The 3rd Woman

by Jonathan Freedland

  Maddy went to her bathroom cabinet to look for amphetamines: she would need to stay alert for this next hour. She found three and knocked back all of them. She caught her reflection in the mirror: her neck was still flushed red, the way it always was after strenuous sex. She went back to the machine, hit ‘Refresh’ and realized she was still wearing her coat.

  She clicked on the weib she had posted to see that it had already been re-weibed, passed on, seventy-eight times, in just the last few minutes. Of the many imports from China, the human flesh search was, she reflected, her favourite. The spontaneous collaboration was a joy to behold, the enthusiasm and eagerness of the searchers always surprising. In China the habit took hold because it was one of the only effective ways the public could spot wrongdoing in their bureaucratic overlords. Americans had taken to it more slowly; maybe they preferred working solo. But now they were hooked – and quite good at it. One hundred and thirty-three re-weibs and counting.

  The results were trickling in too. Here was Jarrett at a crime scene in Watts, in what looked like the early morning. His mien was grave, suggesting a homicide. On his wrist was a watch, solid and hefty. But the angle was side on; there was no way of telling what he was wearing.

  Another link arrived, this one accompanied by a message.

  What you working on now, Madison? Will this be in the LA Times – or will it be taken down? ;) Anyway, hope this helps.

  She clicked on the link, which turned out to be a webpage containing several images in a sequence. The Chief was reviewing a passing out parade, smiling at new recruits. The third picture had him offering a playful salute. This time the watch on his wrist was crystal clear, a Rolex, the gold of its face catching a gleam of sunlight.

  Maddy sat back in her chair. If anything, this third apparent example made her confidence wobble. What man owned three watches, let alone three expensive ones? Maybe they weren’t precious at all, just street-corner knock-offs, churned out by those underground factories in Alabama or Kentucky in the few days they got to operate between police raids. Maybe Jarrett was vain, choosing a different fake for each occasion. Lame, but no crime.

  She replied to the two users who had posted pictures.

  Are we sure these watches are genuine?

  Answers came rapidly, not confined to those to whom she’d directed the question. Others came on, people who even at this hour – and it was the middle of the night on the east coast – had enlarged the images and submitted them to detailed, if not forensic, examination.

  Note the grooved winder, said one of the Patek Philippe. Very hard to replicate that semi-herring-bone pattern. See photo of fake here and note difference.

  Madison did as she was told and could not argue; the attached photo of two watches, one fake, one original, side by side appeared to settle the matter. What Jarrett had been wearing on his wrist was the real deal.

  Now more replies were coming in, most offering the same evidence: the same photos of the same events. Finally, there came a fresh sighting of one more watch, a vintage piece this time – 1930s, if she had to guess – and therefore hard to value instantly. It was Swiss with a face cast in two tones of grey. The picture was the clearest yet, the watch front and centre in a shot of Jarrett at a grip-and-grin, shaking hands with some city bigwig at an event to mark the anniversary of his appointment as Chief. The cop was mugging at the camera, his jaw set firm. To Maddy’s amusement, the picture came from LA Policing Today, the cops’ own house magazine.

  She was no expert, but this one looked really precious. Five minutes later someone who had been following her Weibo timeline popped up to let her know that a similar watch had come up for auction in London recently and been sold for one hundred and sixty thousand dollars.

  Still, though, she was unsure. It seemed such an unnecessarily risky thing to do; almost daring someone to notice. It was true that plenty of these alpha types in top jobs craved danger and created it for themselves if there was too little of it. One of her earliest reporting assignments had been the discovery that the City Comptroller of Oakland had been using prostitutes, cruising in his car on the corner of 50th Avenue and East 14th Street to find them. Of course he could have arranged discreet, if expensive, liaisons but that, Maddy came to realize, was to miss the point: he wanted the thrill of risk. Maybe Chief Jarrett was the same.

