Social Death: A Clyde Shaw Mystery

by Tatiana Boncompagni

  I shook my sugar packets together loudly. She got the picture and skulked off. “Am I really supposed to buy that your name change is all because of a mixup at the uniform shop?” I asked, pouring a generous amount of cream in my coffee.

  He shrugged. “Yeah.”

  “Then why didn’t you correct me before I put you on TV.”

  “Seemed like you were in a hurry.”

  It was true I had been in a rush to get him on camera. “So why not correct me later, when we talked on the street?”

  “I didn’t want to embarrass you.”

  “I wouldn’t have been embarrassed.”

  He scratched the back of his neck. His sleeves, this time, revealed more of the green tattoo. “Are you going to use that footage from last night?”

  “I have to. Unless you agree to sit down for us.”

  “Not gonna happen.”

  “You did it Sunday morning.”

  He shrugged again. “That was a mistake.”

  “Well, there’s no camera on you now, and all this is off the record.” I was giving him the highest amount of protection possible, but he had to give me something in return. “I need to know everything you know. Everything. Tell me something I don’t already know, Andrey, and I promise, I’ll make it up to you. Believe me when I tell you I can be a very powerful ally.”

  “Everyone’s got to answer to somebody.” He stared at the paper napkin he was twisting in his hands. “Who’s your boss?”

  It was a strange question, but sometimes sources liked to be coddled and indulged. One source of mine would only meet in the housewares section of a department store; another source required a lobster salad and porterhouse to get him talking. Andrey apparently needed to know whom my boss was before he would give me what I wanted. “Georgia Jacobs is my immediate boss,” I told him. “But I have others, including the bureau chief and the network president. Anything that goes to air, especially on a story as high profile as this one, has to be approved by one of those three people, plus a slew of lawyers from our legal team.”

  Our food arrived. Andrey had ordered pancakes and bacon. The waitress, who had applied a fresh and very unnecessary coat of lip-gloss in the interim, lingered once again over our table. “Let me know if you want more maple syrup, or anything else,” she said, flirting with all the subtlety of a lap dancer.

  “I think she likes you,” I said after she left.

  Andrey cut into his pancakes and ate without further comment, his head down and focused on his food. His manner reminded me of a little boy sitting at his mother’s table. All that was missing were the flannel pajamas. I ate a few bites of my eggs and bacon, my appetite still not what it used to be, and pushed my plate to the center of the table to make way for my spiral notebook. Andrey finished his food, took a slug of coffee, and planted his elbows on the table. “She was a referral,” he said finally.

  I picked up my pen. “I assume we’re talking about Rachel Rockwell?”

  “Rachel has a great body, but she wanted to be more toned. She came to me in the spring, about two years ago. Her second child was about a year old. We started working out in the gym, but then we worked out a deal where I would come to her house a couple days a week. It was easier for her, and I didn’t have to give half my fee to the club. I trained Rachel Mondays and Fridays at the club, Wednesdays and Saturdays at her home. Her husband built a huge gym in their basement, so we had everything we could ever need.”

  “She’s in good physical shape?”

  “That woman is 115 pounds of pure muscle.”

  I had to rethink my previous assumption that Rachel Rockwell might not be strong enough to kill Olivia on her own.

  Andrey moved his plate to the side. “We were friends at first. That’s how it started. After we trained together, she’d invite me to stay for coffee or breakfast and we’d talk. Then one day one thing led to another.’”

  “How long did it go on like that?”

  “A year,” he said.

  “And then what happened?”

  “Her husband found out and had me fired. The club had a rule—not against sleeping with your clients, because they’d have no trainers left—but against working with clients on the side.” He paused, threw his napkin on the table. “Then she dumped me.”

  “Rachel broke up with you?”

  “She said she had to put the kids first. Michael had served her with papers. Her lawyer said it wouldn’t look good if she was shacking up with me.”

  “Were you in love with her?”

  “At the time, yeah. I guess.”

  “But that was the end of it?”

  Andrey looked down into his coffee cup, his shoulders sagging beneath his flannel shirt. “It’s what she wanted.”

