by Jeff Soloway
Victoria nodded. Doby sighed and tilted her head upward. Maybe she was accustomed to gazing into the tremendous Arizona sky for inspiration; here all she got was my eight-foot ceiling. “Didn’t know you were friends.”
“Why are you here?” I asked.
Doby humphed. “You didn’t say you had a guest over.”
“She came after you called. You took your time.”
“Had a good long walk. Got off at the wrong station. Had to wake up the guy in the booth to ask directions. And they say Brooklyn is walkable! Like Seinfeld is funny.” She stuck her nose out over the turtle tank, where Yertle was engaged in his most picturesque activity, paddling around. “Get me a glass of water before we start? You can drink the water here, huh?”
I didn’t want to leave Victoria alone with her, but I went and poured a glass. I brought it back quickly so that she could see the bubbles that, as always with water from a New York City tap, half filled the vessel. Let her think it’s all New York’s fizzing poison come to gobble up her innards. I wasn’t buying her goofy-yokel shtick. I’ve always hated people who defensively play the fool in foreign places.
The two women were now sitting on opposite ends of the futon. Victoria was staring straight ahead at the lower reaches of my bookshelf. I had copies of some of my silliest books there: the uninstructive but inspiringly sexy Anaïs Nin books a college girlfriend had given to me; the science-fiction yarns I had loved in my childhood, including the complete Tom Corbett—Space Cadet series; multiple author copies of my own outdated guidebooks. If we were alone I could have humorously defended them all. It seemed outrageous that this double invasion was making me look like a dork.
“Tell me what’s going on,” I said.
“You know how hard it was for me to get out here? Had to beg my supervisor just for airplane money. Frickin’ sequestration. Made me give up two personal days. What happened looks close enough to a hiking accident, so nobody in the FBI or the marshals are interested. But I’m interested, and when that happens, I can’t sleep or eat, except for what I munch out of a bag. I’m no good for other work. Maybe that’s why they let me come here.” She turned on Victoria. “Can you leave us alone? I can’t question people in groups.”
“I’d rather stay.”
“See, that just can’t work.”
“She can stick around if she wants,” I said. “It’s my place. What do you mean about a hiking accident?”
“It’s Jewel,” said Victoria.
“What about her?”
She hesitated. “She died.”
They both stared at me. Doby nodded.
“How?” My body went numb but my mind kept working. It was some crackpot theory. I had to poke holes in it.
“That’s what I’m here to find out,” Doby said. “It’s a hard blow, I know it is. You’re a good man to take it like this, standing.” She drank and looked about for a place to put her glass. She settled for the floor.
“I don’t believe you,” I said.
Doby glanced at Victoria. “Maybe you both better see it.”
She handed me an incident report, with photos of Jewel’s daypack, her ID, and her body, which was nestled under some kind of desert bush. A red-brown smear stretched from it to the photo’s edge. The report stated that she had died just three days ago, on Sunday. It still could be a lie, I told myself, but then everything could be a lie. I realized I was now sitting on the futon arm. Was I still a good man? It was too late to stand again. Victoria leaned away from me slightly, as if from a drunk on the subway.
“We found her body below the Dripping Springs Trail,” Doby said. “Couple hours down from Hermits Rest. The trail passes over some long verticals. Looks like she fell off. I’m sorry you have to get the news like this.” She didn’t sound sorry.
“This picture,” I said. “This is her?”
Doby nodded. “We found the little pack nearby.”
“Is it—the body—still there?”
“Of course not!” She sounded a little wounded. “We took her up to the medical examiner. We called her mom first thing.”
“That reddish stuff trailing from her body—”
“We’re assuming it’s blood,” said Doby.
I managed not to say anything and turned to Victoria. “You knew?”
“I told her husband just this morning,” said Doby, before Victoria could answer.
“Do you think she was killed?” I asked. “Is that why you’re here?”
