The Ex

by Alafair Burke

  He took a step back, but his hands remained balled into fists. “You don’t think I know what you’re doing? You told that judge that Tracy Frankel may have been calling someone at the Sentry Group with a financial motive to kill my father? It took five seconds for Gothamist to quote anonymous sources that Dad wouldn’t help me start my own fund. I had finally gotten that asshole Frederick Gruber back in line, and now he’s talking about pulling his money again. Our phones have been ringing off the hook. The press has been digging around for details about my father’s will from the probate court. Now they’re starting to ask about that bullshit back in college. Not to mention, you’re accusing me of murdering my own father. What kind of person are you?”

  “Are you done?”

  “No, you have to stop this.”

  “I don’t have to do anything except defend my client. Why was Tracy Frankel calling you?”

  “The DA tells me Jack Harris is the killer and that your job is to twist the facts around and confuse people. Leave me out of it, lady, or I will use every last dollar I have to sue the shit out of you for defamation. You think you’re the only one who can dig up some dirt? How would you like it if I started leaking stories about you to the press?”

  “Again, Mr. Neeley, are you done?”

  “No, I’m definitely not done. You’ll be the first to know when I am.”

  He slammed the door so hard on his way out that I thought the glass might break.

  “Are you okay?” Einer asked.

  I told him I was fine.

  I HAD FINALLY REGAINED MY composure when Einer knocked on my office door again. “Sorry to bug you, but a process server was just here. I think you need to see this.”

  THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK v. JACKSON HARRIS, defendant.

  PEOPLE’s motion for reconsideration of bail.

  I knew Scott Temple was angry with me for embarrassing him in court, but I had not anticipated this.

  I WAS READY TO CALL it quits for the day, but felt obligated to tell Jack about the bail motion in person. I had just gotten the all-clear from Nick the doorman when I saw a familiar face heading in my direction in Jack’s lobby. It was Ross Connor, Owen’s former partner on the NYPD.

  “The last I heard, you made it pretty clear you wanted nothing to do with my client.”

  He held up both palms. “Just here to see an old friend, Olivia.”

  “That’s bullshit. He’s on house arrest. He doesn’t let anyone up without police approval. No friends allowed. Just ask Charlotte.”

  “Damn. Charlotte, that’s right. Remember that time I tried haunching on her after way too many shots of whatever we were drinking? I thought she might clamp my balls in a vise, but instead she just started laughing. Talk about brutal.”

  I wasn’t going to be distracted by humor. “Is this about the bail motion?”

  The question appeared to confuse him. “That’s over and done with it. He’s home, so kudos to you.”

  “You came here as law enforcement, Ross. Otherwise, you couldn’t have come at all.”

  “Fine, you caught me. I thought I might have better luck with Jack than the stranger who questioned him when he was arrested.”

  “While he has murder charges pending? I’ll go to the judge.”

  “And if you do, I’ll say that ever since you came to see me, I’ve been thinking about him. How close we used to be, when his brother was around. Felt I owed it to him—or maybe just to Owen—to come. How will it look if you rat me out for that?”

  “You’re unbelievable. You just admitted to a defense attorney that you’re willing to testi-lie.”

  “Just calm down, okay? I gave it a shot, but your boy didn’t even say anything incriminating. No harm, no foul.”

  “He didn’t incriminate himself because he’s innocent. Has the job tainted you so badly that you can’t even entertain the possibility that the department screwed up?”

  “Do you want to keep yelling at me, or do you want to know why I bothered to come here?”

  “We’ve established that you came here to question my client. As for your reasons, you’ve already decided whether to share them with me or not.”

  He pretended to mull it over for a few seconds. When he spoke, he put his hands in his pockets and looked at the ground. “So after you stopped by my office, I kept thinking about when I came here to tell him about Molly. And those condoms fell out of his bag, and he started acting all spooked.”

  “I think you said it was awkward. Now it’s spooked?”

