by Ben Sanders
Then he had another thought.
He held his breath on it, as if trying to pause any mental currents, hold the notion steady for inspection.
He let the breath out slowly and said, ‘Huh.’
The cat raised its head and looked at him and then settled back down.
‘Don’t go moving around in the night, or you’re out of here. You got a perfectly good Russian lady next door.’
Silence for a minute, and then it settled into a purr: low and rhythmic, almost a crackle. Marshall lay in the dark listening to it – rain with a bass note of cat – thinking about the past and the dead, what to do about everything.
FIVE
Marshall only slept for three hours. Five thirty and he was awake again, something in his blood. It was still raining. Up on Clarendon, the traffic was sparse, cars slow and black-windowed and hissing along through the groundwater. He knew he should take the subway – he could feel the heat from the MetroCard in his pocket – but he felt that efficiency was the governing concern right now.
He crossed Clarendon and waved down a westbound cab. The driver was off-shift, and gave him an off-meter fare: fifteen bucks across town to Sunset Park. The guy let him out on Fourth Avenue, under the BQE, and Marshall walked down to Fiftieth and stood at the corner. The Vialoux place was halfway along the block. An NYPD cruiser was still parked out front, tight in behind Ray’s car.
Marshall checked his watch. The graveyard shift ran until seven fifty. He had eighty minutes to kill, unless this guy planned to clock out early, factor in the drive and paperwork delays.
He walked south on Fourth until he found a coffee shop. He liked the way coffee was heading in New York. It used to be that if you wanted something elaborate, they’d give you a splash of cream, or a container of half-and-half on the side. As far as Marshall could tell, that had been the zenith of fancy. Now you could get a cappuccino just about anywhere, and every so often he’d find a place that did a kind of Antipodean take on it – something called a flat white, which Marshall approved of greatly. This place on Fourth didn’t know about flat whites yet, but the cappuccino they made him was pretty good.
The neighborhood was well awake now, stores open and the traffic getting heavy. No one paid him any notice. In an alley off Forty-third he found a mound of empty cardboard boxes, kicked through them until he found an offcut of plastic strapping. A good specimen: three-and-a-half feet. He stuffed it in his pocket and headed back up to Fiftieth.
At seven twenty-five, the cop car finally started up and pulled away toward Fifth Avenue. Clocking off early, but he probably figured if the last eight hours had been uneventful, the next twenty minutes would be similar. Marshall left his cup in a trash can and walked over to where Vialoux’s Crown Vic was parked curbside, dropped to a push-up position so he could see beneath the chassis. Nothing out of place. He checked the wheel wells in turn. Clear. Nothing under the front or rear fender. He took the length of plastic strapping from his pocket and halved it, went around to the driver’s side and passed the fold in the strap in between the window frame and the door pillar. He fed in another six inches off one of the tailing lengths, and the inserted portion separated to form a loop. He eased the loop down over the lock button on the top edge of the door, pulled the loop closed, and yanked upward. The button popped up, and Marshall opened the door and got into the car.
He smelled booze immediately, and he wondered if it was the product of a single spill, or just gradual buildup: months or years of maintenance pops. In any case, the culprit was in the glove compartment: Southern Comfort, a few inches remaining. Not just a wine man, after all. He placed the bottle on the seat while he sorted through detritus. Insurance documents, mechanics’ invoices and work summaries, a handful of receipts. Liquor, liquor, liquor. Appliances Connection. Maimonides Medical Center Parking. He wondered if Ray had been ill. He didn’t look himself last night. Then again, Marshall hadn’t seen him for probably a decade. Thin and frazzled might’ve been the new normal.
He checked the door pockets, leaned across to check beneath the passenger seat. A Snickers wrapper and an empty bottle of Southern Comfort. When he sat back upright, Hannah Vialoux was standing at his window.
When he was a cop, he used to marvel at these guys who didn’t recognize the stupidity of a given action until after the fact. Even then, a lot of the time they weren’t putting it together. And now here he was.
