by Joël Dicker
“Never heard of him. Who is he?”
“A gangster from Ridgesport. He was extorting money from Ted Tennenbaum by threatening to prevent the opening of Café Athena.”
Bird was astonished. “Tennenbaum had pressure put on him by a gangster?”
“Yes. We missed that in 1994.”
Thanks to Bird, I was also able to do some more checking about “The Darkest Night”. He called other newspapers in the area, in particular the Ridgesport Evening Star, and asked if they had in their archives any article containing the keywords “Darkest” with “Night”. But there was nothing. The only reference to it was the graffiti that had appeared in Orphea between the fall of 1993 and the summer of 1994.
I took all the photocopies back to the station and plunged in. I started reading, cutting out, underlining, discarding, classifying, while Betsy and Derek continued their search in the copies of the Notre Dame magazine. Betsy’s desk was starting to resemble a newspaper distribution center. Suddenly, Derek cried, “Bingo!” He had found the ad. On page 21 of the Fall 2013 issue, there it was:
DO YOU WANT TO WRITE A BESTSELLER?
MAN OF LETTERS SEEKS AMBITIOUS WRITER
FOR SERIOUS WORK. REFERENCES ESSENTIAL.
All we had to do now was contact the person at the magazine who dealt with classified ads.
* * *
Carolina was still outside the gate of The Garden of Eden. Her father had not called her. He must hate her, she thought, like everyone else. Because of what had happened in the house. Because of what she had done to Tara Scalini. And she would never forgive herself.
She burst into tears again. Things would never get better, she thought. She no longer wanted to live. Through misty eyes, she searched in her bag for a vial of ketamine. She needed to feel better. As she searched, she found the little plastic box she had been given by her friend Leyla. It was heroin, to be snorted. Carolina had not tried it yet. She laid a line of white powder on the dashboard and twisted to move her nose closer.
Inside the house, Gerald Scalini, who had been told by his wife that a car had been parked outside the gate for quite a while now, decided to call the police.
Several police cars were outside The Garden of Eden. In the back of Montagne’s car, Carolina, her hands cuffed behind her back, was crying. Montagne was questioning her through the open door.
“What were you doing here? Waiting for a customer? Do you sell this shit here?”
“No, I swear,” Carolina said, weeping, half-conscious.
“You’re too high to answer, you idiot! And don’t go throwing up on my seats, got that? Fucking junkie!”
“I’d like to talk to my father.”
“Sure, what else? With what we found in the car, you’ll be hauled up in front of a judge. The next stop for you, girl, is a prison cell.”
The afternoon was coming to its end, and in the quiet residential neighborhood where the Browns lived, Charlotte, who had just gotten back from her day at the clinic, was daydreaming on the porch. Her husband, returning from the Grand Theater, sat down next to her. He seemed exhausted.
She lit a cigarette. “Alan . . .”
“Yes?”
“I’d like to take part in the play.”
He smiled. “You should,” he said encouragingly.
“I don’t know . . . I haven’t been on a stage in twenty years.”
“You’ll be a hit.”
By way of reply, Charlotte gave a long sigh.
“What’s going on?” Alan said, seeing that something wasn’t right.
“I’ve been telling myself it may be better to keep a low profile, and stay away from Hayward.”
“What are you afraid of?”
“You know perfectly well, Alan.”
A few miles away, at the Lake Palace, Eden was in a state. Carolina had disappeared. He had looked for her all over the hotel, in the bar, around the pool, in the fitness room. She wasn’t answering her phone and had not left a message. He had finally informed hotel security. Camera footage showed Carolina leaving her room, wandering for a while in the corridor, then going down to reception, asking for his car and driving away. The head of security, unable to suggest a solution, suggested contacting the police. Then Eden’s cell phone rang.
“Carolina?”
“Mr Eden?” said a solemn voice. “Deputy Jasper Montagne of the Orphea police department.”
“Police? What’s going on?”
“Your daughter Carolina is currently being held at the station. She was arrested for possession of drugs and will appear before a judge tomorrow morning. She’ll be spending the night in a cell.”
JERRY EDEN
In the summer of 1994, I was the director of a radio station in New York City. I was earning a modest living and had just married Cynthia, my high school sweetheart, the only girl who had ever believed in me.
You should have seen us at the time. We were in love, we were just thirty, we were free as air. My most precious possession was a second-hand Corvette. We spent the weekends traveling around the country, driving from one town to another, staying in motels or boarding houses.
Cynthia was working for the administration of a small theater. She had all the best tips and we saw lots of plays on Broadway without spending a single dollar. We weren’t rich, but what we had was more than enough. We were happy.
1994 was the year we married. Our wedding was in January, and we decided to postpone our honeymoon till the weather improved. We had a limited budget, so could only choose destinations we could get to in the Corvette. It was Cynthia who heard about the new theater festival in Orphea. There was quite a buzz about it in artistic circles and famous journalists were expected to attend, which suggested the quality of it. I found us a delightful family-run boarding house, not far from the ocean, in a log house surrounded by hydrangeas. We were sure that the ten or so days we would spend there would be memorable. And they were, from every point of view. When we got back to New York, Cynthia discovered she was pregnant. In April 1995, our only child, our beloved daughter Carolina, was born.