  “I kept going back to that moment where Jack freaked out. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. So I called the medical examiner. They autopsied all of the Penn Station victims. Standard procedure for homicides. Turns out Molly had a hysterectomy.”

  “So maybe they used condoms for some other reason.”

  “Married people don’t use condoms—period. But especially not when they’re done having babies.”

  He was right, of course, as a general matter. Not to mention the fact that Jack was carrying the condoms around in his bag. So if Jack was cheating on Molly at the time she was killed, how did that affect the current case against him? It didn’t. I said as much to Ross.

  “You’re missing the point. Trust me, on the job, I’ve seen plenty of men with side pieces. I thought if I told him what I knew, he might drop the facade and tell me the truth about what really happened with him and Neeley. I asked him point blank: did you do it? No luck, but it was worth a shot.”

  “I think that’s called a violation of his Sixth Amendment right to counsel.” Even as I spoke the words, I remembered the various times I had also tried to get Jack to open up to me in the last month. About his hospitalization. His feelings about Malcolm. Us. Jack had specifically told me that Molly was the “only one” after me. Had there been others during his marriage?

  “I’m telling you, Olivia. You don’t know that guy the way you think you do.” He was shaking his head as he walked away.

  Jack didn’t bother with a hug or any other greeting when he opened his apartment door. His back was already to me as he walked down the front hall. “I didn’t know you were coming by.”

  He was obviously still upset that I had leaked the information to a reporter about Tracy’s phone calls, but, in typical Jack fashion, was sulking instead of telling me he was angry.

  “I figured we hadn’t talked for a couple of days, and I want to keep you up to date. How about you? Anything to report on your end?”

  “Ha-ha. I can see it now, my next book, A Diary from Home Confinement. Riveting stuff.”

  Apparently I was going to have to ask him about Ross Connor’s visit. I made myself comfortable on his sofa. “This is a crazy question,” I said offhandedly, “but I could have sworn I saw Owen’s old partner leaving your building.”

  “Oh, yeah, I guess I did have one break from routine. Man, I can’t believe you recognized him. Ross Connor, after all these years.”

  “I’ve always been good with faces. So what did he want?”

  Jack shrugged. “Just to see how I was holding up. He went through corrections and got approval to come by and everything. Pretty nice of him, don’t you think?”

  All those times I had lied to Jack, it had never dawned on me that he might be the better liar. This was masterful.

  “I guess so, but he’s also a cop. He didn’t ask you about the case?”

  “Nah. Just shooting the breeze. A little awkward, I guess, but still—it’s the thought that counts, right? So, you said you have an update?” It was a nice pivot. Just like that, no more Ross Connor talk.

  As I told him the information I’d gotten from Tracy’s mom and sister, I was struggling to keep my thoughts straight. If Jack had cheated on Molly, did it change anything about his case? Maybe he was only lying about the reason for Ross’s visit to avoid the awkward topic of an old infidelity. But once again, I was wondering whether I’d been too quick to assume Jack was innocent.

  I forced myself to f
ocus on what mattered: Tracy’s connection to the Sentry Group. “My best guess is that she was looking at Max—or maybe Malcolm—as a potential sugar daddy. If it was Malcolm, she might have been at the waterfront to meet up with him when Max killed his father. Or if she was seeing Max, he may have sent her there to get rid of them at the same time. Two for one. Either way, it plays into our theory that Max Neeley’s the one behind this.”

  “I know we’ve been throwing Max’s name around, but do you really think he did this?”

  I thought about the contempt Max had revealed in my office. At the time, I thought I was looking into the face of a killer. But maybe his anger was a perfectly natural response to our not-so-subtle suggestions that he had killed his father. “More likely him than you, right?”

  If Jack sensed my suspicions in the question, he didn’t show it. “Jesus, what a family. Neeley trained his mentally ill son to use guns as if it were any other hobby, like it was golf or scuba or coin collecting. He made the other one hate him so much that he was driven to murder. Malcolm Neeley blamed those boys for their mother’s death. His own stories about the ways he tried to parent them are like a handbook on how to screw up your kids. Ticking time bombs, the both of them.” He shook his head. “So is that it?”

