Maggie did not understand. Why reject other people? They might need you. But wait, maybe a surprise was in store. Maybe it was one of those unreliable narrators who would learn the most important lesson of all: that other people are real and need our mercy. She had not read an entire book in years, perhaps decades. Paperwork, yes. But a novel from beginning to end? Not unless it was The Big Book, or Courage to Change, or How Al-Anon Works. She didn’t have space. Maggie tried again.
Her wounds glowed like desire.
Why reject somebody because they are wounded? That was the whole problem, wasn’t it? She regretted not having stayed the three extra minutes at the NA meeting. Where else were illusions of one’s own perfection so quickly dispelled?
They illuminated all the lives she had ruined before she’d noticed his, from across the room.
She closed the cover, looked at the author photo on the rear jacket. Tanned, on a sailing skiff, laughing. Probably an asshole. Being a detective always reminded her that some people are a surprise, but not everyone. That was the problem, after all, jumping to conclusions without evidence did not pan out 25 percent of the time. If she had to make a snap decision because a house was on fire, it was right to assume that the big, muscled fireman could carry her and the tiny, skinny guy could not. But then later she might find out that the muscle queen OD’d on steroids and his arms were imploding, just for show. The little guy, however, was a tai-chi master and could decapitate bad people with his pinkie finger. Still, rich men who advertise their boats and came late to meetings with investigators working on the murder of their girlfriend were probably not the nicest, most caring lot.
“Hey,” someone called out. “Are you Maggie Terry?”
Is it my dealer? was her first thought. Then she remembered that like a mother and a daughter and a lover, she no longer had a dealer. All she had was this moment, this book in her hand that she didn’t want to read, this job she was not ready for, and the unlikeable man coming up the street. That was her real life. Today.
CHAPTER EIGHT
8:30 PM
Steven Brinkley ran up as though he had been running for a fortnight, leaping over streams, avoiding gunshots, evading police on horseback only to fulfill his promise to make it to Maggie’s feet. This was supposed to assure her that, in spite of his gallant show of integrity, evil exterior forces had conspired to make Brinkley an hour late. He had an embedded no fault of my own air about him, carried by the impressive ability to run at his middle age without much sweat. Only one day back in the real world and Maggie had already learned—by comparing Craig to Mike—how to identify men with personal trainers who go to all their sessions, hit punching bags, train for marathons, and throw barbells with hired young men of color egging them on. Perfection was a fad, apparently, like the bitter, algae-rich, scum-encrusted lake water she imagined when she saw the words cold pressed. Or Gyrotonics, which she had at first assumed was a new kind of Greek meat served from a spinning skewer with raw onions. She imagined all the announcements of gluten free to be a call for gluttonous Americans to just stop overeating.
“I’m sorry I kept you waiting.”
He lightly hopped up the stairs, smiling, showing again his great shape and that he, at somewhere in his late forties, still had full control of his muscles as well as his neurons, hair follicles, hearing, skin tone, sight, lymph system, and sphincter.
Brinkley, ever the gentleman, indicated for her to precede him, and so she stepped forward, ladylike, and approached the imposing entranceway. His front door was a hand-carved dark wood. It had probably been on that house since the days of Edith Wharton. That it had remained intact and unmolested on this picturesque side street of wealth and comfort was miraculous, so she already knew there was a security camera poised in the thick trees shading the sidewalk. Maggie ran her hand over the door’s sculpted vines, grapes, and leaves that bordered its imposing presence. Brinkley pulled his keys out of his tailored jacket pocket and pushed open the door, again holding it for her like the gentleman scribe he certainly intended to be.
“After you.”
She entered. “Thank you.”
“Miss Terry.”
That was the gentleman’s fishing expedition to find out if she was married and to let her know that he was trying to find out.
“Maggie.”
“I want to do everything I can to help.” Then the door closed behind them.
It wasn’t this offer that threw her, most people in his position said something along those lines. Often they were almost sincere. But help what? Human relationships were complicated and that didn’t mean they were corrupt. Did he want to help her find the killer? Yes, if it wasn’t him. Did he want to help her see things his way? Perhaps that, too. Sometimes there was more at stake than life and death.
