The Underwriting (15 page)

She stared down at him. Was he serious? Anger was the last stage before the disappointment took over, and she clung to it with all she had.

“Yeah,” she cut him off, turning on her heel to leave, “I do.”

—

I
T
WAS
SNOWING
OUTSIDE
and the wind hit her face hard. It was almost April: there was no reason it should still be this cold. She pulled her coat tight around her and tiptoed on the accumulating snow to keep her feet from slipping out of her heels, feeling the physical discomfort creep up through her toes and spread across her chest and into her heart.
Don't cry
, she willed herself.

She put her arm out for a cab, knowing it was futile as the yellow cars rushed by, lights off and already occupied, like physical signs of her rejection. This city was mean, and for no good reason: What was so wrong with her? Why couldn't New York just give her a light and let her in?

She stood on the corner of Forty-seventh and Park and looked north, noticing L.Cecil looming and, for the first time in the past three months, not hoping to run into Todd. She wanted to go back to college, where she knew what to do, or to Florida, where she'd been bored but at least had been in control. But she knew she couldn't go back, and the heaviness of that thought made her hope sink down into her stomach where she hardly noticed it anymore.

But then a cab stopped to let someone off. She felt her legs move to rush for it, the will to survive surging through her veins with animalistic instinct that didn't care when her foot submerged in a puddle of gray slush at the curb, ruining her shoes.

She gave the driver her address. Traffic was slow and she stared out at the lights in the windows, trying to remember what it was like to think this city was cool. She hated it. Hated the men and the snow and her numb limbs and the shitty thirteen-dollar cocktails at shitty midtown bars. Why did she even want its approval? The thought of another weekend here, alone, made her heart swell with the claustrophobic panic of being trapped on an island.

She reached into her purse to fish out her BlackBerry.

She found the e-mail she'd seen earlier from Crowley Brown's HR department titled “Transfers.”

For paralegals interested in transferring to other offices on a temporary or permanent basis, please contact your HR manager. The following offices presently have openings for first and second year paralegals:

Dubai

Shanghai (Mandarin required)

San Francisco

She forwarded the e-mail to her HR manager and typed in the body of the e-mail:

I'd like to be considered for San Francisco, please. Ready to leave immediately.

CHARLIE

W
EDNESDAY
, M
ARCH
26; N
EW
Y
ORK
, N
EW
Y
ORK

“We'll take another round,” Johnny Walker told the bartender, without asking Charlie whether he wanted it.

Johnny, a slender, fashionable native New Yorker who did not find his name as amusing as his parents had thirty-three years earlier, worked at the
New York Times
, where he and Charlie had met as college interns. Johnny was the closest thing Charlie had to a best friend, though they normally only saw each other once a year, for drinks at the Distinguished Wakamba, a kitschy cocktail lounge in the Garment District that had become a journalist hang after an undercover cop killed an unarmed security guard on its doorstep and made it feel edgy.

“So are we going to talk about it?” Johnny finally asked, checking his watch as Charlie passed the second empty beer bottle back to the bartender and asked for another. It was the first evening he'd gotten out of his parents' Brooklyn apartment since he'd flown back with them after Kelly's services and he wanted it to last.

“It's just strange to be on the other side,” Charlie confided.

“I'm sure.”

The press wouldn't let go of Kelly's overdose, or the platform it provided to argue over drugs in America. And the memorial fund Renee had started, despite all its good intentions, was just making it all worse, fueling a national debate over whether Kelly was a victim or a spoiled girl who'd squandered her opportunity.

Charlie sipped the fresh beer. “Do you think Sean Robinson's right? About the white girl thing?”

As one of the few black reporters at the
Times
, Johnny was the go-to “racial issues” coverage person, a position he despised.

“I think they're right that no one would be so concerned if it were a poor black kid that had died, but I doubt they'd care as much if she'd been an ugly white girl, either.” He studied Charlie's face. “Come on, man, you know everyone is going to make this a platform for whatever they want. You can't take it personally, you know that.”

“I just don't get it,” he said. “She was a girl in college, not a public figure.”

“Welcome back to America.”

He was right: Charlie had forgotten how the American press worked. Amongst the many things he was struggling to readjust to, the prioritization of public interest in his sister's death over the thousands that were happening in the Middle East was at the top of his list.

“How's your mom doing?” Johnny asked.

“Terribly.” Charlie shook his head. “You know they talked every single day? Kelly called my mother
every single day
. I think I called my parents once a semester when I was in college.”

Johnny sipped his beer. He was one of the most talented guys Charlie knew, but had never gotten the recognition he deserved. It would have been so easy to break through by playing the race angle, but Johnny wouldn't do it. He refused to let an agenda drive his work, or be tempted by the salability of sensationalism.

“I think she was murdered,” Charlie said quietly.

Johnny's eyes snapped up. “What?”

Charlie took another sip of his beer before he delivered the facts he'd carefully collected to form the narrative he now believed.

“Her friends only saw her take one hit of Molly. All of them took from the same batch and were fine, so there wasn't anything bad in it,” he reported. “Her friend Renee said it took them an hour and a half to get back to campus from the concert, and that Kelly was fine when she put her to bed. So even if Kelly had found and taken more drugs from someone else at the concert, which I find hard to believe, it would have kicked in while she was in the car and Renee would have noticed.”

Charlie could feel his friend studying his face, trying to decide whether Charlie himself was being logical or was under the influence of his own desire to see his sister as pure.

“The toxicology report showed that there was more than one hit in her system,” Johnny said carefully.

“I know. I think she must have taken it after Renee left.”

“That doesn't make it murder.”

“I found a water bottle in her stuff, and it has a powder residue in it that I think is Molly.”