  “No, I’m afraid not.” I slipped a copy of the People’s motion to reconsider bail from my briefcase and handed it to him. The title of the motion was self-explanatory.

  When Jack looked up, he tried to hand the papers back to me as if that would make them go away. “But I haven’t done anything wrong. Honestly, I find myself staying feet away from the door when I open it, even for you, just in case I accidentally set it off.”

  “They’re not saying you violated your release conditions. They’re alleging that you shouldn’t have had them from the beginning. Basically, the state’s saying the court got it wrong from the get-go.” The hearing was in three days.

  “You sound awfully calm.”

  “It’s just Scott Temple wanting a second bite at the apple. Without new evidence, I’m sure the judge will keep the status quo. So unless you know something I don’t know . . .”

  “So okay, then. I’m sure it will be fine.”

  I said good-bye like it was any other visit, promising to contact him with new developments. I placed one foot in front of the other, through his apartment, down the hallway, into the elevator. The second the doors closed, I felt myself tremble.

  Golf. Scuba. Coin collecting. Those “stories” Malcolm Neeley had told about his parenting had come straight from Malcolm’s deposition—the one that Jack swore to me he had never read.

  THAT NIGHT, IN BED WITH Ryan, I was starting to doze off but couldn’t stop thinking about Ross Connor and Jack. “Do you know any married men who use condoms?”

  “With their wives?” He laughed.

  “I’m serious. And this isn’t about you and Anne. It’s for one of my cases. A married man had condoms in his briefcase: what does that mean to you?”

  “I’d say, sure, it’s just birth control. Not every woman wants to be pumped full of hormones. But in his briefcase? Wouldn’t they go from shopping bag to nightstand?”

  “Plus the wife had a hysterectomy.”

  “Then that dude was stepping out.”

  I of all people knew that having an affair didn’t make you a murderer. But it did make you a liar.

  Jack had lied about his fidelity to Molly. He had lied about Ross Connor’s visit to the apartment. And he had lied about having read Malcolm’s deposition, which meant that he knew long before the shooting that Malcolm could be found at that football field every Wednesday morning. What else was he lying about?

  Ryan kissed me on the shoulder, crawled out of bed, and began getting dressed. “You realize next month, we’ll have known each other two years?” I asked. Ryan had called me after not making partner. Preston & Cartwright always breaks the bad news at the end of August.

  “I’ve known you a lot longer than that. I was one of the many summer associates who was terrified of you years before.”

  “This wasn’t supposed to go on for two years.”

  He was standing next to my bed, his shirt half buttoned, being beautiful. “I’m happy. I thought you were, too. If anything, I wanted more. You were the one who—”

  “I know. I don’t want more. But I also don’t want . . . this. We need to stop.”

  “We tried that before, remember? And it was my own wife who asked you to come back.”

  “It wasn’t supposed to be for two years. She didn’t know what else to do, Ryan. You were sad and damaged and convinced you had failed at work and therefore had failed as a provider, and for some reason, I made you feel better. But you’re not damaged anymore. You need to go home.”

  “Anne’s okay with us.”

  “Well, I’m not. Not anymore.”

  “So, what? This is good-bye?”

  “Yes,” was all I could say. I didn’t think it would be this hard. I was never supposed to care about him.

  He leaned over and kissed me on the forehead. “You’re a better person than you give yourself credit for, Olivia. Don’t forget that.” He touched my hair one last time and left.

  When he was gone, I blocked his number and then deleted it from my phone. When I say good-bye, I mean it.

  Chapter 20

  I WAS BACK at my conference table, thinking about all the same evidence I had reviewed yesterday. How could everything look so different today?

