The Girl in Times Square

by Paullina Simons

  “That’ll be fine,” he replied, in a voice that said, yes, I’d like an olive in my martini. Whatever.

  “I can’t believe you’ve resigned from Congress.”

  “Yes, well.”

  Miera fussed with her purse, with the buttons of her suit jacket, with her hair. Andrew sat in profile to her; he did not turn to her once.

  She said, “That girl’s been found.”

  He was mute.

  “Andrew…” she lowered her voice.

  “Don’t.”

  “I have to ask you, I have to. I haven’t talked to anyone about this. And once I turn and go, it will all be over between us, I won’t ask you anything again—” She forced herself to go on. “I don’t want anything anymore from you, Andrew. I just want you to answer me. Over a year ago, one Friday night, for some reason I couldn’t sleep, so I came downstairs to find you and I heard you in your office. When I opened the door to look in, you didn’t hear me, your back was to the door and to me, much the same way it is now. I saw you sitting in your chair, and your shoulders were quaking…you were crying so hard, I became afraid that something terrible had happened to a member of your family. I said your name, but you didn’t hear, and then suddenly…I felt that I was intruding on something you didn’t want me to see. I don’t know why I got that feeling, but I did, and so I tiptoed out and shut the door, and thought that you would tell me the next day, morning, night. But you never told me.” Miera fell quiet.

  Andrew was quiet. He gave no response.

  Miera said, “Do you want to tell me now?”

  “Tell you what?”

  “As the last thing you do for me in our marriage.” She clutched her purse.

  “I was crying for her, Miera,” said Andrew.

  “It was the night of May 14, 1999, Andrew, wasn’t it?” Miera’s voice was nearly inaudible. “The day they said the girl disappeared.” And then she left, stumbling slightly in her three-inch leather pumps on the slippery marble floor. One Treasury agent went with her. Two remained behind with Andrew.

  A few hours after Miera left, Spencer walked up the same marble staircase to the lounge bar, in his clean dark blue nondescript suit and his black dress shoes, and Spencer didn’t slip and he didn’t have a purse to fidget with, nor was fidgeting his habit. He didn’t know why he didn’t bring Gabe with him. He didn’t know why he wanted to talk to Andrew Quinn alone.

  This from Elizabeth Monroe from three weeks ago that he had been carrying around in his jacket pocket: “Internal Affairs have conducted a thorough and concrete investigation into the allegations against Spencer Patrick O’Malley and apart from vague circumstantial information found no sufficient evidence of abuse of his badge or his profession or of any other crime being committed on his behalf either in civilian or professional capacity to sustain the complaint against him of serious misconduct. Matter is summarily dismissed with prejudice.”

  One of the federal agents by the bar, there for the purposes of protecting the former congressman, told Spencer that “the guy has sat like a block all day at that table—almost as if he’s waiting for someone.”

  “Thanks. I’ll go talk to him now.”

  “Do you want a drink, detective?”

  “Yes, a Coke,” said Spencer. And with his “drink” in hand, he went and sat down at the table across from Andrew, who turned his head slightly to Spencer.

  “I was wondering when I’d see you,” Andrew said. “I’m surprised it took you this long.”

  Spencer took a sip and said nothing. His hands went around the tumbler. Coke in the hands.

  “Do you want a drink?” Spencer asked.

  “No, thank you, I’ve had plenty,” replied Andrew. “How is my sister?”

  “The same.”

  Andrew sighed painfully.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Spencer said, “of certain things, of things we talked about, things I know, things I’m guessing at, the pieces I try to put together, and I always feel that I’m missing some pieces, here, there.”

  “Yes. And what has all this thinking led you to?”

  “Certain things you said to me that I remember now that go with the things I’ve learned since we last spoke. For example, when I asked you if you knew Amy back in 1992, you replied that you did not know of her then. I hear the emphasis now which I didn’t hear then. ‘I did not know of her then,’ is what you said to me.” Spencer didn’t take his eyes off Andrew. “As if you knew that she knew of you then.”

