Graveland: A Novel

by Alan Glynn

  “Like Christmas has come early.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve got to resubmit the book to publishers, Jimmy.” She watches an MTA bus glide by. “Do you still have an agent?”

  “No, but—”

  “I’ll talk to mine.”

  “Thanks. I just want to do some edits, a few days, and then—”

  “Yeah, let the momentum build. This story isn’t going away anytime soon.”

  Jimmy laughs. “You know what, Ellen, I’m supposed to be heading out to work in a few minutes, but how am I going to get through this shift without cracking something open, and preferably a bottle of champagne?”

  “Uh-uh, you save that for when I’m there.”

  She tells him about the Frank Bishop development. They discuss the overlap, and how it might mean they could end up working on the same story again.

  “For our sins,” Jimmy says.

  “Yeah.”

  “Fine by me, though.”

  “Yeah, me, too.” Ellen looks around. “Okay, Irish, you get your edits done, I’ll talk to my agent tomorrow, and we’ll meet up early next week.”

  She puts her phone away, breathes in a lungful of Amsterdam, and heads back inside.

  * * *

  It’s four thirty when he wakes definitively. Doesn’t mean he’s going to get up, but he certainly won’t be going back to sleep. That last little passage of dreamtime was enough to seal that deal—him and LBJ in a corridor somewhere, Johnson blocking the way, won’t let him get by, exhorting, cajoling, breathing in his face. “I’m tellin’ ya, son…”

  The reality was quite different, though, because Vaughan famously clashed with LBJ—had the temerity to defy the man—and then went to work for Barry Goldwater.

  It was in the summer of ’64.

  Famously?

  If that isn’t a relative term.

  Now that he’s sufficiently awake, yesterday comes flooding back to him in all its horror. First, the screaming, mostly from Meredith, who was all defensive and passive-aggressive, trying to say it didn’t mean anything, which if he hadn’t been in such physical pain by that point he would have laughed at. And then the dramatics, the bag packing and the flight from the apartment, ostensibly to save his “feelings,” but in reality because she knew damn well that if she stayed here, she’d end up—once the cat was out of the bag—becoming a virtual prisoner in the building. And it wasn’t long before said cat was out of the bag and roaming free, claws out. It was a few hours at most.

  Sometime late in the afternoon his phone started ringing, and it didn’t stop.

  He refused to take any calls.

  He also resisted turning on the TV for a while, but he eventually gave in. What he saw unfolding before him on the screen, and later on his computer in the study, was deeply traumatizing. He had never experienced anything like it before.

  It was his ultimate nightmare.

  Exposure.

  Every mention of the word Vaughan felt like a stab wound. Every photo they showed—and they were mostly from the archives—felt like a laceration. As the evening progressed, he also felt sicker and weaker. This was, presumably, the effect of his withdrawal from the medication, which in turn, presumably, was responsible for the gradual unmasking of his various underlying conditions. After a while, it became hard to tell them apart, these two forms of pain—one imposed from outside, one pulsating from within.

  Painkillers helped.

  But painkillers only help in the short term. In Vaughan’s experience, they usually ended up killing a lot more than just the pain. He tried Paul Blanford again, without success, so he now pretty much accepts that with all this media stuff going on he hasn’t a hope in hell anymore of continuing with the medication.

  He gets up at seven, and slowly makes his way to the bathroom.

  It hurts to piss now.

  He has a quick, awkward shower, using the handheld unit. He dries himself off and puts his robe back on.

  As he’s coming out of the bedroom, he realizes that he’s alone in the apartment.

  Mrs. R will be here shortly, as will his doctor. He dismissed his full-time nurse a couple of weeks ago. Didn’t see the point of having her. In the old days he used to employ a permanent domestic staff, but Meredith changed all of that.

  Clutching his side, which is really sore now for some reason, he walks along the hallway toward the kitchen.

  A few minutes later, as he’s preparing to make coffee, or trying to, he spots the remote control on the counter, and curses it.

