by Paul Griffin
My cell vibrated again. I let it. Two calls from Starbucks Cherry two minutes apart? Now I knew how Nicole felt Thursday afternoon in CVS: like I was being stalked.
TWENTY-ONE
From Nicole’s journal:
Saturday, 23 Oct-
AP chem tutor quit today. “You’re not concentrating. You’re wasting your father’s money and my time. If you fail, I fail. That goes down as a stain on my reputation.” A stained rep. Wow. How will you face the day, Lance? Possible real reason for Lance’s leave-taking: The check Mom wrote him bounced-again. I checked the accounts. The one has plenty of money, the other twenty bucks, so Mom cuts Lance a check from the empty account? She’s losing it. Has she slept a single night since this happened? She won’t let me past the village gates. Feel like I’m six again. Have to get out of this house. I’m stir-crazy. Skype w Dad tomorrow. Possible ride with him, if Mom says cool to go out. They’ll fight over it. Awesome. New painkiller hard on my stomach. Email from Jay: Sorry I was an idiot. Hopefully I’ll see you at Schmidt’s. A polite blow off. Totally sucks. Need a new plan. Emma still sick. Please don’t let this be the end.
TWENTY-TWO
The rest of the weekend passed without any word back from Nicole. This didn’t stop me from trying to catch her attacker. I may have been doing it as much for me as for Nicole. I couldn’t accept that such a malevolent crime might go unpunished.
Mondays were slow at The New Jersey Clarion-I remembered that much. After my mother was killed, my father would pick me up after school and take me with him to his office. You don’t get a lot of homework in fourth grade, and I didn’t have anything to do except make mini snowmen with my earwax. This guy Pete Keller worked the local news desk back then. He was a good reporter, could have been better if he weren’t such a boozehound. Uncle Pete, he wanted me to call him, and after a while I did. We played a lot of Nerf hoop. Every day at four o’clock Pete took me with him to the diner next door. The Clarion is across the street from the precinct, and Pete liked to buy the cops ending their eight-to-fours a pony beer or two. For the ones coming in for the four-to-midnight, he’d spring for takeout coffee. Sometimes the detectives dropped him a line on how an investigation was going. Uncle Pete was too old to be chasing NJPD through Newark alleys now. He’d moved into the obituary pit, my father told me, but I was betting he was still on the Friendlies list of a gold badge or two.
I stopped off at the bodega and grabbed a six of Becks. With my height and my absolutely unimpeachable fake ID I never got shut out. I didn’t like to drink myself-not that I could, with my meds-but some of the computer shows required you to be twenty-one to get in. Uncle Pete was hung over. That didn’t stop him from cracking a beer. “I’ll give you twenty bucks, you go get a haircut,” he said.
“Gimme twenty bucks then.”
“If I had it. You keep looking at your phone.”
“Three forty-five. Thought we could hit the diner.”
“Little Jay-Jay Nazzaro, what happened to you? And what are you up to?”
“Who’s on the Castro case?”
“The acid thing? PD doesn’t want to let that information out just yet.”
“So the paper says.”
“They don’t want the Recluse to see them coming.”
“Of course not.”
“Wouldn’t you rather brick some Nerf?”
“I just want to find out where they are on catching this psycho.”
“Yeah, huh? You stick with your geometry or wherever it is you’re at in school. How damned old are you now?”
“Sixteen and calculus. Pete? Nicole Castro. She’s my friend.” Not having heard from Nicole, I wasn’t sure if I was telling the truth about that.
Pete sighed. “Jessica Barrone. Gold for ten years, at least. The best. If the Recluse is catchable, Barrone’s the one to do it.” He studied me with night-after-Heineken eyes. “You’re your mother through-and-through.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I used to hook her up with freelance work now and then. Did you know that?”
“I don’t think so.” My mother had been a journalist before she had me. She and my dad were in the same grad program at Columbia.
“This was back when you were in diapers,” Pete said. “A few dollars here and there to help with rent. You know, check out this guy’s story, stuff she could do over the phone from home. But now and then she would come into the office for an editorial meeting. She was so damned nice to everybody. That lopsided smile, that ridiculously loud laugh. People were suspicious. ‘What does she want from me?’ Like that. I had known her for a while by then. ‘Nothing,’ I’d say. ‘That’s just how she is.’ ‘Nah, she’s fake,’ they’d say, but after a while people got it, that she was the real deal.”
“And what was that?”
Pete shrugged. “She was just an other-centered person. C’mon, kid. Buy your old uncle Pete a cup of coffee.”
“Think she’ll tell us anything, Detective Barrone?”
“I’ll tell her you’re an aspiring reporter.”
“As in I’m your intern. Smart.”
“Son, you don’t get to be fifty-six-looking-sixty-six, twice divorced, forty pounds overweight, and alcoholic by being an idiot.”
“The truth is, the majority of cold cases go unsolved,” Detective Barrone said. “Most perps if they’re going to be caught are picked up in the first forty-eight hours. After that, the likelihood of an arrest is halved. After a week, you have a ten percent chance of closing the case.”
“Wow, I had no idea,” I said. “That sucks.”
