Social Death: A Clyde Shaw Mystery

by Tatiana Boncompagni

  Delphine regarded my sobbing, almost naked body, and rolled her eyes. “Get over it.”

  “I promise I won’t tell anyone,” I bleated, sinking further down into the tub. “Please. Please, please. Let me live.”

  She placed the gun on the sink and pulled my right arm out of the water, holding the razor steady for a moment before plunging it deep into my flesh. I felt a sharp sting and watched as a red stream poured into the bath.

  “One more,” she said in a soothing voice, the razor poised to slice into me again.

  The mist rose from the bath in the shape of my mother’s face. She was frowning as she shook her head slowly. No Cornelia. Not like this. Fight back.

  I grabbed the first thing I saw, a glass bottle of bath oil perched on the side of the tub. Delphine never saw the blow coming. It caught her just above the ear, one blow, hard enough to make her lose her balance and fall to the side. I jumped out of the bathtub, slipping and careening forward as I dashed through Alex’s living room and slid open the door to his balcony with a bang. Outside the rain beat cold against my hot skin. I lunged for the railing and swung a leg over.

  Delphine appeared on the balcony a moment later. “You’ll die either way,” she roared through the storm.

  If you’re watching, Mom, help me.

  I swung my other leg around. Delphine shoved me in the chest with all her might. I lost my footing and was dangling, clothed only in my underwear, the rain pummeling me as I clung for life eleven stories up. I had no voice to yell for help.

  Delphine looked down at me. “This is even more perfect,” she whispered.

  My hands burned as I closed my eyes again and pictured my mother’s face. She bared her small white teeth in the smile I’d remember always.

  It’s OK, Bumblebee.

  You can let go now.

  The gunshots startled me so much I almost did let go.

  But then I heard voices, shouts and footsteps. Delphine fell to the ground, her hazel eyes blinking blankly at me through the railing. Blood seeped onto the balcony floor. My muscles ached. I felt my grip slipping.

  Two hands reached down and grabbed my wrists. “I’ve got you. Don’t let go. I’ve got you.” I looked up. It was Alex. Restivo appeared behind him on the balcony, assessing the situation. He called out to the people behind him. “One floor below. She’s hanging.”

  Alex struggled to hold his grip. My arms were wet. I was slipping. “It’s OK,” I may have only said to myself, while below I heard the glass door to the tenth-floor balcony crash open. Arms—I don’t know how many—encircled my torso, pulling me over the railing to safety, to a cold stone floor. I made a cocoon of my own body, hugging my legs, shivering in the freezing rain. Someone wrapped a towel around me and carried me inside. Hands tied a tourniquet around my bleeding arm. A pair of paramedics arrived and began ministering, checking my body temperature, my heart rate, my pupils. A flashlight shined in my eye. Their voices buzzed in my ear. Did you take any medication? Do you know what you took? I tried to speak but no words came out.

  Two EMTs lifted my body onto the gurney. “We need to pump her stomach now,” one said to the other.

  “Clyde, thank God.” Alex was at my side. He gripped my good hand and kissed my forehead and then my lips. His were soft and warm.

  Alex looked up at the EMTs. The paramedics hoisted up the sides of my gurney.

  I tried again to thank him.

  He shushed me, and kissed me again. “Later.”

  I laid my head back on the pillow as the paramedics rolled me away.

  Friday

  I woke up in the hospital.

  This time I got my own room equipped with a gigantic television and a nice view over the East River. For the first twenty-four hours, I had round-the-clock visitors. First Alex, then Georgia and Panda. Then my father, who had gotten in his pickup truck the second Georgia tracked him down and then broken just about every traffic law along the Taconic State Parkway. Ehlers and Restivo came next. Naomi Zell sent balloons. Frank Uffizo offered his services “at a substantially reduced rate” while Prentice Maldone sent flowers, and a note that read, “Please don’t make a habit of this,” and Orchid Cellmark, the lab in New Jersey, sent a DNA kit, accompanied by a very nice letter asking if I would care to submit my DNA to confirm that Charles Kravis was indeed my father. I swabbed my cheek and repackaged the kit according to the enclosed directions. After all that had happened, I wanted incontrovertible proof.

