“Nope.” They were in front of the station now. Morasco’s gaze drifted to a car edging its way into the police parking lot—a silver BMW 360i.
“That’s some fancy cop car,” said Brenna.
“It’s the chief’s.”
Brenna and Morasco watched the BMW pull into a reserved space. A chunky man slid out. He wore a charcoal gray suit that looked expensive, even from a distance. He strode past Morasco and Brenna and into the station without saying hello. He had that look on his face, like a celebrity shopping for groceries. I know you recognize me but please don’t talk to me.
“That’s seriously the chief?” Brenna said, once the station door had closed behind him.
“Yep,” said Morasco. “Chief Lane Hutchins. Understated, isn’t he?”
But Brenna hadn’t asked the question because of the pompous figure the chief so obviously cut. She’d said it because she honestly had recognized him, and her mind was reeling back once again, taking her to October 20, 1998 . . . To that knock on her passenger window, and the pretty-faced cop peering in at her with his shark’s eyes, the bulky, scruff-faced uniform standing behind him.
“Lane Hutchins rose up the ladder pretty damn fast,” Brenna said.
“Huh?”
“During the Iris Neff case, he was a uniformed officer.”
Morasco gave her a half smile. “I’m not even going to ask how you know that,” he said. “But yeah. You’re right. Lane doesn’t come from money but he’s always seen himself as a bigwig. Made him a little hard to work with back then, the attitude. He hated taking orders—always said, ‘I do better without people standing in my way.’ ” Morasco took a breath, his eyes drifting away from Brenna’s, into some middle distance over her shoulder. “I’ve got to hand it to him, though. He knew how to make the right people happy.”
“Such as?”
“Teasdales,” he said. “You make them happy, you make the mayor happy. Lane hasn’t worked past five a day in his life, but he golfs with Roger Wright at 7 A.M. every morning. Around here, that’s what you call a work ethic.”
“So, listen . . . What’s the name of the detective who drives the light blue Vivio Bistro?”
“Huh?”
“I saw him at the Neff house ten years ago with Hutchins, actually. And he was just at Nelson’s press conference. Big guy in his forties, brown hair, pretty-boy features?”
Morasco looked at her. “Doesn’t sound like anybody I know,” he said. “You sure he’s with the Tarry Ridge PD?”
“He’s got a black mole, right here.” Brenna pointed to the side of her face.
Morasco’s eyes were blank. He shook his head.
“Are you sure?”
“We had a dozen plainclothes officers and twenty uniforms when I started working here,” Morasco said. “Thanks to the Teasdale funding, we’ve now got five more of each. I know all of them very well. Not one of them fits that description.”
Brenna took a step back. “But I saw him . . . with Hutchins. I was staking out the house and they knocked on my window. Told me to leave.”
Morasco shrugged. “No idea.”
She looked deep into his eyes, wishing again that she could see what was going on behind them. “Nature of the beast,” she said.
“No, Brenna. I honestly don’t know who you’re talking about.” Morasco said good-bye to Brenna with a handshake and a quick smile. He left her standing outside the station, alone with her doubt.
Chapter 19
The press had all left by the time Brenna made it back to Nelson’s house. A good thing for him, too, because if any news outlet had been there, they’d have gotten the photo op of their lives: Nelson Wentz’s investigator, leaning on his bell, pounding on his door with the side of her fist, shouting his name like some spurned wife in a Lifetime movie.
It was Brenna’s fault, of course. She was the one who’d insisted he take the sleeping pill, then unplugged his upstairs phone, set his machine to pick up after one ring, and turned the volume way down, so that it was now just as impossible to wake him with a call as it was to accomplish the task via the too-thick front door, or this maddeningly feeble electronic bell.
