by Paul Griffin
I burned through New Jersey Traffic’s firewall, back-doored my way into the E-ZPass database and scrolled through his E-ZPass statements. Two months earlier, he’d done the same thing on his way to a show in DC, exiting the highway at Marathon. That time he was MIA for a little less than two hours.
Girlfriend? He’d dated exactly two women after my mother died, maybe five or six dates total, and he’d never tried to hide them from me.
This was not the big break in information I was hoping for.
My bedroom doorknob twisted. The lock was broken, but I’d wedged a chair under the handle. I grabbed my baseball bat.
THIRTY-SEVEN
“Let me in. Jay, open up.” My father.
I slapped down my laptop screen and cleared the chair from the door. “I thought you weren’t due back till this weekend?”
“Your assistant principal called.”
“Dad, seriously, Kerns totally started it.”
“We’ll get to that later. Why were you blocking the door?”
I told him about the black Civic.
He rolled his eyes. “People are down there hanging out all the time, smoking drugs, fooling around, whatever else. They sleep in their cars.”
“In their trucks, after they’ve been driving all night.”
“You’re being paranoid. The woman came to pick up her husband at the train station, crashed for half an hour until his train arrived, woke up late and sped out of the lot. There. Nobody’s after you, Jay. Relax.” He took off his tie and headed for the kitchen. “I picked up a pizza. C’mon, we need to talk.”
I couldn’t tell him that the Civic’s plates were bad. He’d know I was hacking. If he knew that, he’d figure out that I was hacking him too. So much for asking him about Marathon.
“He squirted me with-”
“Water, Jay.”
“How was I supposed to know that?”
“You’re lucky his hand isn’t broken. It was a sprain, his mother said. The thumb. Still, it’ll be two weeks before he can get back.”
“Two weeks from school for a sprained thumb?”
“From wrestling. You know, his ticket to Harvard or wherever.”
“You’re always telling me to stick up for myself. What was I supposed to do?”
“You definitely didn’t need to choke him.”
“He-”
“Hey. I can’t afford to get sued, okay? Neither can you. If we have to hire a lawyer, we’re out on the street. C’mon, man. Use your head.” He poked my temple with his index finger as he got up to get himself a Diet Coke.
“Did you get that message from that detective?”
“Gimme a break, Jay. ‘That detective’? You mean the one you had coffee with?”
I should have known Pete would cave. In my experience, when adults give you their word about something, half the time they’ll break it, invoking the old standby clause: I know what I said, but I had to do what was best for you.
My father settled in his chair, rubbed his eyes, eyed me. “The Castro girl. Stay away from her. You’re in enough trouble with this suspension crap. And stay the hell away from Barrone too. She’s a pain in the ass. I helped her kid on a paper once-”
“She told me.”
“Did she tell you the daughter was sending me these book-length emails, calling me three and four times a day at the office?”
“What was it, Dad? Your beef with Mr. Castro.”
“Now how the hell did you find about that?”
“Mrs. Castro.”
He frowned. “He insulted an artist I happened to think was a hell of a talent.”
I shrugged. “So he didn’t like his stuff. Free country.”
“Her stuff. The artist was his wife. He killed her dream the night of her debut.”
“What, he like started slashing her paintings?”
