PLUMMET: A Novel

by MICHAEL ZAROCOSTAS

  "She was a symbolist painter," Rachel said. "A strong Mexican woman. Like your mother no doubt was. To put up with a clan of Greek men."

  Nick chuckled. "No woman could compare to my mother. We had a saying in Greek for her. A strand of her pubic hair can pull ships."

  Everyone laughed, even Rachel, which surprised Raphael. He watched as she tilted her head back and squeezed Carlos' hand, laughing louder than everyone else. Almost mockingly.

  Raphael jealously watched them interact, finished his brandy, and excused himself to go to the bathroom again. Below deck, he did another bump of cocaine, licked the residue from his upper lip, and squirted breath spray in his mouth. He looked in the mirror, comparing himself to Carlos. He stroked his receding hairline and frowned.

  Voices carried in the hall outside the bathroom.

  Raphael gently pressed his cheek against the door, listened to hissing and scuffling.

  Rachel Weiss was saying, "Let go of me."

  "Shhh, calm down," a man's voice whispered. "Just do this for me, will you?"

  "I'm so disgusted with-"

  "I know, I know. But, listen, you don't have to talk."

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "Don't be fucking coy, this is important."

  There was a loud slap in the face. Then a sigh.

  "Thanks."

  Shoe heels clacked away, down the hall.

  The locked bathroom door shook violently.

  Raphael stumbled backward and shouted, "Just a second!"

  He wiped off the sink counter with his sleeve and unlocked the door to see Gabe's cold eyes. Blue pinholes of rage that made him shiver.

  "Raphael," Gabe said, "what the hell are you doing in there?"

  The cocaine had Raphael on the verge of insulting Gabe, but instead he said, "Nothing."

  "Then get out of the way so I can use the can."

  13 Thursday

  * * *

  The night of the killing, when he had gotten back into bed with his adulterous wife, Gabe dreamt about a party thrown by Sullivan & Adler. He thought he might be dreaming because the S & A partners were usually too cheap to throw a lavish soirée like the one in his dream world. In his dream, Gabe wandered uncomfortably through a crowded black tie affair in a white stone banquet hall with cavernous ceilings and no windows. He'd forgotten what the occasion was, and not remembering irritated him. He noticed one of the Products Liability partners, a troll of a woman, showing off her twenty-five year old escort to embarrass her ex-husband. The escort looked like a young Gen Lit associate. The odd couple tongue kissed in front of him, biting each other's lips, and he cringed as he waded deeper into the crowd.

  He walked up to a grand buffet of food on a neverending silk table cloth and bumped into Stu Greenbaum. Gabe and Stu had gone to Binghamton together and were made partners the same year in the Gen Lit department. But having competed for the title, they were never as close as it superficially appeared. In fact, Gabe thought that Stu must have been a playground punching bag in childhood because of the way he abused subordinates at the Firm.

  "How are you, Stu?" Gabe asked, seeing that Stu wore a snakeskin bow-tie and white tuxedo and looked a bit paler than his usual orange melanoma sheen. "What's with the tux?"

  Stu said in his delicate voice, "What about the Firm, Gabe? What about appearances?" Stu's one good eye held a disapproving look. "Really, I'm surprised by you. I can't believe what you did to us. What you did to me."

  "What the hell are you-"

  Stu turned around and disappeared.

  Gabe wanted to follow him, wring his skinny neck, but he completely lost sight of the bastard. Gabe felt on edge as he walked the length of the buffet table. Couples on both sides gorged themselves, stuffing their pasty faces with gelatinous pink meat. A chef stood in the center with a long knife ready to carve a whole pig, bright red apple jammed in its broken mouth.

  "Who the hell came up with this menu? This isn't kosher."

  "You did, sir," the chef said. "Would you like some?"

  "No, I don't want a goddamn piece of that pig."

  Gabe was shaking his head when Max Goldberg tapped his shoulder. He was one of the few S & A partners who Gabe actually called a friend.

  "What did I tell you about your temper, Gabe? It is what it is." Max chortled, rotund gut jiggling, his breath smelling like wine. "I guess the chaza wasn't such a good guy after all. Maybe he was just overworked? Or maybe you were?"

