by Joël Dicker
In his office, Major McKenna reads the letter I have just brought him.
“A transfer request, Derek? Where the hell do you want to go?”
“Just put me in administration,” I suggested.
“A desk job?” the major said in a choked voice.
“I don’t ever want to be out in the field again.”
“For Chrissake, Derek, you’re one of the best police officers I’ve ever known! Don’t ruin your career on a whim.”
“My career? What career, sir?”
“Listen, Derek,” the major said in a kindly voice, “I understand how upset you are. Why don’t you see the shrink? Or take a few weeks’ leave?”
“I’ve had enough of being on leave, sir. I spend my time going over the same images in a loop.”
“Derek, I can’t put you in administration, it would be a waste.”
The major and I stared at each other for a moment, then I said, “You’re right, sir. Forget that letter.”
“Now you’re talking.”
“I’ll resign.”
“Oh, no, not that! O.K., you can have a desk job. But only for a while. Then I want you back here as a detective.”
The major assumed that, after a few weeks of boredom, I’d reconsider my decision and ask for my old job back.
As I was leaving his office, he said, “Any news of Jesse?”
“He doesn’t want to see anybody, sir.”
*
At home, Jesse was busy sorting through Natasha’s things.
He had never envisaged living a day without her. Faced with the deep void that he could not fill, he alternated periods of clearing things out with periods of reassembling memories. Part of him wanted to turn the page, immediately, to throw everything out and forget it. At those times, he started filling cardboard boxes with all the objects that had a too powerful connection with her, intending them for the garbage. Then it took just a moment’s pause, an object attracting his attention—a photograph frame, a pen without ink, an old university notebook—and everything would lurch and he would move on to his curator phase. He would take the object in his hand and look at it for a long time. He would tell himself that maybe it was better not to throw everything away, that he should keep a few souvenirs, to recall all that happiness, and he would put the object down on the table in full sight to preserve it. Then he would start taking back out of the cardboard box everything he had put in it. You’re not going to throw this away, are you? he would ask himself. Or this? Oh, no, you’re not going to do without the cup you bought at MoMa that she drank her tea in! Jesse ended up taking everything out of the boxes. And the living room, which had briefly been swept clean of all these objects, took on the appearance of a museum devoted to Natasha. Sitting on the couch, his grandparents watched him, eyes overflowing with tears, murmuring, “That’s shit.”
*
By mid-December, Darla had emptied the whole of Little Russia. The neon sign had been taken down and put in a dumpster, all the furniture sold off to pay the last few months’ rent and allow the termination of the lease.
The removers took away the last chairs to deliver them to the restaurant that had bought them, while Darla watched, sitting on the sidewalk, in the cold. One of the removers came and brought her a cardboard box.
“We found this in a corner of the kitchen, we thought you might want to keep it.”
Darla examined the contents of the box. There were notes made by Natasha, ideas for menus, her recipes, all the souvenirs of what they had been planning. There was also a photograph of Jesse, Natasha, Derek, and her. She took the photograph in her hands and looked at it for a long time.
“I’ll keep the photograph,” she said to the remover. “Thanks. You can throw away the rest.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
The remover nodded and walked back to his van. Darla, devastated, burst into tears.
Everything had to be forgotten.
JESSE ROSENBERG
Friday, August 1, 2014
Six days after opening night
Had Meghan threatened to leave Samuel Padalin? Maybe Padalin hadn’t taken it well and had killed her, pocketing his wife’s life insurance in the process.
He was not at home when we arrived that morning. We decided to go to see him in his place of work. Advised of our arrival by the receptionist, he led us without a word to his office and waited until he had closed the door behind us before exploding.
“Are you crazy, coming here unannounced like this? Do you want me to lose my job?”
He seemed furious.
“Are you a man who loses his temper easily, Mr Padalin?” Betsy said.
“Why do you ask me that?”
“Because you used to beat your wife.”
Padalin was aghast. “What are you talking about?”
“Don’t pretend to be surprised,” Betsy said.
“I’d like to know who told you.”
“That hardly matters.”
“Listen, about a month before she died, Meghan and I had a big argument, that’s true. I slapped her, and I shouldn’t have. I went off the rails. I have no excuse. But that was the only time.”
“What was the argument about?”
“I found out that Meghan had been cheating on me. I wanted to leave her.”
* * *
Monday, June 6, 1994
That morning, as Samuel Padalin was finishing his coffee and getting ready to leave for work, his wife joined him in her robe.
“Aren’t you going to work today?” he said.
“I have a fever, I don’t feel well. I just called Cody and told him I wouldn’t be coming in today.”
“Good idea,” Padalin said, gulping down the rest of his coffee. “Go back to bed.”
He put his cup in the sink, kissed his wife on the forehead, and set off for work.
He probably would never have known a thing if he hadn’t had to return home one hour later to pick up a file he had taken home to study during the weekend and had left on the living room table.
As he got to the street, he saw Meghan coming out of the house. She was wearing a beautiful summer dress and elegant sandals. She was smiling and seemed in a good mood, nothing like the woman he had said goodbye to an hour earlier. He stopped and watched her as she got in her car. She hadn’t seen him. He decided to follow her.
