by Jan Brogan
“I’m so sorry, I should have called you to cancel,” she said, “I forgot you were supposed to be our guest tonight. I…” She looked back at me, helplessly.
I moved down the hall, beside her. “You haven’t heard?” I asked Ayers.
He shook his head.
“There’s been an accident,” Robin began.
His face grew very still, but he did not register shock. At his age, Ayers was no longer surprised by people’s deaths. Robin had started crying again, so he reached into his jacket and offered her a handkerchief. It was neatly pressed, old-fashioned, possibly monogrammed. She held it in her hand, not knowing what to do with it.
Ayers gestured for her to keep it. Reaching for my hand, he told me how very sorry he was about Leonard. I thought about the night at Raphael’s when we’d all been in the bar together, the night that I’d rubbed Gregory Ayers’s arm for luck. How full of life Leonard had been that night. How full of persuasion. No one that young should die that abruptly. Not Leonard. Not my brother, Sean. A blade twisted inside me and tears began to burn behind my eyes. I blinked them back and quickly left the station.
CHAPTER
20
I PULLED INTO my parking space, turned off the ignition, and stared squarely out the window at my apartment building.
I thought about climbing those dark stairs to my empty apartment to spend the night awake, listening for sounds. I turned the key in the ignition and started the car again. More than anything, I wanted to go to a casino, where it would be bright and loud and crowded all through the night.
I glanced at my fuel gauge, which was nearing empty again. What was I thinking? I didn’t have enough money for gas, let alone the blackjack table. I shut the engine off and opened the car door. A sudden image of the mangled bike broke into my head and I slammed the door shut again.
Reaching into my pants pocket, I pulled out the crumpled note I’d found on Leonard’s floor. “Hallie, listen to this carefully. You’ll forgive me…. If this doesn’t nail”
Whoever had found the tape must have read the note, must have known Leonard had been trying to get it to me. They had to wonder how much I already knew. How much Leonard had already told me.
I might have stayed in the car longer except that the temperature had dropped at least ten degrees, and it occurred to me that breaking into my car was a lot easier than breaking into my apartment. I took several steps on the asphalt, toward my front door. The light above the door illuminated the entry-way.
My brain jumped into video mode, projecting a male form into the hallway. The man was huge, wearing a parka and pressing himself against the wall, waiting. I could almost feel the huge arm grab me around my neck, the metal gun barrel at the back of my head. I shook my head, trying to shut off the picture machine. Something large snapped behind me. I whirled around. In the dark, I saw a branch hanging like a broken arm from a tree.
Past the tree, a man was turning the corner. He was running a slow jog, an end-of-the-workout pace, past Starbucks and onto Elmgrove. He wore a familiar-looking hooded sweatshirt and had a very long stride.
“Matt!” I screamed across the street.
He stopped, looked back over his shoulder toward Starbucks. I shouted a second time and he finally turned my way.
Before I’d worked out what I was doing, I was across the street, meeting him on the sidewalk. He was panting from his run, rubbing sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand and regarding me with curiosity. “What’s going on?”
I stood there shivering from both cold and fear. I glanced back at the hanging tree limb, not knowing how to explain.
“You all right?” Matt asked, taking a step closer.
“You heard about Leonard Marianni?” I asked.
“The bike accident?”
I was watching Matt’s reaction carefully, looking for some flash of understanding, but he gave nothing away. “Yeah.”
“Was he a friend of yours?” The question sounded sincere and just a little surprised.
“Sort of,” I said, realizing that there were things I couldn’t tell Matt, that I’d have to adapt the story. “I was supposed to meet him today,” I heard myself lie, “to get the follow on a vote-no rally I covered yesterday. I got stuck in the traffic holdup—you know, because of the ambulance. I had to identify him for police.” My voice broke off.
“You want to go for a drink somewhere?” he asked softly.
I nodded.
“I’ve got to change; you want me to meet you at your apartment?”
“No!”