*
I don’t want to take anything away from our happiness at the arrival of Carolina in our lives, but we hadn’t planned to have a child so soon. The months that followed were like those of all young parents whose life is turned upside down by the presence of a little creature. We had to sell the two-seater and buy a bigger car, change apartments to have an extra room, and carry the cost of diapers, baby clothes, a crib, a stroller, and so on. In short, we had to make do.
To make matters worse, Cynthia was fired by the theater when she got back from her maternity leave. As for me, the radio station was bought by a large group, and after hearing all kinds of rumors about restructuring and fearing for my position, I was obliged to accept less airtime and more administrative work and responsibilities for the same salary. Our weeks became a true race against the clock: work, family, Cynthia looking for a job and not knowing what to do with Carolina, me coming back in the evening exhausted. It was quite a trial for both of us. So when summer arrived, I suggested we spend a few days at the end of July in our little boarding house in Orphea, to recharge our batteries. And once again the Orphea miracle worked.
It was the same in the following years. Whatever happened in the bustle of the city, whatever daily life threw at us, Orphea made everything better.
Cynthia had found a job in New Jersey, an hour’s train ride away. She had three hours traveling to do each day, and had to juggle diaries and calendars, taking the little one to nursery, then to school, doing shopping, going to meetings, doing the best we could at work and at home, from morning to evening and all the days that God gave us. Our nerves were at full stretch, some days we barely saw each other. But once a year, all the stress and misunderstandings and rush were wiped out as soon as we arrived in Orphea. The town was cathartic for us. The air seemed purer, the sky more beautiful, life quieter. The owner of the boarding house, who had grown-up children, took wonderful care o
f Carolina and was happy to look after her whenever we decided we’d like to see a show at the festival. At the end of our stay, we would set off back to the city happy, rested, calmer. Ready to resume our lives.
*
I have never been especially ambitious. I don’t think I would have risen as far as I have in my career if it hadn’t been for Cynthia and Carolina. Because, as the years went by, having gone back to Orphea so often and feeling so good there, I wanted to give them more. I started wanting more than the little family boarding house, wanting to spend more than a week a year in the Hamptons. I wanted Cynthia not to have to do three hours’ traveling a day and barely be able to make ends meet, I wanted Carolina to go to a private school and benefit from the best possible education. It was for their sakes that I began to work even harder, aiming for promotion, demanding better pay. It was for them that I agreed to give up my airtime and take on more responsibilities, in positions that interested me less but were better paid. I began climbing the ladder, seizing all the opportunities that presented themselves, being first in the office and last to leave. In three years, I went from being the director of a radio station to the head of T.V. series development for the whole group.
My salary doubled, trebled, and our quality of life went up with it. Cynthia was able to stop working and enjoy Carolina, who was still quite young. She devoted part of her time to working for free for a theater company. Our vacations in Orphea grew longer: they lasted three weeks, then a whole month, then the whole summer, in rented houses that were ever larger and more luxurious, with a cleaning woman once a week, then twice a week, then every day, who took care of the house, made the beds, cooked for us, and picked up whatever we left lying around.
It was a good life, rather different from what I had imagined in the days when we spent our week’s vacation in the boarding house. I was completely disconnected from work. With my new responsibilities, I couldn’t take more than a few days at a time. While Cynthia and Carolina enjoyed two months by the pool without having to worry about a thing, I would go back to Manhattan at regular intervals to deal with business. Cynthia was upset that I could not stay longer, but everything was going well. What did we have to complain about?
My rise continued. Maybe even despite myself, I don’t know. My salary, which I thought was already astronomical, continued to increase, as did the amount of work. Media groups were buying one another to form all-powerful conglomerates. I found myself in a big office in a glass skyscraper. I could measure my professional ascent by the size and height of the offices I moved to. My remuneration followed my progress up the floors. My bonus grew tenfold, a hundredfold. Ten years after being director of a small radio station, I found myself the C.E.O. of Channel 14, the most watched and most lucrative T.V. channel in the country, which I ran from the 53rd and final floor of the glass tower, for a salary, including bonuses, of $9 million a year. In other words, $750,000 a month. I earned more money than I could ever spend.
Everything I wanted to give Cynthia and Carolina, I was able to. Luxury clothes, sports cars, a fabulous apartment, a private school, dream vacations. If the New York winter depressed us, we would leave in a private plane for a revitalizing week in St Barts. As for Orphea, I built the house of our dreams there, for a vast amount of money, a house by the ocean. I called it The Garden of Eden and put the name in wrought-iron letters on the gate.
Everything had become so simple, so easy. So extraordinary. But it had a cost, not only a financial one. I had to devote myself even more to my work. The more I wanted to give to my two lovely women, the more I had to give to Channel 14, in time, energy, and concentration.
Cynthia and Carolina spent the summers and every weekend when the weather was good in our house in the Hamptons. I would join them as soon as I could. I had set up an office there, from which I could deal with business and hold telephone conferences.
