A Dangerous Fiction

by Barbara Rogan

  A man in a suit approached the car. Mingus barked again, but this man wasn’t deterred. He beckoned me out of the car. I held on to Mingus and looked away. I didn’t know him. He could be anyone. A reporter. Sam Spade.

  He took out a detective shield and held it up. “Open the window,” he said. I pushed the window button, but nothing happened. My keys were on the floor of the car. It took three attempts to insert the key in the lock, but I finally succeeded.

  I rolled the window down three inches. Mingus snarled.

  “Ma’am, can you control that dog?”

  That, at least, I could do. I ordered Mingus into the backseat and told him to stay. He was more obedient than my own body. The detective asked me to unlock the door and step out of the car. The unlocking part went OK. But when I tried to step out, my knees buckled and I would have fallen if he hadn’t leapt forward to catch me. “Oh no,” I said, for he’d stepped in the puddle of vomit. He lowered me into the driver’s seat and hunkered down outside the car. I felt humiliated.

  The detective was a man of about Molly’s age, with sleek silver hair and a gray mustache. He asked my name. I said it. My voice sounded strange, as if I had water in my ears.

  “Was it you who found her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you live here?”

  “I live in the city. Molly lives alone.”

  “How did you come to find her?”

  “I kept calling. She didn’t answer. I was worried, but not worried enough. I should have come hours ago. She shouldn’t have had to wait so long, lying on the hard floor. And the apples are ruined. Even if you washed the blood off, who would eat them now?” I could tell by his face that I sounded like a lunatic. But I had no more control over my mouth than my body.

  “Was the door open when you got here?” he asked.

  “Locked.”

  “How did you get in?”

  “I have her keys, she has mine.”

  “What’s your relationship to Molly?”

  Molly indeed, I thought. Never met her in his life and he’s first-naming her. The dead get no respect. It was starting to sink in: Molly was gone, irretrievably gone. I was alone again.

  “We used to be business partners. She’s my best friend.” Was my best friend, I thought. Something was wrong with my breathing. The air wasn’t reaching my lungs.

  “Are you OK?” the detective asked, reaching toward my shoulder.

  I shrank away. “Fine.”

  “You’re doing great, ma’am. Just a few more questions and we’ll get the medics over here. When did you last see Molly?”

  “Last night. We drove upstate for the foliage and then I dropped her off. I should have gone in. She asked me to. But she looked so tired.”

  “What time was that?”

  I tried to focus, but it was like wading through cotton. “It was dark. Nine, nine thirty. I watched her go in and then I drove away.”

  “Did you see anyone hanging around?”

  I would have laughed if I could have. “In this neighborhood?”

  “Any unfamiliar cars? People walking by?”

  “No,” I said, then remembered. “A man with a dog.”

  “Detective!” The call came from somewhere behind him. I looked past the silver-haired man and saw Tommy Cullen approaching, holding out an NYPD gold shield.

  I caught a flash of anger as the detective stood and turned to face Tommy. They walked away together, Tommy talking fast and gesticulating. He didn’t look at me. He only looked at the detective.

  I shut the car door and rolled the windows up. I felt safer that way. I watched Tommy and the other detective. Gradually the other man’s posture relaxed. They talked for a while more, then entered Molly’s house without knocking. Time passed. Tommy came out alone and walked straight over to my car.

  He tapped on the passenger-side door. I let him in. Mingus jumped up, but Tommy spoke to him and he sat back down.

  “I’m so sorry,” Tommy said.

  “Did you see her?”

  “I did.”

  “What happened to her?” It was the first time I’d thought to ask. The fog was getting patchy.

  “We’ll talk about that later,” he said softly, in a rush. “I only have a moment, and you need to listen carefully. You need a criminal lawyer before you say another word to these detectives. Do you hear me, Jo?”

  I heard him fine. I just didn’t understand him. “Why would I need a lawyer?”