They looked at each other for a moment. Then Marshall cracked his door. He didn’t know what to say, so he went with, ‘Good morning.’
Hannah said, ‘I have a key, you know.’
‘Sorry. I wanted to look for something, I thought I could just be in and out without disturbing you.’
‘Something.’
He didn’t answer.
She said, ‘Come inside. Make sure you lock it after you.’
The entry hall smelled like toast and coffee. She went into the kitchen, but Marshall stayed by the door, unsure of himself, feeling like an idiot.
She said, ‘You’re lucky I saw you actually get in, and didn’t just glimpse you in the car. I might’ve had a heart attack. Or did you factor that into your risk assessment?’
He didn’t have anything for that straightaway. She emerged from the kitchen with a pot of coffee in one hand and two empty mugs in the other, eyebrows raised as if in mild curiosity. The overall effect was to reiterate his blunder, feigned breeziness drilling the message right to his bone marrow. He checked the time. Seven forty-two. Not a brilliant start to the day.
She nodded past his shoulder. ‘We’ll go in the living room.’
He moved in ahead of her and sat down on a sofa, making an effort not to go straight to the window. It had a pull for some reason: the place she’d seen the gunman.
This had been Ray Vialoux’s living room, but it didn’t feel like it, somehow – even if the photographs in the glass case and on the mantelpiece were of him, his family. Too soft, too intimate, too personal. Mismatched furniture in mismatched colors – heirloom pieces, Marshall thought, retained out of filial duty. An old tea wagon with a pink china tea set, a dark landscape painting, visibly textured with oil, a heavy faux-gilt frame. A busy feature wall of photographs: Ray and Hannah and Ella through the years. He tried to picture Ray in here, maybe in that armchair in the corner: a skewed window-shape of sunshine on the floor, Ray with the Times, up and open. He couldn’t make it fit. He thought about the Hannah Vialoux he knew in 2010, and he couldn’t make that fit, either. A woman who’d told him her marriage had run its course shouldn’t have a living room like this, a shrine to the happy life. He thought maybe it was all a prop. A diorama for how things should be.
Hannah put everything down on a low table in front of him, poured herself a mug of coffee. ‘Help yourself.’
She took a chair opposite, the table between them, and mirrored his pose: leaning forward, elbows to knees. He had the sense that every pause, every silence had this special quality to it, energized somehow. The charge of common history. The question was whether to acknowledge it or not.
The burner phone in his pocket buzzed. That would be Harry Rush, calling him back. Marshall ignored it. He said, ‘Look, I know that was dumb. I thought you might be still asleep, and I didn’t want to wake you for the sake of a theory that was wrong anyway.’
She gave a small shake of the head, kept her eyes on him. ‘I didn’t sleep.’
A patter of feet on the stairs, descending. Hannah said, ‘Ella, I’m just in here. Marshall’s back.’
He poured himself some coffee, parsed the line carefully, those last two words: Marshall’s back. Good thing, or bad thing?
He said, ‘I kept thinking about the timing last night. They were here, waving at you through the window, and then they were at the restaurant. So somehow they knew where Ray would be if he wasn’t home. I told Nevins they might’ve been tipped off, or been watching him long enough to establish some kind of routine, if he’d been going there regularly. But then I realize
d there was an easier option. They could’ve been tracking your cars.’
He sipped some coffee, not wanting to drown her in dark maybes, but she was sitting quietly, waiting for the rest of it.
Marshall said, ‘He took your car to the restaurant. Assuming they were tracking the vehicles, it made sense that they came here first. And then it would just be a case of, if it’s not this car, it’s the other one.’
His phone was buzzing again.
Hannah said, ‘I’ll give you a minute.’
‘No, don’t worry.’
But she was already walking out.
Marshall answered the phone.
Harry Rush said, ‘I got your message. Police have been calling me, too. I’m going in this afternoon to make a statement.’
‘I’m with Hannah right now.’
‘She doing OK?’
‘I don’t know. You checked out those names for me?’