  He holds out for about thirty seconds.

  When he flicks the TV on, the first image he sees, if only for a brief moment, is the exterior of his own apartment building. There are clearly reporters and photographers down there, but Billy the doorman is under strict instructions not to interact with them.

  It then cuts back to a studio and another panel of primped and preening morons. Mostly what they seem to be talking about is Meredith and that whole social scene she’s involved in. Despite his vested interest in this, Vaughan quickly grows restive and changes the channel.

  But it’s more of the same.

  On yet another channel, they’re showing a photo of Vaughan in a white linen suit and a Panama hat, standing next to poor Hank Rundle. They’re in front of an enormous construction site—it must be in the Middle East somewhere, one of their great engineering projects from the early seventies. It’s followed by an even older black-and-white shot of Vaughan’s father, William J., taken at the Stork Club with Lana Turner. After that—Jesus wept—there’s one of his grandfather’s funeral procession on Fifth Avenue from, what, 1938?

  Where’d they get their hands on that?

  Vaughan’s sense of invasion, of violation almost, is acute. How can this be relevant in any way? How can these people possibly justify this stuff?

  That’s why he had to take the steps he did with that young journalist. This thing with Meredith is temporary, and with any luck it’ll blow over and be forgotten, but not a book … not a book with goddamn chapter headings and footnotes …

  “Mr. Vaughan.”

  He turns around.

  It’s Mrs. R. He didn’t hear her coming in.

  “Good morning.”

  “Good … Mr. Vaughan, what … what are you doing?”

  “Nothing … I…”

  He looks at the counter, at the mess he’s made, spilled coffee beans, the grinder on its side.

  He got distracted by the TV.

  But that doesn’t explain the look on her face. He glances down and sees that his robe is open, and that he forgot to put his boxers back on after the shower.

  Damn.

  He then sees his reflection in one of the glass cabinets, tousled wisps of gray hair, two-day stubble.

  Pale as death.

  He stands there, not entirely unaware that several seconds have already passed and he hasn’t closed his robe yet.

  What is wrong with him?

  “I’m sorry,” he says, closing the robe, the room starting to spin slightly—a glimpse of Meredith up on the TV screen, eyes shining, lips ruby red.

  A kaleidoscope.

  He reaches out for the counter to steady himself, and starts coughing.

  “Mr. Vaughan?”

  It takes him a few moments to get it under control, but he does eventually, and when he looks down at the marble countertop, he sees that it is speckled with blood.

  * * *

  The call comes on Monday morning. Ellen is at her desk, keying in notes from her Atherton interviews.

  She reaches for the phone, her hello as distracted as they come.

  “Is this Ellen Dorsey?”

  “Yeah.”

  “My name is Detective Oscar Rayburn from the Seventy-seventh Precinct in Crown Heights in Brooklyn. Are you acquainted with a James Gilroy?”

  “Yes.” She sits up. “Is he okay?”

  “No, ma’am, I’m afraid he isn’t.” She tenses. “Mr. Gilroy was found dead i
n his apartment yesterday afternoon. We believe he took his own life.”

  “What? But that’s—” Her incredulity, instant and all-encompassing, prevents her from going on.

  “Ms. Dorsey?”

  “That’s … not possible. He was—” She wants to mention the champagne, how he talked about cracking open a bottle of champagne, the word exploding like a supernova in her brain—champagne, champagne—but she doesn’t, she can’t, and resorts instead to a dense, slow, loaded “Oh … my … God.”

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Dorsey.” He pauses. “How well did you know Mr. Gilroy?”

  “Not that well. We worked together. I’m a journalist, and so was he. We were colleagues, and friends, but…”

  She’s babbling.

  “The reason I called you, Ms. Dorsey, is because it appears the last person he spoke to on his cell phone was you.”

  “Yeah, on Thursday. Thursday evening.”

  “Can I ask what you guys talked about?”