  "Max, what the hell are you talking about?"

  "You better start hitting the bottle again." Max pointed to a crowded dance floor where a sallow band played music that began to grate and screech like a sick cat's wailing.

  Max held out a goblet of bright red wine. Gabe pushed it away.

  "What the fuck is this party?" Gabe glared at Max, then at the dance floor.

  The screeching music grew louder, and that was when the dream morphed into a nightmare. His wife, Rachel, and a man were waltzing together, close enough for the man to slip his tongue in her ear. She closed her eyes in delight.

  Gabe strode to the dance floor, grabbed his wife's arm.

  "Goddamn it, Rachel, what the hell are you doing? Are you trying to embarrass me or have you lost your mind?"

  "Yes."

  Gabe looked over at the man. "Who … what the hell is going on?"

  The man's face was beyond unrecognizable. It was inhuman. It decomposed and melted like a green wax figure. Speechless, Gabe looked down and realized that the man's chest was bleeding right through his tuxedo shirt. The red circle growing wider, dripping lower until crimson beads drizzled onto the hardwood dance floor and burned through it like acid. The nightmare ended with the dance floor collapsing in pieces beneath his feet, and Gabe falling and screaming and clawing at anything to catch himself. No one lifted a finger to help him.

  Everyone, except Rachel, laughed at him.

  When he woke, Gabe was clawing his sheets to shreds. He sat up and gasped. He looked around the room and his hand instinctively reached for Rachel, but the bed was empty. The clock on the night table glowed 9:11 a.m. Everything seemed normal, except for the fact that he had overslept and Rachel hadn't jabbed him awake. He hadn't slept this late in years, and it had been a deep unbroken sleep until the nightmare.

  In the kitchen, he stumbled around in his jeans and Fordham Law t-shirt. He wandered through the morning light slanting through the kitchen's bay windows. He was disoriented, wondering if everything were just a dream. The black-tie party, the naked man he thought he confronted the night before, the body in the trunk of his daughter's car.

  "Rachel?" His normally hardened voice trembled. "Sarah, you here, honey?"

  He stopped in front of a pad on the refrigerator door. It was Rachel's curly handwriting. His wife wrote like a junior high school girl sending love notes.

  Gabe, did you do something with Sarah's car keys? She was very annoyed. I gave her my extra set. Off to the gym. Have a good day at the office. R

  His jaw nearly fell to the floor. He ran out of the kitchen into the unventilated tomb of the garage. Through a small window in the garage door, Gabe could see his Porsche at the edge of the driveway, exactly where he thought he had left it. He looked down at the floor and saw evidence of the night before. In tiny dark drops, coagulated on the concrete where Sarah's Ford used to be. Not quite as dark and large as the oil leaks. And her car, the body in the trunk, they were both gone.

  $ $ $

  He nearly punched his thick fingers through his cell phone trying Sarah's number. No answer. He tried again and again, standing in the middle of the driveway in his t-shirt and carpenter's jeans. He looked up and down the quiet lane, expecting the Taurus to turn the corner and roll up to the house. A little girl on a bicycle pedaled slowly past him, stuck her tongue out at his desperate stare. He wiped sweat from the cell's keypad, dialed again, and paged his daughter. She wasn't calling him back, and where she was, he couldn't have known. He finally left a message, trying not to sou
nd too panicked.

  "Sarah, it's Dad. Please call me as soon as you get this. I need to borrow your car. It's important, honey, okay? All right. Call me. Please."

  He tried Rachel's cell, but she wasn't answering either. She was probably deep into some aerobics class at the gym, in full make-up, jumping up and down, firm elastic tits bouncing in unison with the rest of the fanatical women in the room. He imagined his wife grabbing the phone, seeing that it was his number, and deciding not to answer. After last night, why shouldn't he think that? He left her a message anyway, listening to the cold monotone of his own voice.

  "Rachel, I need to speak with Sarah. Call me if you know where she is. No, call me no matter what. It's urgent."

  Gabe took the article of clothing he had found earlier beneath his bed and locked it in his briefcase. He got into his Porsche, tossed the briefcase on the backseat, and started the car. He didn't know where he was going, but he had to find Sarah.

