Graveland: A Novel (38 page)

By ten o’clock, however, and despite his determination to brave it out, Vaughan has to admit that he’s feeling pretty lousy. Energy levels are noticeably down on recent days, and all of a sudden he’s aware, as he hasn’t been for ages, of various bodily aches and pains.

And he’s not
doing
anything, apart from shuffling aimlessly around the apartment. He doesn’t want to panic, though, so he makes a real effort to engage. He goes into his study and sits at his desk. He places a call to Paul Blanford. After a few moments, he’s informed that Mr. Blanford is unavailable. Wheezing a little now, suppressing a cough, he just about stops himself from barking
Do you know who I am?
into the phone. What he does say is that it’s imperative Mr. Blanford gets back to him.

Then, feeling a bit sick, he goes in search of Meredith.

He finds her, as he does most days now, sitting at the counter in the kitchen, drinking either coffee or a soda and staring up at live coverage of the Connie Carillo murder trial on the wall-mounted TV. Sometimes Mrs. R is around, sometimes not. Today she’s not, and Mer is alone, in jeans and a T-shirt, no makeup, hunched forward over the counter, can of soda next to the remote.

It all seems to have become a little obsessive of late.

Vaughan doesn’t say anything. He just stands in the doorway—watching her, then watching the TV for a bit, alternating between the two, in a sort of daze himself.

Mrs. Sanchez is still on the stand, and Ray Whitestone is continuing the very thorough and forensic dissection of the housekeeper’s cleaning regimen that he began yesterday. Vaughan read about it online earlier this morning, how jury members had been shown a selection of cleaning solvents taken from the kitchen of the Park Avenue apartment, and had then been treated to detailed readings from their labels. Whitestone argued that the presence of one product in particular, Erodon 10, a highly unusual and industrial-strength cleaning solvent, was inconsistent with the defense counsel’s claim that Mrs. Sanchez was scrupulous in regard to safety. No one seems to know where this is going, and Judge Roberts hasn’t shown any inclination to intervene.

Unbelievably, Whitestone is still chiseling away at the same point this morning.

“Mrs. Sanchez,” he’s saying, “is it not true that Erodon 10 is a singularly inappropriate substance to use in an everyday domestic setting?”

“Objection, leading.”

“Overruled.”

“Mrs. Sanchez?”

“Yes, normally. I suppose.”

“And yet you had it there, under the sink, in among the washing powders and grease-stain removers?”

“Yes, sir, but—”

“Mrs. Sanchez, are you aware that Erodon 10 is used in heavy industry, and that it is even used by the military?”

She pauses, obviously irritated by the line of questioning. “No, sir.”

Vaughan looks at Meredith. She is engrossed, mesmerized.

“So you are not aware that it is essentially a commercial by-product of a chemical weapons R&D program?”

“Objection.”

“Mr. Whitestone?”

“Bear with me, Your Honor.”

Judge Roberts exhales, waves him on.

“Mrs. Sanchez, did you never once read the safety warnings on the label?”

“Yes, I did, but if I could—”

“So despite the alarming nature of those warnings, as we saw here yesterday,
you
saw fit to keep a container of the stuff in the defendant’s
kitchen
?”

“I had—”

“Mrs. Sanchez, please, you must answer the question. Did you consider it appropriate to keep a container of Erodon 10 in an ordinary domestic setting? Yes or no?”

Mrs. Sanchez rolls her eyes. She hesitates, sighs, seems to be looking for a way out.

“Mrs. Sanchez,
did
you consider it appropriate?”

“Yes.”

“I see. May we ask why?”

“Why? You want to know why?”

“Yes, Mrs. Sanchez.”

She leans forward in the box, clearly agitated now. “Because of Mr. Meeker’s
girlfriend,
that’s why, she kept spilling her stupid cherry soda—”

The courtroom erupts.

“—it was that Dr. something, diet cherry, and I don’t know how many times she spilt it on the kitchen floor, on the tiles, and
nothing
gets that stuff out,
nothing,
believe me, I’ve tried—”

The defense counsel jumps to his feet.
“Mrs
.
Sanchez!”