  “Er…” Ellen pauses and swallows. She stares at a page of scribbled notes on the desk, her mind beginning to glaze over. Then something kicks in, some kind of professional survival mechanism, where gears shift and extra adrenaline is pumped into the system. She leans forward on the desk. “I’m sorry, Detective, did you say the Seventy-seventh Precinct? In Crown Heights?”

  “Yes, I—”

  “Are you there for the next while, the next hour or two? Because frankly I’d prefer to do this face-to-face.” She swallows again, and winces, as though there’s suddenly something toxic in the air. “I think I’m probably going to have as many questions as you have, if not more.”

  “That won’t be nec—”

  “Yes, it will.”

  They tussle over it for a bit, but Ellen’s determination wins out. She gets the impression that this case is only one of many on Oscar Rayburn’s roster, that he hadn’t figured on it needing anything more than a phone call, and that she has blindsided him, maybe even inconvenienced him.

  But what, she’s supposed to give a fuck?

  It’s his job.

  She puts the phone down, and the next short while, the time between ending the conversation with Rayburn and getting into the back of a cab on Columbus Avenue, goes by in a blur—no coherent thoughts, just bathroom, jacket, notebook, phone, keys, stairs, street. Sitting in the cab, though, city flickering past, is a different story. Here the thoughts are all too coherent, and they revolve around a single, awful word, suicide—in most cases awful for the obvious reason, in a certain few cases awful for a less obvious one. In these few cases, the victim is usually a journalist, or a whistleblower, or a troublemaker of one kind or another. In these few cases, it’s suicide as a weapon.

  But, of course, in these few cases it’s not suicide at all.

  And that’s her most coherent thought, the one that’s keeping others at bay, the one that’s keeping emotion at bay.

  Or not.

  She tightens her fist into a ball, squeezes it hard. It doesn’t work. She starts crying.

  The little bastard. He stormed into her life one afternoon, out of the blue, walked into her apartment, sat down, and started talking, unspooling this incredible web of intrigue and malfeasance, of corruption and venality. He was almost ten years younger than she was, but he had none of the arrogance or sense of entitlement you often get with guys that age, journalists that age, who think the world owes them an era-defining scoop, and are themselves defined, chiefly, by impatience. He wanted her help, and he was respectful, because all he really wanted was to make sense of what he had in front of him and to write it up.

  They were thrown together by necessity—she had the experience and connections, and he had the story—but people she knew, people in the business, were shocked to find that the notoriously uncooperative and prickly Ellen Dorsey was actually collaborating with someone.

  It was easy, though.

  Because the guy was basically a sweetheart. He was good-looking, and kind of cute, but there was never anything between them. He felt like a really smart kid brother that she could boss around and—

  She was going to say protect.

  But that could never be part of the equation, not in this job. She’s not so sentimental as to think that that’s why she’s crying.

  She’s crying because she liked him and respected him, and now he’s dead.

  She sniffles and gets out a tissue. Blows her nose, sighs, says fuck a few times under her breath.

  Looks around.

  Driver taking in the show, surreptitiously, through the rearview.

  She goes back to her most coherent thought.

  Why would Jimmy Gilroy want to kill himself? No discernible reason. Plus, he was talking about cracking open a bottle of champagne and celebrating. Why would someone else want to kill Jimmy Gilroy? For a very discernible reason. Plus, he’d already been threatened.

  There’s a depressing, all too familiar pattern here. She could list off other cases, Danny Casolaro, Steve Kangas, Gary Webb, half a dozen more. She doesn’t know if these people were murdered or not, but the official line on each of them is the same—they were depressed, they drank too much, life closed in on them … nothing to see here, please move along. Meanwhile, relatives are baffled, and files go missing, and legitimate lines of journalistic inquiry dry up.

  Thing is, it’s an airtight method, it’s foolproof, because anyone who cries foul can easily be dismissed as a conspiracy theorist … and a fool.

  And Ellen doesn’t know. She’s ambivalent. Believing isn’t enough, and people do commit suicide.

