The Arrangement

by Robyn Harding

  “I’m okay, Mom,” Nat assured, as her mother held her and wept into Nat’s hair. Her dad stood by awkwardly, unsure of his place in their former family unit. Andrew Murphy had been dark and mean, and then he had abandoned them. His desertion had damaged his daughter, contributed to her terrible choices. If Nat wanted, she could hold on to her anger, even blame her dad for her toxic relationship with an older man. But her father had come when she called him. He was there, trying to help her, trying to save her life.

  Gently, Nat extricated herself from her mom’s embrace and moved to her dad. He opened his arms, and she fell into them, the years of resentment melting away, replaced by unfamiliar sensations: comfort and warmth. Andrew stroked her hair, murmured assurances into her ear. It was there, in her daddy’s arms, that Nat fell apart.

  Their emotional moment was interrupted by a male voice. “Excuse me?”

  Natalie and her parents turned toward the speaker. He was slim, boyishly handsome, holding a small recording device toward Nat’s face. “Anything you’d like to say about your involvement in Gabe Turnmill’s murder?”

  Gabe had been a powerful attorney, New York society, a one-percenter. And he had been a sugar daddy. His murder was a scandal.

  “No comment,” Nat’s dad snapped. The small family hurried from the courthouse.

  * * *

  The conditions of Natalie’s bail included surrendering her passport, wearing a monitored ankle bracelet to ensure she did not leave the court’s jurisdiction or approach Gabe’s family, and house arrest between the hours of 8:00 P.M. and 8:00 A.M. Her mom would stay with her in the studio apartment; her dad was renting a cheap—at least by New York standards—hotel room in Midtown. When a taxi dropped them off in Chelsea, Nat unlocked the front door (her keys had been returned to her, but her phone was now evidence) and ushered her mom into the building.

  “For God’s sake,” Allana muttered, when they entered the small suite, “did the police really need to tear the place apart?”

  Nat didn’t admit that the state of her apartment had more to do with her own slovenly habits than the police’s search for evidence. The vomit and blood were still on the floor, dried to a putrid crust. The air was fetid and close, but still an improvement from the atmosphere in the basement cell Nat had so recently occupied.

  Allana opened the window and let the night filter into the studio. Even though it was after 11:00 P.M., her mom set about cleaning the apartment, while Nat went to shower. She wasn’t sure when she had last slept (shock and exhaustion had muddled her thoughts, messed with her perception of time), but she needed to rinse away the filth and stink of the holding cells first. The hot water softened the scabs on her knees and hands, allowing blood to ooze from the wounds. She watched it run down her shins and swirl down the drain. And then, a flash of remembrance.

  She saw Gabe’s face, pale and terrified. He was saying something inaudible, pleading for his life probably. And then a bang, a gunshot, rang through her head, rattled her brain. She staggered in the shower, gripping the edge of the tub before she collapsed. Her memory was returning, and it was horrifying. She didn’t want to remember murdering the man she’d loved.

  When she got out of the shower, she found her mom putting clean sheets on the bed. She turned as Nat entered in her towel. “Are you okay? You’re pale and you’re shaking.”

  She couldn’t tell her mom the image that had revisited her. “I’m just tired.”

  “You need to sleep. Do you want to eat something first?”

  Nat shook her head, suddenly overcome by exhaustion. Tears brimmed in her eyes, and a ragged sob shuddered through her chest. Her mom took control, finding a nightie in the overstuffed dresser drawers and pulling it over Nat’s head. She helped her daughter climb into the fresh sheets, still smelling of lavender-scented laundry soap despite weeks in the closet. Allana kissed Nat’s cheeks, like she had done when Nat was a little girl.

  “You sleep,” her mom said gently. “I’m here.”

  It was two or three hours later when Natalie awoke drenched in sweat, disoriented and panicked. It took her a moment to distinguish her surroundings, to remember that she was home, for now. The apartment was dark except for the light slipping from under the bathroom door. Her mom was in there, talking softly on the phone. She must have called home to chat with Derek, to check on Astrid and Oliver. Allana was still on Pacific time. It was not as late for her. Quietly, Nat got up to change her soaked nightie, her mom’s voice just audible in the still space.

