The Night in Question

by Nic Joseph

  PUHL: She says you approached her.

  WILESON: That’s not true.

  PUHL: What did you talk about?

  WILESON: I promise, I wasn’t up to anything. I just wanted to meet her. And then I went back a few days later, and she asked me to come to the dinner party to learn more about the clothing line. I wasn’t going to go.

  PUHL: Had you already corresponded with Ryan Hooks by then?

  (Inaudible)

  PUHL: Louder, please.

  WILESON: Yes, I had.

  PUHL: What about?

  WILESON: I asked him for money.

  PUHL: Money in exchange for what?

  WILESON: I’m sorry. I asked him for money in exchange for the cell phone. And for me not to say anything about what I saw that night. I saw him going into 115 to meet up with who I thought was Emma Bentley.

  PUHL: You thought?

  WILESON: I thought so, yes. And he let me think that, because he realized I didn’t know the entire truth. But it wasn’t Emma who he was having an affair with. It was Beverly Brighton. She worked at the law firm that’s been representing him. I guess that’s how they met.

  PUHL: And how do you know this?

  WILESON: Because I saw them. I saw them in the kitchen that night. I thought it was Emma, but when I saw her face in Bolton’s apartment, it struck me. She wasn’t the woman I saw Hooks with that night. It was Beverly.

  PUHL: In Emma Bentley’s apartment?

  WILESON: Yes.

  (Inaudible—13 seconds)

  PUHL: Okay, let’s back up. So at first, you thought Ryan Hooks was having an affair with Emma. Tell us what you did then.

  WILESON: I sent him a tweet, and then he called me, and we arranged to trade the phone for the money.

  PUHL: You do know that’s illegal.

  WILESON: Yes, I do, but I don’t have it anymore.

  PUHL: The money?

  WILESON: The day he broke in, he took it back. I can’t prove it, but I know it was him. He’s a violent man. That’s what I’ve learned over the past week. But he didn’t kill Beverly Brighton.

  PUHL: What do you think happened, Mrs. Wileson?

  WILESON: Actually, it’s not about what I think. Emma Bentley did it. She admitted it to me at Reg Bolton’s, right before she smashed the laptop. She killed her because all this time, she’s been seeing… (Inaudible)

  PUHL: What? I need you to speak up.

  WILESON: (Difficult to hear) The man she’s been seeing. It was Andrew Brighton all along.

  Chapter 34

  Claire

  Five days after

  Claire and Greg stepped out of the interrogation room where they’d been talking to Paula Wileson and walked over to their desks. Greg flopped down in his chair and crossed his arms in front of his chest, stretching as he leaned his head far back.

  “Can you believe this shit?” he asked as he sat up straight. “Talk about a case of she-said, she-said. Where’s Reg Bolton’s nanny cam when you really need it?”

  Claire didn’t say anything. She paced back and forth in front of her desk; she was too on edge to sit down. After a moment, she leaned forward and placed her hands on the mound of file folders that she was accumulating for the Brighton case.

  It all meant nothing.

  The killer was sitting right there in one of those two interrogation rooms, and she didn’t know who it was.

  What was she missing?

  As if she’d spoken out loud, Greg echoed her thoughts. “I can’t believe one of them is just sitting there, lying to our faces,” he said. “This isn’t some kind of huge mix-up. They are both saying the other one confessed, which means one of them is full-blown lying.”

  Claire still didn’t respond. She looked up at the two-way mirrors of the rooms where the two women still sat. The women couldn’t see them, but Claire could watch their every move.

  There had to be something she was missing.

  The women couldn’t be any more different. Emma Bentley was perfectly still, her hands folded in front of her on the table. She looked as if she’d stopped breathing, so motionless was her body, and she gazed out into the precinct as if she could see. Emma had spoken plainly and confidently during her interview, and it was hard not to believe her when Wileson had already admitted to lying about so much.

  But there was something about Paula Wileson, something Claire couldn’t put her finger on, that made her believable. She was a ball of nerves; she was trying to hide it, but she could barely get her words out, fumbling over sentences, mumbling her answers. She seemed desperate for Claire and Greg to believe her, which could be a sign of guilt or a sign that she truly had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  “So, what do you think?” Greg asked. “I’m torn, but if I had to go one way, it would be the Wileson woman. She’s too jumpy, too nervous, and she’s admitted that she’s been lurking around that apartment for the last week. Using different names, showing up unannounced, sneaking around. There’s obviously something not quite right about her. And look at her. She can barely sit still in her seat.”

  “Would you be able to sit still if you were being accused of a murder you didn’t commit?”

  “So, you think it’s Bentley?”

  Claire pursed her lips and continued to watch the two women through the glass. “I don’t know.”

  She went over the statements that both women had made.

  The blackmail.

  The affairs.

  The dinner party.

  The video.

  The video.

  Claire slumped down in her chair and put her head in her hands.

  “Of course,” she said out loud.

  “What’s going on?” Greg asked.

  She lifted her head and looked at him with a small smile. “I know how to figure out who’s lying. I have an idea, but it’s going to take a lot of convincing to get the help we need.”

