The Ex (23 page)

The apartment was still disorganized from Deirdre’s move, as if it had occurred only a few days ago. Molly took the lead despite David urging her to stay behind him, and they stormed through the apartment, satisfying themselves that it was unoccupied. They found themselves again in the living room.

For the first time, Molly looked around carefully at the mismatched and apparently secondhand furniture, the stacks of cardboard boxes against a wall.

Then the desk near the window caught her eye, and it took her a moment to realize why.

It closely resembled her own desk. There were the half-dozen reference books supported between quartz bookends, the green-shaded banker’s lamp, the mug stuffed with pens and pencils.

Molly stepped closer to the desk and saw that the mug was exactly like hers, dark blue with a silver Statue of Liberty on it. Only the slight chip on the rim that marred her mug was missing on this one.

She began opening drawers.

“What are you doing, Mol?” she heard David ask behind her.

“Looking for some clue as to where Deirdre might have taken Michael.”

The top drawer held only a stapler, a bottle of Liquid Paper, and a few household bills and receipts. Stuffed toward the back were some maps. A road map of Missouri. A street map of New York. A subway guide.

The second drawer contained only a shoe box.

Molly lifted the box out with both hands, noting that it was slightly too heavy to be empty. She set it on the desk and opened it.

Inside were a jumble of newspaper clippings weighted down by a videocassette. She set the cassette aside, then began lifting out the clippings and placing them on the desk.

She looked at them where they lay overlapping each other:

WOMAN PLUNGES TO DEA
/
POLICE ARE LO
/
TWENTY
-
STORY FALL FROM ROOFTOP RESTAURAN
/
RISTINE MATHEWS
.

There was also a newspaper photo of what appeared to be a body lying beneath a bloody sheet.

“Look at this, David,” Molly said.

But he was already standing behind her. He reached past her and rearranged the clippings.

They revealed the name of the woman who’d apparently plunged from the rooftop restaurant: Christine Mathews. It was her body beneath the bloody sheet.

“What do you think it means?” David asked.

“I’m not sure,” Molly said. A fear like ice was moving beneath her flesh. “But I don’t like it. I’m going to call the police.”

As she turned her back to reach for the phone, she didn’t see David pick up the videocassette and slide it beneath his shirt.

He quietly drifted into the hall leading to the bedrooms and bathroom. When he was far enough from the living room but could still hear Molly’s muted, indecipherable voice as she talked on the phone, David withdrew the cassette from under his shirt. He put on his glasses and held it up to the light.

The label was neatly printed in capital letters with blue ink: 2ND HNYMN.

He looked around desperately. He couldn’t let Molly find the cassette. And it couldn’t be in the apartment if the police decided to conduct a search.

For now, he was stuck with it.

He slipped it back beneath his shirt, feeling its sharply defined angles press against his bare side beneath his ribs. Then he returned to the living room.

Molly was hanging up the phone after her conversation with the police.

She saw him in the corner of her vision and spoke to him. “They said—”

She and David both heard a slight noise and turned toward the door.

It was wide open, and Craig Chumley was standing in the doorway. His gray suit was wrinkled, his tie was loosely knotted, and there were perspiration stains on his pale blue shirt. He entered the apartment as if lost in a dream, glancing at the damaged door.

“What’s going on here?” he asked. He was obviously confused and afraid.

“What are you doing here?” David asked before Molly could speak.

“I don’t see where it’s any—”

“Where are they?” Molly interrupted. Her rage erupted and she flung herself at Chumley, clutching his shirt with both hands. “Tell me!”

She lost her reason entirely, her place in time, as she tried to shake Chumley, to throw him to the floor, to kill him with the raw anger that devoured her senses.

Stunned, Chumley spun in a wild dance, giving in to Molly’s efforts rather than fight her.

Finally she felt David’s hands on her shoulders, pulling her away. Chumley gripped her wrists, not as hard as he might have, and gradually forced her arms back so she lost her grip on his shirt. The expression on his face was strangely kind as well as stricken.

She was in control of herself again, but breathing as if she’d run for miles.

“Calm down, Mol,” David was saying. He was up against her back now, his body turned sideways, one arm lowered to encircle her waist. He took a few unsteady backward steps, dragging Molly with him.

David hugged her hard. “Easy, easy…” She could feel his breath in her ear.

She willed her body to relax. His grip on her midsection seemed to loosen. Or was it simply that she’d stopped struggling?

“Gonna be okay?” David asked.