  She looks out the window, the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge rippling past in the sunlight.

  She knows where Barstool Charlie would stand, and that always gives her pause. But at the same time she has to steel herself here, because even from this distance, she can feel it coming, feel it in her bones …

  The dreaded official line.

  It comes sooner than expected, and not from Detective Oscar Rayburn, either.

  When she gets to the Seventy-seventh Precinct, she announces herself, and is asked to sit in the waiting area. She takes her phone out and does a quick Internet trawl. To her surprise, there are already several reports of Gilroy’s death. Unsurprisingly, there’s a uniform, sort of planted feel to them. James Gilroy, the journalist who broke the Senator John Rundle story a couple of years back, has been found dead in his Brooklyn apartment, a bullet to the head, suspected suicide … sources say he’d been depressed, and drinking, that his career had gone off the rails …

  Sources?

  She deflates in her hard plastic chair.

  Poor Jimmy.

  Ellen’s interview with Rayburn doesn’t help.

  He’s distracted and uninterested. Mid-forties, heavyset, sad and unhealthy-looking. Probably underpaid and overworked. When he asks his question again and she gives him an edited version of what they spoke about, adding that Jimmy was happy and untroubled and looking to the future with real enthusiasm … he barely reacts.

  Ellen asks him about the weapon used, about ballistics and positioning. He answers each question, without looking at her, by consulting pages and folders on his desk.

  She asks him about the state of Jimmy’s apartment, about his computer or laptop.

  Rayburn looks up at her, and then back at his pages. He flicks through them, reads something. Checks another page. Then he looks at her again, and shakes his head. “He didn’t have a computer.”

  “What the—” Ellen stops and composes herself. “He didn’t have one, or you didn’t find one in the apartment, because you people—”

  Rayburn raises an index finger. “Steady, ma’am.”

  “Detective, he was a single male, thirty years old, he was a journalist. Are you seriously telling me he didn’t have a computer? How did he send e-mails?”

  Rayburn shrugs.

  “And I’ll tell you something else, Detective. It’s a hell of a lot less likely that he owned a gun.”

&n
bsp; Rayburn shuffles through a few papers and then holds something up. “State of New York,” he says wearily. “License to own a handgun, premises only.”

  Ellen nods, her weariness matching his.

  She asks about who found him, and about next of kin.

  Seems he has a cousin who lives in Queens. And yes, there’ll be an autopsy. Funeral arrangements aren’t yet known.

  Ellen gets the cousin’s number.

  Rayburn then indicates that time’s up, that he’s really swamped here.

  He stands up. She stands up, too.

  They shake hands, and she leaves.

  * * *

  In bed, propped up with pillows, Vaughan clicks his way through the pages of the document. He catches words, phrases, names especially, but he can’t focus enough to read anymore, not properly. A sentence or two at a time is about all he can manage.

  Nevertheless, it’s infuriating—the idea of some little shit snooping around his affairs like that, talking to people, asking elaborate questions, looking up archives, scrolling down through endless sheets of microfiche in some musty old library basement.

  Like a rat.

  On a treadmill.

  And of course he’s Irish.

  Vaughan doesn’t have a great history with the Irish. Got held at gunpoint once in Dublin, on a construction site, on the forty-eighth floor of a new build, albeit by an extremely attractive young woman.

  The file arrived this morning as an e-mail attachment, sent by Beth Overmyer.

  House of Vaughan.

  He nearly got sick.

  Sicker than he already is.

  He’s been in bed since Friday, hooked up to drips and machinery. He refused to go to the hospital. His doctor argued for it, harangued him about it, but Vaughan resisted. What’s the point of having fifteen billion dollars if you can’t tell your doctor to go fuck himself?

  He’s also refusing to see visitors, even though they’re apparently lining up outside.

  Who are these people, anyway, but ghosts? Some of them, most of them, not even born when he was in his prime.

  He looks out over the room, the machines beeping, the BP values fluctuating.