The Last Descent

by Jeff Soloway

  “She was out there for you,” I said.

  “Not for me! Not just. She was working on a story. You know that. You heard her. She was looking for dirt on the GC2. And she found something. She’d been talking to some local activist comrade. He’d got in his head that the GC2 was running some scheme to, like, colonize the Canyon’s water supply. He was going to take her to the evidence, but before he did, she had to prove herself.”

  “Why would she have to prove herself?”

  “He didn’t want to get busted. After he exposed the secret, he planned to make the GC2 suffer.”

  “How?”

  “That’s exactly what I asked! Jewel said, ‘You don’t want to know.’ Then she said, ‘Burn down the Grand Chalet.’ I laughed. I told her no way. The place is totally fireproof, way beyond code, you’d need a bomb. Now I wonder. What if they really had one? Or knew how to make one out of fertilizer or something? What if she found out and was going to write it up and he killed her? You can’t know with a guy like that.”

  “Who was the guy?” If he was going to accuse Freddie Bridgewater, I wanted him to say the name, not just imply it.

  “How should I know? I can’t exactly ask around. No one will talk to me. You don’t understand my situation.”

  “I guess you’re too fucking complicated.” I’m usually a good interviewer. I know how to fit myself into people’s zone of trust. But any emotional manipulation requires some level of sympathy. For Grant I had nothing.

  He could see it.

  “Christ, Jacob, you think you’re the only one who can’t stand me? I disgust myself. She’s dead, and all I think about is my own survival. But I have to! I hate it, but I do. She gave me all she had, and I can’t go to her funeral or swap stories about her or tell her mom how sorry I feel. Or tell anyone! Because I never should have been with her. It was all a huge mistake. Even before all this, I was slicing my wrist for guilt, because of what I was doing to my wife—who I still love, who I’ll always love, and who I was being such a shit to. Every night I would go to bed and I couldn’t sleep because I was thinking about her and Victoria and hating myself. I lost, like, ten pounds. I told myself I was going to change. And now this happens! How am I supposed to feel now? I want to apologize to everybody and at the same time I want to tell everybody to fuck off, because only two people deserve my apology—my wife and Jewel. My wife most of all. Because she’s the one I really love. You don’t understand!”

  He picked up his beer and put it back down immediately. “I never lied to Jewel,” he said, “never, but I lied to myself when I said I was in love with her. She made me feel like Superman. For what she did and who she was, I should have been grateful, I should have thanked her, but I should have walked away, because I always knew I’d never love her like I loved Victoria. But I didn’t walk. And now I can’t apologize ever. I have to be the world’s biggest asshole and pretend she was just some girl I was fucking around with, excuse me. I have to forget what she meant so I can fight for my life. You know what I’m thinking right now? What I can barely stop myself from asking?”

  “No.” But I wanted to know, and he could sense it.

  “What you told Ranger Rick today. I know she talked to you. No, I can’t ask you. Never ask questions that’ll make you cry.”

  “Another Grant’s Rule?”

  “Now it is.”

  “The worst I could have said to the ranger is that you’re a jackass. That won’t get you convicted.”

  “I can’t be convicted—I didn’t kill her!”

  “Then what are you afraid of?”

  “My life!”

  At this, Glyn and even the two women glanced our way.

  “Greenbaum,” he whispered. “If Doby arrests me, it’s over. I don’t mean my career. They’ll never convict me—I didn’t do it!—but if Greenbaum thinks I’m involved in any way, he’ll fire up a plan of his own. He’ll wait and use some old-school technique, so no one knows it’s murder, but he’ll do it. I could run to Alaska, it wouldn’t matter; I’d just die cold. You got to help me. You got to find the guy she was mixed up with. That’s the guy who killed her, I know it.”

  I imagined Grant begging some goon for his life. A proud man would refuse to beg, make peace with death, apologize out loud to Victoria, to Jewel, even to Greenbaum, and accept his punishment calmly. I’m not so proud, but I think I’d do the same, to spare myself the last endless minutes of agonizing struggle. But Grant wouldn’t. He’d prefer to go out whining, pleading, bribing, hoping. That’s what he was doing now. Fighting for his life.

