by M. J. Rose
But that didn’t make it any easier for me to accept when it came to my own daughter. At thirteen, her secrets might still be innocent and harmless, but with each piece of knowledge that she hid from me, afraid that I would not understand it or that I would interfere, she moved farther away from me. She was at the age when the chasms appeared. And I knew, because I had counseled patients about this—about how important it was to love your child for who she was, for who he was, to not be disappointed about whom your child didn’t turn into. That the best a parent could do was to listen, be sensitive, not give up. But when it came to my daughter, following my own advice was far more difficult than I’d imagined.
The orchestra played the first notes of the finale. Dulcie found her position. She finished her line, took a breath, segued into her last song of the evening. Her voice, like liquid gold, poured into the cavity of the theater. The richness of it, the purity of it, melded with the orchestra and rode just on top of the music, merging but never getting lost. She carried the song for the first twelve stanzas and then was joined by the others.
When the song ended, the notes and the voices died out, and all that was left was the reverberation in the air. Finally that, too, was gone. Silence held for ten, fifteen seconds and cracked open as the applause swelled. I joined in, more excited than I thought I could be, more moved than I wanted to be, more caught up in Dulcie’s moment—and feeling her excitement—than I was prepared to be.
Feeling her happiness should have pleased me. It would have had I not also realized that standing up there made my thirteen-year-old so much happier than anything else in her life had. I recognized the look in her eyes as she took her bow. I’d seen it before.
I knew better than to merge them like this. My mother. My daughter. They were two separate beings. Thirty years separated the last time I had seen my mother and tonight when I was seeing my daughter.
How could I begrudge Dulcie adulation because of my failing and my insecurity?
Mitch told me I was too protective of our daughter. So did Nina. But when I was in that state between sleep and wakefulness, when I talked to my mother in my head, she told me that I was right. That Dulcie was too young. That I needed to keep my daughter from the things no one had kept her from.
After the crowd thinned, I walked down the center aisle and onto the stage and then behind the curtain and into the wings. I knocked on my daughter’s dressing room door and waited to hear her response.
No answer.
I knocked again.
Maybe she was in the bathroom. I opened the dressing room door and then instantly regretted doing that. She wasn’t a baby anymore. I couldn’t barge in on her.
“Dulcie? I’m sorry. I knocked, but—”
She wasn’t there.
I walked over to the small bathroom. The door was shut. I knocked. No answer. I knocked again. Still no answer. This wasn’t like her. Even when she was angry, she responded, her voice dripping with her effort at adult fury.
Finally, I tried the door. It wasn’t locked. The bathroom was empty.
She must have gone into someone else’s dressing room; I’d sit down and wait. Normally, she didn’t linger when the play was over. None of the kids did. They were tired and hungry and had been with one another all day. But that didn’t mean it never happened.
After a few minutes more of waiting, I went out into the hall to search for her. The car and driver the theater arranged for every night would be outside waiting and it was getting late and God knows how much more snow had fallen while I’d been inside and how bad the traffic on Broadway would be.
I asked everyone I ran into, but no one had seen her since the last curtain call.
Finally, I found Raul, the director, talking on his cell phone by the back door. At first he didn’t get off the phone, but when I didn’t politely go away, he cut the call short.
“Something wrong?”
“Have you seen Dulcie? I can’t find her.”
“Not since the last curtain call. Did you check in the car?” He’d suggested the most logical place, and as I went back into the dressing room to grab my coat, I felt foolish. Of course. She didn’t know I had been in the audience. I didn’t always come inside. Dulcie had probably been in such a hurry to get home that she’d raced out of the dressing room and was waiting for me, wondering where I was.
Forty-One
The black town car was not where it always was.
I looked across the street.
No, it wasn’t there, either.
The panic started deep in my chest.
I ran as fast as I could in the snow, twenty yards up the street, then backtracked in the other direction.
No car.
A rush of adrenaline set my heart racing and I stood there in the freezing cold, trying to figure out what I was supposed to do first. And then I thought of the phone. I called Dulcie’s cell, and while I waited for her to answer, I tried to imagine her voice, curling at the edges with her smile, calling me Dr. Worry and clearing up the mystery of where she was with one simple sentence.
“Hi—”
“Dulcie where the hell—”
She was still talking. Damn it. It wasn’t her, it was her message, saying she wasn’t available.
“Dulcie? Where are you? Call me. I’m worried. Raul didn’t see you leave. I didn’t—” It was pointless to keep talking. What if something was wrong? What if—
I couldn’t think. The wind was blowing and the snow was getting in my eyes. My coat was open and I was starting to shiver.
What the hell should I do?
Dulcie was old enough to take the car service home on her own but either Mitch or I usually met her. We didn’t want her to be alone after a performance. It was a good time for us to talk, to find out how her day went, to reconnect. If one of us couldn’t be there, she could take the car by herself. But I’d told her I’d be there that night.
I stared at the phone, glowing blue and green in the dark. Call 911. Tell them— No, I could do better than that. I punched in Noah’s cell phone number. He answered quickly, listened to me, and then asked me for the name of the car service.