Brenna backed up for a few moments, eyeing the bay window that made up most of Nelson’s living room wall. The pristine white draperies were drawn shut, as always. She moved closer and put her hand on the glass, gave it a tentative knock. The sound resonated. She wondered how hard she could bang on the window without breaking it, her gaze shifting to the small garden at the base of the window—a bed of impatiens, atop which staid white mums flowered at evenly spaced intervals, all framed by a line of smooth, fist-sized rocks. For a few moments, she imagined picking up one of the rocks and winging it at the bedroom window. Brenna had a good arm—she’d pitched for her high school softball team and even played for the Trumpet’s team as a ringer two years in a row, forcing the rival New York Post to insist on a “no spouses” clause for company games—but these rocks looked like they could do some serious damage. She wanted to talk to Nelson, not face him in small claims court.
Her gaze went to the rock at the center—slightly larger and rougher, with an odd, bloated shape. A familiar shape . . . Brenna grabbed it. Sure enough it was plastic, the same brand Brenna’s mother had bought from Ellory Hardware at 2975 Ocean Street and placed under that hedge by the side of the house twenty-three years ago. If you need to use the key, fine. But this rock needs to be our secret, Brenna. You make sure no one sees you opening it!
Brenna twisted open the rock, pulled the key out, unlocked Nelson Wentz’s front door, and hurried upstairs, following the sound of his snoring.
She found him in his bed, flat on his back in the type of deep sleep that ages you—blanket up around the chin, mouth wide open, cheeks sunken in. He could have been eighty or ninety years old. This could have been his deathbed. On the nightstand next to him, Brenna saw the book she’d noticed on the coffee table—Safekeeping: A Memoir. She put her hand on the cover, and Nelson gasped as if she’d touched a limb. His body jerked, and when Brenna turned, she saw him, sitting up in bed, his eyes wide open and confused. “What are you doing here?”
“Let myself in.”
He stared at her. “What’s wrong?”
“We need to talk, Nelson,” Brenna said. “They found the murder weapon.”
He closed his eyes for a moment.
“You know what was used to kill her.”
He nodded slowly.
Brenna made herself look him in the eye. “How do you know?”
Nelson took a deep breath. “When I found Carol. I . . . I saw her wounds. I saw that my screwdriver was missing from its hook.”
“Well then why the hell didn’t you tell the police?”
Nelson sat up, and the blanket slipped, revealing the plain white T-shirt, the one he’d been wearing under the dress shirt and bow tie for the press conference. There was something indecent about it. He looked vulnerable and exposed. “They were . . . they were already accusing me. I was frightened.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
He cleared his throat, pulled the blanket closer to him. “I don’t know.”
“We had an understanding, Nelson. You promised to tell me everything—no matter how difficult or embarrassing it was to say.”
“I was afraid.”
Brenna exhaled, watched his face. Nelson’s mouth twitched. He returned her gaze, but his eyelashes kept fluttering. Brenna didn’t know whether to take that as evasiveness or nerves—with Nelson, they so often went hand-in-hand. She said, “They found the screwdriver at the Lukoil station on Van Wagenen and Main.”
“That’s . . . that’s where I always get my gas.”
“So you understand the problem here,” she said between her teeth. “You understand the situation that you’re in?”
Nelson collapsed, as though someone had put a lead weight in his chest and then ripped out his spine. He rested his elbows on his knees and sank his head to his wrists. He stay
ed like that for quite some time, his shoulders trembling. “Why would someone,” he kept saying, “why would someone do this to me, why would someone be so cruel, why would someone, why . . .” His voice was muffled and slightly wet. Brenna wasn’t sure whether Nelson was crying until he looked up at her. His eyes were dry.
“Nelson?”
“Yes?”
“Did you kill your wife?”
“No. I swear to God I didn’t. I wouldn’t . . . I would never hurt Carol.”
Brenna searched his face. “I believe you,” she said. And she meant it—for those same simple instinctual reasons that had made her believe him in the first place. And because for the life of her, she couldn’t picture a man as frail and anal retentive as Nelson Wentz committing such a violent and messy act.
But Nelson was hiding something from her—she knew that much. “Can I make you a cup of tea?” she said.