Meghan drove to Bridgehampton, unaware that her husband was a few cars behind her. After driving along the main street of the town, she turned onto the road to Sag Harbor, then, after another two hundred yards, turned into the sumptuous property of the Northern Rose Hotel. It was a highly regarded but discreet little hotel, much appreciated by celebrities from New York City. When she got to the majestic building with its colonnades, she entrusted her vehicle to the valet and went into the hotel. Samuel did the same, giving his wife a head start in order not to be seen. Once in the building, he couldn’t find her either in the bar or in the restaurant. She had gone directly upstairs. Obviously to join someone in a room.
That day, Padalin did not go back to work. He waited for his wife in the hotel parking lot for hours. When she did not reappear, he returned home and hurried to look at her diaries. He discovered to his horror that she had been meeting with this guy at the Northern Rose Hotel for several months. Who was he? She said she had met him at the New Year’s gala. They had been there together, so he must have seen him. It might even be someone he knew. He felt like throwing up. He went back to the car and drove for a long time, not knowing what he should do.
By the time he got back home, Meghan had returned. He found her in bed, in her nightdress, pretending to be ill.
“My poor darling,” he said, trying very hard to keep his voice steady, “aren’t you feeling any better?”
“No,” she said in a thin voice, “I haven’t been able to get out of bed all day.”
Padalin could contain himself no longer. He exploded. He told her that he knew everything, that he had been to the Nor
thern Rose, that she had joined a man there in a room. Meghan did not deny it.
“Get out!” Padalin screamed. “You disgust me!”
She burst into tears. “Forgive me, Samuel!” she begged him, ashen-faced.
“Get out of here! Get out of this house! Take your things and get out, I never want to see you again!”
“Samuel, don’t do this to me, I beg you! I don’t want to lose you. You’re the only man I love.”
“You should have thought of that before sleeping with this man you met.”
“It was the biggest mistake of my life, Samuel! I don’t feel anything for him!”
“You make me sick. I read your diaries, I saw what you wrote about him. I saw all the times you met with him at the Northern Rose!”
“You’ve stopped caring about me, Samuel! I don’t feel important! I don’t feel looked at. When he tried his charms on me, I liked it. Yes, we’ve met regularly. Yes, we’ve flirted. But I’ve never slept with him!”
“Oh, so it’s my fault now?”
“No, I’m just saying that sometimes when I’m with you I feel alone.”
“I read that you met him at the New Year’s Eve party. So you did it right under my eyes! Does that mean I know the guy? Who is he?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Meghan sobbed, no longer sure if she should talk or keep quiet.
“It doesn’t matter? I can’t believe this!”
“Samuel, don’t leave me, I beg you!”
The tone became more heated. Meghan reproached her husband for not being romantic, for neglecting her, and Padalin, exasperated, finally said to her:
“I don’t excite you? Do you think you excite me? You have no life, you have nothing to tell, apart from your dull little stories about the bookstore and all those things you imagine in your head.”
At these words, deeply hurt, Meghan spat in her husband’s face, and he instinctively gave her a violent slap. Shocked, Meghan bit into her tongue. She felt blood fill her mouth. She was stunned. She grabbed her car keys and ran off in her nightdress.
* * *
“Meghan returned home the next day,” Padalin told us in his office. “She begged me not to leave her, she swore to me that this guy had been a terrible mistake, and because of him she’d realized how much she loved me. I decided to give my marriage a second chance. And you know what? It did us the world of good. I started paying her much more attention, she said she was happier. It transformed our relationship. We were more in tune than ever. We had two wonderful months, we were full of plans . . .”
“What about her lover?” Betsy said. “What became of him?”
“I have no idea. Meghan swore to me she had broken with him completely.”
“How did he take it?”
“I don’t know.”
“And you never found out who he was?”
“No, never.”
There was a moment’s silence.
“So that’s the real reason you never looked at her diaries again,” Betsy said, “and why you kept them hidden away in your basement. Because they reminded you of that painful episode.”
Padalin nodded, unable to speak. His throat was too knotted for him to utter another word.
“One last question, Mr Padalin,” Derek asked. “Do you have a tattoo on your body?”
“No,” he said.
“Can I ask you to lift your shirt? It’s only a routine check.”
In silence, Padalin removed his shirt. No tattoo.
What if the jilted lover, unable to bear losing Meghan, had killed her?
We could not rule that out. After our visit to Padalin, we drove to the Northern Rose Hotel in Bridgehampton. Obviously, when we told the receptionist that we were trying to identify a man who had booked a room in 1994, he laughed in our faces.
“We would like to see a record of all the reservations from 5 to 7 June and we’ll study the names ourselves,” I said.
“You don’t seem to understand,” he said. “You’re talking about 1994. We still had handwritten registration in those days. There’s no database I can use to help you.”
As I was negotiating with the receptionist, Derek was walking up and down the lobby of the hotel. His gaze came to rest on the wall of honor, on which hung photographs of famous guests: actors, writers, directors. Suddenly, he took down one of them.
