Hard Feelings: A Novel

by Jason Starr

  On Saturday, Paula went to Bloomingdale’s and I went to the gym. I had no energy to lift weights so I spent a few minutes doing ab exercises. Then I went into the sauna, hoping to relax. Unfortunately, sweating only made me more tense, and afterwards my skin itched all over.

  On my way home, walking down Second Avenue, I saw a black Volkswagen bug double-parked across the street. The driver was a man with red hair. I remembered how yesterday I had thought that a red-haired man walking behind me was an undercover cop. I couldn’t tell if this was the same man or not, but he looked similar enough. I stopped and stared at him, but he didn’t look in my direction. Another man came out of a pizza place, holding a pizza box, and got into the car. The red-haired man drove off.

  That night, I decided I needed to get out of the apartment, so Paula and I went out to dinner at a Mexican restaurant. When we came home, the phone was ringing. I answered it, but there was no one there. I realized how the same thing had happened a couple of times during the past week. I asked Paula if she’d gotten any hang-ups and she said, “Maybe one or two.” I wondered if the calls could have been related to the e-mails. When Paula went into the bedroom I took the portable phone into the dining room and dialed *69, to automatically call the person who’d phoned last. A Puerto Rican–sounding woman answered, “Allo,” and I hung up, feeling like an idiot.

  The next day, Sunday, Paula and I rented a car and drove to Westchester. We drove around through the quaint small towns of Scarborough and Harmon, several miles above Tarrytown on the Hudson. Then, just for the hell of it, we stopped at a real estate office and the agent took us to see a few houses. They were all big and spacious with large bedrooms and big backyards. One of the houses was eerily similar to the perfect suburban home that I had fantasized about living in someday. It was sad, walking around the house with Paula, talking about which would be the baby’s room and where the dining room table would go, knowing that I was probably going to prison. I regretted that I had agreed to look at houses in the first place.

  Riding back toward the city along the Henry Hudson Park-way, approaching the George Washington Bridge, I looked in the rearview mirror and spotted a black Volkswagen bug. It was hard to tell for sure, but the driver seemed to have red hair.

  “Did you notice that car before?” I asked.

  “Which car?”

  “The one behind us—the black bug.”

  Paula turned around to look then said, “No. Why?”

  “Never mind,” I said.

  I slowed down until the bug angled to the left lane and passed me. I looked over at the driver—a woman with dirty blond hair—and she glanced at me briefly and then looked back at the road.

  I imagined Michael Rudnick laughing, the same way he used to laugh when he was chasing me around the Ping-Pong table.

  After we returned the car I walked Otis. It was a warm, oppressive night. Back home, I took a long shower. With the ice-cold water beating down on my head, I had a brainstorm.

  16

  THE NEXT MORNING at nine o’clock, I burst into Steve Ferguson’s office and shouted, “Son of a bitch!”

  “What the hell?” Steve said as if he didn’t know what was going on. He was at his desk, sipping a cup of coffee.

  “Look, I know it was you and it’s not going to work,” I said, “so you might as well admit it.”

  He started to smile, in that slick, phony way.

  “You’re gonna have to slow down, Richie,” he said, “because I’m still on my first cup of coffee here and—”

  I moved closer to his desk and swatted away some papers to show him how serious I was.

  “Hey,” he said, standing up to face me, “what the hell’s the matter with you?”

  “I don’t appreciate your pranks,” I said, my Ps spraying saliva. “Maybe you think we have a little rivalry going here and if you can distract me I’ll stop making sales and then maybe Bob and Alan will promote you before me. Well, it’s not gonna work, no matter how many e-mails you send me.”

  Now he wasn’t smiling anymore.

  “E-mails? What the . . . Are you fucking crazy or something?”

  I left his office, slamming the door hard. I dropped off my briefcase by my cubicle, then I went into the bathroom. Staring at myself in the mirror above the sink, I noticed the deep bags under my eyes.

  At my desk, I booted up my computer and checked my e-mail log. I had four new messages—three work-related and one from you_are_a_liar.

  WE’RE STILL WAITING, ASSHOLE. DON’T THINK YOU’RE GONNA GET AWAY WITH THIS, YOU JERK-OFF, BECAUSE YOU’RE NOT. YOU HAVE NO FUCKING CHANCE.

  The message had been sent at 9:29 last night. I read the note again and again, searching for clues. The grammar wasn’t great and I had a feeling the sender wasn’t very intelligent. I started focusing on “WE’RE,” wondering if more than one person had written to me.

  Steve still could have sent the message, but I realized I had probably made a big mistake blaming him. Would he really go to all this trouble just to drive me crazy?

  Figuring I had nothing to lose, I decided to send a reply.

  I thought it over for a couple of seconds, then I typed:

  Who are you? I think you might have the wrong guy.

  Then, after giving it some more thought, I deleted this and typed:

  Sorry, wrong e-mail.

  Perfect. I sounded casual and distracted, as if I were too busy to be concerned by some crank e-mails. I read my note several times, liking it even more, then clicked SEND.

  I started working on some new hardware quotes that Jim Turner had requested, but it was hard to stay focused.