He looked across the street at my apartment building and then swiftly up and down the street. “Why?”
I didn’t answer.
“Someone come after you?”
I shook my head. “I heard a noise, probably just a branch snapping in the wind. I’m just a little spooked… after all that’s gone on today.” I saw the mangled bicycle again and closed my eyes.
“All right. All right.” His voice was his best feature, warm like a blanket. “Why don’t you come upstairs and wait for me while I change? Or better yet, I think I have beer in the fridge.”
His apartment smelled of pizza. It looked messier than last time, as if way too many meals had been eaten while watching television on the corduroy couch. The number of files had multiplied on the dining-room table, and there was now also a laptop and a printer, with several extension cords plugged awkwardly into the wall.
Matt guided me to the couch in the living room and cleared a pizza box from the coffee table. He left with the box and returned with two beers and a take-out coffee cup filled with brown liquid. He put both a beer and the take-out cup in front of me. “I’m out of mugs. But it’s brandy, warmed in the microwave. If I were you, I’d drink that first.”
He might have ridiculed all my false bravery earlier that day on the ride from the state police barracks, but he didn’t. Instead, he dragged the corduroy La-Z-Boy chair close to the couch and sat opposite me, leaning forward, elbows on his knees while he studied me. I realized then that his sarcasm was a veneer.
The take-out coffee cup had been rinsed, but I still inhaled the leftover scent of coffee with my swallow of hard alcohol. The burning in my throat was comforting.
“All right. What exactly has you so freaked out?” he finally asked.
I tried to think of what I could say that wouldn’t say it all. I took another sip of the brandy and told him about the silver sedan. How Leonard had called me at the bureau and told me that he thought he was being followed.
“Why did he think someone was following him?” Matt asked.
I studied his face. There was nothing artificial in his expression, nothing brimming in his eyes. If Matt was searching for the same audiotape, he had no clue Leonard had gotten hold of it. I did not offer to make the connection. “He didn’t say,” I lied.
Suddenly, his expression changed. Leaning so far forward in his chair that our knees practically touched, he grabbed my shoulders and searched my eyes. “What do you know that you’re not telling me?”
“Nothing. I don’t know anything.”
“But you suspect something; what is it?”
I looked away.
“You think he was murdered, don’t you?”
“I’m… I’m not sure.”
He let go of my shoulders and leaned back in the chair, looking at me as if he needed perspective. “You went to his apartment to interview him for a story, a follow-up on yesterday’s rally? What happened to the counterfeit-scratch-ticket story? To all your theories about the Mazursky murder? You just put those aside?”
I ignored the tone and nodded. He folded his arms and stared at me, his eyes darting between thoughts. Then something else lit in his eyes. “You must have gone to Leonard’s right after I dropped you off at the lottery.”
I might have said I stopped at the newspaper first, but I didn’t think that would gain me anything. I took another sip of brandy and felt it in the pit of my stomach. Vaguely, I remembered that I h
adn’t eaten lunch.
“To work on a story about yesterday’s rally?” His sarcasm was getting a little thick, so I didn’t respond.
“And Leonard Marianni called you afterward to tell you he was being followed, but not why? But somehow you are now convinced he was murdered—and that the murderer was coming after you next?”
“I never said that.”
“If you told me what really happened, why you were going to meet Leonard and what he had to do with these dirtbags who are after you, maybe we could actually catch these people and put them behind bars. You know, before they got a chance to kill you.”
I was tired and hungry and sick of being scared. I thought about laying it all out: from the audiotape I couldn’t find to the note on the floor of Leonard’s ransacked apartment. But I remembered the conversation I’d had with Dorothy. The long and pointed silence. The part where she deliberately did not advise me to go to the police with my suspicions. I stalled by taking another sip of the brandy, swallowing. Then, I spotted the logo on the side of the take-out cup: the Mazursky Market. I thought suddenly of Drew. Wouldn’t he have made a copy of the tape before he gave it to Leonard?
