You Made Your Bed: A Novel

by Cornelia Goddin

  “Funny. I’m telling you, someone gave Wilson Crowe those mushrooms with intent to kill, first degree all the way. I’ll bet you anything you want. I’ll send you to fucking Paris for the weekend with your boyfriend if I’m wrong.”

  “I don’t have a boyfriend,” smirks Andie. “So I’ve got you down for pastrami/rye/extra sauerkraut. Check you later.”

  Franks watches her leave, eyes on her backside. She’s too young for him but he does not think about that. He has jumped ahead to the conversation with Oates, in which he predicts Oates is going to make the same argument Andie just did, and that the little bastard is going to try to weasel out of giving him the case.

  57

  Caroline

  I keep having this vision of Wee Willie on the beach in Negril, digging like a maniac until you can’t see him at all, only handfuls of wet sand being flung into the air. Passersby would think it adorable, a young boy pretending to dig for treasure. But I knew then that he was digging because he wanted a sanctuary, a place to hide, a shelter from the things in my family that were already starting to slide into territory where no family should ever go.

  Maybe he thought he had that sanctuary in the Berkeley hills, with Rebecca. But I doubt it. The malignant birds that come hungrily after us aren’t daunted by distance that way. The jeerlings—though we never spoke of it, surely he had them too?—the jeerlings no doubt laughed their asses off at his wedding, as though something as simple as a marriage would provide any sort of refuge.

  I try to tell myself that I saved Wilson from all the pain unraveling through his life, as it doubtless would have.

  All I can do is set these feelings aside and press forward.

  The advent of the autopsy had me in a near-collapse of anxiety, but now that the midazolam scare is over, I’m judging that the procedure may have been for the best. Better to have the cause of death known and not guessed; better, I mean, for a quicker resolution, leaving less for Gordon’s mind to obsessively pick over. And it neatly gives Gordon and Rebecca a reason to be pissed at Wilson, for his carelessness at accidentally eating something so deadly.

  So overall, I’m sensing a slight hint of optimism in the air, thinking that of course the next few weeks, maybe even months, will be difficult to get through, but one foot in front of the other and all that.

  Until I notice my bare wrist, and wonder where in hell the beaded bracelet has gone.

  58

  Amory takes a long time in the shower at the Holiday Inn on University, letting the hot water beat down on his back as he considers Rebecca and the house on Sunset Lane. His mother drifts into his thoughts, and he sees her standing by the tall window in the living room of the apartment where he grew up, sobbing into her hands, her shoulders shaking. Which was not unusual, Mrs. Porter being a woman given to emotional outbursts over things most people would shrug off.

  Amory goes back to the Crowes and the possibility of murder. There is something about Gordon Crowe…it feels to Amory as though he knows more, or suspects more, than he is letting on. Amory knows him to be an untrustworthy, unscrupulous man, a man not governed by the usual rules of civility and behavior. Does he want Rebecca to go down so she won’t get any of the money? Is that his angle?

  And then, Caroline. Amory imagines her angular face with its sharp cheekbones and deep-set eyes, her sleek body, her legs that go on for miles. He sees fear in her eyes. An ache wells up and he daydreams for a moment, picturing himself lying in the sun, with Caroline on a chaise next to him, reading a book in French. Their eyes meet. She puts the book down and reaches for him…

  He forces himself to go back to the interview with Rebecca, running through the conversation again in his head as billowing steam fills up the Holiday Inn bathroom.

  Finally he gets out and dries off, ready to take a look at Wilson’s iPad. He puts the towel around his slim waist, crawls on the bed and leans up against the rickety headboard. He taps in the passcode Rebecca gave him. He can’t help feeling a mild zing of pleasure at snooping in another person’s personal business, something he has liked doing since he was a child going through his brother’s and parents’ stuff when they weren’t looking.