  Then, at about eleven-thirty, my phone rang.

  “You didn’t think we forgot about you, did you?” Detective Burroughs asked.

  “What do you want?” I asked, wondering if the call had something to do with the e-mail I’d sent.

  “I’m afraid we’re going to need you here at the police station this afternoon,” Burroughs said.

  “What for?” I asked.

  “We need you to appear in a lineup.”

  “A lineup?” I said, trying to stay calm. “What for?”

  “A witness came forward and we want to see if he can ID you.”

  “Look, I’m very busy today and—”

  “This isn’t optional,” Burroughs said. “A car’s already on its way to your office to pick you up. I was just calling to make sure you were in today.”

  I thought about calling Kevin Schultz, the lawyer I had spoken to on the phone, but I decided that this would be a bad idea. Demanding to have a lawyer present would only make me seem guilty, as if I had something to hide. It would be better to wait and see if I was really in trouble before calling Schultz. Besides, no lawyer, no matter how good, could stop a witness from identifying me.

  “You’ll see, you’re making a big mistake,” I said, “but if you want me to be in a lineup, I’ll be in a lineup.”

  Bob was busy in a meeting and I knew I couldn’t just disappear for the day with no explanation. I remembered that one of my new clients, Ken Hanson from the accounting firm on Seventh Avenue, said he was going to be out of town all this week, so I added a bogus 12:30 meeting with him to my Lotus Notes appointment program.

  As Burroughs had promised, at noon a police car was waiting for me in front of the office building. It was a nice day and the street was crowded with people going to lunch. I looked around carefully, trying to make sure no one from my office was watching, then I entered the back of the car quickly. I kept my head down until the car pulled away.

  The driver—a young, blond officer—didn’t say anything when I got in. Jazz was playing on the stereo at a low volume.

  Sitting in the back of a police car, on my way to a lineup, probably should have made me nervous, but I was surprisingly calm.

  There was hardly any traffic and we made it to the police station in central Jersey in a little over an hour. I expected Burroughs to be waiting for me, but he wasn
’t there. I was led into a waiting area where two other men were seated. One of them looked drunk and homeless, the other one was a typical New Jersey hick, with a ripped denim jacket, an unruly goatee, and a chewed-up toothpick dangling from the corner of his mouth.

  We sat there for at least fifteen minutes. I was getting impatient. Finally, a female officer told us to take off our jackets. She asked me if I had on anything under my shirt. I told her I was wearing a T-shirt and then she told me to take off my tie and dress shirt as well.

  The officer led us into a room where two other men in T-shirts were waiting. One of the men looked sixty, and one of them looked like he was twenty. The only thing that all five of us had in common, as far as I could tell, was that we were all white. I was the only one who looked like I worked for a living and like I didn’t have some kind of disease.

  The officer asked us to line up, with our hands by our sides, in front of a large mirror. She told us to try to maintain a “natural expression,” and to keep our heads straight and eyes open.

  After about thirty seconds, the officer returned with five pairs of sunglasses. They weren’t similar to the pair I’d been wearing the night of the murder, but it was frightening that the police knew about this.

  “Now we’d like you to put these on and stare straight ahead again,” the officer said.

  I put on the sunglasses—they were slightly small on me— and tried to maintain a “natural expression.” After about a minute, the officer returned and said, “That’s all,” and she led us out of the room.

  I put on my shirt, tie, and jacket. The other guys were talking to one another, but I kept to myself. A man in a suit—he looked like a detective, but I had never seen him before— came into the room and asked me to come with him.

  As I followed the man down the hallway, I wondered if this was it. Somehow, the prospect of getting caught seemed realer now than it ever had before. I imagined myself falling to the floor and crying like a baby when they told me I was under arrest.

  The man led me into an interrogation room where Detectives Burroughs and Freemont were seated at a table. Burroughs told me to take a seat, but I remained standing.

  “So what’s going on?” I asked, trying to prepare for the worst.

  “Just sit down,” Burroughs said.

  “Did your witness ID me or not?”

  “Sit down, Mr. Segal.”

  I hesitated for a few seconds, then I sat.

  “To answer your question,” Burroughs said, “no, the witness couldn’t ID you.”

  “So then take me back to Manhattan.”

  “I’m afraid that doesn’t mean you’re off the hook,” Burroughs said. “We know you lied to us about your alibi.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The Old Stand bar has video surveillance cameras. We looked at the footage and we know you weren’t at the bar that night.”

  I sensed a trick.

  “There has to be some mistake,” I said, “because I was there that night. I’m telling you the truth.”

  “Oh, there’s no mistake,” Burroughs said. “We looked over that tape carefully and there’s no doubt about it—you weren’t there. So you want to tell us what really happened that night?”

  “I told you where I was,” I said. “I really don’t understand this. Did you talk to the bartenders?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact we did,” Burroughs said.

  “So? Did any of them recognize me?”

  “Two of them did,” Burroughs said. “They said you’d come in a few times over the past few weeks, but they couldn’t say for sure whether you were there that night.”

  “That’s not my problem.”

  “Oh, it is your problem,” Burroughs said, “because we know for a fact you weren’t in that bar.”

