by JP Delaney
I tell them about Stella, then how I approached her husband in the bar. When I get to the point where Patrick gave me the book of poetry and walked away, Detective Durban stops me. “Think he’d guessed what was going on?”
“I don’t see how.”
“Okay. And Mrs. Fogler? How did she react when you told her how it went? Was she pleased? Reassured?”
“Not exactly.” I repeat what she’d said about getting something on her husband. Somehow it sounds more ominous now. The way these two are grilling me so intently feels like it can’t be good.
“Are Patrick and Stella okay? Did something happen?” I ask, and again they don’t answer my question.
“When she paid you, did you see any other money? In her bag, maybe?” Durban asks.
I shake my head. “But there must have been at least a thousand in the roll she got out. She paid me in hundreds.”
“So you took four bills.” Durban puts a lot of emphasis on the word four.
“Yes,” I say, puzzled. “Like I told you. That was what she owed me.”
“What happened to the rest?”
“What rest?”
“We didn’t find any money on her person,” he says flatly. “And she’d made a large cash withdrawal that morning. Substantially more than a thousand dollars.”
I stare at him. “On her person…You mean—she’s dead?”
“That’s correct.” He’s watching my reaction.
“Oh my God,” I say, appalled. “How? What happened?”
“We’re treating it as a homicide. That’s all I can tell you at present.” He continues looking at me steadily. His expression, which had seemed friendly, even avuncular, has hardened. “I can say that she died in her suite, sometime before dawn. The same night you were with her.”
“Oh no,” I whisper. “That’s terrible. You can’t think…”
“If you’d just finish answering our questions, Claire.”
He takes me over it again, and then a third time. Davies keeps scribbling notes.
“What happened to the video?” Durban says at last. “The one from the hidden camera. Who has it now?”
I think back. “I gave it to Stella. Mrs. Fogler. That’s standard. She’d paid for it, after all.”
“And the book of poems?”
“Still in my bag. I don’t usually read poetry but these are really interesting, in a weird—”
“We’ll need it,” he interrupts.
He gets an evidence bag, turns it inside out and uses it as a glove to take the book from me. “You ever find out what that French stuff meant? The thing he quoted at you as he left?”
“Yes—I’m pretty sure it’s from a poem called A Une Passante, ‘To a Passer-by.’ It’s about seeing someone in the street, exchanging a glance, but still going your separate ways…The literal translation is, ‘O you who I had loved. O you, who felt it too.’ ”
Durban snorts. “That’s nice. I should try to remember that. So you leave the hotel…Then what?”
“I went out with some friends.”
“To a bar?”
I nod. “The Harley Bar. There were plenty of people who can confirm I was there by nine thirty.”
“And you got home when?”
“About seven A.M. I…met someone.”
“His name?”
“Er—Tom.”
“Last name?”
“I—I’m pretty sure I have his phone number somewhere.” I rummage in my bag and find a scrap of paper. “Yes. This is it.”
Detective Durban scrutinizes it as he takes it. “Looks like an i to me. Tim, not Tom. We’ll contact him.”
“What did you do with the money, Claire?” Detective Davies says. It’s the first time he’s spoken.
“The four hundred dollars? I gave it to my roommate. I owe her a lot of back rent, so—”
“Not the four hundred,” he interrupts. “The twenty thousand dollars you stole from Stella Fogler’s hotel room.”
I stare at him, my head swimming. “What? No—you can’t think—”
“Just answer the question,” Durban says.
“There never was any money—not that amount. At least, I never saw it. Am I a suspect?”
“A suspect?” Davies snorts. “You’ve already confessed to recording without consent, working as an unlicensed investigator, soliciting, and conspiracy to blackmail. We just need to wrap up theft and murder and we’re done here.”
“Murder?”
“According to Henry North, you had an argument with Mrs. Fogler that night.”
“I told you—she was the one acting weird—”
“So you went away, brooded on her rudeness…And then you went back to her room,” Davies says. “Where she just happened to have a large quantity of cash. Henry North told us about your financial problems. It must have been galling, to see a woman like that with so much wealth.”
I shake my head, mystified. “I told you, I only went back to return the book. And look, Henry told me everything I did for that firm was legal. So long as you record them in a public place, he said. And you’re not soliciting if they make the first move.” A thought strikes me. “Have you questioned him?”
“Of course. And we’ll check his account very thoroughly. Just as we’ll check yours. With this Tim.”
“Did you kill Stella Fogler, Claire?” Detective Durban asks, as matter-of-factly as if he’s asking whether I take sugar in my coffee.
I look him straight in the eye, ignoring the thudding in my chest. “No. I did not.”
There’s a tense silence. “Detective, shall we confer outside?” Durban says.
They step out. I hear the murmur of voices through the door. Then Durban comes back alone.
“I’ll need the details of at least three people who can confirm you were at the bar by nine thirty,” he says. “After that, you can go.”
