WIN

by Coben, Harlan

  But it’s not really who I am.

  CHAPTER 35

  The sound of tires crunching on the gravel awakens me.

  I’d fallen asleep on the couch, which is a surprise. Exhaustion alas trumped keyed-up. I wouldn’t have guessed. I am still lying on the couch when the front door opens and Cousin Patricia walks in carrying a bag of groceries.

  The first thing she sees is me on the couch.

  “Win? What the hell?”

  I stretch and check my watch. It’s 7:15 p.m.

  “How did you get in? I locked the doors and set the alarm.”

  “Oh yes,” I say with all the droll I can muster. “It’s really impossible for me to get past a Medeco lock and an ADT alarm system.”

  When Patricia looks past me, when her gaze reaches the dining room table, she stumbles a step back. I wait. She doesn’t speak. She just stares. I slowly stand, still stretching.

  “Cat got your tongue, Cousin?” I ask.

  “You broke into my home.”

  “Nice deflection,” I say. “But if we must go there, yes.” Then I point to the dining room table and mimicking her voice, I add, “You stole my Picasso.”

  It’s not my Picasso, of course. But I liked the repetitiveness of the phrasing.

  “I expected a more arduous search for it,” I tell her. “I can’t believe you just hung it in your bedroom.”

  Cousin Patricia gives a small shrug. “I don’t let anyone go in there.”

  “And that’s where it’s been this whole time?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Ballsy,” I say.

  She shrugs. “Not really. If anyone asked, I would say it was a replica.”

  I nod. “People would buy that.”

  She starts toward the dining room table. “Why did you screw off the back?”

  “You know why,” I reply. “What did you do with the negatives?”

  “How do you know about them?”

  “Our art authenticator found a set in the back of the Vermeer. The negatives were square shaped—six centimeters by six—unusual by today’s standards. It didn’t take long to realize that they were very likely to have come from an old camera”—I glance at the shelf—“like your father’s Rolleiflex. Anyway, I figured that if your father had hidden some in the Vermeer, maybe he also hid some in the family’s only other masterpiece—the Picasso.”

  Patricia stands over the painting now. “So you checked?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you didn’t find anything.”

  I sigh. “Do we have to play this game, dear Cousin? Yes, the negatives are gone. You removed them. I did, however, notice a certain stickiness on the stretcher—from Scotch tape perhaps. In the Vermeer, the negatives were taped to the stretcher. It would stand to reason that the same applies to the Picasso.”

  She closes her eyes and tilts her head back. I see her swallow and I wonder whether tears will follow. This is probably a time to offer a word or two of comfort, but I don’t think that will play here.

  “Can we skip the denials, Patricia?”

  Her eyes blink open. “So what do you want, Win?”

  “You could tell me what really happened.”

  “The whole story?” She shakes her head. “I wouldn’t know where to start.”

  “Perhaps,” I say, “with your father befriending Ry Strauss in New York City.”

  “You know about that?”

  “I do. I also know about the Jane Street Six.”

  “Wow,” she says. “I’m impressed.”

  I wait.

  “This is years after that night though,” she continues. “He would visit us from New York City. Ry, I mean. Dad introduced him as Uncle Ryker. He said Uncle Ryker was CIA, so I couldn’t tell anyone about him. I think I first met him when I was fifteen. He took an interest in me, but, I mean, yes, he was very good-looking and almost supernaturally charismatic. But I was fifteen. Nothing happened. It was never like that. I realized later that Ry was periodically coming to my father for money or a place to crash…”

  She stops and shakes her head. “I don’t know where to go with this.”

  “Jump ahead,” I tell her.

  “To?”

  “To when you and Ry Strauss decided to steal the paintings.”

