by Joshua Corin
“Mr. Solo, we can come back with a warrant.”
“At which point I will hand over our list. Among the qualities our clients treasure in us is discretion. Force us and we will comply. We are good corporate citizens.”
Having concluded his brief speech, Aaron Solo shut his mouth. He became a statue.
The meeting, it seemed, was over.
The two detectives stood up. They took turns shaking Aaron Solo’s hand. Xana was the last to say good-bye. This was by design. She briefly fondled one of the succulent’s leaves. It was real. Damn it.
But she’d kept her word, insomuch as she hadn’t said a word. Truth be told, she didn’t have any questions for Aaron Solo. He was the wrong man to ask, if only because he was the man the company had put forward to meet the police. This might not even have been his office. The lack of any personal items was an oddity. At the moment, Aaron Solo was nothing but a flag flapping loudly in the wind, and one didn’t sink a battleship by attacking its flag.
In the elevator, Konquist and Chau acknowledged similar suspicions.
“I don’t like puppet shows,” stated Chau.
“I like ’em,” added Konquist, “but only when they’re advertised.”
“May the woman talk now,” asked Xana, “or does she have to remain quiet?”
Neither detective replied.
She took their silence as consent.
“We got a couple avenues to explore. There’s the Port-au-Prince angle. We need to find out everything we can about this priest, Father Dacy. We don’t even have a motive yet, do we? You said Phillip Wilkerson is a mortgage broker out of Oregon. What’s his connection to a height-impaired padre from Haiti? Next, we—”
“There is no ‘we,’ Miss Marx.”
“Shh, I’m talking. Next we find out who tipped Wilkerson off in the first place. Someone gave him that list. I want to speak with the witnesses.”
“Miss Marx—”
“Detective Chau, for almost thirty years, I did exactly this, and I was very, very good at my job.”
“And if you were still an FBI agent, we’d welcome you with open arms.”
“Or at least have no choice in the matter,” amended Konquist.
“But…”
The elevator doors opened. They strolled silently through the lobby, past the sleeping guard, and into the parking garage.
“But,” continued Chau, “you’re a civilian now. And that makes you a liability.”
“If by that, you mean vulnerable, you’re sure as hell correct. Someone out there wants to hurt me. Now, I could stand here and pretend to be tough and tell you that I’m not scared, but that would be bullshit, and I think we all have had our fill of bullshit for this morning. I’d feel a lot safer if I were with you.”
Chau eyeballed her, considered her request.
Konquist, meanwhile, eyeballed his own shoes. He didn’t buy for one second that this woman was genuinely fearful for her life. Marx was playing on their instincts to protect her. It was more bullshit…but at least it was the kind of bullshit he could get behind. His partnership with Victor Chau had worked these past seventeen months out of mutual unspoken respect. If Chau really didn’t want Marx to ride along, Konquist, despite his seniority, despite his inclination to draw water from any helpful well, wasn’t going to fight him on it. They would get a squad car posted outside her apartment and that would be that. However…
“We’ll pay a visit to the McCormicks,” Chau finally relented. “You can ask them whatever you want to ask them. But that’s the extent of it. We don’t need a consultant, Miss Marx. Especially not one whose objectivity is compromised. Am I understood?”
As it turned out, the McCormicks were no longer at the Marriott but instead had been moved to a motel by the airport called the Airport Motel. The Airport Motel was the kind of establishment that boasted on its electric roadside sign that all rooms had HBO, as if HBO were a rare and valuable commodity. All rooms faced out to the parking lot. Scott and Crystal were on the first level. Room 104. The two cops and Xanadu had to navigate through the front office to access the hallway. They also could have simply climbed over the hallway’s four-foot-high metal railing, but why risk tetanus? As they passed, the boy behind the desk didn’t look up from his phone. His eyebrow was pierced with a clothespin and his hair was bleached bone white.
“I’ve been here before,” Xana muttered, and she had. Almost ten years ago now. A drug- smuggling case. Back then, the boy behind the desk had been a girl and her septum had been pierced and her hair had been bound in pigtails. But the smell was the same. Lysol with a hint of enchiladas.
