Never Tell

by Alafair Burke

  “Yeah. Cattle and alpacas, even. They hire local guys to do all the work, but I think my dad likes the idea of being a weekend cowboy.”

  “How about you? Are you infected with the country bug?”

  “No way. My mom says I’d hate it. There’s nothing to do, and the house is barely even a house. More like a cave for my dad and his friends to play poker twice a year and pretend they’re still twenty years old. She’s only been there, like, twice. I’ve never even bothered.”

  “Never?”

  She shook her head.

  “I hear you.” The picture of Julia in the country was taking on new meaning. Maybe a few of the secretaries at his former law firm weren’t the only girls who saw an appealing side to George. “The Hamptons sound much nicer. Hopefully, your dad at least got to take some time off work to go with you and your mom last weekend?”

  “Yeah. Well, the first part, at least. He went back on Saturday night.”

  Rogan gave Ellie a small nod. It was J. J. Rogan code for nicely done. They were just about done here.

  “Do you mind if I use the bathroom before we head out?”

  As the elevator doors closed, Ellie studied Casey and Ramona, standing side by side at the apartment entrance. Casey had that same adoring look he’d had on his face whenever he had talked about Ramona. And, contrary to what they had been told by Brandon and Vonda, Ramona no longer seemed oblivious to Casey’s attention. She leaned slightly in toward him. She seemed comfortable with his hand on her back.

  Ellie found herself wishing—for their sakes—that the world was less complicated.

  “You took long enough in the bathroom,” Rogan said. “I was running my mouth so long I wound up telling that Casey kid to sue the hell out of Bill Whitmire. Meanwhile, you were off violating the Fourth Amendment, weren’t you?”

  “It’s not like I tore their bedroom apart or anything.” Like most police, they both knew the difference between a little shortcut and the kind of screw-up that led to evidence getting thrown out of court. “I got a list of all the incoming phone numbers on their caller ID. Way faster than the phone company.” She waved her notebook proudly.

  “Damn. I hope you can read your own handwriting, because that looks like chicken scratch to me.”

  “Sorry, wrong number.” She dialed while Rogan drove. “That was Duane Reade.”

  “Sorry, wrong number.” She ended yet another call. “Hair salon.”

  “Sorry, wrong number. Some place called Marea?” It sounded familiar.

  “Restaurant,” he said. “Central Park South.”

  “Ah, right.” One meal probably cost more than her entire month’s take-out budget. “Yes, hello. I’m sorry. What business did I call? . . . Attorney at law? . . . Yes, can you tell me why someone from this number may have called George Langston last Thursday?”

  Rogan shook his head. They both knew there was no way a receptionist would answer that question.

  “All right. Well, I assume Mr. Wiles does some kind of drug or medical malpractice type of litigation?” It wouldn’t be unusual for a lawyer to call Langston at home.

  “Exclusively? Okay. Thank you very much.”

  Not the pharmacist or the hair salon or a fancy-pants restaurant. Not even an adversary on a pending case.

  “That was the law office of Mr. Michael Wiles, Esquire, Attorney at Law.” She mimicked the receptionist’s professionally pleasant voice.

  “Esquire, Attorney at Law? Isn’t that redundant?”

  “Yes, but here’s the excellent part. This particular Esquire, Attorney at Law, practices nothing but family law. We suspected Julia might have an older man in her life. Now we find out George Langston has a private little alpaca ranch—and now maybe a divorce lawyer?”

  “Everyone seems to agree Julia was sexually adventurous. What did that teacher say about wanting men who were off limits? Can’t get much more forbidden than your best friend’s sort-of-handsome but rigid and inaccessible dad. It would certainly explain why Julia didn’t tell Ramona who she was dating.”

  “It could also explain the threats on Adrienne’s website.”

  “Well, only the first one, right? Maybe George found out about Adrienne’s blog and told Julia. In a fit of jealousy, she posts a late-night comment, just to fuck with her. But then who’s messing with Adrienne now?”

