Into the Dark

by Alison Gaylin

  “Can you please come to the MoonGlow Hotel, Miss Spector?” Waxman said, rattling off the address. “I’ve got some questions for you.”

  Chapter 14

  As soon as Brenna arrived at the MoonGlow, she saw the coroner’s van parked outside. Oh God, Errol, she thought. What have you done? She hurried into the lobby, pushing past a group of uniform cops and joining five crime scene techs as they jammed into a waiting elevator. The whole while, she was scanning the group for a six-foot-eight-inch man in handcuffs—Errol wasn’t someone who was easy to miss—but she didn’t see him. One of the crime scene techs hit floor four—a heavy girl with butter-blonde hair and a sweet face. “I’m here for Errol Ludlow,” Brenna said to her, trying to sound official.

  The girl scrunched up her forehead. “Yeah,” she said. “Us too.”

  The doors opened. Down the dingy hallway, Brenna saw police tape covering one of the rooms, medical examiners hustling in with a gurney. She headed down the hall, where a very young guy in a cheap blue suit was talking to another lab tech, just outside the door to the room.

  Brenna heard, “Unusual, considering the age and overall health.”

  She started to talk to them, but Cheap Blue Suit looked up first. “Miss Spector?” he said.

  She blinked at him.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I recognized you from TV.” He smiled—a goofy, guileless smile. “Detective Tim Waxman. We talked on the phone.”

  “Oh, right.”

  Detective Tim Waxman looked young enough to use Clearasil on a regular basis. If Maya brought him to the eighth grade mixer, Brenna wouldn’t have batted an eye, and yet here he was, in his best bad suit with the sleeves too short and the shirt cuffs frayed, standing in this dismal purgatory of a sticky-sheet motel, cleaning up some awful mess made by Errol Ludlow . . . She felt like covering his eyes. “So, you were familiar with Mr. Ludlow,” Tim said.

  “Yes, I used to work for him years ago . . . Wait.”

  “Yes?”

  “Did you just say ‘were’?”

  He cleared his throat. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Not ‘Are you familiar.’ Were you familiar.”

  He looked at the floor. “Yes.”

  “Is that significant?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Did . . . That ME was saying . . . Whose age? Whose overall health?”

  “I just need to ask you a few simple questions, ma’am.”

  “Is Errol dead?”

  “Did Mr. Ludlow say anything odd during your phone conversation yesterday?”

  “Answer my question.”

  “Did he complain of shortness of breath?”

  “Oh my God. How did he die?”

  “Did he say he felt funny in any way?”

  Brenna stared at him.

  “Miss Spector?”

  “No,” she said quietly. “He . . . he didn’t say he felt funny.”

  “Did he have any unhealthy habits?”

  The past tense. “He didn’t smoke. He drank occasionally.” She looked at him. “How did he die?”

  “We don’t know,” he said. “But it . . . it was peaceful . . .”

  The door to the room opened, room 419, a group of uniforms moving aside to make room for the gurney. “Oh my God,” Brenna whispered.

  “I’m sorry, Miss Spector.”

  She stared straight ahead of her. “Not your fault.”

  “Was he a good friend?”

  “No.”

  And then Brenna caught sight of the body bag on the gurney, the very length of it. Errol. The big feet angled out, the shoulders too broad for the platform, the outline of the wide forehead, the pointy nose. She remembered his voice on the phone the previous night, the life in it (Ta-ta!) and then she again saw that dark thick plastic, resting on the body, Errol’s body. How still it was.

  Errol Ludlow in the past tense.

  Brenna felt a cold blast at the back of her neck, as though it were June 23, 1991, as though she were sitting in Errol Ludlow’s over-air-conditioned office for the first time, staring at this enormous, odd-looking man during her job interview, Errol smirking at her, staring into her face with those dull, black-olive eyes of his . . .

  “What type of drugs are you on?” he says. Not Have you ever tried drugs? Or even, Are you on drugs? No, he’s too certain for that, this guy. He wants to know what type.

  He folds his catcher’s-mitt hands on the desk in front of him and smiles—a slow, dry smile, like granite cracking.

