“Maybe,” Brenna said.
Maya swallowed hard.
“Well,” said Brenna. “What do you think?”
“You’re not going to like what I think.”
Brenna exhaled. “Try me.”
“I’m thinking maybe something bad happened to Robin,” Maya said, very slowly. “And if that woman who does that thing with the bottle really is Clea . . . then maybe she had something to do with it.”
Brenna closed her eyes. “You think . . . you think your aunt Clea . . . you think she killed Robin Tannenbaum?
Maya shrugged. “I don’t know her, Mom. And neither do you.”
“She’s my sister.”
“Look.” She sighed. “I know I’m an only child and all, so I might not fully get it. But if Clea is still alive, it means she left you guys twenty-five years ago and hasn’t tried to get in touch with you once. I mean—even after all that stuff about you in the news? Not even a letter or an e-mail? What kind of a sister is that?”
Brenna looked down at her hands. “Her father’s daughter,” she said, very quietly.
Maya got up from her chair, settled in next to Brenna on the couch. “She’s got a gift for destruction that runs through her veins,” she said.
Brenna stared at her. Her pulse sped up, and in an instant, she was back into the previous night, Morasco moving closer to the computer screen as Lula Belle spoke, the light from the screen on his eyes and that emotion in them. Was it pity? . . . She thought I was crazy like my daddy. She thought I couldn’t take care of nothin’ without breakin’ it. Mama said that gift for destruction ran through my veins.
“Where did you hear that?”
“Huh?”
“Have you been watching those downloads?”
Maya’s eyes were wide. “What downloads?” she asked, her voice quavering, and it was only then that Brenna realized how harshly she’d spat out that question.
She took a deep breath. Calm. “Maya, I’m not mad at you,” she said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I never should have said anything.”
“Don’t be like that. I just can’t have you looking at them. They’re very inappropriate, and besides, what if you accidentally damaged one of them?”
“What downloads?”
Brenna frowned.
“Lula Belle.”
Maya stared at her. “I haven’t looked at those.”
“Where did you get that, then?
“Get what?”
“That expression—destruction running through her veins.”
“Come on,” she said. “You’ve never heard her say that?”
“Who?”
Maya bit her lip.
Brenna put a hand on her shoulder, looked deep into her eyes. “Who, Maya,” she said softly. “Who says that expression?”
Maya stared at her. “Grandma,” she said. “She says that about Clea, all the time.”
Kevin Wiggins, Desk Clerk to the Stars, called out, “Good-bye!” as that pretty girl left the MoonGlow.
She didn’t reply. They never did.
Stupid as it sounded, Kevin was a little disappointed—not over the lack of reply, but in the girl herself. Kevin had figured (hoped, actually) that she was a movie star staying at the MoonGlow to evade the paparazzi. She really could have been, too, what with those big dark glasses, those red lips, and her shining blonde hair swept up into a bun, like Grace Kelly in a Hitchcock movie—only with much bigger boobs.
But no, she was just another paid date—a big cut above the ones that usually came in here, but paid nonetheless. Kevin had clocked her: one hour. Figures.
Kevin sighed heavily. He’d been working here at the MoonGlow for going on twenty years, and when he’d first taken the job, he’d imagined things so differently. A hotel in New York . . . It sounded so glamorous.
Keep in mind, Kevin had just moved here himself from Cicero, Illinois, and he’d never even seen the ocean before. He figured a hotel in New York would be full of romance and intrigue—even a divey one like this with smoke-dulled mirrors and suspiciously sticky floors and stains on the walls. It was the type of place you could call seedy and mean it literally. But Kevin didn’t care. His first week of working here, he expected Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra to come bopping into the lobby in their sailor uniforms singing about all the gals they were gonna meet on the town tonight. But as it turned out, life wasn’t a Technicolor movie—and the only thing that came bopping in here was hopped up on meth, and had a switchblade stashed up someplace you didn’t even want to think about too hard.