‘Not yet. I wrote them down, though. D’Anton Lewis and Frank Cifaretti.’
‘I guess that’s a start.’
‘You think they hit him?’
‘I don’t know. I’m trying to square up the basics before I talk to them.’
‘Right. Did you have a package delivered? From eBay?’
‘Maybe. What is it?’
Quieter now, Harry talking offline: ‘Marlene, what was that package that came?’
A pause, and then Harry came back, full volume. ‘A jigsaw puzzle of a Jackson Pollock painting.’
Marshall said, ‘Is it Autumn Rhythm? Otherwise it’s not mine.’
Harry said, ‘You know, maybe you could get stuff sent to your own place? Or, no, tell you what: I’m going to open it, take out a random piece – just one. Call it a handling fee.’
‘I’ll drop by later.’
Harry hung up.
Marshall sat listening to voices through the wall, muffled but tense, a staccato rhythm, back-and-forth. Footsteps in the entry hall, and Hannah’s voice said, ‘Just keep in mind that I’m not the problem.’
Then she was back in the living room. She sat down across from Marshall again and said, ‘I had the same theory. That they were tracking the cars, I mean.’
She placed a small black rectangular object on the coffee table. Two inches to a side, maybe half an inch deep. Slender LED windows labeled GPS and POWER. An on-off button and another labeled SOS.
She said, ‘You’re the expert, but that to me looks like a tracking device. Don’t you think?’
SIX
Marshall picked it up. Some kind of sending unit, definitely. The technology had moved on since his day. Improved slenderness, and improved longevity he guessed. This was more compact than the stuff he was used to. You could just about swallow it with water if you needed to.
He said, ‘Where was it?’
‘In his car, the glove compartment.’ She shrugged. ‘I told you I couldn’t sleep. I found that at about four a.m. Nevins said he was going to look at Ray’s office first and then come back for the car, and, you know, just made me think: what’s so interesting about the car?’ She smiled faintly. ‘That might be a start, anyway.’
He held it flat on his palm for inspection. It was edged thinly with rubber. Maybe for shock absorption, or maybe so people thought they were buying something Pentagon-approved.
Hannah said, ‘I turned the power off. I thought they might assume the battery died.’
‘Who knows about it?’
She shrugged. ‘Me, you, whoever put it there.’
‘What about the cop on scene guard?’
‘All he knows is I got in Ray’s car last night and then got out again.’ Her mouth downturned, innocent. ‘Maybe I was getting a phone charger.’
Marshall opened his coat and dropped the device in a pocket. ‘Can I hold on to this?’
‘It’s already in your pocket.’
He didn’t answer. He leaned back in his chair, and for a moment when he looked down, he could see the material of his shirt bouncing minutely, a tiny amplitude in time with his heartbeat. He realized too he could hear it in his ears: the thud of growing anger. He took a breath and released it gently, let himself grow still and quiet and calm, and in the absence of other things there remained the certainty and the clarity about what he was going to do.
He said, ‘If they were tracking both vehicles, there’ll be a device in your car, too. The police probably have it by now, and they’re going to wonder why there isn’t one in Ray’s car when they search it.’
Hannah said, ‘Do you still want it?’
Marshall nodded. ‘Yes. I just want you to keep in mind they’ll be asking about it.’
‘It might not be an issue. They might assume Ray found it and got rid of it. But why do they need both, anyway? They can have one, and you can have the other.’ Looking at him carefully. ‘See who gets answers first.’
Marshall didn’t answer.
Hannah said, ‘I was so relieved when you showed up. Last night, I mean. Police will do their job, say “thoughts and prayers” and that kind of thing, but you’re the only one who needs to know what happened. I mean … you’re the only one who wasn’t paid to show up.’ She shook her head, took a moment putting something together in her head. She said, ‘It wasn’t debts. Why would he be killed over a debt? You can’t pay when you’re … you know. He’s not going to be paying anyone now, is he?’
He didn’t want to answer that, no point taking her deeper into the gloom.
