by Zelda Reed
“I’m sorry ma’am,” McManus says. “But that’s not how this works.”
“I’m not talking about Chris,” she says, standing. “Neal murdered Julian Wheeler and he deserved to be punished for it.”
“I didn’t do anything you crazy bitch,” Neal says.
I break away from Gilda’s hold and rush to his side. I tell Officer McManus, “He’s telling the truth.”
“She’s in on it too,” Ashleigh says. “Which isn’t a surprise considering she’s always hated Julian but now she gets all his money. How convenient.”
Officer McManus glances between the two of us, Neal with his tight jaw, staring Ashleigh down, me with my wide, pleading eyes. Something inside of her shifts.
“You have the right to remain silent,” she says, pulling Neal’s arms behind his back.
“What are you doing?” I say.
Officer McManus doesn’t look at me as she slides the handcuffs around Neal’s wrist. He’s still fuming with anger, eyes locked on Chris, slowly pulling himself to his feet.
“I should fucking kill you,” Neal says to him.
Ashleigh spits out a laugh. “Go ahead,” she says. “Dig yourself into an even bigger hole.”
Officer McManus ushers Neal away from the scene and towards her squad car. I run after them, slowing when I’m at Neal’s side.
“He didn’t do it,” I say. “I would’ve told you if he did.”
“It’s nothing personal,” McManus says. “But now the case has been reopened.”
She opens the back car door and pushes Neal in. He glances at me out the window and passes me a smile, not an inch of fear in his face.
“I’m going to get you out,” I say.
Neal doesn’t respond.
The shooting’s ceased but the chaos remains. McManus steps inside her car and drives away, pushing her vehicle through the crowd. I watch them go, the photographers with their cameras, capturing Neal being hauled away.
Across the street there’s a faint movement on the roof. Someone’s standing there.
It’s Alanis, her long hair blowing in the wind and a sniper rifle in her left hand.
Nine
Martin won’t allow me to stay in the city. He sends me home with Gilda, promising to have Neal back by the evening.
A black car drives us, Gilda’s back pin-straight as she stares out her window, the city moving around us. She clutches her purse in her lap and says nothing until we’re stepping through the front door.
“You always think you’re over it,” she says, kicking off her shoes in the foyer.
“Over what?”
“It happened in slow motion for me. I was watching the three of you on stage and I saw it out of the corner of my eye. The bullet. At first I didn’t know what it was, it was moving so slowly, then I felt something burst in my chest. A realization that someone was about to die and I was going to witness it. I closed my eyes but all I could see was my son’s face.”
She looks at me.
“I was the one who found him, you know. At a party I noticed he’d been gone for a while so I went out back to check on him and found him bleeding out on the grass. After years of therapy you think the image’s been wiped from your mind but.”
Gilda pulls her lips in her mouth. A small laugh bubbles inside of her.
“Listen to me,” she says, shaking her head. “You don’t want to hear any of this.”
“That’s not true.”
Gilda smiles. “It may seem difficult right now, it always is in the beginning, but you’re going to get through this because you have to. You love him too much to give up on him.”
I can feel a resistance brewing inside me. The eighth grade answer, hot on my tongue. I don’t love him. But I can no longer deny it.
“You’re right,” I say. “I love him. So what do I do now?”
Gilda starts towards the kitchen. “We are going to have a drink while we wait for Martin to apply his magic.”
______
Gilda and I wait in the living room for hours; Gilda flipping through a novel, me sucking down glasses of wine between sticking my thumbnail between my teeth.
Officer McManus said Neal’s arrest wasn’t personal but she was lying. I saw the glimmer of anger in her eyes, the way she itched to drag Neal into an interrogation room and rip him to shreds, all because of Ashleigh’s lie.
I could rip out her throat if given the chance, for being so willfully blind. It’s true, my father was murdered, but how can she not see it was by the hands she lets touch her every night.
The front door opens and I shoot to my feet.
Gilda smiles. “Don’t go running yet. Let them come to us.”
I’m antsy, waiting for them, my bottom lip pulled between my teeth as I wring my hands in front of my lap. A pair of footsteps echo through the home and my stomach tightens.
Until this moment I didn’t consider the possibility that Martin could fail. That Chris and Ashleigh could conjure up enough false evidence to have Neal thrown in a holding cell until he was shipped for booking.
My stomach grows in my throat as Martin rounds the corner, a relieved smile tugging at his mouth. Neal follows behind him, his tie loose around his neck. Gilda patiently grows to her feet but I can’t contain myself.
I rush across the room and throw my arms around Neal’s neck. He catches me, both hands against my back as he buries his nose in my hair. It’s as if we haven’t seen each other in months.
Martin crosses the room slowly, taking Gilda into his arms.
There’s something rancid about the way Neal smells, a thicker scent than the one I picked up in my holding cell, but I don’t care.
I step back and Neal looks down at me with an exhausted smile. I press my mouth to his and he pulls me a little closer. He tastes of nothing, no soda, no beer, no food. Has he had anything to eat since breakfast?
“They couldn’t hold him,” Martin says to Gilda. “Lack of evidence.”