  "What if she opens the trunk? Jesus Christ."

  The thick August morning had already seeped through his windshield and cooked his black leather interior. His shirt was clinging to the sticky skin on his back. He fumbled with the vents, but the car's air conditioning was stale hot air. Suffocating, he rolled down the windows and sped through New Jersey, racking his brain for a destination.

  Sarah often spent the night with one of Gabe's paralegals. He didn't think much of her other friends. They were spoiled and lazy, spending their parents' money on drinking and going to raves and coming home the next afternoon with bloodshot eyes and stories of "X" hangovers and Special K highs. Whatever the hell any of that meant, Gabe didn't want to know. He just knew that he didn't like his daughter's crowd one fucking bit. That's where Gabe's paralegal came in.

  Adrienne Lutsky seemed like a nice little maidel at the time. Adrienne had just graduated from Cornell, and she started working as a legal assistant in Sullivan & Adler's litigation department to see if she might be interested in law school. Her uncle was a partner in the Boston office, so she got a job automatically. She was about the same age as Sarah, and Gabe thought that she had a good head on her shoulders. She was professional and mature and funny, a girl Gabe wished that his Bohemian daughter could emulate. He introduced her to Sarah, and, by some miracle of God, they became friends. He'd hoped that Sarah would want to be a paralegal at S & A so she could spend more time with him.

  After Sarah became best friends with his paralegal, he grew silently angry because he saw Sarah even less. It made him feel like a failure. Gabe had never said anything to his paralegal or his daughter. Instead, he took out his frustration by piling so much shit on Adrienne Lutsky that she might as well have lived in a New York City sewer. One weekend, he made her work around the clock, reviewing thousands of pages of deposition transcripts to find one admission that didn't exist. Eight transcripts and four thousand pages later, she cracked and moved to the Corporate department, probably to escape him. Still, she stayed close friends with his daughter.

  Maybe that's where Sarah was now, he thought.

  Gabe called up a telephone operator at Sullivan & Adler, found out Adrienne Lutsky's address from the Firm directory, and raced to her apartment in Hoboken. The miles flew by, his Porsche revving angrily through lights. When he found the apartment, he banged on the door, hit every buzzer. No one answered.

  What if Sarah and her friend had opened the trunk already? They would have called the police, wouldn't they? No, Sarah would've called her mother first, and Rachel's shrill voice would have been in his ear in seconds.

  "They don't know," he reassured himself.

  The Porsche tore across the road, splitting between long columns of cars. He was on the verge of ruin, and he couldn't let that happen to Sarah. He didn't want her to find out anything, to see what was in the trunk of her car. If he could at least spare her that, then he could begin to devise a way out.

  His hands squeezed the steering wheel as he veered in and out of traffic, perspiration pouring down his face as if someone held a candle in front of his forehead. His eyes stung, and he tried to squint the droplets away when it happened somewhere near Willow Avenue. A reddish brown blur, trotting along the side of the road, began to cross right in front of him.

  "Stop, stop!"

  The car's right front tire crushed its back. The piercing yelp echoed in Gabe's head. He pulled over for a minute, too distraught and nervous to get out. He glanced at the rear view mirror, the twitching red paws over the white edge of the emergency lane, the snake of cars slowing to avoid the road kill.

  He clamped his eyes shut. "Jesus Christ."

  He wiped a coat of salty tears and sweat from his face and watched the poor thing die in the midst of passing exhaust fumes. It was too clean and healthy to be a stray. He felt worse because it was some family's pet. It reminded him of their first one, the spastic Irish Setter he had bought Sarah as a child. He had promised to buy her that dog only if she took care of it herself.

  "You're a big girl now," he'd told her, "and you have to be responsible. You're gonna have to feed it and take it for walks, you know? Dad's not going to do it all, Sarah."

  "I know, Dad. I'm not a schmuck, you know?"

  "Hey, watch that language, you."

  Gabe laughed, thinking about the foul mouth on Sarah's cute little face. An acid tongue like her old man's. She wasn't ready for that dog, but he bought it anyway. She had tried to take it for a walk one day, and it bolted after a neighbor's cat. The Setter probably weighed more than Sarah did, but she hung onto the leash for a good fifty feet.

