Disillusions

by Seth Margolis

  He cleared his throat. Nick Lawrence stopped playing and turned abruptly, eyes fierce, jaws clenched for rebuke.

  “Oh, it’s you.” He turned back to the piano for a moment. When he faced Dwight a second time his features had regained their usual composure.

  Dwight felt his stomach muscles cramp. He’d never seen a face go from ugly to splendid like that.

  “What can I do for you?” Nick said.

  “You remember I asked you about the baby monitor?”

  “Christ, that again?”

  His annoyance was justified, and yet the monitor went to the heart of the matter.

  “You’re positive it was in the nursery? Are you sure that no one was listening from the hallway when you and your father-in-law and your wife were talking about ransom plans?”

  “As I’ve said a dozen times already, the door to the master bedroom was open. If someone had been listening in the hallway we would have seen them. And the monitor was not in the room. It never leaves the nursery.” He seemed quite positive, and that precise diction of his, that prosecutorial inflection he was prone to, made arguing with him an unappealing prospect.

  “Then Gwen Amiel knew about the ransom plans from some other source.”

  He shrugged and shook his head slowly. “We were sleeping together, I’m sure you know that. Had I known what she’d…” His voice broke and he took a deep breath. “She was my child’s baby-sitter, do you understand that? I entrusted my daughter’s well-being to this woman who…” He shuddered. Red splotches appeared on his cheeks and jaw.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Lawrence, I—”

  “Dada!”

  Tess charged into the room, Rosa Piacevic close behind.

  “Come here, dumpling,” she said. “Dada is talking with…”

  “It’s okay, Rosa.” He scooped up his daughter and tossed her into the air, catching her in both hands and pulling her to his chest.

  “Anything else, Mr. Hawkins?” He wiped tears from his eyes with the back of a hand.

  “There is one more thing. The morning your wife was killed, do you recall where she went?”

  “Jesus Christ, that again? The poor woman’s dead. Who cares if she drove around for a while that morning?”

  “So she was driving around?”

  Lawrence glared at him, his chest heaving under his damp T-shirt. He was like some kind of wildcat, muscles always poised for combat.

  “You’re absolutely positive she was driving that morning?”

  “I don’t know. For the hundredth time I don’t know.” He sounded angry but also, for the first time, worried.

  Dwight shook his head and glanced at the little girl. He was certainly no judge of infant beauty, but Tess Lawrence struck him as exceptionally pretty, with an almost magnetic intensity to her eyes. And yet there was something else he couldn’t quite figure out, something in that face that disturbed him somehow. He glanced from father to daughter. The similarities were obvious, and yet there was another, deeper quality to her face that he couldn’t quite fathom.

  “I’ll let myself out,” he said, and by the time he reached the front door he heard the piano again, that same piece, the notes flowing as smoothly as before.

  Chapter 40

  Gwen rode the subway back to Manhattan, after calling directory assistance for Valerie Goodwin’s address. She got off at 23rd Street and walked two blocks north to Valerie’s building, feeling buoyed by accomplishment. She was saving herself.

  Valerie lived in a six-story white brick building on East 25th Street, a few doors east of Lexington Avenue. Gwen pressed the buzzer next to GOODWIN and waited. The building wasn’t nearly as elegant as she’d expected, given Valerie’s stylishness. There was no doorman, the tiny vestibule was filthy, and the address itself was rather unfashionable.

  “Yes?” Valerie’s voice crackled through the antiquated intercom.

  “It’s Gwen Amiel.”

  A long silence; then the lock on the inside door clicked open. Gwen rode a cramped, jerky elevator to the fourth floor. When she got off, Valerie was standing in front of an open door, arms pressed against the frame, as if holding the two sides apart. Her red hair was gathered in a girlish ponytail. She wore a long gray sweatshirt over black leggings.

  “What a surprise.” An unpleasant one, her tone suggested.

  Gwen replied with a smile; her goal, after all, was to be invited inside the apartment.

  “I need to talk to you,” she said.

