by Konstantin
It was filled with plastic bags. They were the self-sealing variety, like evidence bags, and in them were souvenirs from Holly’s video encounters— items of the sort I’d seen in her reliquaries, though these were going nowhere now. Used condoms, stockings, soiled underwear— his and hers— neckties, cigar butts, washcloths, a pillowcase, some matchbooks, six inches of rubber tubing: a sordid lost-and-found. Each bag was labeled in black marker with a date and a location, in a firm, precise hand. I read the labels and realized that the items on top must have come from her sessions with David. While it was comforting to know that he’d practiced safe sex, the trophies made me uneasy, and my eyes skidded away. I picked through the box delicately, enough to see that it was bags of mementoes, top to bottom, and nothing more. I closed it. My heart was pounding, and I waited a moment and took a deep breath before I opened the second one.
It held memories of a different sort. There was a zippered black nylon case inside, filled with plastic sleeves. Each sleeve held several DVDs and was labeled in Holly’s neat print: “Interview #1”; “Interview #2”; “Interview #3,” all the way up to 12. Nestled next to the binder were twelve external computer disk drives, each one the size of a thin paperback. Like the DVDs, each was labeled: “January 31 backup”; “February 28 backup,” all the way up to last December 31.
I sat on the stool and looked down at the locker. Mike Metz’s voice sounded in my head: “Just keep the word ‘tampering’ in mind, and be fucking careful.” He was accompanied by Detective Vines: “And God knows what you did to the evidence.” I tapped my foot on the concrete floor.
“Shit,” I whispered.
34
It was past seven when Clare came in, and I closed the lid on my laptop. She stood in the doorway and took off her coat. Her brow was furrowed for a moment, and then a smile spread on her face as a blush rose on mine.
“The last time I saw anyone move that fast, and look that guilty, was when I walked in on my cousin Roger, in the bathroom. He was fourteen, and I forgot to knock.” She unwound her long scarf. “Keep it up, and you’ll go blind.”
“It’s work,” I said.
“Roger said he was just reading the interview.”
I pointed at the bags she’d brought with her. “Dinner?”
“I’ve got cold sesame noodles, hot-and-sour soup, steamed dumplings, and broccoli with garlic sauce…assuming you can tear yourself away.” I didn’t have much appetite, but I was glad for the break.
Back at Creek Self-Store, I’d stared for several minutes at Holly’s file box, and then I’d said fuck it. I’d returned one box to its place under the workbench, emptied the other one, and snapped the lock that I’d brought with me onto the door of unit 58. I put the empty file box in a Dumpster near the stairs, and took the elevator down. My backpack was considerably bulkier on the way out, but no one at the front desk seemed to notice.
When I got home, I fired up my laptop and connected Holly’s December 31 backup disk to it. I’d been going through files and watching videos ever since, and I’d sat through two painful hours of Holly and my brother when Clare walked in. I’d watched the scene McCue and Vines had shown us, and many others, and they left me covered in a skin of sweat and embarrassment. The only solace to be had was in the fact that David hadn’t hit her. As it turned out, my brother’s appetites seemed to lie in quite the opposite direction.
Which was cold comfort. I imagined the video playing in a court-room— to jurors, to the press, to what family and friends were there. I imagined it playing on television. The humiliation would be crippling, and it wouldn’t take a prosecutor half as bright as Rita Flores to turn that footage into a basis for blackmail and a motive for murder. If the cops had seen what I’d seen, it was no surprise they liked David for Holly’s death.
Clare called me to the kitchen counter and dinner, and she eyed my bruises as we ate. She’d been openmouthed and staring when I’d come back in tatters the night before, and she’d stood unmoving for nearly a minute. Then she’d put on her coat and walked with me to the ER at St. Vincent’s. “Fucking crazy” had been her only comment, and she’d made it two hours later, when we were walking home again. I took it as rhetorical, and kept my mouth shut.
We were drinking tea, and she put out orange slices and fortune cookies. Her eyes went to my splints.
“Nothing new since last night,” I said.
She nodded. “Slow day, huh?”
“It doesn’t happen that often.”
“No? I guess I’ve just been lucky to see so much of it.”
“It comes with the job now and then.”
“You say it like you’re talking about carpal tunnel syndrome or something. Coming home cut and bruised and broken, it’s not quite the same thing.”
“It doesn’t happen—”
Clare stopped me. “ ‘Doesn’t happen often,’ ‘part of the job’— I heard you the first time. And I’m not asking you to justify it. You love it— that much is clear.”
“You think I love getting beat up?”
“No.” She smiled. “I don’t think you’re quite that twisted. I meant your work— it’s clear you love your work. Enough so that you’re willing to get the crap beat out of you on a semiregular basis to do it.”
I shrugged. “I don’t know that I’m cut out for much else.”