  “She’s doing okay, all things considered,” her mom said. There was a long silence, followed by a muffled response that Nat couldn’t make out. And then: “I don’t know, Derek. But she’s my daughter. I’ll stand by her no matter what.”

  Natalie pulled a cool, dry T-shirt over her head as she absorbed her mom’s words. Her own mother thought she was capable of murder. Had Allana seen a darkness in her even when she was a little girl? Was there something in her childhood that had foreshadowed her ability to take a life? Or was it only now, since Nat had moved to New York, since she had sold her body to a rich man, that the evil act seemed within her bailiwick?

  And yet, Allana was here. She had left her young children to support her eldest. And Nat’s dad was here, too. She crawled into bed, exhaustion softening her angst. Soon, she had fallen back to sleep.

  * * *

  The weekend passed in an anxious, monotonous blur. Nat’s mom had visited New York only once before, when she was a teen, so Nat played tour guide. But there was no joy in it. The city that had once had her so enamored, now felt cold and harsh. Her dad joined them on a few outings, but it was tense and forced. After the weekend, he flew back to Vegas.

  “I’ve got some business to take care of,” he told her, “and then I’ll come back.”

  Nat nodded, but her ingrained mistrust of her father’s word was hard to overcome. Even if Andrew didn’t return, never returned, he had done enough. He had bailed her out of jail; he had hired her a defense attorney; he was paying her legal bills. Andrew Murphy had been her dad when she needed him to be.

  And Nat was a murderer. She had no right to ask for more.

  51

  * * *

  The Lawyers

  Natalie and her mom met with Matthew Hawley at his office in Midtown. The lawyer had offered to come to them, but assuming his hourly rate, they didn’t want him to incur travel time. Nat and Allana took the subway uptown to the intimidating tower that housed the Blacklock Law Firm. A polished receptionist led them into a meeting room, where they were soon joined by Mr. Hawley. In his rumpled suit two sizes too big for his slight frame, the attorney stood in stark contrast to his cold, sleek environment. Accompanying him were two attractive associates—a white female, a black male—who fit the decor so precisely they seemed almost ornamental.

  They took seats around a custom concrete conference table. Hawley pulled out a moleskin journal and a pen while his colleagues set up laptops. “Start at the beginning,” he urged Nat, his smile avuncular. “You can be honest in this room.”

  Nat was glad of her lawyer’s accessible nature. Ignoring his intimidating sidekicks, she told Hawley about her relationship with Gabe, how she’d met him through the sugar website, how their relationship had morphed into something meaningful. “We loved each other,” she assured her attorney, and vicariously, his two associates and her mother. “It was real, before it all went wrong.”

  She recounted Gabe’s abrupt breakup, her shock, pain, and confusion. Nat explained how she’d followed Violet Turnmill to the Met, how the girl had quickly developed a crush on her, how Nat had accepted the invitation to her graduation pool party. “I shouldn’t have gone,” she admitted, “but I just wanted to see Gabe. To talk to him.”

  Hawley met her eyes. “Did Gabe’s wife and daughter have any idea about your relationship with their husband and father?”

  “No,” Nat answered truthfully. “They were completely clueless.” She heard her mother exhale heav
ily. Her daughter’s moral lapses were a source of disappointment. Or was it disgust?

  Finally, Nat told her defense counsel about her walk with Gabe on the High Line, about their horrible fight on Thirty-Fourth Street, how she’d clawed his wrist, his blood and skin getting under her nails. She relayed her visit to the saloon/sports bar, the creepy man with the green eyes who had scared her out of there, how she’d ended up at a club.

  “Someone must have roofied me or something. I remember walking out onto the street and then . . . that’s it.” She omitted the flash of memory in the shower: Gabe’s frightened face, his desperate plea, the sound of the gunshot. “It’s all a blank until I woke up on the floor of my apartment.”

