The Black Widow

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  If only there were a way around the red tape . . .

  If only Ivy Sacks had been more forthcoming . . .

  If only she—or someone else—had reported him missing before a full two weeks had passed . . .

  Stockton leans forward, resting the front legs of his chair on the floor again and his elbows on the table, fists beneath his chin. “So what do you think she was hiding?”

  Sully doesn’t have to ask who he’s talking about.

  Ivy Sacks. His thoughts, as usual, have taken the same path as her own.

  “I don’t know,” she tells him, “but it was definitely something.”

  They discussed this earlier—several times, in fact, beginning in the car after leaving Ivy Sacks’s apartment. They’d agreed that the woman was exceedingly nervous.

  Witnesses—even the innocent ones—often are. But her body language indicated that she was keeping something from them.

  After leaving her apartment, they’d looked into her past, trying to uncover a link between her and the other two victims. They’d found nothing.

  Nor did they uncover a profile for her on any of the popular dating Web sites, including InTune. She did have a Facebook page—but of course, none of the three missing men showed up on her friends list.

  They could have been there at one time, but none of the missing men have active Facebook profiles. Fuentes and Delgado both had accounts that were abruptly deactivated, according to their families. Diaz doesn’t show up in the search engine. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t there at one time.

  They need a search warrant for his computer files—but again, that takes time. Meanwhile, all they can do is try to interview everyone who knew him well and saw him regularly.

  There aren’t many—if any—available candidates. Like many single people in this overpopulated city, Carlos Diaz seems to have led a relatively lonely life.

  “Maybe he really did just walk away,” Stockton muses, rubbing his double chins.

  Leary shakes her head, unable to avoid looking at all the lines criss-crossing the columns on the wall. “Maybe,” she says, “but I doubt it. I think he crossed paths with the wrong person on May thirtieth. Let’s just hope whoever it is doesn’t pounce again until August twenty-second. That should give us enough time to figure out who he is.”

  “Or who she is.”

  “If it’s a woman, then what’s her motive?”

  “Good old-fashioned perv?” Stockton asks, and then, seeing her expression, “No?”

  “Maybe, but I’m thinking it might be a hell of a lot more complicated than that.”

  “Like . . . ?”

  “Damned if I know.” Leary shakes her head. “I think I’m too exhausted right now to think clearly.”

  “You need to get some rest.”

  “I need to get some good strong tea. Rest can wait until we figure this out.”

  This time, Alex parks several blocks away, rather than in her usual spot at the curb. Better to risk a walk along the seedy neighborhood streets than to take a chance that someone will recognize the black BMW sitting in front of Mr. Griffith’s house.

  Anyway, no one is going to mess with her. Not dressed like this. It’s a warm night, but she’s wearing baggy jeans and a dark sweatshirt with the hood pulled up over an old baseball cap of Carmen’s. She looks like any other teenage thug who loiters on street corners and stoops around here. Even the other thugs don’t give her a second glance as she passes, head bent, shoulders slumped, hands jammed low into her front pockets.

  As she walks, she can’t help but wonder whether Ben is going to get back to her this evening while she’s out . . . taking care of business.

  He hadn’t yet when she last looked, about half an hour ago. She left her phone back at home, plugged into the charger. She’d run the battery almost all the way down today with her incessant pacing and futile, constant checking for private messages.

  She’d thought it would be good to have a distraction from waiting and wondering, but every muscle in her body is painfully contracted with the stress of the day. Not to mention yesterday.

  Too bad Carlos took it upon himself to do a job she’d have gladly done for him. You’d think throwing him into a crate in a hole in the woods and covering it with dirt would have been cathartic, but it didn’t begin to ease her anger toward him.

  Now, that anger has taken a new direction.

  I’ve been sleeping with a gun under my pillow ever since the neighborhood color scheme changed from white to brown and black . . .

  My husband and son are Hispanic . . .

  Carmen.

  Dante.

  And Ben . . .

  Ben, too.

  Picking up her pace, Alex turns onto the block that runs parallel to Mr. Griffith’s street.

  As she walks, she surreptitiously scopes out the houses on the left-hand side. Most have lights in the windows and cars in the driveways, but midway down the block—in almost exactly the right spot—she finds a stroke of luck: an empty driveway in front of a deserted-looking house with darkened windows.

  She walks casually down the driveway as if she belongs there. In the small backyard, she passes a couple of rank-smelling garbage cans and crosses a patch of overgrown grass to an unkempt shrubbery border separating this property from the one behind it. Peering through the bushes, she recognizes the roofline and salmon-colored siding: Mr. Griffin’s house.

  There are lights in two upstairs windows.

  That’s okay. She’ll wait for them to go out. She’s got all night.

  But as she stands in the shrub border, staring at those parallel yellow rectangles, they morph into red ovals, filling her with sorrow—and fueling her rage.

  Something’s bothering Gaby.

  Ben is certain of it.

  It’s nothing specific that she’s said or done. But he sensed a subtle shift in her mood when they were up on the Highline, watching the sunset and talking about the past. He felt better having explained why he’d left, and she seemed to feel better hearing it; she even thanked him for telling her. Then she was about to say something else, and she stopped herself and said it wasn’t important.

