Her Last Breath

by Hilary Davidson

  “I try.”

  “No, you don’t. You take too many risks.” She patted my arm. “But you are a good person.”

  “I saw my father yesterday. He definitely doesn’t think I’m a good person.”

  “Did he say that?”

  “No. But we fought.”

  “If you didn’t, something would be wrong.” She smiled again. “You are a good sister. You’re doing what’s right. Shuǐ dī shí chuān. You remember what that means?”

  “Dripping water pierces a stone.”

  “That’s right. You are strong. Tenacious. You will pierce the stone. Just be careful.”

  “I’m careful.”

  “Bad things never walk alone,” she warned. “Keep that in mind.”

  CHAPTER 33

  DEIRDRE

  The Diotima website didn’t list a mailing address, but Adinah Gerstein sent me an address in Greenwich Village, at the corner of University Place and Twelfth Street. The building turned out to be doorman-free, so I let myself in and took the elevator up to the seventh floor. A plaque on the door identified it as Dr. Gerstein’s suite. The building was on the old and crumbly side, but inside the office was airy and modern, with white walls, framed prints by Frida Kahlo and Georgia O’Keefe, and flowering plants dotting the reception area. A poster of The Two Fridas caught my eye. On the left was the artist in a formal white European gown; on the right she was in a colorful Tehuana costume. The pair held hands and seemed to share a heart that had been cut out of the woman in the white dress, who was holding a pair of scissors and had blood on her skirt.

  “Hello, Deirdre. I’m so glad you reached out.”

  I turned and saw the willowy woman I’d met at Caroline’s funeral. Her braids were down, loosely gathered at the nape of her neck, but she looked just as elegant.

  “Thanks for seeing me on such short notice, Dr. Gerstein.”

  “It’s Adinah. I’m only ‘Doctor’ to my patients.” She led me into her office and gestured at a plush armchair. “Please, sit down.”

  Her office was small but cozy, with green plants on every available surface. She returned to her perch behind her desk, making me feel like the doctor was in.

  I didn’t know how to start. “I feel like I’m going in circles,” I said. “I loved my sister, but we weren’t that close. And now that she’s gone . . .” I took a breath. “I feel like everyone has an agenda when they talk about her. I don’t know how to judge what they say, if it’s true.”

  “How much does it matter?” she asked.

  I considered that. “Caro wrote me a message to read after she died.” There was a hard lump in my throat.

  “Delivered by Osiris’s Vault?” Adinah asked.

  “How did you know?”

  “My nephew works there.” She smiled, and I wondered if she was talking about Todd. “I’ve encouraged women to write notes identifying their abusers in case the worst were to happen. But it’s not all doom and gloom. Anyone who wants to keep their location completely private can use the service. Or people who want to get something off their chest without having a conversation about it.”

  “This is what my sister wrote to me.” I pulled the message up for what felt like the millionth time and slid my phone across her desk. I didn’t want to look at it again.

  Adinah read it quietly and slid the phone back.

  “Reading that message led me down a rabbit hole,” I said. “What Caro says is clear. Her husband wanted to kill her. But the more I dig, the more I find people who . . . people who had their own motives to hurt her. How long did you know her?”

  “I met Caroline when she was a student at SUNY. She talked to me for an assignment and ended up wanting to get involved. Diotima’s always been run in a decentralized way, so she was able to answer hotline calls from New Paltz.”

  “Did Caro ever tell you that our father beat our mother?”

  “No.” Adinah shook her head sadly. “She told me your mother used to hit her.”

  I was so upset I couldn’t answer. “That’s not . . . ” That’s not true, I wanted to say, even though it wasn’t exactly a lie. You get away with everything because you’re the baby was Caro’s refrain when we were kids. I had dim memories of my mother slapping me, but they were buried deep. You’re lucky. She used to hit me with a hairbrush, Caro had told me more than once.

  “Violence is often part of our family histories,” Adinah said. “It’s especially painful to talk about, because you feel shame. You have a sense of being disloyal, even though you’re not.”

