Whisper Network

by Chandler Baker

  The chug of a printer spitting out paper sounded from down the hall. He lowered the can from his lips, this time without taking a sip.

  “Yes.”

  “Still married?”

  His eyes sharpened. “Yes. I am.”

  She nodded. They stood across from one another. Rosalita and Ames. He still wore the same watch—silver and gold link—the one that had once left a scratch on her arm the length of her hand.

  “Good,” she said. “That’s very good.”

  Transcript of Interview of Adriana Valdez Part I

  18-APR

  APPEARANCES:

  Detective Malika Martin

  Detective Oscar Diaz

  PROCEEDINGS

  DET. DIAZ:

  This interview is in reference to a fatality referenced under Dallas County Police Report Number 14-83584. The person being interviewed is Adriana Valdez. Okay, um, Ms. Valdez, we spoke prior to this recording about the events of April 12th. Can you tell us in your own words what you remember?

  MS. VALDEZ:

  It was a normal day. I arrived at work around eight-thirty A.M. after dropping off my son at daycare.

  DET. DIAZ:

  Where does your son attend daycare?

  MS. VALDEZ:

  Children’s Courtyard of Preston Center.

  DET. DIAZ:

  Continue, please.

  MS. VALDEZ:

  I sat down at my desk and worked on some ongoing property tax protests, which took up nearly the entire morning. I picked up a salad and a croissant from the coffee shop downstairs—Al’s—and brought it back to my desk to eat.

  DET. DIAZ:

  And what time was that?

  MS. VALDEZ:

  I don’t know, probably around eleven-thirty or eleven-forty-five A.M. That’s when I normally eat.

  DET. DIAZ:

  And do you have the receipt for that lunch if required?

  MS. VALDEZ:

  I’m sure it can be obtained. I swiped my card into one of those iPad things, the ones that prompt you to tip for every little over-the-counter thing.

  DET. DIAZ:

  Thank you, we’ll follow up on that. Go ahead.

  MS. VALDEZ:

  I worked through lunch. This time of year is busy for us. Just enough time before the summer lull to really make some headway.

  DET. DIAZ:

  Where were you around one-thirty P.M. on that day?

  MS. VALDEZ:

  Around that time, I had gone to go get a payroll form signed.

  DET. DIAZ:

  Anyone that saw you there?

  MS. VALDEZ:

  The payroll officer. After that, I came back to my desk.

  DET. DIAZ:

  At what time?

  MS. VALDEZ:

  I don’t remember exactly.

  DET. DIAZ:

  Anyone that could verify?

  MS. VALDEZ:

  Grace Stanton or Sloane Glover, maybe.

  DET. MARTIN:

  Anyone else?

  MS. VALDEZ:

  I don’t know. Maybe my secretary, Anna Corlione.

  DET. DIAZ:

  Ms. Valdez, when was the last time you saw the victim?

  MS. VALDEZ:

  Detective Diaz, who exactly are you referring to as the victim here?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  3-APR

  Ardie used to think it was a phase. This desire to retreat into herself, to claw inside her own skin like a hermit crab. It had always been this way. Back in high school, she would arrive early to her classroom and wait outside the door for her teacher to invite her in. When her classmates began to arrive, she’d pretend to read a book or, worse, make her eyes go strangely unfocused like she was daydreaming just to avoid conversation. Not all the time, but the mood and desire struck her unexpectedly, like a gastrointestinal virus, and she was forced to heed its call. By college, she’d discovered that this particular affliction wasn’t a phase, but had instead decided it must be a disease passed down by her father. Something only semi-debilitating, but with no cure or hope for marked improvement.

  So when Ardie boarded an empty elevator and moments later heard footsteps before a hand shot out to catch the split doors, frustration jolted through her. She’d long since given up on the “close” button doing anything more than offering a psychological comfort.

