The Guilty (2008)
Page 9
with my hand. She stared at me, unsure of what to do. Her
eyes were terrified, but something was shackling her to the
scene. She had to be here. She was much closer to all this than
she wanted to be.
“You were next to him, weren’t you?” I asked softly. She
nodded. “I’m Henry,” I said, taking her hand in mine. Her
whole body was shaking. I put my hand on her shoulder,
tried to comfort her. I felt silly. I’d seen people die in front of
me. And no hand in the world could comfort that.
“Betty Grable,” she said. “I’m—was—oh God—I’m Mr.
Lourdes’s assistant.”
My jaw dropped.
“That,” I spat out. “That’s Jeffrey Lourdes?”
She nodded again, then burst into tears.
Jeffrey Lourdes was the publisher of Moss magazine, and one
of the most influential figures in popular culture for nearly thirty
years. He’d been credited for discovering dozens of headlining
acts, some of the greatest reporting the country had ever seen,
and now he was a mass of flesh torn apart by a piece of lead.
“I didn’t know what was happening,” Betty said. “I swear.”
Her hands were a trembling mess, tears cascading down her
cheeks. “I was just telling him he had to be in early tomorrow
for a photo shoot, then out of nowhere—”
She covered her mouth with her hand, choked sobs into it.
I stayed silent. Had to let it come to her.
“Then he shot him!” she cried. “He shot him!”
“Who?” I asked.
“The young man,” she said, her lip quivering. “He did it.”
The Guilty
95
“Who was he? Young man? How old was he? What did he
look like?”
“I don’t know,” Betty said. She looked at me as if having
a revelation. “He looked about your age.”
I stopped writing, looked at her.
“What happened?”
“We were standing there, Jeffrey was about to hail a taxi,
and all of a sudden this man came out of nowhere. He was
holding this giant—gun isn’t even the right word—this giant
thing. This fucking cannon. He just walked right up to Jeffrey
and pulled the trigger, and then he ran. Oh God, Jeffrey!” She
was staring at the body. One foot was visible through the sea
of blue and white. I saw a police car pull up in front. An ambulance behind it. Two EMS workers popped out, ran to the
body. I could tell from their body language they weren’t going
to work too hard on this one.
“What did he look like?” I said.
Betty shook her head. Not because she didn’t know, but
because she didn’t want to.
“He was tall,” she said. “Maybe an inch taller than you.
Jeans. A jacket.” She trailed off.
“What else?”
“I don’t know!” she cried.
“Trust me, I know this is hard,” I said. “But did he have
any distinguishing features. Facial hair, tattoos, piercings…”
“The gun,” she said.
“The gun?”
“The way he held it after he killed Jeffrey. I’ll never forget
that look in his eye. He stared at his gun for a second and then
he ran. Looked at it the way somebody looks at a lover. This
sick, sick boy. Oh my God…”
“The gun,” I said. “What did it look like?”
96
Jason Pinter
She looked at me as if in shock that I could be asking such
a trivial question.
“Please. It’s important. Think. ”
“It…it looked like something out of a movie. Not a recent
movie, something old. And the way he held it, like it was fragile.”
“What about what the gun looked like?”
“The handle was brown…”
“Could it have been made from wood?” I asked. She nodded.
“There was this terrible explosion…” She stopped.
“Please, I can’t do this right now.”
“Can you tell me anything else about it? Was it one
barrel or two?”
“I don’t know! I’ve never seen a real gun before in my life,
now please leave me alone.”
Just then a cop seemed to take notice and jogged over to
us. He separated me, whispered, “Get the fuck out of here,
scum.” Then he said, “Miss, did you see the shooter?”
As I walked away, I looked over my shoulder long enough
to see her nod and then collapse in his arms.
Ten feet from the carnage, a man clicked open his cell
phone. Sweat was streaming down his face. He’d thankfully
skipped lunch. Breathing heavy, he pressed Redial and waited
for an answer.
“Hello?”
“Miss Cole?” He mopped at his brow with a shirtsleeve.
“It’s James Keach. You’ll never believe what just happened.”
17
I arrived home tired to the bone. After spending hours writing
my piece on the Jeffrey Lourdes murder, my fingers ached, and
my head throbbed. I’d had enough death for a lifetime, and I
was growing tired of seeing it up close. I tossed my wallet and
keys on the table, fell into the couch next to Amanda. She put
her hand on mine. I squeezed it with whatever energy I had left.
We sat there. Tried to talk. Conversation came in bits and
pieces. Amanda had ordered dinner for both of us. I wasn’t
hungry, just watched her poke at a salad. I stirred my pasta
with a disinterested fork. All I could think about was Jeffrey
Lourdes, and how ironic it was that the first time I ever saw
him in person, his most recognizable feature had been
reduced to blood and bone.