  “Because Molly was murdered. She was shot, just like Rowena. Didn’t you see the writing on the side of the island?”

  “I saw something. There was so much blood, and all those apples, and Molly’s face. Her scarf fell off. I wish I’d fixed it.”

  He gripped me by both arms, then quickly let me go. “You’re not tracking. Listen to me. You’re tied to two murders. Molly was shot sometime last night. You may have been the last person to see her alive. For all I know, as close as you two were, you could be her heir.” I started to speak, but he raised a finger. “I’m not asking. That detective will be back in a moment with more questions. You tell him you can’t talk; you’re sick and in shock and you need to go home now. Tell him you’ll see him tomorrow. But don’t talk to him again until you’ve got a lawyer.” He peered into my face. “Are you following, Jo?”

  I was, but three or four steps behind. “What did it say?”

  “What?”

  “The writing.”

  Tommy grimaced. On Molly’s porch, a man with an old-fashioned doctor’s bag was pulling on booties. I watched him enter the house.

  “Same as the last time,” Tommy said. “‘Can you hear me now?’”

  Chapter 23

  The EMTs, having come too late for Molly, wanted to take me in instead. I said I wanted to go home, and the silver-haired detective didn’t argue but asked permission to search my car and swab my hands. I had no objection except the cold, which seemed to have crept into my bones. Tommy put me and Mingus into his car and turned the heat on full-blast before returning to Silver Hair’s side. Two men in jumpsuits came out of Molly’s house carrying a stretcher. I covered my eyes.

  After that Tommy drove us home in my car. At the end of Molly’s block, the police had set up barricades, and beyond the barriers there were media vans, photographers, and reporters. As Tommy ran the gauntlet, they trotted beside the car, peering in, but the windows were tinted and I knew they couldn’t see me.

  “They already know?” I asked.

  “They’re like flies. Takes them no time at all to sniff out a crime scene. And Molly was somebody.”

  I rested my head against the door and closed my eyes, just as Molly had done last night. We didn’t speak again until Tommy pulled up in front of my building. Without asking, he came upstairs with me and walked briskly through the apartment, looking in every room, as if I, like Molly, had surrendered ownership. I went into the kitchen to feed Mingus.

  “All clear,” Tommy said, appearing in the doorway.

  “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  He watched me mix a raw egg in with the kibble. “You’re doing that now?”

  “He’s hungry now.” I put the bowl down. The dog waited, eyes on my face. “Chow time,” I said, and he fell to as if he hadn’t eaten in a month.

  “You remember what I told you, Jo?”

  “Get a lawyer.”

  “A criminal lawyer. Do you know any?”

  “Sean Mallory. He’s a client.”

  “I know Mallory. He’ll do.” Tommy handed me his cell phone. I looked at him. “All yours are tapped.” He left the kitchen.

  I looked up Sean’s number on my cell phone and dialed it on Tommy’s. Sean answered and listened to my rambling explanation for no more than a minute before cutting me off. “I’m coming over,” he said.

  I found Tommy in
the living room, pouring a scotch. He handed the glass to me, and took back his phone. “Did you get him?”

  I took a long pull of the drink. Feeling and sense were returning, and I needed a buffer in place before they arrived. “He’s coming,” I said. “But he’s just going to give me advice I won’t take.”

  “You’ll take it if you’re smart.”

  “Strange advice from a cop.”

  “Strange like Benedict Arnold was strange. You’d be doing me a favor if you forgot we had this conversation.”

  “What conversation?”

  “There you go,” Tommy said with a flash of the old smile.

  “Max was wrong about you.”

  “What did Max say?”

  “That you weren’t to be trusted. That you hadn’t forgiven and forgotten.”

  “He got it part right, anyway. You’re not so easy to forget.”

  I sat down on the couch, Mingus beside me. Tommy’s cell phone beeped. He read the message and said, “I have to go back. Is there anyone I can call for you?”