  The typing stopped. The pen was set down on the table. Matthew Hawley leaned back in his chair.

  “We’ve submitted our demand to produce to the prosecution. When they hand over discovery, we’ll review it, do some investigations of our own, and strategize a defense.”

  Nat’s mom spoke in a tight voice. “How long will all this take?”

  “The prosecutor has six months to indict.”

  “Six months?” Allana could not mask her panic. Six months away from her job, her husband, her young children. Six months of sleeping on Nat’s hard sofa, of wandering around an inhospitable city, of supporting a daughter who had killed a man.

  “We can negotiate pre-indictment,” Hawley assured her. “Often, an expeditious plea bargain is the best course of action.”

  A plea bargain.

  Nat didn’t know what that meant, exactly, but she was too afraid to ask.

  52

  * * *

  Discovery

  So Natalie and her mother waited. Days and then weeks passed. On occasion, a photographer would snap Nat’s photo as she and her mom went to buy coffees or groceries, but otherwise, they were left alone. Nat’s mom and Derek paid the rent on the studio for another month. Allana’s calls home became tense and fraught. “Yes, I know I have three children, Derek. But only one of them is fighting for her life right now.” Nat could feel the strain she was causing her mother’s marriage through the closed bathroom door.

  Her father called regularly. He spoke to Nat and to her mom. Her parents agreed that Andrew would relieve Allana for four days, so she could go home to her family—her good family, not her screwed-up disaster family in New York. Sharing the small space with her dad was awkward, intense, but ultimately therapeutic. And getting to know her father again proved a good distraction from the fact that she’d been charged with murder. But her alleged crime was always there, hanging over all of them.

  And then, just over three weeks after their initial meeting at the law firm, Natalie and Allana were summoned again. In a different boardroom, with the same decorative associates, Hawley began his spiel.

  “We’ve gone through the prosecution’s discovery, and we now have the details of their case against you.”

  Nat heard her mother’s intake of breath, felt her grip Nat’s hand.

  Matthew opened the file on the concrete table, began to read from it. “Ballistics tests confirm that the nine-millimeter Beretta they found near the scene is the murder weapon. Your prints are on it, and it was wrapped in a T-shirt they’ve established to be yours through DNA and hair samples.”

  Fuck.

  “A necklace belonging to you was found at the scene. A witness saw a young woman matching your description in the vicinity, the night of the murder. The bartender at the sports bar remembers you, but no one at the nightclub can verify you were there. We’ve checked with the cab companies but none of the drivers can recall taking you home. Unfortunately, you have no alibi for the time of the murder.”

  Allana’s hand was crushing Nat’s, their palms getting sweaty and clammy. But Nat couldn’t let go. She felt she was holding on to her mother for dear life. If Allana released her, Nat would drift away, fall, tumble into a deep, dark void from which she would never return.

  Hawley wasn’t done. “Phone records show hundreds of calls and texts to Gabe Turnmill’s phone.” He looked up from the file briefly. “You threatened to kill him several times.”

  “I was upset,” tears of fear, regret, and hopelessness, welled up in Nat’s eyes. “I didn’t mean it.”

  “We have a few things on our side.” The man’s prominent nose was back in the file. “The witness who saw you on the Upper East Side is a shut-in in his eighties, probably not reliable. There was no GSR on your hands, and we can explain Turnmill’s DNA under your fingernails due to the fight you had near the High Line.” He looked up at her then. “And the rookie cop who found your T-shirt with the gun thought it was covered in blood. Turns out, it was cranberry juice.”

  “What?”

  “The lab tested it. The red stains were from cranberry juice.”

  Nat’s pulse hammered so loudly in her ears that she could barely hear her own words. “It’s the wrong shirt,” she said. “I kept the gun wrapped in a plain white T-shirt, hidden in a shoe box. The juice stains came from Violet’s graduation party. Her girlfriend was jealous. She threw a drink at me.”