Kevin always hoped that some big developer like Donald Trump or Roger Wright might buy the MoonGlow, maybe turn it into a place he’d be proud to work at. But no. Management never changed and the MoonGlow never changed—it just kept decaying around him.
Kevin Wiggins, Desk Clerk to the Doomed.
Oh well. Kevin had his little TV in the back room, and on slow nights, he could bring in DVDs of all his favorite films—the classics. He could watch them start to finish, sing along with Gene and Frank and Dino and Debbie at the top of his lungs—nobody cared. He had his imagination, too—and sometimes, pretty girls to fuel it. Boy, paid date or not, she was a nice one.
Somewhere in this building, some lucky bastard was sleeping like a baby.
Chapter 13
The road was bumpy and Brenna was small. The handlebars curved around the tops of her legs, her sister’s strong arms pressing against her sides as she steered. Clea was pedaling fast, she thought. But Clea knew where she was going and so Brenna felt safe.
“Smile for Daddy,” Clea said.
Brenna looked up from the road and smiled . . . But she couldn’t see a camera. She couldn’t see her father. Thick trees swarmed before them, the road getting narrower, darker. Brenna looked down again. The road was pitted with big, slimy rocks.
“Smile for Daddy,” Clea said again. But there was no Daddy and then there was no Clea, Brenna riding the handlebars of the blue bike alone, the blue bike from the photograph and Brenna grown up but still small and a cliff looming ahead, the bike flipping and Brenna flying, falling into the dark.
“ . . . Mom.”
Brenna gasped herself awake, and saw Clea standing over her, the sun backlighting her long blonde hair, Clea, a silhouette.
“Don’t tell Mom. I’ll call in a few days—promise.”
“No you won’t,” Brenna murmured. “You won’t. You lie. You will never call me.”
“Mom?”
Brenna felt a hand on her shoulder. Clea shifting into focus, into . . .
“Mom.”
“Maya.”
She stepped back. “Uh . . . You told me to wake you up at eight.”
“Right,” Brenna said, the day’s schedule arranging itself in her mind: Morasco coming at nine. Visiting Hildy Tannenbaum and hopefully talking to Pokrovsky, checking in on Trent, maybe taking Maya out to lunch and then heading over to that gas station in White Plains where Tannenbaum had filled up his tank back in October . . . And meanwhile, where the hell is Lula Belle? Brenna sighed. She struggled up in bed and focused on Maya. “Was I talking in my sleep?”
“Yeah, a little.”
“Sorry. Weird dream.”
“About Clea?”
“Good guess.” Brenna ran a hand over her eyes.
“Hey, listen, Mom?”
“Yeah?
Maya sat down on the edge of the bed. She picked at a fingernail. “What happens if you do find her?” she said.
“Lula Belle?”
She turned to Brenna. “Clea.”
Brenna moved next to her daughter, smoothed her hair. “That’s a good question,” she said. “I’d want to find out if she’s okay, first.”
“Sure. But then what?”
She shrugged. “Talk to her, I guess.”
“What if Grandma is right about Clea, though? What if she’s crazy and destructive and stuff?”
Brenna put a hand on her shoulder. “Ma
ya,” she said. “Grandma says a lot of things to make herself feel better.”
“How would it make her feel better to say her own daughter is a nut job?”
“Maybe it helps her to stop wondering why Clea ran away and never called.”
“Okay, I get that . . . But Mom? If you do find Clea . . .”
“Yeah?”
“Do I have to talk to her?”
Brenna searched Maya’s face—so much like Clea’s, it sometimes made her breath catch. “Honey,” she said. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”
She stood up from the bed, her eyes grave. “Thanks,” she said.
“I am an old man. Why are you troubling me like this?”
“Mr. Pokrovsky,” Brenna said. “All we did was ask you a question. If the question troubles you, just answer it and we’ll leave.”