I push a strand of hair behind his ear, an overwhelming sense of joy building in my stomach. He’s back with me, in my arms.
“I doubt they’re going to let this die,” Gilda says.
“They’re not,” Neal says. “They’re sending a team to my house to look for evidence.”
“They’re not going to find anything are they?” Gilda says.
“Of course not,” Martin says. “Neal didn’t do it.”
Neal throws an arm around my waist and I capture his free hand with my own. Never have I been so affectionate with another person, not even with Justin who I cooed over in public.
My fingers run across his knuckles, swollen from his fight with Chris. Gilda was right, Chris deserved every second.
“Shit,” I say. All eyes turn towards me. I look up at Neal. “They might find something.”
His eyebrows furrow. “What do you mean?”
“When Alanis and I broke into your place, I found a bottle of mercury pills in your drawer.”
Gilda stands a little straighter. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“My father died from mercury poisoning,” I say. “His ‘doctor’ was prescribing them under the guise of medication.”
Neal releases me. “Louis,” he says.
I nod.
Martin moves towards the window where a landline’s set up. “I’ll have someone ride over there and pick it up. Is it just one bottle?”
“There’s no point,” Neal says. He moves towards the threshold of the room. “That officer said she was going to send out a car hours ago. They’ve probably found it.”
I step towards him. “It doesn’t hurt to try.”
Martin presses the phone to his ear. “She’s right.”
Neal throws up his hands and disappears around the corner, his feet slogging towards the staircase.
I want to go after him but Gilda tells me to, “Come sit down, dear. He needs some time.”
______
The men Martin sends out find nothing in Ne
al’s bedroom. I tell him this around midnight as Neal lays on the floor, his hands limp against his stomach, his eyes fixed to the ceiling.
He doesn’t react.
“Did you hear me?” I say.
“Of course I fucking heard you,” he snaps.
A combative response flares inside of me. Don’t fucking talk to me like that, but I bury it for both our sakes. I have no idea what Neal must be going through. I don’t want to make it all about me.
After a long moment of silence Neal says, “I was going to kill him.”
I’m sitting on the edge of the bed, my feet inches away from Neal’s head.
He looks at me. “I was going to kill him. If that cop didn’t pull me off, I was going to kill Chris.”
I glance down at his bruised knuckles, flared a violent red. “I would’ve wanted to kill him too.”
Neal pushes himself to his elbows. “You aren’t listening to me. I didn’t want to kill him, I wasn’t thinking about killing him, you witnessed me in the middle of the act.”
I slide from the mattress and crawl over to him.
“I know and I don’t blame you.”
“I’ve never been that angry in my life,” he says. “I was going to kill Chris and then…That bitch, Ashleigh, getting me arrested…”
I lean down and press my mouth to his. I know I’m shutting him up but I don’t want to hear about Ashleigh. The mere sound of her name places something distasteful on my tongue.
We kiss until Neal’s mouth goes slack and I roll over on my back, laying on the floor beside him.
“They’re going to arrest me,” he says.
“Not if I have anything to say about it.”
Ten
I’m up before Neal, who shies away from me in his sleep, even after I stick my hands down his pants and wrap my fingers around his cock.
He’s not in the mood. He just wants to sleep and forget.
Gilda’s making breakfast in the kitchen, powdered crepes filled with fresh fruit and whipped cream. She makes me a plate with a side of bacon and slides her tablet across the counter.
I’m not surprised to see Anthony Serafin’s smug face in black and white, his photo shoved next to an article on Lee Geon’s death. A distasteful photo heads the article, Lee lying lifeless on the stage, a blur of chaos erupting in front of him.
The article’s hefty on speculation. Who Anthony thinks killed Lee, what Anthony thinks will happen next.
The last paragraph surrounds Neal. There’s a photo of him, teeth bared as his fist hovers over Chris’s head, Neal straddling him with his other hand bunched in his shirt. Gilda and I are pictured in the background, a look of horror on my face, a look of complacency on hers.
Ashleigh’s pictured separately, mascara running down her cheeks as she faces the camera head-on. It’s almost a beauty shot, her lips pursed perfectly, her hair blowing in the light wind. If it wasn’t for the red rings around her eyes her tears would’ve looked staged.
The subheading reads: “A Careful Murder” and follows Anthony’s interview with Ashleigh, hours after we left. He mentions her “blood-shot eyes, brilliantly blue beneath the tears” and how “her words drip with sympathy”. He says, “It’s hard not to feel Monroe’s warmth as she talks about her late boyfriend, Julian Wheeler. It’s undeniable. She loved him.”
Ashleigh spends a good paragraph slandering Neal, supplying anecdotes I know in my gut to be false.
“Once,” she says, “we were riding back to Julian’s place in a cab. He was drunk so like, I’m sure he doesn’t remember but he kept telling me how much he wanted to take over Julian’s business. That he didn’t know what he was doing and he could do a better job. If he ever got the chance to, you know, take it from him, he would. What better way to grab hold of someone’s business if they’re dead?”
I push away the tablet. I can barely stomach my breakfast, imagining the look on Anthony’s face as he gleefully took notes.
“Now the world’s going to think Neal’s a murderer,” I say.
