Lucidity

by David Carnoy

  Dupuy didn’t mind at all. She happily led J.J. out to the deck, leaving Madden in the house to stew. A minute later he was on the phone with Shelby, expressing his dismay.

  “Did you forget to tell me something, Hal?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “Let me give you a hint. He sold out the Garden back in ’95.”

  “Oh, J.J.” Shelby chuckled. “You’ve met?”

  “What’s he doing here, Hal? There isn’t supposed to be anybody in the house. On the small chance this is a crime scene, I don’t need any random over-the-hill rock stars roaming the property.”

  “Relax. I had to arbitrage the situation. I don’t like dropping twenty grand and getting nothing in return. So you got J.J. I’m covered now.”

  “Covered for what?”

  “He’s playing my niece’s wedding. Five songs. Acoustic set. There’s a little club you don’t know about. We barter. It’s all about bartering these days. It’s the new economy for rich people who have too much money to spend.”

  “And what’s he get out of it?” Madden asked.

  “A concept for his next album. The Walker case went down right when he was at his peak. We were talking the other day and when I brought it up, it hit a nerve. He said he once thought about writing a song about Stacey. And I said, ‘Why not do a whole album?’ He’s got a bad case of writer’s block. I’m sure you can commiserate.”

  “Fantastic.”

  “I’m a facilitator, Detective. I put people in a position to succeed. When they succeed, I succeed.”

  “What happens when they don’t?”

  “They fail. And I enjoy that, too. Sometimes more.”

  “So you win either way?”

  “Who’s keeping score? Like I said, relax. What are you doing there anyway? Sitting around? Now you get to party with a rock star.”

  “I thought the phrase was party like a rock star, not party with a rock star,” Madden said.

  “Got a call coming in, gotta jump,” Shelby responded and the line went silent.

  Madden walked back to the sliding glass door, pausing before the opening to look outside. Oh, no, he thought. J.J. had found a rapt audience in Dupuy, who’d entered a state that could only be described as fawning. Madden never would have guessed she had it in her.

  He limped outside and fixed himself a mimosa, light on the orange juice. He never drank on the job when he was on the force, so it felt a little decadent to be drinking now, especially at ten in the morning. But he didn’t care. This so-called investigation was turning into a joke. And thanks to slamming into the table, both his leg and foot were hurting. His back, too.

  “He’s going to write an album based on the Walker case,” Dupuy said excitedly after he reclaimed his seat.

  “So I hear,” Madden said.

  He noticed that J.J. only had lox on his plate and no bagel. Lowcarb diet? Probably.

  “You forget that at one point these people were in love,” J.J. said. “I’m going to open with that. Ross had been married once, was in kind of a rough patch. Then he meets Stacey at a friend’s barbecue. Twenty-two, right out of college. Tight body, totally fresh. And he just falls for her. Typical story. People warn her. He’s got a mean streak. She doesn’t listen, of course. I had a girlfriend like that. Everybody told her to be careful. And we were together for four years before the wheels came off. Which is what I’m thinking is the title for the opening track. Before the wheels came off. I thought of that this morning when I was lying in bed.”

  “What’s ‘Where’s your wall?’ stand for?” Madden asked, eyeing J.J.’s T-shirt.

  J.J. turned around and showed him the back of the shirt, where there was a silkscreened image of a soccer ball and the name of a local store Madden recognized.

  “My buddy has a soccer shop,” J.J. said. “You know, if you’re a kid and you’re serious about playing, you gotta get out there and play by yourself sometimes and knock it against a wall to get better. You gotta find your wall. But I read it more metaphorically. Where is your wall? There’s something mystical about that. It’s all about finding that wall and using it to move forward.”

  “So, where’s your wall?” Dupuy asked in a low, husky voice that induced in Madden flashbacks to Kathleen Turner in Body Heat. A little too seductive for his tastes.

  J.J. smiled, leaned closer to her and looked into her eyes. “Maybe here,” he said. “In this expensive little dump.”

  The two continued to stare at each other, which made Madden nervous.

