Terry sat there quiet for a while, not looking at me, not looking at anything. “Show me the other letter again,” he said abruptly. I pulled Paula’s resignation out of my pocket and handed it over. He studied it. “She likes you,” he said. I was about to say something stupidly bashful and modest when Terry leaned forward in his chair and brought his face near mine. “She likes you a lot,” he whispered forcefully.
He gave me back the letter. “You know she worked for Schuster Mannheim before she came here?”
I nodded.
“Did you know she worked for Jim McIntyre?”
Jesus.
“Of course, he wasn’t senior partner then. He was head of corporate, but already well on the way to the top spot.”
“Did he fire Paula?” I asked. “She wouldn’t say and her file doesn’t show anything.”
“It wouldn’t.” Terry smiled knowingly. “When I said that Ernie didn’t gossip, that wasn’t strictly true. It appears that McIntyre went through a bad patch in his marriage and problems with the bottle. And he turned to Paula for support. He took her up to some monster house on the Long Island North Shore, Oyster Bay, I think, and presented his credentials, as it were. She wasn’t having any of it, brave girl, and told him where to go. There was a bit of a scrap, with Paula threatening to scream harassment, and McIntyre alleging fraud and extortion. Anyway, the upshot was that Paula was prevailed upon to leave Schuster with $70,000 in her pocket. From what Ernie said of McIntyre’s behavior, Schuster was very, very lucky to get off so lightly.”
“No wonder she felt she couldn’t stay,” I said.
“She’ll be all right, she’s a very strong lady,” said Terry. “But what about you? I know you saw the Carlson suicide. That must have been horrific.”
It was indescribable, so why describe it? “I’m going to Bombay next week,” I said. “It might help to put it out of mind.”
“I know. Mendip wants me to make sure you can get out of the country. Shouldn’t be a problem, if we’re quick about it.”
“Pity.”
“Where your daddy died. I can understand your reluctance.”
Terry pointed to his shelf. “You’re welcome to my material on India. It’s pretty much up to date, although I expect you know everything already.”
He stood up and ran his finger along the line of files. “Here.” He pulled it out and handed it to me.
It was heavy, the steel rods of the lever arch couldn’t have held any more.
“Watch it in India,” he said. “Ernie had an expression for it, just as he had an expression for most things.”
“What was that?” I asked, knowing what I was about to hear.
“Bombay breakfast: scam and eggs.”
TWENTY-TWO
Itook a car to the Cloisters. Up the West Side Highway, all the way to Fort Tryon Park, around the folly that necklaced the rocky outcrop overlooking the Hudson. A chunk of land was given to the Metropolitan Museum of Art by a Rockefeller to house their medieval art collection. And on this chunk, they’d built the replica of a monastery.
The driver asked if I wanted him to wait. I squinted up at the squat medieval tower rising from the thick walls of familiar Manhattan stone. The sun shone fiercely on the place and I fancied I was a noviciate monk checking in to my Tuscan Benedictine hideaway for the rest of my unnatural life. I could tell the driver he could wait, if he had sixty years to spare. Then I saw the fleet of M4 buses; this was their last stop. I’d take one home when I was ready and save myself thirty-five bucks.
I was a little early, but didn’t want to hang around outside in the heat, where I could be seen.
A tunneled flight of steps took me into a cool hallway where an intense-looking student sat reading Homer’sOdyssey.She put down herbook and awarded me a totally disarming smile and welcomed me into a cavern that reminded me a little of my college chapel. I sauntered aimlessly around for a while, gawking unintelligently at the icons, the statues of saints, the faces of gargoyles, the tapestries. There was even a whole chapter house that had been imported stone by stone and reassembled. Everything looked strangely comfortable in its 1930s home, hostage from a genteel pillaging around the remnants of medieval Europe.
