She had finally left Jeff’s apartment when she found herself nodding off on the couch. She had been tempted to accept his invitation to stay overnight, but had foreseen what would have developed. The shoulder rubs. The smell of his broken-in robe as she’d stepped inside it from the steaming shower. His gestures had been in friendship, but she knew herself well enough to interpret her own responses to them. Whatever journey their relationship was on, today was not the time for a major shift in direction. When Alice insisted on going back to her own place, Lily had proven her dedication once again by insisting she sleep on the sofa.
The ting-ting of the doorbell halted her thoughts. She was about to call out to Lily when she heard the release of the safety chain, followed by friendly murmurs. She assumed her self-appointed bodyguard had ordered a late dinner until she heard the voices getting louder.
“She’s had a bad fucking day, made all the worse by the fact that her own brother wasn’t there when she needed him. She must have called you fifteen times.”
And here Alice had thought she’d been discreet, feeling guilty about sneaking off for phone calls while Lily and Jeff had placed their own lives on hold for her.
“All I can say is you haven’t changed a bit. Take that however you’d like.” Her brother’s voice was simultaneously cutting and dismissive.
Alice stepped from bed and cracked open the door. “I’m still up, Lily. It’s okay. Sorry if he woke you.”
“No, I was up.” No complaints. No passive aggression. Just Lily, trying to stick up for her.
Ben didn’t bother moving the clothes from the only chair in the bedroom before plopping down. “Jesus Christ, that girl is and always has been such a royal cunt. There’s a screw loose with that chick.”
“Unh-unh. Not here, Ben. Not today.”
“Sorry, I just can’t believe you guys are friends. Irony of ironies, you know? She was the biggest sycophant in high school. She thought she was hot shit in podunk Mount Kisco. Treated me and my friends like scum until she realized who we were, then couldn’t get enough of us. You would have fucking hated her.”
Alice now wished that she and Lily had never figured out the few degrees of separation in their past lives. After her mother died, Lily had been raised by her father in Mount Kisco, just south of Bedford, where Alice’s family had a home. Alice and Ben had gone to school in the city, but had friends who were from local families. As best as Lily and Alice had been able to reconstruct, Lily was a year behind Ben. They were never close friends, but ran in the same weekend circles. She’d even been to their house for a couple of his parties, but had never met his little sister.
“You know what’s funny, Ben? It’s funny that you didn’t mention all that months ago when you found out we were friends. Maybe you suddenly remembered just now when she totally called you out?”
The words were harsh, but were delivered teasingly. Alice couldn’t help it. Ben could frustrate her, anger her, even break her, and somehow she always had a little smile for him, even when she was doing her best to bust on him.
“Whatever, fine. I was out of line.”
“Seriously? The c-word? Under my roof? About my friend?”
“I said I was sorry.”
“So you got my messages.” She crawled into the bed and bunched a pillow on her lap.
“Yeah. I’m sorry. I should have called you about the arrest. It never dawned on me it would make the news.”
“And you got the other messages? About the gallery?”
“Yeah. How’s that going? I’m really sorry I missed the opening.”
She shook her head. He had listened to the first message, maybe even the second, when she’d been calling about his arrest. But he’d obviously deleted the rest of them. Ben, I’ve got a man’s blood on my hands. Where are you? Beep. Jesus, Ben, you can’t even call me back when there’s been a murder at my job? Beep. I’m sorry Ben, but I could really use some family right now. And you know with Mom and Dad ... Beep.
“So was it true? Were you arrested?”
“You called like it was some big Medellín Cartel bust or something. There was a complaint about the sidewalk noise outside of Little Branch. Some douchebag I didn’t even know mouthed off to one of the cops, so we all got frisked. I had some dope in my pocket. It’s no big deal. The lawyer says I’ll pay a fine and that’ll be that.”
“I thought your program required you to be completely clean. In the past, you’ve said the pot makes you more likely to slip into other drugs.”
“Can you give me a break? Please? I’ve been clean five years, and the Humphrey family still sees me as the junkie loser son. It was just a little pot. I promise.”
She looked into his eyes, wanting so much to believe him. Wanting to wash her brain of its desire to check his pulse. Inspect his forearms. Search his apartment for pipes, needles, and bloody Kleenexes. She’d have to search for all of it, because for a decade and a half of his life, Ben Humphrey had been a human garbage can, willing to dump anything and everything into his body.
“You believe me, right?”
She was about to, before he’d asked that question.
“So what’s up with your dear, sweet, totally-not-a-cunt friend out there with sheets on the sofa. She get dumped or something?”
“Um, no, Ben. She’s here because something really bad happened today.” She told him about finding Drew at the gallery. She watched his eyes move unconsciously to the pocket that must have held his cell phone, the one she’d called so many times.
“Sorry you went through that alone.”
“I wasn’t alone. But, yeah, I did want my family.”
“You didn’t call Mom and Dad?”
“Did you call them when you were arrested? I notice you mentioned ‘the lawyer.’ If Dad was involved, you would’ve said Art.”