  She pushed a box of tissues toward me, and I dried my eyes and blew my nose.

  “I don’t even really know what Diotima does,” I said, desperate to turn the thread of our conversation away from myself.

  “Have you ever heard of Diotima of Mantinea?” Adinah asked. “She’s an important character in Plato’s Symposium. Her ideas were the basis for the ideal of platonic love. She was a real person, though historians disagree about who she was in real life. I was fascinated by her, and so I borrowed her name.” She steepled her hands. “The Diotima Civic Society is dedicated to educating women and men about domestic abuse. We help people get out of abusive situations. You probably know this already, but a great many people who leave an abusive partner in New York end up homeless. They have to navigate the city’s shelter system, which is inadequate and even dangerous. Imagine taking your children and leaving your abuser and ending up in that situation. We help people—mostly women, but some men as well—into safe housing.”

  “Sure.” I nodded, glad that she was filling up the air while I recovered.

  “A lot of institutions help abusers, not victims. For example, when kids are involved, an abuser has custody rights. The abuser knows where their victim lives. The law pretty much lays out a map for the abuser. Diotima provides assistance that government-funded groups can’t.”

  “Like what?” I asked, throwing the wad of tissue in a bin next to the desk. I’d asked about Diotima because I needed to get my head together, but now I was genuinely curious.

  “Have you ever heard the name Deisy Garcia?” Adinah asked.

  “No.”

  “Her case happened a few years back. Deisy went to the police for help with her abusive ex. Only, her report was taken in Spanish and never translated. She made three reports in all, and the police did nothing. Then, one night, her ex came over and stabbed Deisy and their two young daughters to death.”

  My stomach clenched. I could imagine the woman’s desperation, and it made my body shake.

  “I didn’t know about the case until after she was murdered, but it was like a polestar for me,” Adinah said. “I thought, ‘What could have saved Deisy?’ Some of it is activism, forcing the courts to change and the police to pay attention. But we can’t wait for laws to change. Seventy-five percent of women who are killed by their partners are murdered after they leave. They need to go to great lengths to escape. Sometimes that means they need fake IDs and other help that’s not considered legal.”

  I was suddenly struck with new respect for my sister.

  “These days, you can’t get a burner without ID,” Adinah went on. “It’s an antiterrorism measure, and it makes sense when you look at it that way, but it does no favors to abuse victims who need anonymity. Ours is not an approach most people approve of. They want things done cleanly and legally. But that’s a luxury we don’t have in every case. Sometimes, it’s a life-or-death situation. Caroline understood that. She stopped working the hotline when she finished school, but she gave us a lot of money.”

  “Thraxton money,” I said, but my brain was stuck on the burner phone. Ben had mentioned my sister having one, and I hadn’t believed him because I couldn’t picture how Caro could get one. Turned out my imagination was lacking.

  “Now that she’s gone, there’s something I should show you. Her message says Theo’s the threat, but . . .” She punched a code into a desk drawer, and I heard six beeps. “Caroline asked me to arrange t
his for her.”

  She handed me a pair of passports. I opened the first one and saw my sister’s image next to the name Deirdre Jane Brooks. The second passport made my heart skip a beat. Teddy’s face was identified as belonging to Edward Ryan Brooks.

  “What the hell is this?” I asked. “I don’t understand.”

  “She didn’t really explain, except that she had to get away from the Thraxtons,” Adinah said.

  “Not just Theo?”

  “The whole family. Her sister-in-law made her miserable. Her mother-in-law . . .”

  “Ursula? I thought they got along.”

  “You know there was some strange issue about Caroline’s stuff being moved around, right?” Adinah said. “Caroline blamed Theo for it. But Theo was gone a lot, and it went on. Then one day, Caroline found her mother-in-law in her room.”

  “Ursula was the gremlin?” It sounded crazy, but Adinah’s face was serious.

  “Apparently she was going through Caroline’s things,” Adinah said. “I asked Caroline about it later, and she claimed everything was fine. She and her mother-in-law had talked it out, and they understood each other. She said Ursula was on her side.”

