The Guest Room

by Chris Bohjalian

  She seemed to think about this, and slowly her body hunched over, her arms now wrapped around her chest—not in defiance, but as if she were ensconced in a straitjacket. She was still crying.

  “That’s the truth?” she asked.

  “That’s the truth. Absolutely.”

  She wiped her eyes, and he went to her. He tried again to wrap an arm around her shoulders, and this time she let him. Her body relaxed into his. He noted that she was wearing some pretty sultry pantyhose, and his mind reeled at the idea that he could even think about having sex with her right now.

  …

  At precisely eight-thirty that morning, Richard called a lawyer from his mother-in-law’s guest bedroom. He was beyond tired, but his hangover was responding to the Advil and the gallons of water he had been drinking; he no longer worried that the excruciating spikes of pain behind his eyes were going to cause him to wilt like a flower in a fast-motion film—to just collapse against a door or a wall with his head in his hands. He rang the fellow who had drawn up Kristin’s and his wills and set up their trust, relieved that he had the attorney’s home number on his cell phone and that the guy actually picked up. He was pretty sure that Bill O’Connell knew next to nothing about criminal law and probably wouldn’t end up representing him—if, please, no, he actually needed representation—but he had to begin somewhere. He was glad now that the attorney was male. The last thing he wanted to do was explain to a woman what happened last night. And, as he expected, Bill told Richard that he wasn’t his man. But the firm did have a couple of people who could help him, one who was indeed female, and one who was male. Immediately Richard asked for the home phone of the attorney who was male, but Bill surprised him.

  “I think you should call Dina. Sam is very, very good, but Dina is a lot smarter than me—and probably, based on what went on in your home last night, a lot smarter than you. She has to be the smartest person I know. And if you ever do need her as a face—in depositions or in court—it would be great to have a woman.”

  “I’d really prefer a man, Bill.”

  “Get over it. Sam is terrific—he really is. But in this case, you’ll be a lot better off with Dina.”

  He swallowed hard. He thought of his wife and his daughter. He had to be smart about this. He took down Dina’s number.

  “One more thing,” Bill said.

  “Sure.”

  “Don’t talk to reporters. If you get a call and don’t recognize or can’t see the number, don’t pick up.”

  “Reporters,” he murmured, repeating the single word to himself. He recalled what the detective had said in his living room. “Fuck.”

  “Yup. Be smart about that, too. Don’t say anything. Eventually they will find you. It’s their job. When you don’t take their calls, they might come to your house. They might come to the building where you work. So postpone the inevitable. By the time they corner you, you can just send them to Dina.”

  He thought again of Kristin and Melissa, this time imagining what they were going to read about him: his looming public mortification. He wanted to crawl into the bed on which he was sitting and pull the covers over his head. He really did need to sleep. Almost desperately. But he couldn’t close his eyes. Not yet, anyway. As soon as he said good-bye to Bill, he called Dina. He must have sounded so pitiable, so pathetically in need, that she agreed to meet him in ninety minutes in her office in midtown. He would have used that time to nap, but he had to shower and shave; he needed to wash last night from his body.

  …

  In his mother-in-law’s elevator, he realized that he was murmuring to himself. He shook his head and told himself he was doing this only because he was overwrought and he was alone. He was in no danger of becoming a street mumbler.

  But he did recall how strangely sensitive he became on airplanes, especially when he was traveling alone on business. Movies seemed sadder, novels more poignant. He recalled watching a comedy—a wistful little bauble about a pair of aging lovers—he had seen a few months earlier with Kristin, and this time having to dab discreetly at the edge of his eyes. Another time, about fifteen minutes after takeoff, he had pulled a werewolf novel from his bag and started to read. When the werewolf was killed, he had put the book down and found himself…unmoored. Wow, he remembered thinking, you’re losing it over a fictional dead werewolf? Seriously? He considered whether he was emotionally stunted.

