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by Konstantin

  I took a deep breath. “Tell me about that Tuesday,” I said.

  “Which Tuesday?”

  “Three weeks ago yesterday. It would’ve been the Tuesday after you saw Holly— the day before you saw David and me at breakfast. Take me through that day.”

  And, with starts and stops and stumbling, she did. Like David, she’d spent much of that day downtown— in and out of her office, at meetings, and on conference calls. And as with David, it was her after-work hours that were more difficult to account for. Presumably, there were people from her yoga class who could testify to her presence there, but would the clerks in the shops on upper Madison recall her— another well-dressed woman who’d browsed but hadn’t bought? Would they swear to it in court? And then there was her trip to the movies.

  “I walked down to Seventy-second and Third. I was supposed to meet Bibi Shea, but I wasn’t in the mood, so I called her and canceled.”

  “So you were by yourself at the movies?”

  “I didn’t feel like talking.” Shit.

  “You walked there?” Nod. “It was a cold night.”

  “I wanted the air.”

  “Did you pay cash for the ticket?” Another nod. “What was the film?” Stephanie told me the name, and the time she thought the show had started, and the time it had gotten out. She didn’t remember the previews. “Did you see anyone you knew?”

  “No.”

  “What was David doing all that time?”

  “As far as I know, he was home. He was here when I left, and here when I got back, asleep— or passed out.”

  I paged through my notebook and ran her through the dates and times once more. Then I looked up.

  “Besides her questions, what else did Holly say?”

  She shook her head. “You asked me that already, and I told you— she didn’t say anything.”

  “She didn’t tell you anything?”

  Stephanie shook her head impatiently. “No.”

  I took a deep breath. “She didn’t tell you she was pregnant?”

  Stephanie’s brows came together and her lips pursed. “No,” she said after a while.

  “The police dropped that on us yesterday. David didn’t mention it?”

  Stephanie touched her fingers to her neck. Her smile surprised me. “It must’ve slipped his mind,” she said, and she chuckled bitterly.

  “They want to know if he could be the father. And I imagine they’re wondering how you would’ve reacted to that news.”

  “Did David have an answer?”

  “He said it wasn’t his, and that if Holly had said so, you wouldn’t have believed it.”

  “He wasn’t lying about that; I wouldn’t have believed it.”

  “Because he’s sterile?”

  Stephanie’s brow went up and she nodded slowly at me. “It’s not the word the doctors used, but it amounts to the same thing. His sperm count is low, and the few that he has don’t swim, and they die if you look at them funny. He told you?”

  “David doesn’t tell me much. I guessed.”

  “We got tested a few years ago. We’d been trying and…” She shook her head.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?” she said quickly, and her eyes narrowed. “Clearly, it’s worked out for the best.”

  I paged through my notebook one last time. Stephanie stood and dug a brown plastic bottle from the pocket of her jeans. She popped the lid, and tipped a white pill out.

  “He’s got vodka; I’ve got Ativan. But at least mine’s prescription.” She put the pill on her tongue and drained her glass and set it on an end table. “Are you through?”

  “I am,” I said. But Stephanie wasn’t. She folded herself in the chair again and looked at me.

  “Did he say anything about why?” she asked.

  “Why?”

  “Why this whole thing. Why these women? Why the lying? Why he’s bound and determined to turn his life— our lives— into shit?” Her voice was firm and steady, as if she’d rehearsed her questions. She didn’t wait for an answer.

  “You know what surprised me as much as finding out about the women? It was realizing that David wanted me to find him out. He was like a kid with a secret, squirming to tell. I don’t know if he wanted to see what I would do— if I would get mad, or leave, or forgive him— I don’t know what he wanted. I just know there’s a part of him that’s been waiting for all this.”

  “For all what?”

  “For this. For some kind of punishment.”

  “Punishment for…what?”

  “You think I understand it?” she said, shaking her head. “But he’s been this way as long as I’ve known him— one part thinking that he’s forever been shortchanged, and another that thinks any good thing that happens is more than he deserves. And that’s the part that’s been waiting— to get caught, to be punished.” Stephanie closed her eyes and rubbed her temples. “It’s a twisted quid pro quo with him: every good thing matched with some self-inflicted pain. I should have known something big was coming when he finally got the M and A job.” She looked up and studied my face.

  “You have no clue, do you?” she asked. I shook my head. “Of course you don’t— how could you? All you Marches, in your own little worlds.”

  “Have you talked to David about this?”

  “Not for years now,” Stephanie said, and her mouth curved angrily. “Maybe Holly had better luck— she was good with the questions. I’m still working on the one she asked me: why I put up with it.”

  “Why do you?”