  If you don’t know a person, and you hear that he stole his best friend’s fiancée, what kinds of conclusions do you draw about him? Amory immediately goes to addict. He thinks Wilson loved drama, loved chaos, loved violating boundaries. Probably drugs. Some might think that stealing Rebecca away from Donny was a deeply romantic gesture, that Wilson’s love for her overcame whatever understandable hesitation he must have had in the face of the pain he would cause his friend.

  Amory does not believe that was how it went down. Though he would be relieved to find evidence that Wilson had been murdered by the jilted Donny Aldritch, he has no real hope that any such thing exists.

  And then, in one of those crystalline moments of clarity we all get, even if rarely—Amory understands that Gordon has hired him to run around after Donny, after Rebecca, after anyone but his daughter. If he doesn’t know she did it, he suspects she might have. And Amory’s job is to pile up all kinds of reasonable doubt to protect her.

  But what if he doesn’t fall in line, or does, but still fails to produce anything at all exculpatory?

  Gordon’s rage as his Caroline is cuffed and led out of 744—oh, it would be glorious to witness. Of course, that would mean she might go away for life. But if she did actually murder her brother, how terrible can Amory feel about seeing her pay the consequences?

  He picks up Wilson’s iPad, hoping the brother and sister were chatty in email, or took a lot of photographs. Please, let there be something.

  “Hey, Gordon,” says Amory into his cell, still only wrapped in a towel, having read through six months of Wilson Crowe’s email.

  “News?”

  “Not much. I’ve spoken to Rebecca. Thought I had a lead but it’s fizzled. She told me this story about getting a fake email from a friend that caused her to go down to LA the day before Wilson died. Friend claims not to have sent any such invitation.”

  “Someone wanted a clear shot,” says Gordon with rising interest.

  “Thought maybe. But I got a look at Wilson’s email, and he got an invitation from a friend of his out in Sonoma. I spoke to the friend and he claims not to have sent any invitation either.”

  Gordon is quiet.

  “So right now it looks like the emails are something different, and probably had nothing to do with his death. Might be a burglary attempt, wanting everyone gone for the night so they could get in without any time pressure.”

  “Mm,” says Gordon. “Or Rebecca could be up to something. She could have sent them, right?”

  “To what end?” asks Amory. She was forthcoming about the will; Amory knows she’s not getting the Crowe billions.

  “Even with the prenup, she will inherit that house and a considerable amount of money from Wilson, never mind that they were only married a matter of months. Surely you have not crossed her name off the list of suspects?”

  “I don’t have a list of suspects, Gordon. We have no evidence that anything happened other than Wilson’s picking those mushrooms and eating them, all on his own.”

  “You’re saying his death was just a big, stupid, colossally dumbass mistake?”

  Amory doesn’t answer.

  “Keep looking. Don’t give Rebecca a pass just because she’s grieving. You can grieve even when you cause the grief, Amory.”

  “I understand,” says Amory. “In any case, if you have a minute, I’d like to ask you a few more questions on the subject of what happened when Wilson and Rebecca got together. How well do you know Donny Aldritch?”

  “Eh, Wilson got to know him in college. Not a childhood friend or anything like that.”

  “That matters?”

  “Of course it matters. You don’t shit on the people you grew up with.”

  Amory takes a quick breath. After the way Gordon treated his father—a man he had gone to Buckley with, fr
iends since first grade—he can’t believe what he just heard.

  “You consider Wilson’s getting together with Rebecca ‘shitting on’ Donny?”

  “Don’t you? Life’s a competition, Amory, and right there, Wilson won. Beat his friend’s ass. Another way to look at it is that he was only doing what any real man would do: taking what he wanted when he wanted it. I have to respect that. If Donny Aldritch couldn’t hold on to her, what good was the marriage going to be, anyway?”

  Gordon proceeds to give Amory a lecture on the proper behavior of a husband in order to keep his wife’s loyalty, which again is hard to believe since it is common knowledge in their world that Gordon cheats on Lillian often and without taking great pains to hide it. But the case isn’t about Gordon, Amory reminds himself—unless things take a very unexpected turn—and he turns the conversation back to Donny Aldritch. Not because he believes Donny had anything to do with it, but because he wants Gordon to think he does.

