by A. C. Fuller
“Mr. Bice, you must relax.”
Rak took the envelope, placed it in the inside pocket of his jacket, then turned and walked away.
When Rak was halfway across the field, Macilroy said, “Mr. Bice, what if Martin told others, like the girl at the funeral?”
“He probably didn’t. He could barely balance a checkbook and certainly couldn’t speak intelligently about high finance.” Bice watched Rak disappear at the edge of the field. “And, even if he did, it won’t matter. Once he’s dead it would be thirdhand.”
“I still don’t understand why you kept the Green girl alive,” Macilroy said as he got into the driver’s seat.
“If she’d had any proof, anything, I wouldn’t have. But she has nothing. She already tried to do something about it, but couldn’t. Once Martin is handled, this is over.”
PART FOUR
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
Monday, September 16, 2002
ALEX STUMBLED INTO the bathroom at 3 a.m. and drank three glasses of water. He went back and sat on the edge of the bed, rubbed the spot on his forehead where Rak had held the gun, then collapsed.
At 5 a.m. he awoke again. He felt both thin from dehydration and bloated from sugar and alcohol. After checking around the room one last time for the USB drive, he changed into his running shorts. For a minute, he stared at the notes he had written the night before, remembering only that they had seemed important at the time. But his eyes wouldn’t focus and trying to read his scrawl made his head pound. He remembered handing the USB to Rak the night before and felt sick to his stomach. Without the recording, he might still be able to put a story together, but it wouldn’t have anywhere near the same impact.
He put on a pair of sunglasses and walked out into the soft morning light. “Morning, Grady,” he said weakly. “I’m so sorry about Officer Balby.”
“He was a good young officer. Only three years on the job. Alex, this is Officer Lucas.” A tall, lean officer who’d been sitting next to Grady stood up and shook Alex’s hand. “We doubt Rak will make another run at you in public,” Grady continued, “but just the same, we’re gonna have Lucas follow you everywhere you go.”
“Any leads yet?” Alex asked.
“No. They’re watching the airports. We’ve been talking with the NYPD.”
“Nothing?”
“Well, we . . . ”
“That’s what I thought,” Alex said. “I’m gonna run anyway. The way I feel, I would be better off if he’d shot me.”
“Okay,” Grady said. “But I’m sending Lucas with you.”
Alex trotted down the stairs and across the courtyard to the beach, trailed by Officer Lucas. The sky was light pink, turning orange. As he jogged past the pier, Alex felt his lungs fill with cool, sweet air. He talked to himself as he ran. “Three miles, then a good breakfast—eggs and coffee. Steamed vegetables. Then I will look through all my notes and make a plan. Then I will lift some weights. Then I will act on the plan that I make.”
After twenty minutes, he turned around to walk back toward the hotel. Lucas let Alex pass him and walked fifteen feet behind him.
Alex’s sweat stank of alcohol, but his legs felt strong and he was happy that his body could so quickly rebound from a binge. As he walked down the beach, he saw the interaction with Rak over and over in his mind. His recollection was hazy, but one thing Rak had said hung clearly in Alex’s mind. This is not him killing you, it’s me. He assumed that “he” was Denver Bice, but what could Rak have meant? Alex had no idea.
When he got back to the hotel, he stopped by the buffet for eggs, but took a basket of blueberry muffins instead.
* * *
After eating four muffins and showering, Alex called Sonia’s house. “I need her phone records,” he told Juan, picking muffin crumbs up off a plate by pressing into them with the tip of his finger until they stuck, then licking them off. “I may have figured out the date of the call you told me about. If I can tell who it came from, I might be able to get whoever it is to talk to me about Mr. Hollinger’s plans. I need someone to go on the record about the five hundred million.”
“Okay,” Juan said, “come by tomorrow around lunch. We will be by the pool.”