  Valerie kept her hands on the door frame. Her angular face and thin body had seemed chic and attractive under the warm sunlight of Penaquoit. Now, wearing no makeup, her face bleached by harsh fluorescence, she looked merely unhealthy.

  “What were you doing at my husband’s boardinghouse in Brooklyn?” Gwen asked.

  Valerie squinted, as if confused.

  “I have proof you were there,” Gwen lied.

  Valerie waited a moment, then turned and walked leisurely through the door. Gwen followed.

  The apartment was a single small room with one big window overlooking the back of a new high-rise. Yet the place was furnished in jarring defiance of its dimensions, like a plain face with too much makeup. An oversize sofa in front of the window was covered in a lush print fabric, flanked by two large wing chairs. An expensive-looking Kirmin rug extended almost to all four walls. An Empire mahogany dining table, the genuine article, Gwen suspected, was shoved into the corner nearest the closet-size kitchen. Six chairs, also Empire, also probably genuine, were crammed shoulder-to-shoulder around it.

  Valerie sat in one of the wing chairs, Gwen on the sofa.

  “Priscilla asked me to see your husband, as a favor,” Valerie said, her voice as silky as the damask fabric on the chair. Lit by the more compassionate table lamp, she’d regained some of her chic.

  “What?”

  “Are you surprised? Priscilla entrusted her daughter to you; she naturally wanted some reassurance about your character.” Valerie arched her expertly plucked eyebrows. “I must say, my visit to your husband’s lodgings wasn’t very encouraging.”

  “Nick hired me, not Priscilla. She didn’t strike me as overly concerned about child care.”

  “Honestly, the poor woman’s dead.” Valerie may have intended to sound censorious, but she came off as eerily unemotional, almost ironic.

  “How did you find Barry?” Gwen asked.

  “I got the address from Priscilla.”

  “How did Priscilla know where he lived? Even I didn’t know.”

  “I haven’t the slightest idea.” She draped one long, thin leg over the other.

  Of course not, and Priscilla, conveniently, was unable to explain it herself.

  “I found out yesterday that Nick was asking questions about me even before we’d met,” Gwen said. “Any idea why he’d do that?”

  “You’ll have to ask him,” she said smoothly.

  “How long have you known Nick?”

  “As long as he knew Priscilla, about three years.”

  “He told me they met when he gave her piano lessons.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But you once told me that you’d introduced them.”

  “Did I?” She flexed all ten fingers on her lap; her knuckles crackled like lit kindling.

  “Yes, you did,” Gwen said. “You told me she lived across the hall.”

  “And I referred her to the music school at which Nick happened to be teaching.”

  “Somehow I can’t picture Priscilla Lawrence living in this building,” Gwen said. “I can’t imagine Russell Cunningham letting her live here.”

  Valerie offered a dainty shrug. Her face was striking in a hard-edged way. Even her plump lips looked tough as rubber. And there was something vaguely familiar about her face…Gwen felt sure she’d seen it recently, after Valerie’s visit to Penaquoit, perhaps in a magazine or newspaper.

  “Have you ever done any modeling work?”

  “When I was much younger. Nothing recent.
I’m an actress,” she added with a lift of her sharp chin.

  Gwen nodded and stood up. “Are you in anything now?”

  “No.” The chin rose another inch.

  “How do you support yourself, then?” Gwen asked, wondering if she’d mention the stipend she used to receive from Priscilla.

  “I’m living off my savings at the moment. I worked in a gallery until recently.”

  Gwen glanced at a framed poster of an abstract painting over the words Sensor Gallery.

  “What exactly did you and my husband talk about?”

  “I don’t recall,” Valerie said. “He wasn’t what I’d call lucid, I do remember that much.”

  “You must remember something.”

  She moved her head ever so slightly from side to side.

  “Did you know he had been in Sohegan?” Gwen asked.

  “I would have thought you’d be the one to know that.”

  Gwen felt her face warm. “My life is on the line,” she said. “I’m accused of something I didn’t do, and I believe that you can help clear me.”