  “What about that for the name of a song?” he broke in. “Expensive little dump.”

  “I like it,” J.J. declared.

  Just then the baby stirred in the carriage, crying out for a few brief but jarring seconds before becoming silent again. J.J. looked over at the carriage as if seeing it for the first time.

  “That belong to you?” he asked Dupuy.

  “Uh, yeah,” she said. “That’s Chloe. She’s five months old today.”

  “Adopted or biological?”

  Dupuy was little taken aback by the question. “No, I birthed her,” she said.

  “Wow,” J.J. said. “You look great. I’d never have guessed you just had a kid.”

  He held up his wine glass and made a toast.

  “To hot moms who’ve had biological kids,” he said.

  Dupuy didn’t quite know how to react to that either, but she clinked his glass anyway. Then it was Madden’s turn. He got a clink from both of them. He was starting to enjoy this.

  “Actually, this is good,” J.J. said. “The baby’s a good audience. Hold on a sec. I’ll be back.”

  With that, he got up and left. Madden couldn’t help but laugh.

  “What’s so funny?” Dupuy asked.

  “Let me know when you regain control of your faculties.”

  “That bad, huh?”

  He nodded.

  “You don’t understand,” she whispered. “I had such a crush on that guy when I was in college. Or maybe it was law school. I can’t believe he’s here.”

  “I’m not your father or your boss,” Madden said. “But I suggest you find your wall and put a moat around it.”

  Dupuy let out a little giggle. “Where’d he go?”

  They soon found out. J.J. returned to the table with a friend, his beat-up guitar. Sitting back down, he rested it on his thigh and said:

  “I’ve been thinking about what you said about Ross killing Stacey.”

  Dupuy pointed to herself, surprised. “What I said?”

  “A while back you were quoted saying he killed her out of simple jealousy. That’s what you thought the motive was.”

  “That’s what I thought enraged him enough to kill her.”

  At the time Stacey disappeared, she was still living with Ross, though they were in fact separated. She’d gotten a job at Bloomingdale’s in Stanford Shopping Center and was going out at night with friends and, as it turned out, Bronsky. Ross may have strayed from their marriage first, but now Stacey was out and about, meeting new people, embracing a single lifestyle. As they worked toward a divorce settlement, Ross claimed they had an understanding. Maybe so, but they had sworn statements from three people—a fellow Bloomingdale’s employee, a manicurist, and Bronsky—who all said they heard him shouting at Stacey over the phone. More than once, he’d threatened to kill her—or used words that implied he could make her “disappear.”

  One night she came home late, leaving her car parked on the street in front of their house, not in the driveway, which she’d been doing ever since they were separated. She appeared to have slept in her bed in the guest cottage, but she wasn’t anywhere to be found in the morning. It took Ross two full days to report her missing. His reason: He thought she’d gone to visit a friend in L.A.

  “Pastorini thought he killed her because of money, not jealousy,” Madden said, speaking of his old boss. “He didn’t want to give up anything in a divorce. That, and he thought he might lose custody of their kid.”
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  “Maybe,” Dupuy remarked coolly, sounding and looking like her old self. “But once he got himself a girlfriend he started working on getting a bunch of assets out of his name. He was preparing for a divorce for months. Which is why I’m not sure her killing was premeditated. A lot of people don’t remember this, but when he took off, we were on the verge of charging him with fraud, not murder. We had him on the financial shenanigans.”

  She was right. A lot of people forgot that. They assumed that with all the circumstantial evidence and solid bits of physical evidence—Stacey’s blood and hair in the trunk of Ross’s car—they had a strong enough case to bring him up on murder charges. But it just didn’t work without a body. It rarely did.

  J.J. didn’t seem to care about all that. “Do you know what John Lennon’s least favorite Beatles song was?” he asked them.

  “I don’t know what my least favorite Beatles song is,” Dupuy replied.

  J.J. handed her his phone. “Do me a favor and get a video of this for me. I want to see how it plays.”

  Madden didn’t like where this was going. That’s the last thing he needed, some video popping up on YouTube or Facebook.