“Okay, and there’s one other thing. You said that Mr. Hollinger always called his wife from a pay phone outside the towers after lunch. Is that right?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Did he always carry change in his pocket? I mean, he was an older guy. Don’t people his age carry change in their pockets instead of just throwing it into a jar?”
“Why are you asking this?”
Alex decided not to tell Juan about the call Martin received on the morning of 9/11. “It’s just a hunch. Probably nothing. Did he tend to carry change?”
“Yes, he did.”
“Okay. Thanks. I’ll see you around noon tomorrow.”
After he hung up, Alex pressed into the last of the muffin crumbs with his finger, then stared out the window at the beach as he licked them off.
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
CAMILA WALKED INTO the kitchen, rubbing her eyes.
Her mother was flipping strips of bacon in a thin, non-stick skillet. She looked at Camila. “He won’t eat anything anymore, but I fry it anyway. We don’t know it’s morning unless it smells like bacon.”
Camila looked at the bacon. “When did he stop eating?”
“About a week ago. Liquids are the only calories he’ll take in.”
“Did he sleep in his chair?” Camila asked.
“Yes.”
Camila had not slept well. Her eyes felt puffy and hot. “Should I go see him?”
“Of course you should.”
Camila walked to the living room and sat on the footstool next to his chair. His eyes were closed. He seemed to her to have receded—as if overnight he had lost the energy for this world. She took his hand and he opened his eyes. “Tell her I don’t eat bacon,” he said.
“She knows.”
“Then why does she keep making it?” he asked in a half-whisper.
“To show that she loves you.”
He closed his eyes.
Camila squeezed his hand and closed her eyes too. Her fingers felt fat and warm between his. She opened her eyes and stared at him as the smell of bacon intensified. She thought he might be sleeping. She looked at the fireplace, then at the candlesticks on the mantle. She saw the wooden cross on the wall over the fireplace, bordered in gold. It had been her grandmother’s cross and her father insisted it be hung in the house, even though he had stopped attending church when he was a teenager. “We keep it there out of respect,” was all he’d ever said about it. She did not know if the respect was for his mother, the Church, or something else.
The small dents in the gold looked like imprints left by fingers and she wondered about all the people who had held the cross, and what it had meant to them. She felt a slight movement in her father’s hand and saw that he had opened his eyes. “Take that cross when I go. It was my mama’s.”
She looked at him and thought she could sense a hardness all through his body. “Where did she get it?” she asked.
He grunted in a way that made her think he didn’t know. “You will take the cross?” he asked.
She looked at it again. “Yes, I will take it.”
He smiled at her. “Cam, get your mama, okay?” She imagined a dark cloud, lifting from his body. His voice was soft and his face had brightened a little.
She walked to the kitchen and saw twelve strips of bacon lying parallel on a paper towel. “He wants to see you,” she said. “He’s going today.”
Her mother set down the pan she was washing and turned. “Oh no, not today. The hospice nurse will be here later.”
“What does that have to do with when he will die?”
“Don’t say that word.”
Her mother walked into the living room and Camila followed. They sat on either side of him, Camila on the footstool and her mother on the floor, each holdi
ng a hand. After a few minutes, Camila turned to her mother. “Can you feel the hardness in him? It’s like a cage. It’s moving.”
With flashing eyes, her mother glared at her and said, “Don’t speak that way about him.” Then she turned toward the wall, crying softly.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
THAT AFTERNOON, Alex sat on his bed and made calls to two other numbers from Martin’s records. The first number rang and rang without going to voice mail. A dead end. The second was a 504 area code that James had listed as belonging to Morgan Tubbs, a psychiatrist in New Orleans. After Alex introduced himself, Tubbs said he had called Martin on a whim when looking through their yearbook from Tulane.
After a couple of questions, Alex realized that he knew more about Martin’s recent life than Tubbs did. Just when he was about to hang up, Alex thought to ask, “Did you happen to have any classes with a man named Denver Bice at Tulane?”
“Hell yeah,” Tubbs said in a slow and smooth New Orleans drawl.
“Do you know if he and Martin were close?”