“I don’t know what to think. Hikers in the Grand Canyon die every year, even smart ones, especially when they’re hiking alone. It’s usually dehydration-related. Heat shoots up over a hundred; they drink up all their water, get dazed and lost. There’s hikers that skid down a dry wash looking for the river, end up at a two-hundred-foot cliff, too weak to climb back up. Now, it wasn’t that hot the day your friend died. There’s also the freak accident. Someone tiptoes out to the edge and a rock crumbles away. Or they’re fiddling with their camera and take one step too far. We warn people every year, but sometimes it’s the smartest who don’t listen. They think they don’t need to.”
“Jewel wouldn’t fiddle with her camera on a cliff edge.”
“You sure?” Doby eyed me appraisingly.
“I know her.”
“That’s what I hear,” said Doby, her words flitting lightly but powerfully from her mouth, like a Broadway actress enunciating during a tender moment.
I now knew what Doby was doing here. Cops know that most murders are committed by people known to the victim. If the deceased is a drug dealer or gang member, they start by questioning friends, rivals, and business associates; if it’s a law-abiding young woman, they start with her husband. Or her boyfriend. Or her ex-boyfriend.
“We used to date,” I said.
“That’s what I hear. So, Mr. Smalls, where were you this weekend?”
“In Boston until Saturday night. Then right here.” Had I left the apartment on Saturday night or Sunday? Quite possibly not. I could conceivably have hopped a flight to Arizona in that time.
I was sure I had an alibi. If some tech genius hacked into my computer they would find the truth, and also know exactly how many times I had googled Victoria’s name and even Grant’s, in a listless, almost unconscious drive for some sort of connection with her. I’d found a vacation picture I’d never seen before: She was swimming in the ocean, just a head with slicked-back hair. Smiling at the photographer, presumably Grant.
“You don’t think it was a hiking accident,” I said. “You think she was murdered. Why?”
“You know anything about criminal investigation?”
“A little.”
“Good. Now go to school, get your degree, and become my boss. Then I’ll tell you everything. Did you know Ms. Rider was going to the Grand Canyon?”
“Not last weekend.”
Victoria said, “You can’t imagine that Jacob—”
“I’ve been up two days straight,” said Doby. “I’ve imagined everything. Mr. Smalls, when was the last time you saw Jewel Rider?”
I thought back. The afternoon she had reclaimed her clothes? Since then, we had often texted, always about Grant and Victoria, but I hadn’t actually seen her.
And then I realized who had killed her. Who Jewel was closest to, who was emotionally volatile, who I should have warned her more fiercely against. I remembered that Grant had been in Arizona over the weekend.
A cellphone rang. Doby smacked her hands against her pockets, in the manner of someone who’s never gotten used to cellphones. Victoria pulled hers out, glanced at it.
“I have to go.” She stood up.
“Is it Grant?” I said. “Don’t go home.”
She took the one step she needed to be at my door and paused. “I’m sorry. She didn’t deserve it.”
She left before I could stop her.
“Just us then,” said Doby. “At last. Look, guy, I’m not out to get you. I know you were here this weekend. I asked your super
.”
I ignored the sudden rush of relief, which might have been the emotion Doby had wanted to produce.
“I heard you saw Jewel a few weeks ago,” she said. “At some function.”
“There was a press event.”
“The one for that giant new hotel, the Grand Chalet Grand Canyon, correct?”
“Yes.”
“And Grant Flanders was there. And Victoria.”
“And a lot of other people.”
“I hear you got into a scrap that night.”
“Where’d you hear that?”
“Never mind. A scrap with Grant Flanders.”
“He threw a drink at Victoria.”
“And he went home with Jewel. And they had a thing ever since. Is that so?”
Ah. She also thought Grant had killed her.
—
After she left, I called Magda. “Did you hear?”
“Jewel’s mother told me last night. She sounded just like Jewel—so calm and confident even when she was insane. She wanted me to tell her what Jewel was doing in the Grand Canyon. The ranger who called her had asked and she was embarrassed not to know. I didn’t know what to tell her. She said, ‘What am I supposed to do now? Do I tell people on Facebook?’ She even said she hadn’t told Jewel’s dad yet. Can you believe that?”