  His sudden vulnerability reignited my attraction to him, but I couldn’t afford to get distracted. Not now when I was finally getting somewhere. “Tell me how you got the job at the Haverford,” I said.

  “After I got fired from the club, I trained a few clients at their homes but mostly I was sitting on my couch for three months pissing away my savings. Rachel knew I was hard up for cash. She offered to try and help me find something.”

  “As a building worker?”

  He nodded once. “I’d worked as a doorman before. Right out of high school I was a porter at a building downtown. I became a trainer because I wanted to leave that shit behind. The life sucks, but the money ain’t bad.”

  “How did that work? Aren’t there unions involved?”

  “I was part of the union already. All Rachel had to do was get me on the interview list.”

  Our check arrived. It was time to stop circling around the question. “When did you realize that Olivia and Rachel were sleeping together?”

  He reached out for the check, pulled out his wallet. “I’ve got to go.”

  “No you don’t.”

  Andrey climbed out of the booth.

  I reached for his forearm. It felt warm and strong, and for the briefest of moments I let myself imagine what his body looked like beneath his plaid shirt and worn jeans. “Put your money away and sit back down.”

  He ignored me, throwing a ten and a twenty on the table.

  I stood up and faced him square. “Then you give me no choice. I’m reporting that you and Rachel had an affair,” I said. “People are going to assume you are still carrying a torch for Rachel and that you killed Olivia out of jealousy. Do you know where Rachel is, Andrey?”

  He leaned forward, his handsome face mere inches from mine. “I’m not a saint, Clyde. But I didn’t kill your friend and I have no idea where Rachel is.”

  He grabbed his leather jacket and left.

  I was pissed as hell, cursing myself for being attracted to him, cursing myself for not getting closer to the truth. I grabbed my bag and trench coat and filed out onto the street. It was a quarter to eight, the sky still cloaked in gray. The sidewalks were crowded with school kids in backpacks and uniforms, the streets with rush-hour traffic. I inhaled the cool autumn air and tried to tell myself that I was making progress, even though it felt like I was spinning my wheels. I had Rockwell in my sights, Andrey on the run. One of them was bound to slip up and tell me something useful.

  I hailed a cab and directed it to the FirstNews building. As we inched down Lex, I looked out the window and bit down hard on my bottom lip to keep from crying. I’d made a bargain with myself: I could cry as much as I wanted in the privacy of my own home, but come daylight, the pain had to go back in the box. I had a job to do and a murderer to catch, and doing anything less than that would be failing Olivia. Get it together, Clyde, I hissed at myself, my hands balled in my lap.

  “Get it together.” Olivia’s voice was in my head as I recalled a memory I’d pushed out of my consciousness for good reason. It was four years after I’d started at FirstNews. I was thirty. I had my act together at work—Georgia had just promoted me from assistant to segment producer—but after-hours I was still drinking too much, too often, and wit
h men who were less than honorable. Olivia, meanwhile, had taken over her father’s foundation, and recently bestowed a grant to a group of American plastic and reconstructive surgeons to travel to Guatemala to help children suffering from various disfigurements. She invited me to come down on the charter with them and assist the team.

  Believe me, I tried to weasel out of it. I had two weeks of vacation, one of which was spent upstate with my father at Christmas. The other I’d reserved for a hedonistic retreat by myself to someplace warm, like Jamaica. I’d always wanted to go there.

  Olivia kept pestering me, though. Every day for a week she emailed me pictures of the kids and their parents, with little blurbs about each. “We’ll be changing these people’s lives forever,” she wrote in the last email. “Don’t you want to help?” I wrote back that I what I really wanted to do was drink a piña colada on a white sand beach. Five minutes later, she called. “Seeing such a profound sense of joy on a mother’s face. It’s like a high, Clyde, and no drug can come near it.”

  “You’re clearly taking the wrong drugs,” I told her.

  But I ended up going.

