chair and took my coffee home.
I powered up my laptop and went online to the BNN Web site. It was badly designed and festooned with blinking advertisements, and I had to hunt for the icon that would open an e-mail window I could use to send a note to Linda Sovitch. While I was hunting, I got lucky. Under a banner that read Today on BNN. com, and next to a little picture of Linda, I read: Chat live with Market Minds host Linda Sovitch. Today at 2:30. It was 2:20.
I found my way to the chat page and registered, and then I waited. At 2:40, a message flashed on my screen and the moderator introduced virtual Linda. I typed my question into the chat window and let it sit for the next fifteen minutes, while people with monikers like muniluv and buynsell and stockgal asked Sovitch questions about equities and bonds and interest rates- none of which, it seemed to me, was she qualified to answer. Which didn’t stop her. When the moderator informed all concerned that time was running out, I hit enter.
I didn’t expect my message to show up on the chat board and I wasn’t disappointed. Linda took a final question and the moderator thanked all the participants, plugged Linda’s show, and ended the exchange. Ten minutes later my phone rang.
“What the fuck are you doing?” It was Linda Sovitch. “You call my house, you call the studio, you show up here, and now this shit. This is coming damn close to harassment- and maybe stalking too.” Her voice was brittle and tight, like nothing I’d heard on her TV show.
“You didn’t like my question?” I asked.
“You think you’re fucking funny?” she said, and she read my question aloud, with plenty of bile. “ ‘What do you say to critics who charge that members of the business press are hopelessly compromised by conflicts of interest- that they are cheerleaders for business and too close to the people they’re supposed to be covering- that they are, in essence, in bed with their subjects?’ You think that’s cute?”
“I thought it was a pretty good question- and relevant, too.”
“Relevant to what?” she asked. I didn’t answer and after a while Sovitch’s breathing was audible. “Come on, asshole, spit it out. Relevant to what?”
I sighed. “Relevant to you and Danes.”
Sovitch started to say something but stopped. “What the hell do you want from me?” she asked eventually.
“I want to talk to you about Danes. I want to know where he is.”
Sovitch snorted. “I’m tired of this,” she said. “Keep bugging me and you’ll be talking to my lawyer.” She hung up. I shook my head and closed down my laptop. I thought it was a good question.
Perhaps, upon reflection, Linda Sovitch thought so too. An hour after she’d hung up on me, and not long before Market Minds was due to go on the air, she called back. She was brisk and efficient.
“Tomorrow morning at ten,” she said.
“Where?”
“Give me your address; I’ll send a car.” I gave it to her and she was gone.
I put the phone down and wondered what had changed Sovitch’s mind. Worry about how much I knew, or about what I wanted? Worry about who else I might be talking to? All of the above, most likely.
I yawned and went into the kitchen. My footsteps were loud on the wood floors. I heated some coffee in the microwave, but it was bitter and muddy and made my stomach feel the same. I looked down the length of my apartment. Late-day light fell in big yellow rectangles across the room but didn’t seem to warm it. It was quiet, and quiet upstairs too. I hadn’t seen Jane since yesterday morning, and she’d told me that I wouldn’t see much of her for the rest of the week, but I was listening for her footsteps nonetheless.
I’d spent a lot of time alone in this apartment- a lot of time alone, period, in the past few years- and I’d wanted it that way. Alone was quiet and predictable. Alone was disciplined and organized and safe. It was sticking to my job and to my running and to an even keel. It was the opposite of static in my head and glass in my chest and aimless, calamitous motion and incinerating anger. It was the opposite of chaos. And if the cost of that stillness had been a certain austerity, even bleakness, then it was no more than I’d been willing to pay. It was getting off cheap. Alone was what I knew. It worked for me. But lately- since Jane- it didn’t work as well.
I turned on the stereo. Jane had left a disc in: Flora Purim singing “Midnight Sun.” I flicked through the others in the changerNikka Costa, Lucinda Williams- and switched to the radio. The Iguanas were playing something funky on WFUV, but even they couldn’t dispel the mood that had overtaken me. I browsed my bookshelves and ran my hands across the spines, but the titles slid by unread. I opened my laptop and made a halfhearted attempt to update my case notes. One hour and two sentences later, I closed it again and went for a run.