  Ames shouldered his way through the opening and saw her standing there. Their twin looks of disappointment had to be the only thing the two of them had in common. He did this sort of half-opening of his mouth and half-hard sigh by way of greeting and then nearly imperceptibly shook his head as he turned to face the closing doors. Ardie pictured one of those police black lights that showed blood splatter and thought that if there were one that showed mutual disdain, the elevator would light up with it.

  Ardie stared at the back of Ames Garrett’s head. He removed his hand from his right pocket. For a moment, his pointer finger hovered over the emergency “stop” button. Then traced up to a lower number. Hesitation. Then hand back into his pocket. Another sigh.

  Agitation rolled off him in waves. Hands out of pockets now. Bowed head, clutching his left wrist. Shifting weight from one foot to the other. He waited in the center, so close to the doors that the tips of his shoes almost touched them. Ardie glanced at the upper corner of the elevator. Cameras watching.

  Small testament to Ames: He was better at masking his temper now. Back before either Grace or Sloane started at Truviv, she’d witnessed him throwing a stapler at a wall after a purchase agreement call and later heard a younger associate relate the story in reverent, impressed tones, the takeaway having morphed into something about how seriously Ames took his job.

  But these days, she could detect that below-surface aggression, like holding her palm to the surface of water on the verge of a boil. The elevator moved, rushed down, and neither of them said anything to the other. Last-minute decision, he punched the button for the eighth floor and waited for the doors to open.

  “You’re all fucking crazy. You know that?” he said just before the doors shuddered back into place.

  * * *

  Fifteen minutes later, Ardie returned to the office kitchen with a gyro to find Katherine scavenging for La Croix. Katherine stutter-stepped at the sound of the door behind her.

  “Whoa, sorry.” Ardie slowed her steps. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”

  Katherine released her breath, her hand pressed hard to her chest.

  “Are you okay?” Ardie squinted, examining.

  Katherine pressed one of the cold cans to the back of her neck and then her cheeks, looking rueful, but not completely recovered. “I’m fine.” Her voice had a husky quality to it. “I just thought maybe you were—”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  3-APR

  * * *

  “—Ames.”

  The forces by which four women gathered in a pumping room to discuss a man whose marked presence seemed to fester and flare among them like an unmedicated case of herpes were beyond Ardie’s comprehension. She knew only that, a few short weeks ago, she’d been seated in nearly the exact same position, talking about the exact same man, and she thought it must be some sort of gravitational pull. Even black holes had them.

  Sloane closed her eyes as she paced and pinched her forefinger to her thumb. “Wait, wait, tell me exactly what happened,” she said.

  Breathe, Ardie wanted to tell Katherine. You can’t forget to breathe.

  Ardie had needed a safe place to bring Katherine and she’d needed safe second opinions. The pumping room now felt like a nuclear fallout shelter, dark and dank and secluded from whatever calamities went on outside. (“Is that an Anthropologie candle?” Sloane had asked Grace when she’d arrived.) For the time being at least, Grace kept her breasts stored away. Easier to listen that way, probably. And Ardie had stored away her own hurt feelings long enough to let Sloane in, having recognized her shortcomings in this department—the comforting of Katherine—instantl
y.

  And so the four women convened to discuss how to solve an unsolvable problem.

  “I … upset him.” An unmistakable note of bitterness saturated Katherine’s words. But they’d already heard this part. “I think we had different ideas about the nature of our relationship and where it was going.” There was an automated quality to what she was telling them, as if she’d explained the whole thing to herself multiple times.

  “Well, looks like no one in here is going to be passing the Bechdel test anytime soon.” Grace had removed her heels and was ballerina-stretching her bare toes on the tiles.

  “I saw him in the elevator earlier,” Ardie confessed. “He said, ‘You’re all crazy, you know that?’” She turned her voice low and gruff to mimic him.