  “I’ve been to Sohegan exactly twice,” Valerie said. She picked up a small inlaid box and ran a manicured finger along the top. “I know nothing about your problems.”

  “Tell me about the purple thistle Priscilla had with her that day.”

  “Purple what?”

  Gwen waited her out.

  “I don’t know anything about that,” Valerie said, but her eyes went out of focus for a moment. Either she knew what the thistle meant, and was lying, or she didn’t know, and was worried.

  “You’re hiding something.” Gwen crossed to the front door, opened it, and turned. “You and Nick.”

  “Coming from an accused murderer, that’s probably a compliment.” Valerie followed her to the door.

  “I’ll find out what really happened at the Devil’s Ravine,” she said. “I have no choice.”

  “Do what you have to do,” Valerie said lightly, but her shrug was more of a spasm, and her eyes drifted again as she contemplated some private strategy already cooking inside her head.

  Gwen considered her a moment. “You’re scared,” she said. “You’re afraid of what I’m going to find.”

  “You’re the one who’s afraid.” Valerie’s voice was unsteady, but her gaze was now firmly fixed on Gwen. “You’re going to spend the rest of your life in prison. And you’ve already lost Nick.” She was still laughing, deeply and without mirth, when she slammed the door.

  Gwen took the stairs down to the lobby, trying to forget that laugh. Valerie Goodwin was lying through her clenched teeth. But why? Why had she gone to see Barry in early June? That bit about checking up on him for Priscilla rang false.

  Pushing open the door to the lobby, she almost ran into a man standing before a row of mailboxes just inside the front vestibule.

  “Sorry,” she said, but the mailman was wearing headphones and didn’t respond. She angled around him, opened the door to leave, and stopped.

  “Excuse me? Excuse me?”

  He looked at her and adjusted the volume on the tape player strapped to his waist. The nameplate on his pale blue uniform shirt read Scott DeBuono.

  “Have you worked in this neighborhood for long?”

  “Almost ten years.”

  “I’m trying to locate someone who used to live in this building. Priscilla Cunningham.”

  He turned from her to the mailboxes. One large horizontal door, opened by a single master key, gave easy access to all ten mailboxes at once. Labels with handwritten names had been affixed to the inside of each door; they were only visible when the master door was open. Many of the boxes had more than one name; several had layers of labels, one pasted on top of another. “She doesn’t live here anymore,” Gwen said as the mailman scanned the labels.

  “Yeah, but I usually leave the name on anyway, in case something arrives after they’re gone. Nope, no Cunningham. Don’t remember the name, either. I usually do.”

  He resumed sorting the mail. Gwen glanced at the boxes, found apartment 4C, and saw Valerie Goodwin’s name written in faded ink on a yellowed label. There was at least one label underneath.

  “I think my friend lived in Four C. Mind if I look?”

  He shrugged and continued filling the mailboxes. She placed a fingernail under Valerie’s label and gently pulled it halfway off, revealing an even older label underneath.

  The writing was badly faded, but she made out the name easily enough. She felt a sudden tightness in her chest. You’ve already lost Nick.

  “Did…did Nick Lawrence live here?”

  He continued sorting letters. “Sure, Four C. About three years ago, maybe longer.”

  “Before Valerie Goodwin moved in?”

  “I don’t know who lived there first. They were together when I started on this route.”

  “Together?” The tightness in her chest reduced her voice to a whisper.

  “Sure.” He stepped to the right and peeled off the entire label from the 4C mailbox. The label underneath read NICK LAWRENCE/VALERIE GOODWIN. I was surprised when he moved out. They seemed happy enough. Sometimes they’d come down together to get the mail. You know, like they couldn’t be apart for even five minutes.” He put the top label back in position and pressed it with his index finger. “Then one day—pfft—he was outta here, no forwarding address, nothing.”

  She couldn’t find the breath to thank him. She charged through the front doors to the sidewalk and gulped the warm air. Nick Lawrence had convinced her to trust him, he’d made love to her, and he’d lied to her…about Valerie Goodwin and much more. He’d lived with Valerie in that one-room apartment, then left to marry Priscilla.