They proceeded to Room 104. Detective Chau knocked twice.
“So,” remarked Xana, looking around, “this is their honeymoon, huh?”
“It’s bad luck is all it is. By this time Sunday, they’ll be strolling hand in hand under the Arc de Triomphe.”
Konquist added, “The wife and me, when we went on our honeymoon, we went to the Grand Canyon, and we stayed in a place like this. It was all we could afford. We had a scorpion in our shower.”
“Oh nice. Free pet.”
Rather than knock again, Detective Chau walked to the front desk to obtain a key.
“Maybe they’re asleep,” suggested Konquist. “It’s not like they’ve got anywhere around here they can go.”
“They didn’t rent a car?”
“Not to the best of my knowledge.”
Detective Chau returned with the key. He opened the door.
“Hello?” he called.
The daylight illuminated a room entirely bereft of occupation. No carry-on bags. No clothes. No phones plugged into sockets. The TV was off. The lights were off.
It was as if Scott and Crystal McCormick had never been there at all.
Chapter 11
“It is with great sadness…it is with enormous sadness that…it is with monumental sadness that I…oh damn it…” Ross Berman pounded a fist against the porcelain of the bathroom sink. His eyes were still red from crying. His assistant had recommended eye drops, but no, he had to choose this time to ignore her. This time, this hour, any moment now—when he would emerge from the bathroom and reenter the ballroom and cross to the stage and stand behind the podium and address seventy-five immaculately dressed millionaires, none of whom had come to hear him speak.
No, the luncheon keynote was meant to be delivered by Phillip Wilkerson. These seventy-five immaculately dressed millionaires traveled across the continent to listen to the words of wisdom of a fellow traveler, and Ross Berman was certainly not that. Phillip Wilkerson ran the housing division of the largest brokerage firm in the Pacific Northwest. Ross Berman operated a small local charity here in Atlanta, Georgia. Phillip Wilkerson had flown here on a private jet. Ross Berman had taken MARTA, the city’s erstwhile public transit.
Then again, Phillip Wilkerson was dead. Ross Berman was not.
Phillip Wilkerson was dead. The very thought of this very fact once again flooded Ross’s green eyes into lakes. How was it possible? How was any of it possible? How could someone whom Ross had known since kindergarten, someone with whom he had chatted, either in person or by phone, at least once a week for decades, how could the closest thing that Ross Berman had on this earth to a brother, be dead?
Phillip had known when and where the confrontation would occur. He’d even had a gun. Ross himself had made sure of all these things. How had everything gone so wrong?
He cleared his throat, took a breath, and tried again.
“Ladies and gentlemen, it is with deepest sadness that I…announce to you…share with you the information…confirm what many of you might already have…because it happened in this fucking hotel.”
A hotel employee entered the bathroom. Stood two sinks away. Rinsed his hands under the automatic faucet. He wore a college ring, a fraternal ring, chunky, Greek letters in gold. He whistled tunelessly. Ran his wet fingers through his close-cropped hair. Dried his wet fingers under the blower. Gave him
self a final hey-there to his reflection. Left the bathroom.
This man was alive and Phillip Wilkerson was dead.
Not for the first time in his life, Ross Berman was left speechless, helpless, paralyzed at the injustice of the world. He vented about it to his therapist and he vented about it online—thank God for the anonymity of message boards—but he still saw, day to day, the cold unfairness of the universe and it was enough to make him…to make him…well, that was the problem. It overwhelmed him. It left him crippled. There was just so much of it! In the wealthiest country in the history of civilization, adults and children were still dying of hunger or preventable illnesses both physical and mental but left untreated and…and…
The message boards had guaranteed anonymity, but it was through his rants on the message boards that he first appeared on the radar of the Serendipity Group. Or at least that’s what he assumed. But then one afternoon, during one of his daily lunchtime walks through Piedmont Park, really the only time in the day that provided Ross with a semblance of tranquillity, a female jogger passed him to his right. Blond, petite, wire-rim specs. His age. And she had smiled at him as she passed and that…that had been so…jarring. She had continued on her way, probably forgetting all about him, but he hadn’t forgotten about her, and the next day, during his lunchtime constitutional, she appeared again. This time, she waved.
