Hard Feelings: A Novel

by Jason Starr

  I made a few phone calls, but I knew it was going to be impossible to get any work done. This was extremely frustrating because I wanted nothing more than to get my career back in full gear, but I couldn’t, and I knew it was all my fault for getting drunk. I was going to have to keep going to A.A. meetings and finally admit to myself that I had a serious problem.

  When I woke up someone was tapping me on the shoulder. I didn’t know where I was, then I recognized Bob’s face.

  “Go home, Richard—get some rest.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, still disoriented. “I didn’t mean—”

  “We’ll discuss it some other time,” Bob said. “Just go.”

  There were two messages on my home answering machine from Paula’s office. The first was from Sheila, Paula’s assistant, asking if Paula was planning to come into work today. The second call was from Chris, Paula’s boss. In a serious, concerned tone, Chris said that he had “missed” Paula at a meeting this morning, and asked her to please call him as soon as she got this message.

  It was very odd for Paula not to show up at work without calling. She had probably spent the day with Doug. I imagined them together—their naked, sweaty bodies in bed—but I tried not to let it get to me.

  Otis was still acting unusually upset—barking and growling. I decided that he was probably angry about all the tension in the apartment lately. I petted his head, which calmed him for a while, but then he started acting up again.

  While I wanted Paula back more than anything, I also realized that the situation was out of my control. If she didn’t love me anymore and she wanted to be with another man there was nothing I could do. But if she still loved me and wanted to keep working on our problems I was willing to do that, too. It was all up to her.

  I undressed and got into bed, passing out quickly. When I woke up I was still exhausted, but at least my hangover symptoms were gone. It was after five o’clock. I still felt awful for having to leave work early. I’d probably made a fool of myself and I knew I’d definitely have to apologize to Bob tomorrow.

  Otis was still making a racket.

  “Come on, dog, get over it, for Christ’s sake,” I said.

  But Otis barked again, louder. I’d had enough. I put him in my office and shut the door. He was still barking, but the noise was mostly muffled.

  I ordered Chinese food for dinner and ate out of the foil containers in front of the TV. I fell asleep on the couch and was awakened by a phone call.

  “Is Paula there?”

  “Who’s calling?” I asked drowsily.

  There was a long pause, then the man said, “This is Doug Pearson—remember, we played tennis in Stockbridge.”

  Still half-asleep, it took me a few moments to put it all together—Doug, the guy who had probably been fucking my wife nonstop for the past twenty-four hours, was now calling me.

  “What the hell do you want?”

  Suddenly, I was wide awake.

  “Is Paula there or not?” he asked.

  Who the hell did this guy think he was, calling my apartment?

  “You’ve got some fucking nerve,” I said.

  “I want to speak with Paula.”

  “She’s not here.”

  “Where is she?”

  “You’d know that better than I would.”

  “I want to speak to her.”

  “I said she’s not here. And if you ever call here again—”

  “You better not’ve hurt her again,” he said. “If you did, I swear to God I’ll kill you.”

  “Hurt her?” I said. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “You’re never gonna get her back,” he went on. “It’s over with you two so you might as well admit it.”

  “We’ll see about that,” I said.

  Doug hung up. I slammed the portable phone down onto the coffee table so hard the battery pack popped out. I was about to lose it completely. I couldn’t believe Doug had the balls to call my apartment.

  Then, settling down, I started worrying about Paula again. If she wasn’t with Doug and she didn’t go in to work today, then where the hell was she? She could have slept at a hotel last night, but wouldn’t she have called me, or her boss, or someone by now?

  I remembered the e-mail: CONFESS, OR ELSE! Maybe the person who’d been sending the messages had kidnapped or hurt Paula because I hadn’t confessed to killing Michael Rudnick. The idea seemed crazy, but it also seemed like there had to be some connection. Paula disappearing right after I’d received the threats was just too coincidental.

  I went into the kitchen and drank lukewarm water straight from the faucet. On my way back to the living room, I passed through the dining room, and stopped still when I spotted Paula’s pocketbook on a chair adjacent to the dining room table. Although sometimes she went short distances without her pocketbook—to the supermarket or to do an errand in the neighborhood—she never went to work without it.

  Now I was even more convinced that something horrible had happened. Paula didn’t have any close friends in the city—not anyone I could imagine her going to stay with. I supposed she could have had a lover I didn’t know about, but I couldn’t see her going anywhere for so long without her pocketbook.

  I wondered if I should start calling hospitals, or even the police. Then I decided to calm down—there had to be some simple explanation for all of this. Maybe Paula had taken a day off work to be by herself. She may have called her office, but there was some mix-up and her colleagues didn’t get the message. She could show up at the apartment at any moment.

  I paced in the foyer and the hallway for about half an hour, steadily losing hope that Paula was okay. By nine o’clock, I was seriously considering calling the police. The last thing I needed was more police in my life, but I knew that time could be valuable and if I waited any longer I might be putting Paula in danger.

