by Konstantin
Deering slumped lower, and his head lolled to the side. “It was a video of me and Holly. We were…in bed.”
I nodded slowly. Having seen the video last night, I understood how Herbert Deering might be driven to distraction— might be driven well beyond— by the thought of his wife watching it. I also understood why he’d offered such a pallid description of the footage: “in bed.”
I’d begun to think of the video as Holly’s test reel, because it incorporated so many essential elements of her later work: graphic, edgy sex, themes of dominance and submission, and a wrenching, punitive interrogation at the end. But there were differences, too. The technical ones were comparatively minor— brighter lighting, murkier sound, the use of a single camera. The important distinction was in the lack of anonymity: the fact that Deering was unmasked— face and voice— throughout, and the fact that he and Holly knew each other outside the confines of the hotel room. So, besides the vivid renderings of Deering’s lust for Holly, the video also documented his many declarations of love for her, his lengthy discourses on Nicole’s sexual deficiencies— on her deficiencies in general— and, near the end, his proposal of marriage to his sister-in-law.
Nicole chuckled grimly. “Of course, Herbert couldn’t give away water in the desert, and all his babbling to me about Redtails—‘Let’s hang on a little longer, it’ll be worth even more next year’— just made me angry. It made me push the deal along faster.”
“What happened then?” I asked.
Nicole looked at Deering. “Go on, Herbert— tell.”
He shook his head. “No, Nikki—”
“You do as I say, you prick!” she said, and she took aim squarely at Deering’s head. He squeezed his eyes shut, and Nicole looked at him with fresh disgust. “You tell him, or I swear to Christ I will shoot you again!”
Deering kept his eyes closed, and his words were nearly lost in the dry rasp of his breathing. “I went to see her, down in the city. I went to explain that Nikki wouldn’t…that I couldn’t convince her. I went to ask her— to beg her— not to do this. I—”
Nicole interrupted with another harsh laugh. “But you brought the gun along, didn’t you, you prick? You stole Daddy’s gun from me and brought it with you.”
He nodded weakly. “It was nighttime and we walked near the water, and Holly was in a bad way. Something happened, an accident or something, and she was bruised. And she was in a terrible mood— angry. I tried to explain about Nikki, but she wouldn’t listen. She yelled and threatened— said she’d send Nikki the video that night. And she called me names— stupid, useless, an ape…
“And then I hit her. I hit her with the back of my hand. I didn’t plan it— it just happened, and she fell down. I tried to help her, but she pushed me away, and when she got up, she was holding a brick. She cursed at me and threw it and it almost hit me. Then she picked up something else, a broken bottle, and she was screaming at me and calling me names, and…” Deering’s head dropped and his shoulders shook.
“Christ, just say it, Herbert— say what happened next.”
He didn’t look up, but he said it. “I took out the gun…and I shot her.”
I let out a deep breath, and something unwound in my gut. Nicole stared at her husband, like a bluejay at a worm. “What happened after that?” I asked.
“I took her things…her clothes…and I threw them in a storm drain. I put her…her body…in the river. Then I went to her apartment, to look for the disk, but I couldn’t…. It was a mess, torn apart, so I got out and went home.
“You came by the next day, and ever since, I’ve been…crazy. I can’t sleep, I can’t think straight.” Deering pressed his right hand harder against his side, and folded around his wound. The pool beneath his chair was larger now.
Nicole snorted. “Hell of a guy, isn’t he?” she said. There was a wild light in her blue eyes.
I looked at her. “Let me call an ambulance, Nicole— for your sake as much as his. If he dies—”
She ignored me. “I knew Holly. I knew what she was like, how selfish she was, how self-indulgent and sick, that there was nothing she wasn’t capable of. Holly didn’t surprise me. But him…” She turned to Deering and brought the gun up again, in a two-handed grip. “You surprised me, Herbert. I thought I knew what you were about— not Superman, maybe, not the brightest bulb, but not a guy who’d fuck my evil sister, either. It turns out you were full of surprises. Live and learn, I guess.”
“Let me make a call, Nicole— for you. You don’t want to sit here and watch him bleed out.”
She laughed, an unlovely, crazy sound. “You sure about that?”
“He’s not worth it, Nicole. Come on.” She looked at me and sighed, and let her hands fall to her lap. She took a deep breath and a shiver ran through her. Her face seemed to collapse on itself, and she looked a thousand years old. “Come on,” I said again.
She ran a hand across the back of her neck, and what was left of her ponytail was gone. Her hair fell forward in a tangle, and caught the winter light, which brightened it and made it somehow richer. For an instant, as she turned her head, it looked like Holly’s hair, and she looked more than a little like Holly. Nicole found a calm, exhausted smile. Her voice was quiet and even.
“You’re right— I don’t want to watch him bleed out,” she said. “It’s taking too damn long.” Then she shot him twice, and blew his chest apart.
