronger with the hormonal infusion, his hearing and vision sharper, a strange taste in his mouth.

  He turns another corner, onto the block behind his own, and runs fifty more meters, then slows to a walk. He turns out of the street and enters an alley between two tall houses, a tight path with a bicycle rack, a quartet of garbage cans, a red hand-truck.

  At the rear of the house he stops. He leans his hand against the coarse cool painted brick, and cranes his neck around the corner. He surveys the backyard of this house, with a low wood fence that separates this yard from his own building’s. He looks up at the fire escape, at his bedroom window.

  A team could be up there in his apartment, waiting for him, one man hiding on the wall beside the door, another sitting on his sofa, holding a pistol. The two men in the car could be the backup. There could be others, in vans, on motorcycles, at the airport, the train station. He could be surrounded.

  He waits one minute, two. He can see his downstairs neighbor knotting his necktie; in the next building a young Dutch mother—in his brain, she’s called Dutch MILF—is trying to get her blonde children out the door.

  He has anticipated this moment, the discovery that he has been blown, that the people who are looking for him—Charlie Wolfe and his handler at the CIA, or more likely some team of private contractors hired by one or the other of the motivated parties—has found him. He has planned for it. In his coat closet he keeps a go-bag, a nylon backpack with a change of clothes, and a disposable cell phone and its charger, and an empty thumb drive ready to copy his manuscript, and another new passport and credit cards plus a hundred thousand dollars worth of mixed currency—American dollars and euros and Swiss francs and English pounds—and a spare car key, and a dog-eared old wallet-size photo of a child.