  But maybe it was merely his lack of control on an airplane—every passenger’s lack of control on an airplane. A subconscious fear of flying. The reality that flights are often about beginnings and endings.

  Then again, perhaps it was just the loneliness—the being alone.

  Outside his mother-in-law’s building he stood for a moment on the curb. This, he decided, was being alone. It dwarfed the loneliness that could besiege a person at thirty-five thousand feet. He was as alone as he’d ever been in his life.

  He shook his head. He gathered himself. He hailed a cab.

  …

  Even though it was a Saturday morning and he was interrupting her weekend, Richard was surprised to see that Dina Renzi was wearing blue jeans, a flannel shirt, and pink and black Keds. But her raincoat was Burberry and her attaché was a Bottega—he knew the weave from the women who carried them in his office—with buttery soft cinnamon-colored leather. He guessed that she was his age, her hair a yellow reminiscent of straw. It was a darker blond than that of the girl who had danced at the party, fucked his younger brother, and then epoxied herself to the back of one of the men who had brought her, stabbing him over and over with a kitchen knife. This morning the lawyer had pulled her hair back into a ponytail; he imagined it snaking its way through the half-moon hole in the back of a ball cap when she wasn’t at work, just the way Kristin did with her hair whenever they took in a game at Yankee Stadium. It was a fashion statement that Richard found wholesome and sexy at once. She had two rings on the ring finger of her left hand, both with serious rocks in them.

  The firm rented the western half of the nineteenth floor of a building on Park, six blocks north of Grand Central. There were a few younger lawyers working in the office that Saturday, too, also in jeans; two were in one of the firm’s conference rooms, the magnificent ash table awash in documents and legal pads, and a third was in his windowless, but still nicely appointed, office.

  For what Richard guessed was the fourth time in the last ten hours, he told someone what had occurred. Each time he did, he found himself adding some details while omitting others. He would remember a different moment, a different sensation, a different facial expression. With this lawyer, he kept seeing the faces of the two dead men. He recalled the pudgy hands of the thug—and now they were thugs in his mind, not bodyguards or handlers or managers—who had been shot in the front hall. He thought of the thick gold chain around the neck of the one who had bled out on his living room floor, and how it had sunk partway into the crimson runnel carved into his throat. He was reminded of how he and the other men had cowered during the violence. Not a one had tried to save the poor bastard.

  When he had finished, he asked her the question that had been gnawing at him all morning long: “Do you think I am in actual legal trouble?”

  “No. At least not criminally. And I really don’t see any civil exposure. You’re positive there are no videos, correct? No photos?”

  “Well, pretty positive. All of the guys were told to keep their phones in their pants.”

  “Pity they didn’t keep everything there. What is your wife thinking?”

  “She is thinking I am despicable. As, I guess, I am.”

  “Is she going to leave you?”

  “No. I don’t believe she will.”

  “Your marriage will be okay?”

  “Yes. I love her. She knows I love her. I believe our marriage will be fine.”

  “How do you think Franklin McCoy is going to respond? My impression is that you guys are not exactly the wolves of Wall Street.”

  “We are pretty cons
ervative. And a lot of our clients are as conservative as we are. I’m a managing director. I work in mergers and acquisitions.”

  “So, what will your bosses think?”

  “Of me? Of the party?”

  “Either. I was thinking of the party and of the publicity that’s coming. The deaths of two people in your living room and your front hall; the Dionysian tone of the whole affair.”

  “Obviously, they won’t be happy.”

  “I assume your clients won’t be either.”

  “No.”

  “But no one’s going to fire you?”

  “I don’t think so.” He thought of the company’s CFO. He thought of his direct boss, a guy a few years his senior named Peter Fitzgerald. Peter was the head of mergers and acquisitions, a job Richard knew that he was in line for someday. The fellow was a great-grandson of one of the firm’s two co-founders, Alistair Franklin. He was the sort of boyish, ageless preppie who, despite being somewhere in his mid-forties, looked like a groomsman at a Brick Church wedding—and the most priggish one at that. He was, it seemed to Richard, tragically humorless—and likely to be the firm’s CFO eventually. Richard believed that he and Fitzgerald had an amicable relationship, though not an especially close one. They were, alas, never going to be friends.