  “That’s something, I guess.”

  “That was also the day Caroline asked me to get passports for herself and Teddy,” Adinah said. “Caroline told me the whole family was like a Greek tragedy, and she had to get her son out of there.”

  CHAPTER 34

  THEO

  My instinct was to jump on the next plane to New York and strangle Harris with my bare hands. It was easiest to hate him, even though I had enough reasons to know that Juliet and my father had been involved as well. My sister had been there in person, after all, and my father had lied to me about my calling him for help. After being trapped for so many years with the belief that I was a murderer, I felt as if I’d been released from prison. Mehmet Badem didn’t know who had killed Mirelle, but I did: Harris. The only question was who had come up with the plan. I couldn’t head back to New York with only the word of an ailing drug addict to support my accusations. I needed more.

  I hadn’t laid eyes on Klaus von Strohm in four years, and while I didn’t know where to find him, I knew how to reach him. I dialed a pager number and waited for the call back. One of Klaus’s henchmen phoned me within the quarter hour. “This is Theo Thraxton,” I told him. “I’m in Berlin, and I need to see Klaus as quickly as possible.”

  Half an hour later, I received another call. “Klaus will meet you at your hotel at seven thirty. Be dressed for dinner.”

  As I hung up, I realized that I hadn’t told Klaus where I was staying. Not that it mattered. Berlin was his town, and he owned it.

  A black Mercedes was waiting outside my hotel at the appointed time. The driver opened the door, and I slid inside. The car was empty.

  “I take it Klaus is meeting me at the restaurant?” I asked the driver in English as he settled into his seat. He was nineteen or twenty, olive skinned and dark haired.

  “Yes, sir,” he answered.

  The drive into the heart of Mitte took fifteen minutes and brought me back to the Brandenburg Gate—now lit for evening and looking exactly as I remembered it—and to the grand boulevard of Unter den Linden. The driver turned right on Friedrichstrasse and right again on Behrenstrasse before stopping suddenly in front of an alleyway. “Here you are, sir.”

  “Where’s the restaurant?”

  “Here you are, sir,” the boy repeated. He wasn’t going to be of any help. I got out of the car.

  The street wasn’t well lit, but the empty alley was forbidding. There was a light near the end, and I followed it all the way back. The lighted area turned out to be a loading dock, but it was empty. I stepped inside and followed it to the end. Another alley was to my left, this one filled with blue and red dumpsters. If Klaus wanted to murder me and dispose of my body, this was his chance. I took a deep breath, and my nose immediately regretted it, but I plunged ahead.

  Up a small set of stairs near the end of this alley was a metal door with two lights above it. An unmarked buzzer was on the wall. I pressed it and waited. There was a buzz from inside, and I pressed the door; it swung open.

  Inside was almost as forbidding. I pushed past the velvet blackout drapes into a dimly lit room. There were two men standing behind a wooden bar.

  “I’m having dinner with Klaus von Strohm,” I said in English.

  “Take the stairs to your right,” one of the men answered. “He’s waiting for you.”

  That thought echoed ominously in my head as I followed the narrow staircase up. After the desolation of the street and alleyways, I wasn’t prepared for the buzzy dining room. It looked boxy and industrial, but it had been painted white, with silver orbs dangling from the ceiling. Cylindrical lights and candles illuminated the space, and metal pipes ran from ceiling to floor, reflecting the glow. The only art was a giant framed poster with ficken—fuck—written in the center.

  Klaus was waiting on a red velvet banquette. A smile stretched across his face as I approached. He stood, taking my hand. “My dear Theo, it has been too long. It is good to see you looking so well.” His smile faded. “I offer you my deepest condolences about your wife. I only met her at your wedding, but she was such a lovely young woman.”

  “Thank you.”