Betty Grable’s words still rang in my ears. Between what
Curt Sheffield told me about the ammunition used to kill both
Athena Paradis and Joe Mauser, and her description of the
weapon used to kill Jeffrey Lourdes, there was no doubt in
my mind that the killer was using a rifle that took magnum
bullets, and he was using that weapon for a reason. And
somehow I had to find that reason, and use that to find the
killer.
98
Jason Pinter
“How’s work?” I asked Amanda. It was just a conversation starter, something to break the mood. Death was an inevitable part of reporting, but it had no place at the dinner
table.
“The judge is still being a dick on the Mary Westin case,”
she said. “Three abuse complaints from the neighbors, two
cigarette burns and Judge Jellyfish still doesn’t realize it’s in
Mary’s best interest to be taken the hell away from her sickass parents.”
I nodded, picked at a piece of penne. On many nights I’d
told Amanda how proud I was of her—both her work ethic
and choice of profession. After graduation, Amanda had
passed her bar exam and achieved high enough marks to
warrant a position in the Juvenile Rights Division of the New
York Legal Aid Society. The caseload for lawyers working for
the Legal Aid Society had increased nearly a hundred percent
in the last few years, mainly due to some high-profile cases
of child abuse and neglect that resulted in the horrific death
of chi
ldren who had slipped through the cracks. The Legal
Aid Society had taken a beating in the press for their alleged
inability to protect children whose parents were already the
recipients of numerous abuse complaints. Because of this
they were looking for fresh blood, cowboys and cowgirls
who wouldn’t stand for red tape.
Amanda worked long hours, alongside several other lawyers
who were appointed “law guardians” by the court. It was incredibly enriching work for her, I knew. But spending all day
every day around troubled and abused children took its toll.
Sometimes she would come home, crawl into bed and appear
on the verge of tears. She was too strong for that, though. She
knew her tears were trivial compared to the reality of the situation. And her energy was better focused outward than in.
The Guilty
99
“You know, I sit there sometimes,” she continued, “and I
want to scream. Not that I really hate the guys I work for, but
in these cases you need to throw the book against the wall and
just holler. Right and wrong doesn’t stem from legal precedent.”
I felt her staring at me, waiting for a response. I didn’t
want to talk about my day, but had to bite my tongue not to
erupt. I hated making Amanda feel like my troubles were any
more important than hers, but I couldn’t focus on anything
but this story.
“I have a lot of work for tomorrow,” I said. “I’m pretty sure
whoever’s responsible for these murders is using an antique
rifle or a replica, something that hasn’t been used in a long
time. There are thirty-two gun shops in the five boroughs
alone, so I have my work cut out for me.”
“You should talk to Agnes Trimble,” Amanda said, sighing,
wiping her mouth as a tomato spurted juice onto her plate. “She
was my American History professor at NYU. Brilliant woman,
but she scared the hell out of us during student conferences.
She kept half a dozen model guns in her office, you know, like
some people keep snow globes or toy fire trucks. She knows
more about guns than Al Gore knows about the environment.
Belongs to the NRA, all that good stuff. I can call her if you’d
like, she should be in the city for the next few weeks and I’m
sure she’d be happy to talk to you. Who knows, maybe she can
help.”
“Actually, yeah. That’d be a huge help,” I said. “Thanks.”
“No problem.”
We sat there in silence as I listened to Amanda chew.
“Did you see him die?” she asked me. There was a corner
of lettuce sticking out of her mouth.
“No,” I said. “I just saw what happened afterward.”
Amanda chewed more.
100
Jason Pinter
“You don’t want to know,” I said.
“No,” she replied. “Guess I don’t.”
As I got up and tossed the rest of my dinner into the
garbage, the buzzer rang.
“Are you expecting anyone?” she asked. For a moment,
my heart hammered. I could picture Mya waiting downstairs.
“No,” I said. Amanda looked at me for a moment, surely
knew what I was thinking. We walked to the window.
Though we had no doorman to announce visitors, our apartment overlooked the building’s entrance vestibule. Handier
than an eye slot.
I grunted and heaved the window open, reminding myself
to wipe down the grease and grime later, and poked my head
outside. Looking down, I saw a man wearing a gray trenchcoat and hat. He looked up.
“Let me the hell up, will you?”
“Who is it?” Amanda asked.
“It’s Jack,” I said with more than an ounce of relief. I
closed the window and pressed the door release button.
“Doesn’t he have his own home? What’s he doing here at
this hour?”
“I have no idea.” I’d worked with Jack for over a year,
and never once had we seen each other’s apartments. I
pictured his clean, full of polished wood and cracked books.
Shelves lined with erudite literature and snifters of amber
liquid, a fire roaring as he puffed a pipe and wrote great
news of the day.