But the easier our existence appeared to be, the more complicated it actually became. Cynthia wanted me to spend more time with her and Carolina, without my being constantly concerned with my work, but without my work there could not be a house. It was like a snake biting its own tail. Our vacations were a succession of reproaches and quarrels: “What’s the point in your coming here if all you do is shut yourself up in your office?” “But we’re together!” “No, Jerry, you’re here, but you’re not with us.” And this would continue on the beach or at a restaurant. Sometimes, during my walks, I would go as far as the old family board-ing house, which had closed when its owner had died. I would look at the pretty plank house and dream of what our vacations had been, so modest, so short, so wonderful. I wished I could turn the clock back. But I didn’t know how.
If you ask me, I’ll tell you that I did all this for my wife and daughter.
If you ask Cynthia or Carolina the same question, they’ll tell you that I did it for myself, for my ego, my workaholic nature.
But it doesn’t really matter whose fault it was. Over the course of time, the magic of Orphea stopped working. Our marriage, our family, no longer mended itself or came back together during our stays there. On the contrary, those stays helped to tear us farther apart.
And then everything changed dramatically.
Things happened in the spring of 2013 that forced us to sell the house in Orphea.
JESSE ROSENBERG
Tuesday, July 15, 2014
Eleven days to opening night
Finding the ad in the Notre Dame student magazine did not help us to trace the person who had placed it. At the editorial offices, the person in charge of advertising had no information. The ad had apparently been placed in reception and paid for in cash. A dead-end mystery. On the other hand, the student was able to find the same ad in the archive, published exactly a year earlier. And the year before that. The ad had appeared every year in the fall issue.
“What’s special about the fall issue?” I said.
“It’s the most widely read. It’s when people come back to college or come for their first year.”
The return to college, Derek pointed out, marked the arrival of new students and therefore of potential candidates to write this book. “If I was the person wanting that book to be written,” he said, “I wouldn’t limit myself to one magazine, I’d place the ad more widely.”
We called the editorial offices of the magazines of literature faculties in several colleges in New York to check out this hypothesis. A similar ad had indeed appeared in a number of other fall issues for years. But whoever had placed them had left no trace.
We knew that it was a man, that he had been in Orphea in 1994, that he had information suggesting that Tennenbaum was not the murderer, that he considered the matter serious enough to be the subject of a book, and that he could not write this book himself. That was the strangest part of it.
“Who would like to write but can’t?” Derek wondered out loud. “To the point of looking desperately for someone to do it by placing ads year after year in student magazines?”
Betsy wrote on the whiteboard what looked like a mystery worthy of the Sphinx of Thebes:
I WANT TO WRITE BUT CAN’T. WHO AM I?
For want of anything better, all we could do was continue looking through the articles from the Chronicle. We had skimmed through them without success. Suddenly Derek became excited and circled a paragraph in red.
“Listen to this,” he said, staring incredulously at the photocopy he had in his hand. “This is an article that appeared in the Chronicle on August 2, 1994. It says: According to police sources, a third witness has come forward. This testimony may prove crucial for the police, who have almost no leads at the moment.”
“What is all this?” I said. “A third witness? There were only two witnesses, the two people who lived in the neighborhood.”
“I know that, Jesse,” Derek said, as surprised as I was.
Betsy immediately contacted Michael Bird. He had no memory of this witness, but recalled that in the days after the murders the town had been awash
with rumors. Unfortunately, it was impossible to question the author of the article, who had died ten years earlier, but Bird told us with certainty that the police source was Chief Gulliver, who had always been a gossip.
Chief Gulliver was not in the station. When he returned, he came to see us in Betsy’s office. When I told him we had discovered a reference to a third witness, he immediately said:
“That was Marty Connors. He worked in a gas station near Penfield Crescent.”
“Why were we never told about him?”
“Because we checked him out, and his testimony was worthless.”
“We’d have liked to judge that for ourselves,” I said.
“You know, at the time, there were dozens like that. We checked them all out carefully before we passed them on to you. People were contacting us about all kinds of things. They’d felt a presence, heard a strange noise, seen a flying saucer. We had to filter them, or you would have been snowed under. We did everything by the book.”
“I don’t doubt that. Was it you who questioned him?”
“No. I can’t remember who did.”
As he was leaving the room, Gulliver stopped in the doorway and said:
“A one-armed man.”
The three of us stared at him.
“What are you talking about, Chief?” I said.
“That thing on the board: I want to write, but I can’t. Who am I? Answer: a one-armed man.”
“Thanks, Chief.”
The gas station Gulliver had mentioned was still there. And by a stroke of luck, twenty years later, so was Marty Connors.
“Marty works nights,” the clerk told me over the phone. “He starts his shift at eleven.”
“Is he working tonight?”
“Yes. You want me to leave him a message?”
“No, that’s kind of you. I’ll come over to see him.”
* * *
Those who have no time to waste getting to the Hamptons from Manhattan travel by air. From the heliport at the southern tip of the island, twenty minutes by helicopter are enough to connect the city with any town on Long Island.