  “I was running for Congress. Of course she knew of me.” Andrew was clipped.

  Spencer cleared his throat. “Did Bill Bryant ever call you? Tell you Lily and I spoke to his wife?”

  “He did, gave me a heads up. One of the reasons I’ve moved out of my house. I’ve been waiting for you ever since. Figured I’d see you soon.”

  “Your sister hasn’t been well. I’ve been busy.”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought you might be interested in some of the coroner’s findings. He is going to do an inquest in ten days and make a formal deposition, but do you want to hear the prelim?”

  “Go ahead.” This said in a dead voice.

  “At the back of her skull the coroner found some blunt trauma, as if she had been knocked out, perhaps after being violently pushed against a solid object, perhaps the tree under which she was buried. There were no other injuries. Perhaps she was suffocated. Her upper vertebrae, her neck, remained intact. Her skull, aside from a three-inch fracture in the blunt trauma area, remained intact. Her otherwise unharmed bones were found together.” Spencer fell quiet, as if to give Andrew a chance to speak, but by the shut in, closed-up look of him, he might never speak, so Spencer continued. “Since there is no flesh left to examine for tell-tale signs of morbidity, the coroner supposes any number of things could have killed her. Do you know what’s most distressing? He does not dismiss the possibility that she was knocked out and not killed but buried unconscious in the soft muddy ground under the oak tree. There is no way to know. But he does not dismiss the possibility that Amy McFadden was buried alive.”

  Andrew’s shoulders rose in an effort to square, and shook in an effort at self-control. “She couldn’t have been buried alive.”

  “No?” said Spencer, ever so casual, taking another sip of his Coke.

  “Detective…”

  “Congressman—”

  “No more,” Andrew said. “Just Mr. Quinn. Or Andrew.”

  “Andrew,” said Spencer. “Why did you make up an alibi? You have a good friend in the councilman. All of us should have good friends like that. But why did you need an alibi for these hours? You met with her, didn’t you?”

  Without turning to Spencer, Andrew said, “She wasn’t buried alive. Did you hear me?”

  “I hear you.”

  “She called me on Thursday, May 13. I hadn’t spoken to her or seen her in four weeks. She called to ask me to meet her. Not here, like always, but in Central Park, in the woods off the Bridle Path. I had been out of my mind without her. I went to the Bridle Path like a man who’d discovered his life again.” He was not looking at Spencer. “I was so happy to see her. I asked her why she wanted to meet here and not in our hotel, and she said because she was about to tell me some things that might make me upset and she didn’t want me getting upset in public. And you know what I said? Nothing you can tell me will make me upset, Amy. I’m so happy you called me. I’m so happy to see you. I’ve missed you more than you’ll ever know.

  “It was there, in those woods, that Amy told me she had voted against me in 1992. It was in those woods she told me about herself and Benjamin Abrams, about herself and Milo. Oh, the things she told me. She had been in love with him. The only reason she came into my life was to help him kill me. And do you know what my reaction was?” Andrew quickly continued before Spencer could supply an answer. “I didn’t believe her! That was my reaction. You’re being absurd, Amy. If this is a ploy to get me away from you, it’s not going to work. But she sai
d it wasn’t a ploy. She said she was never going to tell me, but Milo had been released from prison, and was now fomenting and pushing her towards something she said she could no longer do. She told me she was telling me this to warn me, that Milo had said he was going to stop at nothing until he got to me again.” Andrew took a deep breath and stopped speaking.

  “Do you know what the word was, detective, that struck out at me just a little bit,” Andrew said at last, “just enough to stop disbelieving her? It was the word again. What do you mean, again, I said.

  “And she told me Milo was the one who shot out the windows in my SUV a couple of years earlier, nearly killing my wife and my daughters. We were all in the truck. It was the intention of harming of my family that I reacted to. Amy knew where we were going to be—because I told her where we were going to be. I told her and she told Milo. That’s when it dawned on me—she was telling the truth.”

