by Konstantin
“You want more?” I asked. He nodded. When I returned, he was examining the book’s cover.
“I used to look at this thing all the time,” he said. “It was on Daddy’s desk.” He turned it over and ran his fingers over the torn dust jacket. “It’s really falling apart now.”
“You should get some sleep,” I said.
David ignored me, and turned the book over again, and opened the front cover. There was a bookplate pasted inside— a white rectangle, yellowed now, with a line drawing that was supposed to be the Widener Library. Printed across the bottom were the names Philip and Elaine March. Our parents.
He looked at me. “How’d you end up with this?”
“I’m not sure. I ended up with most of Dad’s books.”
He nodded vaguely and ran his fingers over the bookplate, over their names. “What was it with them, anyway?” he said.
“I don’t—”
“I mean, why stay together, if all you do is fight? Why get married in the first place, for chrissakes? And why have children, when you don’t have a single fucking clue of what to do with them— or any interest in finding out? You’d be better off on your own.”
Old questions, and I certainly had no answers. I shook my head. “You should get—”
“And what the hell were they looking for in their kids, anyway, that they could never seem to find in me? Did I not have the password, or something— the secret charm?” He looked up at me again, and his eyes were shining and angry. “How did that happen, Johnny? How is it that you got all the fucking glamour, and I got none?”
He took the glass and drank the water in one swallow, and a shudder ran through his shoulders. He squeezed his eyes shut and held his head in his hands. His skin went from white to gray, and I knew his world was spinning, and that he was fighting to hold on. I went to the kitchen and came back with a garbage pail. I took the book from David’s lap and held the pail while he retched.
By morning the storm had passed, and the city was a frosted fantasy of wind-carved snow and glistening ice, achingly bright under a lapis sky. Squinting out the windows at the GaudГ curves and spires, I forgot for a moment about David, who was in the shower, and had been for a long time.
“You think he’s drowning himself in there?” Clare asked. She wore yoga pants and a sleeveless T-shirt, and her hair was pulled into a loose ponytail. She looked maybe twenty.
“Feel free to check.”
She smirked. “I’ll give it another hour or so.”
We were eating oatmeal and watching news reports about the storm when David appeared. He was pale and drawn and wrapped in my bathrobe. His ginger hair was damp and roughly combed and his eyes were painful to look at. When he spoke his voice was hoarse but devoid of embarrassment.
“Where are my clothes?”
“In there.” I pointed to a black plastic garbage bag in a corner.
David walked over on brittle legs, and opened the bag and looked inside. He drew his head back quickly and closed the bag. “Shit,” he said. “You have something I can wear?”
I nodded and went into the bedroom and pulled a pair of jeans and a turtleneck from my closet. When I came out, David and Clare hadn’t moved, but were eyeing each other over the kitchen counter. The look was one I’d last seen exchanged on the Nature Channel, between jackals and lions over an antelope carcass. David took the clothes and went into the bathroom. Clare frowned.
“Friendly guy,” she said. “Very warm.”
“Always.”
“Not like you.”
“Don’t even joke.”
Clare laughed and kissed the corner of my mouth. “Not as cute, though.”
The news showed endless scenes of plowing and digging— snow from roads, cars from snow, people from cars— from D.C. north. In the city, the mayor, mindful of the storms that had permanently buried the careers of some of his predecessors, struck brave and resolute poses astride plow trucks and sanders, assured us that all was well, and pledged not to rest until asphalt was showing on every street in Queens. In fact, surface transportation was only just beginning to recover, though the people skiing down Fifth Avenue seemed in no rush to have it back.
David returned wearing my clothes, which were too long in the leg and too snug at the waist. He squatted by the black plastic bag and wrinkled his nose and began sorting through it. “Where the hell are my shoes?”
“They’re in there,” I said.
He pulled through the wet wreckage and came out with them and dropped them on the floor, disgusted. More clawing yielded his wallet, his watch, and his cell phone. He popped the phone open and pressed some keys and in a moment he was shouting.
“The roads are your problem, not mine. My problem is getting home— and unless you want to lose the Klein & Sons account, you’ll fucking solve it for me.”
Clare suppressed a laugh and looked at me, eyebrows raised. David pressed some more keys on his phone. When he spoke again his voice was a low monotone.
“I stayed with John. Yes, my brother John. He was walking distance, that’s why, and I couldn’t get a car. There were no taxis, Stephanie, and the trains were all screwed up. Why, you want to talk to him? I didn’t think so. How are things in New Canaan?”
He said his goodbyes and closed the phone and looked at me. “There any coffee?” he asked.
I poured a mug and handed it to him. Clare excused herself, shaking her head, and went into the bathroom and shut the door. In a moment, I heard water running.
“Who’s she?” David asked.