  “That stays in the phone,” he said. “No social media, understand? You will not screw up my investigation, I don’t care who you are.”

  “Chill, Detective,” J.J. said. “We’re all responsible adults. Except the baby, of course.”

  “Have another mimosa, Hank,” Dupuy suggested, fiddling around with the settings on the phone’s screen. When everything was set, she pointed the phone at J.J. and nodded, indicating she was ready.

  “And a three, two, one,” J.J. cued himself, then started playing, plucking the strings on his guitar as he launched into a sweetly subdued acoustic intro. When the words finally came, his voice—quiet, soulful—wasn’t what Madden had expected.

  Well I’d rather see you dead, little girl

  Than to be with another man

  You better keep your head, little girl

  Or I won’t know where I am

  Ah no, no, no

  Madden vaguely recollected the original song, which was off one of the Beatles early albums. He fought to remember the title and then it came to him as the words came out of J.J.’s mouth: You better run for our life if you can, little girl. The original version had a much quicker, driving pace. But J.J.’s new rendition was just the opposite: slow and soulful. He’d turned an angry, misogynistic tune into a bluesy ballad. Madden wasn’t easily creeped out, but he suddenly felt a little spooked.

  Let this be a sermon

  I mean everything I’ve said

  Baby, I’m determined

  And I’d rather see you dead

  Ah no, no, no

  When J.J. stopped playing, Dupuy tapped the phone’s screen, then set the phone on the table. Madden noticed that tears had welled up in her eyes.

  “What do you think?” J.J. asked.

  “Haunting,” she said. “I’ve never heard that song.”

  Madden clapped, giving him a short ovation. So, too, did the ground-radar technician, who’d removed his headphones and had them around his neck.

  “The Beatles?” the guy called out. “‘Run For Your Life.’ Off Rubber Soul. 1966. You added the ‘no, no, no’, right? Really changes it. Awesome rendition, man. You play around here?”

  “Thanks, dude,” J.J. said. “Hey, what do you call that machine?”

  “GPR,” the technician said. “Ground Penetrating Radar.”

  “GPR,” J.J. murmured to himself, then picked up his phone and pulled out the little stylus that was stored inside it and scribbled something on the screen.

  “I write everything down now,” he said when he was finished. “I let a lot of shit slip by when I was younger. They didn’t have these phones back then. I got pages of notes in here. I’m going to write a book. Maybe have it come out at the same time as the new album. One supports the other. You married?”

  Not surprisingly, the question was aimed at Dupuy, not Madden.

  “Is that for your notes?” she asked.

  J.J. laughed. “No.”

  “Let’s just say negotiations are ongoing.”

  “Yeah, I’ve been there,” he replied. “Was engaged twice. Didn’t knock anybody up, though. Good thing, because I’ll tell ya, the best business decision I made was not to get married. My lawyer said don’t get hitched without a prenup. And I listened. That’s the one rule of showbiz. Get a good lawyer and listen to him. Or her, as the case may be.”

  Madden didn’t know exactly why Dupuy and her on-again-off-again boyfriend of the last several years, Ted Cogan, hadn’t tied the knot, but he was pretty sure money or prenups weren’t the hold up. However, she didn’t say anything to refute J.J.’s comment; she let him reminisce about his two brushes with near-catastrophic financial ruin.

  “One of my bandmates recently had to declare bankruptcy,” he said.

  “Drummer?” Madden asked.

  “Yeah, major bummer. I felt for the guy. But it was his own fault.”

  Dupuy took a long drag on her wine glass. Madden could see she was growing a little weary of their houseguest. Some of the sheen was wearing off. What a shame.

  After draining what was left of his drink, he looked over at the ground-radar technician, who was now staring at his screen intently.

  “I sincerely doubt this guy is going to find anything,” he said, thinking aloud.

  Almost as soon as he said it, the technician pulled his headphones off his ear and stepped away from his machine. For a moment, Madden was concerned he’d heard him and was somehow offended. But it wasn’t that.