“Not the whole world,” Gilda says. “And even if they do think he murdered your father and Lee, the world thought they killed someone to get where they were too.”
Gilda knocks back a glass of wine. The first one of the morning.
“Did my father kill anyone to get to where he was?”
Gilda stares at me for a moment, her mouth hovering over her glass. “I don’t know. But I think…Your father had it in him.”
______
An hour later Neal’s still buried beneath the covers of our temporary bed, sinking beneath the weight of depression. He’s waiting for the cops and so am I. But I grow sick of waiting around and jumping at every sound, glancing towards the window whenever a car rolls in the distance.
“I’m coming with you,” I say to Martin, slipping on my shoes.
“I’m going to work,” he says. “Regardless of all that’s happening, the world and our business still turns.”
“I know, but I need a ride to the city. I have some things to take care of.”
Martin raises an eyebrow but says nothing.
The drive to the city is mostly silent. Martin fills it with his schedule but I’m not listening.
He’s trying to keep my mind off Neal, the police, Chris, Ashleigh, and my father. It’s helping, a little bit, but my mind is a whirl of events, a timeline smashed into an hour, playing over and over in my head.
Martin drops me off at the front of his office building. “No sense in you coming to the garage.” He watches me as I step out and straighten my blouse. “Caitlin,” he says. “I don’t want to know what it is you’re about to do but please, be careful. I may be able to pull strings but there are limits.”
A small smile tugs at my mouth. “I won’t do anything stupid.”
Martin nods. “Good.”
I walk to my father’s condo, the summer air surrounding me like a scarf. I ask the man at the front desk for the spare key and head up the elevator, a wealth of anger building in my stomach. I’m riling myself up, imagining Chris lounging on my father’s couch with his shoes pressing into the cushion. Or Ashleigh eating chips and spilling them all over the expensive rug.
I’m not quite ready to fight but I’m ready to scream when I open the front door.
Ashleigh’s standing in the living room as if she’s been waiting for me, her arms crossed at her chest, her eyes fixed on my father’s urn.
“Is Chris here?” I say, slamming the door behind me.
“No,” she says. “I heard they released Neal last night.”
“They didn’t have any evidence to hold him,” I say, keeping the news about the pills to myself.
“They will,” she says. “They’re going to find something and when they do –”
“Ashleigh –”
“—when they do you’re going to look so fucking stupid.” She steps towards me, her voice growing louder. “How could you? You’re his daughter. His only kid and you’re off fucking his murderer like –”
“You’re fucking his murderer!” I shout. “Chris is behind all of this.”
Ashleigh spits out a laugh. “He told me you would say something like that.”
“Yeah, to cover his own ass.”
She shakes her head. “Because you’re too fucking blind, you can’t see the truth even as I wave it in your face.” She takes a step back. “But maybe you don’t care about the truth. You never liked your father anyway.”
“You don’t know shit about me.”
A tight smile spreads across her mouth. “I know you haven’t cried about your father being dead. I bet if you saw Neal plunging a knife in his chest you probably would’ve stood by and cheered.”
The rage in my stomach explodes. If I were Neal I would’ve lunged forward and wrapped my hands around her neck, but Ashleigh isn’t the worth the assault charge.
“You’re wrong,” I say. “And you’re compensating because you thought my father loved you enough to leave you more tha
n a paid tuition.”
Ashleigh’s face closes down. I’ve hit a nerve.
“You thought he was going to leave you this condo, or a fraction of his company, or at least a little money so you could buy a place of your own but he helped you as much as he helped his ex-wives. You’re starting to realize you meant as much to him as they did and it’s pissing you off.”
Ashleigh’s jaw tightens. She’s boiling, her skin red from her hairline to her toes. “Shut up,” she says, fists clenched at her sides.
“No. Because if you’ve forgotten, this is my house. That’s my couch, you’re standing on my rug, and last night you were sleeping in my room.”
“It’s our room,” she says, voice trembling.
“No, Ashleigh, it’s not and it never has been.”
A light film of tears covers her eyes.
I hold out my hand. “I need your keys back.”
Her bottom lip trembles. “Why?”
“You can’t stay here anymore.”
Two tears roll down her cheeks. “Where am I supposed to go?”
“Stay with Chris, I don’t know. But you aren’t allowed in my house anymore.”
Ashleigh looks away from me as more tears fall down her face. She walks towards the shelf where my father’s urn sits towards the edge. She pulls it into her arms.
“What are you doing?” I say.
She looks at me, clutching the urn to her chest. “You said I could have this.”
My cruel streak leads me across the room. I’m expecting a fight but Ashleigh doesn’t flinch as I snatch my father’s urn from her. We’re close, our fingers brushing against one another, our toes pressed together.
“My father believed in Neal. If somehow those mercury pills didn’t kill him and he was lying in a hospital bed, he would know Neal didn’t put him there. He loved him like a son. If you can’t see that, you don’t deserve this.”
Ashleigh’s mouth drops open, her eyes bore into mine. A wealth of tears build up at the corner of her eyes.
“You’re a bitch,” she says. “And you’re going to be very miserable with him.”
“Right back at you.”