Victims (29 page)

He poked his index finger at her. “And listen, you, you’re not the only thinking head around here. We’re all in this together, so you just get back on the team line. And,” he added as an afterthought, “do not discuss any of this with your friend, the journalist.”

Miranda pulled herself up straight and spoke with great control. “I should think, Captain, as one ‘thinking head’ to another, you would realize that Mike Stein is the last person in the world who would be interested in my ‘theories.’”

The other detectives filed into the office quietly, without making eye contact with either Miranda or the Captain. For the rest of the meeting, any questions that were asked were low-key and polite and procedural.

Miranda Torres remained silent and expressionless.

She had nothing more to say.

M
IKE STEIN’S ARTICLES WERE
given sensational handling. In large black headlines, each featured witness was announced in his own words: “
I WAS JUST PASSING THROUGH
”—bus driver had schedule to keep; “
IT WAS THEIR OWN BUSINESS ENTIRELY
”—middle-aged couple watched with “interest”; “
I DID WHAT THE AMERICANS DID. NOTHING
”—Russian immigrant studies for citizenship.

Miranda flipped through the collection of articles yet to be scheduled. They would all be headlined except if some major local or national catastrophe interrupted the rhythm that the articles had established.

She had driven out to his beach house for the day because he was holed up, working on his book.

“I’m glad you came,” he told her. “I was afraid you wouldn’t. You look tired, Miranda.”

“I am tired.”

“You look sad.”

“I am sad.”

“Don’t be sad. Wait. I’ll give you something to be happy about, okay? The only nice thing to come out of all this. There was a young boy I interviewed. I didn’t tell you about him. Angelo Stone.”

He described Angelo: his life, his handicap, his remarkable talents and intelligence. He changed the important details, however.

“So this kid was home alone and he was the only one—the only one who
tried
to get 911. Angelo is so limited in his movements, everything depends on a very precise timing, an exact relationship between the elements of his activating equipment.”

Mike told her that Angelo, in his excitement and agitation at seeing the attack on Anna Grace, had turned in his wheelchair, headed for his special telephone equipment, but he had toppled from his chair and was unable to move until his father came home, hours later. By then, of course, Anna Grace’s body had been removed.

“And that is something for me to be happy about?”

“Not yet. This part.”

Mike had been impressed by the young boy’s sincerity and horror at the lack of humanity on the part of his neighbors, at the handicapped youngster’s need to tell Mike that he wasn’t handicapped in human concern. Mike spent some time with Angelo and was impressed by his amazing capabilities. Mike just happened to have a friend at IBM.

“He visited with Angelo and his father—here’s the happy part—and his division is planning to develop some of Angelo’s inventions and adaptations. They’ve given the kid not just a scholarship but a paid job as a consultant on designs to assist the handicapped. Angelo is set for an open-ended future. Now, does that make you happy?”

“Yes,” Miranda said. “That is a good thing.”

“Good. So will you try not to look so sad? You didn’t eat anything, you don’t want to go for a walk on the beach. I would suggest a nice long, relaxing rubdown, Miranda, but I get the feeling that isn’t what you want.” There was a long, tense silence. He drew in his breath and then asked her, “What is it you want, Miranda? Why are you here?”

“To talk.”

He dropped onto the chair opposite the sofa and studied her. The beautiful Miranda. The lovely, earnest young woman with whom he was slightly in love, slightly in awe of. He hadn’t come upon such hard, certain honesty, such street-wise innocence, in a lifetime. She had a wounded, vulnerable, suffering look. She actually believed in something, in rules and doing things the right way—whatever the hell that meant. She was in great pain and he could not help her. But he tried.

“Miranda, I told you it had been a mistake. Didn’t you see the corrected autopsy reports that Captain O’Connor got?”

She stared at him. “There are questions, Mike. There are questions involved here. There are...many things involved here.”

She understood his calmness completely. He was safe. His articles were safe. His book was safe. His movie was safe. His future was safe. He could afford patience, and there was a patronizing tone in his words. He was being generous.