And not a moment too soon, either. Brenna and Morasco had been in Pokrovsky’s apartment for a little more than five minutes, and already the smell was getting to her. Mothballs and stale coffee, mingled with something dark and medicinal and sad. Neither Pokrovsky nor his apartment were anything like what Brenna had imagined they would be when Morasco had told her, on the ride over, that he was a multimillionaire with Russian mob connections who had done twenty years in Ray Brook for racketeering. “I’m sure he moved his money around—they always do,” Morasco had said, after he’d shown Brenna the old mug shot—a lean, chiseled man with thin lips and angry green eyes that burned straight through the lens.
Yes, he did live in the same ivy-choked townhouse as Hildy Tannenbaum, but still Brenna had assumed Pokrovsky’s apartment would be far more expensively furnished—either sleek and minimalist or Real Housewives–baroque. She’d also expected servants, burly “advisers,” maybe a young, pneumatic trophy wife. But no. The apartment was a dust trap with drawn shades and creaky old furniture—and Pokrovsky was in it all alone.
He also seemed to have aged exponentially in the thirty years since the mug shot had been taken. The olive skin now had the texture of balled-up parchment and he moved so slowly, Brenna had to fight the urge to physically assist him. But the eyes had stayed the same—bright and hard and eerily vacant. Hildy had brought them upstairs, and he’d opened the door quickly for her. But after she’d made the introductions and left and Morasco had shown him his badge, Pokrovsky had stared at him with those eyes for a good minute, and Brenna had half thought he might strike like a cobra, take them both down before she could even get a word in. Bo and Diddley aside, she could see why Robin had not only disappeared but covered his tracks, growing a beard, laying off the credit card, leaving his traceable cell phone behind.
“You want to know why Robin Tannenbaum borrowed money from me,” Pokrovsky was saying now.
“Yes,” Morasco said.
“And you call that a simple question.”
“It is,” Brenna said. “It’s a ridiculously simple question.”
“You are trying to trap me into saying that Robin Tannenbaum owed me money.” His gaze darted from Brenna’s face to Morasco’s and back again. “I do not know those two men who were in your car. I have never seen them in my life, and how they knew my name, I have no idea. But my lawyer can prove that I had absolutely no knowledge of—”
“Look,” Brenna said. “We’re not trying to trap you. I don’t care about those two, and the carjacking isn’t even Nick’s case—he’s just helping me out.”
Pokrovsky stared into her eyes. Brenna stared back. Misplaced eyes, she thought. Two shards of glass sticking out of such a weak, sad face.
“I don’t know how I can put it any plainer, Mr. Pokrovsky,” Brenna said. “How about this? I couldn’t care less about you.”
His eyebrows went up.
“I mean it,” she said. “You could have fifteen bodies stashed under that window seat over there, it wouldn’t matter to me.”
He glanced at Morasco. “It would matter to him.”
“Yep,” Morasco said. “It would.”
“Then we won’t look under the window seat.” Pokrovsky took a breath, his shoulders slumping with it. “Why are you so interested in Robin?” His gaze rested on Brenna. “Or what is it he calls himself now? RJ?”
“I’m looking for him.”
“I gathered that. Why?”
Brenna thought about Lula Belle. Dare she tell Pokrovsky? Would he understand it if Brenna told him who Lula Belle might be? “His mother misses him,” she said.
Pokrovsky sighed. A slight smile crossed his face, and for a moment, the glass-shard eyes warmed with it. “Hildy hired you.”
“Yes.”
He shook his head slowly. “I don’t know why she couldn’t have just told me that. Why did she say you were friends of her son?”
Brenna shrugged her shoulders. “She isn’t a very direct person.”
“True,” he said. “Very true.” He exhaled slowly, and it was as though the anger, the distrust, was seeping out of him, just at the thought of his downstairs neighbor.
“Hildy is worried about her son,” Brenna said.
He ran a hand over his eyes. And when he looked at her again, they, too, looked duller, tired. “I’d like to sit down,” he said.
Brenna and Morasco looked at each other. There was a stack of metal chairs against the wall next to the window seat. Pokrovsky took the window seat, and Brenna and Morasco opened up two of the chairs and moved them across from him. Then they all sat there for several seconds, Pokrovsky catching his breath while Brenna and Morasco watched, as if this were the world’s most uncomfortable group therapy session.