  “Maybe status-conscious George doesn’t want her writing about her background—her trashy family, her abuse, the fact that she was a babysitter before she was Mrs. George Langston. He could have been the one to post the first threat, too, using Julia’s computer. He wasn’t in East Hampton that weekend, after all.”

  Rogan pointed a finger at her. “Aha! You’re starting to think we’re actually on to something.”

  “Maybe,” she said grudgingly. Her cell phone buzzed in her hand. “Hatcher.”

  “Hey, Ellie Belly. It’s M and M.”

  Michael Ma was by far the nicest analyst in the entire NYPD. He also liked nicknames. And cookies. Three Christmas Eves earlier, Ellie had passed off a dozen Bouchon Bakery nutter-butters as her own home-baked recipe to persuade Mike to stay late to compare a latent pulled from a stolen handgun to Ellie’s favorite suspect. One of these days he’d figure out that he, too, could score a handmade nutter-butter for two-twenty-five a pop at the Time Warner Center. Until then, Mike was Ellie Belly’s go-to guy for a lab rush.

  “I got seven latents off that shoe box. Five of them belonged to your vic and her daughter. And two come back to the same guy: James Grisco, DOB March 13, 1972.”

  “Any chance he’s the doorman who handed them the package?”

  “Park Avenue address? I don’t think they hire murderers as doormen.”

  “Grisco has a murder conviction?”

  “Served fifteen years. Got out two months ago.”

  “Cool. Anything else?”

  “I’m just the print guy. You guys figure out what it all means. And bring the cookies.”

  “Will do, Double-M. This Friday at the latest. I promise.” She ended the call before he could argue about the timing. “If George Langston is Adrienne’s ‘secret admirer,’ we may have found the guy who can help us prove it.”

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Their lieutenant had her head tilted back in her chair, a bottle of Visine trembling over one fluttering eye. “Fucking LASIK. You’re the one who convinced me to do this, Rogan. What about you, Hatcher? Contacts?”

  “Some days, but I can go without.”

  “Another reason to hate the both of you. Now, how many times are you going to change your minds about this one case?”

  “You can’t hold the Casey Heinz bump in the road against us,” Hatcher said. “That was all Bill Whitmire. We said from the beginning that his guy Earl Gundley was bad news.”

  Ellie’s remark wasn’t quite a told-you-so, but the groan that came out of Tucker’s throat was a sign she recalled vouching for the former cop.

  “Pretty damn big bump in the road. So tell me again what you’ve got on George Langston.”

  Ellie gave Tucker a quick update on Langston’s investment property up in Pound Ridge and the photograph of Julia. “We thought all along Julia was probably seeing someone she didn’t want her friends to know about, even Ramona. We also knew she had a thing for men who were inaccessible. And men who were older. If the man was George Langston, that would certainly explain why Julia never told Ramona. And it would also explain why Julia might have posted threatening comments on Adrienne’s blog.”

  “And what do you know about George Langston?”

  “A family law attorney phoned the Langston house two days ago, which means George might be looking into a divorce. And he had multiple motives to kill Julia—she may have been close to telling Adrienne or Ramona about the affair, or she could have discovered that something wasn’t so kosher about George and his representation of Jason Moffit’s parents. It looks like he sidled into the Moffits’ good graces to convince them to sell out quick in their l
awsuit against his friend David Bolt. He shuts them up, and Bolt continues business as usual.”

  “That’s a lot of mights and maybes,” Tucker said. “And why would Langston take a case where he had such an obvious conflict of interest? He could lose his license.”

  “We’ve seen people do worse out of friendship. Or maybe Bolt paid him to help keep it quiet. From what we can tell, Langston isn’t making nearly as much money as he used to draw from the firm, but there’s been no change in the lifestyle: same school for Ramona, same luxury apartment, same vacation house in East Hampton.”

  “We’re just asking for a couple days more to see these leads through,” Rogan said. “No additional staff. Just the two of us.”