Barrone nodded, sipped her coffee. She was ridiculously pretty. I imagined perps would come to her on their knees to confess if only to be eye level with what I dreamed was her very tanned, inny navel. “I know your dad,” she said.
“Wouldn’t imagine cops are into fluffy stuff like art.”
“You’d be surprised, but that’s not how I know him. My daughter is at Pratt.”
“The art college in Manhattan?”
“Brooklyn.”
“You don’t look old enough to have a daughter that old,” I said.
Barrone nodded to Uncle Pete. “How old’s this kid?”
“Sexteen.”
“Kid,” Barrone said, “never try to charm a cop.”
“My apologies.”
“And never apologize.”
“Sorry.”
“My daughter had to do a paper, some art history thing. She was using one of your father’s books. I recognized the name, told her I’d bump into your old man here at the diner every once in a while. She asked me to set up an interview. He was very helpful, she said. Very nice guy.”
“Oh, he’s the best all right. What if it’s a serial?”
“How’s that?”
“The Castro case. If it gets hot again. Say just for example the Recluse tried to attack Nicole a second time, the other side of her face. You know, finish what he started. Or if he decided to go after somebody else.”
“Like whom?” she said.
“I don’t know. Anybody. You, me-”
“Why would she go after you?”
“No, I’m just saying,” I said. “Why do you think he’s a she?”
“Who says I do?”
“You did.”
“I’m using ‘she’ as a global pronoun.”
“I suck at grammar.”
“Tough luck for you if you want to be a journalist, worse for Pete if you’re his intern.”
“A second attack,” I said. “Catching her after that. Do the odds swing back in the police’s favor?”
“Yes and no. The new evidence is a warm lead, obviously, but serials are tricky. They live for the cat-and-mouse, and they think twenty steps ahead.”
“Do you think you’ll catch him, her, whomever?”
“Not my case.”
“Whose is it?”
“Can’t say.” Her phone beeped. She checked it and put it back down on the tabl
e. “How is your dad?” she said.
I shrugged. “Fine.”
She nodded as she stared at me just a hair too long. Suddenly the diner was way too hot. Barrone sipped her coffee. “Drop a hello on the old man for me.”
“Definitely.” I pretended my phone beeped, checked it, put it on the table. The lights flickered, except they didn’t. I was dizzy. “I have to pee,” I said.
She smiled. “You’re not under arrest. . yet.”
We all laughed. Yeah, so funny. I went to the bathroom and shut myself in. The zigzag lightning. The aura. Everything going fish-eye. I sat on the floor in case I seized. The aura didn’t always mean an attack was coming. Most times it just came on its own.
It passed.
I splashed my face with water I wished were colder and hung out in there for about as long I would have needed if I really had to pee bad. When I came out, Barrone was looking at my hair. I realized only then I’d run my wet hands over it. I wondered if this was some kind of tell, a show of my guilt. Was she onto my hacking?
Pete was standing now. “Thanks for your time, Detective,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Thank you very much.”
“Pete said if I give you twenty bucks you’ll get a haircut.”
“Might just blow it on meth too.”
“Trying to build a sheet, huh?”
“It’s tough, but I’ll get there.”
She winked. “What’d I tell you about not trying to charm a cop?” Then to Pete: “I like this kid.” Back to me: “Don’t forget your phone.”
“I’m an idiot.”
“And don’t forget to tell your old man Jessica Barrone said what’s up.”
I nodded and hoped my smile didn’t look as fake as it felt. She was really hammering this say hi to Pop thing.
When we were outside, Pete said, “Come on back to the office. I have those Velcro tennis paddles.”
“I gotta go.”
“Don’t be such a stranger. I mean it. You look good in a newsroom.”
“Threatening to make me your intern for real?”
“Make my coffee light and sweet, shine my shoes, pick up my dry cleaning, all for not a single penny: What else could you want?”
“Plus I’d get to be around Daddy more.”
“Hell, that mop. You really are a punk.”
“Pete, do me a favor, don’t tell Pop I stopped by?”
“What’s up, kid?”
“Maybe I really will take you up on the internship thing.”
“Your old man would love that. Only natural for a father to want his son to walk his walk. He always said he thought you’d be great at the paper business.”
“Seriously?”
“‘Jay has a special sensitivity,’ he said. ‘That and his natural inquisitiveness, he’d win a Pulitzer.’”
Took me a second to absorb that, a compliment from my father, albeit indirect. “Then let’s let the internship be a surprise.”
“Whenever you want to start, let me know. Another Nazzaro at the Clarion. I wonder if the paper can survive it.” He slapped my back.
I dropped my board and kicked away from the diner as fast as I could. I forced myself not to look over my shoulder, but I felt them on me, Detective Barrone’s eyes.
I docked my phone to my laptop and downloaded everything I’d stolen from Barrone when I put my Nokia on the diner table next to her BlackBerry and let it sip her drive. I almost puked when I saw it in her Calls Made list: my father’s cell number. Call duration: twenty seconds. Long enough to leave a message, maybe something like, “Call me back. I’d like to talk with you about your son.” Then again, she’d called him the previous Saturday, two days before she and I met. Whatever Barrone’s reason for reaching out to my father, he didn’t call her back.