It struck me that I hadn’t been to a museum in four years. I hadn’t even been to the Met itself, let alone its weird annex up on these remote Manhattan heights. I figured Carol was a museum-goer, a lover of galleries, concerts at Lincoln Center, that kind of thing. The books and pictures in her apartment spoke for her. I imagined her cross-legged on the floor of the classics section of a Barnes & Noble bookstore, checking out the latest translations of Greek poets.
I looked at my watch. It was three o’clock. I made my way hurriedly along the posted directions to the Cuxa Cloister, not bothering to look at the relics on the way.
Although the Cuxa Cloister was deep in the complex, the sun was still high enough to stream into the little courtyard, bounded by an arcaded walkway, deep in shadow at one end and bathed in sunshine at the other. I took one circuit of the arcade, half-admiring the capitals and their carvings: scrolling leaves, apes, pinecones, lions, leaping men, and other stuff I couldn’t identify. I couldn’t see Carol anywhere. I looked out into the courtyard itself, symmetrical flower beds and paths spreading from a centerpiece basin, an old font, perhaps. The carpet of plants was too short to hide anyone and the place was empty.
“Fin.”
I turned around. Carol was standing in a shadow. She emerged, wearing the same shades as she’d worn at the funeral. Her hair was tousled carefully and shone like an ad for conditioner. If this had been a real monastery, she would have represented a clear and present danger to a monk’s vows.
I gave her a light kiss on the mouth. Her lips puckered only slightly in return.
My arm swept across the view.
“Nice place,” I said. “What made you choose it?”
“It was nearby,” she said absently, her gaze following my arm.
Nearby?
Canada felt nearer to Wall Street than this place.
She sat down on a wooden bench. I joined her.
She stared out into the courtyard. Every detail of the blue and yellow flowers was picked out by the sun; it was an utterly still life. No wind could find its way into this basin of tranquillity. My mother would have loved it; she’d know the names of all the plants, their full Latin names; she could’ve conversed with the monks of antiquity as they glided around their garden and admired God’s handiwork and maybe felt a touch of pride at their own human talents. Of course,thisgarden could not have been planted more than sixty years ago, but it still had the timeless feel of the bygone age it was supposed to represent.
Carol rocked slightly, rhythmically, like she’d done that night in her Tribeca loft. She rubbed her hands, as if she were washing them. Her nails were chewed, and there were scratches on the backs of her hands.
“The guy who died,” she said.
“Ernie Monks.”
“Yeah. Him.” She rubbed her hands some more and then gripped the edge of the seat.
“What about him?”
“Well, maybe it’s not so important, maybe I just got carried away.” She looked like someone who’d gotten on the wrong bus and was too embarrassed to ask to get off until it reached a scheduled stop.
“Why not tell me anyway and then we’ll see.”
“JJ knew him.”
“Knew Ernie Monks?”
“Uh-uh.”
“I don’t think so. Ernie actually said he didn’t know him.”
“They knew each other.”
She said it with conviction. But she had to be wrong.
I shook my head. “JJ and I used to talk about people at Clay & Westminster, Ernie included. Particularly Ernie—he was an extraordinary man. JJ never said he had met him. There would be no reason to hide it, would there?”
“Maybe there was a reason. I don’t think Ernie Monks liked JJ. I think that maybe they didn’t like each other.”
“Ernie never said anything. He knew what had happened to JJ, he knew I was there. But he never said anything, Carol.”
“He knew him.” She hesitated. “They met each other,” she said. “They had a big argument.”
“Where? What about?”
“I’m not sure, India maybe, some of the words they used . . . they were used by Chuck Krantz. And by you.Badlawas one of them. I don’t know, Fin, I feel kind of stupid. But there’s JJ’s death, there’s Bombay, and now there’s Ernie Monks. I just needed to hear myself talk about it, out loud, see if it made any sense. It doesn’t. Forget I said anything.”
“You were there? When the argument took place, I mean?”
“What are you getting at?”
“Either you were there, or someone reported it to you.”
