In This Rain (39 page)

Irene glanced at the others. “We’re trying to help.”

“No, you’re trying to calm down your crazy friend. Helping would be lending me your phone.”

“My phone?”

“Luis Perez isn’t taking my calls,” Ann said. “But he doesn’t know your number.”

Once more Irene exchanged a look with Shondi and Beth. Then she reached into her purse and handed over her phone.

*

“It’s Ann. Don’t hang up, Luis.”

“Madre de Dios! Why the hell shouldn’t I? What do you think you’re doing?”

“I have new information— ”

“I don’t give a damn if you have a videotape! Leave me out of it. I have orders not to talk to you and believe me, I have no problem with that. I had IA all over my ass because of you, Princess.”

“That evidence was planted, Luis.”

“Oh, no shit!”

“Not by me. By Glybenhall.”

“What the— ”

“Because he knew I’d fall for it. He knew the investigator was me— was going to be me. It’s a long story. Meet me, I’ll tell you.”

“No way in hell.”

“That white woman they pulled from the river the day Kong and T.D. were killed? Tom Underhill’s other case? Her name was Jennifer Eliot and she was sleeping with Walter Glybenhall.”

A pause. Ann was aware of her friends’ stares but didn’t look up.

“Princess,” Perez finally said, “you’re nuts.”

“No. But he wants everyone to think I am.”

“Well, then, he’s got what he wants.”

“He was sleeping with her and he killed her, Luis.”

“You have proof? A smoking gun? A confession? Two priests and a nun as witnesses?”

“No, I— ”

“Call me back when you get them. But not from this phone. Now that I know this number.” He clicked off.

Ann stared around the table. Irene’s fierceness and Beth’s discomfort she could take, but Shondi’s kindly concern was too much. She handed Irene her phone and abruptly said, “I have to go. I’ll talk to you guys later.”

“Honey— ”

“Ann— ”

“Come on— ”

“Later.”

She slung her bag over her shoulder and pushed out the door, refusing to slow down even when she realized she had no idea where to go or what to do. She made seven blocks uptown that way before she hit a red light and had to stop. A wave of exhaustion rose and crashed over her. When the green light came she could hardly move.

She felt a fatigue she’d never known before, a trembling hollowness. All she wanted was to go home. On the way she’d buy great armfuls of flowers. She’d lock the door behind her, sit on the sofa, and watch the East River flow. From there, surrounded by wild color and eddying scent, she’d call Joe.

A few blocks north she found a fruit stand. She bought crimson tulips and purple irises for their shades, stargazer lilies for their perfume, white peonies like the ones in Joe’s garden. She retrieved the Boxster from the garage, dropped everything on the seat, and navigated across town. Pulling into the garage under her own building, she raised the top and steered into her space. She got out and walked around to the passenger side to pick everything up again.

The wrapping on the bouquets crinkled as she gathered them. She clutched everything close and reached for her purse, not sure how she was going to balance it all. When a hand clenched her arm and yanked her backwards, her first fear was for the flowers.

“Yo, bitch!” Clamping fingers spun her around to inhumanly mashed features: a stocking mask. A fist reared back and gold teeth glittered. Later she’d realize that his sneer was what saved her. The white-hot fury it sparked melted her frozen fear.

Smashing everything she held into his face, she ducked and kicked. A punch slammed her ear like a brick. Her head ringing, she clawed for the thumb of the hand squeezing her arm. He released his grip, but as she tried to straighten, another blow pounded her face, throwing her back against the car. Tulips and lilies littered the garage floor. As he grabbed her blouse and ripped it, she sliced at the mask with her keys, aiming for those horrible grinning lips. She heard a yelp and felt him let go.

“Give it up, bitch!” He backed just out of her reach, arms spread like a wrestler in a ring. The stocking mask was torn and peeling back, blood oozing from the slash. She felt hot bile rise, felt as sick as if the peeling nylon were flesh. “I got a message from the Boss. He say you ain’t smart enough to give it up when you should, so you got to give it up now.” He had her trapped against the Boxster’s open passenger door and this was no standoff; he’d stopped his attack only long enough to deliver his message. Her keys, her only weapon, were a joke.