He was horrible with messages, rarely checked his voicemail or texts. And when he was on the road he kept his phone off to save the battery, too lazy to bring his charger, which was tangled up in knots with the rest of the wires strangling his desk. Sometimes he’d forget the phone with the charger and wouldn’t notice it was missing until he got home. Art critics get e-vited to shows, go, have a couple of drinks, write their bit and post it, done, no need to talk to a soul, which got me thinking that maybe being an art critic wasn’t such a loser thing to do after all. He was due back from Philadelphia Saturday, and he’d get the message by then, if not before. I had at most five days to figure out why Jessica Barrone was calling my father. Did she know I had leaked those two emails the Recluse sent to Mrs. Marks?
It didn’t seem possible. I had safeguard after redundant safeguard in place to prevent detection. I’d cracked an FBI server once, as a test, and gotten away with it. If the NJ police were onto me, they would have hit me right after my first hack into that server, in the middle of the night, and seized my computer-and me. I was gaining an appreciation for how Nicole felt now: hunted. I called her. She picked up with, “Jay Nazzaro, I was just thinking about you.”
“Is that good or bad?”
“Could be either, depending on whether or not you know how to play tennis.”
“As in Wii?” I said.
“As in meet me at the East Gate Tennis Club in half an hour. And Jay? Tell me you don’t have Wii.”
“PS3, thank you very much.”
“Thank you very much, nobody plays Wii tennis anymore, or at least they don’t admit to it. Not unless they’re six years old and wear pigtails. Actually, you would look cute in pigtails.”
TWENTY-THREE
“I want to see if I can still see the ball.” She was wearing this knockout tennis suit, and here I was in my black jeans and army jacket. I was getting nasty eyes from many elderly, almost uniformly svelte model types who had gotten lost on their way to the L.L.Bean catalog shoot.
“Feed me,” Nicole said.
I eyed her hands. She was wearing golf gloves. “You sure?”
“You ever swung a racquet?”
The lady at the counter had given me one that had never been picked up from lost and found. I hadn’t held one since before my mother died. Mom was terrible at tennis, but she liked to take me up to the public courts and swing and miss and laugh at herself. We’d end up playing stickball. I pitched the ball to Nicole instead.
Her forehand was off. She kept grounding the ball into the net. She didn’t get down on herself. She made adjustments until the ball cleared the tape. She kept checking her long bill cap, pulling it low to hide as much of the bandage as she could. Her backhand was better than her forehand. A couple of times she really drove the ball. I threw it right to her, so she wouldn’t have to run to get to it, but she didn’t last long anyway. She took a break every three hits or so, then every two, then after every ball.
“Your hands?” I said.
“My wind.” She peeled off her gloves. Her hands weren’t nearly as bad as I thought they’d be, four or five blisters on her left, a couple on her right. All had healed or were close to skinning over. We went to get a drink from the vending machines. She was pale. “Amazing how much you lose in a month. Can’t wait to get back to running. Not as dizzy today, though. Skipped my meds.”
“Not good,” I said.
“You take yours?”
“Course not.”
She put up her fist for a pound. We bumped knuckles. Her phone buzzed. It had been buzzing every few minutes. She checked it and frowned.
“Dave?” I said.
“No,” she said. “You can take a deep breath now.”
“Dave benches three hundred eighty-five pounds. Would you like to be caught sneaking around with his girlfriend, even if you and I are just friends, if we are in fact.”
“You doubt that?”
“Maybe you just needed somebody to throw you a few balls.”
“Right, because they don’t have machines for that, ones that can’t judge me as I’m making an idiot of myself, trying to play tennis with one eye open.”
“I’m not judging you. I think
you’re awesome.”
“Shut up. Anyway, I’m not sneaking around. I have nothing to-” Her phone buzzed again. “I’m AWOL. She won’t stop calling till I pick up.”
“Then pick up.”
She turned off her phone and tucked it into her little tennis skirt.
“Did the doctor clear you?” I said. “Like for strenuous physical activity?”
“He said as soon as I felt up to it, I should get moving.”
“Moving isn’t tennis.”
“Would be pretty boring if it weren’t.”
“But what if the ball hit you?” I said.
“So? It happens.”
“In the face, I meant.”
“What am I supposed to do, be a statue for the rest of my life? Never sweat again? Hungry?”
I grunted.
“This means ‘Man want food,’ one grunt yes, two grunt no?”
“You speak Cro-Magnon?” I said.
“To imply the Cro-Magnon were lug heads is wrong. They exhibited a cranial capacity approximately sixteen hundred cubic centimeters larger than modern-day humans.”
“So I’m not a Cro-Magnon, you’re saying, but merely a lug head.”
“Grunt once for Taco Bell, twice for Domino’s.”
“At least you didn’t say Sbarro’s.”
“Crap.”
“Tell me about it.”
“No, I mean Monday is roadwork,” Nicole said, going tiptoe to look over my shoulder. “They weren’t supposed to be here.”
“Nic!” This girl from the tennis team, Samantha Rees, practically tackled Nicole into the Coke machine. “Did you get the Care Bears package?”