Technically this was an innocent man whose inappropriately paired, too-young girlfriend had just been murdered. How was he supposed to act? Some people are destroyed when a murder enters their life. They can’t conduct normal business. They become permanently shocked, obsessed with justice, or feel overwhelmingly endangered in an act of recognition or projection. None of these applied in his case. If Steven Brinkley was in fact guilty of the deed himself, well, murderers who thought they could get away with it usually employed histrionics or the contrast, a deep cold. A quiet. But most murderers didn’t think. They were overcome by need, controlled by it, and planned the cover-up with hindsight, when it was too late to hide. Steven Brinkley was a celebrity. His skills at sociality extended far beyond the average citizen. He engaged with fans, with colleagues, with media daily, and had done so for at least two decades. He knew how to show interest, how to appear to be available, and how to do the hard work of making other people feel at ease. Therefore, he had a natural public face designed for others’ consumption. And the fact that he could wear it as well as his antique watch and hand-cut belt told Maggie nothing more than simply that.
They walked into his den, instantly comforting and familiar, like a seminar room in the old Vassar library. Which, in turn, was much like the private studies of some of the fathers of some of the girls who attended Vassar. Maggie was one of those girls. The den had books that created possibility, the chance that one could read them or write them or become the subject of them. After all, a writer worked here. He made those books and read these books; they were not for show. They were experiences, not objects. And, since it was comfortable and dynamic and clearly in use, if expensive, it was ultimately functional. This was a place to consume literature in order to produce it.
“Thanks for reading my book.”
“I’ve only read two sentences.”
“Thanks for telling the truth.”
She looked up and, without thinking, started perusing the shelves. It was a wonderful library, the kind that invited immediate inspection, more of that tactile carved wood, beautiful editions in loving condition. She walked along, inhaling more than reading the spines. Hart Crane. Carson McCullers. Claudia Rankine. Rabih Alameddine. She opened a copy of Tennessee Williams’s Memoirs. Signed, of course. To Buffie Johnson with love, Tom.
“Who is Buffie Johnson?”
“An obscure, great iconoclastic artist of the twentieth century. Passed away now. She had two husbands and two girlfriends and lived to be ninety-four. I met her at Yaddo when she was blind but still painting. She was painting spheres. Her boyfriend was an old crotchety minimalist, Clayton something. She once had a relationship with Patricia Highsmith, apparently. One of her husbands died of AIDS.”
He can do this forever, Maggie thought. Tell classy stories that are half gossip, half history.
“Excuse me.” He smiled. “I’ll be right back.” Brinkley stood silently and gave her space, stepping out and disappearing somewhere into the house.
Could he tell that she was queer? Was that the reason for all the girlfriend/AIDS talk? Normally straight people didn’t point out other people’s girlfriends, but it’s a different world now. They want to have everyt
hing. The stakes of cool masculinity were ever on the rise.
Left alone with classics of heart and taste, this room was a special breed of refuge, and, unlike most familiar things from Maggie’s past, it was comforting. She appreciated that. She glided along a bit and saw herself in an antique mirror set quietly among his books. She allowed herself to stare, fully taking in how both plain and exhausted she looked. Finally, Maggie saw what everybody else saw. Someone who had squandered all her opportunities and talents and whose life was over. Or almost over. Or even worse, would go on and on in this state of waste. Her eyes welled with tears. How would she ever keep them back? She had to. Her heart attacked her composure. It was an internal struggle, heat and anxiety overcame her and she started to sweat. Maggie just stood still. There was no way out of any of it. This was who she was, and this was her life. She had spoiled it all.
She turned away from the mirror at the sound of Brinkley’s footsteps coming purposefully down the hall. He carried a tray, silver of course, with evening tea and some delicately crafted cookies, purchased from someone who worked with their hands.
“It’s a detective novel,” he said, setting the tray down on the coffee table, actually used for coffee and perfectly reachable within the socially arranged configuration of embracing sofas and relaxing armchairs. So far everything in the house that was beautiful was functional, in applied use for human relations.