  Patricia almost smiles at that. “Okay, why not? So this is after Ashley Wright. Your father had already thrown my father out of the family, but my dad would still sneak into Lockwood to see Grandmama. She was, after all, his mother. She could never say no to him. One day, my father comes back furious and frantic because the family—your father—had agreed to loan the two paintings to Haverford for an upcoming exhibit. I couldn’t figure out why he was so angry about this. When I asked him, he started ranting about how your father had cut him off and taken what was rightfully his. A lie, of course. I’m now sure it was about the negatives. Anyway, I was a senior in high school. We were in this small house while you all lived it up in the grand Lockwood Manor. I was looked down upon at school, the subject of whispers and innuendo. You know how it was. A few days later, Uncle Ryker came to visit again. I’ll be honest. I wanted him. I really did. I think we would have, but once he heard me talk about the paintings, he hatched the plan.” She looks up at me, baffled. “How did you figure it out?”

  “Ian Cornwell.”

  “Ah. Poor sweet Ian.”

  “You seduced him,” I say. “Slept with him to gain his trust.”

  “Don’t be a sexist, Win. If you were eighteen and needed to sleep with a female guard to pull off a heist, you wouldn’t have given it a second thought.”

  “Fair point,” I agree. “More than fair, actually. I assume that Ry Strauss was the man with the ski mask.”

  “Yes.”

  “He saw you once years later. Ian Cornwell, I mean. You were on The Today Show promoting the Abeona Shelter.”

  “I had long hair when I was with him,” she says. “Dyed it blonde for those three months. After the robbery, I cut it and never let it grow back again.”

  “Cornwell claims that he still wasn’t certain you were his Belinda—but even if he was, what could he prove?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And you didn’t tell Aldrich about the robbery?”

  “No. By then, I knew Ryker was really Ry Strauss. He confided in me. We grew close. We even got the tattoos together.”

  She turns to the side and pulls down on the back of her top, revealing a tattoo—the same Tisiphone abeona butterfly that I’d seen on the photographs of Ry Strauss’s corpse.

  “What’s the significance of that butterfly?” I ask.

  “Beats me. That was all Ry. He ranted about the goddess Abeona, of rescuing the young, I don’t know. Ry was always full of such passion. When you’re young, you don’t realize how thin the line is between colorful and crazy. But the planning and execution of the heist was”—her face breaks into a wide grin—“it was such a high, Win. Think about it. We got away with stealing two masterpieces. It was the best thing I’d ever done in my life.”

  “Until,” I say, arching an eyebrow for effect, “it turned into the worst.”

  “You’re such a drama queen sometimes, Win.”

  “Again: Fair. When did you find the negatives?”

  “Six, seven months later. I dropped the Picasso in the basement, believe it or not. The back of the frame broke. When I tried to fix it…”

  “You found them,” I finish for her.

  Patricia nods slowly.

  When I ask my next question, I hear the catch in my throat. “Did you shoot Aldrich or did Aline?”

  “I did,” she says. “My mother wasn’t home. That part was true. I sent her out. I wanted to confront him alone. I still hoped for an explanation. But he just snapped. I had never seen him like that. It was like…I had a friend with a really bad drinking problem. It wasn’t just that she would fly into a rage—it was that she would look straight at me and not know who I was.”

  “And that’s what ha
ppened with your father?”

  She nods, but her voice is oddly calm. “He slapped me across the face. He punched me in the nose and ribs. He grabbed the negatives and threw them in the fireplace.”

  “The broken bones,” I say. “Those were the old injuries the police found on you.”

  “I begged him to stop. But it was like he didn’t see me. He didn’t deny it. Said he did all this and worse. And I mean, those negatives, the images on them…”

  “You now knew what he was capable of,” I say.

  “I ran into his bedroom.” Her eyes are far away now. “He kept the gun in his night table drawer.”

  She stops and looks at me. I help her out.

  “You shot him.”

