Red Cat

31

I was on hold for Mike Metz when Clare came through the door. She had a cell phone in her ear and newspapers under her arm.

“Yeah, Amy, Berkeley’s heaven on earth, you’ve been saying it for years. But it’s so crunchy granola, and besides, what would-” Amy, whoever Amy was, was saying something, and Clare put down her papers and slipped off her coat while she listened. She smiled at me and ran a hand through her hair, which rippled like a silk sheet. She pulled up the sleeves of her black turtleneck, and her arms were white and smooth. Mike Metz came on the line.

“You spoke to her?” he asked. He sounded slightly out of breath. I carried the phone into the bedroom, along with my notebook, and I told it all to Mike. When I was through, he had questions, and when I’d answered all of those he was quiet.

“So no one has an alibi for anything,” he said finally. “That’s great.”

“She’s not in bad shape for business hours; neither is David.”

“It’s not business hours I’m worried about. The ME is placing time of death somewhere between seven p.m. Tuesday and midnight Wednesday.”

“That’s new.”

“I just got off the phone with my friend. They’re basing it mostly on stomach contents. The cops found someone who claims to have seen Holly at a diner near her apartment at around five Tuesday afternoon.”

“Stomach content isn’t very precise.”

“Nope. So it would help if David and Stephanie could account for even some of that time period. Unfortunately, they can’t. Add to that Stephanie saying she wanted to kill Holly, and it’s almost more good news than I can handle.”

“I’m guessing you’ll counsel her against putting things quite that way when she talks to the cops.”

“Assuming she’ll take my advice.”

“She knows she has to,” I said. “And by the time I left, she seemed ready. She’s scared out of her mind- she and David both.”

“An entirely reasonable response, all things considered. We need to come up with a viable alternative soon- either that, or consider whether they need separate counsel.”

“Christ! What’re you going to do, hang one of them out to dry, to defend the other?”

“If it comes to a trial, we’ll be looking for reasonable doubt where we can find it.”

“There’s got to be a better place than with each other.”

Mike went silent, and I could almost hear him weighing something. After nearly a minute, he decided to say it. “Have you considered the possibility that the cops may be looking in the right place?”

“David? You’ve got to be kidding. Why the hell would he hire me, if he was planning something like that? Or keep me on the job afterward, if it wasn’t planned? It doesn’t make sense.”

“I’m not talking about David.”

It was my turn to be quiet. I thought of Stephanie, ashen, exhausted, and medicated in her chair, and I tried to picture it. But it was a stupid exercise, I knew: my ability to imagine her pulling a trigger had nothing to do with whether she actually could.

“Any word on Coyle?” I asked finally.

“I haven’t heard anything about him being picked up. And you- any word from the cops?”

“No one’s thrown me in a holding cell yet.”

“Are you headed up to Tarrytown again?”

“This evening. I want to see where Uncle Kenny was going with those doughnuts.”

Clare was off the phone when I came out of the bedroom, standing at the kitchen counter with the newspaper spread before her. Apartment listings.

“Shopping?”

“Getting the lay of the land, anyway. I don’t want to overstay my welcome, after all.”

I went into the kitchen and poured myself a seltzer. “I’m not complaining,” I said. “Who’s Amy?”

Clare smiled. “My sister- my big sister- who knows all there is to know about divorce, real estate, career planning, you name it. I try to listen politely, but it doesn’t always work out.”

“She lives out west?”

Clare turned and leaned against the counter. She crossed her arms beneath her breasts. “In the Bay Area,” she said. “How are things with your brother?”

I shook my head. “Not improving.”

“You’ve put in some long days on this- and nights.”

“Tonight will be another.”

“He must appreciate the effort.”

“He’s got other things on his mind,” I said. “And so far the effort hasn’t done much good.”

“I’m sorry,” Clare said. Her gray eyes held mine, and there was no irony in them. She put her hand on my cheek. I kissed her palm, and I thought again of Stephanie- her hands clutched together in her lap, her desperate fingers.

“Why did you stay?” I asked.

Clare’s brows knit. “Stay where?”

“With your husband. Why did you stay so long?” Clare’s face stiffened and her hand withdrew. I caught her wrist. “I’m not making trouble,” I said.

She pulled her hand free. “Yeah,” she said, “it’s just your great timing again.”