  “I’ve got a couple of hot spots,” he called out to them. “Like I said earlier, I can’t tell you what’s there, but if you want to start digging while I do the other side, that’s fine by me. I’m curious myself.”

  Madden sat up in his chair, a bit shocked.

  “Are they big enough to be a body?” he asked.

  “Could be,” the technician replied. “I’m just reading the topography. It can sometimes show metal. Have a look if you want.”

  Madden followed him back over to the machine. To the untrained eye it was hard to interpret what the wavy lines meant.

  “They both aren’t too deep,” the technician said. “Around four feet. You digging or you getting someone to do it?”

  Madden wasn’t exactly sure how he was going to handle the excavation. He had Shelby’s landscaping crew scheduled to come in that afternoon.

  “I’ll start and let’s see how it goes,” he said.

  “I’ll help,” J.J. called out gamely.

  Madden ignored the comment. He thanked the technician and headed to his car, parked out in front of the house. On the sidewalk, he paused for a moment and looked around. All the cars parked nearby appeared empty. There wasn’t any sign of the tail he thought Shelby had put on him.

  He opened his trunk and retrieved Shelby’s gleaming gift shovel along with a tripod and digital SLR camera he planned to use to document the excavation.

  When he returned to the backyard, J.J. was gone. Dupuy said she’d sent him into the garage to look for a shovel.

  “I don’t want him digging,” Madden said.

  “Come on, Hank. Maybe he’ll take his shirt off.”

  “Stop.”

  After he used the camera to shoot some still images of the site, he set up the tripod in the middle of the lawn and put it into video mode. He told Dupuy to stand behind the camera while he rolled up his sleeves and began scripting out what he wanted to say in his mind. After thirty seconds or so he declared himself ready and took up a position in front of the camera. The shovel, head up, stood by his side. He asked her how he looked.

  “A little American Gothic,” J.J. said, returning to the deck with a less glamorous digging tool than Madden’s. “I like it.”

  “I didn’t ask you,” Madden quipped.

  “Just talk, Hank,” Dupuy said.

  And he did.
He said who and where he was, why he was there, and noted the time and date.

  Then he started to dig.

  13/ Getting Woozy

  CANDACE EPSTEIN DIDN’T DIE. FIVE DAYS AFTER SHE WAS HIT SHE WAS in the ICU at Mount Sinai St. Luke’s Hospital on a ventilator with multiple medication drips and bandages around her head that extended across the right side of her face. Thanks to her daughter, Fremmer had made it onto the approved visitors list, but he also discovered he had an inside contact: A friend from spinning class, an anesthesiologist who worked at the hospital and helped run the ICU as a critical-care physician.

  The extent of her injuries was staggering. The impact, or really three impacts, if you counted the windshield and the pavement, had left her with a broken femur, fractured pelvis, and a “closed-head injury”—a skull fracture and subdural hematoma. A neurosurgeon had performed a “bolt” operation, installing a device in her head to relieve pressure on her brain from intracranial bleeding. She’d also ruptured her spleen, which had been removed, broken six ribs and had a bilateral pneumothorax—torn lungs in non-medical speak.

  His anesthesiologist friend Ethan Bernstein said she was lucky to be alive. He’d seen other “peds vs. cars” who arrived in her condition and most didn’t make it. She still might not make it.

  Ped vs. car—pedestrian vs. car—was how first responders and hospital trauma teams referred to patients like Candace. The term also showed up in YouTube video titles, although in Candace’s case, the publicly released video of her being struck was labeled with a more literal descriptor: “Woman pushed in front of car in New York.” It had more than five million views in less than forty-eight hours.

  He didn’t stay at the hospital long. Delivering a bouquet of flowers and some clichéd words of encouragement, he’d become profoundly unnerved. Years ago, he’d spent several days in the hospital with his ex-fiancée Denise, who’d suffered a broken neck in a body surfing accident. That was a clusterfuck. She was paralyzed from the chest down. But the damage was limited. Mostly internal, not external. He wasn’t looking at a shattered human being, someone who was unrecognizable.