Bradstreet Gate: A Novel

by Robin Kirman

  If Charlie wanted details of Storrow’s professional activities, Flynn offered to pursue this, but Charlie’s instructions had been to focus on the matter of his personal security. As far as that went, Storrow hadn’t reached out to any of Charlie’s contacts; he hadn’t followed him to Palo Alto or made signs that he would come. The last call he’d made to Charlie was three weeks in the past and so it didn’t appear as if Charlie was the object of any pressing obsession. Flynn’s recommendation—rest easy, expel Rufus Storrow from his thoughts.

  So Charlie had tried to do, but still, on nights when he lay awake in his big, empty apartment, he sometimes let his imagination get the better of him. From the moment the bullying calls started, from the first evening, when Storrow phoned to invite him to that D.C. hotel bar, he’d had fantasies of Storrow coming upon his name in the paper, some account of his success, and, in a fit of jealousy, the blurriness of an ego in decay, mistaking his former protégé for some self he might have been, resolving to end it all and take Charlie with him.

  Yes, these heroic types were just the sorts to go for a bloody ending, to think in terms of grand, trite, final acts. For all Charlie knew, moreover, Storrow had been capable of extreme violence once, even if this fact was never proven, and even if Charlie had preferred to doubt his guilt before.

  On the message Charlie left for Flynn, this morning, he tried to make the worries sound like Georgia’s: “A friend asked me to look into Storrow again: with the Patel memorial approaching.”

  May was just about four weeks away; the notice of the memorial event had already gone out to members of their class, his own name listed among the program’s speakers. The Patels had insisted he offer a few words, as the fund’s biggest patron, though he couldn’t fathom what words these would be. For a speech like that he’d rely on Alice, he’d decided: let her fret over what to say about a girl they’d hardly known, let her hang pretty phrases on such a grisly matter as violent death. He was preoccupied enough by his own impossible subject, “Sensitive Surveillance,” the title of his talk that afternoon.

  The time was nearly twelve; he’d do well to get on the road, to call Roger from his car. Inside his hybrid, he rolled down the window, turned the stereo up high, and tried to banish all negative thoughts: Shuster, the Baltimore Sun, Rufus Storrow.

  He had reason to be glad this afternoon: it was a sunny, brilliant day and in a few hours he would appear before a room full of young, talented entrepreneurs who looked up to him—even with a few critics and spoilers, there were plenty who would see him as a champion, as he’d once seen his beloved professor. Somewhere in the audience might be a girl as pretty as Georgia had been back then: a bold, ambitious girl who’d follow him out to the halls. He could always find an excuse to linger, let her find a way to lead him to her bed, like Storrow had done with Georgia, and all the while, he could flatter himself that he deserved her adoration, that she’d sleep safer at night on account of him.

  I worry less knowing you’re there.

  Did Georgia really? Did she really believe he could keep Storrow from causing harm if that was what he wished to do?

  Storrow wasn’t a grave threat, Flynn had assured him, though Charlie couldn’t pretend he’d been too thoroughly persuaded. Nor could he pretend there weren’t days that he rethought his refusal to McCraw; maybe Triathlon could do with a security detail, or maybe he could. Maybe there were worse calamities than having men with earpieces and black gloves paid to look over your shoulder, trained to see the things you missed.

  24

  Mr. Friedlander would be meeting her at Friedlander Park. From the airport in Baltimore, where she’d flown in first class, Alice had been chauffeured by Mercedes into Laurel, Maryland, on her way to visit the nearly completed, two-acre public garden that was Maurice Friedlander’s first vanity project, the second being the mayoral campaign he planned on launching the next year.

  He had an unusual job to offer, Friedlander had explained over the phone the month before. His park would be opening in May; there would be press coverage, and this would be his chance to make the round of talk shows, and so forth, to introduce himself, Maurice Friedlander, to local voters.

