frown, then go and pick up a phone somewhere and make the call. Maybe on some level I wanted this to happen. But she only smiled and brought me a glass of champagne that I downed in two swallows.
“Easy,” said Jack. “That head injury has you loopy enough.”
I lifted my glass and the attendant was quick to refill and I was quick to drain that as well. Jack didn’t bother with any more warnings; he just leaned his head back and closed his eyes.
All I had was my husband’s given name, the name of a town outside of Prague, and the vaguest idea that it was to that place Marcus might return. I thought of the last kiss we shared, the horrible scream I heard, the woman S preening on the Web site. I thought of the dying man and his last whispers. But even with all of this swimming in the dark waters of my mind, the two glasses of champagne helped me to drift into a troubled sleep. I dreamed of my father.
Part Three. Deliverance
– JAMES RAGAN, “CROSSING THE CHARLES
BRIDGE” FROM
21
They took the ride to Queens in silence, each of them lost in their thoughts. Grady kept replaying his call with Sean, hope battling despair. Maybe the call had caused trouble, and if there was trouble already, maybe that would work in his favor. Or maybe Clara would just hate him again, hate him for being such a baby; whatever weakness had impelled her to call would be cemented over with her anger.
They emerged from a slow crawl through bumper-to-bumper traffic in the Queens Midtown Tunnel, inexplicable at that hour, and were cruising down Queens Boulevard. A twelve-lane, in some areas sixteen-lane, main thoroughfare affectionately known as the Boulevard of Broken Bones because of the high rate of pedestrian deaths, it was one of the longest streets in Queens. It was modeled after the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, but to Grady it had none of that romantic aura of lost grandeur that the Concourse had, where magnificent old buildings had grayed with neglect, sagged with disappointment and sadness at the deterioration of a once-great neighborhood, modeled after the promenades of European cities. Queens Boulevard was just a thriving urban center with gigantic apartment high-rises, chains and independent businesses lining the roadway. It was New York, but somehow energetically apart, somehow its own thing, minus any of the glitz and glam of Manhattan. It was just Queens. They passed a gun shop and a liquor store, a flurry of fast-food joints, a Cuban hole-in-the-wall.
Grady pulled the Caprice into a spot across the street from a large warehouse building that bore the address he’d found on the Internet. He’d expected something garish with bright lights and lines down the block, a “gentleman’s” club maybe, with cars lining the street and all the typical losers you find at such a place-the frat boys looking to party, coming off the train in packs, raucous, self-conscious; the rich guys taking a night off from their marriages, pulling up in Hummers; the pervs, quiet and badly dressed, waiting with hands in pockets.
But the block was relatively quiet; most of the businesses-a copy shop, a pet store, a men’s big and tall-were all gated for the night. Every few minutes a cab would pull up-once with a group of a gorgeous young girls dressed to the hilt, the next an old man in a black wool coat, the next two young guys in business suits carrying sleek black laptop cases. They all disappeared behind a plain black door, opened from the inside by someone who stayed out of sight of the street.
“She was a working girl, wasn’t she?” Jez said out of nowhere.
“What makes you say that?”
“I don’t think a woman would come to this place if she wasn’t in the industry-a dancer, a higher-end call girl. According to her credit report, she wasn’t employed, but that SoHo apartment? A nice one-bedroom in that neighborhood? A couple grand a month, at least.”
“Maybe our faux Marcus Raine was giving her money,” said Grady.
She nodded. “Maybe. But why else would she come here?”
“Maybe she came here to meet someone.”
“Yeah, like a john.”
“Maybe,” he admitted.
“Well, let’s go in and take a look around, ask a few questions.”
He felt the phone in his pocket vibrate. He pulled it out to see that he had an e-mail message from Isabel Connelly. He almost didn’t recognize her name, he was so accustomed to thinking of her as Isabel Raine. The subject line read: “Some things you should know.”
“Oh, brother,” he said.
“What is it?”
He held the screen up so Jez could lean her head in, and they read Isabel’s e-mail together.
WHAT GRADY FOUND interesting about people was that most of them didn’t hide well. Of course, people like Kristof Ragan were different; they slipped out of the skin they were in, wrapped themselves in a cocoon, and emerged as a different creature altogether. But most people found it difficult to stray from the places that were familiar to them, the people they knew. They might be smart enough not to go back to their primary residence, but they’d hole up with friends, or sleep on their aunt’s couch. They’d return to their favorite bar after a few days, thinking no one would look for them there.
He almost wasn’t surprised to see Charlie Shane, the Raines’ missing doorman, sticking a dollar bill in a blond strippers’ G-string while she lowered her bejeweled, gravity-defying breasts to eye level. He and Jez were about to leave, had shown Camilla Novak’s and Marcus Raine’s picture around to blank stares and pressed lips, quick shakes of heads, some frightened shifting eyes. Meanwhile, they’d been trailed, not inconspicuously, by two ridiculously pumped, thick-necked goons.
Jez looked nervous, as if she sensed some danger he did not. She tugged on his shoulder and he leaned down so that she could yell in his ear over the music.
“We should get out of here, call for backup and get this place shut down for a few hours. We might get more cooperation.”
On a T-shaped stage naked women of all shapes and sizes flaunted their goods to a hypnotic trance beat. Their mouths smiled but their eyes were empty, high or otherwise elsewhere. Some of them looked so young, too young to be here, still had that creamy fresh cast to their skin, that soft innocence about the mouth.
Grady always hated places like this. He liked a dancing naked female body as much as the next guy, but he battled an urge to run around with bathrobes, cover these girls up and take them home to their mamas. Of course, their mamas were probably in worse shape. You didn’t wind up on a pole without a lot of help from your family.
Watching a redhead deftly move out of reach of a groping hand, Grady thought of Clara. How long had it been since he’d made love to her? What did Sean say, nearly two years since she’d walked out the door? A year of legal separation following that. Not counting their breakup fuck-that sad, slow final hour they shared after leaving the attorney’s office. He’d convinced her to have coffee with him, and they wound up back at the new place she shared with Sean, a spacious two-bedroom in the Fifties, with a terrace and nice views, that he had no idea how they could afford. He took great pleasure in having her one last time in a bed she shared with her new boyfriend. He’d have