I stepped closer and took her around the waist. Clare brought her fists to my chest. “I just want to know,” I said softly.

She raised an eyebrow. “Mr. Curious,” she said, but her fists uncurled. She wriggled away and drank from my glass and looked at me over the rim. “Staying was easy,” she said. “It was the path of least resistance. He may be self-indulgent, and completely self-absorbed, but he’s not a mean bastard, not in the usual ways. As long as he could do his thing, and so long as I showed up on his arm when he wanted me there, he was happy to let me do mine.

“And the perks didn’t hurt, either- the real estate and the vacations and the rest. I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t thought twice about walking away from all of that. How does the song go? ‘Money changes everything.’ I didn’t have a lot of it growing up, and it definitely changes the calculus of leaving.”

“Still, you left.”

She drank some seltzer and put the glass down. “As far as I know, you only get this one life, and I wasn’t getting any younger. And it turned out I still had some ideas about marriage that I wasn’t ready to trade for another HermДs bag.” A crooked smile crossed her face. “Who knew I was so fucking noble?” she said, and she turned back to her newspaper.

I came up behind her and put my face into her hair. I slid a hand under her shirt and across her warm belly, and I slid my fingers down the waistband of her low-slung jeans. “There’s something about all that integrity…” I said softly.

She shuddered, and rolled her ass against me, and unbuttoned her jeans. “Mr. Curious,” she whispered, and she slid my hand lower.

I drove north with the first wave of rush hour. The sky was purple going to black, and the traffic was stop-and-go into Yonkers and again in Tarrytown as I made my way along Route 9. I parked three long blocks from Van Winkle Court and took a cold, roundabout walk to the condo complex. I kept my eyes open the whole way; if there were cops staked out, I didn’t spot them.

Hagen’s basement door was locked, and there were no lights on in the windows that I thought were his. I followed the path he’d taken the night before and went two buildings south and tried the basement door there. Locked. I circled the building and checked the basement windows. I saw an empty laundry room through one. The rest were dark, and one was painted black. Yellow light seeped through a crack in the frame. I went back to the basement door and looked over the Van Winkle Court footpaths. No one. I pulled a small pry bar from the pocket of my parka and slipped it in the door jamb. I barely leaned and the door popped open with a sound like a cough. I put the pry bar away and took out a flashlight.

Inside, I smelled damp cement and laundry soap. I listened for a moment and heard mechanical ticks and water in pipes and the rush of air in ductwork, but nothing else. There was a dark corridor ahead, and I walked in what I thought was the direction of the painted window. There was a fine grit on the concrete floor, and I tried to move quietly on it.

The hallway branched. To the right, light spilled from a wide doorway. The laundry room. To the left was darkness. I went left. I passed by a dented metal door, and the reek of rotted vegetables and dirty diapers. Garbage room. I kept going. At the end of the hall, opposite a small mountain of bundled newspaper and flattened cardboard boxes, there was another metal door. There was a lock in the knob, another, heftier one above it, and a seam of light at the sill. I leaned closer and, faintly, I smelled coffee. And cigarettes.

I took the pry bar from my pocket and found the darkest shadows I could beside a tall stack of newspaper. I held the pry bar high and let it drop. It made a shattering clang on the cement; I picked it up and waited.

Almost instantly, a shadow moved across the threshold. Adrenaline surged into my arms and legs, and my heart spun like a flywheel. And then, nothing…for what seemed a very long time. Sweat prickled on my chest and slid down my ribs, and the shadow shifted again. I heard a metallic scraping, and I held my breath. The seam of light slowly widened and spread up the doorframe, and I saw a sliver of crew-cut head, one blue eye and a pinch of nose. I got all my weight behind the kick.

I hit the door above the knob, and there was a sound of crumpled metal, splintered wood, and a wetter sort of crunch. There was a barked, startled curse and the door flew wide and then rebounded, but Coyle was down against the far wall and I was in. His hand was to his face and blood was streaming between his fingers. I caught a glimpse of cot and card table, utility sink, lamp and folding chair, coffee pot- and then, somehow, he was coming up fast and a big fist caught me under the ribs.