  No one spoke, but their eyes relayed their confusion.

  Nat tried to remain calm as she recounted the day of the pool party. After Fern had doused Nat with her drink, Gabe had taken her upstairs where she had removed her wet top and donned a shirt of Violet’s. (She left out the fact that she and Gabe had been about to have sex in Violet’s room when the younger girl entered, professed her romantic feelings, and kissed Nat on the lips.) Nat explained that Gabe had put her wet shirt and bikini top into a plastic bag. She recalled him handing it to her before he drove her to catch the bus back to the city.

  “I distinctly remember the logo on the bag,” she said. “It was from a specialty deli. It had an overflowing cornucopia on it.”

  Hawley said, “So how did this T-shirt end up in an Upper East Side dumpster with the murder weapon?”

  “When I got back to the city, I went to a bar,” she said excitedly. “Maybe I left the stained shirt there? Or I could have left it on the subway on the way home.”

  “And, someone found it and planted it at the crime scene?” The attorney’s tone was understandably skeptical.

  “No. . . .” Nat was flustered. “Maybe I took the shirt home and it got lost in the clutter? Someone broke into my apartment. He could have taken the shirt and planted it at the scene.”

  “But you didn’t report the break-in to police.”

  “No, because nothing was taken.” She glanced sheepishly at her mom. Nat had already admitted that she’d fabricated the laptop theft.

  The female attorney looked up from her papers. “You told Detective Correa that your pendant was stolen during the break-in.”

  “I—I was confused,” Nat stammered, her face burning. “But there was a footprint on my bed. A bigger shoe than mine. The police must have photographed it.”

  “There’s nothing in the reports about a break-in or a strange footprint,” the male associate contributed.

  Her mom added, “I changed Natalie’s sheets when I first arrived. I didn’t notice a footprint on the soiled ones when I took them to the laundry.”

  Panic gripped her. The window of hope was closing. “Did anyone talk to Cole Doberinsky? He was here. He was stalking me.”

  The sleek blond lawyer looked at her file. “Cole Doberinsky was located in Portland, Oregon,” she said. “He has a solid alibi for the time of the murder.”

  But someone had been in her apartment. Nat had been distraught, drinking heavily, but she had not fantasized the break-in to get Gabe’s attention. The footprint was not simply a figment of her imagination. Was it?

  The female associate continued. “Mr. Doberinsky says you arranged to have him badly beaten, leaving him with permanent damage to his right eye. He also submitted a Facebook message into evidence. You threatened to kill him.”

  They didn’t believe her. And she couldn’t blame them. It all sounded so far-fetched, a despe
rate grab at innocence. She’d told so many lies, kept so many secrets . . . she didn’t know what was true anymore. And suddenly, she realized it didn’t matter what was true. It only mattered if she could prove it.

  Her rumpled lawyer articulated her concerns. “It would be extremely difficult to make a case that you were framed, Natalie.”

  No one spoke for a moment, but she clocked the glances exchanged between her legal team and her mother. Then Matthew Hawley’s watery brown eyes found hers.

  “The prosecution has offered a plea deal, and we advise you to accept.”

  “What kind of plea deal?” Her mom asked.

  “We can waive the indictment and plead guilty by way of superior court information. The DA won’t budge on second-degree murder. This case has caught the media’s attention, and prosecutors don’t like to go easy on defendants when the public is watching. But the DA is open to sentence bargaining.” Hawley turned his attention from Allana to Nat.

  “We’ll get you as little time behind bars as possible, Natalie. With your clean record and the dysfunctional nature of your relationship with the victim, I think we can get you five years in custody, the remainder served on probation.”

  Blood rushed through her ears, her vision blurred. She couldn’t spend five years of her life in jail. She wouldn’t survive it. Through the fog, she heard her mother’s shrill voice. “Five years? She’s just a kid!”

  “If we took this to trial, she could get fifteen to life,” Hawley said. “Natalie has motive. She has no alibi. And the circumstantial evidence is damning.”