  On the first morning of our trip, Olivia took me to the clinic where the surgeries were going to be performed. I held Magdalena, a baby with a cleft palate who cooed into my ear when I held her against my chest, and played checkers with Avril, a five-year old with a tumor the size of grapefruit growing out of her face. I met their parents, saw the hope in their eyes, and finally understood why Olivia had wanted me there. In the van home that night, she turned to me and said, “I knew you’d get it.”

  “Yeah,” I’d merely replied, because by then I’d already made up my mind about what I was going to do next. Seeing those mothers who would do anything for their children had reminded me of my own mother. I’d never know her or understand how she could do what she did.

  That night, after Olivia went to bed, I stole off to the bar, got wasted on rum and cokes with one of the doctors—the very married, fifty-year-old plastics man from Iowa City. Olivia found me next to him the next morning, naked, condom wrappers and empty minibar bottles strewn about my room. She let him leave before she started slamming doors and banging into anything that made noise. I clutched my ears in pain. “Stop, OK. Just stop.”

  She stood panting in the middle of the room, glowering down at me. “You’re thirty years old, and life—real life—is passing you by. When are you going to grow up?”

  “I fucked up, Olivia. What else can I say besides I’m sorry?”

  “Don’t apologize to me. I don’t want apologies and I don’t want excuses. This was for your benefit, Clyde. I did this for you.”

  I put my head back down on the bed. It hurt too much to be held upright. “I don’t need your help.”

  “Oh really? Who got you your job? Who co-signed for your apartment?”

  I lifted myself back up. “Don’t be a bitch.”

  Olivia walked two steps to the end of my bed, her nostrils flaring, but when she spoke again the thunder was gone, and in its place, disappointment. “Don’t you want to get married, start a family?

  “You really think I should get married? Have a kid? Could you imagine me with a kid?” Of course I wanted to have a normal life, to come home to a handsome, adoring husband and a kid or two every night instead of my empty apartment and a box of takeout. But I knew myself well enough to know I’d be a terrible wife and an even worse mother. Just the idea made me nervous, made me itch for my next drink. I’d come to terms with what was in the realm of possibility and what wasn’t. Why’d she have to stir that shit up in me? Show me a bunch of saintly mothers loving their poor, disfigured children.

  I peered up at her, my voice like ice. “Come on, Olivia. Have a family? We both know it’s not going to happen—for either of us.” By then Olivia had come out to me but none of her other friends or family members, and my comment was designed to make her feel as bad as I did.

  She crossed her arms. “No we don’t. I have every intention of having kids one day.”

  “How’s that going to work? You going to marry a man and stay in the closet forever? That sounds like a great life.”

  “Now who’s the bitch?”

  “You pretend to be so perfect, so much better than me, but you’re living a lie, Olivia. Your whole goddamn life is a lie. What are you so afraid of? Charles disowning you? Losing the foundation? You’re a coward. I may be a drunk and a slut, but at least I don’t pretend to be someone I’m not.”

  She left after that, slamming the door on her way out. I ordered some hair of the dog, packed my bags, and hailed a taxi for the Guatemala City airport. I didn’t leave a note.

  Olivia wouldn’t talk to me for almost a year after that, and when we did finally begin seeing each other again, our friendship was never quite the same. After Guatemala, Olivia rarely confided in me about her love life. If I tried asking questions, she made it clear she didn’t want me prying. Rachel was just one of a string of girlfriends about whom I’d known embarrassing little. Yet as upsetting as it was to be frozen out of such an important part of my best friend’s life, I had no choice other than to respect Olivia’s boundaries. It was only now, after reading the text on my phone, that I realized she might have been keeping other—potentially bigger—secrets from me.

  Five blocks from the office, my cab wasn’t moving. I killed time checking my email and found at the top of my inbox a message from my dad asking me to come up for the weekend. I wrote him back that as much as I wanted to, I doubted I’d be able to get away. He was worried about me, but I wasn’t going to solve Olivia’s murder moping around my father’s house. I needed to be here, in the city. “Sorry, Dad,” I tapped out with my thumbs. “I’ll come up as soon as things get more settled at work.”