  If she’d told me to go to hell, or just kept stiff-faced and silent, it wouldn’t have surprised me, but I didn’t expect the quiet, level voice, or the answer that I got.

  “It’s the deal I made, isn’t it? Or what’s left of it. It’s what I’ve negotiated down to.” Her hands found each other in her lap, and they held on tight, but her voice stayed even. “When you look back on it— when you look at it all together— it seems crazy, I know. Crazy to stay. But it didn’t happen all together. It was a gradual process, like erosion.

  “Little by little, things turn out to be less than you thought— every year, always a little less. So one day you realize there won’t be any children, and another day you realize your husband doesn’t really like you. Later on, you find you don’t like him much, either, and wonder if maybe he’s not a little crazy. And that takes the sting out a bit when you think about the children you won’t have, and when you find out about the other women. It helps you care a bit less.

  “It’s a slow whittling away, but with each new disappointment, with each hope you abandon, you strike a new bargain with yourself. You’ll trade up to a larger apartment, you think, maybe in a better building, or you’ll buy a larger beach house. You’ll spend an extra week on St. Bart’s this year, or throw yourself a bigger birthday party. You’ll go for the seven-sixty Beemer, instead of the five-fifty. And after a while, leaving becomes…tricky. Apartments, houses, vacations, all the friends and acquaintances…In the end it comes down to money, I guess, and that leaving is so expensive and complicated. So scary.

  “There were times I thought I’d reached the end of my rope— I thought so when I heard her voice on the telephone— but each time I found the rope had no end. There’s always another strand you convince yourself to cling to, however frayed. And it just keeps unraveling, miles of it, year after year…down, down, down.”

  Outside, the sun had shifted in the sky, and a bright beam came through the window. The unfiltered light fell on Stephanie’s face and turned it to a mask, taut, Kabuki white, and brittle. Only her will, and maybe the Ativan, kept it from crumbling. She looked at me.

  “I’m used to the erosion, John, but this is…too fast. We’re not ready for it, David and I— we’re not ready.”

  31

  I was on hold for Mike Metz when Clare came through the door. She had a cell phone in her ear and newspapers under her arm.

  “Yeah, Amy, Berkeley’s heaven on earth, you�
�ve been saying it for years. But it’s so crunchy granola, and besides, what would—” Amy, whoever Amy was, was saying something, and Clare put down her papers and slipped off her coat while she listened. She smiled at me and ran a hand through her hair, which rippled like a silk sheet. She pulled up the sleeves of her black turtleneck, and her arms were white and smooth. Mike Metz came on the line.

  “You spoke to her?” he asked. He sounded slightly out of breath. I carried the phone into the bedroom, along with my notebook, and I told it all to Mike. When I was through, he had questions, and when I’d answered all of those he was quiet.

  “So no one has an alibi for anything,” he said finally. “That’s great.”

  “She’s not in bad shape for business hours; neither is David.”

  “It’s not business hours I’m worried about. The ME is placing time of death somewhere between seven p.m. Tuesday and midnight Wednesday.”

  “That’s new.”

  “I just got off the phone with my friend. They’re basing it mostly on stomach contents. The cops found someone who claims to have seen Holly at a diner near her apartment at around five Tuesday afternoon.”

  “Stomach content isn’t very precise.”

  “Nope. So it would help if David and Stephanie could account for even some of that time period. Unfortunately, they can’t. Add to that Stephanie saying she wanted to kill Holly, and it’s almost more good news than I can handle.”

  “I’m guessing you’ll counsel her against putting things quite that way when she talks to the cops.”

  “Assuming she’ll take my advice.”

  “She knows she has to,” I said. “And by the time I left, she seemed ready. She’s scared out of her mind— she and David both.”

  “An entirely reasonable response, all things considered. We need to come up with a viable alternative soon— either that, or consider whether they need separate counsel.”

  “Christ! What’re you going to do, hang one of them out to dry, to defend the other?”

  “If it comes to a trial, we’ll be looking for reasonable doubt where we can find it.”

  “There’s got to be a better place than with each other.”

  Mike went silent, and I could almost hear him weighing something. After nearly a minute, he decided to say it. “Have you considered the possibility that the cops may be looking in the right place?”

  “David? You’ve got to be kidding. Why the hell would he hire me, if he was planning something like that? Or keep me on the job afterward, if it wasn’t planned? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “I’m not talking about David.”

  It was my turn to be quiet. I thought of Stephanie, ashen, exhausted, and medicated in her chair, and I tried to picture it. But it was a stupid exercise, I knew: my ability to imagine her pulling a trigger had nothing to do with whether she actually could.

  “Any word on Coyle?” I asked finally.

  “I haven’t heard anything about him being picked up. And you— any word from the cops?”