“Pretty much. He and I are standing in front of the same painting. I’m smiling, he’s frowning. I tell him I think the work is remarkable, and he says, ‘a remarkable burden.’ He goes on to explain that he’s footing the bill for all these ‘castles in the air,’ as he calls them, gesturing to the paintings. Says he can’t even get his wife out of the studio long enough to take her to dinner. She’s obsessed, he says. What she really needs to be doing is getting down to the business of having kids and ‘being happy,’ as he put it. I argue that it’s all worth it, the time apart, putting the family thing on hold, because she’s great. And Castro’s exact words were, ‘She’s not great. She’s very good, and that’s not good enough.’ Anyway, Elaine had gone to get her husband a Perrier or whatever the hell he was drinking, but she’d come back in time to hear most of what he said. She’s standing right there as Castro says, ‘The difference between a Pablo Picasso and an Elaine Castro is that Picasso needed to paint, and filling Elaine’s head with ideas that she has the same need just isn’t fair to her. It can only lead to crushing disappointment, and I don’t want to have to see my wife suffer like that.’ Then he notices Elaine. She’s putting up a brave fight, smiling, but she can’t hold back the tears and excuses herself. Castro hurries after her, apologizing. It’s a scene, you know? A sad one. The damage is done, party over. People are leaving the gallery. I’m getting my coat, and here’s Castro again, giving me this sarcastic thank you, like this was all my fault. I had toasted Elaine earlier with something to the effect that she was one of the best I’d ever seen. I was young, but I had a guest column in the Times back then, and I guess what I said carried some weight-not a ton, mind you, just the tiniest bit maybe, but I guess it was enough to get Elaine Castro believing in herself a little anyway, which is all I was trying to do. Give her some support, you know? I told Castro he was an asshole, and I left. Actually, I might have said a bit more. Maybe a lot more. The gallery was still half full, mostly his banking buddies, I imagine, lots of Brooks Brothers suits. I embarrassed him in front of his friends, and I meant to. I embarrassed myself too, apparently. I was a little-”
“Drunk?”
“I kept an eye out for Elaine, but she never exhibited again, not publicly. I ran into the husband a few years ago at a gas pump, of all places. He said she was still painting, but strictly as a hobby.” My father folded himself another slice of pizza, shaking his head. “Guy’s a bona fide prick. He killed her. He killed his. .” He let the pizza fall to his plate, sat back in his chair, looked up at the ceiling and let out a long breath. “Shit,” he said. He glared at me.
“What’d I do?” I said.
“Do we have any Tylenol?”
“It’s expired.”
“You double the recommended dose, it still works.”
I got him the Tylenol and then Mrs. Castro’s copy of his book. “Could you sign this for her?”
He studied the paint splattered over the book. Mrs. Castro had flagged a page with a Post-it. My father flipped to it. He smiled sadly. “She picked my favorite. Not that I don’t mention that fact in the book at least five times.”
I was looking at the picture upside down. She’d tagged a Picasso and written on the Post-it: “his best.” It was the only one I knew, Guernica, his most famous one.
“Should we give her a fresher copy?”
“After it’s taken her so many years to get this one like this?”
“Hey,” I said. “How come you never painted?”
“I’d have to send you on a Heineken run before we got into that conversation. I know about your fake ID, by the way.”
“Seriously, Dad. Why didn’t you pick up the brush?”
“I did. I painted for years.”
“And?”
“I burned them.”
“Why?”
“Fear.”
“That the critics would kill you?”
He shook his head. “I couldn’t figure it out. What the great ones knew. Inokuma. Picasso. I mean I knew it on an intellectual level. But not in my heart.”
“Knew what?”
“What comes after beauty.”
“
Have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Not sure I do either.” He flipped the book to the title page, inscribed it and, yawning, headed for bed. I checked the inscription: “To You Who Know What Comes After Beauty.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
A little after noon the next day, Friday, I met up with Angela at the Clarion.
“And why should I do this for you?” Pete said.
“Because you owe me,” I said.
“For telling your father you were about to get yourself tossed into jail?”
“You set me up with Detective Barrone in the first place.”
“For educational purposes. I figured you were looking to do a school report about detective work. How was I supposed to know you were involving yourself in an open police case, not to mention falling in love with the target of an acid thrower.”
“I’m not falling in love with-”
“Right. Somebody mentions the girl’s name, and you get this look in your eyes. Watch: Nicole. See? You’re toast.” He turned to Angela. “Am I right?”
Angela cracked her gum. “Bread crumbs.”
“Pete, I need this favor. Think of my mother.”
“Don’t do that, kid. Don’t try to make me feel sorry for you.”
“I’m not. I don’t mean it like that, and I don’t want your pity. I mean that she would have done what I’m trying to do.”