  “What if her killer was Greenbaum? Or one of his men?”

  “If Greenbaum ordered it, they’d have needed a backhoe to find her. His guys are pros. I’m thinking if it wasn’t some radical, it was one of those locals who hated the radicals. You know the type, grew up with bowls of ammo around the house instead of M&Ms. Me, I love those guys. I fish. But you know Jewel. One thing she could always do is piss people off. Victoria’s different.”

  “If you really loved Victoria, why did you keep going back to Jewel?”

  “You don’t believe me that I love my wife. You don’t want to believe it. I get it. It’s not just me you don’t understand, it’s me and Victoria. What we’ve got is something different, some beautiful monster. All relationships are bizarre. All people are bizarre. That’s what Victoria says.”

  I stopped myself from saying “I know.”

  “You don’t have to trust me completely,” he went on, “just admit you don’t know everything. I love Victoria. You love her too, I know it. That makes us brothers. I’m sorry you can’t have her, I really am. But now your brother needs a favor. Come to the GC2 this weekend. It’s the press trip, remember? You didn’t sign on. I need you there.”

  I looked down at my glass. It was empty. I reached for his still-untouched drink, slid it across the table, and took a slug. Warm, flat, and bitter. “What for?”

  “To find out what happened. If she really was killed—I’m not saying she was—but if she was, don’t you want to know why?”

  “Not as badly as you do.”

  “Look, I know I’m an asshole. I never forget it, even when people don’t remind me. I’m insecure. I’m touchy. But I never hurt anybody. I wish I didn’t have to ask for help. Maybe, in my place, you wouldn’t ask. But I’ve got other people to think about. My mom. Victoria. You know how much she makes teaching? She should get a paper route instead. And let’s be honest, I don’t really feel like getting strangled with piano wire or fed through a wood chipper or whatever Greenbaum’s guys do. He owns the Tusayan cops, and those fucking National Pork Service cops have no idea. You’re smart. And you knew Jewel. You can track down who she talked to. There are so many weirdos in Tusayan. The drunk deadbeats in Camper Village, the alky hardhats just bused in from Vegas. You think I’m inappropriate? We had to ban them from our Broadway shows. Plus they keep hassling our concierge about prostitutes. But the activists are something else. They believe. You want to start there. I’ll fly you in, comp you everything.”

  “There’s no way I’d do anything for you.”

  The door jingled behind me, and Grant jumped off his chair. Was he guilty or just fearful? Maybe Grant himself no longer knew. He was so good at lying, he must be good at lying to himself.

  “It’s her,” he said.

  I turned.

  Victoria was standing by the bar. She glanced around, lost, her gaze floundering amid the bar’s commotion of small dim lights. She was the one I had to protect.

  “He won’t help,” Grant called out.

  Victoria’s eyes finally settled on us. “I knew he wouldn’t.”

  Glyn saw her. “Victoria! Vodka and cran?”

  Victoria nodded.

  “You been here?” Grant asked.

  “Go home, Grant,” Victoria said.

  “You been here,” he said. “With him. It’s what I deserve, I know it.”

  “We all know it. Goodbye.” She took the chair n
ext to me. Grant didn’t leave.

  “I want to talk,” said Victoria.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” I said.

  “I could use a smoke,” said Grant.

  “Just us,” said Victoria.

  Grant gestured with both hands to Glyn. “But—”

  “The drink is yours,” I told him. “This time, tip.”

  Chapter 7

  We crossed Flatbush and passed the place that used to be Christie’s, everyone’s favorite Jamaican meat-patty shop. It was now a yoga studio. Everything was a yoga studio. Victoria had never known Christie’s, never known half the places in New York I loved best. If only I had met her three, five, ten years ago! Saved me so many ardent but profitless romantic adventures; saved her from her greatest mistake. Night had fallen, but the distant city lights made the horizon glow like dawn in all directions. To my relief, she said nothing as we crossed Grand Army Plaza’s demonic traffic circle. Whatever she had to say, I wanted to hear every word.