  I wanted it, but I didn’t need it. I knew in my heart I was Charles Kravis’s daughter and Olivia’s half-sister. It made sense of so much, not only Olivia’s text, but the feeling I’ve had my whole life that something wasn’t quite right. This was why my mother insisted I carry her last name and not my father’s, why no one had ever wanted to talk about my conception and the date of my parents’ wedding. Panda had been wrong. Sometimes all the pieces of a puzzle did fit together.

  But the puzzle wasn’t complete yet. After two days in the hospital, I changed out of my gown and back into my clothes, signed myself out against doctor’s orders and left a note for my dad, who was staying in a nearby hotel and was out buying papers and coffee. Then I caught a cab cross-town to Lennox Hill.

  I found the hospice-care wing. The nurse at the reception desk took one look at me and handed me a pen. She was a big lady with chocolate skin, an island accent and a name tag that said her name was Judith. “We were wondering if you’d come,” she said smoothly, pointing to the visitors’ log where I was supposed to sign my name.

  Judith had apparently seen the news: the Post, the Daily News, the lead story on just about every cable network in the country, including FirstNews. Three dead, a rich female murderer, and a shootout on an apartment balcony. Like we say in the business, “You can’t make this shit up.”

  I signed my name. Judith escorted me down the hall to the corner room. “You came at a good time,” she said, pushing the door open. Buttery morning sun slid through the slats of the blinds onto a small hospital bed where my biological father lay staring up at the ceiling tiles. The nurse pulled a chair close to his bed. “He just got up.” And then, louder, to Charles, “Didn’t you, Mr. Kravis?”

  He nodded, propping himself up on the pillows.

  “You have a visitor. Would you like to eat now or after she leaves?”

  His finger crooked toward a tray of food on a countertop. “I’ll eat now, Judith.” The left side of his mouth slanted downward, paralyzed from the strokes, slurring his speech. He was weak of body, but his mind seemed lucid.

  “Take a seat, child,” Judith said to me, motioning to a chair by the bed, as she began to feed Charles his breakfast. First eggs, then a few bites of oatmeal. A piece of toast stayed on the plate. As I watched him eat, I tried not to think of how frail he looked for seventy-eight years old, the gray pallor of his skin, the sound of the machines monitoring his heart, and how I really just wanted to get the hell out of there. What was I doing? Why did I think he’d want to answer any of my questions? I was the reason his daughter, the only daughter he’d ever known, was dead. He probably hated me for it.

  Judith rolled away the cart, shutting the door behind her. Charles tilted his head toward me.

  “My name is Clyde Shaw,” I said simply. “I worked for FirstNews as a producer. And I was very close friends with Olivia.”

  His eyes slanted in my direction once again. “I know who you are.” He spoke slowly, trying to enunciate each word as clearly as his condition allowed. “You are my daughter.”

  I bit my lip. “You know?”

  “I do watch the news.” The right corner of his mouth lifted.

  It was a joke. I laughed belatedly.

  “Do you want to know,” he said hoarsely. “About your mother and me?”

  I blinked through a few tears, my emotions getting the better of me. “Yes. Do you remember her?”

  “Of course I remember her. She looked like you.”

  “Skinnier.”

  His
pointed at me with his right hand. “That’s from my side.”

  “And the hair.”

  His rheumy eyes lifted to mine. “Ah, yes.”

  “What happened?”

  “She was single. I was not. And I couldn’t leave my wife, you see. She was pregnant.”

  “With Olivia.” Two women, my mother and Olivia’s mother, had been pregnant at the same time. He chose his wife. I couldn’t blame him and yet it was difficult not to feel some resentment.

  Charles seemed to know what I was thinking. “I didn’t know about you,” he wheezed. “Not until I saw you at that Fourth of July party. Then I suspected it, but your mother was gone by then, and I couldn’t have taken you away from your father.” He paused again for breath. “You were all he had left of her.”