“And what’s that?”
“Sticking up for somebody who’s having a hard time sticking up for herself.”
Pete shook his head and picked up the phone.
Angela, Cherry and I met at Cherry’s Starbucks a little before three p.m., when Cherry relieved the person behind the counter. I was back there too, setting up Angela’s phone camera inside the pastry case. Angela was sipping a latte and surfing on what appeared to be a brand-new, just-released special-edition MacBook Pro with a seventeen-inch screen that would have retailed for $3900 if its guts weren’t absolute garbage I had pieced together for around $40. The nice shiny case itself was from BJ’s. The forklift king actually showed up for work the previous weekend and had sailed the blades through a stack of Apple boxes. They were tested, found to be broken beyond repair, written up as damaged freight and tossed, and then I went Dumpster diving.
Starbucks was, per usual at this hour, empty, until Puglisi showed up around 3:45, just as Pete’s friend in the Clarion’s feature department, aka the gossip room, suggested he should. By now I was hiding out in the parking lot, in Cherry’s yellow Honda. I watched Puglisi hurry into the shop. He’d gotten a tip Nicole Castro was meeting her new beau there at about four p.m. If Puglisi got there a little early and put himself near the front door, Nicole and her man would be sitting ducks. Puglisi could get a perfectly clear shot, front-page worthy.
Puglisi barked a coffee order at Cherry and situated himself in the corner, setting up his lens. Four o’clock came and went, and neither Nicole nor the beau or whoever he was showed up. Ten after four came and went. At about twenty after four Puglisi’s phone rang. He answered angrily and then hung up even more angrily, having been told that the tip turned out to be bad information. Just as he was about to pack up his stuff, Angela, seated two stools down the window counter from Puglisi, yawned and stretched and said, “Can you watch my laptop for a couple of minutes while I go to the bathroom? Thanks.” And off she went.
Puglisi sized up the situation. The bathroom door was closing behind Angela. Behind the counter Cherry was cleaning the espresso machine, her back to Puglisi. He shrugged, tucked the laptop under his arm and headed out to his car. He stopped when he noticed a thick glass Coke bottle on the hood of his Honda. It had been placed there as a paperweight to keep the smiley face Angela had drawn from flying away in the considerable wind. The smiley face also had hands, and both of them were flipping off Puglisi. He turned around to find me walking toward him. I was holding out Angela’s phone, playing the video of Puglisi’s robbery. He took a swing at the phone, but I saw it coming and held it high over his head. Being much taller than the dude, I had no problem keeping the phone away from him. “Besides,” I said, “she got you too.”
Cherry was out with us now, looking at her phone camera screen. “So weird. From this angle, it looks like you’re stealing a four-thousand-dollar computer.”
“I believe that’s grand larceny,” I said.
“It’s entrapment,” Puglisi said.
“Wanna gamble on a six-year minimum sentence?” I said.
Puglisi smirked and looked around the parking lot. “I’m guessing Nicole isn’t coming?”
“I’m happy to relay any message you have for her. Maybe a final good-bye?”
“Okay, champ, I’m off her tail. Be about a day before the Enquirer has a new team on her.” He got into his car. “Happy now?”
I reached through the window and casually took back the laptop. “I need you to do one more thing for me.”
Twenty minutes later, the picture I got of the black Civic swerving out of the parking lot in front of my building the previous night was up on the tabloid sites with the headline BREAK IN BURNED BEAUTY CASE IMMINENT, RECLUSE ON THE RUN.
I’d tried to leak the picture myself, but no media organization would take my anonymous submission seriously. Only the likes of Shane Puglisi and his Scorpion Imageworks had the credibility to get such a shot picked up. He actually sold the picture for five grand, over the phone, from right there in the Starbucks parking lot.