  “Molly,” I said automatically, and didn’t realize my error till I saw Tommy’s face. I knew she was dead, but the knowledge wasn’t continuous; it was more like a series of speed bumps.

  “No one,” I said.

  • • •

  “Out of the question,” Sean Mallory said, with all the authority inherent in his bulk. He’d been a boxer in his youth, and with his broken nose, massive chest, and long arms, he looked the part still, though he didn’t dress it. I’d changed into jeans and an old sweatshirt, comfort clothes, while Sean, despite the hour, had appeared at my door in a fine blue suit and pristine white shirt. It gave him an extra edge in what already felt like a contest.

  “Not till I say so,” he went on, “and only in my presence. Also, we will have to rethink the phone taps. Really, Jo, you should have called me sooner.”

  “I didn’t want a lawyer,” I said, “because I knew what a lawyer’s knee-jerk reaction would be, and I wanted to help the police. Now more than ever. Catching this monster is the number-one priority.”

  “Yours, maybe. Theirs is closing the case. Mine is keeping you safe. You’re the real target here. You’re as much the victim of these crimes as Molly or Rowena, yet right now those detectives could be building a case against you. You’re the last person known to have seen Molly; you found the body; and you stand to inherit the bulk of her estate. They’re gonna think they hit the trifecta.”

  “They can’t be that stupid. There’s no motive. I love Molly, and everyone knows it. Hugo left me very comfortable, and I make a good living. Her money means nothing to me. As for her house . . .” I shuddered. “After tonight, I’d burn it down before I’d set foot in it again. If the police have questions for me, I want to answer them. And you can forget about taking those taps off my phones.”

  “Preferences duly noted,” Sean said smoothly, “and just as soon as I am satisfied that you are not a target of their investigation, I will make you available for questioning.”

  I could not gain any traction with him. This was a whole different man from the one who’d sat in my office, hat in hand, hoping I’d sell his book. Then I was the expert, he the supplicating client. Now our roles were reversed, and I was finding it a lot harder to accept guidance than to give it. But my objections bounced off Sean like pebbles off a steel fortress. I could see I had only two choices with him: I could take his advice or I could fire him. And I wasn’t at all sure he’d agree to the second.

  Sean’s thoughts must have run along the same lines, for he said, “You’re in my ball park now, Jo, and you’ve got to let me call the shots. Think about your own business. Without you standing between your writers and their publishers, how screwed would the writers be?”

  “Totally.”

  “I rest my case.”

  I didn’t rest mine, though, but went on arguing until finally we reached a compromise. The phone taps stayed, but I would allow Sean to run interference with the police. Soon after that, heavy with weariness and sorrow, I walked the lawyer to the door and submitted to a bear hug I hardly felt. “Leave the investigation to the police, and the police to me,” Sean said. “You have your own work to do.”

  I stared at him. Could he really believe I was going back to the office as if nothing had happened?

  He squeezed my shoulder. “You need to mourn your friend and tend to your own wounds.”

  • • •

  We buried Molly on Thursday, one day after the police released her body. By then the story had gone national. I tended to forget it, because we were so close, but Molly was indeed, as Tommy had said, “somebody”: lifelong agent to Hugo Donovan, mother hen to generations of great writers, “the Max Perkins of agents” the New York Times called her in their obituary. Although the police withheld the one definitive piece of evidence that linked Molly’s murder to Rowena’s, reporters on the twenty-four-hour-a-day one-upmanship treadmill made their own connections; they also dug up the earlier items about the agency’s “prankster.” Any way you connected the dots, the agency was right in the middle. Reporters gave the case a name: the Publishing Murders. There was such a media frenzy that it took a hundred police officers to secure the funeral route and the Westchester cemetery where Molly would be laid to rest beside her husband. My apartment building had been staked out by reporters, one of whom tried to sneak in disguised as a masseuse and was summarily ejected, folding table and all. Just outside the funeral home, a Fox News van collided with a CNN van as both maneuvered for a vantage point. No one was hurt in the collision, but two reporters and a cameraman were injured in the scuffle that followed.