  I lowered my eyes. “My mother told you she had an abortion?”

  “She did. That is what she said,” he said, grabbing on to his absolution. “I wasn’t much of a family man then, but if I’d known about you. I would have taken care of you.” There was another short pause and within this I understood that much more had happened, things Charles felt I should not know. I hungered for details; he wanted to spare me of them. A pair of nurses called to each other in the hall. A cart rumbled past the room.

  I leaned closer to the side of his bed. “Monica made me go to my room the night of that big party, and I was told to leave the next day. Did she know I was your daughter?”

  “I met Monica long after my first wife died, and long after your mother and I stopped seeing each other. She couldn’t have known.”

  He’d married Monica in 1982, the year I’d met Olivia. I was eight, and in the second grade. My mother had died in 1980, on my first day of kindergarten. I was six years old.

  “Have you talked to her about what happened after the funeral?” Delphine had died on the way to the hospital. One of the bullets had pierced her liver, another her lungs.

  Charles coughed, slumping into his pillow. “She is upset. This has all been quite upsetting.”

  I couldn’t imagine being in Charles’s position right now. His own daughter was dead by the hands of his wife’s daughter, and his wife’s daughter was dead at, if not my hands, then the hands of the policemen who were trying to save me. “What about the letters?” I asked. “The ones my mother sent to you. Olivia found them. Do you know where they are now?”

  He shook his head. “I’m afraid I don’t.”

  “I would like to have them.”

  Silence fell again as I gathered the resolve to ask the question I’d come to ask, the only one that really mattered. “Did you love my mother?”

  He considered his response. “It was a very passionate affair,” he said gently. “She was a beautiful woman.”

  I looked away, embarrassed. There it was: I was the product of something other than love—of lust and subterfuge, of my own jaded axiom: People lie and people cheat. My mother had an affair with a married man who loved his wife better. I knew how terrible she must have felt.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, his hand inching toward mine.

  I wiped away my tears with the heel of my hand. “All those years that you did know about me, or suspected I was yours, why didn’t you try to get know me?”

  “I did know you in a way. Olivia kept me informed.”

  “She did?”

  He nodded. “She didn’t know why. I said it was because I found the stories about you entertaining.”

  “Did I get my job here because of you?”

  “I may have put in a word at the very beginning.” The right corner of his mouth rose once again. “Everything else you accomplished on your own.” Charles sat up a little straighter on his pillows. “I tried to help more. My offer of financial assistance was declined.”

  So my father had known.

  “I had planned to leave you a good sum, Cornelia.”

  A pit opened in my stomach. Delphine had killed Olivia to keep her from telling Charles about me, or so she’d said. My conviction was that she’d wanted all of Charles’s money, not just whatever portion of the pie that would have been set-aside for me. Still, finding out about me seemed to have sparked in Delphine’s mind the idea that she was entitled to more than she was getting.

  Charles looked out the window. “I was so sorry to hear about your mother’s passing. I sent flowers.”

  I didn’t remember much about my mother’s funeral. I remembered what I wore—a navy dress and matching tights, the black patent Mary Janes that pinched my toes. I remembered my father’s bloodshot eyes and his hand gripping my shoulder as they lowered her casket into the grave, the leftovers from the catering company that crowded our refrigerator until finally, when there was mold growing on everything, I threw them out. I remembered my father opening the refrigerator and seeing it was clean, and starting to cry. Right there, on the floor of our kitchen, with the refrigerator door open. He cried until there was nothing left.

  I stood to leave.

  “Going so soon?” he asked gently.

  I nodded. Suddenly, all I wanted was my dad, the one who raised me. I’d thought learning the truth from Charles would comfort me. But it hadn’t. It couldn’t. He’d given me answers, and it turned out they weren’t what I needed.

  I paused with my hand on the door.

  Charles regarded me sadly. “I am sorry, my dear.”