  • • •

  Claire’s grandfather had always said that it was easy to tell who your real friends were when the shit hit the fan. “They’re the ones that have to scrape shit off their face,” he’d say seriously, much to Claire’s mother’s dismay.

  “Dad, do you have to?” her mother would say as Claire and her grandfather collapsed in a heap of giggles.

  When the shit hit the fan, Andrew Brighton went—no, he ran—the other way.

  It had started with convincing Reg Bolton to tell a little white lie in exchange for extra surveillance of the dog park for violations.

  “We can arrange that,” Claire had said. “If you do what we ask.”

  “So, you want me to come back to the station and pretend that I have another copy of the video in front of each of the ridiculous women who destroyed my laptop earlier today,” he asked.

  “Yes,” Claire said through gritted teeth, ignoring how happy he seemed to throw the words ridiculous and women together. “It would be a great help to the case.”

  Reg had reluctantly agreed, and he’d returned to the station where they handed him a jump drive.

  He’d been shepherded past both rooms with the doors slightly ajar. Then Claire had gone in and said the same thing to both suspects.

  “Good news. Mr. Bolton came in and dropped off a backup drive of the recordings,” she’d said, holding up the jump drive that she’d fished out of the back of her desk drawer. “We’ll be able to back up your story after all.”

  Emma Bentley’s reaction had been immediate.

  She’d launched her body across the table in a frantic, desperate attempt to take it.

  It was all the proof Claire needed.

  When Andrew Brighton heard what happened, he’d jumped at the opportunity to share his side of the story. He’d signed, sealed, and licked the stamp on his statement before he even had a chance to face
Emma. He’d told them every sordid detail of their affair.

  “She wanted me to leave Beverly, but I wouldn’t do that to our families,” he said. “Bev didn’t want that either. We both had our…arrangements, but we’d decided to make it work. At the same time, I do care for Emma, a lot. That’s why I helped her.”

  “What did you do?”

  He swallowed. “I heard a noise outside the apartment and stepped out, and that’s when I saw Emma standing there over Bev’s body, holding the statue. I think she was in shock. There was blood splattered on her clothes. She told me that she’d woken up in her apartment to find the door open and that Ryan Hooks and Bev came back a moment later. They told her that they were helping the artist, the drunk lady, into a car to get her home. Hooks left, and Emma said she followed Bev upstairs, just to get her to talk. Said she asked my wife why she wasn’t pushing for a divorce, especially since she was seeing Hooks.”

  “Why did you help her?”

  “I was panicking,” he said. “I know it wasn’t the right thing to do. I told her to run all the way downstairs to the first floor and leave a trail of blood so it would look like the intruder left. Then she came back upstairs and took her clothes off. Right there at the top of the steps. I gave her a garbage bag to put them in. I wanted her to track the blood through the building but not into her apartment. After she went back home, I carried all her things through my apartment and took them out the back. I ditched them down the block. I left the gate propped open and went back up that way to get into my apartment. Emma and I both had a couple more drinks until we crashed.”

  “Did you break the glass on the way in?”

  He hung his head. “Yes,” he said, and he broke down and began to sob. “Like I said, I was panicking. I just wanted to help Emma. I don’t love my wife anymore, but I didn’t kill her. Do you believe me?”

  Claire sighed. “Yeah,” she said. “I do.”

  Chapter 35

  Paula

  Five days after

  I walked out of the station around 2:00 p.m.

  It was jarring to leave such a dark, depressing place and instantly be surrounded by so much…normality. All around me, people buzzed by carrying Starbucks cups and shopping bags as they enjoyed the warm August day without any thought of the darkness that lay just behind the glass doors of the 18th District Police Station.

  Why should they know?

  Why should they care?

  A woman walked by me with her hands full of Macy’s bags, her head angled to one side as she cradled her phone between her ear and her shoulder.

  “I told you I left my headset at home, babe! No, I’m not going to just hold it. I’ll talk to you later…”

  Behind her, a family of four, presumably tourists, ambled by, their phones lifted in the air as they took photos of everything around them.

  It was all so normal, so nice.

  And so painfully oblivious.

  It made me wonder how many times I’d walked or driven by this same building, lost in my own world, while somebody else’s world was ending just out of sight.

  Or, better yet, how many times had I laughed joyously in my own home while someone else sobbed a few doors down?

  I’d seen Emma’s face, just before I left, through the glass window of the interrogation room where she was still sitting. She was staring straight ahead, her gaze fixed on something or someone else in the room that I couldn’t see. Her mouth was slightly open, and her skin was flushed, and she just sat there…transfixed. There were no traces of the woman I’d first seen just a week and a half earlier, standing proudly and confidently in her window. That woman was gone.

  And I had to wonder. Had she ever been there?

  Or was that just the woman I wanted to see?

  I’d tried to tell the detectives everything, but the words and the stories had been jumbled in my head. I described my first meeting with Emma that day in the park—how she’d frozen up not, as I thought, because I’d mentioned the Ryan Hooks concert, but because Andrew had been there and he kept mentioning his wife. I explained that Emma had told me the truth right before she’d grabbed the laptop out of my hands and smashed it to the floor. That she’d opened up to me, with fury in her eyes, about her best friend Bev who seemed to have it all.