  We entered Prospect Park through one of the winding paths under a bridge and tramped into the near meadow. It was warm for April. I dropped my jacket on the grass and we lay back and looked at the smoky white clouds in the plum-colored sky. You never see stars in New York City. Sound carried across the meadow: dog chains jangling, a cork popping amid muffled cheers, a flock of teens hooting like geese. Used to be you wouldn’t enter a New York City park after dark without fear of muggers or sex fiends. Now you just worried about cops handing out open-container tickets.

  “Do you know what he wants me to do?” I asked.

  She didn’t answer. Her shoulder brushed mine. I was glad of a little warmth. The cool grass tickled my cheek.

  “He told me he was ending it,” she said. “Two days later he invites Jewel to the Grand Chalet. He lied to me.”

  “He always lies to you. I want to know if he killed her.”

  “He didn’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Why would you kill somebody who crossed the country to sleep with you? I’m the one who should have killed her.”

  Now the cold seemed to seep into my back from the ground. I thought of Jewel lying off the trail on the Grand Canyon’s sun-baked dirt. How long had it taken her to die? Did she have time to feel heat, thirst, fear?

  “I’m sorry.” Victoria sat up and leaned over me. Her falling dark hair curtained the sky. “I’m sorry for her, I really am. And I’m sorry for you.”

  She rolled back to her side of my jacket, a little farther away. We were like a married couple in their graves, chilly in the ground and not quite touching. “I used to go on these trips to help Grant out,” she said. “But I haven’t been in months. He tells me there’s no money for an extra plane ticket. So I stayed home all weekend. I read books and waited for him. I didn’t even have you to see. I thought everything had changed. I thought they were finished with each other.”

  “If it wasn’t Grant who killed her, who was it?”

  “We know she was trying to find Freddie Bridgewater.”

  In the distance, another cork popped, this time followed by a cheer that quickly died. People drank outdoors a lot more raucously in the old days, when cops had better things to do than shut down open-air wine tastings.

  “Is that what Grant told you?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “I know Grant thinks Freddie Bridgewater killed her,” I said, “but why should we believe him? You know he’s a liar. He lied about seeing Jewel. Will you leave him now?”

  “If I do, everyone will think it’s because he’s a murderer. And I don’t believe he is. I know I have to leave him eventually. He’s a good man in every way but one. But he doesn’t deserve this. Who knows what Florence Doby will dig up and make public? Greenbaum doesn’t know about their affair. If he does, he’ll suspect Grant too—just like you. The longer the investigation goes on, the more likely Greenbaum is to cut it off quick. But Grant says she was trying to hunt down some shady people. If you could find out what she was doing that weekend, why she was on that trail, who she was talking to—”

  “You’re asking me to try to save your husband. Because you know I can’t refuse you anything.”

  The party people had gone quiet. From across the meadow came the sound of leaves sighing, then the breeze skimmed over our bodies.

  “I know what Grant’s guilty of,” she said, “and it isn’t murder. I want to be the one to punish Grant, not Greenbaum. And not you.”

  “What if you’re wrong? What if I find proof that Grant killed her?”

  “Then I’ll spit on him as he’s frog-marched to prison. I know you can’t trust my judgment. I can’t trust it either. I always knew he cheated on me. I always saw how he played the jackass to win laughs and the suck-up to close deals. And I still loved him. I thought I knew the worst about him. He’s the only person I ever loved except my parents, the only person I chose to love. It’s hard to believe he’s a murderer. But I’ll make myself believe it if I have to. If it’s true, I know I’ll have to punish myself, change myself, redeem myself somehow, however long it takes. This is more important than anything else, more important than love. Please, Jacob. I want to know what happened. Do it for me if you can’t do it for Grant.”

  “I won’t do it for him or for you.”

  —

  I went home and thought about Jewel. Her father had been a handyman at a progressive private school in Palo Alto, so she had been able to go there for free. Later she had majored in outdoor recreation at Cal State Long Beach, a degree that later made urban snobs smirk, though it was no more impractical than art history or sociology. One of her midterms had been a graded snow-camping expedition in the Sierra Nevada. When I too ventured to tease her about this, she laughed and, to defend herself, started battering me with moral questions about poverty tourism in Bolivia. And she turned out to be genuinely knowledgeable about poverty tourism in Bolivia.