“—then someone told me about this Erodon 10,” she goes on, “that it was good for getting out tough stains, but without damaging the tiles, because you know with terra-cotta—”

“Mrs
.
Sanchez, please.”

Judge Roberts calls for order.

“—because you have to…” She is looking around now, obviously bewildered by the reaction. “… you have to be careful…”

With the commotion continuing in the courtroom, Vaughan turns, as though in a dream, and looks at Meredith. She is leaning back from the counter now, her mouth open in shock. She raises a hand to cover it. “Oh my God,” she whispers—it’s just about audible—and then turns in Vaughan’s direction.

Their eyes meet.

A wave of exhaustion washes over him. He’s confused, but also suddenly quite focused.

Meredith shakes her head, and then, slowly, they both look down at the counter, and at the can of soda in front of Meredith.

It’s the one she always drinks, the one that anyone who knows her knows she drinks.

It’s Dr. Thurston’s Diet Cherry Cola.

*   *   *

The word she’s seeing most is
frenzy—
as in “media frenzy” or “frenzy of speculation.” Because everyone is asking the same question. Who is she? Who is Howard Meeker’s quote unquote girlfriend?

“Please tell us,” one blogger writes, “because we gots to know…”

On the train back from Atherton, Ellen has just put away her notes and taken out her phone. And it’s all over Twitter—this first serving of real drama in the Carillo murder trial. Mrs. Sanchez is trending, Ray Whitestone is trending, #mysterygirlfriend is trending.

Ellen checks a couple of news sites to get the lowdown. It seems that Whitestone’s laborious and painstaking technique of intense engagement followed by sudden deflection has paid off, providing the trial with something it has conspicuously lacked up to now, a motive.

She watches a clip of a panel discussion on MSNBC. The studio backdrop is a graphic depicting the scales of justice superimposed on a photo-montage of Salome’s veils, the Dow Jones logo, and a dead fish wrapped in newspapers.

“Yes,” one of the panelists is saying, “we now have a motive, and it appears to be sexual jealousy.”

“Which, of course,” another panelist says, “is quite in keeping with the operatic dimensions of this whole case.”

“Indeed. But who is this other woman? The only thing we know about her is that she drinks some kind of … diet soda.”

“And appears to be a little clumsy.”

This prompts a laugh.

“We’re also getting reports in that Mildred Sanchez is now claiming she doesn’t know who the girlfriend is, or at least doesn’t know her by name, but that this person was a frequent visitor to the apartment, especially when Connie was away on tour.”

“And now the hunt is on to find her.”

“Extraordinary. An absolutely extraordinary development in court today.”

They then show the relevant exchange.

And it
is
extraordinary.

But how many times, Ellen wonders, will they be rerunning it in the coming days and weeks?

She puts her phone away, leans back, and gazes out the window, pondering the extraordinary development there has been in her own circumstances.

The call on Tuesday from Frank Bishop came as a real surprise, but when he made his proposal she didn’t hesitate for a second. Because it all seemed to make sense now. She was no longer racing against the clock to crack a story that kept getting ahead of her. The story was already there, and she was being given the chance to tell it, comprehensively and more or less from the inside. When she got off the phone with Frank, she called Max, and they worked out a strategy right there and then—three parts over three months, once the trial was out of the way.

Ellen got on the case without delay by going through all of her notes. She then took the train up to Atherton College to reestablish some of the contacts she’d made first time around, and to make a few new ones. She stayed until this morning so she could interview as many people as possible.

Traveling back this afternoon, she feels energized, her head brimming with ideas on how to approach this. From Penn Station she takes an A train uptown, but instead of going straight home she decides to stop off at Flannery’s first for a quiet drink.

Settled at the bar, one beer in, she looks up and sees Charlie approaching.

“Hey, Ellen.” He takes the stool next to her. “You been following it, right? Please tell me you’ve been following it.”

“Carillo? Not exactly.” She plays with her phone, twirling it slowly on the bar. “I’ve been working. I heard, though.”

“Something else, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, the mystery girlfriend. You couldn’t make it up.”

Charlie rears back. “What? You’re behind the curve, sweetheart. Mystery’s been solved.”

“What?”

“Yeah, things are moving pretty fast. Someone squealed, apparently, about an hour ago. On Twitter. Of
course
. And now it’s everywhere.”