The third day, she actually said hi.
The fourth day, he actually said hi back.
The fifth day, she stopped to tie her shoe and started up a conversation. Her name was Jessabelle Rothstein. She was the single mother of two exasperating, exhilarating kids. Twins, even. She worked with her ex-husband for a company they built from the ground up and which did…something? Her favorite color was fuchsia, her favorite band was the Indigo Girls—whom she had seen in concert seventeen times—and her favorite beverage at Starbucks was a tall iced caffè mocha with a shot of caramel. She followed this up with, “Want to buy me one?”
And how could Ross say no? He could literally count the times that a woman had ever flirted with him. He once justified it to his therapist with the argument that Mother Teresa had never needed romantic companionship, but afterward he apologized for implying that he deserved mention in the same sentence as Mother Teresa. And so Ross had walked with Jessabelle Rothstein, that day clad in a canary-yellow jumpsuit, to the Starbucks in the park and he purchased two iced caffè mochas—with a shot of caramel each—from the bored barista, and then they’d adjourned to a table outside in the delightful April sun.
The sixth and seventh days were the weekend. It was the longest weekend of Ross’s life. He had never been good at waiting. Perhaps this was why he had for all these years sublimated his own personal desires. He made a note to ask his therapist on Tuesday.
On Monday, the eighth day, after another chat followed by another trip to Starbucks, Jessabelle had asked Ross about his childhood. And rather than clamming up or changing the subject, he’d told her the truth. He told her about the bullying, about the teasing, about the beatings he had received in the daytime from his classmates and then in the nighttime from his uncle. He told her about his friend Phillip, the only one of the cool kids who ever stood up for him.
“But it wasn’t like a movie,” Ross had explained, a sheepish grin on his lips. “Just because one of the cool kids stood up for me, the others still did whatever they wanted. They just waited until he wasn’t around.”
“Children can be the meanest creatures on this planet. They really can.”
And then she’d reached across the table and soothingly rubbed the top of his hand with the bottom of her right index finger.
It wasn’t until the following Monday, their fifteenth day, that Jessabelle had asked for names.
“Who was the worst of them?” she’d asked him. “The ones who picked on you…was there anyone who went further than the rest? Every group of kids has its resident sadist.”
“Walker Berno.” Just saying the name made Ross’s heart tremble in fear. “He was always there. Always behind me. Berman, Berno. His specialty was wet willies. Do you know what that is? It’s when you lick your finger, get it really wet with your spit, and then jab it into someone’s ear.”
“That’s disgusting.”
“He popularized…I can’t believe I’m telling you this…he popularized this nickname people called me.”
“What was it?”
“You know the movie Back to the Future? You know Michael J. Fox’s father, the way his hair is all flat and dark and his face is, like, seventy-five percent nose, and he’s just a real doofus, and I guess I looked like that…I know I looked like that…and one day in eighth grade, in gym class—because of course in gym class—Walker called me ‘McFly.’ You know, as in ‘hey, McFly!’ and everybody laughed and the nickname stuck for the next five years of my life.”
“Oh, Ross…”
“In ninth grade—this was the worst thing, probably—in ninth grade, in homeroom, Walker pulled out my chair just before I sat down and I fell on the floor and broke my coccyx. I had to be in a brace for six weeks. It made the local news. And when I finally came back to school, I thought he’d see what he’d done and he’d apologize, but he just cracked jokes.”
“He didn’t get punished?”
“Oh sure. He got detention, I think. I don’t know. He played on our school’s baseball team. Another time, while waiting for the bus, he threw a rock at my head. Just because. Everybody saw him do it. Nobody stopped him. A few people laughed.”
“Please tell me that karma exists and he got run over by a Zamboni.”