“It was just all the wind howling outside,” I said, standing up. “And all your warnings. I let it get to me, but I’m okay now.”
He stood up, too. “No, you’re not okay. You’re incredibly stubborn and blindly ambitious.”
On an empty stomach, the brandy had done its job. I felt steadier, bolder. “I’m sorry I bothered you. I don’t know what I was thinking, really. I should probably be getting back to my apartment.” I was halfway to the door when I felt his arm on mine again, wheeling me around.
“Hallie, you’re going to get yourself killed. Please, tell me you’re smart enough to lay off this story—”
I didn’t answer.
He shook his head at me and let my arm go. For a minute, I thought he was going to let me out the door, but then he changed his mind again. This time, he put a hand on each of my shoulders with a firm grip.
“Listen, whatever instinct told you not to go back to your apartment tonight was the right one. You look pretty wobbly. If I let you go back to your apartment and something happened…” He stopped, left the possibility unsaid.
“I’ll be okay.”
“Maybe you will, but I won’t. I’ll be awake all night. Have you even had dinner yet?”
I shook my head.
“I can offer you leftover pizza. Just humor me. Stay here.”
Our eyes met. He deliberately held my gaze. A current flowed between us. I felt it in the grip he had on my shoulders, the warmth of his hands, and the flow of blood in my arms. For a brief moment, I hoped he would kiss me. I could forget about Leonard, about Barry, about the investigative team. The brandy in my stomach made me think it might happen. But Matt, always the professional, knew how to restrain himself. Instead of kissing me, he turned me in the direction of a short hallway.
“I’ll warm up the pizza and get you some clean sheets. You can sleep in the bedroom,” he said, sounding matter-of-fact. “It has a lock on the door. I fall asleep on the couch half the time anyway.”
When I awoke the next morning, there was a clean, folded towel, a toothbrush, and a newspaper at the end of my bed. Underneath the newspaper was a note:
“Orange juice and English muffins in fridge. Don’t go anywhere. Be back by eleven.”
I snorted at the Chronicle’s front-page story about Leonard’s death. It quoted the Barrington police about the bike accident as if all their theories were so logical: severe winds, crevice in the winding road, a squirrel that ran out into the bike’s path.
Suddenly, I felt anxious. It was already ten-thirty. I couldn’t waste time hanging around Matt’s apartment. I left him a note thanking him for letting me stay the night and promising to call him later. Then, I headed directly across the square to the Mazursky Market.
It was packed with people. A woman I’d never seen was working the cash register, so I headed through the throng to the back of the store, hoping Drew was behind the counter at the deli. A young man in his early twenties was making sandwiches. I asked him where Drew was and he told me that he’d had to go home, but would be back in a half hour to relieve him. I ordered coffee, drank it, ordered another, and wandered around the store. Drew didn’t come back. After the rush cleared out, I finally approached the woman at the register. She was heavyset and sweating profusely in a sleeveless, silky kimono as she reached on her tiptoes to get the man in front of me a pack of Marlboro Lights.
“You know when Drew’s going to come back?”
She took a moment to catch her breath, and then she threw her arms up as if to say, who could tell?
“He is coming back this afternoon, right?”
“If they don’t keep him all day.”
I gave her a puzzled look.
“That poor family, it never ends.”
“Is his mother okay?” I asked. “No emergency, I hope?”
“Violated is what she is. Husband dead. Murdered in broad daylight.” The clerk caught herself, then amended, “Well, not broad daylight, but right here, right in his own store. Shot to death. And what do the cops do? They search the victim’s house. Can you believe that? Last week they searched poor Nadine’s house, this morning she called here all upset. Now they’re searching her son’s apartment. Can you believe the nerve?”
I shook my head.
No, I couldn’t believe the nerve, the audacity of Matt Cavanaugh, who’d outsmarted me this morning, left me sleeping in his apartment as he searched for the tape I wanted so badly.