A town car pulled up in front of my building at ten on the dot, its black skin gleaming in the morning sun. There was a small man with gray hair behind the wheel. I got in back and we drove off. We headed uptown, but we did not make for the Manifesto Diner or the BNN studios. Instead, we slid onto the FDR Drive.
“Where’re we going?” I asked him. He started a little, as if I’d roused him from a nap, and checked some papers on the seat next to him.
“I got here that I’m taking you up to Greenwich. North Street, it says.” The Lefcourt residence.
I sat back and watched the Triboro Bridge and the Bruckner Expressway slide by. He got on 95, and there was construction and chaos and lots of dodging and swerving and sudden braking. I was glad I wasn’t driving. Fifty minutes later, he got off in Greenwich, near the train station.
Downtown Greenwich was crowded in the warm late morning, and we picked our way slowly past the low office buildings near the turnpike and through the shopping district to the north. The shop buildings were brick and stone and meticulously maintained, and the shops themselves were gently rusticated versions of their cousins on Madison Avenue. The streets and curbsides were crowded with saurian SUVs and shiny sedans, mostly German. The sidewalks were filled with prosperous matrons and slender young mothers, mostly blond.
We wound our way onto East Putnam, and homes began to appear. They were large and old and Victorian, and comfortable-looking on their well-barbered lots. The lots got larger as we went up Maple Avenue, and larger still on North Street, and the houses receded farther from view. We passed over the Merritt Parkway and drove under a canopy of branches and new leaves, and the lots and houses vanished altogether behind thick hedges and high stone walls.
The Lefcourt spread was a few minutes north of the Merritt, and bordered by a tall, undulating brick wall. We stopped at the wrought-iron gates and a security camera looked us over. The driver spoke to an intercom and the gate swung open and we pulled in. The winding gravel drive was bordered by a blazing cloud of forsythia. It ended in a rising loop around a large circle of lawn and a gnarled oak. On the far side of the circle, at the top of the rise, was the house.
It was a great wedge of fawn-colored shingle, with sage-green trim on the windows and doors, and a foundation of rough gray stone. The faA§ade was asymmetric and busy, studded with window bays and eyebrow dormers and with a deep veranda on the right. Four broad steps led to the front door. The car crunched to a halt by the steps, and I got out.
“I’ll be over there,” the driver said, and he pointed to a low shingled car barn, farther around the gravel circle. I nodded and he drove off. The sun was warm on my shoulders, and the light breeze carried the scents of grass and earth and cedar. It was quiet but for some birds chirping and the soft growl of a distant mower. The front door opened and a woman stepped out and stood at the top of the steps. It was not Linda Sovitch.
She was about five-foot-two, and her gray suit was crisp and angular, like her short dark hair and pale face. She folded her arms across her chest and regarded me with something that might one day- in the distant future- thaw to suspicion. I was wearing a black polo shirt, gray trousers, and black loafers, and I’d left my gun at home. I was presentable, even by Greenwich standards, but she peered at me and sniffed as if I’d been sleeping in the stables.
“Mr. March? I am Mr. Lefcourt’s assistant. We spoke on the telephone.” I recognized the cold officious voice. “Mr. Lefcourt is in his office.” She turned and went back inside. I followed.
“I’m actually here to see Ms. Sovitch,” I said.
She didn’t turn around. “Yes, well… this way.”
The entrance foyer was bright and wide, with paneled walls painted white and dentil molding. The plank floors were a dark shiny brown, and the Persian rugs were mostly red. The coffered ceilings were far away.
I followed the woman into a broad hallway. A stairway with slender balustrades swept along the wall to my left. Straight ahead, its entrance framed by a pair of columns, was a sitting room with tall windows and a marble fireplace, and silk-covered sofas that looked ornamental. I saw a broad swath of lawn through the windows and, in