“Hold on, Morgan.”
I could hear him dialing another phone in the background and then he was back. “Hold on, Morgan, we’re calling the driver.”
Now I felt stupid on top of worried. Why hadn’t I thought to call the car service? Why hadn’t I—
“Morgan, she’s fine. The car service just dropped her off at home.”
I couldn’t say anything right away. The relief was overwhelming. Then I thanked him, told him I’d call him later, and dialed Dulcie’s number at home.
This time when the machine answered, I was angry. She was avoiding my call, acting out because of the audition.
“Call me back. Now.”
The bright neon signs and twinkling marquee lights were muted by the snow. Cars moved as if their drivers were unsure of what was happening beyond the windshield. A hush had come over the city. Winter storms mute Manhattan as nothing else can.
I pulled on my gloves, held the cell phone and walked west, figuring eventually I’d find a cab or get to a bus.
On the corner, a homeless man was huddled in the entranceway to a dark and boarded-up theater. All but one section of the theater’s neon sign was covered with snow, but the wind had blown in such a way that a single pink leg wearing a red shoe was exposed. On another night, I’d stop and try to talk him into going to a shelter, but I needed to get home.
I’d gone five blocks without hearing from my daughter. Stepping into the entrance of a busy and well-lit Japanese restaurant, I shook the snow off my hair and dialed the doorman of our building.
“Good evening, Doc. I hope you’re on your way home. It’s nasty out there.”
“I am. But listen, Gus, I’ve been calling Dulcie and she isn’t answering. How long ago did she get home?”
“I haven’t seen her, Doc.”
“How long have you been there?�
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“I’ve been on duty since six.”
“But the driver said he had dropped her off at home.”
Gus was talking but what he was saying didn’t register. I ended the call and quickly punched in my ex-husband’s phone number.
My daughter had gone home, Noah had said.
Dulcie had two homes.
Damn. How could I have been so stupid?
“Mitch, it’s me. Is Dulcie there?”
“Yeah, didn’t she tell you she was coming back here tonight?”
“No.” I knew I was yelling into the phone—the patrons at the bar of the restaurant were staring at me.
“She left the theater without telling me. You can’t imagine how worried I’ve been, calling everyone—including the police. What the fuck is going on? Is this about that damn television show?”
“I think you’d better come over,” he said.
“First tell me, is she all right?”
“She’s not sick or hurt. She’s fine. But it might be better if—”
“I’ll be there as soon as I can. There are no cabs. I’m walking,” I said, and hung up.
A young man and woman were standing out in the street, just standing there, two faces looking up at the sky, letting the soft flakes fall on them, mystified and amazed by the storm.
I was mystified by the storm, too: the one going on within my family.
Forty-Two
“That’s impossible,” Alan Leightman said to his doorman through the intercom.
“Sorry, Judge. But I’m looking at their badges.”
“Okay, Jimmy, send them up.”
He stood in his hallway waiting for the elevator to stop on his floor. He was a New York City Supreme Court judge. The police treated him with respect. They certainly didn’t show up at his home at eleven at night unannounced. But apparently that’s exactly what they were doing.
Watching the numbers light up, charting the detectives’ progress, he tried to imagine what had brought them here at this time of night.
Someone he was responsible for putting in jail must have been released. He would listen, nod, reassure the detectives that he was not only careful but was well guarded both in his luxury apartment on upper Fifth Avenue and in his downtown office. The city in the post-September 11th world did not take the safety of its officials lightly.
The elevator door opened and two men stepped off, their coats still flecked with snow. Alan nodded to them as they stood there stamping the last of the slush off their boots. He recognized both of them, welcomed them, and then ushered them inside.
He liked to watch people come into the apartment. Despite his high-profile job, it was his wife’s salary that paid for them to live floating above the city. No one was unimpressed by the floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over Central Park. At night, the view crept up on you, seduced you, pulled at you. The sparkling lights from thousands of apartments across the park, on the West Side, looked like stars.
Leightman led the detectives into his den and motioned to the seating area. Detectives Jordain and Perez sat down side by side on a couch. The judge took a chair facing them. A coffee table piled with papers and leather-bound books separated them.
“Would either of you like a drink? Coffee? A cigar?”
“I wouldn’t mind some coffee,” Perez said as he rubbed his hands together, warming them up.
Leightman nodded and looked at Jordain. “And you, Detective?”
“Sure, if it’s not too much trouble.”
“None at all. I just hope you’re not here about something that’s going to be too much trouble.” He chuckled.
“It may be, Judge.”
Forty-Three
Waiting for Leightman to return with the coffee, Jordain looked around the room, taking in the two walls of fine walnut bookcases.
“How many books would you guess there are in here?” Perez asked, following his gaze.
“More than you could ever read in a lifetime, my friend.”
Perez gave him a sideways glance.
“Okay, I’m underestimating you. About three thousand more than you could read.”
“That leaves how many that you think I could read?”
“Maybe ten.”
