best alternatives are non-starters, if that’s what you mean. I’ve also noticed that we’re fresh out of other candidates.”
Mike turned around. “Which leaves us where we started, with David and Stephanie.”
I took a deep breath and pain pulsed in my fingers. “Where is Flores going with this?” I asked.
“I don’t know what she’s going to do,” Mike said. “There are plenty of reasons why a case against either of them would be a dog to prosecute: no witnesses, no physical evidence, the victim’s lifestyle, her history- the list goes on. An ADA as smart as Flores wouldn’t usually be in a hurry to roll the dice over something like this. But we don’t have ‘usually’ here. Here we have sex tapes, adultery, a beautiful white victim, and wealthy, prominent, unsympathetic suspects- a cable television wet dream. Flores is ambitious, and…” He shook his head. “I just don’t know.”
“Best guess, then.”
“I’m not in the guessing business.”
“As a favor to a friend.”
Mike looked at me with bloodshot eyes. “I don’t know if it’s any favor,” he said, “but best guess is we’re circling the drain.”
His words stayed with me in the taxi home, and they were with me still as I sat at the table, staring stupidly at my notes. My memories of Pitt Street, and of Rita Flores- her stares and questions and body language, her nods to Vines and McCue- took on an ever more menacing cast, and it was hard to shake the feeling that there was doom written all over this thing. There was nothing yet certain about the case going to indictment, I told myself, much less to trial, and nothing sure in what a jury might do, even if the case did go that far. But if it did, I knew, there would be one all too predictable outcome- public humiliation for David and Stephanie, and professional and personal ruin. I remembered something Stephanie had said: “There’s a part of him that’s been waiting for all this… to get caught, to be punished.” Was this what David had had in mind when he’d answered those ads?
I opened my laptop. I could wonder and worry all night, and it wouldn’t be of any use to David or Stephanie- not that there was much useful to be done at this point. There were more calls to be made, to check on Werner’s alibi, but Friday night isn’t the best time to reach people, and especially not theater people. There were loose ends in my notes to tie off. And there were the other backup disks, and the DVDs, that I’d taken from unit 58 at Creek Self-Store- hours of depressing video, sitting on my kitchen counter. I knew I should watch them, but just then, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Circling the drain.
I sighed, and tapped my splints on the table, and thought of something else Mike had said: “Have you considered the possibility that the cops may be looking in the right place?” It was a reasonable question, a prudent question, the right one to ask. It was the kind of question I’d asked before, about plenty of other clients. But not about this one, not seriously. Was that because I thought I knew the answer, or because I didn’t want to know?
“Shit,” I said out loud, and I heard a key in the lock.
Clare opened the door and stood at the threshold, looking at me. After a while, she shook her head. “Get your coat on,” she said. “If there’s a long night of brooding ahead, you’re at least getting some air and a meal first.”
She walked me south and west, to Doctor Wu’s, the New York branch of a trendy LA burger joint, and a favorite of the fashion crowd. It’s usually impossible to get a table there any evening, much less a Friday, but Clare worked some magic and we were seated in ten minutes.
I ordered a ginger ale and Clare had wine, and the candlelight wrapped around us, and the chatter of the crowd covered us like a tent. The warmth and darkness and noise of the place made for a kind of privacy, and I was drifting into silence and fatigue and the scramble of my own head when Clare took my wrist. I looked up. Her hair was loose around her shoulders, and nearly white against her black sweater. Her face was luminous, and her fingers were smooth and cool.
I thought she was going to ask questions- where had I been, how was the case, what was wrong with me- and I had no answers, nor even the breath to try. But Clare asked nothing. Instead, she smiled, and talked about, of all things, real estate: the twelve apartments she’d seen that day, the outrageous asking prices, the hideous furnishings, the bizarre owners, the fascist co-op boards, and the freakish real estate agents. It was a wry, flowing monologue, interrupted only by the waitress and our food, and I didn’t have to do anything except laugh, which- after a while- I did.
On the walk home, Clare leaned close and took my hand. Her perfume was light on the icy air. “I should work,” I said.
She shook her head. “It’ll keep.”
I awoke two hours before dawn, in the ashes of a dream. It was something with Holly and David and Stephanie and Jamie Coyle, but the narrative was lost. I stood by the windows and looked at the frozen city, and salvaged what pieces I could: Holly’s voice, pleading, laughing, cruel, and sad; her shadowed eyes; her bare, shining back; David’s angry mouth; his fingers tugging at the skin over his Adam’s apple; Stephanie’s hands, twisting in her lap; Coyle, bent over his sink; a pall of sadness over them all. I turned the fragments over and around in my head, but I couldn’t make them fit. I pulled on jeans and a sweatshirt and opened my laptop.
Clare got up at nine-thirty, and she moved slowly but methodically around the apartment- breakfast, newspaper, shower. I was working my way through Holly’s DVDs, and she put a hand in my hair as she passed.
I’d gotten through three so far, Interviews Nine, Ten, and Eleven, the final and the unedited versions I’d found in the binder. The men were there, unmasked, in all their glory, and so were their names, addresses and places of business. I’d never seen Nine before, but Ten and Eleven were, respectively, the tall bald guy and the pale, hairy guy I’d watched the night before. Chaz Monroe had been right about her later work being more extreme, and each of these men would be worth a visit.
Not that there was anything to suggest that one of them had come looking for Holly months after the fact. Still, it was possible something had stirred one of them up, perhaps in the way that Mitchell Fenn had been stirred. Cowering on the stage of the Little Gidding Theatre, Werner had sworn up and down that Fenn had been his only foray into blackmail, but doubting him came easy. I sighed. This had the feel of grasping at straws. I was reaching for another disk when the intercom sounded.
I went to the screen just as David’s image emerged. He was wrapped in a coat that looked too large, and he was stabbing at the intercom button again and again. I buzzed him in and opened my apartment door. I knew when he stepped off the elevator that he was drunk.
His steps were slow and deliberate, and though they didn’t wander, they seemed to require a great deal of concentration. He wore jeans and a pink oxford shirt under his big coat; the clothes looked slept in, and maybe more than once. His face was unshaven and the stubble on his chin was gray. His hair was tangled and cowlicked. He walked past me into the apartment, smelling of sweat and cigarettes. I looked at my watch; it was just eleven. Great.
“You have orange juice?” he said. His voice was dry and tired.
“In the fridge,” I said. He tried to help himself, and I looked on. His hands shook and his attention faltered, and it was like watching a slow-motion car wreck. After a while I went into the kitchen and poured it for him. “What are you doing?” I asked.
He was annoyed. “Drinking orange juice- what’s it look like?”
“What are you doing here, David? What are you doing wandering around drunk on a Saturday morning?”
He took a drink and slopped juice down his shirtfront. He seemed not to notice. “This isn’t drunk- this isn’t even a decent buzz.”
“I’m going to get you a taxi. You need to go home.”
David snorted. “You are the last fucking person on earth to tell me what I need, Johnny.”
Great. “You need to go home,” I said again.
He pointed at me, and lost more juice. “What I needed was for you to do one thing- one stinking thing- and look at what you turned it into.” His voice got louder.
I shook my head. “You’re not making sense.”
“No? Then let me make it clear: you destroyed my life, Johnny. I needed you to take care of one problem, and you turned it into a disaster- a total fucking disaster. Jesus Christ, you’re more of a screw-up than any of us ever