  When I clicked back to my inbox, there was a new email from Georgia. “Deep shit,” read the subject line, and in the body of the message: “You’re in it, girl. Call me as soon as you get this.”

  I dialed her cell. No answer. So I dialed Alex. Also no answer.

  This wasn’t good.

  I had the cab pull over and ran the rest of the way to the bureau.

  Georgia was waiting at my desk. I was surprised to see her. “What happened?” I asked, panting.

  She looked grim. “Let’s go. Everyone’s waiting.”

  “For me?” I dumped my bag under my desk. “Where are we going? What happened?”

  “Diskin’s office. GSBC landed an interview with Olivia’s housekeeper.”

  “Ilsa Chavez?” I’d had the woman’s name, but never followed up with Sabine to see if she’d tracked down her number. “What did she have to say?”

  “She found the body.”

  “I know that. So what?”

  Georgia pressed the elevator button. “It’s a fucking barn burner, Clyde. GSBC is way out in front now. You’ll have to see for yourself.”

  In network news, you’re only as good as your last scoop, especially when it came stories like these. It’s not enough to land one big interview, you have to land them all. Get out in front and stay there. Dominate the competition. This is what we do, and anything less will earn you a pink slip and one-way ticket to Des Moines. “How pissed is Diskin?” I asked.

  “On a scale of one to ten, he’s an eleven.”

  Alex was already in Diskin’s office when we got there. So was Hiro Itzushi, our chief legal counsel. I wasn’t quite clear why he was there other than that he’d been personally vetting everything we reported on Olivia’s murder and was, for better or worse, a member of the team covering her case.

  “Glad you could fit us into your schedule,” Diskin said to me as I took my seat facing the wall of monitors. He hit the play button on his remote, and Harlich’s perfectly symmetrical face filled the screen. As the camera panned back, I could see that she was in one of GSBC’s studios. Sitting across from her was a shapely Latina dressed in a black-and-white striped blouse and black knee-length skirt.

  “I’m here with the woman
who discovered the body of slain heiress Olivia Kravis. Her name is Ilsa Jimenez Chavez,” Penny said. “She’s here to tell us about what she saw.”

  The interview started out innocuously enough with Ilsa explaining in heavily accented and broken English why she’d gone to Olivia’s apartment on a Sunday morning. Apparently, she’d missed a day of work because of a family emergency, and was making up for lost hours. Then Penny said, “I know it must be hard for you, but can you tell us exactly what you saw on Sunday morning, Ms. Chavez?”

  Ilsa described the murder scene in detail, explaining how she dropped her coffee when she discovered Olivia’s body and dialed the police. Penny squinted her eyes Couric-style. “How long had you worked for Ms. Kravis?”

  “Nine year.”

  I glanced over at Georgia. I didn’t understand what all the fuss was about.

  “Here it comes,” she mouthed at me.

  Penny uncrossed her mile-long legs and leaned forward. “What was Olivia Kravis like?”

  “She was good boss. She work hard. I no see her that much.”

  “Was she in a relationship?”

  “I no think so. But one day I come in, regular time and she still home. I usually start by cleaning the sheets on the bed. But the bedroom door is locked. I wait, clean the kitchen. Finally Miss Kravis, she come out. And there was someone else with her. A woman. And she say, Ilsa, ‘I like you to meet my girlfriend.’”

  Deep down, I knew this would happen.

  Olivia was a lesbian, and now everyone knew.

  Georgia snapped her fingers, directing my attention to the television monitor and the fact that GSBC—and God help me, Penny Ho-stick—had scooped us yet again. I had a lump the size of Alex’s ego in my throat. But it wasn’t over. Ilsa Jimenez Chavez had another bombshell to drop.

  “What was the name of the woman who came out of the bedroom?” Penny asked.

  “Rachel.”

  “Rachel Rockwell?”

  The housekeeper nodded. “Yes.”

  Diskin stopped the tape. “Shaw, goddamn it, we should have had this.”

  I crossed my arms. “You’re telling me you would have let me report that our right-wing founder’s daughter was a lesbian? Hiro, back me up. There’s no way this would have made it to air.”