“Oh.” She takes a sip from her glass. “So who’s the little charmer?”

Charlie catches the barman’s eye and orders a drink. He turns back. “Who is it? Well, her name is Meredith Vaughan. Seems she’s married to some much older—”

Ellen’s jaw drops.

Charlie looks at her. “What?”

“Meredith
Vaughan
?”

“Yeah.”

“
Holy
shit.”

She slides off the stool, simultaneously grabbing her phone from the bar.

“
What?
Ellen. Jesus.”

“Give me two minutes, Charlie.”

She heads for the door, moving quickly, phone held up in front of her, looking for Jimmy Gilroy’s number.

Outside, there is a warmth in the late-afternoon air, a sort of thickening.

“Hi, Ellen.”

She feels excited.

“Have you heard?”

“Meredith? Yeah. It’s just unbelievable. The whole thing has ignited. I’m online right now, and one of the questions people are asking is, who is James Vaughan? It’s like … it’s…”

“Like Christmas has come early.”

“Yes.”

“You’ve got to resubmit the book to publishers, Jimmy.” She watches an MTA bus glide by. “Do you still have an agent?”

“No, but—”

“I’ll talk to mine.”

“Thanks. I just want to do some edits, a few days, and then—”

“Yeah, let the momentum build. This story isn’t going away anytime soon.”

Jimmy laughs. “You know what, Ellen, I’m supposed to be heading out to work in a few minutes, but how am I going to get through this shift without cracking
something
open, and preferably a bottle of champagne?”

“Uh-
uh,
you save that for when I’m there.”

She tells him about the Frank Bishop development. They discuss the overlap, and how it might mean they could end up working on the same story again.

“For our sins,” Jimmy says.

“Yeah.”

“Fine by me, though.”

“Yeah, me, too.” Ellen looks around. “Okay, Irish, you get your edits done, I’ll talk to my agent tomorrow, and we’ll meet up early next week.”

She puts her phone away, breathes in a lungful of Amsterdam, and heads back inside.

*   *   *

It’s four thirty when he wakes definitively. Doesn’t mean he’s going to get up, but he certainly won’t be going back to sleep. That last little passage of dreamtime was enough to seal
that
deal—him and LBJ in a corridor somewhere, Johnson blocking the way, won’t let him get by, exhorting, cajoling, breathing in his face. “I’m tellin’ ya, son…”

The reality was quite different, though, because Vaughan famously clashed with LBJ—had the temerity to
defy
the man—and then went to work for Barry Goldwater.

It was in the summer of ’64.

Famously?

If
that
isn’t a relative term.

Now that he’s sufficiently awake, yesterday comes flooding back to him in all its horror. First, the screaming, mostly from Meredith, who was all defensive and passive-aggressive, trying to say it
didn’t mean anything,
which if he hadn’t been in such physical pain by that point he would have laughed at. And then the dramatics, the bag packing and the flight from the apartment, ostensibly to save his “feelings,” but in reality because she knew damn well that if she stayed here, she’d end up—once the cat was out of the bag—becoming a virtual prisoner in the building. And it wasn’t long before said cat
was
out of the bag and roaming free, claws out. It was a few hours at most.

Sometime late in the afternoon his phone started ringing, and it didn’t stop.

He refused to take any calls.

He also resisted turning on the TV for a while, but he eventually gave in. What he saw unfolding before him on the screen, and later on his computer in the study, was deeply traumatizing. He had never experienced anything like it before.

It was his ultimate nightmare.

Exposure
.

Every mention of the word
Vaughan
felt like a stab wound. Every photo they showed—and they were mostly from the archives—felt like a laceration. As the evening progressed, he also felt sicker and weaker. This was, presumably, the effect of his withdrawal from the medication, which in turn, presumably, was responsible for the gradual unmasking of his various underlying conditions. After a while, it became hard to tell them apart, these two forms of pain—one imposed from outside, one pulsating from within.

Painkillers helped.

But painkillers only help in the short term. In Vaughan’s experience, they usually ended up killing a lot more than just the pain. He tried Paul Blanford again, without success, so he now pretty much accepts that with all this media stuff going on he hasn’t a hope in hell anymore of continuing with the medication.