  Of course, Ardie should have known right then and there that the comment was a preemptive strike. The temptation, nurtured by people like Ames, had always been to conjure up an image of bored housewives in business formal attire, playing a game of telephone on the office lines. We had to have been overreacting, behaving hysterically, a word which was quite literally derived from the Latin “hystericus”—or—“from the womb.” Actually, a great deal of time and words had gone into the art of not quite believing us. Adjectives like “bossy” and “feisty” and “pushy” and “intense” became subtle excuses meant to help justify selective hearing loss.

  When Ardie had found Katherine in the kitchen, she had seen the same expression she’d found on Sloane’s face so many years ago. What the hell am I going to do now? it had said. And now it was starting all over again. It was like suddenly realizing that, though you believed you’d been running in a race, you’d just been on a treadmill the whole time.

  “But … didn’t you read the list?” Sloane ventured.

  They’d all been clinging to the promise of the BAD Men List as a little life raft bobbing on the seas of the Internet. It had been the disclaimer written on the sign nailed to the amusement park ride. Enter at your own risk. Once the warning had been issued, they’d fulfilled their legal liability. But not until now did they suddenly realize how untrue that was.

  “I read it.” Katherine’s cheeks puffed out from where she sat on the couch. She tucked her feet underneath her. “When you sent it. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with it, though. Ames got me this job. I’m not an idiot.” She glanced around the room, daring each of the women to disagree with her. “You weren’t telling me anything I didn’t sort of know on some level. I knew I was already walking a fine line. Yeah, I’m qualified.” As if the facts that she’d gone to Harvard and worked on Law Review were less important data points about her. “But I came without any recommendations. Worse, my past employer actively hated me. I met Ames in a bar in Boston. I sorted out that he was, you know, attracted to me, probably. But I worked really hard to get where I am. And, I needed a fresh start. Somewhere that didn’t feel like taking a step backward. That sounds bad.” She pushed her shoulders into the sofa cushions. “But what woman doesn’t do that a little? You run out of gas on the side of a road and, okay, well suddenly it’s not so bad to play a little … you know, cute, to get some help. Don’t look at me that way,” she said to all of them. “We all do it.”

  Sloane nodded. “This is a judgment-free zone. You’re one of us.”

  “Anyway.” Katherine sighed. “I reasoned that, once I got my foot in the door, I could gradually create some distance and it would become a non-issue. He was taking an interest, but, honestly, it had seemed in a good way. He was helping me and he hadn’t asked for anything in return. It was under control.”

  Grace dropped her heels to the floor and stared. “And The Prescott?” she asked.

  Katherine looked up at Grace, who stood near the TV. The black screen held a miniature picture of Sloane and Katherine inside it. “Ames paid for it,” she answered slowly. “He asked me not to mention it to anyone. I’m sorry. He said that the company didn’t usually cover moving expenses, but that I should consider his help part of my hiring package. He was using a company credit card and everything. I told him I ran into you and that was the first time he seemed a little, I don’t know, dodgy about it.” The skin around Grace’s eyes tightened. She crossed her arms protectively over her chest. “But I swear nothing happened at The Prescott.”

  “Okay, so nothing happened at The Prescott.” Sloane rolled her hands in midair: go on. “So what did happen?”

  Katherine’s throat tightened in a swallow. “He asked me to stay late to help with—I don’t even remember, honestly—and I went to his office and we started talking and he got kind of…” She tilted her head sideways as if examining it in her mind’s eye. “… closer, I guess, and … This is going to sound weird, but it was dark because he said that it was easier on his eyes with the computer screen at night. And then it just kept—I thought something else—but he was … He kissed me. And then.” Her mouth flickered with an unpleasant memory. “And, initially, I was just kind of surprised. Not in a nice way. But. I was trying to remove myself, you know, gracefully. He’s persistent, though. He tried—he kept, you know—so I tried—anyway, he took my hand and he placed it on his…” She made eyes so that they all understood. There were so many words missing from Katherine’s sentences and yet Ardie understood the meaning perfectly. “Someone walked in on us, actually. The cleaning lady.”