  “Well,” Dina said, “that’s another issue you should be aware of: being fired.”

  “Without cause,” he added.

  “Or with.”

  He tried to look stoic. “I see.”

  “I suppose you have a contract with the bank.”

  “I do.”

  “Send it to me.”

  “I will.”

  Dina was just starting to elaborate on the employment land mines that were now in the ground before him when his cell phone rang. He pulled it from his suit pocket and saw a number he didn’t recognize. He let it ring and the call went to voice mail. When the screen showed that he had a message, he pushed “speaker” and put the phone down on Dina’s desk.

  “Mr. Chapman, hi. Cynthia Prescott here. I’m with the New York Post. You probably know why I’m calling and I am sorry to bother you.” She left her number and asked him to call her back.

  “How the hell did she get my cell phone number?” he asked Dina.

  “Maybe from someone at the party. Maybe not. There are lots of sites now where you can look up a cell number.”

  “Really?”

  She nodded.

  “Can you call her back for me?” he asked. “Bill told me it would be best if you spoke to the reporters.”

  “I will. But I see no reason to call her back right now. You haven’t been charged with a crime and probably won’t be. You said the girls may have looked barely postpubertal, but—”

  “I said they looked young, but they were definitely of age.”

  “I understand. That’s where I was going. That was going to be my point.”

  “Don’t I want my side out there?”

  She raised an eyebrow and for the first time gazed at him with judgment in her eyes. “And precisely what is your side, Richard?”

  He sat there thinking for a moment. He saw the girl Alexandra on the guest room bed, her smile balancing longing and desire without regret. He saw her once more reaching out to him.

  He realized that he had absolutely nothing to say.

  …

  As Richard was leaving Dina’s office, he recalled how he had told the detectives last night that he thought the blond girl—the one who was calling herself Sonja—had killed both of the bodyguards. Abductors. Whatever. But he really had no idea who had fired the handgun. He hadn’t seen it. None of the men had.

  Just now he told Dina Renzi the same thing: he thought the blonde had killed both of the Russians, the first with that knife and the second with the pistol she had pulled from beneath the dying thug’s blazer.

  And this was, more or less, what he had told Kristin had happened—though when he thought back on his conversation with his wife, most of his focus had been on what he had done (or not done) with the girl with the raven-dark hair.

  He knew the other men who had been at the party were not so sure. Some, in fact, insisted that it had to have been Alexandra who had shot the dude in the front hallway. Chuck Alcott said so. Eric did, too. They both assumed it was her. After all, they recalled hearing the gunshots no more than a second or two after the blonde had left the living room. Somehow Alexandra must have wrestled the second gun from beneath the other guy’s jacket and shot him. There had even been some debate about how close to the chest the gun must have been when it was discharged. Blowback. That was the word one of the detectives had used. Blowback. How much of the bodyguard’s heart or lungs or bone was up the barrel of the gun? Then he’d made a passing remark about the possibility of powder and soot on the shirt. Fabric in the wound. Someone would check, he assured them.

  But, the truth was, all of the men from the party really knew nothing. Or, perhaps, next to nothing. Philip’s friends agreed that everything had happened so fast—so quickly—that it was hard to be positive about anything. Certainly none of the men had asked the girls for more details when they’d been getting dressed.

  And, unfortunately, both guns were gone. And without them and without an actual witness, it was impossible to say who had twice pulled the trigger.

  …

  Late that morning, a few minutes before Kristin and Melissa were going to leave the apartment for lunch and the matinee, Philip’s fiancée called. Kristin was sitting on the living room carpet with Melissa, helping her study for a quiz the child had on Monday about prime and composite numbers. When she saw on her phone that Nicole was on the line, she kissed Melissa on the top of her head and adjourned to the kitchen so she could speak to Nicole in private.

