'Did you go to her building?'
'Watch the tape,' she said. 'You can see for yourself.'
I took the tape and my bottle of water into the den.
'Don't sit in the recliner,' she said. 'That's Rob's when he gets home. And put a coaster under the water, 'kay?'
I sat, keeping the cassette beside me. I didn't want to play it. Truth was it showed fuck all. I had thought it would show Nina going in. I had feared it might show Andrew Cantor. But the camera didn't pan far enough to show the full entrance to Maya's building: you could see anyone who exited the building and turned to their left, or south. You could see the backs of people going in that way. You couldn't see anyone who would have exited to the north or come in that way.
Neither Nina nor Andrew nor anyone else I knew had been captured on the tape. If they had been at the building they had come from the north.
Nina was strong enough to have thrown Maya over. I saw how much weight she'd bench-pressed with Perry. I had looked at her rangy muscled body, saw the sweat she could generate. But I had screened the video three times and there wasn't a frame conclusive enough to force her hand if we did sit and watch it with Rob.
I was sitting on the couch with my water bottle neatly beside me on a coaster as directed. A good guest, someone you'd invite back. For my trouble, Nina came up behind me and slammed something hard and heavy into the back of my head, bang on the occipital bulge. I pitched forward and banged my bad shoulder hard on the edge of the coffee table in front of me. My vision went blurry and I felt nauseous. When I tried to push up on my hands, the floor fell further away. I was concussed and good, like Eric Lindros after a Scott Stevens open-ice hit, looking for the right bench to collapse onto.
I turned my head and saw Nina with a weight in her hand, a fifteen-pounder by the look of it, one end shiny with blood.
Seeing it, taking in the red end of it, made me realize the back of my head was bleeding and that I'd better try very hard not to pass out.
'She was going to fuck it all up,' I said thickly.
'That she was,' Nina said, coming around the couch, her hand flexing around the bar of the weight.
I made it to my feet, wobbling like a bandy-legged vaudeville drunk. I grabbed a framed picture of Rob and Nina off a shelf and threw it at her. Didn't hit her. Didn't come close or slow her down. She advanced. I rambled backward. Mumbled, 'What happened here that night? What'd you catch her doing?'
'Going through Rob's briefcase. I don't know what she was looking for but she was looking.'
She didn't know much of anything, Nina. Only what she wanted. It haunted the room like cold breath in a morgue.
'She was serious about stopping him,' Nina said. 'About sticking to her principles even if it meant bringing her own father down. So stupid for someone supposedly smart. If she knew a tenth of what she thought she knew, she'd be alive today. But she was twenty-two years old and didn't know a fucking thing. Do you have any idea what I already knew at twenty-two? What I already was?'
She hurdled the corner of the coffee table and tried to bring the weight down on my head. I lunged away and kept my feet somehow and lurched left to keep the coffee table between us. But she was faster than me. She got a leg behind mine and shoved my chest and I fell onto my back. She tried again to crush my head but I rolled away. She leaped astride me, holding the weight easily with one hand while trying to push my hands away with the other, to get a clear shot at my head.
So fucking weak I was. Such a dazed head. A sure skull fracture. I couldn't buck her off. My limbs flapped like useless fledgling wings. Only the length of my arms was keeping the weight from pulping my skull. Couldn't scratch or bite her. Couldn't reach a weapon. I could feel a throb now in the back of my head, wetness on the back of the neck. Getting harder to focus, seeing four hands above me, two weights to fight off, four cold eyes staring down.
Then a roaring sound: a voice calling Nina vile names, asking how she could do it-the voice raging with hurt and hatred, surging with violence.
It wasn't me. I wanted to say those things to her. Wanted to ask how she could have done it. But it was a different voice. A man but not me. Then he stormed into view past me, moving so much faster than I could imagine moving-Rob Cantor, lifting Nina off me and slamming her into the entertainment centre. The weight dropped from her hand. Shelves rattled and compact discs poured out of the shelves around her. She put her arms up in front of her face, some stance she'd learned from Perry or some other trainer, but Rob was much taller and outweighed her by at least sixty pounds and had the full strength of rage. He simply punched through her hands and landed a solid blow to her nose, then banged her hard on each bicep, breaking down her defence. Slammed a fist in her gut. Then he hit her in the face again, holding nothing back. I could make out his words-'How could you?' — as he landed each blow.
I remember her slumped and weeping against the trashed entertainment unit, blood pouring out of her nose and a vertical gash in her upper lip.
I remember Rob turning to me with his fist still cocked, as if asking me if I thought she'd had enough.
I think I remember saying, 'One more couldn't hurt.'
EPILOGUE
I still get headaches. I get them when I stand too fast, when I stand too long, sometimes just when I stand. Working out is out of the question-has been for two weeks. Some of the headaches are sick ones and I lie on my bed or the couch like a stricken woman in a Tennessee Williams play, waiting for someone to mop my brow with a cool linen handkerchief and say, 'There, there.'
No one has done that so far, though Jenn has visited every day and her partner, Sierra, has come with her at least half the time. She's dedicated to her craft and, in typical Sierra fashion, has been swamping herself with information on post-concussion syndrome so she can distill it into a cogent, caring analysis and approach, all of which has gone for fucking naught. I feel gnarled and depressed. It doesn't help that we're losing light by the day, that what little we have is flat and cold as nickel.
Other people have come and gone to help out, to keep me company, to steer me through some of the touchier legal matters that followed me home from Chicago like flies around my fruit. Luckily I am on medication for pain, so little that I say can be held against me.
It had been hard enough to keep all my stories straight before sustaining a Grade 3 concussion, but I think in the end it went something like this.
Working in close cooperation with Detective Thomas Barnett of the Bureau of Investigative Services, Chicago Police Department, Katherine Hollinger determined that both Martin Glenn and Will Sterling had been killed by Francis Curry, whose confession had been heard by Barnett and Chicago lawyer Avi Stern before Curry was shot to death in a desperate bid to escape. That was two cases closed for her, which put me on her good side.
Stern, an innocent speculator who happened to be viewing an apartment with Birk when Curry snapped, sustained a gruesome leg injury during the attack but was said to be healing nicely.
Nina Cantor confessed to killing her stepdaughter, Maya, but insisted a fight broke out spontaneously and there was no intent, and an overworked Crown will likely agree to a charge of manslaughter, which means she won't serve serious time. Probably three years of an eight-year sentence, being a first offender. She could be out by the time she's thirty-six, still time to wander into another gym and stretch out in front of some guy who'd welcome the thought of her straddling him-provided she wasn't trying to crush his skull.
It also means I'm three for three with Hollinger. Whether or not she likes being helped, her Super loves it when cases close in bunches. She called the other day to say she'd come and see me on her way home from work, then had to call again later saying she'd be pulling an all-nighter at a dead-end crescent west of the Allen Expressway, a brazen drive-by that left one teen dead and three more wounded, all because their basketball bounced off a passing car after a particularly piss-poor shot.
Hollinger said she'd try again soon.
My mother told me she heard through my brother that Rob Cantor was considering selling his interest in the