  There could be alternative explanations. She scanned the profiles again, to see if she had missed an alternative source of wealth. But no: his parents were modest hog farmers, no money there. His wife had been his college sweetheart from Des Moines; she was a school librarian. And he’d only ever worked as a cop. There had been no lucrative, five-year spell as a ‘private security consultant’, raking in the corporate cash. The only salary he had ever earned had been from the public purse: decent money, for sure, but not Patek Philippe, TAG Heuer and Rolex money.

  Madison stood up, went to the fridge, found some Greek yoghurt, spooned it from the tub and then poured herself a Scotch. Her body, the series of tastes in her mouth, reminded her where she had been an hour or two ago: for a second, her skin tingled at the memory of it. In reply, her brain told her it had almost certainly been a mistake. She and Leo were chemical elements that, no matter how drawn together, could not mix. She could picture Quincy delivering her verdict, shaking her head in condemnation of what her reckless sister had done – and at a time like this too.

  Back at the machine, there was a Weibo alert in the corner of the screen.

  Nothing on watches, I’m afraid. But nice vacation …

  Attached was a picture that looked pleasingly amateur, a vacation snap. In the background, a vast swimming pool with artificial waterfall, waiters in white and palm trees. In the foreground: Doug Jarrett in shorts and lobster-red chest, his arm around his wife on one side and another woman on the other, with a second man at the end. Two middle-aged couples on vacation.

  She replied to the sender, who appeared to be an accountant in St Louis.

  Where?

  His reply took less than thirty seconds.

  Glasses.

  She went back to the photograph, now zooming in on the low, poolside drinks table that she had barely noticed. There were three glasses, each resting on a coaster, and a fourth that had been drained. A gold pattern was visible: a logo, circled by three words. Dominion Hotel, Macau.

  The briefest of searches confirmed that this was the plushest resort in the former colony, now administered by China, boasting six stars and prices to match. When, an hour later, another searcher produced the evidence that Jarrett was not only a visitor, but a paid-up member (albeit discreetly, in his wife’s name) of LA’s Tang Polo Club, a spin-off of its ultra-exclusive Beijing counterpart, the matter was settled.

  The Chief of Police was living way beyond his means – or rather way beyond his publicly disclosed means. Either someone was giving him serious hospitality – six-star vacations and memberships of the most upscale outfits in the city – or they were giving him the cash to pay for it himself. Either way, it could only mean one thing: Jarrett had been taking bribes. And almost the only people in LA who could afford to pay bribes these days were the Chinese.

  She sat back for a second to absorb what she had found. So was this why the Chief had been so adamant that his detectives focus only on Abigail’s case? Did he know that if they linked her death with others, it would bring his benefactors embarrassment?

  As for the file, she did not know how the mechanics had worked precisely: how Jarrett had got the dossier to Leo or how he had persuaded Leo to take it, whether directly or through a trusted, and perhaps equally duped, intermediary. But she could guess at the sequence. Maddy’s story had appeared, pointing at the garrison. Jarrett had determined to shut her up, if only for a while, by sending her to chase a goose that was not only wild but triply amputated. Had he done that on the orders of his Chinese paymasters? She doubted it. In her experience, such arrangements were rarely so crude. They ‘looked after’ him, as they surely put it, and
in return he knew what to do without needing to be told. That was why they called it corruption: it corroded you from the inside.

  And not just him. If she was right, the entire LAPD, which followed Jarrett’s direct orders, could not be trusted. Jarrett had been ready to do whatever it took to stop her. So, therefore, had the entire Los Angeles Police Department.

  The irony of it did not escape her. She had written that story in a stupor, drunk with tiredness, armed with the sketchiest facts, in a state, the shrinks would say, of mental and emotional turmoil. Her sister had died just seventy-two hours earlier. When Howard had arrived to tell her it was a crock, that it passed none of her own standards, let alone those of the LA Times, she knew he was right. Part of her had been glad he had taken it down from the site: it was not good enough.