  “She doesn’t love him, you know,” she’d said. “And she wouldn’t let him go. She had Ryan Hooks hovering around all night, coming, leaving, coming back. Ryan Hooks! And she still couldn’t let go of Andrew. I begged her. I said, ‘Marie, you know how I feel about him,’ but she was just so damned stubborn, so committed to this perfect image, she wouldn’t dare get a divorce, and she’d sucked him into believing the same thing.”

  I’d frozen. “Wait. Marie?”

  “Oh, only close friends and family called her that,” Emma said. “It’s her middle name.”

  Of course.

  M.

  Detective Puhl had made a point of saying she was letting me go, for now.

  “We’ll be monitoring your accounts,” she’d said sternly, and I nodded. She seemed to believe that Hooks truly had taken the money back the night he broke in—but I understood why they had to check.

  “No problem,” I said. “Monitor anything you like. There won’t be anything to find.”

  She stared at me for a moment. “And I’m assuming you’re not going to press charges for the break-in, given…”

  “No,” I said quietly, measuring each word. “I don’t have any real proof it was him, and…after everything else…”

  Detective Puhl sighed. “I’ll talk to him too. It’s not just about giving the money back. He’ll have the right to press charges too, though I have a feeling he won’t as a matter of discretion. All that to say, don’t be hard to get ahold of if I need to talk to you.”

  It wasn’t the first time she’d told me that in the past week, and I nodded.

  I began to walk, nowhere in particular, the sun bearing down on my face and warming my neck. At some point, I began to head east, toward Lake Michigan, and I walked until my breathing became labored and my back was drenched in sweat. It took me about twenty minutes to reach the pedestrian tunnel at Division Street that took me under Lake Shore Drive and out to the lakefront path.

  In the middle of the warm August day, it was covered with cyclists, runners, and toned women with high ponytails jogging behind expensive strollers. I waited for a break in the action and stepped onto the paved path.

  Then I started to run.

  I was already hot, tired, and sweaty, and I was far from dressed for it—I was still wearing the pair of jeans and simple flat shoes that I’d slipped on that morning. But I ran anyway. I ran because I had to, because my body craved it, and because my mind needed it. I could feel the sweat building under my arms, above my upper lip, and behind my kneecaps, but I pushed on anyway. I ran as fast as I could, the hot wind blowing into my face, the dust stinging my eyes. I felt my blood pumping through my body, heard it rushing in my ears, and I pushed some more.

  I caught a few glances from people around me: other runners in their spandex athletic gear and proper running shoes; people dressed like me who were walking at a more appropriate pace. But I ignored them and pressed ahead, feeling addicted to the miserable, itchy feeling that was taking over my body as my blood vessels expanded and contracted.

  I was a good person.

  It wasn’t something I’d ever questioned before, not really, not even during the past week. I’d seen what illness had done to my parents, and I’d wanted to avoid it by any means necessary.

  But as I’d sat a room away from Emma and stared at a cop who seemed to very much put us in the same category, I couldn’t help but wonder:

  Did Emma Bentley think that she was a good person too?

  It was a question that had bothered me from the moment I’d sat down, through the interrogation and my fi
nal conversation with Detective Puhl. If Emma came out of this thinking she was, deep down, a good person, she may be a bit more delusional than me.

  But how much more?

  I was panting heavily now, but I kept running, farther and farther and farther until I felt a pain in my side and my entire body cramped up. I veered off the path and raced toward a tree, placing my hand on the craggy bark as I leaned forward to gulp in the thick, hot air. My stomach turned over, and I thought I’d be sick, so I slumped down to the ground and waited a few beats.

  “Hey, you okay?” a woman in a purple short set with a tennis racket asked, jogging over to me, but I put my hand up and nodded.

  “I’m good,” I managed to get out, and she jogged away. The nausea was subsiding, and I took a few deep breaths.

  I was still a good person.

  Emma had murdered someone in a jealous rage, for goodness’ sake. I’d blackmailed someone for money, someone who (a) was not a nice person and (b) probably spent $180,000 a year on garage space for his cars.

  I pulled myself up and then stumbled across the two-lane path, navigating around a pair of men jogging with no shirts and a biker who was bent forward as she barreled toward me.

  “On your right!” she yelled, and I moved quickly out of the way.

  I was breathing heavily as I walked away from the path and toward the street before fishing my phone out of my pocket and calling a DAC.

  When I got home, I walked through the door, and the first thing I saw was Shelby standing next to her bed, watching me. I don’t know if she could sense my despair, but she took a small step forward. It was all I needed. I rushed over and sank down on the floor in front of her, wrapping my arms around her neck and burying myself in her fur. She was stiff, only for a moment, then she relaxed against me, nuzzling the side of my face.

  I heard a noise and looked up as Keith appeared, rolling himself into the living room. I hadn’t let him come to the station with me; I’d needed to face it on my own. He looked at me expectantly, and I launched into a recap of the day. I told him everything that had happened—from the interrogation to Emma’s ultimate confession.