  When Spencer remained mute, Andrew continued. “Detective, my whole family was in danger, living under their poison microscope. The things I had shared with her! I told her the most private things about my wife, my children, my sister. For years stalked by them. I screamed Amy, Amy, don’t you know how much I love you? She said she knew. That was why she was here, warning me about Milo…I lost my mind. All right, I said, I understand about me, but what about them, what about my family, my wife, my children, Lily, what were they, incidental, accidental victims? I asked. And do you know what she said? Not even that. All just tools against you, Andrew. Ben’s mother is dead, Milo is the living dead; but your wife, your children, Lily, they’re still alive.” Andrew’s head was down. “I must have grabbed her. I no longer remember it clearly. I must have grabbed her. My reason left me.” He didn’t look up. “I broke her skull, I think, on the tree behind her, I bashed her against the tree, I took her and pummeled her against the trunk, and when she crumpled to the ground, I covered her with the leaves, and left. I didn’t bury her, I didn’t check to see if she was breathing. She simply fell, and I threw—heaved—dirt and stones and leaves on her and left, and that was all. I washed my hands in the Central Park Lake, I brushed the dust off me, pried the wet leaves off my shoes. It had been raining for days, the ground was wet. My shoes were muddy. I washed the soles off in the lake, and then walked back on dry pavement to 57th street and sat here in the bar for four hours and then I went home.”

  Spencer’s Coke was long gone. How he craved another drink.

  “What she had told me was diabolical. While I was dreaming of her, she was dreaming of killing my children, to bring me suffering for something I had no direct hand in. Oh, there was some ideological bullshit. She turned a face to me that was funny and kind. I betrayed my wife for that face, and all the while, she was betraying me. She said she had changed, her heart had changed, but everything was shattered now that I knew the duplicity and malice of that beloved face.”

  Spencer ordered and finished another Coke. He and Andrew sat side by side at the same table. He fingered his handcuffs in the pocket of his suit, he felt for his gun, felt for his whirring tape recorder.

  For a very long time, Spencer sat with Andrew at the little round table in the 57/57 Bar. Evening fell. The tape had long finished.

  Finally Spencer stood up from the table. “The inquest is in ten days,” he said. “The coroner is ruling this death an aggravated homicide because of the skull trauma. Someone else might have questions for you. Probably will have questions for you.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “But I myself am going now. I suggest you go, too.”

  Andrew looked up at Spencer. “Justice is at hand?”

  And taking out his recorder, Spencer pulled out the tape and handed it to Andrew. “Not from me,” he said. “Mercy from me. Because of Lily. Now do you understand?”

  80

  The Other Side

  The superintendent said later he first thought it was a mischief of dead rats. For weeks the hallway had been smelling increasingly fetid. Finally he opened one of the fireproof steel doors leading to a small storage room, gasped and started retching even as he was running down the corridor. He had to stop and vomit before he could continue up to the street level to call the police. The stench was awful, he told them, almost like a roomtemperature morgue full of bodies. The police with gas masks on discovered it was just one decomposing body. The smell of wretchedness and nihilist zeal in high relief was the same odor that still clung to Lily’s apartment, even weeks after Milo had absconded with her (and himself, and Amy, and Andrew). He must have regained consciousness just long enough to crawl away into a closet to die and rot in darkness, and his flesh began to fall off his bones. No one even knew he had been long dead and gone. The rats had gnawed on what was left of him.

  Two police cars, three ambulances, and a fire truck were pulled to a stop on the Palisades Parkway north of George Washington bridge on the way to Bear Mountain. Part of the highway had been sealed off to traffic. Spencer parked his car at a sharp, expedient angle and he and Gabe made their careful way down the near vertical cliff to the Hudson River below. They stopped about twenty paces from the wreck that had just been pulled out of the water. He and Gabe slowly walked to the car, their eyes adjusting to the night, trying to discern what shape the car was in, and who was in it.