  Gabe came home from work that day, and Sarah showed him the runny scabs beneath the patchwork of Band-Aids on her elbows and bony knees to prove how hard she had tried. She had cried when she told him how she screamed at the dog to stop, but she couldn't control it. The loose collar eventually slipped off the dog's neck, and he ripped through a backyard, leapt over a wire fence, and disappeared from their world. He let her skip school the next day, and he called in sick to the Firm. They drove around the neighborhood at a Sunday driver's pace, Sarah hanging out the passenger window, calling out the dog's name, "Rusty! Rus-teeee!" That dog was in Philly by then, Gabe knew that, but he caressed his daughter's cheek and spent the entire day looking for their dog, taping her misspelled handwritten flyers on light posts, covering her eyes whenever they came across a dead animal in the street. But it was never Rusty. The flyers became tattered bits, and the Magic Marker handwriting with the phone number and the "Lost Dog" description faded away, illegible then invisible. Soon there was nothing left of the paper, and Sarah had given up finding her pet. Gabe dug a small hole for his daughter in the backyard. He and Rachel improvised a prayer for missing and presumed dead family dogs while Sarah buried its dish and favorite ragged tennis ball.

  He wondered if Sarah thought he'd been a good dad. He sighed, shifted the Porsche into gear, cutting his way back into traffic. He picked up his cell phone and dialed her number. Voice mail. "Sarah. It's Dad. … I'm sorry."

  He closed the connection, tossed the phone aside. He was weaving in and out of cars, his mood swaying back and forth with the curves in the road. From anger to sadness and back. He snatched the phone up again, punched a number, almost rear-ending a minivan full of nose-picking toddlers in front of him.

  "Gabriel Weiss's office-"

  "Cherise. It's me." Her voice came across like a den mother's, "You're going to be late for the partner brunch. They said you had to be there."

  "Fuck the brunch. Just be quiet and listen." Gabe bit his lip. "Listen, I'm sorry. I have an emergency, and I'm a little off. Call my daughter's cell phone and keep calling until you get her. Tell her to come to my office. It's urgent. Okay?"

  "Let me make sure I have her number. Okay, got it."

  "Thanks."

  The Porsche darkened as it descended into the Lincoln Tunnel.

  14 (9 months ago)

  * * *

  The clock next to his bed read 6:27 A.M. He'd already gotte
n dressed, but somehow had fallen back asleep. He hurdled the mattress, snagged an S & A litigation briefcase, and sprinted down the stairs of his apartment building. He hit the sidewalk running with the leather case big enough to hold three hundred pages of documents and a collapsible easel that Stu Greenbaum wanted to use for oral argument. Outside he realized he'd forgotten his overcoat, but didn't turn back. With his lips numb and teeth chattering, he whistled down a cab and rode to Penn Station. They could have flown into Baltimore the night before, but Hannah Smythe was afraid of flying. So the S & A travel department booked three tickets on the Acela Express.

  Once he got to Penn Station, Micah squeezed his way through the Thanksgiving holiday travelers. He jogged down an escalator and came to a main floor with a huge electronic billboard listing the departing trains by city and gate number. The 7:00 a.m. Baltimore express was "boarding." He ran through the gate, nearly falling down the steps to the tracks. On the train, he towed the briefcase, sweat pouring down his nose, and maneuvered to the reserved seats in the First Class cabin. He found Stu and Hannah ensconced side-by-side in reclined seats, sipping Starbucks lattés.

  Hannah was wearing a navy wool blazer and skirt. She looked pretty to him in her soft make-up and high collar pink blouse. She was staring at her laptop on a tray table. Stu was in the window seat, typing an e-mail on his Blackberry, wearing a pink Windsor-knotted tie and navy suit. They looked like they had intentionally matched their outfits.

  "Did he sleep in?" Stu glanced up, his runny eye looking normal for once.

  The train doors closed, and the cars started inching along the rails.

  Hannah looked up at Micah. "Did you sleep in, Mike? I tried to call your cell, but it went right into voice mail. You should have it on, especially on a court day."

  Stu said to Hannah, "Does he have the easel and extra copies of the briefs?"

  "I have everything," Micah said, "in this lit bag."