  And yet the three of them had remained friends…How was that possible?

  She took a cab back to the hotel, staring at the gray blur of New York at dusk, the lights and shop signs and passing cars like flashbulbs popping in her face, leaving her dizzy and disoriented. She rolled down the taxi window and let the damp, sooty air wash over her face, her sense of empowerment rapidly giving way to the conviction that the closer she got to a solution to Priscilla Cunningham’s murder, the worse she was going to feel.

  Chapter 41

  Gwen stood across from 222 West 83rd Street that evening and counted up six floors to her old apartment. Warm yellow lights glowed in several windows—their former living room, Jimmy’s old bedroom, the guest bathroom. She felt a peculiar satisfaction in that; the apartment had been sold after all; a new life was taking root where the old one had died.

  She walked east, turned down Amsterdam, and leaned against a parking meter in front of her old store, now a card shop. She’d really loved Better Times—the store’s name had a bitter irony now, but twelve years ago, when she opened it, Better Times expressed not just nostalgia for the past but her expectations for the future. She could still smell the sharp, resiny furniture polish that had greeted her every morning after she’d hoisted the heavy metal window gate and unlocked the front door. Each sale had felt like a small triumph, no matter how slim the profit. There was a time, early in their marriage, when she’d race home to share the news with Barry: I sold the Hoosier cupboard for six hundred, can you believe it? Later, the shop had become her refuge, each sale less a triumph than a finger in the dike holding back financial ruin.

  And yet she found herself curiously unable to leave. Standing in front of the card shop, she had the sense that she was looking at a vestige of someone else’s life, a life at once familiar and remote, like a character from a book read long ago. Had so much of her happiness really depended on this narrow space, a thousand square feet wedged between a Korean nail salon and a take-out Chinese place? Had she really been so deluded? Once her life revolved around pine sideboards and marble-topped washstands and ladder-back chairs. Now her former sanctuary was a card shop and she felt wholly unmoved by the sight; in fact, that very absence of emotion, where surely some sentiment should be, was what kept her standing there, in a hazy, a
lmost hypnotic state.

  Eventually something brought her around. It was a face reflected in the front window of the card shop, just another pedestrian on busy Amsterdam Avenue. But a familiar face, and not a friendly one, even in reflection.

  Gwen turned quickly and locked eyes for a brief moment with a startled Valerie Goodwin. Then Valerie ran toward the corner and disappeared down a side street. Gwen began to follow but had to stop on the far side of Amsterdam for ongoing traffic and gave up.

  In her hotel bed that night, Gwen felt an overpowering isolation. Somehow the fact that Valerie Goodwin had been following her only added to the feeling of being totally alone. The room smelled of mothballs, old shoes, and despair. The sheets were starchy and too white. Her old life was gone; her new life, it turned out, was built on a lie. Nick Lawrence had chosen her, he’d lied about his past, he’d sent Valerie Goodwin to check up on her husband…and worse, she was beginning to imagine, much worse.

  She didn’t think she’d get any rest that night, but when she closed her eyes she found the blackness an unexpected comfort, and soon drifted off to sleep.

  Chapter 42

  Gwen entered the Sensor Gallery, on Broome Street in Soho, at ten o’clock the next morning. The gallery occupied one very large ground-floor room in a former industrial building. Its walls were bright white, the floor polyeurethaned to an icy shine. A dozen or so enormous canvases lined the gallery, depicting, in hyperrealism, tight groups of people wearing vacant expressions of postmodern apathy.

  Behind a desk near the gallery entrance sat an elegantly thin woman with a gamin haircut who might have posed for one of the paintings. She smiled languidly as Gwen explained that she was seeking information about a former employee. She did manage to lift the phone from its cradle and buzz for the director, who appeared a moment later through a doorway at the back of the gallery.

  “I’m Fiona Stevens,” she said. “How can I help you?”