  “I shot him,” she repeats. “I couldn’t move. I just stood over his body. I didn’t know what to do. I just felt, I don’t know, confused. Unmoored. I knew I couldn’t go to the police. They’d figure out I stole the paintings. They’d learn about Ry for sure—he would go to prison for life. The negatives were ashes in the fire, so where was my proof? I also thought—I know this will sound weird—but I worried about the family too. The Lockwood name, even after we’d been kicked to the curb. I guess it’s ingrained in us, isn’t it?”

  “It is,” I agree. “You said my father came to see yours the night before he was murdered. That wasn’t true.”

  “I was just trying to throw smoke at you. I’m sorry.”

  “And the part about two assailants kidnapping you?”

  “Made it up. Same with that story about the kidnappers giving me hope and letting me think I was being let go. Some of the rape and abuse stories I told came straight off those negatives, but none of that happened to me.”

  “You just wanted to muddy the investigation.”

  “Yes.”

  I want to get her back to her story: “So you’d just shot your father and you felt confused. What happened next?”

  “I was in shock, I guess. My mother came home. When she saw what happened, she totally freaked out too. Started ranting in Portuguese. She said the police would lock me away forever. She told me to run and hide somewhere, that she would call 911 and say she found my father dead. Blame it on intruders. I just reacted. I grabbed my suitcase—well, your suitcase—and I packed it and I ran.”

  “I’m guessing,” I say, “that you ran to Ry Strauss?”

  “I knew he lived at the Beresford. I was the only one he trusted with that, I think. I don’t know. But when I got there, Ry was in bad shape. Mentally, I mean. He was hoarding. He hadn’t shaved or even showered. The place was disgusting. I woke up the second night, and Ry had a knife against my throat. He thought some guy named Staunch had sent me.”

  “You left.”

  “In a hurry. I didn’t think twice about the suitcase.”

  I can’t help but note that in both cases—the murder of my uncle and the theft of my family’s paintings—the investigators’ first instincts had been correct. With the art heist, they suspected some involvement on the part of Ian Cornwell. That was correct. In the case of Uncle Aldrich’s murder, one of the first theories was that Cousin Patricia had shot her own father, packed a suitcase, and then she’d run away.

  That too had been correct.

  “This is going to sound crazy,” she says, her voice barely a whisper, “but I was with my dad when he bought that shed at a hardware store. We drove up not far from the site, and he dropped it off.” She looks at me, and I feel the temperature in the room drop ten degrees. “I was in the car, Win. Think about that. I look back now, and I wonder if one of the girls was tied up in the trunk. How messed up is that?”

  “Very,” I say.

  “I don’t know what was on your negatives, but there were some outdoor shots, so I had some idea of where the shed might be. When I was ten or eleven, Dad used to take me camping up there.”

  “How long did it take you to find it?”

  “The shed? Nearly a month. That’s how well he hid it. I must have walked by it ten times.”

  “Did you ever actually stay in the shed?”

  “Just that last night. Before I faked my escape.”

  “I see,” I say, because I don’t. Something isn’t adding up. “And you came up with this plan?”

  Patricia’s eyes narrow. “What do you mean?”

  “You’re eighteen years old. You shot and killed your own father. It was clearly traumatic. So traumatic, in fact, you still keep his photographs on the wall.” I point behind her. “You made your father a big part of your story. Aldrich was, you claim, what inspired your good works.”

  “That’s not a lie,” she counters. “What I did…my dad…it haunted me. He was my father. He loved me, and I loved him. That’s the truth.” She moves close to me. “Win, I committed patricide. It shaped everything else in my life.”

  “Which brings me back to my point.”

  “Which is?”

  “You, a confused eighteen-year-old girl, came up with the idea of pretending to be a victim. Because if that’s true, kudos. It was brilliant. I bought it completely. I never for a moment questioned it. You were able to bring closure to those girls’ families. You were able to ‘expose,’ if you will, the Hut of Horrors, but not your own father. You gained attention and used it to launch the Abeona Shelter. To do good. To try to make up for what your father had done. I’m amazed you thought of it on your own.”

  We stare at one another.

  “But I’m guessing,” I say, “that you didn’t think of it on your own, did you?”