  “No one’s thrown me in a holding cell yet.”

  “Are you headed up to Tarrytown again?”

  “This evening. I want to see where Uncle Kenny was going with those doughnuts.”

  Clare was off the phone when I came out of the bedroom, standing at the kitchen counter with the newspaper spread before her. Apartment listings.

  “Shopping?”

  “Getting the lay of the land, anyway. I don’t want to overstay my welcome, after all.”

  I went into the kitchen and poured myself a seltzer. “I’m not complaining,” I said. “Who’s Amy?”

  Clare smiled. “My sister— my big sister— who knows all there is to know about divorce, real estate, career planning, you name it. I try to listen politely, but it doesn’t always work out.”

  “She lives out west?”

  Clare turned and leaned against the counter. She crossed her arms beneath her breasts. “In the Bay Area,” she said. “How are things with your brother?”

  I shook my head. “Not improving.”

  “You’ve put in some long days on this— and nights.”

  “Tonight will be another.”

  “He must appreciate the effort.”

  “He’s got other things on his mind,” I said. “And so far the effort hasn’t done much good.”

  “I’m sorry,” Clare said. Her gray eyes held mine, and there was no irony in them. She put her hand on my cheek. I kissed her palm, and I thought again of Stephanie— her hands clutched together in her lap, her desperate fingers.

  “Why did you stay?” I asked.

  Clare’s brows knit. “Stay where?”

  “With your husband. Why did you stay so long?” Clare’s face stiffened and her hand withdrew. I caught her wrist. “I’m not making trouble,” I said.

  She pulled her hand free. “Yeah,” she said, “it’s just your great timing again.”

  I stepped closer and took her around the waist. Clare brought her fists to my chest. “I just want to know,” I said softly.

  She raised an eyebrow. “Mr. Curious,” she said, but her fists uncurled. She wriggled away and drank from my glass and looked at me over the rim. “Staying was easy,” she said. “It was the path of least resistance. He may be self-indulgent, and completely self-absorbed, but he’s not a mean bastard, not in the usual ways. As long as he could do his thing, and so long as I showed up on his arm when he wanted me there, he was happy to let me do mine.

  “And the perks didn’t hurt, either— the real estate and the vacations and the rest. I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t thought twice about walking away from all of that. How does the song go? ‘Money changes everything.’ I didn’t have a lot of it growing up, and it definitely changes the calculus of leaving.”

  “Still, you left.”

  She drank some seltzer and put the glass down. “As far as I know, you only get this one life, and I wasn’t getting any younger. And it turned out I still had some ideas about marriage that I wasn’t ready to trade for another HermДs bag.” A crooked smile crossed her face. “Who knew I was so fucking noble?” she said, and she turned back to her newspaper.

  I came up behind her and put my face into her hair. I slid a hand under her shirt and across her warm belly, and I slid my fingers down the waistband of her low-slung jeans. “There’s something about all that integrity…” I said softly.

  She shuddered, and rolled her ass against me, and unbuttoned her jeans. “Mr. Curious,” she whispered, and she slid my hand lower.

  * * *

  I drove north with the first wave of rush hour. The sky was purple going to black, and the traffic was stop-and-go into Yonkers and again in Tarrytown as I made my way along Route 9. I parked three long blocks from Van Winkle Court and took a cold, roundabout walk to the condo complex. I kept my eyes open the whole way; if there were cops staked out, I didn’t spot them.

  Hagen’s basement door was locked, and there were no lights on in the windows that I thought were his. I followed the path he’d taken the night before and went two buildings south and tried the basement door there. Locked. I circled the building and checked the basement windows. I saw an empty laundry room through one. The rest were dark, and one was painted black. Yellow light seeped through a crack in the frame. I went back to the basement door and looked over the Van Winkle Court footpaths. No one. I pulled a small pry bar from the pocket of my parka and slipped it in the door jamb. I barely leaned and the door popped open with a sound like a cough. I put the pry bar away and took out a flashlight.

  Inside, I smelled damp cement and laundry soap. I listened for a moment and heard mechanical ticks and water in pipes and the rush of air in ductwork, but nothing else. There was a dark corridor ahead, and I walked in what I thought was the direction of the painted window. There was a fine grit on the concrete floor, and I tried to move quietly on it.

  The hallway branched. To the right, light spilled from a wide doorway. The laundry room. To the left wa
s darkness. I went left. I passed by a dented metal door, and the reek of rotted vegetables and dirty diapers. Garbage room. I kept going. At the end of the hall, opposite a small mountain of bundled newspaper and flattened cardboard boxes, there was another metal door. There was a lock in the knob, another, heftier one above it, and a seam of light at the sill. I leaned closer and, faintly, I smelled coffee. And cigarettes.