“A friend.”
David snickered. “I figured that out. She have a name?”
“Clare.”
He nodded. “Nice looking. I thought you were seeing that Chinese girl.”
“Not for a while now. Stephanie’s in New Canaan?”
“With her parents.”
“Is she…okay?”
David scowled. “She’s great. Is there more coffee?”
I refilled his mug. “And what about you?” I asked. “Are you great too?”
He squinted. “Don’t start with me, all right? I had a little too much on an empty stomach, and—”
“Enough bullshit, David. What the hell is wrong with you?”
“Nothing’s wrong. I didn’t have lunch yesterday, and I—”
“I’m not just talking about the drinking, or the wandering around in a storm. I’m talking about all of it— the Internet sex, not cooperating with your lawyer—”
“I slept on your fucking sofa one night; that doesn’t give you— you of all people— the right to lecture me.”
“Fine, don’t listen to me. But don’t waste my time, either.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means don’t ask people to help you when you won’t help yourself— when you’re actually making things worse.”
David’s pale face went red; he opened his mouth to shout, then shut it again. “Worse how?” he asked.
“Mike needs to know what’s what, and so do I. Surprises make our jobs harder, and, trust me, they’re already hard enough. You want your lawyer’s mind on solving your problems, David, not on wondering about what you haven’t told him and why.”
He tugged at his turtleneck collar. “Is that what this is about— you and Metz have doubts about me?” I looked at him and said nothing. “You son of a bitch, you think I did it.”
“I think you’re not being upfront with me, and I don’t know why.”
“I haven’t seen that girl in months,” he said. His voice was low and hoarse. “I had nothing to do with her death.”
I nodded. “How much does Stephanie know about…all this?”
David reddened again. “She knows…I guess she knows that I’ve seen other women. I…” His voice broke and he ran shaking hands through his hair. He took a deep breath. “That’s enough,” he said finally. “I’m not talking about this anymore.”
I started to speak, but the bathroom door opened and Cl
are came out. She looked at me and at David.
“Am I interrupting something?”
“Not a thing,” David said quickly. “I need to eat.”
I made him toast and he sat on the sofa, eating in silence and looking like a sick old man. Two hours later his car came. He slipped on his still-damp shoes, hoisted the black plastic bag, and left without a word.
“What the hell is his problem?” Clare asked, but I had no answer. She opened a window and let some icy air climb in.
* * *
Clare had finished the Warhol biography and had started another, this one of Diane Arbus. She sprawled on the sofa and read. I tried not to think too hard about my brother, and opened my laptop instead.
The phone number J.T. had given me for Jamie Coyle was answered only by a synthetic voice and an out-of-service message, and I found no corresponding billing address for it in any of the reverse directories on-line. The post office box had a zip code in Peekskill, New York, and it too did me little immediate good. J.T. had told me that Coyle had done time in Coxsackie, so I plugged his name into the always helpful New York State Department of Correctional Services inmate search, and got lucky.
According to the DOCS database, Jamie Coyle, d-o-b August 11,
1979— the only Jamie Coyle in the system— had been convicted of Assault II, a class D felony, and had been sentenced to no less than two and no more than five years in prison. He’d spent three years in Coxsackie and was paroled a year ago, and he’d behaved well enough for the next ten months to have been discharged from parole, free and clear, last November.
Googling him yielded little— an article in a Westchester newspaper about his arrest, and another, a few weeks later, when he pleaded out. The arrest piece played up a local-hero-gone-bad angle, and squeezed some pathos out of Coyle having been a high school football star and Golden Gloves champ who’d fallen in with a bad crowd after blowing out his knee in the last game of his senior year season. The bad crowd belonged to a local loanshark for whom Coyle had become a collector, and Coyle’s arrest was apparently the result of some vigorous debt rescheduling with the owner of a Peekskill video store. Skull fracture, facial lacerations, fractured jaw, detached retina, and fractured ribs— with that list of injuries, I was surprised that Coyle had only gone for Assault II. Good lawyering. I took down the details and the name of the reporter who’d written the pieces.
Clare sighed massively and put down her book. She stretched and walked to the window and looked down at Sixteenth Street.
“I want to go for a walk before they plow it all away. You want to come?”
I was surprised: Clare was usually very careful about us and public places. Maybe the storm had swept away her caution. I nodded. “Let me just call this guy again,” I said. “I’ve been trying to reach him for days.” Clare pulled on a sweater and I pushed the buttons for Gene Werner’s number yet again. And was stunned when he actually answered.
21
I wrong-numbered Gene Werner, pulled on boots, coat, and sunglasses, and made my apologies to Clare, who took them stoically. In fifteen minutes I was at the subway station, where the subway gods were kind, and in thirty minutes more I was climbing the snow-covered stairs at the 110th Street station.
