'Once, I told you,' Ryan said. 'I watched it once. Most of the time it's-'
'Biba,' Jenn beamed. 'He watches Biba. She cooks like his Italian nana.'
'That's real cooking, is all I'm saying.'
She patted his cheek. 'Thanks for the ride, tough guy.' I told Jenn what we needed to do before I went to the Cantor house. She agreed. We made the necessary phone call. The other party agreed-eventually-to provide what we asked for. Being entirely uninjured, Jenn agreed to fetch the item we had just procured.
Everyone so agreeable.
I took a hot bath while Jenn was gone. I could almost make fists. I tried to relax, breathe my way into a better state, but I couldn't even keep my eyes closed. Too hyper, trying to think of everything I knew, of anything I might have missed.
When Jenn got back, we turned off the news-CNN had nothing new to add to its reports on Birk, now packaged under the banner 'A Tycoon Falls'-and played the tape she had retrieved. Played it and played it. Rewinding, fast-forwarding, pausing. Advancing frame-by-frame. Watching people's heads, shoulders, backs, parcels. Their feet coming and going. The passage of hours. Moments in time. — I could hear Nina's workout track going, booming bass and pounding drums getting into my chest like a defibrillator as I knocked on the French doors. And kept knocking, a good ten times over thirty seconds until the sound went down by half and she came to the door.
She made no pretense of being glad to see me through the glass pane but she did let me in. She wore a dark purple workout suit over a black sports bra. 'The shit-kicking detective,' she said. 'I thought you were in Chicago.'
'I'm back.'
'I can see why. Is all hell breaking loose there or what? Rob is so freaked out about this. I mean, even I've been watching the news. Is it all true? Some lunatic pushed Simon Birk off his own building?'
'Yes.'
Her arms were crossed tightly across her chest, the forearm muscles well defined. 'Why?'
'Presumably because he was a lunatic.'
'I mean, why now? Why Rob? He finally has it all in his grasp, he's got a partner who knows absolutely everyone, every door is open, he's stepping out in the spotlight, and boom, someone throws Simon Birk off a roof and that's it? Because the way Rob's talking, the whole deal is falling apart.'
'He's home?'
'No, he called from the car a few minutes ago to say he was stuck on Bayview where they're digging up Moore. He'll be fifteen, twenty minutes.'
'Is there somewhere I can wait?'
She looked me up and down. 'Wipe your feet,' she said. 'Come on back to the gym.'
I wiped as directed and followed her through the den, past the entertainment unit that took up all of one wall, its centrepiece a mounted plasma TV at least sixty inches wide, with speakers placed around the room to provide full sound. Hundreds of CDs, hundreds of DVDs. If Rob had set them up, they'd be alphabetical; if Nina, by the workout they provided. I noted with relief that among the many video and stereo components was a working VCR.
In the fitness room, Nina took a white towel off a pile of them and wiped a puddle of her sweat off the base of a stair-climber, then rubbed away dark wet stains on the grips. She tossed the towel into a laundry bin, then took another from the pile to rub her arms and legs, used a third to mop her face and neck. She squatted in front of a mini-fridge next to a stack of free weights that went in pairs from five to twenty-five pounds. She took a bottle of spring water. Offered me one. I decided to match her drink for drink.
She took a long drink of her water, half the bottle in three or four fierce gulps, wiped her mouth and said, 'So do you know what really happened there? More than was on the news?'
'I know a lot of what happened.'
'Can you tell me without Rob here? Or is it, like, privileged or something?'
'First of all, he's not my client. Marilyn is. And even if he were, you're his wife. So I think we're on safe ground.'
I wanted Nina talking about it. Wanted to see what she would ask me.
She sat on a gym mat and stretched out her legs, not able to do full splits but coming close, dampness visible in all the expected places. She leaned out over each leg, exhaling slowly. 'What are you going to tell Rob about Maya?' she said on an outward breath. Perspiration visible at her dyed hairline, above her lips, between her breasts. 'Did they kill her?'
I said, 'Birk was desperate to finish his building in Chicago. He was late, he had hit every possible obstacle, he was jammed up, and this man Francis Curry, the one who killed him, he had made a career out of removing obstacles from Simon Birk's path. He would do anything to keep Birk going because it kept him going too.'
'So he killed Maya?'
'He would have, if Birk had told him to. If he'd thought of it himself. He killed at least three others I know of, two of them right here. He admitted it. He also stood by while Birk beat his wife into a coma. Helped him commit massive fraud. He admitted all that. So did Birk.'
'That's awful.'
'He came close to getting away with it.'
She turned away from me, stretched herself out over the far leg. 'How?'
'Tape. He had tape of Birk beating his wife, taken off a security camera. I learned a fair bit about these systems while I was down there. And the thing that stands out, Nina, out of everything I saw, is how much power you have over someone once you catch them doing something bad on tape.'
I figured it was as good a time as any to take the tape I had brought out of my jacket pocket and lay it on the counter above the mini-fridge, with the label facing the wall.
Nina didn't ask what it was.
'Like I told you,' I said, 'Birk and Curry did some terrible things. Admitted them… well, not exactly freely but out loud, on tape and in front of a lawyer. But neither of them owned up to Maya. No reason not to-in for a penny, in for a pound-but neither one did.'
'So she did kill herself. Is that what you came to tell Rob?'
'No. I wouldn't tell him that. No one still believes that.'
'Well, I do. Everyone did, till you came around.'
'Someone threw her off the balcony, Nina. Someone hoisted her over and gave her a good start off her balcony. Maybe they stunned her first. Choked her out. I thought maybe Rob had, because he had the most to lose if Harbourview went bad.'
'That's crazy,' she said. 'He would never.'
'But somebody did. Someone else who wanted that building to keep going up and up. And I came back from Chicago convinced no one there had anything to do with it. I thought about her brother Andrew,' I said. 'He's definitely strong enough to have done it and he's devoted to his dad and that building. It was a big part of his future.'
'He never says very much,' Nina said. 'At least not to me. Although I'm pretty sure he'd fuck me if he got the chance. I've caught him checking me out.'
'There was only one way to know who went into Maya's building that night and came out minutes after the fall. And that was to look at the tape.'
She looked at the cassette on the shelf, then at me, smirking, 'There's no camera in Maya's building. It's like a student dump.'
I swivelled the tape around so she could see the typed label. 'It's not from Maya's building,' I said. 'It's from the College View Apartments next door, from the night that Maya was pushed to her death. The security firm keeps digital recordings for thirty days and they let us copy the footage from that night. And we're going to watch it when Rob gets home.'
Nina looked at me, her face impassive. 'Sure,' she said. 'Let's watch your tape. We can set it up in the den. I can even nuke some popcorn.'
'Were you there that night?'
'The night she died?'