A part of me understood that Matt had a job to do, but the other part, the part that had felt so responsive to his concern the night before, was furious. I sure as hell wasn’t going to go back to his apartment, and I desperately needed a shower.
I opened the outer door of my building and stood listening for sounds on the staircase. In the bright light of a sunny November day, it was a little easier to be brave. It was a little easier to believe that if I stood there long enough, confirming the absence of shifting feet, of movement in the hall, that I could make it upstairs, lock the door behind me, and be safe.
My mailbox was overflowing with several days’ worth of mail. I couldn’t deal with all the bills—the mounting debt I’d never be able to repay—so I left it in the box. Upstairs, I checked the apartment thoroughly, triple-locked the door behind me, and headed for the shower. Under the hot steam, I allowed myself a few blank moments before I turned my thoughts to the Chronicle and whether I’d ever be able to convince the editors to believe there had actually been an audio-tape.
I stepped out of the shower and into a puddle of lukewarm water that had leaked onto the floor. Dorothy had gone out on a limb trusting me with my story about Barry’s compulsive gambling, and where had it gotten her? Without the tape to back up my claims, no one was ever going to believe that Leonard’s death was murder.
I stood in the bathroom after I’d dried off and listened through the door before I opened it. From the bathroom, I could see no signs of entry. I stepped far enough into the living room to get an angle on the door; it was still triple bolted. My running shoes were where I’d left them on top of the coffee table. I picked them up, ran to the bedroom, and locked the door behind me to change.
I put on a turtleneck and squeezed into blue jeans in record time, but by the time I’d laced up the running shoes, I began to relax a little. I made a quick bowl of tomato soup and grilled cheese and actually finished it. My mother called and I forced myself to sound calm, collected, as if this was just another Saturday afternoon, listening patiently to the update of my cousin Susan’s wedding plans. It was almost three o’clock when Matt called. I let the machine pick it up. He apologized for getting “delayed at the office,” and not calling sooner. “Don’t go to work before I get a chance to talk to you,” he said. “I need to talk to you.”
To gloat? To keep tabs on me to make sure I couldn’
t get anything about his search in tomorrow’s paper? I grabbed my yellow running jacket from the closet and decided I should get out of the apartment before Matt decided to make a personal visit.
Downstairs, as I was headed out of the hallway, my gaze caught the mailbox again. It was so completely crammed with uncollected mail, I wondered if the postman might refuse further delivery.
I stopped, wrestled with the envelopes, twisting the paper to extricate it from the box. As I expected, they were all bills, four from credit card companies, one from the phone company with the red-warning delinquency band across the top, and a handwritten envelope that no doubt had been left by Hal the landlord.
If only I’d actually won $10,000, all these problems would be gone. If only the big winner of my life hadn’t been a freaking counterfeit. I didn’t want to think about my luck or my finances, so I stuffed the mail under my arm and headed outside to my car.
As I threw the pile onto the passenger seat, it scattered, several envelopes falling to the floor to reveal the larger, thicker, hand-addressed envelope on the bottom. Familiar handwriting. Not my landlord’s.
I locked the car doors and ripped open the envelope.
Hallie,
Nail him to the wall Page one. Call me and tell me you forgive me. ASAP.
Leonard
Inside, wrapped in a single sheath of bubble packing, was a tiny microcassette.
CHAPTER
21
I CHECKED TO make sure my microcassette recorder was inside my knapsack, and then quickly pulled out of the parking space before Matt could look across Elmgrove and spot me inside my car.
I fumbled with the tape at the first red light, twice popping it into the recorder backward before settling it into the machine. And then suddenly, Barry’s voice, eerily alive, filled the car, as if he were in the passenger seat beside me. “Jesus, this is a lot of inventory.”
I felt the shock of his voice. My lungs got tight trying to draw air and my eyes began to get blurry. The road dissolved. A horn behind me honked and I snapped off the machine, letting it fall off my lap and onto the seat. I’d get killed if I tried to listen to this while driving.