'Where's Gabriella?' I asked.
The question hit him like a rabbit punch. I don't know what he'd been expecting but it sure wasn't that. His face folded into nine variations of anger, indignity, and confusion before it settled into outright surprise. It suited him just swell.
He couldn't come up with anything better than, 'What?' and he hated himself for it. He got grounded again and the peevish tone thrummed into his voice once more. 'Who are you to ask that?'
'Who the hell would I have to be? Where is she?'
'She's not here.'
'That doesn't answer my damn question. Where is she?'
His resentful front began to fall apart even faster. He couldn't maintain his outrage. I watched it crack to pieces and the sight startled me. We were getting down deep where the nerve clusters were always on fire for one reason or another. The venom began to seep from me but I held onto that desperate need to see her. He detected it in me and almost took a kind of pity as he said, 'She's gone.'
'What?'
'It's true.'
I took a lunging step toward him and caught hold of myself in time. I looked over his shoulder and hoped he was lying, but I couldn't feel her presence in the slightest. I couldn't smell her perfume, I got no sense of her at all.
'Gone where?'
'I don't know, Will.'
The way he said my name tightened my chest. It was almost a whimper, an appeal to friendship. The sound of his own voice angered him and I watched his thin face harden further, his shoulders straightening. I took another step until we were toe to toe. 'What the hell are you saying?'
'She hasn't been home since the day the old man was killed in the lobby.'
'That was over two weeks ago!'
He steeled himself. 'Yes.'
'Have you called the police? Filed a missing persons report?'
'No.'
'Why not?'
He didn't answer. His eyes softened and he dropped his gaze. He fell back a few steps like he was aiming his ass for the rich leather wraparound sofa I saw in his living room, but he began to stumble. I actually had to reach out and grab his arm to keep him from going over. I shook him hard once but he still looked dazed. The cops should've been called in long before this, but I didn't push the point because I'd lost just about all my confidence in the police anyway.
Corben said, 'I can't speak to you now.'
'You damn well better.'
'I can't. Later. Why don't you come up tonight for a drink? It's been a while since we've talked.' He slowly closed the door in my face. I had no idea how I'd gotten out into the hall.
I had three cards from the three teams of cops. I picked up the one from the whiners and started to phone them, but before I tapped out all seven numbers I hung up. I was already a second-rate suspect in a cooling murder case. How smooth would it go down with the police if I called them about Gabriella? They'd question Corben and he was a New York celebrity, a personal friend of the mayor and the governor. He'd slick it over if he wanted, and they'd just have even more reason to presume me guilty of something. I couldn't waste the time. I had to find her. I had to make him crack. I felt it was something I had to do. Something only I could do. Audacity is sometimes its own reward.
Leave it to Corben to call a decade and a half 'a while'. I decided to play along.
A few hours later we sat in his living room drinking bourbon. From the stink of his breath I could tell he'd been at it for a while before I got there. We skipped fifteen years and anything of substance. I wanted to let my gaze roam his apartment. I'd been in the place many times before. Whenever a toilet clogged. Whenever the garbage disposal backed up. I'd cleaned up Corben's shit for two years, but I'd never been a guest and I'd never spent a minute taking in the personality of his apartment. I wanted to look at the photos with him and movie stars, on the sets of his films. I wanted to get up and hold all his rare nineteenth-century first editions. There were many paintings, mostly small originals done by artists who resided in the world's greatest museums. His tastes were similar to mine and I knew I would find many wondrous, beautiful, awe-inspiring aspects to his home.
But I simply sat and looked at him and waited.
He started off with trivial matters. We discussed our latest works — I mentioned the last manuscript I'd finished and made enough misleading comments for him to think it was still under consideration at my publisher. This one was a grand family drama delving into such an assortment of relationships and secrets and personal mysteries that I had no idea what the hell the story was about. He mentioned his latest bestseller, the one I'd bought and left on the front stoop. He didn't talk about the Stark House book.
He was splitting his attention between our conversation and writing in his head at the same time. He was letting his mind wander the building. The slightest noise made him snap his chin aside. The muscles in his legs jumped. He was trying to kill his interest with booze. He wouldn't be able to stand it much longer.
I started in where I'd left off earlier. 'Why didn't you call the police?' I asked.
'We had argued that morning —»
'I know. I heard you.'
It did something to him. It got down beneath the layers of his created persona and dragged up his real self. I got a view of my old pal again, the kid he was back in the day before we blew our friendship. He was just a scared boy, alone without his mothering wife to lead him safely through the extent of his own life. He'd been coddled for so long that he'd lost any kind of veneer. His hard shell had cracked badly over the years of his success, and it had let in all his insecurities and reservations and doubts. No wonder he screamed out his titles when he was losing a fight. He couldn't apologise and he couldn't debate. It was all he could defend himself with.
It's sometimes a curse to have an imagination that can draw up detailed visuals, and when you got down to it, he was better at it than me. He had a worse affliction to bear.
'Why are you writing about this building?' I asked.
He reared in his seat but the bravado wasn't there anymore. 'She told you that?'
'Not outright. We were talking that day and I got a hint of what you were doing. So why are you doing it?'
He poured himself more bourbon. His hands trembled badly but not out of fear. At least not merely out of fear. Gabriella had been his buffer between him and the rest of the world, and without her he was being rubbed raw. 'You know why.'
'No, I don't.'
'You do!' He sank back into his seat, all knife edges and points. If he moved too quickly he'd slash open a cushion. He frowned and his eyes were already so deep in his skull that they nearly disappeared altogether. He studied me, unsure of just how far to go. Finally his voice leaked words. They fell from his lips so softly I missed them.
'What?'
He said, 'You've seen those who share the house with us.'
'Seen who?'
'Those who stalk these halls.'
'The toxic waste guy bothering you?'
He lashed out and sent a vase sailing across the room where it crashed against the far wall. 'You know of whom I speak!'
When his speech patterns grew more gentrified I knew he must be really upset. I tried not to let it get too good to me, but it did. I felt a warmth bloom in my guts. Corben was actually nervous, but not about losing his wife. He'd had dinner at the White House and given signings and speeches to crowds numbering in the thousands, but right here in his own living room he sat trembling before something he couldn't even name.