  The air-conditioner is cold on the back of Brenna’s neck. Why does he keep it so cold in here? But still her palms sweat. Her jaw tenses. Errol Ludlow is enormous. He dwarfs the desk, the room. If he were to inhale deeply, Brenna figures, he’d suck all the air out of it. But she can’t think like this. She can’t hate this guy. She needs him.

  Help me find Clea, Errol Ludlow, Brenna thinks. Teach me how to find people . . .

  “Miss Spector?”

  “I’m . . . I’m not on drugs.”

  He shakes his head. “You fit the profile of a drug abuser.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Raised by a sin-gle mother. A sin-gle art-ist at that.” Ludlow overenunciates, Brenna notices now. He spits out syllables one at a time, like seeds. It’s very annoying. She suspects he does it on purpose.

  “So? Lots of people are raised by . . . single artists.”

  “I’m not through yet.” He leans forward. His big arms strain against his dark green sport coat, making it shine. He launches the words at her—each syllable flying out of his mouth and crashing. “Sin-gle art-ist moth-er, run-a-way sis-ter with a slut-ty rep-u-ta-tion you worked so very hard to avoid that you became a bit re-clu-sive, didn’t you?”

  Brenna swallows hard.

  “Only a few close friends in high school, didn’t date much, kept to your-self. Your teachers said you always seemed to be in another world . . .”

  “You talked to my high school teachers?”

  “Just twenty-one years old, yet you’ve seen three different psy-chi-a-trists. Ivy League college, yes. But as I’m sure we both know, Ivy League colleges are about as full of drugs as Diego Maradona on a Saturday night in Amsterdam.”

  “Who?”

  “And then, the icing on the cake . . . you drop out of Columbia after just two years.” He takes a breath. “Now what would you think of that profile?”

  Brenna’s face feels hot. Her hands clench into fists. “I would think,” Brenna says, “that you are the biggest asshat I’ve ever met.”

  The flat, dark eyes widen, then crinkle up at the corners. A smile crosses the granite face. He starts to laugh. “I think I like you, Brenna Spector!”

  “I know it’s hard to lose a friend,” Tim Waxman said, bringing Brenna back into the hallway, into the crime scene techs loading Errol’s bagged body into the elevator.

  Brenna blinked. There were tears in her eyes. “I’m sorry.” She took a breath. “Were you saying something, Detective?”

  “Just wondering if he might have had a history of recreational drug use.”

  “Errol?” she said. “Actually he was very antidrug. Why?”

  “Was he on blood pressure meds?”

  She shrugged. “He drank a lot of green tea,” she said, which made her throat clench up again. Crying over Errol. The loss of Errol . . . What was wrong with her? Must be the shock.

  “I just ask because we found Viagra in his Dopp kit. And the crime scene guys said that Viagra mixed with nitrate-based drugs can bring on a heart attack.”

  She looked at him. “He brought Viagra.”

  “Yep. Also a bottle of really nice champagne—empty, though.”

  “So he wasn’t alone,” Brenna said.

  “Well, he was this morning, when the desk clerk found him.”

  “Yeah, but champagne and Viagra are usually group activity–type things,” she said slowly. She looked at the detective. “I assumed he was working.”

  “Working?”


  “Meeting one of his girls before or after a stakeout.”

  “His girls?”

  “He was a private investigator, specializing in cheating spouses,” she said. “Far as I knew, Errol never came to hotels like this for . . . uh . . . personal reasons.”

  A voice behind Brenna said, “You aren’t his wife, are you?”

  She turned around to see a man with greasy gunmetal hair, wearing khaki pants, a gray sport coat that looked petroleum-based. She swatted at her eyes. “God no,” Brenna said. “I’m a former business assoc— Wait. Who are you?”

  “Kevin Wiggins.” He showed her a row of yellow teeth. “Desk Clerk to the Stars.”

  “You found him, huh?”

  “Yup.” He peered at her face. “Say, anybody ever tell you, you look a little like Barbara Stanwyck?”

  “Only my mom.”

  “What happened to your eye?”

  “Air bag.”