  Yet now, with his heavy-footed attempt to close her down, Doug Jarrett had stood up the most radioactive element of her story as firmly as if he had summoned the media to West 1st Street and announced it was true. By throwing her the severed bones and damaged psyche of Tony Gilper, he had achieved the very reverse of his objective. In his determination to divert her away from the China connection that linked the deaths of Rosario Padilla, Eveline and her sister Abigail, Doug Jarrett had just proved it.

  Chapter 33

  There was nothing she could do now, even though the temptation to try was intense. She needed, she knew, to get at least an hour or two of sleep. Or if that proved as impossible as ever, then at least some rest and some silence, sixty or one hundred and twenty minutes when her brain might fall still.

  She began the drill, the one that was meant to work. She ate something, microwaving some surviving pasta from the back of the fridge. Carbs make you sleepy, the books said. Sometimes that was true, sometimes it wasn’t. But it was worth a try. She closed the lid of the laptop and set the other machines to sleep. She dimmed the lights and resisted the urge to put on the TV, knowing that that way lay the evening news. Instead, she put on a radio station playing music that, it claimed, came ‘straight from the chiller cabinet’.

  The last stage would be a shower, another one of the allegedly failsafe, but usually futile, steps towards a good night’s sleep. She headed into the bathroom and slipped off her clothes, the sensation instantly reminding her of the frenzied rush with Leo a few hours earlier. Except now in the mirror she saw the bruises she had sustained in her escape from the sweatshop that might as well have occurred several years ago. She wondered if Leo had noticed them.

  She looked at her naked self in the mirror, baffled once again at how, despite everything, she retained her shape. She was still trim, her waist still narrow, even though regular exercise had become a stranger to her. She made a three-quarter turn, looking back at herself over one shoulder. Her ass was firm, with a roundness of muscle hardwon from that now-abandoned routine of squats. No obvious cellulite on her thighs, no dimpling of fat. Not yet, not in this light, at least.

  She turned back, the memory of her visit to Leo’s apartment still fresh. She closed her eyes, remembering how he had laid her down on the couch and found her with his tongue, how he had explored her. She realized her earlier hunger had not been fully sated. She began to touch herself, opening her eyes so that she could watch in the mirror.

  Afterwards, she stepped into the shower, letting the hot water run for a long time, the water soothing on her skin, washing away both the pleasures and terrors of the day – both the scent of Leo and the stink of the apartment block in Huntington Park, the pounding fear of that flight down the fire escape, the ordeal of preparing to face the man who might have been her sister’s murderer. She closed her eyes, cradling herself in the heat of the water, savouring the fact that she was home. The bathroom was enveloped in steam, wrapping itself around her. Suddenly the shower was as hard to leave as a bed in the morning: it felt warm and safe.

  Only the hope that she was now so faint from the temperature she might at last fall asleep pushed her out. It was a wrench to turn off the water, but she did it, stepping out to grab a towel. The room was a cloud, a dense fog of steam, the walls dripping. She had lost track of how long she had been in there. But then, as she towelled herself dry, shaking off the droplets on her thighs, she noticed something that stopped her.

  The entire room was covered with condensation, every last surface beaded with droplets of water – save the mirror. The glass was pristine, the slightest blurring at the very edges, but otherwise unaffected. Her reflection was sharp and clear; the anguish now engraved on her face entirely visible.

  Nothing like this had happened before. A reliable part of her morning ritual involved emerging from the shower to give a big wipe of the mirror, clearing a face-sized window in the steam. It was the same every day. She had an extractor fan, but it rarely made a dent. In her bathroom a glass as clear and untouched as this was unheard of.

  That it defied physics was obvious. She had no idea how to explain it, except for the iron certainty that it was no accident, coupled with a nagging and sickening suspicion.