“Go on, Miranda. Run through your list. It’s all academic. A mistake was made and corrected. Can’t you accept that?”

“The odds on the mistaken cause of death being something her doctor had mentioned to me, an aneurysm—the odds are about the same as winning the lottery.”

“And yet somebody
always
wins the lottery, Miranda.”

“And you win this lottery, yes?”

He shook his head sadly, shrugged. “What else? Anything else that you haven’t already mentioned to me, that is bothering you?”

“Yes. I think that Bill Grace has a right to know how his wife died. I think he should be told, privately, so that he doesn’t have to go through the rest of his life thinking she might still be alive if
only
someone had called for help. Let him know: it wouldn’t have mattered, her death was inevitable. And then he can get on with the rest of his life. And her mother...”

“And her mother? Who thought ‘it was the Spanish girl,’ so the hell with that yelling, crying, pleading, knifed-up girl out there? What do you want to give the mother, Miranda?”

“Truth,” she said softly. “It will mitigate nothing for her. Nothing. But she should have...the truth.”

“And the truth will make her free?”

“No. Nothing will make her free. Your article on Anna Grace’s mother, it will be the last one?”

“Oh, yes. It will be the
featured
one, the ultimate one. Oh, yeah.” He waited. “Anything else?”

“Yes. Something else.”

She confronted him with such hard intensity he felt it was impossible to move, to blink, to glance away.

“You asked me, at the very beginning, you asked me what gets to me. You were upset that I wasn’t surprised or infuriated by the behavior of the people on Barclay Street. Well, I’ll tell you now what gets to me. I’ll tell you what has surprised me. It’s that someone like you—I’ve read your work for as long as I can remember. You’ve written constantly about the need for honesty, for exposing the liars and the cheats, for cleaning up government, for making life more livable for all of us. For having courage, for taking the hard way when it is necessary to do this. And then, when something comes along and it doesn’t meet with
your
needs, when it isn’t what it seemed at first, when it would change what it is that you want—then you abandon all the things you said you lived by.”

As if talking to a distraught child, he reached for her hands and said, “Miranda. You are wrong. A mistake was made. And the mistake was corrected.”

“That’s the part of it that I cannot...That there were, God, how many people involved? How many people does it take, how many contracts, how many favors, to do such a thing? To change an autopsy report to fit a theory, to fit the needs of a journalist?”

Mike stood up abruptly, tired of defending himself. He paced around the large open room, flung a pillow from one chair to another, reached down and pulled her to her feet. There was no more pretense; he had reached honesty.

“Let me tell you, Miranda, about the
needs
of a journalist. Twice a week, I’ve been turning out the routine garbage about the throw-aways of our society. Victims as well as perpetrators. They’re all interchangeable, they all have small, unimportant, uninteresting little stories that all end in the same way. Sooner or later. I just switch around the names. You give me details of a crime, I’ll tell you who did it, why he did it, how he did it, and who the hell cares? That’s honesty. That’s integrity, and I have been drowning in it for years. Nothing has touched me, impressed me, moved me, no particular victim, no special asshole who makes up for an abused childhood by committing sadistic acts on other victims.”

“But you could have written other things. You have knowledge of other worlds and—”

“It’s all the same, out there. It’s all victims or perpetrators. You saw those guys in Pisani’s? Did you take a good look? I mean a
really
good look? In their eyes, Miranda. It’s all there in their eyes. The fear of being a victim, of being a loser, of even
appearing
to be a loser. A guy could be the biggest schmuck in the history of the world—some little twenty-four-year-old vice-president of some network thinks his idea of a circle of houses that talk to each other is the greatest thing since Thomas Edison—and the schmuck turns into a power. It’s not just the money, Miranda. It’s the power that comes
with
it.”

“But your success was genuine, Mike. With your novel, with the Vietnam book.”

“Genuine did not translate into big bucks. Did not translate into real—
real
—success.”

“As measured by your childhood friends from the Bronx.”