  Spencer had a lot of experience with wrecks, after spending years patrolling the Long Island Expressway on Saturday nights. Within a few feet of the car he could usually tell not only what shape the passengers were going to be in, but also what injuries they were going to have. Gabe, never out of grid-locked New York City, was green in this area and was going to be of no help, self-evident by his stunned whistle and, “Oh, shit.”

  Spencer shushed him. When he got ten paces from the car, he realized things were going to be pretty bad. It was a blue sports car, a Mercedes 500SL convertible. He hated convertibles. He wished he could explain the laws of physics to every idiot who thought it was so cool to drive a convertible at night on the highway at ninety miles an hour. This convertible he thought had been going faster than ninety. This one seemed as if it had been going at a hundred-and-ninety when it met the immovable force of the concrete divider, careened once, twice; spun once, twice, flipped over, screeched to a sliding stop on its convertible hood, and then went over the cliff into the water below. The car was now unrecognizable as something that once had metal around leather seats, perhaps a dashboard and a windshield. Though the windshield could protect the driver from wind, it wasn’t as good at protecting him from physics. Invariably it was almost always a him. Women tended to drive tanklike Volvos and to drive their Volvos slower, as if they still remembered the kids they had left back home even when the glorious night wind was whipping through their hair.

  Spencer and Gabe stood silently by the wreck trying to process what they were seeing. Even the inexperienced Gabe might be able to point out the thing about the convertible that didn’t make sense.

  “Hey,” said Gabe. “There’s no driver in it.”

  “Shh. Don’t say anything.”

  “You think there were passengers?”

  “Gabe! This is not a remote-control car. Of course there were passengers.”

  It was a two-seater car. And it was empty. “Well, where are they?”

  Spencer looked around. It was so dark, with only the police flares and floodlights illuminating the wreck, and up above, over the cliffs, the occasional light whiz of passing cars at midnight. But whether it was dark or daylight, one thing was clear—there was no driver.

  There was no driver in the car, and the car was demolished.

  “Why did you bring me here?” said Gabe. “Why are we looking at a car accident in New Jersey at midnight? I can’t even believe that sentence is coming out of my mouth! Why us? Why me at midnight?”

  And Spencer replied. “Because, McGill, Mr. Homicide Detective, this is Andrew Quinn’s car.”

  Andrew was not found.

  THE PAST AS PROLOGUE

  �
��Spencer, do you see this?”

  “Katie, I do.”

  “Her investments are shooting out of the sky. I’ve never seen anything like it. Her fund is growing at rate of thirty-four percent a year.”

  “Joy, should we have some lunch?”

  “Stop smiling at me like that, Larry, I know what your lunch entails. I can’t. I’m knitting.”

  Giggling.

  “Did you read the paper this morning? In Ethiopia, a grenade exploded at a wedding, killing the bride and three other people.”

  “Mother, please!”

  “What? Apparently it’s custom for guests to fire their guns at weddings in wild jubilation, though grenades are apparently more rare.”

  “You’ll have to excuse my mother, Detective O’Malley.”

  “Thank you, but I’m quite entertained by her, Mrs. Quinn.”

  “Mrs. Quinn, how are you feeling?”

  “I could be better, Dr. DiAngelo. I’m tired all the time. And I wanted to show you this.” There is a pause, the sound of shoes walking across the floor. “What do you think this is? Some kind of a weird rash, right?”

  “Allie, do you think you can stop showing the doctor your ailments with the police in the room?”

  “Oh, Detective O’Malley has seen worse than this, Mother. Haven’t you, detective?”

  “Much worse, and please—call me Spencer.”

  “No, Allie, I just don’t understand you at all. Why do this now? It’s just a rash!”

  “Oh, you can talk about your Ethiopian exploding brides, but I can’t show the doctor a real problem? The doctor is here, I might as well take advantage, right, Dr. DiAngelo?”

  “Absolutely Mrs. Quinn. Let’s see what you’ve got here.”

  There is sighing, clothes rustling, a silence, an ahem, a “Well, what is it?”