  She says nothing.

  “You were on the run. Your one ally, Ry Strauss, is crazy. You couldn’t call your mother. You probably didn’t count on the police suspecting her too—but now they had eyes on her.” I steeple my fingers. “I’m putting myself in your place—trapped, alone, young, confused. Who would I call for help?”

  Her weight shifts from one foot to the other. She doesn’t say it, so I do.

  “Grandmama.”

  Three reasons why this made sense to me. One, she loved Cousin Patricia. Two, she had the resources to hide her. Three, Grandmama would do anything to protect the family from the scandal this revelation would bring forth.

  Cousin Patricia nods. “Grandmama.”

  Before you judge, it isn’t just a Lockwood thing. Families protect their own. That’s what we do. And not just families. In a sense, we all circle the wagons, don’t we? We use the excuse about the “greater good.” Churches cover up their clergy’s crimes and hide them in new locations. Charitable organizations and ruthless businesses are all adept in the art of covering up indiscretions, at self-protection, at rationalizing with some configuration of the ends justifying the means.

  Why would it surprise anyone that a family would do the same?

  From the time he was young, my uncle Aldrich committed bad acts and never paid a price. He never got help, though to be fair, you can’t really help someone like that.

  You can only put them down.

  “So what next, Win?”

  How did I put it before? There is no bond like blood, but there is no compound as volatile either. I think about that common blood coursing through both of us. Do I have some of what Uncle Aldrich had? Is that what makes me prone to violence? Does Patricia? Is it genetic? Did Uncle Aldrich just have a damaged chromosome or chemical imbalance or could some kind of major therapy have helped?

  I don’t know and I don’t much care.

  I have all the answers now. I’m just not sure what to do with them.

  CHAPTER 36

  Life is lived in the grays.

  That is a problem for most people. It is so much easier to see the world in black and white. Someone is all good or all bad. I try sometimes to glance online, at Twitter or social media—at the outrage real, imagined, and faux. Extremism and outrage are simple, relentless, attention-seeking. Rationality and prudence are difficult, exhausting, mundane.

  Occam’s razor works in reverse when it comes to answers: If the answer
is easy, it is wrong.

  I warn you now. You’ll disagree with some of the choices I make. Don’t fret about it. I don’t know whether I made the right ones either. If I was certain, per my personal axiom, I would probably be wrong.

  * * *

  When I arrive back at the Dakota, PT is waiting for me. I bring him up to my apartment. I pour us both cognac in snifters.

  “Arlo Sugarman is dead,” I tell him.

  PT is my friend. I don’t really believe in mentors, but if I did, PT would be one. He has been good to me. He has been fair.

  “You’re sure?” he asks.

  “I had my people call the crematorium that works with St. Timothy’s to look into their records for on and around June 15, 2011. They also looked into death certificates for the Greater St. Louis area for that date.”

  PT sits back in the leather wing chair. “Damn.”

  I wait.

  He shakes his head. “I wanted him, Win. I wanted to bring him to justice.”

  “I know.”

  PT raises the cognac. “To Patrick O’Malley.”

  “To Patrick,” I say.

  We clink glasses. PT collapses back into the chair.

  “I really wanted to right that wrong,” he says.

  With the glass near my lips, I add, “If you did anything wrong.”

  PT makes a face. “What does that mean?”

  “You were the junior agent,” I say.

  “So?”

  “So those were his calls, weren’t they?”

  PT carefully puts down his glass on the coaster. He watches me. “What calls?”

  “To not wait for backup,” I say. “To go in through the back door on his own.”

  “What are you trying to say, Win?”

  “You blame yourself. You’ve blamed yourself for almost fifty years.”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  I shrug. “Who called that tip in?” I ask him.

  “It was anonymous.”

  “Who told you that?” I ask. “Never mind, it’s not important. You both drove to the house, but when you got there, Special Agent O’Malley made the decision not to wait for backup.”