  “I’m in shock,” Nicole said, her voice quavering and hushed. “There must have been an hour after Philip told me what happened when I couldn’t…I couldn’t stop crying.” Nicole was soft-spoken and gentle and kind; she volunteered Tuesday afternoons at BARC—the Brooklyn Animal Resource Coalition—and spent another few hours on Thursday mornings at the assisted living facility where her grandmother was slipping into the confused murk of Alzheimer’s, visiting the woman and her friends and helping them paint and play with clay. She was an immensely talented graphic designer, and while her business wasn’t large, it was the right size for her; she could work from her home and visit the elderly and the cats that made her happy. She was shy and she was sweet, and neither Richard nor Kristin could understand what in the name of God she saw in Philip. They didn’t know Nicole well, but they were confident she was way too good for Richard’s younger brother.

  “I know,” Kristin agreed. “I know…” She wanted to be careful about what she said; she believed that Philip had fucked one of the girls (both, for all she knew), because Richard had told her. But she had no idea whether Philip had confessed this to Nicole.

  “People were killed,” Nicole continued. “I understand those two men might have been criminals. But they’re dead now. They’re gone. I mean, maybe they had wives or kids. They had moms. They had dads. And they’re gone. And those women who killed them?”

  “Go on,” said Kristin. Nicole’s voice had trailed off before she had answered her own question.

  “Whatever happened to them before they murdered those men must have been unspeakable. It must have been horrible. Imagine being so angry or so scared that you could kill people like that.”

  Kristin sat down in one of the kitchen chairs. Ever since Richard had said something about how the girls may have been held in their jobs against their will—how they may have been kidnapped—her feelings toward them had been altered ever so slightly. And even if they hadn’t been abducted and coerced into the work, the truth was that no one becomes a prostitute because she wants to. It’s always the occupation of last resort. You go there because you need money for food or drugs or (the media’s favorite explanation, because it suggested simultaneously that the girls were cl
ean and college was too expensive) tuition. And so she understood Nicole’s empathy. But this was still her house that had been soiled. This was her marriage that had been desecrated. In her mind, she saw her husband naked with one of the prostitutes in the guest room. “I agree,” she said after a moment. It was just so hard to reconcile Richard with a girl like that.

  But then Nicole surprised her by asking rhetorically, “And how could those guys do this to us? How could Richard do it? How could Philip? All the men who were there? I mean, I figured there might be a stripper. I didn’t ask. But I figured since it was going to be at your house, it would be harmless. They weren’t even going to a strip club. They were going to…they were going to Westchester, for God’s sake.”

  “What did Philip tell you?” she asked finally. She simply couldn’t resist.

  “He wasn’t going to tell me anything.”

  “Probably not.”

  “He only told me what really happened because it was so clear he was lying.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “He confessed. He confessed that he had sex with one of the girls. He actually thought it would make me feel better when he reassured me that he’d used a condom. Some of the men didn’t.”

  “Have you seen him? Or did you two just talk on the phone?”

  “I can’t bear to see him. I just can’t.”

  “I understand.”

  “Tell me, how bad does your house look? How awful?”

  “I have no idea. It’s a crime scene. I’m not allowed to go home.”

  “A crime scene? Oh, God, that’s terrible.”

  “Yup.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m at my mother’s—in the city.”

  “How mad are you—at Richard?”

  “I’m mad. I’m hurt. As you said, I just don’t see how he could do this to us. To our family.”

  “That’s how I feel, too,” Nicole agreed. Then: “Why do you think they did it? Had sex with those girls?”

  “Richard didn’t.”

  “He didn’t?”

  “No,” she said, though she realized instantly both that Philip had told Nicole his brother was equally guilty and that it was possible Richard had lied to her. Maybe he had fucked the girl he had brought to the guest room. But she wanted to believe her husband, because in the shipwreck that was her life this weekend, that was the only debris floating by she could latch onto. “He went upstairs with one, but he…he resisted her.”