How did you get to that?“ Let her know how impressed you are with what she’s done. Every time I thought I heard footsteps or voices in the distant background, the noise soon faded to quiet, blending in with the natural sounds of squirrels stepping on dry leaves or birds flapping wings as they landed on nearby branches. Cars whizzed by on the cross-drive from time to time, but the steady hum of their wheels suggested that none even braked at the sight of a car pulled in off the roadway. Lights from above in the apartment windows at the majestic San Remo were shutting off throughout the building as people all over the city were going to sleep, and my only companions were the scores of blue rowboats behind my back, beached on their sides and chained together near the boathouse.
“The Filofax,” Goldman said, smiling.
“There’s always stuff in that, if you’ve got half a brain.” So much for me.
She continued.
“People are too lazy to be subtle. Most of us use the obvious significant dates, ann iv-‘ ”But you didn’t have my Filofax, you had Isabella’s.“ I wasn’t playing coy I simply didn’t know what she had done to get into my code.
“That’s all I needed. When Jed was in L.A.” he used to use his anniversary as the code. A lot of married people do, especially the women. His was February eighteenth two eighteen. I’m surprised he could remember it it didn’t seem too significant, given the state of his marriage. It was probably his wife’s idea, you know, for the home machine. Here, in New York, I got his unlisted number from Isabella’s book, then guessed he was using his birthday, now that he’s divorced.
“For you, the birthday was my first guess. Never been married, no special anniversary date. Lascar had your birthday in her book, along with her other information about you. April thirtieth. Four three zero. You’re probably stupid enough to use it for your banking code and all your other pin numbers.”
She had me there. Goldman was rapt in her own self congratulatory explanation and didn’t seem to notice that I was making headway against my binds. I wasn’t free, but they were loosening.
“And you picked up messages from my home machine‘ all week? And you erased them after you listened?” I had ignored Jed’s protestations that he had called repeatedly, and I had been depressed that there were so few calls from any of my other friends and family. This was not the moment to find out who else had been intercepted and erased from my radar screen. No wonder Jed had been trying so frantically to get me and my network of friends to believe him. Goldman had found him again, had reapplied herself to the effort to attract him in the days after Isabella’s murder, and he indeed was asking for my help these past twenty-four hours.
“If you’re telling the truth about not wanting anything to do with him,” she scoffed at me, ‘then you wouldn’t have missed his calls, anyway. Pleading for forgiveness and complaining about me. Those things were bad enough.
But telling you how much he loved you that you were his golden girl, that Isabella was just a mistake, that he wanted to marry you more than anything in the world all that made a mockery of what I had risked my life to accomplish. I didn’t want you to hear any of them, if I could help it. Maybe he was getting that through to you some other way, but not with the messages I could stop.“
Ellen Goldman was intense now, concentrating her anger on me again.
“I followed him to New York when I got out of jail. I found him again. But he had become distracted because of you,” she said, with obvious disdain.
“I wanted to meet you, to see what you were like. So I arranged the interview.”
“Don’t you really work for the Lawyer’s Digest?” I asked, knowing that the Public Relations Office had vetted her before letting me set an appointment with her.
“What a joke,” she blasted back at me.
“I just said I was freelancing for them I’ve never published anything in my life. I never finished graduate school. Your people were so hungry for good press about the office that once I told them how much I admired your work, I could have said I was writing for Popular Mechanics and they would have given me carte blanche. Nobody ever checked my credentials.”
My thoughts flashed back to the day after Isabella’s shooting, when Mike brought me home to the apartment from the office, and Ellen had left flowers with the doorman. I had been so pleased to see them I had assumed Laura had given her my address. How easily I had been misled, to have commented to Mike then about what a nice reporter she was. Oxymoron, he had said.
“But why Isabella?” I asked her.
“I can understand you were mad at me for taking up with Jed while you were in jail, but Isabella Lascar?”
“All of a sudden, last month, I began to find out about his meeting her. I could deal with you, I was sure. There was nothing that special about you,” she said.
“I knew if I made him aware of me again, you wouldn’t be in my way.
But then when she began calling him and seeing him, here and in L.A.” I knew it was a serious problem. I may be able to compete with you, but she was a movie star people idolized her, adored her, worshiped her. He’d never come back to me as long as she was in his life. Once I learned they were going to Martha’s Vineyard together, it just seemed so easy for me. I drove right onto the ferry, didn’t need any reservations off season. Got up to your house easily between the listing in the phone book and those locals in the post office who’d trust anybody pulled off the main road, just like I did tonight… and waited. I was back on the boat within hours. I just never meant for Jed to get blamed for it.“
Psychose passionelle. I tried to recall more facts from my reading the night before. Ellen Goldman really believed that Jed loved her, that he would actually return her affection, were it not for some external influence. The person in jeopardy is not the beloved she’d have no reason to harm him. The most likely recipient of the violent act, I had read, is the person perceived to be standing in the way of the desired union: Isabella Lascar. Get her out of the way and Jed Segal would be free to devote himself to Ellen.
And then, once she was dead, instead of turning his attention to Goldman, he tried to repair his romance with me. I wasn’t interested, but that didn’t lessen the annoyance of his calls and entreaties in her mind. For me, this was final jeopardy, too. Ellen was too impatient to wait for Jed’s ardor to subside. She had seized the moment of my precinct visit this evening when she learned about it on the radio, and used the fact that it drew me through Central Park, to come up with a scheme. Kill me, in the style of Harold McCoy who had a reason to want me out of the way and it wouldn’t look anything like the death of Isabella. Abduct and stab me to death, don’t shoot another one. She was right the tabloids would love it, and more importantly, no one would connect it to the death of Isabella Lascar.
How sadly ironic for me, to have spent a decade prosecuting men for crimes of violence against woman, and now to meet my peril at the hands of a woman. Perhaps that’s what had me blinded in this case all along.
I thought of the lines of poetry scribbled in Isabella’s manuscript, sent to her by Goldman, in the guise of the letters of “Dr. Jeffers‘: ”Is it… a crime… to love too well?“
Pope named it aptly a most unfortunate lady. The crime was not the loving, but the murder.
I tried to give her more incentive to back off.
“Let’s call Jed together, Ellen. Let’s talk with him about-‘
”I don’t ever want him to talk to you again, don’t you understand that? If you’re out of his life, he’ll come back to me. I know that.“
“I’m leaving New York. I’m going out of town this weekend. I – I won’t come back till you work it out with Jed.” I’d go anywhere, forever, if you’d let me out of here.
I was almost able to work loose my hands, but had no idea what I could do with them, against her weapons and her physical ability, if I were free.
“You’re playing with me again, Alex. You won’t leave for long. This is where your work is, you can’t stay away.”
Shit, maybe they need a sex crimes prosecutor in Wyoming or Montana. Someplace without investment bankers and without erotomaniacs.
A man’s voice from the top of the staircase on the Bethesda Terrace, to our south, broke the stillness. Both of our heads snapped in that direction, vainly trying to see who he was and where he stood, as he called out, “Hey, girl, hey, pooch. You down there? C’mon back up here to me.”
A dog walker. Goldman tensed and held a finger in front of her mouth, warning me to stay quiet. I prayed whoever he was would venture down the steps to my hellhole.
“Hey, Zac. C’mon back up here. Zac? Zac? C’mon, let me put your leash on.”
