Dexter put on a Dodgers ball cap and dark sunglasses, the same he had worn on the flight from New York, then took the stairs down to his rental car. There was a long day ahead and he had some shopping to do.
* * *
Whitney Greene might have been Ellen’s friend but I had never seen her before. She was very attractive but up close she was clearly much older than the mid-thirties I had guessed. Mid-forties was more likely. I could tell she had probably been a stunner in her day. She still had the body but her curves had started going soft.
The church was quiet. Whitney avoided eye contact. I left space enough for two people between us on the pew so she wouldn’t feel threatened.
“How do you know Ellen?” I asked.
“I’ve known her all her life. I was close friends with her mother.”
“She has never mentioned her mother to me. Nothing about her parents. Are they alive?”
She continued to face the front of the church, not yet acknowledging me with eye contact. “Her mother died years ago,” she said.
“Is her father around?”
“He has never been a part of her life.”
“That makes sense.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Ellen has a touch of wild child in her, and I’d say that’s common of a kid growing up without a strong parental presence in her life.”
Whitney nodded. “True enough.”
“What happened to her mother?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“So why are you here? Why were you following me?”
“I’m worried about her.”
“Why?”
“I haven’t heard from her in a few days.”
“Should that be a reason to worry?”
She hesitated a beat, knitting her fingers together on her lap, and stared down at her hands.
“Ellen and I are very close.”
“I’m surprised she never mentioned you.”
“I’m not.”
“I don’t understand.”
“She and I have a very deep, special relationship.”
“Do you live here in the city?”
“No.”
“OK, why are you here?”
“Because I fear something has happened to her.”
“Do you know about her car?”
At last she glanced at me, her eyes full of questions. Her eyes were a blazing shade of green.
“What about her car?” she asked.
“The police found it abandoned in New Jersey. Someone had burned it. There’s not much left of it.”
I watched the color drain from her face.
“Did they find Ellen?” she asked.
“No, only the car.”
Light from the candles made shadows dance on Whitney’s face. There was water on the wooden pew from her umbrella. I heard movement behind us and turned to see an elderly woman rise from her seat and hobble toward the exit at the rear of the church. The church could have easily been two hundred years old. It smelled of decades past. I saw a clergyman moving in the shadows beyond an open door, and a moment later he was gone. Surely a billion prayers had been uttered within these walls.
“Have you spoken to her?” Whitney asked. Her voice was hushed.
“I can’t recall our last conversation but its been at least a couple days.”
“I know you’ve been dating about a year.”
“That’s true. Has Ellen spoken to you about me?”
“Yes, she thinks you’re a great guy.”
“Good to know, I guess.”
“Do you love her?”
“I’m fond of her.”
“Is that the same as love?”
“I don’t know how to answer that, but I’m not here to answer questions about the depth of my relationship with Ellen.”
“Fair enough, I suppose,” she said.
“Yesterday morning I received an email from her. This was after learning about her car. She said she was fine and not to worry.”
Whitney pivoted to face me. “That’s spooky.”
“What do you think has happened?”
Her eyes studied me. She was choosing her words carefully.
“There are things you don’t know about Ellen,” she said.
“Like what?”
“I must be careful what I say because I don’t yet know if I can trust you.”
“Does Ellen trust me?”
“I believe so.”
“So maybe you can too.”
“There are things you might not want to know about her.”
“Let me be the judge of that,” I replied.
“She has secrets, Mr. Cortland.”
“Don’t we all?”
I could sense hesitation, and for a moment her gaze drifted past my shoulder to shadows on one side of the church.
“You are not the only man in her life, Mr. Cortland.”
My heart skipped a beat.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“She has been sleeping with someone else.”
The words were like a bucket of ice poured on my head. It felt like I had simultaneously been kicked in the gut and had a knife plunged deep into my back. I hadn’t been prepared for what she would say. My mouth instantly went dry. I tried to breathe but for a long moment my body ceased to function properly.
Should I really have been shocked? Part of me understood on some subconscious level that Ellen was not the type of woman who could ever remain faithful to one man. She was a woman of appetites. That was a major part of what had drawn me to her. She was too young for me, a fact I had known but refused to acknowledge from the beginning. She had twice the energy, but there was a dark side to her. Again, that was part of the attraction.
Whitney knew she had dropped a bomb on me. I was blown away.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
I searched for words. The tumblers in my brain were spinning out of control. My imagination instantly began generating images of Ellen riding this faceless man in bed, grinding into him as she had done to me so many times, driving him mad with desire. Then I watched as she collapsed on him, their naked bodies pressed together, glistening with sweat from an hours-long session of lovemaking.
I wanted to claw my eyes out.
“Who is he?” I asked through gritted teeth, trying but failing to keep the edge out of my voice. I could barely breathe.
“I don’t think you want to know.”
“Tell me.”
She relaxed in the pew, her eyes again focused casually on the arraignment of candles, the flames dancing and flickering.