“What is?” She wiped her face with the back of her hand.
“My novel. The one you didn’t read.”
Wake up, she told herself. You are working. Get with it and stop wasting time. “Forgive me for asking, but do you usually write about detectives?”
“Not at all,” he smiled, acknowledging that she was in fact a detective and yet behaving entirely unthreatened by the thought that Maggie may know more about being a detective than he did, and therefore he may have gotten some of it very, very wrong. He seemed nice, somehow, and he seemed happy to have someone to talk to. His lover had just been murdered, after all.
Maggie sank down into the soft leather sofa. It was perfect. She could have rolled up into a little ball and cried under a big comforter and then slept peacefully until someone bearing homemade soup swooped in with a feathery kiss—an event that was far, far out of reach. No kiss, no nap, no someone, no comforter, no comfort, no soup, but today, a person did bring her tea on a tray with little pretty cookies. That was something.
“My first book was a mystery, and I have come back to that now, so many years later, so much better a writer, so much more knowing.” He poured the steaming ginger tea into a handmade mug, she guessed a sentimental gift from a friend. “You know the trope—one person, the detective, wants to understand. The other, the guilty party, doesn’t want to be punished. But why the guilty one committed the transgression, and why it is in fact a transgression, and whether or not punishment is appropriate at all is ultimately up to the reader to uncover and decide. The detective has his own burdens and conflicts, and sometimes those of the illegal act he is charged with investigating match some of his own demons, and sometimes they match too well.”
“What’s the crime?” She sipped the tea, bright, probably organic, and freshly alive.
“A drug thing.” Brinkley drank his tea. “And you know what that means, as an officer of the law. We all have addictions, but when illegality is involved, the person has extra problems.”
She was, of course, no longer an officer of the law. “Like what?”
“Well, they have to hide, which means they have to lie. They have to be a great judge of character because they want something from everyone they meet. And they have to be willing to write some people off because when you are on a big full-time hustle, there are . . .”
“Losses?”
“Well, I was thinking more of the term collateral damage. It’s unavoidable. Like Trump trying to roll back the EPA’s methane restrictions and the courts, God bless them, trying to stop him. But God, let’s not get into that bottomless swamp.”
“The courts matter.” Maggie reached for a cookie. What would it be? Would she like it? “Is the book arguing for drug legalization?” She bit into it. Chewy, it stuck to her teeth. Maybe she didn’t like cookies.
“Absolutely. Too many people are in jail and Trump . . . You seem upset.”
Men and gay women had always been nice to Maggie. They were susceptible to her looks. They respected her beauty for the most fucked-up reasons. Frances came calling when she saw her baby blues. Julio was the only one who really loved her for her mind, when it was working.
“I’m sorry,” she almost cried. “I’m having a rough day . . . month . . . year.” She noticed the photographs framed on the paneled walls, autographed glossies of Marilyn Monroe, Vivien Leigh, Jean Harlow.
“So am I,” he almost laughed. It was one of those unpretentious moments of honest acknowledgment that things could hardly be worse, and there was no reason and no way to pretend otherwise. “Maggie, you know what my problems are. Do you want to tell me what’s troubling you? I’m a good listener. It happens to everyone.”
That shocked her back into reality. Steven Brinkley had just revealed the fact that he was a shit. He had played it one step too far and exposed himself. He was a manipulator. And a user. She could see it all splayed out on the oak walls before her. If he was for real, there would only be one thing that concerned him: the death of his lover Jamie Wagner. Not getting laid by a stranger. Not grooming her by letting her self-indulge when she should be solving the case. This revealed him to be a user of the most sophisticated set. He allowed others to do things they had no right to do. This turned the attention on them, indebted them, made them complicit, and then gave him crucial information, letting him off the hook. He was dangerous.
She pointed to the photographs. “You have a soft spot for damaged beauties.”
“I guess you could say Jamie fit that description.”
