by Robert Pobi
Blood spurted across the windshield and for a bright panicked second he understood that he was already dead.
He lost consciousness and the Benz rolled west for half a block before detonating a fruit stand and slamming into a lamppost.
Then the sky opened up and the rain began.
||| FORTY-FOUR
THE OUTER office had been redecorated since the last time she had been here, the architectural symmetry of French Empire traded in for Midcentury Modern. The receptionist—a woman named Karen who had been here as long as Hemingway could remember—ushered her straight through the maze of cubicles to the big corner office. The plaque on the door read DWIGHT R. HEMINGWAY III.
When she walked in, the man behind the desk got up, came to her, and embraced her extended hand in both of his. Then he gave her a kiss on each cheek and held her at arm’s length—something that seemed to be happening a lot lately.
“You look wonderful, Allie.” He smiled as he spoke. “Radiant, even.”
“Thanks, Uncle Dwight, but I’m a little old for compliments.”
Her uncle laughed. “Ah, yes, Alexandra, the eternal pragmatist. The Hemingway women are never too old to be told they’re beautiful—just look at your mother.”
“How’s Miles?” she asked. Even though she was here on business, a certain amount of respect was due. Besides, a lot of her family information came from these moments.
“He’s glad to be out of LA, I think. That series was killing him. Broadway’s been good—”
“I’ve read the reviews.”
“Well, we’re spending time out in the country. If you ever want to get away from the Big Apple . . .” he let the sentence trail off.
“Uncle Dwight, I don’t have a lot—”
“—of time.” He nodded and mixed a smile in with the movement. “I know. What can I do for you?”
She hadn’t seen him since last Christmas. He had taken her to lunch. They ate at Atelier, sitting at the family’s usual table. The meal had started out full of awkward silences but eventually they found common ground and the afternoon disappeared over Scotch and catching up. He dropped her off at her place and she promised to keep in touch. To do this more often. But even as the Bentley pulled away, and he waved from the backseat, she knew they wouldn’t. And here they were, more than six months later, and she hadn’t so much as sent him an e-mail.
“This is all confidential,” she said.
Uncle Dwight waved it away. “Everything we talk about is confidential, Allie.” He was talking about her parents.
She was talking about a man who took children apart with a hacksaw.
“Have you heard about the boys we’ve found in the East River?”
He nodded and his handsome face tightened up. “Of course.” He walked around his desk and sat down in the big leather chair. The skyline spread out behind him was wiped out by the thunderstorm hammering down. Every now and then the gray throbbed with lightning, as if a giant fuse had blown.
“We’re lean on leads and I need a favor. A big favor.”
He stared at her, his lawyer side trumping the uncle. Listen first; ask later.
She reached into her pocket and pulled out a padded envelope. She handed it across the desk. He peered inside then dropped it to the desk.
“That’s heroin,” she said.
“Okay.”
“It’s been colored with some sort of vegetable dye. I assume the color should make it easier to track down a point of origin.”
“Okay.”
“That heroin was found in the house of a man who murdered a lot of children.” She handed a photograph of Trevor Deacon across the desk.
Her uncle didn’t bother picking it up, as if contamination might be an issue.
“His name and address—including his former telephone number—are on the back. I don’t care about the drugs, Uncle Dwight. As far as I’m concerned, they’re a nonissue. Whoever sold them; whoever supplied them; whoever cut them—it doesn’t matter to me. But I need to know about this man. I need to know where he went, what his habits are, and I’ve hit a wall. There’s not a lot of pink heroin out there, so that’s something.”
Her uncle leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest. “I’m not that kind of a lawyer, Allie, you know that.”
“Look, Uncle Dwight, I know the corporations you represent. I’m not asking for secrets. I’m not asking for names. You have my word—my personal word—that I want nothing from these people except information that will help me figure out Trevor Deacon’s habits. You still represent Redfoot Industries?”
He nodded. It was a tentative, almost guarded, gesture.
“I don’t care about Mr. Yashima’s business dealings. But his beginnings are not as auspicious as his Wikipedia entry portrays. If anyone can find out where that comes from, it’s him. I am asking you for the favor.
“I need to speak to the man—the actual street dealer—who sold this stuff to Deacon. I can’t get down the food chain that quickly. All of Deacon’s phone records and e-mail accounts are clean. I don’t have any leads.”
He stood up and turned to the rain beyond the window. For a few moments he stared out at the dark gray that had swallowed the skyline. When he turned back, his face was a mix of doubt and indecision. “These are not people that like questions, Allie. I can do this. But if you are lying to me, if anyone is prosecuted because of this, there will be repercussions. Do you understand what I am saying?”
“I promise this is not about drugs.”
Her uncle dropped his eyes to the desk, to the photo and envelope she had given him. “Give me three hours,” he said. Then he steepled his fingers and looked at her. “But I need something in return.”
Here it is, she thought. “What?”
“Don’t be so suspicious. I want you to call your father.”
“I called him last month. He was out.”
“That was the month before.”
She thought about it for a second, then nodded. “You’re right. It was.”