“As good a measurement as any other. And I’ll tell you something. One of the reasons I went nuts when I turned forty—married a twenty-year-old kid I didn’t even know, fathered a little boy I hardly ever see—was panic. At the realization that it was all behind me. I turned down all the crap that was offered me after my Pulitzer—all the TV-series ideas, all the wild action movies they wanted me to put my name on. I had integrity, Miranda and I walked away from millions of dollars. Instead, I lectured bored kids who wanted to be star TV news commentators, and I wrote about the scum of the earth who were bringing us all down. Nothing mattered. My baby bride divorced me and got herself a baby bridegroom. My oldest son is fathering my ‘fatherless’ last-born. And I just kept churning out the latest atrocity: who-what-when-where-how? And who the hell cares?”

“Until the night on Barclay Street.”

“Until the night on Barclay Street. Something opened up inside of me. Some sense of indignation I didn’t realize I still had. A sense of outrage. A need to write about it, to explore it, to explode with it.”

“But, Mike, your outrage is proper. The actual cause of Anna Grace’s death changes nothing. You could still—”

“It changes everything! Don’t you get it, kid? The outrage out there”—his arm swept the room—“is more like relief. ‘Hell, I’m glad it didn’t happen under my window.’ It’s vicarious outrage, a way of exorcising their own indifference. You know what the hook was, Miranda? The title:
The Girl Who Was Murdered Twice.
Ah, Miranda. I’ve been offered more jobs, more assignments, more ways to make money. In two weeks I’ll be fifty, and that’s just another number. My future is still there. I’m taking all I can get.”

“So you can walk into Pisani’s and have them all look at you with their worried eyes and hug you with envy instead of with love.”

“You got it, kid.”

She shook her head and went out to the deck that surrounded his beach house. It was damp and sticky and the air was foggy and wet, with a mild breeze coming off the ocean. He came behind her, his arms turning her to face him. He moved his mouth along her cheek, back to her ear, he whispered and encouraged her, then met her lips. She stiffened when he tried to bring her back into the house.

“Miranda. Come with me. For as long as it lasts. Take a leave of absence. Come out to the Coast with me. Miranda, in your whole life, have you ever done anything just for the hell of it? For the fun of it?”

“I have not had the luxury.”

“I’m offering it to you now. A whole new world, Miranda.”

She shook her head sadly and then stood, studying him, motionless as a statue. Finally he knew why she had always seemed so mysteriously familiar. Nefertiti: the proud, beautiful, mystical, strong, innocent yet knowing and indomitable mask of the queen. Miranda.

“At the center of my world, Mr. Stein, there must be truth. I cannot exist without this center.” She frowned for a moment, then smiled, raised her hand and snapped her fingers. “As for the Coast, which you offer me as a gift, I will tell you what I have told you before: it is all East Harlem.”

M
IRANDA WENT TO HER
bureau, opened the top drawer and removed a small ceramic box with the face of a cat handpainted on the lid. She took out the card that Senator John Collins had given her more than a year ago. She studied the telephone number he had written in ink on the reverse side of the simple but impressive business card. She breathed quickly and felt the dryness inside her mouth. Well. Now she would see how this thing worked.

Carefully, Miranda dialed the number.

He answered on the second ring.

She had caught him just right. He had arrived in New York to attend a testimonial dinner, had stopped by his office to pick up some papers. Which was why he had answered so promptly. He would be in New York for a few days.

She was awkward and hesitant, unsure of how to proceed. She was about to ask if she could possibly visit his office when he suggested he stop by her apartment.

“I have a feeling this is rather serious and best handled face to face, right?”

He was wearing formal dinner clothes. He was taller, more vivid, handsomer than she had remembered, with the charisma of a movie star. He was gracious and charming and polite and oddly old-fashioned, courteous and concerned, giving her his total attention. From time to time, he asked her to slow down: he was taking notes.

“Remember, Miranda, you are in the middle of all of this and it is all new to me. It certainly is involved, what with the drug thing. That seems to be at the beginning and heart of everything that follows, doesn’t it?”

He saw that immediately. She didn’t have to sell him on anything. He was quick and sharp and bright. He made connections quickly as she explained. Finally, he snapped his notebook closed.