  I started dialing 911, but on the second 1 I hung up. It seemed crazy to call the police when I was still a murder suspect. I figured that the New Jersey police had probably contacted the New York police about me and I definitely didn’t want to complicate things. Besides, even if the New York police had no idea that I had been questioned about Rudnick’s murder, I wouldn’t be able to tell them about the threatening e-mails I’d been receiving, which would probably be their best lead for finding Paula.

  I decided to give it another day. For all I knew I would wake up and Paula would be in bed next to me.

  In the locked room, Otis was still making a racket. I went to check on him and see if I could get him to calm down, when I saw that he had shat and pissed all over the floor.

  “Goddamn it, dog!” I yelled. “What the hell is wrong with you?!”

  Otis ran out of the room and I chased him around the apartment. Finally, I caught him in the living room and I picked him up and spanked him. Then I dropped him on the floor and he scampered away into the kitchen.

  19

  “ I’M GLAD YOU came in here on your own to talk to me this morning,” Bob said, “because, to tell you the truth, I did a lot of thinking last night, and if you didn’t start showing me this kind of responsibility for your actions I was probably going to let you go today.”

  I was sitting across from Bob in his office. I hadn’t slept well and I was struggling to stay awake.

  “Thank you so much,” I said. “Believe me, I only have one goal, and that’s to make a lot of money—for myself and for the company. From now on, I’m going to be completely dedicated—I’ll even start working nights and weekends if I have to.”

  “All right, let’s not get carried away,” Bob said. “This is just a job—I want you to have a life too. All I ask from my employees is that while they’re in this office they give me one-hundred-percent dedication. You think you can do that from now on?”

  My cell phone rang and I answered it, hoping it was Paula. Instead the call was from Jim Turner at Loomis & Caldwell. I instantly remembered how I’d made an appointment to meet Jim at his offi
ce at nine o’clock this morning to discuss his hardware quotes. It was close to ten now.

  “Oh my God, I’m so sorry,” I said. “I’ll leave right now. I can be there in ten minutes, I promise.”

  Jim said he was tied up for the rest of the day and he sounded bitter and annoyed. When I suggested meeting tomorrow he said he had a call coming in on another line and he hung up on me.

  “Who was that?” Bob asked accusingly.

  He had heard too much of the conversation, so there was no way I could cover with a lie. I explained the situation, then Bob said:

  “We can’t lose this sale, Richard. That’s an eighty-thousand-dollar client—maybe more—and he hasn’t paid us anything yet.”

  “We won’t lose him,” I said.

  “It sounds like you may’ve lost him already.”

  “I don’t know how this happened,” I said. “I guess I just left here so suddenly yesterday that I forgot to print out a copy of my next day’s appointments, the way I usually do, and—”

  “This can’t go on any longer,” Bob said. “I’m trying to run a business here and every day there’s a new crisis with you.”

  “I’ll reschedule the meeting,” I said.

  “You’d better,” Bob said. “If you can’t, that’s it. No more second chances.”

  I spent the rest of the morning trying to get hold of Jim Turner. His secretary kept giving me the runaround, insisting that he couldn’t come to the phone. Finally, around noon, I was able to get through.

  He sounded even more upset than he had been before, saying, “Maybe I’ll just have to find a company that wants my business,” and I knew I had to resort to desperate measures. Completely humiliating myself, I started crying, telling him that my job was on the line.

  “Please give us another chance,” I begged. “If I lose this sale my whole life’ll be ruined. Please.”

  The strategy worked. Turner said that he would be out of the office most of the day tomorrow, but that he would be in my neighborhood in the afternoon, and we agreed to meet at one o’clock at my office to discuss the quotes. I thanked him again and again, telling him what a great guy he was and how much I appreciated him helping me out this way.

  When I hung up, my shirt was drenched in sweat and I let out a deep breath. Then I remembered that Paula was still missing and I picked up the phone again.

  I had called Paula’s office early in the morning, before nine, and left a message on her tape, apologizing for being such a jerk the other night, and to please call me as soon as she got this message. Now I called again and Paula’s assistant transferred me to Chris, who had left the message on my tape last night. Chris asked me if I had heard anything and when I said no he asked me if I’d called the police. Thinking fast, I said, “Yes, first thing this morning.” Chris asked me if I had any idea where Paula could be and I said no, I was completely baffled. He asked me to call him as soon as I heard anything and I gave him my office phone number and asked him to do the same.

  Now I knew I couldn’t put it off any longer. I had to call the police right away.

  An operator transferred me to my local precinct. I waited on hold for a while and then a Detective John Himoto came on the line and said that the precinct had already received a call about Paula Borowski’s apparent disappearance from a man named Doug Pearson this morning. I was about to explain how I hadn’t called sooner because I was hoping to hear from Paula, when Himoto interrupted and asked if I could come to the precinct or if he could stop by my apartment sometime this afternoon. Realizing that there was no way I could leave early and still have a job, I said, “Okay, how’s five-thirty?”

  “So tell me more about this fight you had with this construction worker?” Detective Himoto asked, sitting across from me at the dining room table. Himoto had a large, round face and a receding hairline. He looked native Japanese, but he spoke English with a hardened Bronx accent.