He said, ‘Was he having any health trouble?’
‘He was drinking a lot. Other than that, I don’t know. I think if he did have anything, the bullet would’ve cured it.’
He wasn’t sure whether to smile or not.
She shut her eyes, shook her head briefly. ‘I didn’t mean it like that. Why do you ask?’
‘He had a parking receipt from Maimonides Hospital.’
‘Oh, right. Yeah. I know what that was. A friend of Ella’s – Jennifer Boyne. It was terrible. She committed suicide. Her parents asked Ray to look into it. I think they were worried there’d been some encouragement. Bullying, maybe. In the end, he didn’t find anything. It was just one of those awful tragedies. No note or anything. It was … well, it was funny actually. It was like they saw a different side of him. Her parents, I mean. He wouldn’t take any money because they knew Ella, and they thought he was just the sweetest, most generous guy. All these different sides to him, you know? One of them’s got all the others in trouble.’
Marshall let that one slide past him. He found that was the thing with encouragement. You had to hang back, really go in hard when you saw an opening.
He said, ‘I know Nevins asked you this last night, but can you remember any specifics about what else Ray was working on?’
‘Well, like I said, it was mainly office-based stuff, I think. Fraud and auditing. But … I remember six, seven months ago I guess it was, he was hired by a gallery owner. Sounded like a vaguely interesting one. Upper East Side. Something like … I can’t quite remember the details. I think there were two owners, and one guy was worried the other was using sales to launder drug money.’
‘And was he?’
‘I don’t know. Like I say, Ray wouldn’t talk shop with me. But I’d hear him on the phone now and again, and put things together. The other one I can remember – you know that company Plethora? Online shopping?’
‘I’ve heard of it. Like Amazon, right?’
‘Sort of, yeah. One of their executives, his wife hired Ray to find out if he was cheating on her. He was worth like two billion dollars or something, and I think Ray was following him for a while, taking photos.’ She smiled. ‘I think he actually got some good ones in the end. Ray had a guy helping him with it. Ex-cop. Jordan … Mora, I think?’
As in Jordan Mora Investigations. The business card he’d taken from the side table last night.
Marshall said, ‘I’ll see if I can call him. He might have some more details.’
‘Right, sure. Ray probably h
as his number somewhere …’
The phone in the hallway rang, and she went through to answer it.
He heard her say, ‘Vialoux,’ and then, ‘Oh, yes. Good morning.’
Stilted, a bit too formal. The kind of thing you’d say when a police detective calls to talk about your dead husband. Marshall didn’t want to sit there, feeling like an eavesdropper. He got up and went through to the kitchen. Ella was still in there, at the table. She had a vial of something colorless raised to the light, a hypodermic syringe inserted in its base. That’s right: diabetes. Hannah had mentioned it last night.
He said, ‘Sorry. I’ll leave you to it.’
She caught him mid-turn as he was going out the door: ‘Don’t worry. Medicine, not drugs.’
He thought he’d handled things quite well, coming in and then heading straight out again, giving her privacy, but now her reply had trapped him. He couldn’t walk off and leave her hanging. But small talk had never been Marshall’s forte, and there was more at stake now: he didn’t know what avenues of conversation were open, given the context. Murder shuts things down. The part of his brain in charge of interactions was telling him to say something, but the speech department wasn’t giving him anything usable. It was all inane and awkward.
He was still standing there, not saying anything.
She looked at him.
Marshall said, ‘You and your dad both had it, huh?’
That wasn’t too bad. But it had been easier talking with Nevins last night, trading clipped lines with no feelings at stake. Too much to navigate, here.
She said, ‘Yeah. Awesome coincidence.’
Behind him in the entry hall, he heard Hannah wrapping up her call.
Ella kept her attention on her task, flicking the syringe to encourage bubbles back up into the vial, and now Marshall had something. He knew he should’ve opened with this line, gone in strong and simple: He said, ‘I just wanted to let you know, your dad was a friend of mine, and I’m going to do my absolute best to find out what happened.’