  “You two are always scheming, working the brass. ‘No additional resources. Only a couple of days.’ But here’s the thing. You two have been all over the place since this case started. Now you think you’ve finally got a theory, but Adrienne Langston is still being threatened. Where does this James Grisco guy fit into the picture?”

  “Minimal information on him as of now,” Ellie said. “A DUI and a burg in the early nineties, then arrested in ’95 for murder at the age of twenty-three in Buffalo. Victim was a forty-nine-year-old white male, an insurance agent named Wayne Cooper. The state alleged Grisco lay in wait before stabbing him to death. Agreed to life in prison to avoid the death penalty, but got out four months ago after testifying against a cellmate.”

  “Is there a parole officer?”

  “I called him this morning,” Rogan said. “The PO had no clue the guy was in the city. Grisco’s been clean as far as he knows. He’s got a New York State driver’s license that puts him in Buffalo, but his fingerprints are on a hand-delivered box here in Manhattan. Until we’ve got something better, our best guess is that Grisco’s in the local area and Langston slipped him a few bucks to dump the package in front of their apartment building.”

  “Be nice to get that nailed down.”

  They both nodded, because that’s all they could do. There was still so much they didn’t know.

  “And if George Langston is your man, why is he sending a shoe box full of maggots to his wife?”

  “The threats started after Adrienne signed her book deal,” Ellie said. “She might be all about opening up and not having secrets, but maybe he doesn’t share that point of view. We need to know exactly how he feels about her blog and her book. Now that Adrienne’s actually scared, we’re hoping that fear might motivate her to open up to us a little more.”

  “Right. Because she’s really going to like you when you tactfully broach the subject of her husband possibly banging their kid’s best friend.”

  “I know,” Ellie said. “We’ve got some serious sucking up to do. I can apologize very profusely when necessary.”

  “Funny. I’ve never noticed.” Tucker looked at the notes she’d been jotting down. “All right, keep working it. Talk to Adrienne first. See just how much her husband knows about this book and how he felt about it.”

  “Adrienne’s at their house in East Hampton. You want us to wait until tomorrow?” It was already four o’clock. Driving out there today would mean serious overtime.

  “You finally have a suspect that feels right to you. I know the two of you. Just go. And bring me back a lobster roll. And tomorrow you try to find that James Grisco person. If he can give you the connection between Langston and that shoe box, you might actually have something.”

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Ellie emerged from Tucker’s office to find Max sitting at her desk.

  “Hey, you.”

  “You got a second?”

  She didn’t. Not really. But Rogan, overhearing, said, “I gotta get some stuff from the locker room. We can head out in ten.”

  They walked together onto Twenty-first Street, neither of them speaking until they were away from the crowd of cops on a smoke break outside the precinct station house.

  “Sorry to just show up at work like this.”

  “You never have to apologize.”

  “I did a lot of thinking last night.” She had called him to see if he was coming over. For the first time since they’d gotten together, he hadn’t returned her call. “I didn’t get any sleep. I’m totally exhausted. And I can’t do it again tonight.”

  “Okay. What can I do?” He was really scaring her.

  “I wanted to make sure I saw you in person. We need to talk. I was upset with you for having made a decision that affected both of us, but now I’ve made one, too.”

  She knew it would come to this. It had been a week since they’d both realized they were picturing different futures together. They’d been pretending to have moved past the issue, but of course they hadn’t. How could they? “Please don’t do this, Max. Not like this.”

  “Will you just listen?”

  She knew somehow she would find a way to blow it. He was breaking up with her. On the sidewalk. At work. Before she had to get in a car with Rogan for a three-hour drive.

  “I—can we just talk about it later?”

  “Did you not hear me before? I left work because I couldn’t get anything done. I need to say this now.”

  “Please—” She hated the pleading sound in her own voice.

  “I love you, Ellie.”