Jewel’s mother had moved east to the Hudson Valley after her remarriage. I assumed the father was still in California.
“I’ll call him if you get me the number.”
“He’s been dead for fifteen years!”
“Sorry. I remember now.” Of course Jewel had told me about him. Her dad, not the hippie her mom was, had died of lung cancer. In his last months, after extensive and useless chemo torture, he’d taken on the look of a plucked chicken, hairless and ribsy. Even then he continued to sneak cigarettes in the upstairs bathroom and flush the butts down the toilet, since he was too weak to hobble outside. Jewel had to beg her mother to stop chewing him out about it. Jewel would have hated toxins and the corporations that spewed them even without that episode, but maybe not with the same crusader passion.
“Was it you who called the criminal investigations unit at the Grand Canyon?” I asked.
“Damn right. How did you know?”
“I just spoke to a National Park Service investigator who knew all about Jewel and Grant.”
“I called them right after Jewel’s mom told me. Talked to a woman named Flo Doby. She asked me not to tell anyone. Including you. So I didn’t. Sorry.”
“It’s all right. I didn’t even know Jewel was in the Grand Canyon.”
“She’d found something for her story. She wouldn’t tell me what. Whenever we met up, all she wanted to talk about was Grant. They were planning a dirty weekend—a working dirty weekend. She was in love. I should have knocked her over the head and locked her in my closet. Instead I did nothing, like always. Jacob, we both know who killed her.”
After we hung up, I lay down on the futon. When I woke, it was dark. I gazed through the window at the facing cliff of my urban canyon. Rooms were lit up; a woman was chopping vegetables; an old man on a couch was straining to yank off a shoe; a couple sitting together were eating sandwiches with one hand while scrutinizing cellphones with the other; several people were watching TV, some alone, some with companions. No one was actually talking to another human face-to-face. Losing Victoria had made me fear I’d always be alone. Now I saw that all my neighbors were just as lonely as me. But none of us were as lonely as Jewel. She would be friendless forever.
The phone rang again. This time it was Grant.
Chapter 6
Because I hated him, I told Grant to meet me at McSwiggan’s, where I had twice been with Victoria. McSwiggan’s has Pabst-in-a-can happy-hour specials, a Big Buck Hunter video game, and two wall-mounted TVs that show curling matches and reruns of ’70s television shows. In general it represents all that veteran New Yorkers despise about outer-borough hipster invaders (veteran meaning arrived more than two years ago).
The bartender, whose name, Victoria and I had decided, was something like Glyn, chirped at me as we entered. I noticed Grant staring at her full-color cockatiel bicep tattoo as if it might give him hep C.
“Get the beers,” I told him.
I sat at a café table with my back to the wall so I could keep watching him. The only other people there were two women far down the bar. They sat facing each other, knees kissing, and stage-whispered secrets about their toddlers. The TVs were soundlessly displaying an old Hawaii Five-0 episode.
“What’s your best draft?” Grant asked.
“We just got in a stone-cold killer IPA from Chicago. Try it?” Glyn poured him an extra-large taste. Grant was preoccupied but not fidgety; I realized he looked especially brooding, damn him.
“Great stuff. Two.” He pointed at her upper arm. “How much did that thing hurt?”
“A shout-not-a-scream. Want to see it squawk?”
“Damn right.”
I had seen this before, but Grant and the two women hadn’t. They swiveled to look. Their eyes settled admiringly on Grant’s face.
Glyn flexed, and the thing’s beak sprung open. Grant chuckled politely. “That’s some turkey.”
He arrived at our table with the two Hop and Change IPAs, which I knew cost ten dollars each. Grant didn’t notice that he got no change from a twenty and left no tip. He also didn’t notice he’d been flirting. In a crisis, people resort to the habitual. He laid his phone down on our table, in the manner of a businessman who wants you to know that your meeting could at any moment be interrupted. His breath stank of cigarettes.
“I blame myself,” he said, “because I let her hike alone.”
Let him speak. Let him lie. “When did you find out?”
