At the bar he ordered a shot of Jameson and a glass of draft Heineken. He had two pieces of information that were very important: the doorman at Yasmine’s building had been killed in what looked like an execution, and the Excelsior’s digital surveillance system had been tampered with. Someone else had entered Yasmine’s apartment on the afternoon of the murder, someone who had been deleted from the building’s security video, and who had coerced Felix Diaz into lying to the police. And then killed him for his trouble.
On the ride home this afternoon from Long Island, Matt had called Jane Manning, the head of T.A.R.U., the NYPD’s technical assistance unit, and asked her point blank if she was willing to testify about the security system. She said she certainly would. On Monday, Matt would impart all of this to Everett Stryker. Stryker would kill Healy with this information, both in court and, worse for Healy, in the press. The case against Michael was getting weaker all the time. The scotches that Matt had been nursing in his apartment in the evenings had been medicinal—anti-depressants—but the Jameson and beer chaser were celebratory. The fact that Michael hated his guts didn’t matter. He was no murderer and would soon be free of the absurd charges against him.
He was about to order another whiskey when his cell phone rang. Jade Lee’s name and number were on the screen
“I saw you today,” he said, after putting the phone to his ear.
“I saw you too. Where did you go?”
“I took the back way to the parking lot.”
“Where are you? Are you busy?”
“I’m at Rudy’s.”
“Really? Are you with somebody?”
“No.”
“You’re drinking alone?”
“Yes.”
“We need to talk. How about if I come over?”
“Fine. Are you bringing your new guy?”
“New guy?”
“The tall one next to you in church today.”
“That was Antonio. I’ll be right there.”
Matt clicked the phone off. Antonio? The kid must have grown a foot since I last saw him.
“Antonio’s grown up,” Matt said to Jade.
They were sitting in a booth along the back wall, Rudy’s prized seats because they were dark and out of the way and private but still afforded a view of the entire one-room bar. Summer Wind, the Lyle Lovett version, was playing on the jukebox. Most of the men in the place had turned to stare at Jade when she came in through the glass front door and stood to look around for Matt. When she greeted him with a kiss on the cheek he felt the pride that all men feel when they are seen by other men with a beautiful woman. The booth had cost him a twenty-dollar tip to the bartender, but it was worth it. A young waitress had just placed shots of Jameson and Heineken chasers in front of them.
“He has,” Jade answered.
“What’s he up to, besides basketball?”
“The Jesuits are kicking his ass.”
“The Jesuits?”
“He goes to Regis.”
Matt smiled. He had gone, on his father’s orders, to the all boys Regis High School, on East 84th Street, for three years, from 1976 to 1979, an hour-plus commute from the Bronx everyday. Though he had been kicked out for fighting—he had broken a classmate’s nose during a basketball scrimmage, and then broke it again two weeks later in a confrontation on the street—and though he had hated it while he was there, he later came to feel a quiet love for the place, and had tried to get Michael to go there, but Debra had other ideas, as usual.
“No game tonight?” Matt asked.
“He’s in Florida with the team. They play three games down there on their winter break.”
“To Antonio,” Matt said, lifting his shot of whiskey.
“I haven’t done this in a while,” Jade said, lifting hers.
“It’s a cold winter night,” Matt said. “It’ll do you good.”
“Here goes,” Jade said. “To Michael as well.” She lifted her shot glass and clinked it against Matt’s. They knocked their drinks back simultaneously, then sipped their beers.
“How about you?” Matt asked, putting his beer down. “Are you O.K.?” Jade looked fine, more beautiful than ever, if that was possible, her color high from the walk in the cold, and her amazing eyes aglow as the Irish whiskey did its work. There was, though, something off about her, something slightly forced about her smile that made him ask this question. Maybe she’s lonely, he thought, with her son away. Lonely like me, he added, surprising himself. No job, no son. Drinking alone…
“Antonio wants to visit his father in Los Angeles. He found him on the internet.”
“The producer.”
“Yes.”
Matt knew the bare bones of the story of Jade’s relationship with Antonio’s father. At seventeen, young and tall and voluptuous and unbelievably beautiful, she had left Queens and gone to Los Angeles to become an actress. She returned three months later, pregnant with Antonio, the father a producer who she described succinctly as a scumbag who wore too much cologne. Her two marriages followed, both short and painful. When she moved to 45th Street after her second divorce, she went to Mass every day at St. Malachy’s, the actors’ chapel across the street, to remind herself, she said, of her stupidity and of the inevitable consequences of vainglory.
“Let him go,” Matt said.
Jade did not answer.
“He’ll go anyway.”
“The guy’s rich, a player in Hollywood,” Jade said. “He does big budget movies now.”
“You think the kid will be seduced,” Matt said, wincing inwardly at his poor choice of words, watching Jade’s eyes, which went vacant for a second. She did not answer.
“You can’t stop him, Jade,” Matt said. “The thing is, if you try, he’ll only want to go more. When does he want to go?”
“Spring break, in six weeks.”