Clare squinted at me. “What bullshit!” she said. “There are a zillion other things you could do, or you could sit around and do nothing at all. But you don’t— because you love your work. You love running around town, and digging around on-line, and talking to people, and finding things out. And I think there’s a part of you that likes being— very quietly— the smartest guy in the room. Mostly, though, I think you want to help people, as corny as that sounds. I think you want to do good. You love your work, and you get all morose and weird— weirder— when you don’t do it. So don’t be shy about saying so. I guess all I’m saying is: be careful.”
I looked at her. Her hair had fallen forward, and soft shadows lay across the planes and angles of her face. Through a blond curtain, her gray eyes were shining, and larger than I’d ever seen them.
“I didn’t realize you’d given it so much thought.”
“Go figure,” she said, and she ran a fingertip around my ear.
“I don’t know how much good I’ve done lately, though.”
“For your brother?” she asked. I nodded. “You’re still at it?”
“For what it’s worth.”
She smiled. “I’ll put coffee on.”
Clare made a large pot and I went back to my laptop. I got through another hour of Holly and David, and then I walked around the room and tried to force some oxygen into my lungs. It had been more of the same, and maybe more embarrassing toward the end. At least he hadn’t hit her.
There were other hotel clips on the disk, though they were much shorter than the ones with David. They showed Holly with two other men, one tall and bald, the other pale and very hairy, and from the dates on the video files, in March and May of the previous year, I guessed that they were outtakes of earlier works, and that these guys had already had their final interviews. There was nothing in the sequences to make either man a more likely suspect than David, and nothing to identify them.
Clare ran a hand over the back of my neck and went into the bathroom. I heard water running in the tub and I thought about joining her, but didn’t. I clicked on another folder and found another video file, this one dated from last summer.
I played it, and I thought of some things Jamie Coyle had said: “She’d always come by to shoot the shit, though— it didn’t matter if I was on the door or behind the bar or wherever.” And: “She had in mind making different kinds of films— documentaries, maybe…” I wondered if this clip was Holly’s first attempt.
It was more hidden-camera work, most likely taken from a handbag, and it was all about Jamie Coyle. The camera looked up at him, and there was something worshipful and larger than life in the pe
rspective. The soundtrack was muddy and the background filled with club clatter— music, laughter, glassware, the hum and buzz of many bodies— but Coyle’s voice was close and intimate, and so was Holly’s as she interviewed him.
“What about that guy?” she asked. “Do you think he’ll cause problems?”
“That guy there— with all the gel and the soul patch? He’s coming up all hard and loud, and he’s had too many mojitos, but he’s no trouble. Just look at his hands— the guy’s got a fucking manicure, and my mother had thicker wrists. Plus he’s got a BlackBerry on his belt. A guy with a BlackBerry and a manicure, nine times out of ten he’s gonna do what you tell him.”
She asked about how he decided who to let in, and how the VIPs behaved, and what about the girls who waited tables, and in his answers Coyle was relaxed and funny and supremely competent, or at least Holly had made him seem that way. Her infatuation with her subject was obvious, and I wondered if Coyle had ever seen the video. Maybe when this was all over…
When that video ended, I clicked on a folder labeled “Brookfield,” and found a dozen more. I played one and let out a deep breath.
He was the husk of a handsome man— thick hair gone white, rheumy blue eyes, a strong, straight nose cratered and darkened by broken blood vessels, white skin sagging from high cheekbones, graceful fingers clawed, mottled, shaking. His voice was still strong and sonorous, which made his bewilderment all the sadder and more frightening. Fredrick Cade, Holly’s father. I knew for sure when she called him Daddy.
There were no hidden-camera shots here; it was all hand held, and Holly’s point of view. She panned around a room that was a cross between hospital and Holiday Inn— oxygen tank, IV stand, pink wallpaper, blond wood trim, bright, bland fabrics— and came to rest again on her father, wrapped in a plaid robe and sitting in a chair.
“It’s me, Daddy, it’s Holly. Look this way, Daddy— here, into the camera. No, goddammit, over here! That’s right, at me. Now, tell me about Mrs. Manton. Do you remember her, Daddy— my seventh-grade teacher? Tell me about you and Mrs. Manton.”
In the hotel rooms, with the faceless men, Holly’s questions were instruments of contempt and punishment and power, and with Coyle, they were tokens of affection. But this was…something else— petulance, pleading curiosity, a child’s desperate search for attention. Fredrick Cade couldn’t answer her, of course— I wasn’t sure he even knew who she was— but Holly kept at it. Most of the short clips ended with the camera focused on the vinyl floor, and with the sound of her ragged breaths. A lump formed in my throat as I watched, and a dull ache grew in my chest.
Not all of Holly’s questions to her father were about his other women, though. In several of the clips she asked about her mother, and in others she questioned him about something called Redtails. Didn’t he remember that Mommy promised it to her? How could he not remember? Why would he give it away? Fredrick just looked at her. I wrote the word in my notebook, with a question mark beside it.