39
“I’m sick of looking at you,” Leo McCue said, and he ran a thumb over his mustache, and closed the door of the interview room. I started to say something and Mike kicked me under the table. McCue made us a quorum: me, Mike Metz, Rita Flores, Tina Vines, and the fat man himself, gathered yet again at the Seventh Precinct station house. It was early enough on Thursday morning that we were all drinking coffee and rubbing sleep from our eyes. McCue was right: we’d seen entirely too much of each other lately.
It had started on Sunday, in the brick bunker on Route 7 that housed the Wilton PD. I’d spent the day there, surrounded by predictably frosty Connecticut law enforcement types— a couple of Wilton detectives, the Wilton chief, and a guy from the state’s attorney’s office— and when I hadn’t been sitting and waiting, I’d been answering questions and giving statements.
I’d kept my story simple, and almost true: that I’d come to Wilton in an attempt to tie up some loose ends in an investigation— specifically, that I’d wanted to discuss with Deering his apparently false claims that Holly never visited her father, and that I’d wanted to ask him what “Redtails” was. I hadn’t mentioned the fact that I also wanted to discuss the video I’d seen the night before, of Deering and his sister-in-law fucking like bunnies. Everything else I told the cops about what had happened at the Cade house, from the time I pulled up, to when the first cars responded to my 911, was as complete and accurate as I could make it. And it was happily consistent with the story Nicole had repeated— with a notable lack of remorse, and over the strenuous objections of her attorneys— several times that day.
Mike Metz had joined me sometime in the midafternoon, and sometime after that, the Connecticut guys had thawed enough to offer me a refill on the bad coffee. For a little while, it looked like we might get out of there before dark. We were sitting in the day room, at a cafeteria table, under buzzing fluorescent lights, when McCue and Vines swept in and sucked all the air from the place.
Vines perched on a desk, and knocked over photos of someone’s kids. McCue opened his mouth, and an avalanche of commands and condescension tumbled out. The Connecticut guys, for their part, were amazingly patient. McCue was told that it would be some time before he and Vines could interview Nicole, and even more time before he could look at the crime scene. Going through Herbert Deering’s personal effects would take longer still. Demands that Nicole’s gun be turned over to the NYPD for testing were met with amazed laughter. Maybe just to get McCue out of his face, the Wilton chief had agreed to let him talk to me.
We’d gone into a sma
ll, airless room, McCue, Vines, Mike, and I, and they took me over the same ground I’d covered with the Wilton cops. I told them the same story, but they’d pushed back harder. “What the hell gave you the right to question Deering?” “Who the hell else have you been talking to?” “What did we say about fucking around in an active investigation?” They snarled and snapped, but even they knew that the game had changed. Their big case, while still plenty lurid, was effectively closed. Mike had summed it up for them.
“We all know how it can go sometimes with investigations, Detective,” he said, smiling. “A direction suggests itself, and— right or wrong— resources follow it. And the more man-hours you spend, the more likely it is you can find things that reinforce your leanings, or that seem to, and that justify sending even more resources in the same direction. And so other possibilities get less attention. No one’s talking about conspiracy here, Detective, or prosecutorial misconduct, or even mismanagement— no one has used those words— it’s just a thing that happens sometimes. Call it an echo chamber, or group-think. It’s just everyone’s good fortune that John is somewhat independent minded. It saved a lot of awkwardness all around.”
Vines had gnashed her teeth and McCue had darkened to a coronary red, but a little while later, they’d cut me loose. Though not for long.
The evaporation of their high-profile trial, and all its attendant career fantasies, left McCue, Vines, and Flores frustrated and angry, and made me a target of opportunity. So it was back to Pitt Street on Monday, and Tuesday, and again on Wednesday. Nominally, the cops were still investigating the death of Holly Cade, but in fact they were fishing. Whom had I spoken to; what had I found; what did I know and when did I know it— anything that even hinted at obstruction.
I said as little as possible, and let Mike do most of the dancing, which he did better than anyone else I knew. He invoked attorney work-product confidentiality when he had to, and raised before them, more or less subtly, the specter of public embarrassment, and in the end I said not a word about Jamie Coyle, computer backups, DVDs, or unit 58 at Creek Self-Store— which, to my knowledge, they still haven’t discovered. When McCue made the clumsy suggestion that the DVD of David and Holly and Stephanie might somehow find its way to the Internet, Mike laughed, and cut him off at the knees.
“Better sell the condo in Florida now, Detective, and cash in the pension, and somebody should tell the mayor that the department’s going to overrun the budget on civil settlements this year.”
As the week wore on, it was obvious they were losing steam. Mike attributed some of it to the mounting forensic evidence that supported Deering’s confession: the E-ZPass records of his car crossing the Triborough Bridge on the night Holly died; the ballistics report on Nicole Cade’s gun, which matched it to the bullets that killed Holly; and the souvenirs found in the spare tire well of Deering’s station wagon— Holly’s bra and panties, and the keys to her apartment, all in a plastic grocery bag. Deering had done it, and we all knew there was less and less excuse for the cops to grill me.