  But all that happened on the periphery, while I sheltered in the eye of the hurricane, surrounded by protective bodies. Since Tuesday morning my apartment had turned into Grand Central Station. Friends, colleagues, and clients formed a procession that never ebbed, most of them bearing platters from Fairway or Zabar’s. The kitchen was always full of women doing something to food: preparing it, serving it, putting it away. The office was closed for the week, but instead of taking the time off, the staff gathered every day in my apartment. Max flew in with Barry and the baby, and together with Max’s mother, Estelle, they spent most of every day at my place. Max’s mother made chicken soup from scratch and stood over me until I finished a bowl, clucking over how much weight I’d lost. There were people in my house when I went to bed at night and when I woke in the morning. The whole thing stank of coordination. I suspected Lorna, who could have organized leaves in a hurricane, but I didn’t object. Unlike Garbo, I didn’t want to be alone.

  And I never was, except in bed. Then images of the scene replayed over and over in my mind. Eventually, I knew, those flashbacks would stop. What I dreaded was the emptiness that would follow, when nothing stood between me and the dreariness of loss, which is like a wound that will not heal.

  • • •

  A small fleet of limos had been ordered for ten a.m. to take us to the funeral home. The younger agency staff would go in one limo, along with our accountant, Shelly Rubens. Max, Barry, Harriet, and I would occupy another. There were three more for old friends of Molly’s who’d gathered for the funeral. Max’s mother had volunteered to stay behind with baby Molly to prepare for the gathering afterward; for it had been decided, with my passive acquiescence, that we would sit shiva for Molly in my apartment.

  By seven of that morning, I was showered and dressed and had embarked on an attempt to restore a semblance of life to my face. Sitting at my vanity table, I coated my swollen eyelids with taupe powder and applied mascara—waterproof, just in case, though I had no intention of needing it. Molly’s dignity had been assaulted by cancer’s depredations, by her murderer, and by the police, who had left her lying in her blood while they took pictures and talked over her. I was determined that her funeral would restore what it could of that stolen dignity. She de
served a stately departure, and by God she would have it. There would be no scenes of extravagant emotion, no weeping and wailing, no hugging of coffins. I would drown in my tears before I would shed them in public.

  Dabs of concealer covered the dark circles under my eyes. I put on a lipstick that Molly had bought me the last time we went shopping, and studied the results critically. What I really wanted was a veil to hide behind, but that would have looked melodramatic. Makeup would have to be my mask.

  I left my bedroom, trailed by Mingus. Keyed up by all the tumult, the dog stuck to my heel like a shadow. When I went to bed last night, Jean-Paul had been dozing on the living-room sofa. Now Keyshawn Grimes lay there, sound asleep under an afghan. My self-appointed bodyguards, the boys were switching off, so that one of them was always within earshot.

  In the kitchen I made a pot of strong coffee and drank two cups in quick succession. Jean-Paul and Chloe came in together and left again at once to take Mingus for a walk. I hadn’t been outside since Tommy Cullen drove me home from Molly’s house.

  Soon the others began to gather. Harriet arrived alone and uncharacteristically enveloped me in a hug. “I just want you to know,” she said gruffly, “I’m here for you. You’re not to worry about the agency. I’ve got your back.”

  Then my back had better watch out, I thought, and was instantly remorseful. Molly had been Harriet’s mentor as well as mine; they’d been colleagues and friends for many years. The hard feelings that arose when Molly installed me as a partner must have made this loss all the more painful. And Harriet had been wonderful these past few days, undertaking tasks that should have been mine, if I’d been functional. She notified clients, handled the press, and set in motion the process for Molly’s pre-planned funeral. She worked from my apartment, hardly leaving except to go home at night and once when the police summoned her to an interview. She’d come back from that interview hours later, paler than ever, with a pinched mouth and nothing at all to say.