“I’m not trying to get between you two because personally I don’t see a need for it. You and he have a relatively good relationship. He worries about you. He’d just like you to be—”
“More like Amy.”
Dwight shook his head. “That’s not fair. To him or to you. He doesn’t want you to be anything like Amy. He has boundless respect for you and for what you’ve done with your life. Sure, he would have wanted more grandchildren, but only if you wanted to have them.”
She felt her hand head for her stomach and she consciously stopped it.
“He just worries about you being bombarded by the worst that humanity has to offer. Any father would be.” He nodded at the envelope on the desk. “Maybe a career where you didn’t carry around heroin.”
“Is this you talking or him?”
“Both, I guess. But he misses you. So do I. I’m not asking you to take family vacations. I would just like a little—” he paused, which he rarely did “—damage control.”
She thought about calling him on that. Because they both knew it was bullshit. Her mother—her father’s second wife—cared very little about anything except for her Bergdorf charge card and the bells and whistles that went along with being the wife of Steven Hemingway. It had always been that way and Hemi had long ago come to accept it. “Okay,” she said after a moment of silence. “I’ll call but I want him to stop sending me those checks. I’m fine. I don’t need anything. When I needed help, he was there. I took the money for the down payment on my place.”
“Which you paid back.”
“I don’t want the money.”
“What should he do with it? Burn it?”
She had thought about this one on the way up—as the family lawyer, Dwight knew what was going on. “It’s not that I don’t want any of the money, Uncle Dwight. I just don’t want it now. I don’t expect him to leave it to the church—it will probably end up being left to Amy and Graham and me. When that
happens, I’ll worry about it. Until then, I haven’t earned it.”
At that, Dwight smiled. “It’s not about you earning it. It’s about your father wanting to give you something while he’s still here. He doesn’t send you any more money than he sends Amy. The difference between the two of you is that Amy cashes the checks.”
“I’ll call him.”
“I’m flying out to the North Shore on Sunday. You want to come along?”
She pointed at the envelope on the desk. “I can’t leave this case right now but I’ll call him. Pinky swear. And as soon as I get a break, you and I will play a few rounds of tennis. How’s that?”
He smiled and shook his head. “Why is it I always believe you when you lie to me? I always have.”
She got up and came around the desk, gave him a hug and kissed him on the cheek. “Because I have good intentions.”
“Evidently you’ve never heard about the road to hell.”
She thought about the mutilated children they had found. “It’s not a road, Uncle Dwight, it’s a superhighway.”
||| FORTY-FIVE
A VAST capillary system of interconnected hallways, corridors, and passages wormed through the earth beneath the American Museum of Natural History. If you didn’t know where you were going, it could be an unsettling place to spend time. Benjamin Winslow had grown up in the subterranean world. His father had never really believed in babysitters and ever since he could walk, Benjamin had spent most of his nights and weekends here, three stories below the streets of the city, wandering the storage rooms while his father worked.
Mother Nature had let go outside and even here, burrowed deep in the earth, the boy could hear thunder pounding the city. The sound waves shook the bedrock and the foundation shuddered with each crack of electricity.
His father was an anomaly within the closed world of the museum. Most of the staff, including the department heads, lived under the continual threat of financial cutbacks. Where the other staff members were forced to deal with the endless internal politics of a massive institution, his father was beyond the petty pressures—and whims—of the museum chairs and departmental financial officers. He accomplished this by providing his own endowments for the department.
When the other departments in vertebrate zoology wanted to pursue research or acquire rare or exotic specimens, they had to deal with endless bureaucracy to make it happen. They had to beg, borrow, and steal. Not so the Department of Ornithology: when Dr. Winslow wanted something, he simply wrote a personal check for it. And received a tax write-off in the process. For this reason, the museum would never get rid of him.
Dr. Neal Winslow was monumentally wealthy; during the early part of the twentieth century, his grandfather’s firm had been the largest manufacturer of surgical instruments outside of Germany. The postwar boom had grown the family fortune to a size where it could not easily be measured.
Benjamin walked by one of the storage lockers, a massive room the size of a gymnasium. He was friends with a lot of the museum’s staff—most of them got a kick out of asking him questions they thought were difficult—and he had visited all of the storage rooms. They were lined with miles of steel shelving that reached up into the darkness, piled with the world’s forgotten secrets.
Benjamin’s favorite locker was the one that housed the specimens from the Department of Entomology—there were hundreds of thousands of drawers filled with glass-cased insects that he found absolutely fascinating. He knew more about certain species than many of the people in the department but a passion for invertebrate zoology had no practical application in his life so he had focused his attention on hyperbolic geometry and writing, two disciplines that got him the right kind of attention. Along with the paper the Harvard mathematics department had published, the school had been surprised by the six-volume, 1,200,000-word collection of biographies he had completed. It seemed that not many ten-year-olds were interested in the lives of Julius Caesar, Niccolò Machiavelli, Charles Darwin, Homer, Molière, and Nicolaus Copernicus. The newspaper coverage had started soon after that. And the scholarship offers.
Benjamin Winslow even had a Wikipedia entry; he loved being touted as a polymath.