Arthur Cronin, in addition to being one of her parents’ best friends, was also the go-to attorney for all remotely law-related Humphrey family problems.
“No Mom or Dad. No Art. I guess your independent ways are contagious.”
“I thought you said I was being too rough on Dad.”
“You mean to tell me you haven’t thought about all those women he was with? I mean, barely women at that. Jennifer Roberson, or whatever her name is? She was nineteen when she auditioned for Smashed. I’ve done the math. She was only a year older than you were at the time. I mean, our father had a casting couch—literally, a casting couch—in his office. And the penchant for photography? Not to mention the fact that all those women look vaguely like our mother. Frank certainly has a type.”
“Stop it, Ben. I really am going to hurl.”
“You don’t even know the half of it.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. Just blowing off steam. Our dad’s a goddamn player, and our mom’s too dazed to give a rat’s ass. Let’s just say we’re both avoiding their shit for the time being.”
She and Ben had always been so different. More than twenty years after she had walked away from a promising start as a child actor, Ben was still trying to find a place for himself in the family industry, first as a screenwriter, a few times as a producer for small-time indies (with their father’s money, of course), and now, more realistically, as a sound engineer recording special audio effects. She’d always been a quiet student. He was a rowdy party guy. She saw herself as a connected part of the larger world. He preferred to shrink from it. While he had the olive skin and exaggerated features of their father, Alice—with her red hair, clear, pale skin, and what her mother called a nose and lips for plastic surgeons to study—bore little resemblance to the man.
That they had found this commonality against their parents, in this tiny, disheveled bedroom, made her sad.
“So do the police have any idea who shot your boss?”
She laughed. She couldn’t help it. The lack of sleep from the night before. The hunger and the stress of the day. The weight of her brother’s problems, and her paren
ts’ flaws, and the completely unrecognizable state of her life. The entire fucked-upness of everything.
“Is that funny?” he said, joining her in the laughter.
“Who shot my boss? No, it’s not funny at all. And they have no idea what’s going on. Neither do I. I don’t even know how to contact the artist or the gallery owner or anything. ITH Corporation. What the hell is that, anyway? So I guess I just walk away.”
“What corporation?”
“Something called ITH. I assume it’s the owner’s investment company for these projects Drew was helping him with, but I have no idea how to contact him.”
“ITH? Just those three letters?”
“Yeah. Why? Does that mean something to you?”
“No. Just seems like a random name, is all.”
“You’re acting weird, Ben.”
“Okay, I know you’ve had a seriously shitty day, but you need to chill out right now. Jesus, I regret even asking about it.”
“You promise? If you know something about that company, you have to tell me.” She knew her brother. He wasn’t behaving like himself. Was he holding something back from her? Maybe this was another sign that he was using again. Or maybe he was right, and she was being hypersensitive after the trauma of the day.
“I promise, all right? I don’t know anything.”
“Well, neither do I. I tried Googling that company name as soon as I got a paycheck. No luck.”
“Just let it lie. Try to forget you were ever involved.”
“Funny. That’s what Lily said, too.”
“Well, your dear, sweet friend is right.”
“Are you still going to meetings, Ben?”
“Seriously, Alice?”
“I thought you went at least once a week.”
“Not for a while now. Don’t look at me like that. Would you want to sit around in some fluorescent-lit church basement drinking bad coffee with a bunch of addicts? Not exactly an uplifting scene.”
“What about Down?” Downing Brown had been the cinematographer on some horrible indie film Ben produced back when he was still aspiring to be Frank Humphrey Jr. Everyone simply called him Down. When the other producers kicked Ben off his own project after one too many drug-fueled rants at the director, Down had introduced Ben to Narcotics Anonymous. As far as Alice knew, he was still Ben’s sponsor.
“He’d like me to be at meetings more, but, yeah, we’re still down. So to speak. He’s sort of my own personal meeting host.”
“You’ll tell me if you need something, right? You know I’m here for you.”
“Always. You shouldn’t be worrying about me after what you’ve been through. You gonna be all right tonight?” He looked at his watch.
“Yeah. Thanks for coming by.”
As she watched Lily replace the safety chain behind her brother and reclaim her spot on the sheeted sofa, Alice thought again about friendship. Friends were supposed to be there for movies and restaurants and maybe even hospital visits. It was family who were supposed to help you scrub dried blood from beneath your fingernails and then sleep on your sofa just in case you woke up in the middle of the night remembering how it got there.
Not only had Lily been there for her, she was also right. Alice had told herself earlier in the day—when she was staring up at that police officer, trying to recall everything she’d ever known about Drew Campbell—that his murder wasn’t about her. It was awful. Horrific. Unimaginable, really. But it wasn’t about her. To see it as such was vanity. And since his death wasn’t about her, it wasn’t up to her to figure out why Highline Gallery was closed and Drew Campbell dead. The protesters. An art heist. A business riff. The police would eventually figure it out, and nothing she could do would hasten that process or bring Drew back to life.