I pushed the laptop away and stood by the window. Sixteenth Street was quiet, Clare was asleep, and my coffee was long cold. And useless anyway. My eyes were filled with grit, and my bones were heavy with a fatigue that was beyond the power of caffeine to cure, beyond even sleep. I thought of what Clare had said—“You love the work; you love finding out.” Not so much just then.
I’d found out more than I wanted to about David and Stephanie: the orthodox faГ§ade of success and self-satisfaction they labored to maintain; the unhappiness and anger and self-loathing that lay behind it; what a desperate, fragile structure it was. More than I wanted to know, but nothing that would help them.
I’d learned much about Holly too— about her obsessions and anger, her cruelty and taste for retribution, her prodigious talents, her bleak artistic vision and her terrible commitment to it, her secretiveness, and dangerous faith in her own ability to control things. I’d learned much, but not yet who killed her. “The smartest guy in the room.” It was a tough sell just then, even standing all alone.
My fingers were aching and my back was stiff, and I wanted to go to bed. Instead, I returned to the laptop and Holly’s files. That was when I found the video of Gene Werner.
35
But for the stage lights, the tiny theater was dark, and but for Claudius, Hamlet, Laertes, and the director, it was empty. They were gathered at stage left, near a frail-looking table. I was quiet coming in, and they didn’t look up as I took a seat in the last row. The air was warm and old, and there was a chemical smell in it, like antifreeze.
King: Yo, playahs, the O.G. drinks to Hammy!
Let’s light it up
And you judging muthafuckahs bear a wary eye.
Hamlet: Come on, bitch.
Laertes: You come on, dawg.
Gene Werner watched as Hamlet and Laertes circled each other, foils wobbling in their uncertain hands. “No, you idiots,” he shouted, “you’re fencing, not skipping. You’re fighting for your fucking lives!” Werner’s own foil whipped through the air and snicked Laertes’s leg.
The actor dropped his sword and spun. “Screw you, Gene— you do that one more time, you’ll be fighting for your own fucking life.”
Werner’s laugh was rich and haughty, and it carried easily to the back of the house. “That’s right, Sean, get angry! And Greg, keep your fucking arm up. The way you hold that thing, you look like a faggot houseboy, mincing around the den with a goddamn feather duster. You’re the fucking prince of the ’hood, for chrissakes— the lead. This play is all about you!”
Hamlet’s face was shiny, and there were rings of sweat under his arms. He wiped his forehead and flipped Werner the bird. Claudius hitched up his baggy jeans and laughed, and the actors took their places to run it through again. Werner walked to the front of the stage and peered into the darkness. I didn’t think he could see me in the thick shadow, but some actor radar had made him exquisitely sensitive to the presence of an audience. I kept still, he turned back to his players, and the rehearsal continued.
I’d spent most of the morning in Brooklyn, where I’d paid another visit to Holly’s neighbor, Jorge Arrua. I’d spent the afternoon back in my apartment, reading through my notes and drawing up a timeline. I’d called Mike Metz several times throughout the day, and heard every time from his secretary that he was still downtown, at the Seventh Precinct house, with Stephanie.
When I’d finished the timeline, I’d gone hunting, on-line and on the telephone, for Gene Werner. I remembered what he’d told me about his upcoming directing projects, and I’d found one of them, a hip-hop interpretation of Hamlet, mentioned on the website of the Little Gidding Theatre. According to the site, the production was due to premiere in a month, and I’d called an information number and learned that rehearsals were taking place all afternoon, in the basement space on West Thirteenth Street.
Werner’s nasty laugh rolled over the rows of folding chairs. “What part of ‘switch swords’ don’t you get, Greg? It means he takes yours and you take his and then you start fighting again. Watch.”
Werner put the tip of his foil under the guard of Hamlet’s, and lifted it from the stage with a flourish. He caught it midair and offered it— grip first— to Hamlet, who took it hesitantly. Werner raised his weapon, and before Hamlet could do the same he shouted “En garde!” He batted Hamlet’s blade aside, stepped in, and locked the guard of Hamlet’s foil against his own. Werner grabbed the smaller man by his shirtfront and grinned down at him. Then he planted his sneaker behind the actor’s heel and pushed. Hamlet went down with an echoing thump and Werner laughed.
He hadn’t been laughing much on Holly’s video, nor had he been nearly so well groomed. It was an untitled, unedited work, shot in her apartment, with a single hidden camera, and Werner was its hapless star. He was unshaven and rumpled, his hair greasy-looking, and his eyes full of fear and anger. Holly, mostly unseen, was at her inquisitorial best. Her voice was a finely calibrated mix— wheedling, sympathetic, seductive, and patient
.
“I made you angry, didn’t I?” she said from someplace. “You felt like I lied to you.”
“How else was I supposed to feel? Jesus, Holly, I loved you. How could you do it to me?”