  He nodded, as if that were the most normal response in the world. “Listen,” Kevin said. “I’m sorry about your friend, but if it helps at all, I can tell you without a coroner’s report that he died with a smile on his face.”

  “Is that right?”

  He nodded. “I’ve seen my share of ’em in here. Happy heart attacks. I don’t need to paint you a vivid picture, do I?”

  “Please don’t.”

  “For what it’s worth, I’m pretty sure I saw the lady who visited him, and there isn’t a man on the planet who could think of a better way to go.”

  “Did you know her?” Brenna asked. Weird question. She wasn’t sure why she’d asked it, or why she continued to care, but she did. Closure, maybe. The last person to see Errol Ludlow alive.

  “I didn’t know her, but she was a looker,” he said.

  Tim Waxman looked at him. “Did you happen to get her name?”

  “Just a first name.”

  “Let me guess,” Brenna said. “Chastity?”

  Kevin gave her a sly look, as if this were some Hollywood movie and they were exchanging the wittiest of banter. “You talk like Stanwyck, too,” he said. “Delightfully acerbic.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Mr. Wiggins,” Tim said. “Can I please get the name of the woman you saw last night?”

  “Oh.” He chuckled, still looking at Brenna. “You gotta understand, it’s so rare I get to exchange this many intelligent words with anyone . . . You’re probably married, aren’t you?”

  “Mr. Wiggins,” Tim said.

  “Sorry,” he said. “What was the question?”

  “The name, sir.” Tim sighed. “What was the name given to you by Mr. Ludlow’s last visitor?”

  “Right.” He kept grinning at Brenna, even as he answered. “The lady’s name was Clea.”

  Brenna stared at him, her heart beating up into her neck, her face, her eyes . . .

  Gary shuddered in his sleep—a movement that wracked his whole body and jolted Jill out of a dream about Yasmine, her yoga instructor, performing surgery on a cat. Wonder what Freud would have to say about that one, she thought, still half asleep. And then Gary shuddered again. “Are you all right, honey?” Jill said.

  He put his arms around her and pulled her close.

  Jill smiled. She and Gary had made love last night and she still felt warm from it. It had been wonderful as usual, but also different—more intense. Gary had kissed Jill so deeply, pulled her so close, as though he were trying to become a part of her, climb under her skin, stay with her always. She’d always felt wanted by Gary when they had sex—there was never any question about that. But last night, Jill had felt needed. Gary had made love to her as though she were saving his life, and in a way, she was.

  In a way, they were saving each other.

  Part of it was that the two-week dry spell was finally ending—two weeks—but more powerful still, Jill thought, was Gary’s confession.

  “I need to tell you something,” he had said, without her asking. Without her having to ask. “I know I’ve been distant these past few weeks.”

  And she had stood there, in their bedroom with the door closed behind her, holding her breath, watching his mouth move as though she were standing at the edge of a cliff . . . Only to hear him say the last thing on earth she had ever expected.

  “It’s because I didn’t trust you, Jill. I’m so sorry. I was wrong . . .”

  “Wait. You didn’t trust me?”

  “I thought you were having an affair.”

  Her jaw had gone slack. “Why would you think that?” Jill had said, but as she said it, she knew the answer. She’d been distant, too—just as distant as Gary had been, come to think of it, though having an affair had been the last thing on her mind.

  Wise Up was having its annual fund-raiser on January 7, which was just around the corner, and the publicity firm they’d worked with for the past eight years had demanded double the money. There was no way the charity could afford that without her supplementing. Jill didn’t even want to think about that now, but yeah, she’d been spending a lot of time at her office looking for new PR, a lot of time on the phone, her head spinning, her thoughts miles and weeks away. She hadn’t talked to Gary about it because he had enough on his mind, why burden him with her headaches? Plus, their plate was so full at home with the three girls and their schedules, feeding them and helping them with homework and making sure they practiced their piano and their cheers and their French and Spanish and that they read for half an hour every night. Worse still, Hannah was in a needy phase so by the time she finally got to sleep, after her third glass of water and her second bedtime story, well, it was all Jill could do to collapse on the couch and stare at HBO for half an hour. This had been going on long before the dry spell, she’d realized last night. Long before she’d started to get suspicious of Gary.