“Don’t know, but I wasn’t.”
“Wasn’t what? Close with Denver Bice?”
“We called him Den. Guy was a crazy prick. Never understood why John hung out with him. Maybe it was some kind of inferiority thing. Anyway, he was a prick. Sorry to be blunt about it if he’s a friend of yours.”
“He isn’t, but in what way was he crazy?” Alex asked.
“Well, he’s a sociopath, by the technical definition. At least he was back then. Smart as anyone, decent looking, always got what he wanted. But couldn’t empathize, didn’t have any feeling, humility, or perspective. And he used to hit himself.”
“What?”
“I didn’t understand it at the time. He seemed to have the world by the balls. But every time he did anything wrong—like forget something or get a bad mark on a test—he’d whack himself on the head. Hard. A second later, he’d go back to being cocky old Den.”
“You’re a shrink now, right? Why do you think he did that?”
“I’m not sure I should say more. What does old Den have to do with Martin anyway?”
“There’s a chance he’s involved in Martin’s death. I just need to know what he’s really like. Mr. Tubbs, please.”
“Most people, when they do something bad, they feel remorse, or sadness. My guess is that Den couldn’t feel anything. Not joy, not love, and not disappointment or guilt either. Closest he could come was to hit himself. Like some part of him knew he’d done something wrong but he couldn’t become completely conscious of it. After he’d hit himself, he’d snap back into confident sociopath mode. Go back to normal, or what was normal for him. Probably some sort of trauma in his past, but I can’t be sure.”
“Interesting, can you say more about what you mean about him being a sociopath?”
“Well, let me give you an example. There was a girl, Martha Morelli, who went to Tulane with us way back when. Every man south of Baton Rouge was after her. She had that New York look that was rare down here in those days. Long black hair, attitude—you know what I mean? Anyway, Den got her. They dated for a few months but then she dumped him.”
“Why’d she dump him?”
“Don’t know. Everyone knew she dumped him but we never knew why. We made fun of Den, though. You know how college kids are. Always talking about our conquests, making fun of each other, all that male bonding stuff. I think he was in love with her because he went around moping for a day or two.”
“That sounds pretty normal.”
“But he was only sad for a day or two. After that, he cracked or something. When a man gets his heart broken, he usually drinks for a couple days, then just finds another woman to fill the hole. With Den, it was as though the breakup had hit a deep wound. He stopped showing emotion, stopped looking people in the eye. He still carried himself with the same confidence. He just became, I don’t know, flatter. Here’s the point. A few months after the breakup, Martha started going around with some other guy. I don’t remember who, but he was older, maybe a grad student. And then her apartment burned down.”
Alex stood and walked to the window. “What do you mean?”
“It just burned down. Once she started going around with this guy, Den burned her apartment down, along with the rest of her building. Remember it like it was yesterday. Place was right down from campus on St. Charles Street.”
Alex laughed uncomfortably. “Come on, how can you know that?”
“We all knew it. All the guys in our dorm. Of course, no one could prove it, and he was so standoffish with all of us that we could never find out for sure. But he did it. When men feel wronged in this sort of situation, most displace their aggression onto the other man. It’s a competition thing. They don’t want to hurt the object of their desire, no matter how distorted their desire is. But Den never showed any jealousy. Just burned down her apartment. You track her down and she’ll tell you he did it.”
Alex asked, but Tubbs had no idea where to find Martha Morelli. “She transferred out of Tulane after the one year. I heard she moved up north. New York, maybe.”
As they spoke, blurry images of Denver Bice in the luxury box passed through Alex’s head. “Mr. Tubbs, one last question. Do you think Bice is capable of murder? I mean actual murder, one on one.”
“Under the right circumstances, without a doubt,” Tubbs said. “To him, murder would not even need justification if he felt he was protecting himself. He’s not the kind of guy who would murder for sadistic pleasure or anything like that. But if he felt threatened? Yes.”