“Yeah. If you can call it that.” She was breathing easier. Her throat was raw. Her display of violence had achieved nothing; everything was the same, even the weight of her fear in her stomach.

“Deirdre’s taken Michael,” David said to the florid and flustered Chumley.

“Your son?” Chumley put his hand to his forehead as if he’d just been assailed by a terrific headache. “Oh, Lord!”

“What’s your story, Chumley?” David asked. “The police are on their way here, and you’ll be telling them soon enough.”

Chumley moved his fingertips around to his right temple and bowed his head. His brow creased. Molly saw that his scalp was mottled beneath his thinning hair.

“I’m married,” he said. “Have been for sixteen years. Deirdre made me forget that. Then, while she didn’t actually threaten me, during the last few days she made it clear…if I didn’t keep her on as an employee as well as a lover, my wife, Shirley, might find out about us.” He glanced up for only a second. “Lately, we haven’t been getting along.”

“You and your wife?” Molly asked.

“Me and everybody,” Chumley said despondently. “Friday evening, after Deirdre had gone home, a man named Stan Grocci showed up at my office. He was abusive, desperate. And he was searching for Deirdre.”

“That’s her former husband,” David said.

“He said he was still her husband. He also said she was diagnosed as psychotic and dangerous after attacking and injuring a sales clerk with one of those spikes used to spear receipts. Later, she escaped from a psychiatric hospital in Missouri.” He looked at Molly, then down at the floor again. “He also said there was an arrest warrant out for her in Saint Louis for the murder of a woman named Christine Mathews he became involved with while Deirdre was in the mental institution.”

Molly’s insides turned cold. “Jesus, David! The woman in the clipping! Deirdre must have pushed her from the roof!”

David was looking hard at Chumley. “You talked to Grocci Friday, you said. Have you seen Deirdre since then?”

“All weekend I thought about what Grocci had told me, wondering what I should do. This morning, when Deirdre came in to work, I confronted her with what he’d said.”

“How did she react?”

“She denied it all and told me Grocci was the mental case and his accusations were preposterous. At that point I didn’t really care. I knew I was in something I couldn’t handle, so I fired her.”

“And she went without a fight?” David asked incredulously.

Chumley smiled sadly. “Yeah. That should have alerted me to trouble. But I’d been thinking with my dick for so long…” He glanced apologetically at Molly. “Sorry.”

“Think with your head now,” she snapped.

“I noticed a while back that my files had been disturbed,” Chumley said. “I think she made copies of some papers and took them with her, maybe even had them before I fired her. If she gives them to the wrong people…Well, I’ve been playing a little loose with my taxes. I came here to get the copies back, and to offer Deirdre money so she wouldn’t go to the IRS or to my wife.”

Molly didn’t care about Chumley’s troubles with his wife or the IRS. She didn’t want to hear about them. She only cared about her son.

“Do you have any idea where she might have taken Michael?” she asked.

“No. I really know next to nothing about Deirdre.”

There were noises in the hall. Voices. Footsteps.

Then, in the corridor outside the open door, a startling amount of dark blue. Cautious, emotionless eyes.

The police entered the apartment.

The uniformed officers listened patiently to Molly and David, then one of them made a phone call while the other gave Deirdre’s apartment a cursory examination.

Soon afterward a pair of NYPD plainclothes detectives arrived. The shorter, heavier of the two, a graying man named Salter, with the face of an amiable but combative bulldog, was in charge. His partner, a much younger man named Marrivale, took notes while they listened to Molly and David.

At first Chumley refused to talk before consulting with his attorney, then at Molly’s urging he changed his mind. With an air of doom and resignation, he told the detectives what he’d told Molly and David.

Neither cop showed any reaction to his story.

“Has anybody got a photograph of this Deirdre?” Salter asked. He had a rough, heavy smoker’s voice. Three cellophane-clad cigars jutted from the breast pocket of his gray suit coat.

“Not even an old one,” David said, glancing at Molly.

Salter looked at Chumley, who shook his head no. “Like I said, she’s really not much more than a stranger to me—in a way.”

The young detective, who had the wan, wasted look of an esthete, stared at Chumley until Chumley looked away.

“What about a photo of the boy?” Salter asked.

“I have several,” Molly said. “They’re downstairs in our apartment, if they haven’t been destroyed.”

“Let’s go,” Salter said. “It’s time we looked at the destruction down there.”

He accompanied them downstairs while Marrivale stayed behind and continued questioning Chumley.