“You should have seen Hildy Tannenbaum thirty years ago,” Pokrovsky said.
Brenna said, “You’ve known her that long?” The seat was cold against her back. She could feel it through her thin sweater.
“Oh yes. I knew her and her husband Walter and that boy of theirs for . . . well, it was at least ten years before I went away on my extended, government-paid vacation.” He smirked at Morasco.
“What was she like back then?” he asked.
“Very different.”
“How so?”
“Oh she was a firecracker.”
“Really?” said Brenna. Other than perhaps “Amazonian,” “firecracker” was the last word in the English language she would have used to describe Hildy.
“Walter was such a stick-in-the-mud, but Hildy, she had this sparkle in her eyes. We didn’t speak much back then, but I could tell. I would watch her, the way she’d sing to herself as she brought a load of laundry down to the washer in the basement—always with the Elvis songs, the Tom Jones . . . She would swing her hips as she walked down the stairs. And she always wore a nice dress. That Walter. I still have no idea what he ever did to deserve her.”
Brenna thought of Hildy today—the frail, hunched little body in the same faded robe she’d worn yesterday, the quavering voice, the scared, buglike eyes, wig slumping on her forehead. Brenna heard herself say, “What happened to her?” Which of course was the world’s stupidest question. What had happened to Hildy was the same thing that had happened to Yuri Pokrovsky, with his chiseled features and his thick blond hair and that death stare of his, so much bigger than his own mug shot. Time had happened. Disappointment and regret and grief and betrayal and guilt and shame and illness and fear and all those other lovely facts of life and time that sap the strength out of you, little by little, until it’s all gone and you’re so much weaker than you were when you first started out, too weak to live at all.
“You want to know what happened to Hildy?” Pokrovsky said.
Brenna looked at him, and jumped a little. He was staring straight into her, the anger back full-force, the glass-green eyes burning.
“Yes,” Brenna said. Her mouth was dry. Instinctively, she slid her chair back, made some space between that anger and herself.
“It was that boy of hers,” he said. “Robin Tannenbaum. That’s what happened to Hildy.”
Pokrovsky had never liked
Robin Tannenbaum, not even when he was a child. “He was lazy,” he explained after Brenna asked. “He would stay all day long in his bedroom. Hildy would call to him to go outside, enjoy the day. He would say nothing in return. He never mowed the lawn, never took out the garbage. Never said ‘please’ or ‘thank you.’ Hildy was forever washing towels for him. That boy would use five separate towels a day. Why does a boy need five towels? He wasn’t even that clean!”
At the time, Pokrovsky was going back and forth between the Forest Hills apartment and homes in South Hampton, Princeton, and Sanibel Island. But on those occasions when he was staying here, the Tannenbaum boy tried his patience. “It was all I could do not to hit him,” Pokrovsky said. “And I know you aren’t supposed to say these things in this day and age. But the way that boy treated his mother, he deserved a lot worse than a pach on the tuchus.”
“He was just fifteen when you went off to Ray Brook,” Morasco said.
“Yes.” Pokrovsky pulled the shade back a little and squinted out the window, the daylight weakening his features still more. “When I got out, this was the only property I had left. Walter had died, and I assumed Hildy would still be here. Not Robin, though.”
“He’d never left home?” Brenna asked.
“No, he was in and out, here and there.” He looked at Brenna. “Three years ago, he went to film school out in California. A forty-two-year-old man, can you imagine? Film school is impractical enough if you are twenty!”
She nodded.
“And here again, his poor mother is footing the bill.”
“Did he graduate?”
Pokrovsky laughed at that one. “He lasted all of three months.”
“Oh.”
“I know I have not always made the wisest decisions in my life.” Pokrovsky said this to Morasco. “I’m sure that if I had it to do over again, I would have done certain things differently, more responsibly, less on impulse . . . But I have been supporting myself and my family since I was thirteen years old and I would sooner die than treat my mother the way he treated Hildy. Like a slave.”
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