Nelson pulled his head up. “I think I need a Scotch.”
In Nelson’s luxurious kitchen, Brenna mixed him a Scotch/water so weak, she could have served it management-approved at a shopping mall chain restaurant during two-for-one happy hour. She fully understood Nelson’s desire for a good strong drink, given the circumstances. But she was afraid of how it might interact with the sleeping pill he’d taken earlier, and she had no desire to pick Nelson up off the floor and carry him upstairs.
Brenna handed him the drink and poured herself a glass of water, and the two of them walked into the living room. He took the same chair he’d been in the night he’d hired her. As she sat down in the hard chair next to him—the same one for her as well—her mind briefly shifted back to that night, two nights ago, Nelson looking her in the eye. I promise. I’ll tell you everything.
She waited for Nelson to take a swallow of his drink. She put her glass of water down on the coffee table, making sure to use a coaster so that he wouldn’t jump out of his skin. “Nelson?”
He looked at her.
“There’s something you’re not telling me,” she said, “about you and Lydia Neff.”
Nelson’s face flushed at the name. He took another enormous swallow. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
Brenna exhaled hard. “I’m sorry, but I can’t work this way.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’ve been through this dance about a dozen times in the past two days, and I’m tired of it. I have no use for evasiveness or white lies, or if-you-don’t-have-something-nice-to-say or whatever you want to call it. It’s all bullshit. You want me to work with you, I need facts. All of them. And if that’s too much for you to handle, then I suggest—”
“I was in love with Lydia Neff.”
Brenna’s eyebrows went up. She stared at Nelson for what felt like a full minute, unsure of how to respond. “So,” she said finally, “you did have an affair?”
“No.” His eyes were starting to cloud.
“You had feelings for each other?”
He shook his head.
“I don’t understand.”
“Lydia had her own PR firm,” Nelson said. “She ran it out of her house, but she had to go into the city a lot. There was a period, a dozen years ago, when she was working on a major event—the opening of the Rose Building on Fifty-seventh. She was taking the train into the city almost every day for a few months.” He took another huge gulp of his drink, draining it, Brenna glad for all the water she’d put in.
“And . . .”
“And you know, I take the train in to my job at Facts of Note. We’d be on the platform at the same time. At first, we just said hello, but at some point, we started sitting together and talking.”
“What did you talk about?”
“Politics, religion, scientific discovery . . . You name it. Lydia would always ask me about whatever article I happened to be editing, and the conversation would sort of . . . take off from there.” Nelson set his glass down on a coaster, and sat down again. He ran a hand through his wispy hair, gazing up at the ceiling. “She was so . . . interested.”
“Not like Carol.”
“No. Not like Carol.”
“You fell in love with Lydia during these train rides?”
He nodded.
“Couldn’t wait to get to the train station every day.”
“That’s right.”
“Do you think Lydia felt the same?”
Nelson shook his head. “I was just someone for her to pass the time with,” he said. “I think part of me knew that, even back then—but I didn’t care. Do you have any idea what it’s like to have a woman—a woman like Lydia Neff—hanging on your every word? Looking into your eyes like you’re the only man on earth?” The hand went back into the hair. “She started to confide in me, too.”
“About . . .”
“Her past. Her wild college years. Her ex-husband, Iris’s father. A genius, but wrecked his brain with drugs—methamphetamine, I think . . . He was in an institution back then. I don’t know that she told anyone else about him, other than me.”
Brenna looked at Nelson. “She trusted you.”
“It was never an affair. We weren’t doing anything wrong—just talking.”
“Sometimes, talking is more intimate.”
Nelson stared down at his hands
“Especially if no one else is talking to you.”
Nelson picked at a thumbnail. For the briefest moment, he lifted his gaze to Brenna’s face, and his eyes looked different, bright—as though someone had suddenly flicked the switch behind them. “Timothy O’Malley.”
“Huh?”