She’d woken up that morning determined that her involvement in the drama around the gallery be resolved. Now it was, albeit in an awful, horrific, unimaginable way. Now she was resolved to listen to Lily. You’re no longer involved, she’d said. Consider yourself lucky you don’t know more about Drew Campbell and the Highline Gallery.
But despite that moment of resolve, Alice would not remain uninvolved. The following day, the detectives from the gallery would arrive unannounced at her apartment asking all of their same questions once again.
Part II
Nothing to Hide
Chapter Twenty-Three
You’ve heard what they say about pictures and a thousand words.
Alice took another sip of her water, but immediately wondered if the movement seemed suspicious, an obvious attempt to appear calm. I’m hot because I took a seventy-five-minute spinning class, she wanted to yell. I’m sweaty because we ended with a long climb, then I sprinted home from the gym. And I just walked into this overheated apartment from the bitter cold. I’m hot and sweaty and more than a little stinky, but not because of your being here or your questions or this ridiculous photograph of me supposedly kissing Drew Campbell.
But she could not say anything. Instead she stared at the picture. It was not the best quality. It looked like a blowup from a digital version. But the man certainly appeared to be Drew Campbell. And the woman? It was hard to make out her face in profile, but the black sunglasses pushing back her red hair looked like hers. That blue coat with the upturned collar was exactly like hers. The profile followed the same contours. Jesus, it looked like her, certainly enough that she had no doubt about why they had come to her apartment to ask her to reexplain everything she had already said to them yesterday.
And now that she’d conveyed it all once again, they apparently weren’t asking any more questions. Not explicitly. Shannon had simply glided the photograph onto the tabletop, accompanied by a single sentence.
You’ve heard what they say about pictures and a thousand words.
The detectives’ silence following that single sentence had somehow made her apartment louder. The clicking furnace. The upstairs neighbor’s plumbing. The usual horns on Second Avenue below. The rattle of an accelerating bus. A distant siren growing louder, then fading once again.
She found herself wishing Lily were still here, but Alice had been the one to insist that she return to her own routine lest she face her boss’s wrath. Lily would have some pithy comment to break through the awkward silence. With humor and fortitude, she would somehow persuade these police officers that, despite every appearance in this photograph, Alice Humphrey was someone they should believe.
But Lily wasn’t there to speak for her. And someone in this room had to start speaking before the sounds in Alice’s own head caused her to scream something she’d regret.
“I don’t understand.” That’s it, Alice? Minutes of stunned silence, and that’s what you come up with? She tried again. “If you think I’ve been lying to you, or hiding something from you, I swear to you, I have not. That’s not me in that picture. It can’t be. Who gave you that? It has to be doctored. I never, ever, ever kissed Drew Campbell.”
The two detectives exchanged the kind of look that suggested an inside joke.
“Well,” Shannon said with a patient smile, “did you ever kiss the man in this picture? The man whose body we carried out of your gallery yesterday?”
Your gallery.
“I don’t understand,” she said before realizing she’d repeated herself. “I just told you, I never kissed him. I only met him a few weeks ago. He hired me. That’s all.”
“That’s not what you told us. You said you never kissed Drew Campbell. We’re just trying to verify that you’re saying you never kissed the man in this picture, despite what this picture suggests.”
“I assume the man in that picture is Drew Campbell, and, no, there was nothing romantic between us.”
“Did you ever know him by another name? Something other than Drew Campbell?”
“No, of course not. I would have told you.”
“And how about yourself? Have you ever used any name other than Alice Humphrey?”
“Me? No. Never.”<
br />
“Well, do you have any thoughts on why there would be a photograph of Mr. Campbell kissing a woman who seems to share a very close resemblance to you? If I’m not mistaken, Miss Humphrey, that’s the very coat you had on yesterday at the gallery.”
“I know. I find it very confusing. Maybe I reminded him of his girlfriend? That might be why he offered me the job in the first place. That’s all I can think of. But I know that’s not me in this picture. It can’t be.”
“And, just to be clear, you didn’t have anything to do with clearing out the contents of your gallery.”
Just to be clear? She knew the worst thing she could do right now was show anger. Friendly, polite, deferential. That’s what she needed to be. “No. The place was closed up when I got there.”
“But not really closed. The gate was open, I believe you said? Door unlocked?”
She nodded. That was obviously what she’d said, both yesterday and today. “By closed up, I meant that the gallery had been cleaned out.”
“Miss Humphrey, is that your computer?” Shannon asked the question, but both of the detectives were eyeing the slim gray laptop that was open on her kitchen table. Her old dinosaur was closed on top of a bookcase in the living room, growing dusty since she’d starting carting around the newer one.
“Um, I guess not anymore. Drew gave it to me for the gallery. And for me to work from home. It served double duty, I guess you’d say.”
“So that laptop there’s the only computer you had in use at the gallery?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And when we asked you yesterday, and today, whether you knew the whereabouts of any of the property from the gallery, you didn’t think to mention the fact that you had the gallery’s computer in your personal possession?”
“No, I didn’t even think about the computer until you asked about it just now. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize—I mean, you’re welcome to have it. It’s not even mine, and I have no idea how to even give it back, or whom I’d give it to.”
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