  Yesterday, I thought we had a good shot at explaining the GSR on Jack’s shirt. I had multiple witnesses who would confirm that Jack had gone to the West Side gun range a few times in the months before the shooting. And I’d get an expert to explain that residue could in fact linger on fabric for long periods of time. But now I was picturing those same witnesses on the stand. Though they weren’t positive, they seemed to recall Jack wearing T-shirts—as if he was trying to fit in—and not the checked collared shirt in question. And then there was the added problem of Jack not having any writing to prove that he’d gone to the range for research, instead of training to kill Malcolm Neeley.

  Same thing with the Madeline e-mails. I could tell a jury that someone else had suggested the football field for the meet-up, but Scott Temple would have a field day on cross-examination. Because the e-mails were anonymous, I couldn’t prove Jack didn’t send them himself. Same thing with whoever hired Sharon Lawson to pose as “Madeline” on the waterfront.

  Then there was Jon Weilly, the co-plaintiff Temple planned to call to the stand. With more specific questioning than I’d been willing to risk, the prosecution had refreshed Weilly’s memory of hearing Jack say he hoped Malcolm Neeley would someday learn how it felt to have a gun-happy madman ruin his life. I would argue it was just a comment made in anger; the prosecution would call it evidence of intent.

  The murder weapon turning up in the very basket Jack had carried to the waterfront? Was it literally a smoking gun, or even more evidence that Jack was framed?

  Like every circumstantial case, every piece of evidence had two sides.

  The case looked different today from yesterday because I was no longer on the side that believed Jack. And it wasn’t just the case evidence I was seeing in a new light. In ten years as a defense attorney, I had never encountered a crime as calculated as this one. Hiring a prostitute to pose at the pier. Telling Charlotte about the sighting, knowing how much she loved missed-moment posts. Working the camera coverage to his advantage. Sending e-mails to himself as “Madeline,” using a location from what was supposedly his favorite book, all to create an explanation in the event someone happened to see him at the football field where Malcolm Neeley could be found every Wednesday. A person doesn’t suddenly become that cunning and manipulative.

  How had I failed to recognize that part of him?

  When his father died, did Jack come to me because he really thought of me as an important part of his life, or did he use his father’s death as a way to get closer
to me? I thought about all the times he tried to convince me that he loved me just the way I was. Was that real, or was being “the good one” his way of trying to control me? I had spent the last twenty years feeling guilty for what I’d done to Jack, but maybe my gut had been telling me that something was seriously wrong. He had tricked me into spending five years with him.

  When Buckley first called me to the precinct, Jack had pleaded with me to take his case instead of passing it on to another lawyer. You know I didn’t do this, but some other lawyer won’t. He had counted on me being blinded by my own guilt.

  I heard a knock at the office door, and Einer poked his head in. “Sorry, I know you didn’t want to be interrupted, but Charlotte’s here. She wouldn’t wait in the lobby. I think she was too uncomfortable with our sexual energy. She insisted on coming back here.”

  “It’s fine.”

  As Charlotte slipped past Einer, he said, “I could turn you if you gave me a chance.”

  “Dear boy, I would break you.”

  Once the door was closed, she made herself at home in my chair behind the desk.

  “So what’s up, Charlotte?”

  “The DA’s about to revoke Jack’s bail, and Jack says you haven’t returned his calls all day. What the fuck do you think is up?”

  “I’ve been busy.”

  “Nice. Well, now I know why Jack’s wondering if he needs a different lawyer for this bail thing. What’s going on, Olivia?”

  So when Jack first got arrested, he only wanted me. Now that I saw the truth, he was ready for someone else. “Maybe he should switch counsel. He could probably get an adjournment. Buy himself some more time.”

  “You’re really going to drop him? Are you even allowed to do that after what I’ve paid you?”

  “Really, Charlotte, this is about your money? Remember why you guys pushed me to take this case from the beginning? Because I knew Jack, so I’d believe him and work harder for him. Well, I don’t believe him anymore.”

  “Will you just tell me what’s going on? Jack said he messed up and lied to you about someone coming to the apartment, but you’ve got him so trained only to talk to his lawyers that he clammed up after that. Did someone mess up his bail by coming over? Jack can’t control that.”