He lunged; she drilled the sharp toe of her slingback up into his crotch. Yowling, he folded over the pain. She drove her elbow into his face. Her arm went numb but he staggered and when he did she shoved him away and dove into the car. She yanked the door shut, squashed the lock button. The click came a second before the pounding thump of his fist on the windshield.

“Bitch!” he yelled. “Fuck you, bitch!” He pressed his bleeding face to the glass. “I kill you! I’m’a smoke you, bitch! Ain’t being paid for that, fuck it, I do it free!”

But Ann was in the car. With a swift, icy calm she started up, shifted as though no one was clawing at her door handle, screaming curses. She held the clutch in while she gave the engine gas, let it up when it was revving high. The Boxster shot backwards out of the space, pulling her attacker with it. She blasted forward and spun left. Laying rubber up the ramp, she glanced in the mirror. She saw her attacker on one knee, howling and waving his fists, surrounded by shattered bouquets.

Heart’s Content

Wild grapes threatened to strangle the young rudbeckia, and the rudbeckia, resourceful as always, had sent shoots to colonize every flower bed within ten feet of its homestead, just in case. The situation needed attention but Joe wasn’t sure he’d hear the phone from that end of the garden. So he was retying the morning glories on the porch posts as though they weren’t perfectly happy, and pulling the stems of the faded wood hyacinths though their leaves were still green.

He’d stopped pretending to himself that he was only angry at Ann for her silence, not worried about what it might mean, and had moved, in the hour since he’d gotten home, to trying to keep both feelings at bay. He’d give her until dark. And if he hadn’t heard from her by then? What exactly, he asked himself, are you planning to do?

Weeding the herb bed by the door, where little had sprouted since he’d done this yesterday, he searched his memory for Ann’s friends, people he could call, people who might say, Oh, she’s right here, sipping a Cosmo, hold on and I’ll get her. Then he could switch off the worry and focus on the anger.

Though for a while the only friend of Ann’s whose name he could recall was Jen Eliot. Thinking of Jen only brought to mind the small, lost sound in Ann’s voice.

He was holding in his mind the face of Ann’s black law school roommate, the one she’d gone into the DA’s office with, hoping her name would swim into view, when he heard crunching gravel and an engine’s purr.

Slapping his dirt-covered hands against his jeans, he jogged around the side of the cabin to the driveway. It was the red Boxster; it was Ann. He reached the car as she was climbing out and he started to say, “Where the— ” but he stopped when he saw her ripped blouse, her tangled hair, her bare feet, and her bruises. She stood perfectly still for a moment, looking at him without expression. Then she started to cry.

*

Golden light warmed the yard, but when Ann emerged onto the porch she was wrapped in one of his turtlenecks and an old wool sweater. Her hands were lost in the fabric of their cuffs; his jeans bunched at her ankles. Her damp hair trailed around her shoulders, curling at the ends, and the whole effect was disquieting, as though she’d once been straighter, taller.

Moving gingerly to a chair, she avoided his gaze. A purple rim around her right eye and a split in her lip were the only visible damage; both would heal completely, from his experience, but they’d take time.

Joe went inside, poured coffee, fixed one with sugar and cream. She didn’t turn when he came back out, didn’t meet his eyes when he handed her the mug, but she took it.

He settled in the chair beside her, drank his own coffee, and watched with her as sunlight inched across the yard, illuminating some plants and leaving others in darkness. Ann’s silence seemed to add richness to the birdsong, to the rush of the stream and rustle of leaves. He wondered what it would be like to be able to count on that silence.

“How badly are you hurt?” he asked when her coffee was almost gone and color had seeped back into her face. That had been his first question while they’d stood by her car, too, his arms enfolding her, her tears warm on his cheek.

“I’m all right,” she’d said then, a patent lie.

“Should I call the cops?”

“No.” After a time she’d pulled away and stumbled inside, toward the shower.

She didn’t try to tell him she was all right now. For a while she didn’t speak at all. At last: “I don’t think anything’s serious.”

“Can you tell me what happened?”

“Walter sent— ” Her voice cracked. She sipped some coffee and said again, “Walter sent somebody to scare me off. He was supposed to rape me.”