  Ardie blinked. “Rosalita?”

  “I’m not sure. I think so. I don’t know.” Katherine bent over her knees, cupping her forehead. “I said something relatively innocuous to him, I thought. Something like, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, I don’t want to get involved with anyone at the office.’ He threw a pen on the ground and said I had to be fucking kidding him. I left. I figured we could smooth things over later when cooler heads prevailed.”

  “Maybe you were giving off signals? Could he have misinterpreted—” To her credit, Grace didn’t sound judgmental, exactly. Though she didn’t sound supportive, either. “Office affairs are a thing, aren’t they?” She didn’t look to Sloane, but she might as well have.

  “Grace.” Sloane wheeled. “She is—I don’t know, how old are you, Katherine? It doesn’t matter—don’t you think she knows?”

  Grace gave no response.

  Because Sloane was voicing something we all believed, which was that we knew the difference. How did we know when behavior was inappropriate? We just did. Any woman over the age of fourteen probably did. Believe it or not, we didn’t want to be offended. We weren’t sitting around twiddling our thumbs waiting for someone to show up and offend us so that we would have something to do that day. In fact, we made dozens of excuses not to be. We gave the benefit of the doubt. We took a man’s comment about the way our high heels made our calves look as well intentioned. We understood the desire for us to draw a line in the sand—this was okay, this was not okay. No such line existed, or at least not one that we could paint. But trust that by the time we were working, our meters had been tested dozens of times over. We were experts in our field.

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “I’m sorry, Katherine,” Grace said, softly. “I’m just trying to fully understand. I just—I don’t know that side of Ames, that’s all.”

  “So?” Ardie asked.

  “So Ames isn’t taking the rejection well,” Sloane jumped in.

  “At first, I thought he was. It seemed like … okay, this happened. That was unfortunate, but you know, maybe I was giving off signals.” She cast a look to Grace. “Or something, and we could all be reasonable adults. Then he found out about the list.”

  “Wait, what?” Sloane’s eyes bugged.

  Hello, lede, thought Ardie. Glad you’ve finally been dug up.

  “Today, actually. And he thinks I added him,” said Katherine.

  Sloane pinched her waist, sucking the bottom of her rib cage concave as she paced the room. “Oh, fuck,” she said. “Fuckity-fuck-fuck-fuck.” She walked in circles now. Little, tiny, sad circles. Ardie wondered exactly what percentage
of this might be considered her fault.

  “You didn’t add him,” Sloane said. “Did you tell him that? Did you tell him that you didn’t add him?”

  “Of course I told him that.”

  “And he said what?” Ardie asked, her tone smooth. They were gathering the facts. That was all. They were on a fact-finding mission. Research. This was a room full of lawyers. They had thirty-two years of advanced schooling between them. The objective: to sort out what was what and to help their peer navigate through a sticky situation with her job intact.

  Perhaps “sticky” wasn’t the best word choice.

  Katherine folded her arms and crossed her legs. It gave her terrible posture. Ardie had never seen her with anything less than perfect physical deportment and it felt like a particularly obvious, alarming symptom to observe.

  “He didn’t believe me,” she said, speaking more to her knees than to them. “He told me I was full of it. He said that he had worked with all of the people in this office for years and years and that I’d started and I’d, I don’t know, yeah, sent him mixed messages.” She used air quotes here. “And then, all of a sudden, it’s supposed to be his fault and there’s this list going around with his name on it and that it’s clearly no coincidence. His words not mine.”

  Sloane’s and Ardie’s looks found each other. Cut right in line to one another. Yesterday, Sloane had showed up to her office declaring, I don’t have an olive branch so I brought Olive Garden. And though it would have happened anyway, the breadsticks certainly expedited the healing process. They were, of course, allies again. And they were old ones. Practiced. Which were the absolute best kind. And Sloane was her best friend. She felt around in her heart for whether that was still true and hoped very much that it was.