  I drove back with my father upstate. He picked me up outside Lennox Hill Hospital in his silver truck. He was dressed in his usual uniform—plaid flannel shirt, Levis, and scuffed brown boots—and greeted me with worried brown eyes. “I thought the doctors said they wanted to keep you under observation for another day,” he said, popping my door open.

  “They’re just being overly cautious.” I said, trying not to wince as I climbed into the cab of the truck. “I’m fine.”

  He gave me a dubious look before putting the truck in gear. “You don’t look it.”

  I gestured at the bandages around my head, ribs, wrist, and hands. “These are just for show.”

  “Should we swing by your place? Pick up some things? You’ll need a heavy coat. Forecast says snow tomorrow.”

  “I’d rather not, if that’s OK,” I didn’t have enough energy to face my apartment. Alex had brought over what I’d left at his home, which amounted to a few changes of clothes, some toiletries, and my handbag. A trip to Walmart in Greenport would have to fill in what I couldn’t borrow from Dad. “You’ll loan me your Patagonia?”

  “Sure, kiddo.”

  It took us two hours to make it to Hudson, New York, a little town that had started as a whaling community way back when. After falling on hard times, it was rediscovered by antiques dealers, foodies, and other New York City transplants, who helped revive local commerce and cultural landmarks. Dad’s place was a little more than five miles outside of town but he said he wanted to swing by Olde Hudson, our favorite little grocery store on Warren, the town’s main drag, to pick up some bread and cheese for dinner. I stayed in the truck while he went into the market. Ten minutes later, he came back out with two huge bags filled with goodies for us. “Hope you’re hungry,” he said, placing the bags by my feet.

  We drove along half a dozen tree-lined country roads before pulling into Dad’s little two-story. In one direction it overlooked an apple orchard, in the other, a cornfield. The field wasn’t his, but the neighbors let him hunt on the land— wild turkey in the spring, deer in the fall. He never shot the does. He never said it, but I was sure it was because he didn’t have the heart to take a mother from its fawn.

  I shrugged off my bag in the living room. Stone fireplace, old wood floors, some couches and chairs that were as beat up as Dad’s truck. Milton, a Norwich terrier, lifted his head from the fleece-lined dog bed by the fireplace. His fat little body jumped into my arms. I let him lick my chin and scratched his round belly. I called out to my dad, who was unpacking the groceries. “Who looked after him while you were gone?”

  “The neighbor,” he said. />
  Not a girlfriend, then. “You’re overfeeding him again.”

  “Am not,” he protested.

  I put Milton back down and joined my father in the kitchen. Dad had bought the house about ten years earlier and made few adjustments in that time. The kitchen, for example, was still papered in a yellow floral print the previous owners had selected. There were etched-glass light fixtures, green-painted cabinetry, and an old stove that looked like it was on its last legs but still worked just fine. I gazed out the bay window at the desolate field below and took a seat at the round oak table after setting it for dinner. We were having a light dinner, just cheese, cured meats, some crusty bread and a cucumber salad. Tomorrow, Dad planned to make his Beef Wellington and roasted new potatoes.

  He sat down in the chair opposite me. “You ready to talk about it?” he asked.

  In the hospital I’d told him that I wasn’t ready. I needed some time to get over the shock and process some of the emotions I was feeling. But it had been three days since I’d learned the truth about who my real father was, and I still wasn’t sure how I felt. Or what I was supposed to feel.

  Dad flipped his blue-checkered napkin onto his lap. Later, we’d rent a movie off the cable service. Milton would fall asleep at my feet. I wanted to fast-forward to that and get over with this, but it was time to put the elephant out of its misery. “You knew,” I stated.

  My father’s chin dipped to his chest. “Of course I did.”

  I could have been mad. I probably should’ve been mad. But I wasn’t. I loved my dad. He’d taken good care of me, stood by me when a lot of other parents might not have, and considering I wasn’t even his flesh and blood, that meant double to me now. “Did Mom tell you?”

  “I can do math, Cornelia. It wasn’t a matter of weeks.”

  “She didn’t try to make you believe I was yours?”