Air came out of me in a shout and I covered up and threw an elbow at his neck. It went off his shoulder and I went back, into the doorframe. Coyle grabbed a hunk of my jacket and hauled me forward, toward a waiting haymaker. I tucked my chin down and drove off the wall and ducked under the blow and smacked him in the cheek with my forehead. He cursed again and we both went over. I kneed him somewhere and he cuffed me on the ear and a flare went off behind my eyes. I scrambled up but Coyle got there first and dug a thumb at my throat. I gagged and yanked the pry bar from my pocket and swung it at his thigh. He roared and went down, but on the way he grabbed my wrist and dragged me into his forearm. Stars lit and the pry bar went flying and so did I, into the card table and into a corner. It took a moment for my vision to clear, another to realize that the hot wet patch down my back was coffee and not blood, and one more to register that Coyle was gone. I hauled myself up and shook my head and lunged out the door.

The cold air was like a slap as I came up the basement steps, and I picked up Coyle headed south, toward a cluster of Dumpsters on a square of hardtop. He wasn’t moving well and the path was treacherous; he slipped more than once. I didn’t push it, but kept him in sight, a muscular figure lurching under sodium lights, past the Dumpsters, through a tangle of bushes, and onto an icy street. My limbs loosened as I trotted along, and my pulse steadied, and after a little while the pain in my ribs dimmed.

On the street, Coyle turned west. I lengthened my stride and trimmed the distance between us. He glanced over his shoulder a few times and sprinted forward a few paces after each look, but smoking had robbed his wind and he couldn’t keep it up. When he saw I was closing, he cursed.

“Fuck you, asshole,” he shouted over his shoulder, and “Get the fuck out of here.” It screwed up his breathing even more.

We rounded a curve and the road ahead became an overpass spanning the Metro-North train tracks. Coyle put his head down and charged at it. But when he got there, he didn’t cross. Instead, he vaulted the metal railing and slid down the embankment. Shit. I ran faster and followed.

The embankment was steep and snow-covered, and I went down along the trail Coyle had made, mostly on my ass. I skidded at the bottom onto a badly plowed service road that ran parallel to the train tracks, and that was separated from them by a high schoolyard fence. I looked north and south. The road was empty. There was no sign of Coyle, but snowy prints led beneath the overpass. I took a slow, deep breath and pulled the flashlight from my jacket pocket, and the Glock from its holster behind my back. I flicked on the light.

The beam disappeared into the darkness beneath the bridge, and I walked forward, listening for ragged breathing. My ears were straining when I saw a bright yellow light to the north. I stopped, and heard a rising and falling air horn. Train. The light grew brighter, and swept across the rails, and the rush and rumble widened, and swallowed every other sound. So I never heard him coming.

He charged from the left and lifted me off the ground, and if not for the schoolyard fence I’d have been on my way to Grand Central, pasted to the front of a Hudson Line train. As it was, I was doing only slightly better. The flashlight vanished and so did my breath, in a burning bellow, but I held on to the Glock and brought it up in both hands as I bounced off the fence. It wasn’t above my waist before Coyle was on me- both hands wrapped around my own, fingers behind the trigger and over the slide. His bristled, block head ground into my eye socket, and his extra forty pounds drove me back.

My boots scrabbled over the icy hardtop and only the fencing kept me from going over. Coyle was pushing and grunting, and the smell of cigarettes, burnt coffee, and sweat was smothering. My heels were sliding away when I brought my knee up hard- and connected. Coyle roared, and for an instant sagged, and then he twisted and yanked and the Glock came out of my hands. I heard my fingers break before I felt the pain.

We spun apart, and I caught myself on the fence and nearly screamed when I did. I came up panting and so did Coyle, holding the Glock in his big palm, looking down at it, bleeding from his nose, his mouth, and the split in his eyebrow. Looking at me. Looking at the gun. My arms and legs were shaking with fatigue and adrenaline, and I gathered what juice I had left for…I wasn’t sure what. Coyle stared for a long minute, and then a fat tear fell from his eye onto the Glock. His voice was choked and his words were squeezed between gasped breaths.

“Fuck it, man- fuck it all. You want me so bad, take me. Take me in, send me upstate, send me straight to hell if you want. I don’t give a shit. I just can’t do this anymore.” He slumped against the fence and slid to the ground. He tossed the Glock in the snow at my feet.