  I had known her for years—she was hard to miss—but nothing had ever sparked between us until one evening last fall. We were chatting at a press event for a new Manhattan retail outlet that billed itself as the Eataly of camping. Some salaried twit from New York magazine tried to cut me out, and I, deciding that exceptional measures of flirting were in order, explained to him that Jewel was from Newport, Rhode Island, that her real name was Julienne, and that her chauffeur, Boris, used to drive her to private school in a limo with bulletproof glass. Mr. Byline looked at Jewel’s cargo pants and Indigo Girls sweatshirt and snorted. I told him he knew nothing about old money. Jewel looked severe. “Boris never drove,” she corrected me. “He took care of the huskies.” She went on to describe to both of us a kind of Edith Wharton upbringing full of horseback riding, manuscript collecting, and scheming with her mother to humiliate her father’s girlfriends. She was both generous and self-assured enough to enjoy a joke even if she was its object. I didn’t know then how poor she’d really been as a child.

  I decided to go to Arizona. To find out—if I could—who had killed Jewel and why and what she had discovered there. To participate in the last drama of her life. But also to prove to Victoria that I too had a moral code that was stronger than love.

  —

  The next morning I called Magda. “I need you to talk to Jewel’s mother and find out what happened to Jewel’s things. Her laptop, her clothes, and especially her big traveling backpack. I didn’t see it in the photos. She must have left it at the hotel.”

  “The purple one I hated?”

  “The purple one we all hated.” Unlike the rest of us adults, who used rolling bags, Jewel traveled with a giant North Face backpack, like a college kid with a Eurail pass.

  “You think she left behind something important? Wouldn’t someone have looked through her stuff already?”

  “Maybe not the right way. Also, I want to know why the Grand Canyon investigators are convinced Jewel didn’t just slip. They must have found some evidence to show she was murdered.”

  “Like a bullet
?”

  “Or a bullet hole in her body. Whatever it was, they would have told Jewel’s mother—”

  “Wait. You’re going to make me ask Jewel’s mother whether there were holes in her daughter’s body?”

  “You can do this,” I said. “I need to find out everything I can. I’m going to the Grand Canyon to find out who killed her.”

  Magda exhaled into the phone. We’d been friends for years, long before either of us had met Jewel. Magda was a swift and funky writer who was debilitatingly shy around strangers. Ten years ago, she could never have been a journalist, but even the most anxious of introverts can do research on the Internet and conduct interviews by email. What I was asking was the hardest thing she could imagine.

  “But we already know who killed her.”

  “We need proof.”

  “I always hated the Grand Canyon. A few months ago I saw it from the air when I was flying back from L.A. National treasure, my ass. It looks like a tattoo some convict carved in his skin. Jewel should have died on a mountain peak, somewhere up over the clouds, not under some dehydrated bush in the world’s biggest ditch.”

  “I need your help, Magda. No one else talks to Jewel’s mom.”

  She sighed. “Fine.”

  “Thank you.”

  “If it’s really Grant,” she added, “you’ve got Victoria free and clear. Just don’t invite me to the wedding.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “Did you love her?”

  It took me a moment to realize she meant Jewel.

  “Yes. Did you love her?” I asked. Magda’s own love life was intermittent and slow-burning. I assumed she was a reliable, faithful, and charmingly sardonic girlfriend, but I knew not everyone valued those qualities as highly as they should.

  “I miss her already,” she said.

  I can never fall in love with someone who can’t love me. Magda was different.

  Chapter 8

  Magda surprised me at the gate at JFK. I was in line waiting to board with a handful of fellow writers also there for the press trip. A number had canceled on Grant, including most of those who considered themselves friends or at least friendly with Jewel. Magda and I weren’t the only ones who knew of their affair. Not all of Jewel’s friends had canceled, of course; a free trip to a hot new resort made up for a lot of moral compromise.