Werner’s block was a mess, barely plowed and badly shoveled, with only the narrow path of other people’s footprints to walk in. I saw no sign of Jamie Coyle, which didn’t mean he wasn’t hiding in a drift. I stamped my boots at the door to Werner’s building, brushed snow from my legs, and pushed his intercom button. His newscaster voice was tinny through the speaker.
“Who is it?”
“It’s John March, Gene— the guy who’s been leaving you messages for what seems like forever.” Silence. “Gene, I’m getting cold out here.”
“You’re who?”
“John March. I left you phone messages. Several of them.”
“And you want…?”
“To talk about Holly.” More silence. “Holly Cade.”
“What about her?”
“How about I tell you indoors, Gene?”
The buzzer sounded, and I walked up to the second floor. Werner was in the hall outside his apartment. He wore jeans and a black checked shirt, and he pulled the apartment door shut behind him.
He looked much as he did in the snapshots, though the straight, dark hair was shorter now— just long enough for a stubby queue— and the goatee was trimmed to little more than a stripe down the center of his square chin. The handsome face was leaner too, and there was a vulpine cast to his dark eyes that the camera hadn’t caught, and a cruel stamp to his mouth. Neither had the camera caught the aura of snaky strength that surrounded Werner. He was a sinewy six-three, lithe despite his size, and there was something coiled and nasty about him that made the hallway seem dangerous and too small. Werner pushed his sleeves up over muscular, hairless forearms.
“I didn’t think anyone would be out today,” he said, and made it a question about my judgment. I ignored it and we shook. His grip was strong and rubbery. He looked me over and shook his head. “Been too busy to call you back. Now, what did you want about Holly?”
“I have some questions, and it’s probably better if we talk inside.”
“What questions? I haven’t seen her in a long time.”
“That was one of the things I wanted to talk about. I’m trying to locate Holly.”
“Locate?”
“I don’t think you want to discuss this in the hall, Gene— unless there’s some problem with going inside.”
Werner squinted at me. “Whatever.” He dug a key from his pocket and I followed him in.
We walked into a tiny foyer, and from there into the living room. It was a high-ceilinged space, with white plaster walls, dark wood molding, and a scuffed wooden floor, and there was a bay window at one end, flooded with white light.
The furnishings were spare and thrift-shop chic— soft and faded, but still solid-looking. Green sofa, brown easy chairs, tables in dark, battered cherry, oak bookshelves stacked with plays. The artwork was mostly framed posters, big reproductions of French and Italian advertisements from the 1920s, with stylish devils and sultry fairies perched over giant coffee cups or lounging on bars of soap. The only other pieces on the walls were a half-dozen framed photographs— white-clad, mesh-masked, sword-wielding figures, leaping and lunging: fencers in mid-duel. A look at the newspaper clippings mounted with each photo revealed that the big guy in the pictures was Werner himself, ten years before— the star, apparently, of his college fencing team.
Werner stalked around the room, watching warily as I eyed the photos, took off my coat, and opened my notebook. When I sat on the sofa, he struck a graceful pose near the fireplace. He leaned an elbow on the dark wood mantel and looked into the mirror above and absently groomed his beard. When he was satisfied, he tossed a thumb at the photos.
“Hell of a sport,” he said. “Incredible physical conditioning, and great training for the theater. And there’s nothing like competition to let you know where your balls are.”
I didn’t recall ever misplacing mine, but I resisted the urge to comment. “About Holly,” I said.
“She’s missing?”
“My client has been trying to reach her for some time.”
“Are you working with the cops?”
I paused half a beat. “Not yet.”
“Why not? If she’s missing…”
“From what I gather, Holly is sensitive about her privacy. My client wants to respect that.”
“And this client is…?”
“Someone who’s concerned about her.”
“But not someone you’ll name?”
“Confidentiality is part of what clients pay for.”
Werner shook his head. “I can’t help. I told you, I haven’t seen her in a while.”
“But you’ve known her awhile— a long while. Since your days with the Gimlets, at least.”
“Yeah…and?”
I smiled e
ncouragingly. “And you’re bound to know plenty of things that I don’t.” Werner shrugged and I pressed on. “Did you stay in the theater after the Gimlets broke up?”
He nodded, and smiled back, happy for the chance to talk about himself. “I’m directing, and the days of scrambling to find a stage and an audience seem like a long time ago. Now I’ve got more work than I can handle. I’m at the end of a run of one-acts, and next month I’m doing Hamlet downtown. Come spring, I’m doing Mamet up in Connecticut, and I’ve got a big project in Williamstown scheduled for summer. Not enough hours in the fucking day.” He looked in the mirror and ran a finger over his eyebrow.
