were going to go at it again, but he had no heart for it. “Fuck you,” he said quietly. “I didn’t know what to think.”
I nodded, and thought about dates. If Holly had been talking about Werner three or four weeks before her death, that would’ve been in December. “Did Holly say anything about someone looking for her?” I asked. “Anything about a lawyer coming to see her?”
Coyle looked confused. He shook his head. “Nothing.”
“When did you realize that Holly was…”
Coyle stared at his hands, at the soaked T-shirt and his coffee cup- at things I couldn’t see. He dropped his T-shirt on the floor. “I saw the paper. I saw the picture…her tattoo.”
“And after that?”
“After that I didn’t know what to do. I went back to looking for Werner. I don’t know why, or what I would’ve done if I found him, but I didn’t know what else to do. Then I ran into you again.
“After that, I went by her apartment a few times. I wanted to go in, but I didn’t. I just…looked at the building. Then I saw cops there, and split. I figured it was just a matter of time before they came around here, and I thought about taking off- but where am I supposed to go? The last few months, every plan I had had to do with her.” Coyle shook his head and sighed. “I should’ve known better. Jesus, has it been two weeks since I saw that picture? It seems like a hundred years, or yesterday.”
“What plans did you make?”
“We talked about maybe moving in together, and maybe getting out of the city. Holly liked Philly- she said space was cheap there. She had in mind making different kinds of films- documentaries, maybe- or writing more plays.”
Coyle made a fist and examined it. Then he rubbed it over his eyes. “We talked about kids too, if you can believe it. It surprised the hell out of me Holly wanted them, but she did. She said she might be ready soon, if that was all right by me. I said sure, why not.”
I thought about Holly’s pregnancy, and I looked at Coyle- hunched and staring a hole in the concrete floor- and didn’t ask. If he’d known about it, I was pretty sure he would’ve said; if he didn’t…it wasn’t in me to tell him. I drank some of my coffee. It was cold.
“Holly ever talk about the guys from her videos? She ever worry about anything coming back at her?”
He looked up. Life came into his dirty, wrung-out face. “You think that’s what happened? You think one of them-”
I shook my head. “It’s a question, that’s all. I want to know if she ever talked about any of them, if any of them scared her.”
His shoulders slumped. “No, she never talked about them, not to me, and I didn’t ask. If she worried, it was only about the ones she was gonna question. That’s why she asked me to back her up those times. But even those she didn’t worry much about. Not enough, as far as I was concerned. She was in charge, she would say. She was always in charge.”
Coyle went back to studying the floor, and I thought more about Holly and her work. “You told Holly that the story in her videos was always the same. You said that she agreed with you, and that she said the questions she wanted to answer were all the same too.” Coyle looked at me and nodded uncertainly. “What were they?” I asked.
“What was what?”
“The story she wanted to tell, the questions she wanted to answerwhat were they?”
He shook his head slowly. “The story was always about a married guy fucking around, and the questions were all about why- why he did it, why he’d screw over his wife and kids that way. It was always the same thing, always about her family.”
“That’s what happened to her family?”
“That’s what she said. Her dad was a real asshole, I guesscouldn’t keep it in his pants, and didn’t bother keeping it a secret from anyone, including her mom. The whole time they were growing up, he was fucking around- his secretary, neighbors, even some of Holly’s teachers. The mom and dad went at it pretty good, I guess, and all the time. Her mom never left him, though. After all the yelling and shit, she just took it and took it, right up until the time she got in the tub, ate a few bottles of pills, and opened her veins. Holly came home from school and found her. She was, like, fourteen.”
“Christ.”
Coyle nodded. “It’s fucked-up shit.”
“You never met the sister?”
He shook his head. “Holly never invited me when she went up there,” he said. “I asked a few times, but she said no.”
I squinted. “How often did she go?”
“I don’t know- once or twice a month, maybe. I didn’t keep track.”
Once or twice a month. “I heard she didn’t have much to do with her family.”
“She didn’t. She and the sister didn’t get along, so when she went up there, it was mostly to see her dad. He’s in some kind of a home, and pretty out of it- too out of it to fight with much, I guess.”
I nodded. I thought about Holly’s apartment, and the video camera boxes on the floor. “Did Holly do all her editing at home?”
“Yeah- she had her computer, and software for the editing, and for burning the disks. But all that stuff was gone when I got there.”
I thought about the videos, about watching them in Todd Herring’s screening room. And then I thought of something else. “The reliquaries- the little cabinets that went with the videos- Holly didn’t make those in the apartment, did she?”
Coyle shook his head. “She did that in her studio.”
“Her studio?”
“That’s what she called it. It was just a locker in one of those self-storage places- not much more than a giant closet- but she had a workbench in there, and woodworking tools and shit.” Coyle gave me the name of the place and the address. It was in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. He didn’t have a key, but he knew the unit number.
I looked down at my hands. They were throbbing and ugly, and the pain was making it hard to concentrate. A trip to the emergency room was in my near future, and I wondered about driving. I asked Coyle how I could reach him, and he sighed and gave me Kenny’s cell number. His lassitude was contagious; a wave of fatigue washed over me, and washed away what little buzz I’d gotten from the caffeine and the sugar. I hoisted myself up and pulled on my jacket. Coyle sighed again and dragged himself off the cot and to the sink. He ran the water and leaned at the edge- all out of air. I was surprised when he spoke.
“It was just a matter of time,” he said softly.
“What was a matter of time?”
“I felt lucky to be with her- too lucky, like it was all a mistake, like I got somebody else’s good luck by accident. It was like finding a wallet full of cash- you know somebody’s gonna come around looking for it eventually. It was all borrowed time.” Bent over the sink, his broad back shook. His voice was small and choked.
“You ask these fucking questions I can’t answer, and I realize I didn’t know a damn thing about her. I had no part in her life. I didn’t know her family, her friends- I don’t even know where she’s gonna be buried, or when, or who’s gonna do it. Will there be a wake or something? If I showed up, would anybody but the cops know who I was?”
Coyle leaned into the sink and began to retch. I closed the door behind me.
33
It was gray and raw on Thursday morning, and the clouds scudding above the midtown skyline were full of ice or sleet or stone. In Mike Metz’s office, it didn’t feel much warmer. I’d told him what Jamie Coyle had said, and that I’d basically believed it, and Mike was silent on the other side of his wide ebony desk. Behind his steepled fingers, his narrow face was blank, but his eyes were skeptical and irritated.