I stare at him, light-headed with relief. “So you don’t think I did it?”
“We’ll double-check everything you’ve told us. If you’ve been telling the truth, we should be able to eliminate you from the investigation pretty fast. But don’t leave the city without checking in with us first. And my strong advice is not to undertake any more work for that law firm. This is a murder investigation, Ms. Wright, not an immigration check, but if we find out you’ve broken the terms of your visa again, I won’t hesitate to pass along that information to the relevant authorities.”
And with that he starts scooping up the paperwork, sorting it into piles. It was all a performance, I realize: the classic good-cop, bad-cop grilling, designed to put the fear of God into me.
And it worked too. I’m still shaking. If I had done anything wrong, I’d have confessed to these two in a heartbeat. The mixture of confidence, friendliness, and aggression reduced me to a cowering wreck within moments.
But even now, in the midst of my relief, I find myself thinking, What can I use from that?
13
When I get home Jess is channel-hopping, her head turbaned in a towel, simultaneously checking Facebook and painting her toenails pale blue.
“Good day?” she asks, not looking up.
“Not exactly.” I tell her about the police, the murdered client. Pretty soon she’s staring at me, openmouthed. “I feel awful,” I conclude. “Apart from the hotel staff, it looks like Henry and I were just about the last people to see Stella Fogler alive.”
“The police say how she died?”
I shake my head. “They were pretty vague. But the way they were quizzing me, it sounded like some kind of robbery. I’ll probably have to go and give evidence in court.”
Just for an instant, unbidden, the scene starts to unfold in my head:
INT. NEW YORK COURTROOM—DAY
CLAIRE WRIGHT takes the stand, dressed like Vera M
iles in The Wrong Man—cool, aloof, but visibly nervous.
PROSECUTOR
Ms. Wright, thank you for coming today. Your evidence will be crucial to the outcome of this trial—
“Did you say Fogler?” Jesse interrupts.
“Yes. Why?”
“There was something on the news—” She thumbs the remote, uses it to point at the TV. “There.”
On the screen Patrick Fogler, his handsome features dark with fatigue, is standing outside an apartment building, speaking to a battery of microphones. Flashes strobe his face.
“That’s him,” I say. “Turn it up.”
As the volume increases we hear him say: “…grateful for any assistance, any assistance at all, that can be given to the NYPD.” He stops, and the barrage of flashes redoubles. Someone from the back shouts, “How was your relationship with your wife?”
“Press ambush,” Jess says significantly. “You know what that means, don’t you?”
“That he’s talking to the press?”
“No, dumb-ass. The police think he did it.” She sighs at my incomprehension. “When the police know who did it, but a lawyer’s stopping them from asking any really tough questions, they tip off the papers so the journalists can ask the questions for them. Next time you see him, he’ll be in handcuffs.”
I flash back to the meeting with Stella, those odd things she’d said.
STELLA
You will be careful, won’t you? Promise me you’ll be careful.
ME
Why don’t you tell me about your husband, Mrs. Fogler?
STELLA
He’s like no man you’ve ever met. I mean it. Don’t turn your back on him. Don’t trust him. Do you promise?
I thought she’d meant her husband was a groper. That was before I’d met him, of course—no one could be less gropey than Patrick Fogler. But had she really meant something totally different?
Was it him she’d been frightened of? Or at any rate, was that how Detective Durban had read the scene, when I’d described it to him?
I look at the TV again, at Patrick Fogler—so calm, so intelligent, so likable—and think how impossible that is.
“Not him,” I say, shaking my head. “I don’t believe it. He was the one who didn’t hit on me, remember. A genuinely nice, attractive, faithful guy.”
“Don’t give me that crap,” Jess says lightly, toweling her hair. “There’s no such thing—that’s what you always say, isn’t it?”
14
The murder makes the front pages. From there it gets picked up by bloggers and commentators, each with a different theory about what happened. The first angle they pursue is that it was a robbery gone wrong. A few years back, an armed gang targeted upmarket suites in Midtown hotels, holding guests up at gunpoint. But the members of that gang are all serving prison sentences, and there haven’t been any hotel holdups in Manhattan since. Even so, there’s a whole thing on social media about what this might mean for tourism. Visitors are being advised to open their hotel room doors on chains.
Pretty soon the attention switches to Stella herself. What was a woman who lived across town, in Morningside Heights, doing in a hotel only a short distance away? There are two theories: one, that she’d quarreled with her husband, and two, that she was waiting for a lover. There are also rumors that a large amount of cash was stolen from her suite, which the police refuse to confirm or deny.
The maid who found the body, Consuela Alvarez, told a reporter the room looked like there’d been some kind of struggle. Stella’s body had been left on the bed, a sheet pulled over it, she said. Weeping, Consuela described the head as “smashed in—terrible—so much blood.”
The hotel’s CCTV showed nothing of any use, apparently.