“How— ”

“ ‘Give it up!’ ” Her voice was suddenly savage. “ ‘The boss said you won’t give it up so now you got to give it up!’ That’s what he said. He laughed. Pretty witty, huh?”

Joe wanted to reach for her hand, but he thought of her on precarious tiptoe on the boulder above the stream, and held himself back.

“Did you recognize him?” he asked instead.

“He had on a stocking mask. Black, taller than me, broader, too. Hooded blue sweatshirt, gray pants. Sneakers.”

“Would you know him if you saw him again?”

“No. But I cut his face. Left cheek, I think his lip, too.”

“Good for you,” he said. “How?”

“My car keys.”

“Where did it happen?”

“The garage under my building. He was waiting when I pulled in. If he’d been supposed to kill me he could have, easily. I kept thinking about that all the way here. Well, no.” She gave a shake of her head. “I didn’t even come to until somewhere past New Paltz. You should have seen me looking around, trying to figure out where I was.”

“What happened to the guy?”

“I don’t know. He smacked me around, ripped my blouse. I slashed his face with the keys and got in the car. He grabbed on but I shook him off. I don’t think he was hurt badly. I wish I’d killed him. All those flowers.” He saw a tear start in the corner of her eye, but she smeared it away.

“Flowers?” Joe said.

“What I was carrying. It doesn’t matter.”

A breeze wafted across the yard. “You want more coffee?” he asked.

“What you really want to ask is why I’m so sure it was Walter.”

“Yes, I do.”

“I’ll tell you,” she said. “If I can have a beer.”

He brought out two beers and handed her one. He sat and waited.

“The short answer is, this morning I accused him of murder.”

When she didn’t go on, he said, “That’s where this started. It’s gotten him millions, the Harlem site, and a free ride forever through the city approvals process. Why would he send someone to attack you now?”

“It’s a different murder.”

“What do you mean?”

She stared across the garden, as though she were trying to make something out in the shadows. “My friend Jen,” she said softly.

“Jen? Why would you think Glybenhall did that?”

“He was at the service this morning. Sitting with her family. You’re about to tell me that they just know each other. Travel in the same circles. Irene tried to say that, too.” She sipped her beer, still not looking at him. “Jen was seeing someone and she wouldn’t tell me who. That means he was probably married and that I probably knew him.”

“A lot of men fit that description.”

“Jen’s— was, she was big on inappropriate men. She never told us who they were if it would be bad for them if it came out. I think it made her feel powerful, to have this big secret that could ruin someone. To be so hot she could get a guy in that position.”

“Powerful,” Joe said. Barely thirty, dead in the garbage and reeds on the river’s edge. “But all right. If it was Glybenhall, and they were having an affair, why would he murder her?”

“Lovers kill each other all the time. It could have nothing to do with this.”

“Walter Glybenhall, in his sixties, has suddenly become a killing machine?”

“He always was.”

“Ann?”

“Joe, wait.”

She wiped angrily at her eyes again. This time he reached to take her hand, prepared for her to shake him off. Instead, she wrapped her fingers around his, held on tightly as though, together, they were preparing to jump.

“When I was fourteen, we lived in Switzerland. Zurich.” Ann’s voice was a quiet trickle. “My father found out Walter and my mother were having an affair. He went to confront them. It was a bad night, warm for winter, fog and rain. Dad spun out on a mountain road, and died.”

“I know,” Joe said. “You don’t have to talk about that now.”

“There are two parts of that story you don’t know. And now is the only time.”

She met his eyes. The mismatched blues in hers seemed to him to have intensified, and he realized that before today, he’d never seen her cry.

“My father was up in the mountains, skiing,” she said. “I came up to join him. The way he knew about Walter and my mother was, I told him.”

“You blame yourself?”

“I told him,” she repeated, “because I’d caught them together. At Walter’s place.

“He’d said he was having some people over for coffee, my mother included, and suggested I come around to say goodbye before my ski trip. A few days before that

a few days before, he’d made a pass at me. He’d come over for drinks, to our apartment. Some of my father’s most important clients were there, too. Walter was

in those days he was rich, but not particularly anybody. Some of my father’s clients were people he had his eye on.”

“In what way?”

“He had projects he wanted them to invest in. Or attach their names to, at least. A word from my father would have gone a long way.”