  “I love you, too.” Unlike his statement, hers didn’t have the sound of a “but” at the end.

  “We can’t keep doing what we’re doing. One day at a time. Never knowing where we’re sleeping or when we’ll see each other. We’ve been dating a year and you’ve never even met my parents. Or my friends, for that matter.”

  “I’ve met your friends,” she protested.

  “No, you’ve run into a few of my friends at work. It’s not the same. We have a lot of fun, Ellie, and we talk shop really well together, but this isn’t a real relationship. I know we have the potential for more, but I need to know you’re going to be there.”

  “Of course I’m here. And of course it’s real.” It was the most real relationship she’d ever had.

  “I want us to live together.”

  This was not what she was expecting. She felt a lump build in her throat from relief.

  “We practically live together now.”

  He shook his head. “No, we spend practically every night together. That’s not the same. I want us to share a home. To share a life. To plan around each other. To take vacations together.”

  “When was the last time either of us had a vacation?”

  He shared the brief smile. “Fine. I want us to plan a vacation that we’ll take five years from now. I want us to take each other into consideration, no matter what.”

  “I consider you. I always have, ever since we met.”

  “Will you please stop disagreeing with everything I say? Maybe I made a mistake wording it like I’m fixing a problem. My point is that I love you, I want us to be together, and I was so pumped to tell you that I bailed on a unit meeting so I could get up here and talk to you right now. Just say yes and I’ll leave here satisfied.”

  She’d thought about living together. Of course she had. And on those previous occasions, she had run through all of the logistical questions: Where would they live? Was either of their apartments large enough to accommodate both of them? If they got a new place, how would they split the bills? Could she really bring herself to walk away from a rent-controlled apartment?

  Max had obviously analyzed the same considerations. “We’ll get a bigger place. If we combine our rents, we could even get a two-bedroom. And Jess can sublet your apartment in the meantime—just in case.”

  Jess had held his current job longer than any previous work, but he still wasn’t up to carrying a lease on his own. “Then I need to talk to him to see—”

  “Those are all just details, Ellie. Say you want it to happen, and I’ll know it’s going to happen.” He pushed her hair back behind her ear and stroked her cheek. “You’re looking for reasons to say no.”

  He had it w
rong. She wanted to say yes. She wanted to unpack moving boxes with him and argue about how to arrange the furniture. She wanted to wake up with him every morning.

  And it wasn’t the logistics of leases and square footage and rent control that kept her from leaping at the invitation, one she’d been hoping for at some level for months. As much as she wanted to, she couldn’t ignore the real reason he was asking her for this now.

  “Do you really think we should move in together when you know we ultimately are going to want different things? It’ll just make things that much harder on both of us down the road when you—”

  “We don’t need to decide that now. It’s taking it to the next step. We’ll make bigger decisions later—together.”

  She saw Rogan standing in front of the precinct, watching them, keys in hand.

  “But I told you, that one big decision has already been made. You’re asking me to change.”

  Ellie had lived with a boyfriend once. He had wanted her to change, too. He couldn’t understand why she had to keep working as a cop when he was offering her the life of an investment banker’s wife. When she realized she had to leave, she had nowhere to go. She was stuck under his roof, still sleeping in his bed, still sleeping with him, until one of Jess’s friends decided to move to Nashville and Ellie scored her apartment.

  “You’ve told me before about every guy you’ve ever dated wanting you to change. I don’t want you ever to change, at least not for me, not for anyone but yourself. But I know you, Ellie. You may not believe me, but I know there’s room for evolution in your life. That is not the same as asking you to change. I’m asking you to make room for some flexibility. To let yourself not make final decisions. To make room for another person in your life. To open up your mind to the possibility that life is a constant process of getting to know yourself, and that sometimes you get to know yourself better when you’re not so alone.”

  She’d heard him say all this that first night, when they were fighting. Not everything was black-and-white. Maybe so, but most things were.

  Rogan was staring at his shoes now, jiggling the keys.