  He was aware, he said, that Alice hadn’t worked in politics before, but after meeting with advisers and pollsters, and more experienced speechwriters, he and his wife believed that they could benefit from the services of someone such as Alice, with a gift, as Mrs. Friedlander put it, for moving ordinary people to care about the privileged. What they needed was a narrative to make Friedlander, eldest son of the hugely wealthy hedge fund manager, as sympathetic as Alice had made late Lady Di and John John.

  Death had made them sympathetic, Alice had replied; she really couldn’t take the credit. But Christine Friedlander wouldn’t be dissuaded. It had been her idea, too, for Alice to get to know her subject better by spending most of April as a guest at their estate. Three weeks, ten thousand dollars. For this sum, Alice had agreed to abandon her quiet Manhattan studio/office and her good espresso pot; she’d even abandon her biweekly salon and psychiatric treatments, the pivots of that very ordered routine it appeared that she required, along with five bottles of pills, now secured inside a locked pouch in her suitcase (so that it rattled like a maraca when it was lifted by the driver) to keep her existence manageable and her behavior, more or less, under her control.

  —

  Friedlander was waiting for her at the fountain by the park’s main entrance; he jogged up to the car, bald and stocky, with a full mouth and a beaked nose. He carried a yellow straw sun hat; his shirt was pink: pastels that matched the flowers in the garden around him, but would be better suited to a man twice as tall and half as wide.

  “Hope you don’t mind that I dragged you here straight from the airport.”

  “Not at all.” Given what she was being paid, minding of any kind was out of the question; she must, instead, pretend as if she’d much rather stand under the noon sun than unpack and wash her face and maybe even rest for a few minutes after her travels. She must pretend that she adored these gardens, the baroque arrangement of roses that recalled her uncle Vasily’s front yard and now resembled, she imagined, the elaborate gravesite she hadn’t cared to visit.

  “Christine did the landscaping,” Friedlander informed her, pointing out the trellis roses, whose varieties he’d obediently memorized: “New Dawn Rose, Eden Rose.” As they toured the grounds, he dabbed at his face and neck with his handkerchief; such a profusion of sweat, even on this mild April afternoon, seemed to her enough to disqualify him from a future in elected office.

  A decent, modest, plain sort of man, he seemed to Alice, despite his family’s success and these recent fantasies of political influence. She’d quickly come to suspect that such fantasies belonged less to him than to his wife.

  “I personally never saw myself as a politician,” he admitted, not long into their chat. “I’ve always stayed behind the scenes, at the company, too. But different times call for different men. Christine has a sense for these things. She thinks I might have a chance now; in a time of recession and war, what people need is stability, sound management.”

  “Your wife sounds like a clever woman.”

  “She is. And she thinks—well, I’ll let her tell you what she thinks of you. Christine’s read all your work. Every last word. You’re her favorite writer.”

  As if familiarity with a few fluff magazine pieces was an achievement on par with reading all of Proust in French. As if the sort of brief, narrow career Alice had once established could qualify her as anybody’s “favorite writer.”

  “I’m flattered.”

  “You’re the key to this campaign, she says. It’s not the issues, it’s the man, his story and how you tell it. Christine has a great respect for writers; she always says, language is power.”

  And there Alice stood nodding, trying to stay alert in the midday sun, agreeing that what this man’s wife said was true, and for the simple reason that money, as everyone withou
t it knew, was truly power. Money could buy language; it could buy, even, forgiveness, which was what that ten thousand the Friedlanders would pay her would finally do. With this last imbursement, she’d be cleared of her debt to society (specifically, to one Miss Mary Wittmer, whose settlement demands continued to haunt her), and no amount of rhetoric, no profound apology or proof of moral improvement could accomplish that.

  “I’m very eager to get started.”

  “Then we’ll go now; Christine has prepared lunch.”

  —

  Friedlander’s wife was waiting for them at a table down by their artificial lake, where she’d arranged a three-tiered platter of fruits de mer. Upon being asked, Alice had said she liked shrimp cocktail, so Mrs. Friedlander had assembled this gruesome pile of raw oysters and clams, tentacled crayfish and barnacled snails, along with two old vintages, red and white, each of which Alice felt obliged, despite contraindications, to sample.