He took it well, the deflection. Brinkley could play every angle, and knew instinctually to bring it back to the matter at hand, his own possible guilt. It was a typical ploy used to avoid accusations of setting up tangents. “She could have been a great actress someday.”
“Why?”
“Because the only place she let herself really feel was onstage. There, she thought she knew how the story would end. With applause, not murder. She felt she had control. Life is, of course, unpredictable. So only onstage was she safe to live it. Actors have a repetition compulsion, you know. They do the same controlled thing in the same controlled, yet open, way. Over and over and over. And each time people, who in real life would shun and abandon and condemn, just sit back and applaud. Sometimes they even stand up.” He raised an eyebrow in collusion. Mr. Brinkley was sussing Maggie out at the same time that she was reading him. It was a double-headed fuck. “That kind of release is what theater people call emotional transparency.” He tapped his fingers on the table. He was thinking.
“What does that mean?”
“That they’re only really alive when they act, and the explosion of feeling is infectious. Like someone locked up in the chains of their fragile emotional life suddenly bursting free onto a daisy-filled field. The world loves watching wounded beauties. I have some handmade caramels, a friend brought them over.”
“No thanks.”
“Once I understood how much pain Jamie was in, I accepted her exactly as she was. Every flaw. Every strange behavior.” He recovered smoothly from her rejection of his candy.
“Well, that was nice of you.”
“Well, it didn’t work.”
“Why not?” Maggie was exhausted.
He didn’t react, but instead unwrapped a caramel and popped it in his mouth. She saw that he was annoyed she didn’t eat one; he couldn’t hide it.
“You know, Maggie, some people love you for what you can do for them. I am not that way. I love someone because that’s how I feel. I can forgive anything and I would always take the person back.”
�
�Unusual.” Familiar.
“With Jamie, it became a dangerous kind of forgiveness. One that kept me from seeing that something was very, very wrong.”
“What was wrong?”
“Well . . .” He hesitated like he was looking for the right words to express a concept he had been carrying, unarticulated, in his heart for a long, long time. But she knew that wasn’t possible. He was a writer; he would stop the world’s turn to find the right language. She could see that Steven Brinkley was lying. Again.
“Do you—”
“Every time.” He cut her off. “Every time we reached a new level of intimacy, she would . . .” He paused again, assured she had learned her lesson and learned how to wait. Maggie understood now that he knew exactly what he was going to say. In fact, that he had said it before. And that this performance of hesitation was another trick to achieve a fake intimacy with her. “She would, I don’t know . . . act out.”
“Act out?”
There was something wrong with Jamie Wagner, emotionally. That’s what Brinkley was trying to convey without coming out and saying it. He wanted to insinuate it, he wanted it to be understood. And he could be right. He was probably right. But what did that have to do with being strangled?
“Yes,” he said, and sat back gravely so they could both ponder. Together. The poor dead girl who “acted out,” and now look. Now look at what had happened.
The ginger was affecting her; Maggie’s system was so clean that these things actually made a difference. And the sugar in the cookie hit her as well. She felt a bit light-headed.
Act out?
Act out.
Act out?
CHAPTER NINE
10:00 PM
Steven went off to make some more tea, leaving Maggie enervated, tired, driven. A troubled, talented girl was dead. And it had something to do with acting out, a reality and an accusation she knew very intimately.
It had been an old neighborhood bar in Chelsea, opened by the original Georgie in the 1950s for his longshoremen buddies to stop off on their stumble home from the piers on West Street. Then, in the sixties there was a lot of construction, and much less shipping, so workingmen moved into building and that was a hard day’s labor, deserving of a few cold beers. The city threw up those boxy projects and the sites were “union only,” which meant white. The neighborhood’s residents had always been mixed, even before the projects, mostly Puerto Ricans coming over in the thirties who weren’t welcome a few blocks north in Hell’s Kitchen, an ugly Irish ghetto. By the seventies, the gay boys discoed off the Greyhound buses by the thousands, and they loved Chelsea and they loved to drink. But each party in the neighborhood coexisted with the other, and people mostly stayed in their own spaces, recognizing that respect for territory was necessary to urban health.
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