  It must have been, though, because after that she seemed to go from laid-back and contented to . . .

  Well, not edgy, exactly. But there’s a slight undercurrent of apprehension in the air even though she’s still talking, still laughing, as they finish their dessert at the same restaurant where they ate the other night.

  “Maybe,” he’d said as a different hipster hostess settled them—by his request—at the same windowed table again, “we should start thinking of this as ‘our place’ from now on.”

  “Maybe we should,” she agreed, but her smile was like a lamp on a dimmer switch turned just a notch below full glow.

  Throughout the meal, he was careful to keep the conversation rooted firmly in the here and now. It wasn’t difficult. With Gaby, conversation has always flowed so naturally. He had never really appreciated that until now that he’s dated so many other women and found himself struggling to engage some of them, or trying to keep his eyes from glazing over during endless monologues from others.

  “How’s the flan?” she asks him as he scrapes a spoon through the rich white custard disk on his plate. “As good as Abuela’s?”

  “No flan will ever be as good as Abuela’s.”

  “Not even mine, when I used her recipe that time she broke her wrist and couldn’t cook for a month. Remember?” Gaby asks, poised with a forkful of chocolate layer cake in front of her lips.

  “I remember. You thought she deliberately left out one of the ingredients so that yours wouldn’t turn out right and hers would always be the best.”

  “You say that like it was a crazy thing to think! Would you really put it past her?”

  “No,” he says, laughing. “I wouldn’t.”

  “That’s what she did with her roast pork recipe. I never could get it quite right, remember?”

  “I remember.
She was a piece of work. But she loved you.”

  “She loved you, too.”

  “Not in the beginning, she didn’t.”

  “Only because she was so protective of me.” Gaby shakes her head and again pokes the fork into the wedge of cake on her plate. “Do you know how many guys she scared away back when I was younger? If Paulie Nazario hadn’t stepped up to take me to my prom I never would have been able to go.”

  Paulie—now a hairdresser in Palm Beach—had lived in the apartment upstairs. Not only was he accustomed to Abuela’s bluster, but he used to give her home perms and gossip with her about her telenovelas—the Spanish soap operas she loved to watch. For a long time, according to an amused Gaby, her grandmother thought she and Paulie were a match made in heaven, even after he came home one Christmas with his roommate—and future husband—Ray, a dancer with the Miami Ballet.

  “Abuela scared me, too,” Ben points out. “But not enough to keep me away from you.”

  “Ah, pero es muy valiente!” she says with a laugh, and in response he strikes a mock he-man pose, lifting his fists and flexing his muscles.

  They linger over dessert until the waiter drops a leather bill holder.

  Reaching for his wallet, Ben takes out his phone, too, to check the time.

  Seeing that there’s a new text, he sets it aside on the table, pretty sure the text is going to be from Peter. When Gaby said she was busy tonight, Ben had agreed to meet him at the Stumble Inn to watch the game. When his plans changed, he texted Peter to say something had come up. Peter’s response to that: Gaby again?

  When Ben didn’t reply, Peter eventually wrote: No answer is my answer. I’ll be @ SI so meet me later.

  Ben ignored that, too. He felt the phone vibrate in his pocket when this latest text came in during dinner but didn’t bother to check it then, and he doesn’t now, either.

  He’s with Gaby tonight. The rest of the world is on hold.

  “What time is it?” she asks as they wait for the waiter to return.

  “Still early. Let’s go have a nightcap.”

  “I know a nice little place off Gansevoort.”

  “That didn’t quite work out last time, did it?”

  “Oh, I think it worked out just fine.” Gaby grins at him, and he decides he was probably just imagining a slightly lackluster mood on her end.

  “Okay, well, if it’s open this time, we can stop there for a drink, and if it’s not . . . we’ll have to find someplace else.”

  Like her place. Or maybe his this time.

  The thought of later is so distracting that it takes him three tries to do the simple math as he adds the tip to the receipt when the waiter returns. Then he drops his napkin as they stand, and fumbles when he tries to pick it up.

  “Estar por la luna,” she teases him, just like the old days.

  “Es todo culpa tuya,” he replies with a grin, blaming his distraction on her.

  She stops at the ladies’ room on their way to the door, telling him she’ll meet him outside.

  Ben weaves past the crowd of people waiting for tables and steps out onto the sidewalk. The night air is warm, and a bright full moon rides high in a starry sky. It’s a perfect evening; everything has been going well so far.

  So why can’t he shake the unsettled feeling that something is not quite right?

  Alex had initially figured it would be a good idea to wait a full half hour after the light in the upstairs bedroom was extinguished. After all, she thought, she had all night.

  But she’s never been very good with time. It either flies by or it drags on, and she usually has a hard time keeping track either way.

  But she did check her watch earlier. She knows that it’s only been ten minutes since she got here. Ten minutes. It feels like hours.

  She can’t possibly stay here, crouched in the bushes, for another twenty minutes. Maybe she can endure another ten, at most. Or five.