  “Tell me about the fall-out. After the wedding was called off...how did Donny react?”

  “Disappeared, as far as I know. I asked Wilson a few weeks after and he said he hadn’t heard from him. Wilson had written him to apologize—he was raised right, you see—but Donny hadn’t answered. And that was the last any of us heard of it. We were all focused on the grandchild-to-come. And I was doing my best to get Wilson back east where he belongs.”

  A pause, each man thinking in different directions.

  “You thinking maybe Donny killed him?” says Gordon finally.

  “Just considering. I’ll check it out.” Amory stands up and lets the towel drop to the floor, twists from one side to the other, still stiff from the plane. “Is going into the woods and picking mushrooms something you’d be surprised to hear Wilson did? Or more like, yeah, okay, you could see him doing that.”

  “Since getting the autopsy results I’ve thought of little else. Maybe he did. That’s all I’ve got. Was my son capable of being a dumbass? Sure. Absolutely. He would get all worked up over some new hobby, go wild with it for a couple months, then drop it. Maybe wild mushrooms was something like that. I have to say I’d have been significantly happier if it had turned out to be the mountain lion.”

  But we’re not talking about your happiness, are we, thinks Amory. He says goodbye and sits down on the bed. He is uneasy. The six months of emails on Wilson’s iPad were so bland, so absent anything even the slightest bit embarrassing, that Amory does not believe them. Over the course of a large number of investigations, he has read a great deal of personal correspondence, and he has found, universally, that everyone has written something that they would not want made public.

  Everyone. Even if it is only garden-variety hurtful gossip, or a random insult. People share ugly stories about each other as currency, or as a way to share an intimate moment with another person. It is just how people are, thinks Amory.

  Everyone but Wilson.

  Why be so careful unless you have something to hide?

  59

  It’s past dinnertime, and Franks is pacing the hallway outside Oates’s office, waiting for a meeting to finish up. He’s full of anticipatory outrage, his face sweating and his ears pink. Finally, the door opens and people start filing out. Franks shoves past them and goes up to the Lieutenant’s desk.

  “You said I’d get the case,” starts Franks.

  Oates holds up a hand. “Yeah. If it’s a murder. Which it’s not. Or at least there’s no indication that it is.”

  “You said—”

  “Look, Scotty, the prelim was heart attack, it turned out not to be, you were right about that. Props to you. But the fact that the kid died from some mushrooms doesn’t mean it’s homicide. You know how many mushroom poisonings we get every year? Somebody writes an article about foraging and everyone and his uncle are out in the woods chowing down on whatever they stumble across when they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing. Happens all the time. People are idiots, you know that.”

  Franks tries to stay calm though his insides feel electrified. “This…it didn’t happen that way,” he says, shoving his hands in his pockets to keep from clenching his fists.

  “No? Tell me what way, then. Give me something solid to consider.”

  “Wilson Crowe was worth billions. Billions. His wife signed a prenup, she’s not gonna get that money. It all goes to the sister.” Franks watches Oates’s face to see if he’s getting anywhere.

  “So? The sister’s already loaded, right? There goes your motive. Any opportunity? Any means? Any fucking anything?”

  “I haven’t investigated yet!” Franks shouts. “You can’t say, hey you’re not giving me any evidence when I haven’t had a chance to work the case! Just give me a week, Lieutenant. A week. I’m telling you, the sister smells bad to me. I don’t know whether it was sibling rivalry or what, but I want to do a little poking around and see for myself.”

  Oates has turned away to look out the window.

  “What did Gordon Crowe have to say about the autopsy?” asks Franks, trying to cool the room down a little.

  “He’s a real piece of work. You know the part where it related the witness’s account, the bit about the mountain lion?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Crowe brought that up a few times. Wanted to know if we could definitively exclude it. Honest to God, the man is thinking about the family’s image more than his dead son. He said mushroom poisoning is sorta faggy and he’d prefer the mountain lion.”