“Yeah, I guess.” She seemed annoyed. She might have tried to close the subject but it was still buzzing around like a fly that wouldn’t go away.
I didn’t want the subject closed. “Well, which? Were you there, or did you hear about it?”
“What’s with you, Fin? I’m not your goddamned witness.” She took off her dark glasses and wiped them on her shirt.
“You asked me up here,” I said.
“I wish I hadn’t.”
“I’m glad you did. I think what you’ve said is significant. I don’t know why yet, but I think it is.”
“They met, that’s all. They argued. People meet and argue all the time. It’s no big deal. Except that JJ killed himself and Ernie Monks had a heart attack.”
“I don’t think Ernie died of a heart attack or, if he did, it’s a highly misleading explanation of his death.” I described the scene in Ernie’s bathroom.
Carol brought her hand to her mouth. “Jeez, that’s horrible.” She moved her hand away and placed it on my knee. “You were there, you saw it for yourself,” she whispered.
I nodded.
“God, how awful.” For a moment she looked bewildered. Then she seemed to make up her mind about something. “I was there,” she said, “I mean I was present when Ernie Monks and JJ argued.”
“At the office, at Jefferson Trust.”
“No. At JJ’s apartment.”
That was crazy. “A meeting at JJ’s place with Ernie? And you? It doesn’t make sense. What was it about?”
“Ernie Monks didn’t know I was there.”
I was missing something. The dot picture was too near. Two steps sideways. Still dots.
“I was hiding in the bedroom while JJ and Ernie Monks argued in the living room.”
I could see the picture now. The dots had gone.
Carol sighed. “JJ and I were lovers.”
“I see,” I said slowly. I didn’t really see at all, the whole thing jarred. The tap of a tuning fork with metal fatigue. The investment banker and his attorney.
“Were you lovers when he died?” I finally managed to ask. If I’d slept with her the day her lover was buried, it would somehow make it worse.
She shook her head. “No. We broke up some weeks before. Finally.”
There were enough supplemental questions to fill a passport application form, but I wasn’t sure that I wanted to ask them.
“If I asked you, would you tell me about it?”
“Are you asking?”
“I don’t know.” It was my turn to rock in my seat.
I turned to face her, but her dark glasses blanked me. “Do you know why he killed himself, was it because of you?”
A meandering line of chattering schoolkids made their way along the arcade and stopped in front of us to be lectured by an enthusiastic guide. She got animated about the likely daily rituals of monks in the twelfth century: prayers, meditation, gardening, farming, tending the sick, and scholastic work; she took the kids a world away from the unfettered capitalism coursing through the skyscrapers a few milessouth. But I remembered that monasteries could be cauldrons of intrigue and unbridled greed and that it was perhaps only a coarse habit that separated them from Wall Street.
The line of kids moved on and the chatter faded away to a gentle hum drifting out of an adjoining enclosure.
Carol stood up and ran her hand along one of the ancient columns supporting the arcade. “I don’t know if it was all down to me. JJ had a whole heap of problems. I knew he used coke, like you said, and other stuff too, really weird and obscure. He had money troubles as well. I think the thing with Ernie Monks shook him up; they hadn’t just argued, I think it had gotten physical. JJ had a nasty scratch on his face when he came back in the bedroom after Ernie had left.” She paused. “But maybe JJ’s death was all down to me. He told me he just couldn’t face losing me. He was scared, he said. I was the only thing that kept the fear at bay.”
“I’m sorry,” I said and found myself thinking of my last conversation with my father, when he’d called from Bombay. It seemed like you could kill someone just by doing nothing. Death by lethal rejection.
“You don’t have anything to be sorry for.” The dark glasses stared at me. “I realized the whole JJ thing was crazy,” she said. “There was a time when I loved him, you know. But then he scared me, people around him scared me. We split up. But he drew me back in and the second time it was harder to leave.”
Second time? Dates, Carol, dates. Would they coincide with her shifting attitude toward me over the years?