“Monday morning. I hadn’t seen her all Sunday. Two rangers, in full Smokey the Bear outfits, knocked on my room door. They had called all the hotels to find out where she was staying and who she was staying with. She had her own room, but the desk remembered that I arranged it. They asked me who she was hiking with. I said, far as I knew, nobody. It’s the first thing they tell you not to do. You got to hike with a buddy, in case you break an ankle or get a dumbass idea, like do the Titanic on some outcrop. You should see some of those geniuses at the overlooks. A buddy’s like deodorant for stupidity. But Jewel didn’t care.”
“Jewel wasn’t stupid.” It came out like a correction, not a challenge. Why was it so hard to maintain my fury? I hated him; I was convinced he was at least complicit in Jewel’s death; I had come to watch him flounder in lies and explanations, to catch a contradiction that would reveal the truth and then to hand the damning evidence to the authorities. And yet here I was listening to him as if he were human.
“It doesn’t take much to go over. She might have crabbed up a slope to pick some wildflowers and taken a tumble. That trail she was on was a wilderness trail, unpatrolled. She wasn’t hiking the mainstream trails. She never did.” He widened his eyes, impressed with the broader significance of his remark. A little pink petal above his eye stretched. The Cuisinart scar? “When they told me she died I almost broke down. Then they told me she might not have been hiking alone. I didn’t get it at first. Then I did. They think somebody killed her.”
I thought of the picture Doby had shown me, the red-brown smear underneath, Jewel herself seeping into the canyon.
“Now,” he continued, “I’m not the one to question the experts, even if they’ve never been east of Albuquerque. Maybe some wilderness outlaws pushed her off a cliff to steal her stuff. If so, I blame myself. I should have gone with her. She didn’t want me to go, but I could have refused to take no. If I’m there, maybe the bad guys don’t sneak up on her so easily. Or maybe I talk them out of it, bribe them, whatever. I pull a Ben Kenobi, distract them by fighting so she can run away. I don’t know jujitsu like you, but I would have thrown down. You think I’m a punk. Maybe I am. But I know I would have fought for her.” He rapped at his glass w
ith his fingernail. “One of those rangers flew to New York. Popped by my office this morning, like ‘Sup, homes, in the hood, wanna brunch?’ Then she gets in my face. Good thing I got an office door. I thought she was gonna arrest me. She didn’t. Not yet.”
Glyn was holding up a glass, pretending to inspect it for spots, but was really watching us. No, watching Grant, even though he’d stiffed her. It was his fate to be admired despite his actions.
“What you think matters to me,” Grant said. “And I know what you think.”
“Tell me why I shouldn’t think it.” He must have come prepared with a reason, and I wanted to force it out now, before he stumbled on to something better.
“Me and Jewel were screwing around. I won’t deny it. Not this weekend, not much. She had her own room. She came by mine the night before her hike, but we didn’t get busy, we just talked. Okay, we got a little busy, but you know, half-speed. That’s not why she came out to the Canyon.”
“Where were you that day?”
“What day?”
“The day she died.”
He slapped the table. “Hotel! I had lunch at the buffet, everybody saw me.”
“What about before lunch?”
“Who gets up before lunch on Sunday? Probably watched some TV. I sure as fuck didn’t go for a hike with her. Never exercise before breakfast. That’s a Grant’s Rule. On Sundays, lunch is breakfast. Did I tell you about the Rules? Someday I’ll write a book.”
“Can you prove you were in your room?”
“That’s the thing! How do you prove you’re sleeping in? I had the Do Not Disturb sign up, but that just shows I’m a slob. Why didn’t I order a pay-per-view movie! I watched one of those Hobbits on regular HBO, you can check the times. But I can’t prove it. They don’t have a security camera in my hallway. Guest privacy or some bullshit. It’s not fair! I’m the suspect for no good reason, just because I was in town, we were screwing around, I was with her the night before, they’ve got no one else. That’s because they aren’t looking! Don’t you want to know why she was out there?”
Glyn was now leaning toward the two women, fielding some twisty cocktail request, still flicking us a glance now and then.