  Although I hadn’t felt comfortable lying to Himoto about who had beaten me up, I’d had to stick to the construction-worker story just in case Himoto, for some reason, decided to speak with Bob. I already sensed that Himoto didn’t trust me. I figured this was probably because Doug had told him that I had pushed Paula into the wall that time, so Himoto figured that if something bad had happened to Paula then I probably had something to do with it. I didn’t know if he had already spoken with the New Jersey police, or with someone else from the New York police, and found out that I was a suspect in the Michael Rudnick murder case. Obviously, I wasn’t planning to bring the subject up myself.

  “It was just like I told you,” I said. “Paula and I were taking a walk, a construction worker said something, and one thing led to another. But I don’t see why this has anything to do with—”

  “Which construction site was this?” Himoto asked.

  “Excuse me?” Suddenly, my face was burning, like I had a fever.

  “Where did this altercation take place?”

  Jesus, I thought, why didn’t I just tell him the truth? Now I was just digging myself deeper and deeper into a hole.

  I tried to remember the sites where construction was taking place in the neighborhood. There was a building going up on Lexington . . . or was it Third?

  “I think it was Third Avenue,” I said. “I really don’t remember.”

  “Third and what?”

  “Somewhere in the Sixties.”

  “Can’t you be any more specific?”

  “Sorry. Can’t we just concentrate on my wife?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to do, Mr. Segal. I know this is hard for you, but if you could just bear with me.” He turned a page on his notepad. “So you and your wife take a walk at around eight o’clock, and this is when a construction worker beats you up.”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “I thought construction workers break at five.”

  “I don’t really know if he was a construction worker,” I said. “He could have just been a guy hanging out near a construction site.”

  “Got it,” Himoto said skeptically. “So after you take this walk you return to your apartment at around eight-thirty. When was the last time you saw your wife?”

  “It must have been about eleven o’clock,” I said.

  “That late?” Himoto asked.

  “I went out,” I said. “I had a couple of drinks. When I came home Paula was in bed.”

  “Did you have a couple of drinks or were you drunk?”

  If Himoto had spoken to my doorman he already knew I was drunk. I decided that there was no point in making up any more stories.

  “Let’s put it this way—I had a couple of drinks too many,” I said.

  “Doug Pearson said you were drunk that night. He said you came home from work drunk and then you had an argument with your wife.”

  “How the hell would Doug Pearson know what happened?”

  “He said your wife called him at approximately nine P.M. What I’m wondering about is if you came home from work drunk, when did you and your wife take this walk you said you took? Were you drunk when you took the walk?”

  “Doug is lying.”

  “Lying about what?”

  “Everything. I’m telling you the way it happened. I had a drink or two after work, but I wasn’t drunk. I came home, took a walk with Paula, then I went out drinking alone.”

  “And you didn’t have a fight with your wife?”

  “It wasn’t a fight, it was an argument—a minor argument. You know, if I were you I wouldn’t pay much attention to anything Doug Pearson says. He was having an affair with my wife and he just wants to make me look as bad as possible.”

  “What makes you say Doug Pearson was having an affair with your wife?” Himoto asked. There was a strange tone in his voice—I didn’t know if he was suspicious or just curious.

  “His fiancée . . . I mean, his ex-fiancée called me up at work and told me.”

  “According to what Mr. Pearson told me, he hadn’t been having an aff
air with your wife at all.”

  “He’s lying,” I said. “He has something to do with this and he’s trying to cover for himself.”

  Himoto seemed unconvinced and I couldn’t help wondering myself if maybe I’d been wrong about Paula and Doug— maybe they weren’t having an affair after all. It had been stupid of me to take Kirsten’s word for it.

  Himoto turned to a new page on his notepad and said, “Mr. Pearson also told me that the first time your wife came to his apartment was about two weeks ago, after you pushed her into a wall—I guess that was during one of your ‘minor arguments.’ Then, on this past Tuesday night, Mr. Pearson says your wife called him again, apparently afraid you were going to become violent, and Mr. Pearson told her to come to his apartment right away. She declined the offer and said that she was going to go out to take a walk and get some fresh air.”

  “I don’t believe this,” I said. “You actually think . . . I told you, my wife was home when I came home from drinking.”

  “I’m just telling you what Mr. Pearson told me. Chris Dolan, your wife’s boss, also called the precinct today, and he also raised some concern about you. He said your wife came to work a couple of weeks ago with a bruise on her cheek—”

  “She fell in the shower.”

  “That’s what Mr. Dolan said your wife claimed happened, but there were fears in her office that domestic violence might have been involved.”

  “Come on, I would never hurt my wife,” I said. “Are you out of your fucking mind?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Accusing me of something like that. You have to be crazy to—”

  “All right, let’s calm down,” Himoto said.

  “No, you calm down,” I said. “My wife is missing and your job is to find her, so just find her, damn it!”

  Himoto shifted on the couch.

  “I’m just trying to get a sense of your wife’s whereabouts on Tuesday night,” he said, “what she might’ve been thinking about, what her emotional state was, and then I’m going to try to piece all of this information together and reach a logical conclusion. This is the way I run my investigations—I’m sorry if you have a problem with that.”