  Christine had already been drinking before Alice arrived. She was a nervous, pert-featured woman in her late fifties, dieted flat, eyebrows orange wisps, bony arms stacked with bracelets; they clattered as she fidgeted at her neckline or with the silverware. How do you feel about leaving New York? You won’t be bored here with us, will you? I’ll do my best to prevent it: we’ll keep each other busy… She prattled on, irritated, overwhelming with her many questions, her bottomless need sadly apparent.

  After forty minutes in the sun, an ocean graveyard piled upon each of their plates, Alice felt compelled to begin making arrangements for her exit.

  “I should mention in advance, through April is as long as I can stay; I’ve made other commitments starting the first of May.”

  “What sort of commitments?”

  An event for a foundation, she explained, “Something to do with a former classmate.”

  “From Harvard, you mean? Not that murdered girl, is it?” Mrs. Friedlander sat upright, sharply enough to give Alice a start.

  Her mistake—the mix of wine and meds—to forget the husband’s warning: This woman had read every piece she’d ever written.

  “Your first story, years ago. A master was implicated. Young. Dashing. Starling, was that his name?” Mrs. Friedlander fingered her pearl earring, turning it, like the screws of memory. “His family was from Virginia, Great Falls.”

  “Amazing how much Christine can remember,” put in her husband. “Especially if a handsome man’s involved.”

  “Oh stop, Maurice, it was in all the papers ten years ago. And Great Falls, the family practically lived next door. Paula knew them: I’m really not so up on all that story, not in comparison to Paula.”

  “Maybe not in comparison to Paula.” Mr. Friedlander winked Alice’s way, dabbing sweat from his upper lip.

  Mrs. Friedlander swiveled from her husband, who turned away then, too, to lie back in his chair, hat tipped over his face.

  “It is true though,” she addressed Alice, leaning forward, wine glass in hand. “I do like stories about people, their personal lives. I don’t see what’s wrong with that. You understand, a writer like you, how fascinating a peek into others’ lives can be.”

  “Can be.”

  Mr. Friedlander sneezed, and his hat fell to the grass.

  Mrs. Friedlander eyed her husband, rapping her nails on the edge of her glass. “He was so impressive, the young master, that was the sad thing: athletic, clever, a person with ambition and charisma. Paula told me, she knew the man. And you, too, you must have known him.”

  “No, I didn’t really.”

  “To write that article, to describe him as you did, you must have.”

  “All I really did was question what others thought they knew.”

  “Right, that’s right, we never really do know about people, which is what—for those like us—keeps us so fascinated.” Her hostess drained her glass and dropped back, clinking, in her chair. “Though in this particular case, well, when you think about it, it really was a shame that Sterling man wasn’t more the way he seemed. He had so many attractive qualities…”

  Alice’s head had begun to ache behind her eyes. The setting was much too bright: the sun, glinting off the china and the implausibly still lake. “If you’ll excuse me, Mrs.—”

  “Christine. Please. We’re going to share a house for practically a month.”

  They were, yes, and if she meant to last that long, she would need to restrict her exposure to this woman. “If you’ll excuse me, it’s been a long trip and I’m afraid I need a rest.”

  —

  Alice lay down in her new room—one of the guest beds of an elaborately restored Colonial Revival, a room formerly occupied by two Siamese cats. Lunch had tired her too much to begin the work of unpacking, which she’d insisted on doing herself. She didn’t want the Friedlanders’ maid handling her luggage. However common it might be to find a stash of Paxil or Zoloft inside the cabinets of the most outstanding families, the sight of five such bottles tended to erode people’s confidence in one’s reliability.

  While Alice was stretched out on the plush duvet, the Crimson reporter called her; Nat Krauss he’d said his name was, this kid who’d left multiple messages for her back in New York and whose visit she’d only narrowly escaped by coming here. She turned off the ringer on her cell. It would be punishment enough to be held captive, in this synthetic landscape, by a woman so torturously curious as Friedlander’s wife; she didn’t need to be pursued here, too, by an ambitious young writer like she’d been once herself.