“That still doesn't make it murder.”

“Why would my sister have woken up to sit in her room by herself and drink a water bottle laced with Molly?”

“Maybe it was suicide,” Johnny said softly.

Charlie shook his head. “She was happy.”

“How do you know?”

“I talked to her that day,” he admitted. “She was upset with me, but she wasn't suicidal.”

“But the drugs—the comedown—”

“Takes two days, not two hours.”

“Do you know who she was sleeping with?”

“I think it was either this kid Luis, who gave her the drugs at the concert, or her RA.”

Johnny waited. Charlie continued, knowing the impact his words would have.

“Renee said she locked the door when she left Kelly. The RA, Robby, was the only one with a key. And according to the doctor, he was still drunk in the morning when he brought her to the hospital, which means he must have been completely blacked out when she died.”

“So you think he had something to do with it?”

“I think someone should ask.”

“You can't get involved.” Johnny shook his head. “Families getting involved never helps.”

“I know.”

“Are you asking me to write something?”

Charlie shrugged, looking down at his hands.

“You know this would make my career, right? Breaking a story like this?”

“I know you'll treat it fairly.”

“But it'll make the attention that much worse. The punditry now will be nothing compared to—”

“I know,” Charlie interrupted.

“Who else should I talk to?”

“I pulled some numbers from her phone.” Charlie handed Johnny a piece of paper with the names and contact information he'd written down. “I'd start with Renee Schultz, Luis Guerrera and Robby Goodman.”

Johnny checked his watch.

“Go,” Charlie said, knowing he wanted to get working on the story.

“Are you sure you'll be okay?”

“Yeah,” he said.

Johnny left and Charlie ordered another beer. It was the right thing to do, he reminded himself. If the media insisted on judging his sister, he was going to make sure she came out clean.

He pulled Kelly's phone out of his pocket and looked at the call log from the day she died for the dozenth time. He hadn't told Johnny about the other number—the 212 area code she'd called that afternoon. He held his breath and dialed it.

“L.Cecil, Tara Taylor's line,” a woman said.

Charlie felt the flood of relief, laughing at his fear the number belonged to a drug dealer. “Oh, I must have the wrong—” he started, but changed his mind, suddenly curious who Kelly would have worked with. “Actually, yes, could I speak with Tara, please?”

“She's at a client event, but I can give you her e-mail?”

“Sure,” Charlie said, “let me get a pen.”

TARA

W
EDNESDAY
, M
ARCH
26; N
EW
Y
ORK
, N
EW
Y
ORK

A man unhooked the red velvet rope as cameras flashed, and Tara lifted the skirt of her long purple gown, conscious of the curious gaze of the pedestrians who'd paused in the cold at the Frick's entrance to determine the cause of all the commotion.

Tara hadn't thought about anything other than Hook for the past three weeks. She got up at five, went for a run, was in the office by seven and stayed until midnight every day, only registering whether it was a weekday or the weekend by how crowded the twenty-seventh floor was when she left the conference room to go to the restroom. She'd been excused from all office- or team-wide meetings, and had finally put an Out of Office automated response on her personal e-mail so she could feel less guilty about being completely unresponsive to any of her friends. The country could have gone to war and she wasn't sure she'd have noticed.

But tonight, she was entering the world again: she was going to have a drink and be social and show Catherine that she wasn't just the kind of woman who could put her head down and work, she was also the kind of woman who could socialize with clients and sell them on the firm's merits.

She posed for a photograph with Beau, who was here as a benefactor rather than a corporate representative, and realized she'd forgotten to line her eyebrows. She chided herself for the neglect: how had she forgotten something so simple? She felt the anxiety that she
wasn't
in fact the woman who could work hard and do well at events start to swell and she pushed it away. She'd make a checklist when she got home of all the things she needed to remember to do when she got ready before these things, and then she wouldn't forget.

Tara followed the entrance lights through a mirrored hall, instinctively checking to be sure she didn't look fat. Her dress was cut on the bias, a swath of deep plum silk that crossed her right shoulder and gathered at her left hip, leaving a slit open for her leg to peek out when she walked. It was four years old, but it felt appropriately edgy for a gala supporting the currently-trending-on-Twitter artist George E.

She plucked a champagne flute off a passing silver tray and wandered through the Garden Court. Oversized party lights were strung around the ceiling, illuminating bouquets of rich burgundy roses and the glass panes of the roof and side wall, where white snow whirled and collected in the corners. She felt the bubbles from the champagne sweep up into her brain and she reminded herself to take it slow.

“Don't you look lovely.” She turned at the voice and smiled when she saw Terrence.

“What are you doing here?” she said brightly, kissing him on either cheek. Another person she hadn't seen for weeks.

“Investor relating.” He smiled. “One of the patrons is a rich gay, so L.Cecil sent me in to swoon him.”

Tara laughed. “Do you feel used?”

“Not if it gets me a rich husband.”

“I should learn to think more like you,” she said.

“I trust the deal is going well?” Terrence asked.

“Yeah,” Tara said. “We filed the S-1 today, which is a huge relief.”

“That was quick,” he said. “No wonder I haven't seen you.”

“You know I literally have not been outside during daylight hours? It's terrifying,” she said, “but I'm really happy.” She added, “I feel like things are finally happening, you know?”

Terrence smiled and nodded. “I'm proud of you.”

He clinked her glass and she felt the warmth of his honesty.

Dinner was announced and Tara and Terrence meandered with the crowd into the alcove where tables were set.

“Don't turn now, but there's a man over there staring at you,” Terrence bent down and whispered to her.

“What?” Tara said, turning automatically. “Where?”

“By the staircase,” he said, “next to the supermodel.”