Gradually, the two theories start to merge together. Stella was waiting for a lover, and she was estranged from her husband too. That was why he’d killed her, was the implication.
Of course, I know that can’t be right. Stella was only staying in that hotel so I could make my move on Patrick. And whatever problems the two of them were having, he wasn’t prepared to be unfaithful, which suggested that he, at least, believed they could be resolved. But the police know that too. I keep waiting for them to close the speculation down by telling the journalists about me, but for some reason they don’t. Nor do they come back to ask me more questions.
I tell a few friends I was with Stella Fogler that night, but only a few. The last thing I want is for my freelance activities to be splashed across some blog. In any case, I can’t satisfy my friends’ appetite for the grisly details, because I don’t know any. I’m as much in the dark as anyone.
* * *
—
When I haven’t heard anything from the police after two weeks, I call Henry.
“Claire,” he answers. A statement rather than a question. As if he’s surprised to hear from me.
“Can we meet? There’s something I want to ask you about.”
A pause, then, “Okay. But not at the office.” He names a hotel where we did a couple of assignments.
* * *
—
When I get there he’s already sitting at the bar, down at the end where the bartender won’t overhear us. I go and join him.
“I thought you might have heard something,” I say. “About the investigation, I mean.”
“All I’m hearing is, they’re getting nowhere.” He shrugs. “But they no longer think robbery was the real motive. Apparently there are details that point to the husband.”
“What kind of details?” I say, surprised at this confirmation that Jess might have been right.
“They’re not saying. That’s pretty standard. So they can spring them suddenly if they need to, in an interview. But the word frenzied has been used.” He looks at me sideways. “They give you a hard time?”
I nod. “You?”
“Nothing I haven’t done to others. Just doing their job.”
“Henry…Is there any chance I can do some more work for you? My situation’s getting pretty desperate.”
“No way,” he says. “The firm was lucky not to get slammed with a fine for using an undocumented worker. If I wasn’t an ex-cop, I don’t think they’d have cut us the slack they did.” He hesitates. “Fact is, Claire, we were about to ditch you anyway.”
“Because I didn’t have the right papers?”
He shakes his head. “We’d had a complaint. A lawyer. Guy called Rick. Remember him?”
I remember him. For that you get quite a lot in Seattle. When I’d shown the tape to his wife, her eyes had blazed with anger through her tears.
“He dropped an affidavit on us a couple of days after the assignment,” Henry’s saying. “Claimed that after you met him in the bar, you’d gone up to his hotel room, had sex, took the thousand dollars you’d negotiated as your fee, and only then shopped him to his wife. Which, of course, would make you guilty of a criminal offense, and us accomplices. It would also make the video inadmissible in his wife’s divorce suit.”
“He’s lying,” I say furiously. “Just look at the tape.”
Henry says steadily, “We did. The video ends with you telling him to go ahead, you’ll meet him in his room. Then you turned the camera off. Rick provided a full timeline, Claire, as well as bar receipts and room key information. You were in that hotel for what—two hours? Plenty of time for his story to stack up.”
“The video ends because I had what I needed,” I insist. “And the reason it took two hours was because I waited an hour for him to leave his table. Jesus, Henry, what is this? You know that was how I worked.”
“I knew you liked to get into your part. I never asked too many questions about that. So long as we got what we needed.”
“I never did that,” I say flatly. “He was a creep, for Christ’s sake. A
scumbag. And a lawyer. He knew exactly what lies to tell to get that video excluded from his wife’s deposition.”
“I’m not saying you did what he said, Claire. I’m just saying we’d have had a hard time disproving it. And anything you did for us after that was going to be tainted, from an evidence point of view. So I’d been told by management to find someone else. If you hadn’t called saying you needed rent money, I’d never have let you do Stella Fogler. It was one last gig for old times’ sake.”
I could almost cry at the unfairness of it all. “Okay. So I can’t work for your firm. There must be some other way—”
Henry shakes his head. “Don’t even go there. Listen, you’re a great girl and I’ve enjoyed working with you. I really hope our paths cross again. But this particular show is over.” He waves at the bartender. “I’ll get the tab, okay?”
15
Time passes. Three months, maybe more.
For a while the Lexington Hotel murder remains a sensation, pontificated on by bloggers, speculated about in bars and offices. Then a soap star is photographed in a swingers’ club, the Lincoln Tunnel is closed for repairs, and the president sends more American troops to the Middle East.
People move on.
Jess’s dad gives me a little leeway on the rent. But without the law firm’s work, I still end up having to do some of the things I told myself I’d never do. Things I don’t like to think about and no one else knows about.
Anything to keep acting.
16
The room is filled with sunshine. We’re lying on the floor, staring up at the ceiling. Eight of us, in a starfish pattern, our heads almost touching.
“This is a very old improv game,” Paul’s voice says, off to my left. “It’s called The Story Tells Itself. We’re going to beat a rhythm on the floor. And each time we make a beat, we’re going to take turns adding one word to the story.”