“It’s his father.” Matt felt the full weight of the irony of this sentence as he uttered it. Antonio would be traveling three thousand miles to see a father he had never met and who had ignored him for seventeen years. Michael could not walk thirty blocks to visit Matt. The pull of blood to blood, ancient and primal, had had no effect on his own son.
Jade remained silent. Matt watched her as she took a sip of her beer and returned the traditional, curved glass to the wooden table. Her eyes rose to meet his, and in that meeting Matt saw not acceptance on Jade’s part, but something else, something more akin to fear than resignation. What was she afraid of?
“What about you?” Jade said, breaking their eye contact, and her chain of thoughts, whatever they were. “How’s Michael doing?”
“I’m not sure, to tell you the truth,” Matt replied. “I tried to get him to come to Nick Loh’s funeral with me, but he couldn’t.”
“Too bad,” Jade said. “Five hundred cops, not to mention Healy and the Mayor, would have gotten the message.”
“Yes, that was the point, but he couldn’t make it.”
This was a lie. Matt had not spoken to his son since he was released on bail on the Monday after Yasmine’s murder. His several messages had gone unreturned. He was sure Jade would see through it. How busy could Michael be as he hung around Manhattan waiting for trial? She would understand, he knew she would, but it stung too much for him to talk about it.
“I’m here about Michael,” Jade said.
“Not me?”
“You too.”
“What about him?”
“I got a strange call from Bob Davila.”
“What kind of a call?”
“He knows I go to St. Malachy’s. He told me there was something there for me, in a missal in a back pew on the left.”
“Was there?”
“Yes. I went to 5:30 Mass tonight. This is what I found.” Jade reached in
to her shoulder bag on the bench seat next to her, extracted an eight-by-ten manila envelope, and handed it to Matt.
The first thing he pulled out was a three page document with United Nations International Independent Investigation Commission below the UN’s iconic light blue, olive branch-encircled globe, at the top of each page.
“Where did he get these?” he asked, after carefully reading all three pages.
“I don’t know,” Jade replied.
“Do you know what they are?”
“I think so.”
“Did you see the entry for January 30?”
“Yes.”
“’Fifteen-ten. Suspects 1 and 2 enter apartment building at 1011 Central Park West. Fifteen-thirty, suspects exit building.’ This is a United Nations surveillance log. The investigators’ identifications are coded. China 1 and China 6.”
“Did you see the one on the night before?” Jade asked. “They went into Lucky’s in Queens.”
“I see it,” Matt answered after flipping the pages backward. “That’s the club Michael mentioned.”
Laying the surveillance log aside, Matt pulled the remaining documents from the light brown envelope: various identification cards for one Ali al-Najjar, two three-by-five color photographs, a half sheet of plain white paper with Bill Crow, FBI??? written on it and a print-out of a magazine article by Christopher Hatch, titled The West Selling Its Soul. Matt read the I.D. cards, then, after staring at the photos intently, said, “Adnan and Ali. Suspect 1 and Suspect 2. Michael’s friends.”
“I thought so,” Jade said. “There’s one more thing. Davila asked me if Monteverde meant anything to me. I went online. There are a bunch of hotels around the world named Monteverde. One of them is closed. It’s in Lebanon. It’s the headquarters of the United Nations team investigating the assassination of the Lebanese Prime Minister, Rafik Hariri.”
“They’re looking at Syria.”
“Yes. It’s supposed to come to trial in March in The Hague. I also found the Hatch article. It’s pretty interesting.”
“What does he say?”
“He thinks the US has offered to shut down Monteverde if Syria will make peace with Israel.”
“Does he have proof?”
“Who has proof of things like that?”
“The papers said Loh was working on a drug task force.”
“I don’t think so, Matt.”
“I don’t either. Not now. Do you have Davila’s number?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s call him. We’ll ask him who Bill Crow is.”
“I already talked to him. I told him you’d want to talk to him.”
“What did he say?”
“He’s being very cautious,” Jade continued, “I think he stole this report.”
“Did he say that?” Matt said.
“No, but why all the cloak-and-dagger?”
Matt let his mind drift for a moment to the day he first met Davila in 1993, when he prepped him for his trial testimony in People v. Hakimi. Only twenty-years old, with a background similar to Matt’s, the newly-minted, bantam-weight Hispanic cop had quickly acknowledged that he had created a Miranda problem for Matt, but he was proud that he had done the right thing by Jack McCann, a fellow officer, had saved his career most likely, and his pension.
“He told me the story about your honor-killing case.” Jade said.
“What story?”
“The thing with McCann, the problem he created. He said you saved his ass.”
“He’s exaggerating.”
“You’re a tough guy, Matt, a stoic, but you’ve got a lot of friends.”
Matt let this pass, thinking not enough to keep my son from getting indicted for a murder he didn’t commit.
“He wants to meet us tonight,” Jade said. “He said he’d call me at ten to fix a time and place.”