The sideways glance now included arched eyebrows. Perez was famous for looks that spoke volumes. Jordain laughed quietly. “That one I deserved.”
The judge came back with a silver tray that Jordain recognized as the classic Georg Jensen acorn pattern that had enjoyed huge popularity more than fifty years earlier. The teaspoons, sugar spoon and coffee service belonged to the same pattern. He wasn’t surprised. Not everyone could incorporate this kind of style into their lives, but in apartments like this, it was almost expected.
“It’s a little late for a social call,” Leightman said as he poured the coffee. “So I’m assuming this is urgent.”
“Urgent and a little uncomfortable, I’m afraid,” Jordain said as he took the fine bone china cup. Bringing it up to his lips, he tasted the steaming liquid, and over the gold rim, watched Leightman’s reaction: There was curiosity and concern but no panic, no looking away, no discomfort.
“Judge Leightman, is your e-mail bob205 at standard dot com?” Jordain asked.
Leightman hesitated. He only used that e-mail for accessing porn sites; how did they know about it? Why were they asking? For a moment, he ran through possible reasons to hold back this early in the conversation. Could they find out what his e-mail address was if he didn’t admit it? What would they think if he refused to discuss it?
“One of them, yes.”
Jordain and Perez didn’t look at each other, but a muscle in Jordain’s jaw throbbed and Perez nodded almost imperceptibly.
“We have e-mail that was sent from you to a woman named Penny Whistle, and e-mail that was sent from you to another woman named ZaZa, no last name. We retrieved both pieces of e-mail off the women’s hard drives.” As Jordain spoke, he watched the judge take in this new information. First, Leightman’s face expressed recognition. Next, relief, which was confounding. And finally confusion.
“You have e-mail sent by me to these two women?”
Before either detective answered, Leightman stood and walked away from the detectives, over to his desk, where a silver laptop sat open. He put his hand on the computer top and lowered it.
“Yes,” Jordain responded, the one word drawn out and definitive.
The judge stood eight feet away from them, looking down on them with a disdain that had not been in his eyes when he answered the door. “What do you want?”
“Do you know who these women are?” It was Perez’s turn to take over the questioning.
“Can you explain precisely why you have come to my home, in the dead of night, to question me about this?” Leightman asked.
“Because these women are dead and because there is e-mail on their computers from you to them.”
“Why is that relevant? There must be a lot of mail in those women’s computers.”
“The nature of the e-mail suggests that the person who sent it was involved with the women’s deaths.”
The judge opened and closed his mouth like a fish gasping for air, and then he regained his composure. “Someone is setting me up. Do you realize how many people know my e-mail address? This is clearly something you need to investigate, and I commend you for coming to me first, but I have nothing to do with this.”
“Judge Leightman, it will save us a lot of time and you a lot of embarrassment if you talk to us now—”
“No,” the judge interrupted Jordain. “I’d like you to leave. Immediately. I’ve never been so outraged in my life. How dare you come here and question me like this. You know how easy computer fraud is?” Leightman was whispering his shouts, so while they were not loud, they were resonant with fury.
“We’re going to need to take your computer with us,” Jordain said.
“Absolutely not. You won’t invade my privacy for some wild-goose chase.
Now, please, get out. Tomorrow morning you can call my office and my secretary will give you the name of my lawyer and his phone number and you can pursue this travesty through him.”
“Judge, I’m sorry. I’m very sorry. But we have a search warrant. We need your computer.” Jordain watched the judge’s eyes narrow and his lips purse into one thin line. A vein throbbed in his neck.
Jordain felt sick to his stomach. He hated doing this to a guy who had a reputation of being a fair judge.
“I’d like to see the warrant.”
Perez walked across the room and handed it to him.
For the next sixty seconds, Leightman read every single line as if he had never seen a court order before. “So. Larry Rosen signed this.” Leightman laughed viciously. “He must have loved that. Well, you can arrest me and put me in jail and deal with the repercussions, but I am not letting you take my computer with you no matter what kind of paperwork you have.”
Jordain and Perez had talked about the possibility of the judge pulling rank and flat out refusing.
If he was guilty, they’d figured he’d do something exactly like that. They had no choice but to insist. If they didn’t take the computer, the judge could easily erase his files or destroy the hard drive overnight. They couldn’t allow that to happen. Two young women had died. A third was still in the hospital. The only thing that they had in common was mail from a man whose e-mail address had been traced back to Alan Leightman. In both e-mails, he asked that the women use the gifts he’d sent. The gifts that had killed them.
Jordain nodded at Perez, who moved to the desk. Leightman lunged. They were well matched. Jordain ran over, pulled out his handcuffs and rushed the judge before he and Perez could hurt each other. The sound of the metal clicking shut stopped Leightman. He looked down, real horror on his face. “What the fuck are you—”
“I really don’t want to do this. But I will arrest you if you interfere with us taking your computer.” Jordain was thinking about the bodies, about the description of what the poisons had done to the women’s insides. He knew how tortured their last hours had been. How ill Tania still was.