  Still clothed only in a towel, she opened the bathroom door and headed for the kitchen drawer where she kept a handful of tools. She found a screwdriver and returned to the bathroom. Now she examined the mirror more closely, but there was nothing she could see. She pressed her head into the wall, closed one eye and looked at the backing. She could make out a small stretch of wire dangling from the back. But this was the first time she had ever looked back here; it was possible the wire had been there before.

  Now she set to work, first gingerly probing the fittings until she had worked out how and where the mirror was attached. With screwdriver in hand, she began to remove it, a teenage memory returning. Once her father was gone, it had fallen to her, aged just fifteen, to be the handyman of the house. The division of labour was never formalized or even spoken about, but that’s how it was: Quincy would put food on the table and pack Abigail’s lunch for school, Maddy was the one who knew how to restore a dead car battery or get the DVD to work. So she knew one end of a screwdriver from the other.

  As it turned out, she didn’t have to do much to get confirmation. In her palm were the first fittings and screws she had taken out; they were brand new, not caked in paint and accumulated dust and grime like the others in this bathroom. Some kind of installation had been done that day, she was certain of it.

  It made sense. The one thing that would thwart a surveillance camera concealed in a two-way mirror would be steam, misting up the mirror and obscuring the view. To prevent that, you’d want one of those dinky heating pads on the glass, working like the demister on a car’s rear windscreen, keeping it forever clear. This mirror had never had such a feature before. Which could only mean that someone had taken the time to install one today. It probably came with the camera, working automatically.

  Which meant that the lens had been in place, silent and unblinking, as she had stood there naked. Everything she had done to herself, it had seen.

  Maddy returned the mirror to its place then took a towel from the rail. She gave her reflection a long hard stare, announcing to whoever hid behind it: ‘Show’s over.’ Then she threw the towel over the glass, hoping to block out the very thought of it.

  Still, she could not stop thinking about the men who had put it there, padding expertly around her apartment today, their shoes off, their movements noiseless. She would find them, of that she was determined. And she had a good idea where to start.

  Chapter 34

  Across town, at the same time, Katharine Hu was making a rare submission to weakness or need. She prided herself on being able to carry on under pressure, to stay up when those around her were knocked down. Quietly, and almost never voiced, she put this strength partly down to her heritage. Of course she hated it when her parents used to talk that way, especially her father. ‘Remember, the Chinese people are the greatest nation in human history,’ he had told her, quoting his own father. She argued with him about it, bracketing it with the garbage he talked about Afri
cans, whom he had once called ‘monkeys’, later claiming all he had said was that they ‘lack innate intelligence and skill’. It was racist and vile and stood alongside his medieval attitudes to sexuality as a measure of the distance between their generations and between them.

  Still, huˇ fù wú quaˇn zıˇ, as they used to say in the old country. A tiger does not father a dog. An immigrant to the US when she was just eleven years old, an American citizen and proud of it, some of what she had been told must nevertheless have got into her marrow, because there were times when she found herself thinking just like the old man. She did not share these thoughts with anyone, not even Enrica – especially not with Enrica. Her wife would be appalled (though Enrica had plenty of similarly indefensible attitudes of her own). All the same, she could not help but feel it. The laziness of these Americans, their sense of expectation and entitlement, still shocked her, even after all these years.

  The way they believed that working from nine till six or seven elevated them into heroes, when to her such a short working day looked like luxury. The way they saw leisure and entertainment as a right, to be exercised daily. The hours they spent in front of the TV, the meals in restaurants, the weekends at ball games, the barbecues, the surfing, the hiking, the computer games, the gym, the celebrity magazines, the dance classes, the therapy, all the countless things they did that were not work. They were like children, endlessly seeking fun, fun and more fun. It was even in their constitution: the pursuit of happiness. When she first heard that phrase, she assumed someone was teasing her, mocking her as a foreigner. Of course such a thing could not have a place in the country’s basic law. It could not be, and yet there it was. No wonder they had lost their position at the top. It was a miracle they had stayed there as long as they had.