  He’d felt suspicious first.

  “Why didn’t you just talk to me about it?” Jill had said. Jill the hypocrite, sneaking into her husband’s office, copying down numbers from his disposable phone . . .

  “I was scared of the answer,” he had said, “I even went so far as to talk to private detectives. I had a phone I was using . . . I threw it out. I’m so sorry.”

  And Jill had gone to him and put her arms around him, her heart crumbling . . . You were suspicious of me.

  But that was gone now, the bad times were behind them. After they’d made love and Gary was sound asleep to the point of snoring, Jill had snuck out of bed. She’d taken the piece of paper with the three phone numbers out of her purse and she’d put it through the trash compactor. “Never again,” she had whispered.

  Gary clutched at her in his sleep now. She kissed the top of his head and shut her eyes tight. Tears seeped out the corners. She loved him. After all these years, now more than ever. She loved him so much it hurt.

  Gary murmured something in his sleep. It sounded like “Sorry.”

  It’s okay. Everything is going to be okay, my love, my great love . . .

  Jill closed her eyes. She took a deep breath—a cleansing breath. She and Gary had taken a pranayana class together just a few weeks ago, and that’s where she’d learned it. She’d liked the pranayana teacher, Lily. Not quite as much as Yasmine, with all her wonderful medical terminology, but definitely more than that Bikram girl, who was forever missing class to audition for commercials and soap operas . . .

  Jill heard a noise. At first she thought it was in her imagination, part of her sleep drifting. But when she opened her eyes, she heard it again. And then again.

  A vibrating phone.

  The sound was coming from Gary’s side of the bed—but strangely, not from his cell phone, lying dormant on his nightstand. No—it was coming from the chair behind the nightstand, piled with Gary’s clothes. Jill moved toward it.

  Strange, the things you think of when your life is about to change forever . . . Here Jill was, moving toward a vibrating cell phone at 6 A.M. on a Sunday morning—a phone her own husband had kept hidden from her—yet
she wasn’t thinking about that at all. She was thinking about the January 7 Wise Up fund-raiser, how she was going to hire back that publicist and buy herself a new dress for it, too. She was going to buy that five-thousand-dollar St. John sheath she’d seen in Barneys last week; while she was at it, she’d buy the girls new dresses, too, because they deserved new dresses and even if it was just someone calling the wrong number at six in the morning on a Sunday, the fact remained that Gary still owned a secret phone, different from the one she’d found in his desk, a different brand—a Nokia, she saw now, as she plucked it out of his shirt pocket. Everyone in their family had Motorolas. They shared a Sprint plan, but she supposed this Nokia’s plan was different.

  A different plan, indeed.

  She checked the blinking screen and saw not a number, but a name. DeeDee.

  Jill hit talk. She didn’t say hello. She said nothing, just breathed into the mouthpiece.

  The voice on the other end of the phone was a girl’s voice, small and fragile, full of breath.

  “It’s done,” the girl said. DeeDee said. Then she hung up.

  “He will never bother you again.” Diandra said this to the walls of her apartment, but in her head she was saying it to Mr. Freeman. She often had long conversations with Mr. Freeman, Diandra did, as if he were in the room with her. She’d tell him stories from her life, and in her mind he’d give her advice. He’d talk to her about everything, but mostly, about her craft . . . “You have it all inside of you, DeeDee. You have the capacity to be a heroine or a villain, a goddess or a tramp. It’s all there—every quality of every single character ever written, buried beneath that beautiful skin. All you need to do is bring it up, DeeDee. Show the world. There’s no part you can’t play. There is nothing you can’t do.”

  This was something he’d told her for real. Or at least she thought he had. The real and imagined conversations overlapped in her mind—especially the ones from long ago. One thing she did know was that he needed her. He needed her like water, for his very survival, and she knew that because he’d told her, over the phone yesterday when he’d asked for her help with Errol Ludlow. I need you DeeDee. I hope you know that.