Basically I was trying to buy us some time. The Recluse would see the story. She wouldn’t be able move around so easily, not with that picture in hot circulation. She would have no choice but to lie low. At the same time, I knew that if she’d been crazy enough to follow Nicole and me to my building, she wouldn’t be backing off for good. We’d get an extra couple of days to do some digging before the Recluse on the Run storyline faded from the front page and the psycho couldn’t fight the itch to burn again. Maybe that would be enough time to hack the breakthrough piece of information that would help us find her before she found another chance to hit Nicole. I’d given up on the idea that Detective Barrone was capable of stopping the Recluse. If she was stoppable, then Angela, Cherry, and I were going to have to stop her.
Angela and I took the bus west. She fell asleep, her face on the window. Her left hand was closed tightly but her right was open. Her fingernails were chewed bloody. A razor wire tattoo circled her wrist. She caught me looking at it. “Cool, right?” she said.
“Cool,” I said.
We got to the Route 22 stop, and from there I walked her home. We stopped at this bodega a block from her house. “I heard you have rock-solid fake ID. Any chance I can get you to man up and buy me some beer?”
“How about a Snapple Green Tea?”
“I believe you’ve already had the pleasure of seeing me hurl all over the street?”
I was suspended, but she’d cut that day. “Thanks for taking off from school for this,” I said.
“Oh, it was a sacrifice. If you were really thankful, you’d get me the Budweiser.”
“I feel bad saying this, but as your friend, I have to.”
“We’re not friends, but go ahead.”
“Can I help you get yourself to a rehab program?”
“Many have tried, all have failed, but I’ll tell you what. Help me get that fifty-thousand-dollar reward, and I’ll check myself into a luxury spa to dry out. Maybe in South America. Maybe I’ll never come back. Yeah, that sounds good. Hey, I’m wondering what it would be like to suck your tongue really, really hard.”
“Not gonna happen.”
“Saving yourself for Nicole?”
Nicole or not, it wasn’t going down, not with all that lip metal. “Thought you weren’t into me like that anyway.”
“Spaceman, that was like two days ago. The way I feel today, anybody’s fair game. When you’re hungry, meat’s meat.”
“I’m truly flattered.”
She headed into the bodega and I went home
.
THIRTY-NINE
From Nicole’s journal:
Friday, 29 October-
Nye: “We’re in this together, Nicole.”
“Really, Dr. Nye, we’re not. I feel like I don’t have enough skin on my face. That the skin that is there isn’t mine. That even if it is, it should be on my hip, not my cheek. Is that how you feel?”
Later, I pull up the pictures from my Facebook, the Before, the comments, so many of them, all wishing me a speedy recovery. Recovery?
Ctrl + click gets you the Mac Word dictionary and “Recovery, n., 1. the return to normal health. . 2. The return to a normal state. . 3. The regaining of something lost or taken away.” The definition neglects to mention the maps, the ones that delineate the return trip to normal or the site of the sunken treasure.
A touch to my shoulder. Mom. “Honey, take a nap.” She tucks me in and strokes my hair. When I wake, she’s asleep next to me. Her eyelids are puffy. They will be puffier soon. Tomorrow, going away with Dad to lake house for weekend. Don’t really want to go. Yesterday, Jay rested his head on mine.
FORTY
The Recluse was quiet all that weekend. I pulled half a shift at BJ’s but mostly I faked like I was fighting a cold and slept during the day. When my father went to bed, my laptops came out. Angela and I had split the list of female students at the Hollows. Basically, we were on Facebook all the time, looking for Nicole-hate, not finding any. Late Sunday night/early Monday morning Angela buzzed me with a red alert text, a link somebody had posted to the fan page set up by Nicole’s well-wishers.
The page was crowded with thousands of comments and videos of Nicole, her pageant appearances, student council speeches, tennis matches, mash-up tributes cut to saccharin music. Angela found one video particularly interesting, a YouTube clip posted Friday night. It played through Mr. Sabbatini’s AP chem page. The post was untitled, but the poster was cryforhelp669, an amateur’s attempt at anonymity: 669 spelled out NOW on a phone keypad. Angela had backtracked the ID to Marisol Wood, the sophomore who confided to Nicole at the tennis club that her parents were splitting up.