  I looked him over as we sat down, oddly isolated in our quiet corner of the busy restaurant. Klaus was—as far as I knew—the closest thing my father had ever had to a friend. They were roughly the same age—in their early seventies now—and while their personalities were dissimilar on the surface—my father gregarious, Klaus the saturnine former Stasi cop—they were united in being total bastards.

  “How did you know where I was staying?” I asked.

  “Come on, Theo. Don’t I get to be a little bit mysterious?” He was dressed in what I was positive was once a bespoke gray Hugo Boss suit, but it sagged on his frame. Klaus had been close to three hundred pounds at one point, but he had downsized. I wondered how voluntary that was; he looked frailer than I’d ever seen him.

  “About that, fine. But not about the night Mirelle died,” I said. “You’re going to tell me the full story.”

  “You may find this hard to believe, but I had absolutely nothing to do with that.”

  “You’re right—I find that impossible to believe.” I shifted in my seat. “You and my father were always partners in crime.”

  “Not in that girl’s death, Theo.” He leaned forward. “I’ve taken the liberty of ordering everything on the menu. It’s all vegetarian—don’t laugh, I haven’t eaten meat in over a year. Let them bring us some wine, and then we’ll talk.”

  Klaus always had been a control freak, but I couldn’t care less about the food or drink. “As long as you answer my questions, I don’t care what’s on the menu.”

  The table service took a moment, with a waiter opening a bottle of riesling. Then he was gone, and Klaus lifted his glass.

  “To the memories of those we’ve lost,” Klaus said.

  We tapped glasses.

  “I’m going to tell you what I know, and I want you to fill in the blanks,” I said. “I’ve always avoided thinking about Mirelle because of the horrific way her life ended. But once I started remembering—and looking at the facts in the cold, hard light of day—it all smacked of a setup. Mirelle just landed on my doorstep one day. That wasn’t an accident. What I want to know is, how deeply were you involved?”

  He met my eyes. “We say we wish to know dark secrets, Theo, but we rarely mean it. The truth is often so ugly we can’t look it in the face.”

  “I need to know what happened.”

  “If you are certain, then. Your suspicion is correct, Theo: I hired her.”

  “Hired? She was a prostitute?”

  “She was an aspiring actress with a sideline as a dominatrix,” Klaus said. “You had a type. Your father was hysterical about the clubs you frequented. About all the drugs. I kept telling him you needed
your freedom, that you’d come to your senses eventually. But your father insisted. That’s why I hired Nastya.”

  “Who?”

  “You knew her as Mirelle. She was a Russian girl. She was talented with languages, good with accents. You never imagined she wasn’t French, did you?”

  “No,” I admitted.

  “I knew she was what you needed just then,” Klaus said. “And it worked. You stopped going to those clubs. You used drugs, but not as much. Things were looking up. At least, I thought they were.”

  “What happened?”

  “Your father was angry. He was paying this girl a lot of money, plus footing the bill for her apartment. He didn’t want simply an improvement; he wanted . . . everything to be his way.” Klaus snapped his fingers. “He wanted you to be his creature. You understand?”

  “Yes.” My father had always wanted a son who would show off his superiority to the world. I was an embarrassment.

  “The straw that broke the camel’s back was when Nastya took you on that little trip through Alsace for your twentieth birthday. Your father lost his mind when you told him you got married. He called me, ranting about this Schlampe trapping his son. I told him to calm down, that the marriage wasn’t even valid. But he took it like a shot across the bow. He thought Nastya—Mirelle—had her hooks in you too deep.”

  “What about my sister? What was her role in all of this?”

  “Juliet?” Klaus asked with surprise. “What role would she have? She was still a student then. If she knew of Mirelle, it was only what you or your father told her.”

  “But Juliet was on the plane that took me to rehab . . .” As the words tumbled out of my mouth, I remembered what she’d said that night. You ruined my week in Paris, you stupid piece of shit. I wish you were dead. It dawned on me that nothing about the night Mirelle was killed was accidental. Juliet was in Europe because our father had flown her there. She had likely thought it a treat, a reward for her good grades. It was my father who’d had other plans.