Benjamin walked down the dark hallway that looked like it reached out into forever. Then he heard it, a soft scraping behind him. It wasn’t much of a sound—hardly loud enough to qualify as noise, really—but it had been enough.
Benjamin spun around and saw the dark figure looming over him. Its arms came out and clamped on his shoulders. Then it squatted down and looked into his eyes.
“I’ve been looking for you, son. It’s time to go. I have a schedule to keep to.” His father didn’t sound angry but his father never sounded angry.
“Sorry, Father. Of course.”
Dr. Winslow patted him on the head. “Let’s go home.”
Benjamin hated going home early—more than anything else in the whole wide world.
||| FORTY-SIX
FOR THE first time in as long as Hemingway could remember, she was alone, something that rarely happened at the station and never happened during daylight hours. The rain filled the air with static that blocked out ambient noise. She stared out the window, watching the buildings across the street flicker through the heavy downpour.
Her corner of the floor was abandoned and quiet; Papandreou and Lincoln were at the clinic waiting for Dr. Selmer; and Phelps had gone for food when they came back from Uncle Dwight’s. The DA was still with Judge Lester. The Matheson boy was with the coroner. Fenton was with her lawyers. All was at rest for the moment.
Except that he was out there, gearing up for another child.
She was tired but that was nothing new. Ever since the incident with Shea she had slept badly. She didn’t suffer nightmares or have residual flashbacks, but for no reason she could understand, she never woke fully rested.
Hemingway didn’t think about Shea anymore, not really. Along with the hospital and the surgeries and the physiotherapy, the memory of him had slowly faded away. Mank was a different story. He came back sometimes, mostly late at night when Daniel was asleep beside her and she was alone inside her head, staring at the shadows on the ceiling. She’d think of him, remember some little thing they had talked about, and she’d start to wonder what they might have had. She’d lie there in the dark and cry. But lately those moments were becoming rarer, and part of her worried that she’d forget about Mank altogether.
It wasn’t fair to Daniel. She loved him; he loved her. What they had seemed to be right for both of them. And she felt safe with him, something she had never felt with Mankiewicz. And now they might be having a baby.
But it wasn’t just a baby; it was a human life. From cradle to grave and all the pain in between. How could she bring a child into a world where the people who told you they had a handle on goodness tended to be the first to judge and to hate? Where genocide was taking place all over the world and torture was deemed okay by the government? Where a monster was out there sawing children up while their hearts were still beating?
She closed her eyes, focusing on the thrum of the rain against the world outside and the roof above her head, and everything else ceased to exist. She was back in the river, on the Hudson, feeling nothing more than the wind in her hair and the resistance of the water. She felt her body swaying a little, riding the swells in her kayak. She gripped the arms of the chair and the steel warmed to her touch like the carbon shaft of her paddle. For an instant she was under the George Washington Bridge, being pulled downriver by the tide, traffic rumbling across the spans high overhead.
And it all fell apart to the chirp of her cell phone.
“Hemingway.”
“Allie, it’s me.”
Hemingway pinched the bridge of her nose to stave off the pounding she knew would soon start up in her head. She didn’t want Amy and her neediness. Not now. “Amy, I’m at work and it’s not a good day.” Which was code for fuck off.
“I know. I saw you on the news thi
s morning.” Brief pause. “I’ve left Patrick. Left DC. I was hoping maybe we could talk. Help me get a little perspective. Have a drink.”
That last part sounded like the goal. “Where are you?”
“I’m on the train right now but I’m staying at the Plaza.”
Hemingway knew it was a mistake before she opened her mouth but it came out anyway. “Forget the hotel. Stay with Daniel and me. We can talk.” Why had she done that? Daniel didn’t like Amy.
Diagnosed as acutely narcissistic when she was sixteen, she had been a problem her entire life. She had always been theatric, very much to the detriment of herself and those around her. Every family has its tortured soul and Amy was the Hemingways’.
“Why don’t you come to the hotel? We’ll have a massage, order in some booze. I can tell you what happened.”
She wouldn’t make the mistake of inviting Amy to the loft again. “I’m on a tight schedule right now. Things are . . .”
The door blew open and Phelps came in. She knew something bad had happened when she saw his face. She said, “I gotta go,” and hung up.
Phelps stared at her for a moment before speaking. “Someone cut Selmer’s throat at a traffic light.”
“Where the fuck were Papandreou and Lincoln?”
Phelps shrugged. “I don’t know. Dennet caught me in the staircase. Nick and Linc are on the way in. Apparently Selmer gave them the slip.”
“Why the fuck would he do that?” Hemingway couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She thought about what had happened and where it now put them. It took a few seconds for her to think of an upside. “At least now we get our warrant.”
Phelps’s eyebrows raised in a how-you-figure-that? expression that hung there for a bit. Then his face broke into a grin. “For a lady, you sure are smart.”
“I get that a lot,” she said.
||| FORTY-SEVEN
THIS TIME they rolled into the Park Avenue Clinic with an army of cops and a docket full of warrants from the DA’s office. Fenton was waiting for them, her two security boys flanking her like a pair of backup singers. Behind the backup singers stood the lawyers. No one looked happy, least of all Fenton.