In the elevator, Salter said nothing. Molly saw him glancing out of the corner of his eye at David, as if he were suspicious of him. She’d read that the police always suspected the parents first in the disappearance of a child. But this was different. They
knew
who’d taken Michael. A psychopath who’d left a taunting message on the parents’ answering machine.

When they entered the apartment, Salter cautioned them not to touch anything. “The place will be dusted for prints,” he said. “We want to know who’s been here recently and handled whatever was vandalized.”

Molly knew that made sense, but she felt somehow violated again, being unable even to touch her possessions in her own apartment. She and David stood near the center of the room with their arms at their sides, looking like awkward trespassers in their home.

Then Molly remembered that the apartment would never be home again—at least not the home it had been. She’d never be able to see it, to live in it, the same way. However the nightmare with Michael would be resolved, Deirdre had changed their lives forever.

Salter clasped his meaty hands together and looked around with his neutral, assessing eyes at the littered floor, the slashed sofa with its batting bulging from its wounds. “Somebody doesn’t like you, all right.”

“Deirdre,” Molly said.

Sidestepping the contents of the desk drawers that lay on the floor, Salter walked over to the answering machine lying beside the overturned desk. He stooped and pressed the message button. Molly felt the boiling pressure of rage building in her again as they listened to Deirdre’s message.

“You sure it’s her?” Salter asked when the message was finished. He pressed his hand to the small of his back as he stood up. “The caller only identifies herself as ‘you know who.’”

“Who else would it be?” Molly blurted.

“It’s Deirdre,” David said. “I recognize her voice. And Julia at Small Business Preschool said Deirdre was the one who picked up Michael.”

“Aunt
Deirdre!” Molly said.

Salter looked at her. “Deirdre was acquainted enough with the boy that he thought of her as an aunt?”

“Apparently,” David said.

“Then the three of you were friends.”

“No,” Molly said. “She’s my husband’s ex-wife, for God’s sake! We were civil, at first. Then it was just as I told you. She began tormenting me, sneaking in here, and she tried to kill me.”

Salter looked at her the way he’d been looking at David in the elevator.

“Damn it!” Molly exploded. “A maniac has our son and you stand there looking at us as if we were the criminals. Do something! Do your fucking job!”

She felt spittle on her chin and realized
she
must look like the maniac, ranting and foaming at the mouth. David tried to pull her to him and hold her, but she pushed away from him, walked a few feet, and stood alone. She felt as isolated and ineffective as if she were frozen in ice with only her agonizing thoughts. When she gazed fearfully into herself, she saw only a deep darkness that pulled like a vacuum at her being. A devouring black hole in the space of her existence. What had happened to her life? It was all so horrible and hopeless.

The detective’s lips were moving soundlessly. He was talking to her. She focused her mind and brought herself back to outer awareness.

“The photograph,” Salter reminded her flatly. “You said you had a photograph of your son.”

Later, in the hall outside Deirdre’s apartment, Salter and Marrivale walked together to stand near the elevator, where they wouldn’t be overheard.

“I checked,” Marrivale said. “There’s a murder warrant out for Deirdre Grocci, maybe goes under the last name Chandler, maybe Jones. She escaped from a psychiatric clinic in Missouri, and she’s suspected of killing a woman named Christine Mathews in Saint Louis.”

“A nutcase killer,” Salter said. “And now they tell us she’s snatched a kid.”

“You don’t think she did?” Marrivale asked, obviously surprised.

“Oh, yeah, I think she’s got him,” Salter said. “And I think maybe there’s a lot more to it than we know.”

“She sounds plenty dangerous,” Marrivale said. His pale face tightened. “Jesus! That poor kid…”

“Yeah.” Salter dug the photograph of Michael that Molly had given him out of his pocket and held it out for Marrivale to see.

“Poor kid,” Marrivale repeated, staring at the photo with his head bowed. “He looks something like my sister’s boy. About the same age.” For a moment his expression hardened with fury.

“Some shitty world,” Salter said, sliding the photo back into his pocket.

“Anything can happen anytime to anybody,” Marrivale said. “And when it does, it usually isn’t good.”

“This time,” Salter told him, “we’ve gotta see that it doesn’t happen to this kid.”

“It’s too often the innocents who get hurt,” Marrivale said. “They’re like prey animals for the carnivores of the world. We have to protect them.”

Salter looked at him, wondering for a moment if Marrivale might be too philosophical to be a cop.