“How well would you say you know Ellen?” she asked.
I shrugged. “We’ve been dating a year. We’ve talked a lot. I’d say I know her rather well.”
“Yet you didn’t know about her parents.”
“I don’t remember asking her about them.”
“Why wouldn’t you?”
“I’m not close to my parents, so maybe it’s just not of big importance to me.”
“Sounds to me like all the ingredients needed for a toxic relationship. Two broken people with parent issues.”
“I’ve never had parent issues. We were just never close.”
“Let’s stay on topic. What do you think you know about her?”
“Are you telling me she has secrets?”
“Like you said, we all have secrets, Nick.”
“True enough, but you are here for a reason.”
“Yes.”
“What are you not telling me?”
“How did the two of you meet?”
“Huh? How do any two people meet?”
“Did you approach her?”
I sat back, folded my arms over my chest, and scrunched my forehead. It seemed like an odd question. I rolled it through my brain.
“Sure. Yeah. Of course.”
“Think about it, Nick.”
I went back a year, scrolling through my memory to the moment Ellen a
nd I first met. It was murky at best. Most of our relationship had been a blur. Things had developed very quickly between us. Ellen hadn’t been one to take things slowly, and I found her exciting enough that I happily went with the flow. My job is very stressful and pressure-filled, and Ellen represented a welcome distraction. She had a way of taking my mind off things.
My eyes drifted to the dramatic pitch of the ceiling above us as I searched my memory, piecing together the flow of events that had first caused our lives to intersect.
“We met in a bar,” I said, barely above a whisper.
“So you saw her seated at a table and introduced yourself?” Whitney asked.
I blinked, watching shadows from candlelight move along the rafters overhead. “No,” I said. “I was standing at the bar, talking to friends. Watching football. It was Monday night football on ESPN. I’m a huge sports fan. Then suddenly, I was aware of someone seated on the stool beside me. She bumped me and apologized. I remember she smelled amazing, and she looked so incredibly sexy. It was lust at first sight, you know? She just immediately started conversation with me as if we had known each other forever. Right in that moment I essentially forgot about the game.”
“Cute. Romantic. Sounds like a moment straight out of a Nicholas Sparks novel.”
“What are you getting at? What’s your point?”
“She picked you.”
“What is that supposed to mean? She bumped into me at the bar and we struck up a conversation. Happens everyday in every bar on the planet.”
“Sorry, wrong. Ellen knew everything about you before she set foot inside that bar.”
I was taken aback by the notion.
“I don’t understand.”
“Ellen walked into that bar because she knew you’d be there. In fact, she followed you there. There was nothing serendipitous about it. If you had walked into the next place down the block, then that’s where it would’ve happened. She had been patient and waited to make her move. We planned it together, Nick. Both of us have known everything about you for a long time.”
The room seemed to spin. I leaned forward and gripped the front edge of the wooden pew with both hands. None of the story she was filling my ears with made any sense. From the sound of it, she was only getting started.
“Who…are…you?” I manage to ask.
“Like I said before, a friend of Ellen’s.”
“Why would Ellen have been stalking me?”
“That’s the thing, Nick. This isn’t really about you. It never was. You were really just a convenient bystander.”
“Convenient bystander?”
“Sorry.”
“I want to know who she is sleeping with?”
“I’m sure you do, Nick. But a word of warning, this won’t be easy for you to digest,” she said.
“Tell me.”
“OK,” she said. “Given the circumstances, I guess you deserve to know the truth.”
“What is the truth?” I asked, the edge returning to my voice.
She looked at me with eyes filled with warmth and sincerity.
“Ellen was having an affair with Terry Burgess,” she said.
CHAPTER 21
Carmen Burgess’s flight was twenty minutes late and that turned out to be lucky for me because I was fifteen minutes late getting to the airport. She didn’t say anything when she saw me. Her face was blank. She looked about as dazed and in shock as I felt. She wore big dark Gucci sunglasses but it was obvious she had been crying. The flight from Australia would have been a long time to hang in the sky and think about the loss of her husband.
I loaded her bags into the trunk of my Mercedes. The drive back into Manhattan was mostly in silence.
“I don’t know what to say,” I muttered truthfully. Whitney Greene’s words were still ringing in my ears, and as much as I tried I simply couldn’t banish the vision of Terry and Ellen in bed together from my mind. Clearly I had been a fool. I had trusted the wrong two people and both had betrayed me. I also found a macabre fascination in the fact that Terry was now dead and Ellen was missing. Could there be a connection? It seemed unlikely given that Terry had simply drowned in his own bathtub, but still it seemed like an absurd coincidence. If Ellen was indeed fine, as her email had declared, what had happened to her car and why had she not made more of an effort to contact anyone in the past twenty-four hours?