  “But I was in the bar,” I insisted.

  “Look,” Burroughs said, “we could do this one of two ways. You could admit you killed Michael Rudnick and maybe you’ll get a lighter sentence. Or you could make things more complicated for us and you’ll get life. It’s all up to you.”

  “This is ridiculous,” I said. “You come to my apartment and cause a big scene and embarrass me in front of my wife. Then you show up at my office and cause more embarrassment. And now you drag me out to butt-fuck New Jersey for some pointless lineup when I had a very busy day scheduled. Meanwhile, there is absolutely no evidence that I had anything to do with any of this. You know, I think I’ll call a lawyer after all and start talking about a lawsuit. I also have a feeling the local newspapers will want to hear about how your department harasses innocent people.”

  “Michael Rudnick’s penis had been nearly severed,” Burroughs said matter-of-factly.

  “So?” I said. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Trying to cut off a man’s penis isn’t the normal way to kill someone,” Burroughs said. “Unless of course the killer was molested by the victim.”

  “I told you, I was at a bar that night.”

  “Then how do you explain why you’re not on the bar’s videotape?”

  “Because there is no videotape,” I said. “You’re trying to set me up when I had nothing to do with any of this.”

  For about twenty minutes, Burroughs and Freemont took turns grilling me. They tried to poke a hole in my alibi, make me admit that I wasn’t at the Old Stand on that Friday night. They had found out that I had scheduled the bogus four o’clock appointment on my calendar that afternoon and I explained that scheduling the appointment had been “an honest mistake.” They made me repeat the information I had told them the other night, about the times I had left work, been at the bar, and arrived home at my apartment. I stuck to my story entirely and I could tell that I was wearing the detectives out. Finally, they realized that with no solid evidence against me they couldn’t keep me any longer. Burroughs led me back to the front of the precinct and said I would be taken back to Manhattan “as soon as a car is available.”

  I had to wait over an hour. This gave me plenty of time to think about who the witness could have been. Burroughs had said that “the platform was darkly lit,” so the witness must have seen me either when I got off the train at Princeton Junction, or before I got on the train to New York. Burroughs had referred to the witness as a “he,” so this ruled out the woman on the opposite platform who had smiled at me. I remembered passing a man in a business suit on the stairs leading up to the platform, then several people who were seated on a bench. One of these people could have been the witness, but I decided it didn’t really matter. Some guy might have seen me on the platform that night, but he couldn’t have gotten a good look at me or he would have told the cops about my blond hair.

  Escaping from my thoughts, I glanced to my right and saw Michael Rudnick standing by the doorway. He looked the way he did as a teenager—overweight, with a faceful of acne and a thick caterpillar eyebrow.

  I closed my eyes tightly and when I opened them Rudnick was gone.

  17

  THE ELEVATOR DOORS opened and Bob was facing me. It was past five o’clock and he was holding his briefcase, leaving for the day.

  “Where have you been?” he said. “We had a sales meeting at four.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “My twelve-thirty ran late.”

  “Sure, sure, whatever,” he mumbled. “See you tomorrow.”

  I continued into the office, wondering if I was on Bob’s shit list again. Then I decided it didn’t matter one way or the other. Maybe a couple of weeks ago he would have threatened my job for scheduling a bogus appointment, but now that I was well on my way to becoming the company’s top salesman he was liable to cut me a little more slack.

  It was a relief to see that I had received no new threatening e-mails. I hoped this was a sign that my troubles were over.

  I stayed late at the office, trying to catch up on some of the work I had been neglecting lately. Around eight o’clock, I decided to call it a day. I was exhausted and it was another humi
d, oppressive night, so I took a cab home.

  Paula greeted me at the front door. She said she was worried about me, but then remembered that I’d had an A.A. meeting tonight. I had completely forgotten about the meeting, but I covered for myself smoothly. I told her that the meeting had gone “very well.” She asked me what we’d talked about and I said, “You know, the usual—our experiences drinking, sharing stories.” Paula said, “I’m so proud of you,” and then she said there was warm Chinese food waiting for me in the kitchen.

  I ate some shrimp with snow peas, although I wasn’t very hungry. I opened my fortune cookie and read the fortune out loud to Paula: “You are in charge of your destiny.”

  “That probably had to do with your A.A. meeting tonight,” she said.

  “Probably,” I said.

  Paula and I sat on the couch together watching TV. I was starting to fall asleep when the phone rang. Paula said she’d get it, but I was closer to the phone so I answered it. I said, “Hello,” but the person hung up right away.

  “Who was it?” Paula asked.

  “Another wrong number,” I said. “If this keeps happening I’ll have to call the phone company.”

  I returned to the couch and fell right asleep.

  THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE, SCUMBAG. CONFESS OR ELSE!

  This was the e-mail that greeted me at work on Tuesday morning. I was reaching my breaking point. Last night, I had managed to get my first good night’s sleep in days, but now my nightmare was starting all over again.

  My fingers banging against the keyboard, I typed:

  FUCKING JERK! IF YOU HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY, SAY IT TO MY FUCKING FACE!

  Then I added:

  COWARD!!!!!

  I clicked SEND.