“If we had been discovered,” she said, “it would have meant big trouble. What with him being married. Jefferson Trust doesn’t like that kind of thing. So it had to finish. I’ve worked hard to get where I am and, in the end, I’d stopped loving JJ. It just wasn’t worth it. But it was hard, all the same. Letting go, that is.”
“I understand.”
“No, you don’t, you couldn’t.” She sat down again and took my hand. “Jesus, what have I done?”
“You had a relationship. You ended it. He died. Like you said, he had plenty of other problems. Don’t punish yourself.”
“What have I done to you, I mean.”
She’d made me happy. In the worst week I’d had in five years, she’d made me happy. “You’ve done more than I can say without sounding like an adolescent. All of it good. Well, apart from Bombay. That was a shitty thing to do, but you meant well.”
“I used you, to protect myself.”
“You haven’t used me, Carol.”
“I have. When I tried to break up with JJ the second time, he wouldn’t accept it.”
“If you tried to ditch me, I wouldn’t accept it either.”
“Just listen, will you? JJ wouldn’t accept it. The only thing that would make him believe it, he said, was if there was someone else. So I told him there was someone else.”
“Was there someone else?”
Carol paused. “In a way, yes, but I wasn’t actually seeing him.”
“You mean you weren’t seeing him yet.”
“Right.”
I heard myself groan. “You told him you were seeing me.”
“You’re smart.”
“No, I’m not. I’m stupid.” I felt numb. I’d been Carol’s wire-cutters, her escape plan. Her way out of Camp JJ.
“So that’s why JJ had me along for his suicide?”
“I guess.”
“And why he put the car in my name. And stole fifty thousand of my dollars. And made me a borrower to the tune of nine hundred and fifty thousand.”
The guy must’ve really loved Carol. And really hated me.
But why whip up such a colossal firestorm? Everything about JJ was big, so he wasn’t likely to go out with a whimper.
Carol took off her dark glasses. “I’ll tell the cops what happened, and the insurers, and the folks at Clay & Westminster, anyone you want. I’m so sorry, Fin. If I’d had any idea, I’d have found some other way of getting free.”
I should have read the writing on the wall. A badass with spray paint had seen it coming.Shit happens.
“And what would happen to you if you told them?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
I knew. Be fired. Her termination letter wouldn’t spell it out, it wouldn’t say: Fired for fucking a married man who killed fifteen people and framed respectable outside counsel. But she’d be pushed, all the same. Unemployed and unemployable thereafter.
I looked at her. She was crying.
I held Carol close to me. “I’m not sure telling everyone would help anyway. Think about it. The moment they cotton on to the fact that we are an item, they’d tear us to shreds, tell us we made it up, that there was something deeper, worse.”
Carol pulled away from me and dabbed her eyes. “They don’t need to find out about us.”
“These things tend to get out, in the end. That is if they continue. And I’m not sure I want us to be a secret indefinitely.”
Carol stroked my face. “I’m bad news, I think. I’ll speak to the police and then you can straighten things out.”
She wasn’t bad news and, anyway, I knew it wasn’t that easy. Manelli wouldn’t buy it, nor would the insurers, nor the press. And certainly not Miranda Carlson. I’d need proof of what JJ had done. Carol’s tearful confession wouldn’t work on its own.
“Is your career important to you?” I asked.
Carol nodded. “Sometimes I think it’s all I have, all I am. I feel defined by it. My parents aren’t rich or smart and when I made Harvard, they turned cartwheels of joy. When I joined Simpson Thatcher they turned some more. And when I got to Jefferson Trust, I thought they’d spin out of control.” She laughed. “But it wasn’t just them. I felt good too. I feel proud to have made it this far. I know I shouldn’t be saying this to you, but I don’t know what it would do to me if I lost all that.”
“Then wait,” I said. “Don’t do anything for now. Don’t tell anyone. Work on Badla, come to Bombay, and take it from there. Okay?”
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