“I really did love him, you know,” she said, apparently feeling the need to convince me. I decided to keep my mouth shut and simply listen. She stared out the window at the urban landscape rolling by, arms folded over her chest. Carmen was a beautiful woman even though she worked very hard at being as unpleasant as possible. Terry had told me a thousand times that sex between them had always been intense, but that was the only emotional adhesive binding them together. The relationship had lacked any form of healthy communication. As I drove I stole a few glances and waited for her to say more, and watched as she struggled to express anything resembling the kind of authentic emotion that a loving wife might express at the sudden tragic loss of her husband.
I felt her eyes on me for a moment but kept mine on the road.
“We had a complicated relationship, Nick,” she continued. “Not everyone understood it, but it worked. We loved each other very much. We were passionate. I know how it must have looked from the outside but that was nobody’s business.”
O-kay, I thought.
“The two of you were as thick as thieves,” she said, glancing at me. “You were his best friend, and I have to be honest and say I was jealous of that.”
“I’m sorry, Carmen,” I offered.
“Why apologize?” she asked. “I’m not taking anything away from your friendship. I loved the autonomy that our relationship afforded me. I came and went as I pleased and did as I pleased. I’ve always had complete freedom, both emotionally and financially. I suppose I chose to not spend a minute more with my husband than was needed or required, but that was fine with both of us. I’m willing to acknowledge there is still a part of me that deep down has always longed to experience a truly intimate relationship with my spouse. Maybe that sounds ridiculous but it’s the truth and so I don’t care.”
“It doesn’t sound ridiculous at all, Carmen.”
“Whatever.”
“What I hear you saying sounds perfectly legitimate and healthy to me.”
She chortled, like I had said something absurd. “Nothing about me and Terry could be classified as healthy.”
“I only meant the desire you described.”
“Whatever,” she said again, using the word like punctuation.
We passed through the Midtown Tunnel and followed a sluggish ribbon of traffic up Broadway to the Upper West Side and stopped in front of her building. I hauled her bags out of the trunk and followed her inside. There was no sign of Herb, so I figured he had seen us coming and decided to avoid an awkward interaction with Terry’s widow. Carmen held the elevator for me and we rode up together. She paused at the apartment door for a long moment, key in hand, while I stood a step behind her and held the luggage.
“Where did they find him?” she asked when we were inside.
“The tub in the master bath,” I said, confident that I had already conveyed all the major details but understanding that most of what I had initially told her had probably been washed away by the wave of emotion during those first few hours after learning of Terry’s death.
She placed her purse on the kitchen counter and said, “Wait here.”
She returned to the kitchen ten minutes later and poured herself a glass of vodka. She drained the glass in two or three gulps and quickly refilled it.
“Maybe it would be a good idea to slow down on that,” I said.
“Mind your own business,” she snapped.
I stood with my back to the Sub Zero refrigerator and watched her intoxicate herself. I shoved my hands in my pockets and stared down at my shoes. My eyes drifted across the tile floor to the wood trim along the base
of the island that divided the room. There was something on the floor in the shadow of the island. Just a small, square shape. Something had fallen on the floor. I took two steps forward and squatted to pick the something up. It was a book of matches. It was black with a red logo printed on both sides. The logo was a small crescent moon followed by the word Dusk. I opened the flap and saw an address printed on the underside in the same red font. Only three or four matches had been torn out.
I pocketed the matchbook and saw that Carmen had taken a seat on the kitchen floor. I knelt beside her and touched her hand.
“It might be a good idea to stay at a hotel tonight,” I said.
She shook her head. The vodka bottle was on the tile beside her. She had dismissed the need for a glass and opted for the bottle. She still had the Gucci sunglasses on. Her face was pale. “Just leave me alone,” she slurred.
“I’m thinking that might not be the wisest idea,” I countered.
“Don’t treat me like a child.”
“Let me get you a room.”
“No.”
I set the bottle on the counter above her head. “Try to cool it on the booze,” I said.
“He cheated on me with every woman in this city,” she said, slurring badly. “He didn’t think I knew but I knew.”
I buried my hands in my pockets again, but didn’t make any attempt at defending Terry. Again I flashed on the image of him in bed with Ellen and suddenly felt the impulse to tip the bottle of vodka and join Carmen in drowning out the misery.
“He was sloppy at covering his tracks,” she said. “He left evidence everywhere. Maybe he believed I was too dumb to notice. Traces of lipstick and perfume. I even found a pair of thong panties stuffed way down in the sheets. They were tiny. My fat ass would have never fit into those damn things.” She raised an arm over her head, snapping her fingers.
I reluctantly handed the bottle down.
She tipped it to her lips and closed her eyes.
“You knew about the women, Nick. You had to have.”
I didn’t reply.
Then she grinned like a Cheshire cat. “That’s okay, I had plenty of revenge sex. I have quite an appetite myself.”
“You’re drunk.”
“Good.”
“You might regret what you’re saying when you sober up.”
Dead and Gone (A Thriller) Page 10