“Hah. No. Maybe. Who knows. I haven’t seen Walker Berno since graduation.”
“And if you ran into him now?”
“Like, what would I say to him?”
“Would you kick his ass?”
Ross shrugged. “That was all a long time ago.”
“Everybody needs closure.”
But then she let the subject slide and they segued to a funny-sad conversation about the once-cute bad habits her two kids seemed determined to keep. The older twin just loved to adjust his junk in public. Every few minutes. Was that normal? And the younger twin had discovered that he could annoy the four-year-old by coughing in his face.
And for the first time in his life, Ross wanted kids.
He also wanted to see more of Jessabelle—at night, perhaps—but he also didn’t want to ruin this amazing thing they had. So he did what he always did when faced with a dilemma. He called his old pal Phillip.
“So you want to know how to close the deal. Well, I’m proud of you, bro. This is an historic moment. So is she cute?”
Phillip then proceeded to encourage Ross to be confident, which had the same likelihood of success as if he’d encouraged Ross to be a spaceship, but it turned out Ross had a few days to mull it over due to rain. When he finally saw Jessabelle again for the sixteenth time, it was Friday. She told him she’d missed him. They adjourned for coffee. They sat with their drinks at an inside table. The skies were still ominously gray.
“There’s something I want to ask you,” said Ross.
“Ask away.”
“OK. So this has never happened to me. This. The whole meeting strangers thing. I’ve been to bars but I always drank alone. Nobody ever approached me, and I never approached anybody, and whatever. I don’t believe in Fate. I didn’t believe in Fate. And I know it’s only been a few weeks. I’m aware of…the last thing I want to do is scare you away. But I like you, Jessabelle. I like you. And I guess what I want to ask you is…and forgive me if I sound like I’m a teenager…do you like me too?”
She smiled. She put down her cup. She spoke. This is what she said:
“What time do you have to be back at work?”
“It’s not…I mean, it’s not like there’s a designated time that I have to be back…”
“Good. That’s good. There’s something I want to show you.”
At which point she led him to he
r car—her car!—and he followed through a light drizzle and a wind from the west and thank God for the drizzle and the wind or Ross would have been convinced he was in that moment inhabiting a fantasy, and Jessabelle smiled back at him with her wire-framed eyes and her blond hair was bound in a ponytail and Ross followed her to her vintage VW Bug and—
Chapter 12
But enough about the past. The past was useless. Ross had a speech to give. A eulogy. Seventy-five immaculately dressed millionaires had flown across the continent to hear from a man they knew only from the business section of Forbes and instead they would meet Ross Berman, who had never read Forbes in his life and in fact held certain prejudices against people who did, whose entire wardrobe and eyeglasses and haircut were purchased at the Walmart down the block from his 550-square-foot studio apartment.
Still, hadn’t it been his idea to have all profits from the annual conference fund his charity? So what if it had been a cover just to get his buddy Phillip in the right place at the right time to satisfy the Serenity Group? He was, in many ways, responsible for this gathering of capitalist thugs. His name was in the program.
Ross checked his waist. Was his shirt tucked in his belt like it had been this morning? No. Good. How about his tie? Was the knot tight? Not especially, but it wasn’t the baby’s fist it had been when he’d first tied it. Were all his shirt buttons buttoned? Yes. Were his shoes tied? No. He bent down. Now were his shoes tied? Yes.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said with clearer confidence. The restroom echoed his remarks among the several thousand tiles.
He headed out to the ballroom. The seventy-five millionaires were nearing the end of their main course. Servers flitted from table to table like hornets. The luncheon’s master of ceremonies, quirky stand-up comedienne ingénue Ashlee Katz, was seated near the front. Ross could have just as easily followed the sound of raucous laughter. Ashlee also was one of the few other people in the room who knew that the guest of honor was not merely running late. As Ross approached her table, he nodded as subtly as he could. She got the message, excused herself, and made her way to the dais. Ross waited by the steps while she took to the podium and its attached mike.