Mike ascribed most of their waning enthusiasm, though, to the press. Because there weren’t many murders in the Wilton zip code, Deering’s had started out as a good-sized story. It had grown larger, and taken a gothic turn, when local reporters recalled the suicide, years earlier and in the same house, of Nicole’s mother. It achieved the status of minor frenzy when it was revealed that the murder victim had himself confessed to shooting his sister-in-law, one Holly Cade, also known as the Williamsburg Mermaid. Mike had explained it as we walked into the station house that morning.
“The bigger the story gets, the less Flores and company want it known that their investigation was headed entirely in the wrong direction. They want to mark Holly’s case closed, and they want you to go away.” Which was fine with me, but there was a lecture to sit through first.
McCue’s voice was a low growl as he wrapped up, and his face was dark. “Bottom line is: you got fucking lucky on this. Things broke your way. But God help you if you think you got over on us, because you didn’t. You think we don’t know the shit you’ve done? You think we don’t know about you going to Coyle’s place, or that you kicked the crap out of Werner? You’re not getting over on us, and I swear to God if I see that smirk again, I’m going to come across the table and slap it off your face.” He pointed a finger at me and I started to stand, and Mike held my arm. Rita Flores nodded, and offered her own admonitions.
“That’s right, counselor, sit him down— that’s good advice you’re giving. And you explain to him that next time— if he’s so foolish that there is a next time— pulling his license is just for starters. There’ll be charges, civil and criminal both, if my office has anything to say about it, and I won’t care if he’s captured Jack the fucking Ripper.” She looked at me, and her eyes were like nail heads. “You get that, March?” I nodded. “Great. Now clear out while I talk to your boss.”
I got up and took a long look at McCue, and hoped it would be for the last time. I had no doubt he was hoping the same. As it happened, we were both disappointed.
I waited for Mike on Pitt Street, under stony skies, in the penetrating cold. He came out smiling, and patting his overcoat pocket.
“You got it?” I asked.
He nodded, and slipped the disk out of his pocket and handed it to me. “Flores promised there were no copies.”
“Do you believe her?”
“I believe that if we keep our end of the deal— to keep quiet and keep away from the press— we won’t have to find out.”
“What about Werner?” I asked. “Are they going to go after him for the assault?”
Mike shook his head. “I tried,” he said. “But with no witnesses, no evidence, and only your coerced confession to go on, it’s a nonstarter for them.”
“He beat the shit—”
“It’s a nonstarter, John.”
I sighed and nodded my head. “So we’re done?”
“With these guys. You’ve got some trips to New Haven in your future.”
“What do you think will happen with Nicole?”
He shrugged. “I imagine her lawyer is thinking about some sort of diminished-capacity argument, and I imagine the state’s attorney has figured that out too. My guess is they’ll deal it down, but how far, I have no clue.”
“She didn’t seem all that diminished to me,” I said. “Mostly, she seemed pissed off.”
“Having your husband fuck your sister and then shoot her dead has that effect.”
“I don’t think it was the shooting she minded.”
40
Clare was at the table when I got home, finishing her breakfast and looking through the real estate listings. I hadn’t seen much of her in the past few days— she’d been all over town, and Brooklyn too, looking at apartments— but she’d waited up for me on Sunday night, rigid and white-faced on the sofa when I came in.
“There was news on TV,” she’d said. “A guy shot in Wilton.” She slipped her hands under my shirt. They were smooth and freezing. “They didn’t give his name.”
“It wasn’t me,” I said.
“Your guy, though?” I nodded. “I had a feeling, I don’t know why. Did you…?”
“I was a witness.” I put my face into her pale hair. Soap, perfume, and underneath, something warmer. “I should’ve called you,” I’d said.
“I wasn’t asking,” she’d whispered.
“Still…”
Clare tapped the newspaper— the Metro section— and slid it across to me. “Another thing about your thing,” she said.
I scanned the article. It was the fifth story that week, and mostly a rehash of other reports: another portrait of the Williamsburg Mermaid as a troubled young hipster, actress, and failed playwright, and liberally seasoned with rumors of sadomasochistic sex tapes. Cassandra Z was mentioned yet again. I looked at my backpack, sitting in the corner and bulging with DVDs and backup disks.
“You want to come to Brooklyn?” Clare a
sked. “Check out some apartments?”
I shook my head. “I’ve got chores.”
I spent the afternoon erasing Holly’s backups and breaking DVDs— not easy to do with splints on. In between, I fielded phone calls. The first was from Ned.
“I’ve followed the story in the papers,” he said.
“They’re getting it about half right.”
“It sounds like this Holly was quite a disturbed person.”
“She was a lot of things,” I said. “Disturbed was one of them.”
“David’s lucky this worked out. He’s lucky he had you to help him. He owes you a huge thanks.”
I laughed. “I’m sure he’ll get around to it.”
“He hasn’t—”
“Don’t worry about it. Is he back at work yet?”
Ned was quiet for a moment. “He didn’t tell you?”