“Timothy O’Malley. Lydia’s ex-husband—that’s his name.” He looked up at Brenna again, his eyes still blazing. “She went to Syracuse, majored in art history. Her freshman roommate was a prudish girl from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, named Marianne Stanhope. I remember everything she ever told me, Ms. Spector. Every single detail of her life—I’ve kept them all in my head like . . .”
“Souvenirs.”
“Yes.” He breathed in and out. “Souvenirs.”
“I understand,” Brenna said, and she did. Probably more than anyone, though her mind didn’t pick and choose the way Nelson’s did. She knew what it was like to be a human time capsule—to be the only one in a conversation to remember its details. She knew how one-sided that could feel, how terribly lonely it could make you, especially when those details held within them that feeling—that crumbling of the heart . . . “Did Carol know about your friendship?”
“She never asked,” he said, “so I didn’t say anything.”
Brenna’s mind went to the folders under Carol’s quilting supplies, the photographs and police reports and the secret chat room life she’d been leading as LydiaTR . . . “She suspected something.”
He nodded. “The funny part was, the whole thing—whatever you want to call the thing that was going on between Lydia and me . . . By the time Carol said something about it, it was more or less over.”
“How so?”
“Lydia’s train rides started tapering off, till they were around once a week at most,” he said. “Lydia was still friendly, but she seemed more distracted. My feelings, thankfully, started to fade.”
“Okay . . .”
“Then one night . . . God, I remember it like it was yesterday. It was a Saturday night, and I was watching the ten o’clock news and Carol walks into the room. She says, very matter-of-fact, ‘Someone told me that you and Lydia Neff are having an affair.’ ”
“What did you say?”
“I told her that it was completely untrue, of course,” Nelson sighed heavily. “Carol told me she’d heard it from her friend Gayle Chandler. She said Gayle had heard it from Lydia herself. Can you imagine? Why would Lydia tell a lie like that?”
“That’s horrible.”
He nodded. “I told Carol the whole story. She seemed to believe me, but still I was bothered. After Carol went to sleep, I drove over to Lydia’s house. There was another car leaving, just as I wa
s getting there. It made me feel . . . strange.”
“Jealous?”
“Maybe. Anyway, I knocked on the door, and it was the weirdest thing. Here I’d driven there at that ungodly hour to tell Lydia what Gayle Chandler had said and ask her if it was true . . . But I didn’t wind up saying any of that.” He cleared his throat. “I asked her about the car.”
“The car,” Brenna repeated. “The one leaving the house.”
“Yes, and she acted so . . . so bizarre, I forgot everything else I’d been planning to say.”
“Bizarre?”
“She told me to forget I saw the car. Forget I was ever there. Tonight never happened. I left pretty quickly—Iris was sleeping upstairs and I didn’t want to wake her, and besides . . . Lydia frightened me.”
Brenna leaned in closer. “Your feelings for Lydia . . .”
“They went away that night.” Nelson’s gaze dropped to the floor. Brenna knew he wasn’t telling the complete truth about that, but she wasn’t going to call him on it. It wasn’t important. The phone rang once in the kitchen, and the machine picked up silently. Neither one of them moved. That wasn’t important, either.
“I thought Carol was over any hurt feelings or suspicions she may have had,” Nelson said finally. “It was more than a decade ago, and it was nothing to begin with. We never talked about it . . . But then seeing . . . seeing everything she’d been up to before she went away . . .” Nelson’s voice cracked. “If it was my feelings for Lydia . . . If that was the reason why someone did that to Carol, I don’t think I’m going to be able to live with myself.”
Brenna put a hand on Nelson’s shoulder. It felt delicate as a bird’s wing. “It’ll be all right,” she said. “Don’t worry. It’ll be okay . . .”
Finally, he caught his breath. “I wish she would call again.”
“The young girl.”
“Iris. Yes.”
Nelson reached for his glass, sucked down a piece of ice, and chewed it up. They sat there for several seconds, the crunching sound filling the air around them. “You want to know something weird?” Nelson said finally.
Brenna looked at him.
And She Was Page 17