“Sir, what are you doing?” the receptionist said. “You can’t—”
“Jesse! Betsy!” Derek cried. “Look at this!”
What he was holding was a photograph of Meta Ostrovski, twenty years younger, in a tuxedo, posing, all smiles, beside Meghan Padalin.
“When was this photograph taken?” I asked the receptionist.
“At the New Year’s Eve party in December 1993. That man’s the critic Ostrovski and—”
“Ostrovski was Meghan Padalin’s lover!” Betsy said in an undertone.
We went straight to the Lake Palace. We ran into the manager as we entered the lobby.
“Already?” he said in surprise. “But I only just called.”
“Called whom?” Derek asked.
“Why, the police. It’s about Mr Ostrovski. He’s just left the hotel, apparently called back urgently to the city. It was a chambermaid who informed me.”
“Informed you of what, dammit?”
“Follow me.”
The manager took us up to Suite 310, where Ostrovski had been staying, and opened the door with his passkey. We entered the room and discovered, stuck to the wall, a multitude of articles on the 1994 killings, Stephanie’s disappearance, our investigation, and photographs of Meghan Padalin everywhere.
4
The Disappearance of Stephanie Mailer
SATURDAY, AUGUST 2 – MONDAY, AUGUST 4, 2014
JESSE ROSENBERG
Saturday, August 2, 2014
Seven days after opening night
Was Ostrovski the third man?
We had lost track of him since the day before. We knew only that he had gone back to the city. N.Y.P.D. surveillance cameras had filmed him as he drove his car across the bridge into Manhattan. But he had not gone home. His apartment was empty. His cell phone was off. His only family was an elderly sister, who likewise could not be traced or reached. So Derek and I had been staked out in the street next to his building for nearly twenty-four hours. It was all we could do for the time being.
All leads led to him. He had been Meghan Padalin’s lover from January to June 1994. The Northern Rose Hotel had been able to confirm to us that he had stayed there quite regularly during that six-month period. That year, he had not come to the Hamptons only for the theater festival in Orphea. He had been there for months. That must have been for Meghan. So he had not been able to take it when she left him. He had killed her on opening night, along with the Gordon family, unwitting witnesses of the murder. He had had time to get there and back on foot and be in the theater for the beginning of the play. He had then been able to give his opinion of the performance to the newspapers so that everyone would know he had been in the Grand Theater. It was an impressive alibi.
A little earlier in the day, Betsy had been to see Miranda Bird, taking with her a photograph of Ostrovski, hoping that she would identify him, but she had been quite vague.
“It might have been him,” she had said, “but it’s hard to say for certain after all these years.”
“Are you sure about the tattoo?” Betsy had asked. “If not, we need to know.”
“I don’t remember now,” Miranda had said. “Maybe I was confused.”
While we were waiting for Ostrovski in New York, Betsy, in the archive room of the Chronicle, had been going over everything in the file with Hayward and Bird. They wanted to make sure they had not neglected anything. They were tired and hungry. They had eaten almost nothing all day apart from the candies and chocolate bars that Bird would fetch at regular intervals from the drawer of his office upstairs, where there was apparently an unending supply.
Hayward couldn’t take his e
yes off the wall covered with notes, images, and press clippings. He finally said to Betsy:
“Why is the woman who could identify the killer not named? All that’s written on the list of witnesses is: ‘The woman in the motel on Route 16’. All the others are named.”
“That’s true,” Bird said. “What’s her name? It might be important.”
“It’s Jesse who’s dealing with that,” Betsy said. “You’ll have to ask him. Anyway, she doesn’t remember anything. Let’s not waste time on it.”
But Hayward would not let go.
“I looked in the State Police file from 1994. This witness isn’t there. Is this a new element?”
“You’ll have to ask Jesse,” Betsy said again.
Since Hayward kept insisting, Betsy asked Bird if he could fetch some more candies. Once he had left the room, she took advantage of his absence to sum up the situation to Hayward, hoping he would understand how important it was to not mention that witness again in front of Bird.
“Oh, my God,” Hayward said in a near-whisper. “I can’t believe it. Michael’s wife worked as a prostitute for that bastard Fold?”
“Keep your mouth shut, Kirk,” Betsy said. “If you don’t, I swear I’ll kneecap you.”
Betsy already regretted telling him. She could see him blurting it out. Bird came back into the room with a bag of candies.
“So, what about this witness?” he said.
Betsy smiled. “We’re on to the next point. We were talking about Ostrovski.”
“I can’t see Ostrovski wiping out an entire family,” Bird said.
“We should never trust appearances, you know,” Hayward said. “Sometimes we think we know people and then we discover incredible secrets about them.”
“Never mind,” Betsy cut in, glaring at Hayward. “We’ll know exactly where we are once Jesse and Derek have laid their hands on Ostrovski.”
*
It was 8.30, outside Ostrovski’s building.
Derek and I were about to abandon our stakeout when we saw Ostrovski coming along the street, walking at a steady pace. We leaped out of our car, guns at the ready, and hurried to intercept him.
