“His messages were on the machine.”
Southerlyn pulled out a tissue and wiped the wet string hanging from Monica’s nose. Monica said thank you, then rolled her eyes up toward Southerlyn with total malice. Suddenly, she gagged like she was going to throw up. The cop held McCoy’s wastebasket under her chin.
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Monica took a deep breath.
“Are you okay?” asked Southerlyn.
“You went up to the room when you saw Mr. McDonald leaving.”
She nodded.
“I told her her book was awful. I told her Avery only laid her for her money and she’d better forget about him or I would kill her.”
“And then?”
“She said Avery loved her. I said that no, Avery never said that. He’s never said that to anyone. He says it’s hypocritical.” She turned toward him. “He’s never said that to me, until tonight.” She began to blubber again.
McCoy waited only a second or two before pressing her again. “Mrs. McDonald! You pushed Barbara Chesko?”
She grew still as if seeing it happen again. “She slapped me. We struggled. Then she got stuck in the open window, holding onto the frame, kind of bent in half, her ass hanging out. I had a moment when I thought she was just another stupid woman, over the hill and no threat to me. She was still holding on and I could have left and she would have pulled herself back in. But when I turned I saw her beret. The label said ‘cashmere.’ Cashmere! It probably cost more than my entire wardrobe and I knew she could have Avery any time she wanted. So I pushed.”
“Oh, Monica…” moaned Avery.
“And you took her purse and her laptop?”
She shook her head.
Arthur Branch appeared in the doorway. “What in blue blazes is going on here?” he demanded.
“We’re…We’re closing a case,” said Southerlyn.
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Branch noticed Leo Herlihy collapsed in one of McCoy’s chairs. He was breathing hard and tugging at his tie. Herlihy saw them staring. “I’m okay,” he gasped. Branch then looked down at Avery McDonald. “Get this fellow to a doctor,” he said and at that moment Monica threw up in the trash can.
“Hmmph,” said Branch, turning to leave.
297
SERENA SOUTHERLYN’S OFFICE
ONE HOGAN PLACE
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 16, 1:35 A.M.
Southerlyn had her stockinged feet propped on a cardboard file box, with her chair as far back as she could get it. She was nibbling the eraser of a pencil as she picked her way through an evidence ruling from 1995 that the defense had cited in a motion.
McCoy appeared in the door, carrying his motor-cycle helmet. He rested his forearm above his head on the frame and at first she didn’t notice him. “The boss says it’s quitting time,” he said.
She glanced up at him and marked a line in the Court of Appeals decision. “It was the boss who assigned me this thing.”
“The Kreposki case?”
“The boss keeps the slam dunks for himself.”
“Hey!” he said. “You want a good case or don’t you? I could have given it to Roberts.”
“If you wanted to lose it.”
McCoy smiled. “Seriously, it’s late. You shouldn’t be going home this late. It could be dangerous.”
“So I hear,” she said without looking up. “You have a reputation.”
“Still do?” he said. “That’s flattering.”
“For a man maybe.”
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“Well…” he shrugged. “It’s flattering, even if unsubstantiated. I never resorted to lurking around the building.”
She stretched and put her feet down. “I think I’ve found the wiggle room on this appeal. Why are you here late?”
“Closing statement on Ripley. Lots of details.”
“Ripley is the hit man?”
He nodded. “Did you hear that Avery McDonald died today?”
“I got an e-mail.”
“Edit him out of the book of the living. They think he had a stroke. He was due to be released in the next month.”
“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” said Southerlyn.
“Six months on a fraud plea!”
“It was better than we thought we could get, and it was a bad bargain for him. It turned into a life sentence. When Monica McDonald gets out at least he won’t be around to use her.”
“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” she repeated.
“I wonder what happened to Rosserman? You know, the editor?”
“Haven’t the slightest,” said Southerlyn.
“Surely he didn’t get a job in publishing again. You think?”
Southerlyn crossed her arms on her blotter and lay her head on them. “Jack,” she said through a yawn,
“have you got a question or something? I’d like to get out of here before dawn.”
“Just leaving,” he said. He took a step, then came back. “Yeah,” he said, “I do have a question.”
“Shoot,” she said.
“When we were working on the McDonald case, 299
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Arthur and I noticed how, well, intense you were about it.”
“It comes with the territory,” she said, closing her eyes.
“No,” he said, “You’re the ‘ice blonde.’ You’ve gone after some really disgusting characters, but I never really worried you were getting too involved. But this thing about wannabe writers and all that…”
Southerlyn opened her eyes, but did not raise her head. “When you’re young,” she said, “you want to change the world. You’ve got all these feelings and they seem so powerful that you could, I don’t know, melt bronze just by thinking about it.”
McCoy started to say something flippant about the vanity of youth, but thought it would seem irreverent.
“You’re in high school and college and you learn about the great things, art and music and literature, and you want to do great things. You want to live outside the ordinary, to be truly a creator. You want to wear a beret and hang out with the other great minds of your time in Paris or Bloomsbury or somewhere.”
McCoy nodded. “Youth!”
“And in some cases, beauty. Along comes somebody, an older person, a person of authority, who legitimizes your writing, who makes you believe you’ve got the ‘divine fire.’ He discusses your writing, like other people discuss dead white men. He talks to you privately. Your roommate begins to understand you won’t always get home at night. Your roommate warns you what a pretender the professor, this minor league hack is, but you don’t listen. What he’s really interested in is not divine fire, and it’s not your talent.
It’s the youthfulness he’ll never have again. And in 300
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the end he hurts you really bad. He’s a vampire. He drains your blood and spirit and throws you away.
Soon he’s got another needy undergrad with pretty legs.”
She closed her eyes. McCoy felt embarrassed, as if he’d overheard a conversation between a dying mother and her son. He didn’t want to know this much about a colleague. “Your friend,” he said hesitantly, “she’s okay now, I suppose.”
“For one reason or another she never got over it,”
said Southerlyn. “She went into college with so much promise, much more than I did. But her sense of self-worth was destroyed. After him came the drugs, then a couple of trips through rehab. When I went to the reunion last year, I heard she drowned in a swimming accident in Matamoros.”
McCoy had thought she was talking about herself.
He was relieved she wasn’t, but he was still embarrassed. It was too intimate. He felt like he’d had a glimpse into a world he didn’t know anything about.
He realized how little he knew about Serena and how much more comfortable it was not to know.
He didn’t look at her for a second or two, and when he did, she had dozed off.
He thought for a moment, remembered how once, when everyone assumed he would become a cop like his father, he had briefly fantasized going to Paris and becoming a painter. Fortunately, no one had encouraged him in that and he had ended up here.
He hefted his stuffed briefcase, judging its weight.
Fortunately? Unfortunately? It was one of the mysteries the nuns used to talk about.
He closed Serena’s door and went home.
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PART 44
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