  Franks shakes his head.

  “To him, it’s all about the family brand. I made it clear that if his son had been killed by a mountain lion his throat would have been ripped out and he’d have claw marks on his back. The guy was seriously disappointed to hear that was not what happened to his son.”

  A pause. Franks is about to try another tactic when Oates says, “Scotty, I’ll tell you…of all the cases to get obsessed by…look, you don’t want to be a thorn in Gordon Crowe’s side. The guy’s got connections everywhere, and he’s…just not someone you want as an enemy. Best thing is just to let this one go.”

  “What?”

  “Look, I’m not laying down for him, that’s not what I’m saying. We don’t have a single solid reason to think his son’s death was anything but accidental. You find something, okay, we’ll reopen the case. But I’m telling you, off the record and out of friendship and respect for you, Scotty—leave it be. No point getting on the wrong side of Gordon Crowe just because he’s an entitled piece of shit.”

  Franks gives a short nod.

  Driving back to his place, Franks pulls out a voice recorder and starts making notes. Oates said to find something, I’ll find something, he thinks. Because there is no way on God’s green fucking earth I’m gonna let this one go.

  60

  “I’m just keeping you up to date,” snaps Gordon. “You don’t have to get all emotional.”

  “My son has died,” says Lillian.

  “I’m quite aware.”

  Lillian drops onto the couch, then curls up, her head on the pillow. “I just don’t know which is worse. Heart attack, mushrooms, murder…you think that if you only knew what happened, it would be some kind of salve. But I…I’m beginning to think…maybe not.”

  “What do you remember about Donny Aldritch?”

  Lillian shrugs theatrically. Surprisingly enough, she has drunk less these past few days, bare maintenance only, as though the terrible news has shocked her out of her usual habits. Her cheeks show an unfamiliar bit of color and her eyes, while not exactly bright, look like the eyes of a living person. “I can’t say I got to know Donny very well. He and Wilson were very close for a while, after Tufts I suppose? I believe he traded oil futures, but don’t hold me to that.” She sits up, tucking her bare feet under her. “Hard to believe he would react to a jilting so violently. It’s not as though the situation is unheard of.”

  “Rebecca is the one who comes out of this whole thing smelling like a rose.”

&nbs
p; “Gordon, really. She’s just lost her husband. She’s carrying our grandchild. Do not go running down that trail, whatever you do.”

  “You gonna stop me?” says Gordon, stepping close to her, putting his hands on his hips.

  Lillian looks into his face. “Oh, Gordon,” she says, and looks away, but she is smiling.

  “You’ve never lost me,” he says, as he bends down to her. He tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, wipes away a tear with his thumb. Then all at once he scoops her thin body into his arms. “I’ve always been here, Lily, right with you.” With Lillian in his arms, he strides out of the living room and down the corridor to her room, tosses her on the bed, and lies on top of her.

  Lillian’s eyes glitter. Her expression is hard to read.

  “My wife,” he says, one hand deftly at the side zipper of her skirt, the other pushing her hair back from her face. “My darling.”

  61

  Back in the city, Amory sits on the desk in the office of 744 Park Avenue, in the basement of the building, reviewing security footage.

  “I’d haveta kill myself from boredom, watching those,” says Hector, a janitor, as he empties a trashcan.

  “My job is one thrill after another,” says Amory, his eyes never leaving the screen. He has seen Mrs. Ferneyhough come and go countless times, carrying bags from various high-end stores. He has seen the large family that lives on the third floor come and go with more than one nanny. Strollers, Chinese delivery, businessmen. A couple making out who might have gone farther if the elevator hadn’t reached their floor. Many people who appear to be less than happy to be going where they’re going, all played back in 8x speed.

  After four or five hours, Ricardo sticks his head in. “Hey, you’re Caroline’s friend,” he says, amiably.