I looked around my apartment. Wondered if his vision of
mine contained empty bottles of Pepsi and a subscription to
Glamour.
“Quick,” I said. “Hide stuff.”
The Guilty
101
I picked up all the girly magazines, food wrappers and
rubber bands I could find and threw them in the trash. Which
was already overflowing with girly magazines, food wrappers
and rubber bands.
“What are you doing?”
“Amanda, baby,” I said, taking her hands in mine. “I
idolized this man growing up. He’s probably the only man
I’ve ever dreamt about. And now he’s coming up to my apartment.” She eyed me like I’d just insulted her mother. “Okay,
forget I said that. Just help.”
For the next minute, we scrambled around the room
tidying up as best we could. In those sixty seconds, our onebedroom apartment went from resembling a tsunami-affected
college dorm room to resembling an apartment lived in by two
people who cleaned dishes after using them.
I heard a knock at the door. I looked around, panicked, then
threw myself onto the worn polyurethane sofa and crossed my
legs. Amanda glared at me.
“You expect me to open the door?”
“Would you mind?” She gave an exasperated sigh.
“Just so you know, you’re sleeping on the couch tonight.”
She went to the door. Peered through the eyehole for dramatic
effect. “Who is it?”
“Now it’d be some coincidence if it was someone other
than the guy who was just downstairs,” Jack said, his voice
muffled by the door.
Amanda unlocked the door and opened it. Jack was breathing heavy, the trenchcoat seeming to weigh him down. He
took off his hat, a few loose gray hairs sticking to it.
“You must be Miss Davies,” he said.
“That’s right.”
“Charmed.” He took her hand, kissed it as he looked into
102
Jason Pinter
her eyes. She smiled demurely. “Henry here talks about you
nonstop.”
“Is that so? Well, at least one man here can call himself a
gentleman.” She led him into the apartment. “Can I get you
a drink, Mr. O’Donnell?”
“Please call me Jack. And I’ll take a Jack as well, if you
have one, on ice.” Amanda and I looked at each other. “It’s
been a long day.”
Amanda disappeared into the kitchen. She came back
with a glass full of brown liquid over ice. “Seagram’s Seven.
All we had.”
“Do nicely,” Jack replied. He moved over to the couch, let
out a groan as he sat down. “How you holding up?”
“Me?” I said incredulously.
“Heard you were at the Franklin-Rees building when…it
happened.”
“Nearby,” I corrected. “I’m holding up fine. Jeffrey
Lourdes is the one who was shot.”
“Murder has a ripple effect, gets a lot of
people wet,” Jack
said. “You better than anyone should know that.”
Jack took a sip of his Seagram’s. His cheeks were red, eyes
tinged with veins. I wondered whether he was simply fatigued
from taking the stairs, or if that Seagram’s wasn’t his first
cocktail of the evening.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Really.”
“You know they haven’t found a quote at the scene of
Lourdes’s murder,” Jack said. “The first two were left in such
prominent locations, either he dropped the whole thing, or…”
“Or he just didn’t have time.”
“You have to wonder, really, what kind of person walks up
to a man in broad daylight and shoots him in the head.”
“Same kind of person who shoots an unarmed woman and
The Guilty
103
a cop from a distance,” I said. “They’re not dealing with your
average run-of-the-mill lunatic. This guy has an agenda.”
“You think so?” Jack said.
“Well, look at his targets. Athena Paradis, Mayor Perez and
Jeffrey Lourdes. Remember, Joe Mauser was a mistake. All
three of those people are celebrities, in some form or another.
He’s not killing random people, he’s killing people whose
deaths would pretty much dominate news coverage. I mean,
just look at the Metro papers the last few days. Athena,
Mauser and tomorrow Jeffrey Lourdes will be everywhere.”
“What do you make of the gun?” Jack asked, another nip
of brown disappearing down his throat.
“I really don’t know,” I said. “Seems like he’s using some
sort of antique, something with a meaning. Don’t quite know
what yet, but Amanda has a contact from school who might
be able to shed some light. I spoke to Lourdes’s assistant at
the scene. She got a quick glimpse of the killer and a partial
of the murder weapon. Unfortunately she couldn’t ID the
actual shooter, and her police sketch is more vague than a
Rorschach. Because of the chaos at the Franklin-Rees building, the guy was able to escape in the stampede.”
“Mayor Perez, Athena Paradis and Jeffrey Lourdes,” Jack
said. “Not exactly three people you could imagine having
brunch together on a Sunday morning.”
“But someone sees them fitting in the same pattern.”
“In this city,” Jack said, “there’s no shortage of people like
those three. People who hog the front page. And though our
great police force is locked up tighter than my grandma’s