  Though not really so like her: at twenty she’d already known better than to talk like Nat Krauss did, as if revealing the truth was an obvious good. Far more good was accomplished through tactful lies and elisions; there would be no Patel Fellowship, for instance, had she informed the Patels that she, their daughter’s libeler, was the one to bring the idea to Charlie. If Mrs. Patel had suspicions, she’d chosen not to press for the full story, and Alice had known better than to force the truth upon her. She’d reached a similar conclusion after her meeting with Georgia: their lunch had made plain to Alice what an act of self-indulgence it had been to try to clear her conscience, to inflict a confession upon her friend over an overpriced shrimp cocktail.

  That was a scene to suit a woman like Christine Friedlander, with her taste for cold shellfish and steamy scandal. Christine, she imagined, would be in raptures to hear the answers to those questions the Crimson reporter had been asking: whether Storrow’s car was parked outside Georgia’s dorm on the night Julie was killed, about a neighbor hearing voices inside Georgia’s room.

  According to Ms. Calvin’s police statement, you were living with her then, isn’t that right? But Lombardi never followed up on that fact, did he?

  Silence, Alice thought: this was her real gift to the Patels and to everyone who would gather for the memorial next month. Even if Charlie had enlisted her to provide a speech, she would accomplish less through what she said than what she left out—the uncertainties and complications, the many figures of corruption, investigators who’d been, it seemed, willfully negligent, politicians less concerned with seeing the case solved than protecting their positions. None of that had to do with honoring a murdered girl, not any more than a crude encounter driven by vengeance, a reckless knock upon the window of a black BMW that she’d observed from Georgia’s window on the fourth night of May.

  Storrow had already been a mess before anything went on between them. When he’d rolled down his car window, she could smell the liquor on his breath. It must have been a moment of panic that sent him seeking Georgia, and then there was the shock of being spotted by Alice, the prying friend, instead. Come on up, it’s all right. Georgia should be back soon.

  What was he doing, entering a dorm filled with students who might spot him, traipsing after the mad roommate of the girl he’d really come to see? Alice had sensed the question arising in his thoughts more than once; first when he’d stumbled, wild-eyed, into Georgia’s living room, and then again, when he’d followed her up
the stairs to Georgia’s bedroom.

  But even if she wasn’t the one who Storrow wanted, seducing him hadn’t been hard: from Vasily she’d learned how to master an egotist, those most desperate to escape humiliation, to accept adulation. I don’t judge you for falling for Georgia, anybody would, and I don’t blame her either about you. I was the one who pointed you out to her to start with. I was the one who’d noticed you first…

  In bed, Storrow had refused to look at her; instead, she caught him eyeing Georgia’s things: a bra left on a pile of newly washed clothes, a necklace on the bedside table. His touch was cold; his performance ruined by vanity: he pushed himself up to seem taller and, to prove his strength, he pinned her legs down under his knees. A man so superior, he seemed almost ashamed to be with her, and couldn’t have imagined that she found him loathsome too, with his antiseptic smell and that brutish vein running down the front of his skull. Once she felt him losing potency and was sickened to recall her nights with Torsten. But while Torsten had been indifferent and lethargic, Storrow was obliged to make a display of his prowess—so he pressed on through to the end, athletically, dutifully, and mutely, letting out short bursts of breath.

  You’ll say nothing, he’d warned her afterward, trying not to sound alarmed.

  Of course I won’t.

  I want your word.

  A man innocent enough to believe in oaths, whatever he might have been guilty of next. And whatever she’d wondered about him, over the next weeks and months and years, she’d nevertheless kept her promise to him to stay quiet. No good would come from piling on the shame: no one would be spared one jot of pain, not then and not now, not Storrow and not Mr. and Mrs. Patel, who deserved better than to have remembrance of their daughter despoiled by crude revelations. It was for their sake she was avoiding Krauss’s calls, for those mild, decent people who would assemble in three weeks to receive, if she could manage it, a small message of comfort from her.