Matt looked at his watch. It was nine-thirty. “We’ll sip our beer,” he said.
“No more whiskey.”
“No. My limit is two anyway.”
“Mine is one.”
Their eyes met again, and Matt was suddenly reticent, a condition he had not encountered in himself in a long time. “I have to ask you,” he said, finding his tongue. “Is there a new guy?”
“No, there’s not,” Jade replied. “And you? Is there a woman?”
Matt shook his head. “No,” he said. He took a sip of his beer and replaced the glass on the table. He had a question to ask: Why did you break up with me, Jade, really? But he couldn’t get it to his lips. Five years was a long time to wait to ask a question like that. All breakups are the same and all breakups are different, but theirs was a strange and surely an aberrant one. They date for a few weeks, they make love once, and then she abruptly ends it. I can’t do it, Matt, was all she said. I can’t do it. Stranger still was his refusal to press her, to ask her what she meant, unable to even think about swallowing his pride, to beg. Now she was here to help his idiot son, and his pride suddenly looked more like arrogance or some weird macho self-indulgence. Matt the tough guy, Matt the guy who begged no one.
“Jade… ,” he said, but the ringing of Jade’s cell phone interrupted him.
“It’s Bobby,” Jade said, looking at the screen. “He’s early.”
Chapter 14
Manhattan,
Glen Cove, February 28, 2009,
8:00PM—11:00PM
Behind the wheel of her BMW SUV, seated high enough to see all the cars ahead of her, Debra al-Hassan ground her third Adderall of the day with her teeth, worked up some saliva in a mouth that was of late always too dry, and swallowed it as she drove through the Midtown Tunnel. She would need two Ambiens, at least, to fall asleep tonight, but she had no choice, she needed to be alert. She had been taking Prozac and Valium surreptitiously for over a year, but had never had to double down on them as she had lately with her new pills. She seemed always to be either in a leaden fog, drowsy and half asleep, or strung way too tight, her nerves screaming, her senses receiving and painfully amplifying the slightest whim of the world around her. No in-between. No real rest.
The tunnel’s lights shocked her at first with their intensity. Calm down, she told herself, calm down. It’s just a tunnel, and not a long one. Five cars ahead a nondescript blue Chevrolet with diplomatic license plates was gliding through the tunnel’s graceful curves at a steady fifty miles an hour. Don’t get distracted. Don’t lose that car.
Basil was en route to Syria. She was supposed to be on her way to their beach house in East Hampton. Earlier this evening, around six o’clock, she had overheard Mustafa make what she thought were arrangements to be picked up in front of her Park Avenue co-op at eight. At seven-thirty, an overnight bag on her shoulder, wearing a Mets cap, her long brown hair in a pony tail, she had retrieved her car from the parking garage around the corner and found an illegal space in a loading zone a short distance from her building’s gilded entrance.
Exactly at eight Mustafa emerged and approached the blue Chevrolet, which had appeared virtually simultaneously. Instead of getting in, however, he handed something to the driver through the passenger window. She froze as her husband’s sphinx-like manservant backed away from the Chevy and gazed up and down Park Avenue before turning to go back into the building. He had not seen her. Her heart pounding, her mouth drier than ever, she decided to follow the Chevrolet.
Mustafa, whose yes madams and no madams had been tinged with contempt these past six years, especially when Basil was not present, was the key. Adnan and Ali were his lap dogs. They would never have framed Michael on their own. With Basil away, her second Adderall doing its work, curled up in a blanket by the fire, pretending to be asleep or in her usual state of listlessness, she had been able to quietly track Mustafa with her half-closed eyes and fully open ears. At six he ha
d taken a call on his cell phone while attending the fire.
When she emerged from the tunnel, relieved to have its glaring lights and suffocating, too-narrow confines behind her, the screen in her head that she could not control pulled itself down and technicolor, surround-sound scenes of her and Michael began immediately to play. This reel was one of the many that had begun playing the night she heard that her son had been charged with murder. The screen came down and the movies came on at random moments, maddeningly random moments, like now.
Mommy, where’s Daddy?
He left us, Michael.
Mommy, can I sleep with you tonight?
Yes, Michael. I’m lonely too, and afraid.
Michael, do you like Mommy’s new dress?
It’s beautiful, like you.
Who do you love more, Mom, me or Basil?
Who do you think?
He left us, Michael. He left us.
The reels varied in content, but the last scene was always the same. Home from Boston for the holiday break, just two months ago, Michael had announced that he and Mina—how she hated that dimunitive, that lover’s nickname—were getting married. No preliminaries, no warmth in his voice, on his way out of the Park Avenue apartment, his coat and scarf on.
“Where are you off to?”
“To see Mina. We’re celebrating.”
“Celebrating what?”
“We’re getting married.”
A simple fact. No big deal. Her heart in shock. She could feel it even now as she was forced to watch the scene play out for the hundredth time.
“You’re only twenty-two, Michael. Yasmine’s not even out of college yet.”
“She graduates in May. We’ll be married in June.”
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