* * *
Trailed by Officer Lucas, Alex headed down to the business center. He looked up a 9/11 timeline and used a clean sheet of paper to write out the major events, adding the call he assumed Hollinger had made.
8:46—North Tower Hit
8:48—First TV Broadcast
9:03—South Tower Hit
9:37—Hollinger calls Martin from pay phone at WTC Plaza
9:59—South Tower Collapses
10:28—North Tower and Marriott Collapse
He figured that if Hollinger had called Martin at 9:37 a.m., he could have called Bice shortly thereafter. The soonest Bice could have picked him up was about 9:55 a.m., assuming Bice was coming from his office. So he must have killed him and dumped the body between 9:59 and 10:28.
He pulled out his list of questions from the night before and crossed off all but the last three: Bice’s phone records? Pay phone records for 9/11? How did Bice know H’s plans? Next, he opened his e-mail and wrote to James at his personal address, asking him if he knew a way to get records of calls to and from pay phones.
Finally, he returned to his room and called Bearon. “I’ve gotta level with you about something,” Alex said. He had decided not to mention his run-in with Rak, but wanted to get Bearon’s thoughts about Bice killing Hollinger.
“You finally ready to tell me what’s going on?” Bearon asked.
“You know how I told you that Rak killed Martin?”
“Yeah, I started your rumor for you, you jerk. Most people just looked at me like I was a rez kid on crack. Everyone is sold on Santiago being the guy. A couple cops said they’d look into Rak, but it didn’t sound like they actually would. We just don’t care about Eastern Europe anymore. If his name was Mohammed they might have jumped on it.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t tell you why he killed him. You ever heard of Denver Bice?”
“Who hasn’t?”
Alex told him about the five hundred million, Hollinger escaping from the tower, and his theory about Denver Bice and the morning of 9/11.
“Wait,” Bearon said when he had finished. “Bice had Martin killed by Rak to cover up the fact that he killed this Hollinger guy?”
Alex opened the balcony curtains and stared out at the water. “Well, I think so, though I’m nowhere close to proving it. My guess is he got a call from Hollinger after he escaped the tower.”
“And left the body in the rubble?
What a sicko.”
“Yeah,” Alex said. “So you’d better stop spreading that rumor around. It’s too dangerous now.”
“Wait,” Bearon said. “That’s it.”
“That’s what?”
“You know how a couple days ago you were asking me about Sharp? Wondering if maybe he was the guy making the weird calls?”
“Yeah.”
“He and Bice hate each other.”
“What do you mean?” Alex asked, closing the curtains and starting to pace the room.
“I mean, besides being two of the most pompous assholes on earth, they have a history. The Standard ran a bunch of editorials ripping Sharp back when he was prosecuting corporate cases. Don’t you read your own paper?”
“Usually not.”
“Sharp totally had it in for Bice. Everyone knew it. And your paper went out of its way to embarrass him, probably at Bice’s request.”
Alex stopped pacing, opened the curtains again, and watched an elderly couple walk slowly down the beach. “That makes sense,” he said, “but how could Sharp know about the video, about Downton, about Bice’s involvement?”
“Who knows? But I’ll bet he’s your guy. Think about it. Maybe Sharp figures out Santiago is innocent. He is prosecuting the case, so that’s not exactly a stretch. He starts digging around. Finds out about the video and somehow that leads him to Rak, and to Bice. Then he figures, kill two birds with one stone. He gets to screw with Bice, and if Santiago gets off, he gets even more exposure. An innocent kid goes free and an evil CEO gets taken down. Sharp’s base would love it.”
“But if Sharp somehow knew about Downton, the video, and Bice and Hollinger, why do it this way?” Alex asked. “Why make a bunch of weird calls? Why not just get the whole story out at once?”
“Too suspicious. You gotta think that if Sharp knew about Santiago being innocent, someone else might know, too. Letting it out all at once would call too much attention to him. If it got out that he was leaking information, ruining his own case, it would end his career.”