  She’s much too warm in layers of denim and fleece from head to toe, but the mosquitoes are biting what little bit of skin she’s left exposed on her face and hands. Her legs are cramping, her head is throbbing and—worst of all—her phone is back at home.

  Surely by now Ben must have replied to her private message. He might be wondering why she isn’t writing back promptly. He might even be giving up on her, right this very second, and moving on to some other woman.

  No, Ben, you can’t do that!

  I need you! We need each other! Wait for me! Please wait!

  Sweat from her soaked scalp trickles down the nape of her neck. She lowers her hood momentarily to wipe it away. A mosquito buzzes close to her ear, then sinks its stinger into the newly exposed skin of her neck. She slaps away the engorged insect and finds blood smeared on her fingers.

  That does it. She can’t stick this out for even another minute. Either she goes in now and does what has to be done, or she goes home and forgets this whole thing.

  Which will it be?

  . . . color scheme changed from white to brown and black . . .

  Carmen . . . Dante . . . Ben . . .

  In, she decides.

  With her heart pounding, she puts up her hood again, and pulls the brim of her cap low over her forehead. She takes a pair of surgical gloves from her pocket and puts them on. Then, with her bloodied hand clenched into a hard fist inside its latex covering, Alex emerges from the bushes and strides toward the salmon-colored house.

  Chapter 9

  In a candlelit cocktail lounge off Gansevoort Street, Gaby sits across a small table from Ben, twirling her wineglass by its stem.

  This time, luckily, the place was open, and crowded with couples on this summery Saturday night. The decor reflects the neighborhood’s vintage aesthetic, with century-old mosaic tile floor, pressed tin ceiling, dark wood wainscoting, and a white marble-topped bar running the length of the room.

  It reminds Gaby of the granite countertops in the apartment she’d shared with Ben. The bigger, better apartment.

  Nothing is indestructible . . .

  Voices from the past seem to contradict the lyrics of the bar’s piped-in background music, straight out of Pottery Barn and/or the Great American Songbook: Nat King Cole crooning “When I Fall in Love.”

  “It will be forever . . .”

  Gaby tries to focus on what Ben is telling her about the new design he’s working on, the one he mentioned the other night. The building is destined to be the tallest in its immediate neighborhood, altering the city’s skyline. Naturally, the prospect thrills him.

  That’s Ben. Always striving to make an impact, reaching for that pinnacle of success.

  She’d thought it was one of his greatest attributes back in the days when she first became enamored of him, watching him swim laps in the sound as though he were going for the Olympic gold . . .

  After Josh died, of course, she’d thought that perseverance was his greatest fault.

  Nobody’s perfect, Gaby . . . You have your faults, I have mine. We can love each other despite them . . .

  But not this particular fault. She just couldn’t. Not anymore.

  If only they hadn’t moved from their original one-bedroom apartment into that bigger one: a “junior four,” in New York City real estate parlance. The new rental had a kitchen, a living room, a bedroom, plus another room that was too small to be considered a second bedroom, even in New York—but was large enough for a crib and changing table and had a door that could be closed.

  It was Ben who suggested moving, right after she got pregnant. She was surprised he wanted to abandon the old place, just a few blocks from his office, to a new one that would mean a crowded rush hour subway commute with a transfer.

  But Ben had grown up in a cramped one bedroom, sharing a pull-out couch with his brother. There was barely enough room in the apartment for the kids themselves, let alone their belongings. He and his brother used to joke that if they fell asleep reading a book in bed, their mother snatched it up and gave it away before dawn.


  She was notoriously organized—she had to be, having grown up with several siblings in a one-room apartment in San Juan, then raising two sons in an only slightly larger Co-op City condo up in the Bronx. The only childhood possessions that escaped Ben’s mother’s constant purging of so-called clutter now reside in the stray box in Gaby’s studio.

  “Our child will have private space,” Ben vowed when she was pregnant, “and so will we.”

  Damn him. Damn him and his space. Damn him and his plan. Always striving, pushing himself toward something—that was Ben.

  Running a marathon when he was feeling rundown, catching a cold . . .

  She remembers telling him not to cough near the baby even if he covered his mouth; remembers telling him to scrub his hands well with soap and then rub them with antibacterial gel before touching Josh.

  “Maybe you should just get him a little Hazmat suit,” Ben said dryly at one point. He liked to tease her about being an overprotective mother. Usually, she smiled at his jokes.

  She did at that one, though she said, “I just don’t want him getting sick.”

  “He’s going to catch a cold eventually, Gab. All kids do. He’s not a fragile newborn anymore. He’ll be fine.”

  He caught the cold. He wasn’t fine. Does one have anything to do with the other?

  If they’d just stayed in that small apartment, where their baby could sleep within arm’s reach . . .

  If only he hadn’t run the marathon . . .

  Back then there was a peculiar and yet overwhelming logic to that line of thinking. Time—time that heals all wounds—seems to have obliterated her ability to make sense of it.

  You have to tell him.

  All evening long, as she and Ben strolled the last length of the Highline in the twilight, then sat across from each other in the restaurant, and now in this cocktail lounge, the refrain has been running through Gaby’s head.