You Should Have Known (28 page)

“Did he know her? Malaga?”

“Well…the little boy was a patient at Memorial. They told me that, and I guess I believe them. The rest of it is all…”

But she stopped herself. All what? A vicious lie? She knew it wasn't. She knew there was more, she was just letting it in as slowly as she possibly could. And she wasn't going to proclaim his innocence to anyone. Let him proclaim his own innocence. And let him show up to do it, thanks.

“Well,” said Sylvia to her surprise, “that does make sense.”

“Really.”

“Yes. I'm going to tell you something that you may already know. But if you don't, I need you to pretend that you know it. I'm in a bit of a liminal place here.”

Grace stared at her. “Am I supposed to understand what you mean?”

Sylvia sighed. “I guess not. I hoped you would, but I was afraid you wouldn't.”

“You're acting very lawyerly,” Grace snapped. It sounded unkind. Well, she was feeling distinctly unkind at the moment. Sylvia would just have to adapt.

Sylvia turned the white mug between her palms, rotating the handle between ten and two. “He hired me. Back in February.”

“Hired
you
,” Grace said in disbelief. It came out sounding like an insult. She was sorry for that.

“Yes. He called, made an appointment, came in, and signed a document hiring me formally to represent him.”

“Jesus,” Grace muttered. “In February.”

“There was going to be a disciplinary hearing. He wanted advice.” She took a sip of her coffee, winced in displeasure, and set it down. “You knew about the hearing?”

Grace shook her head.

Sylvia started to roll the mug between her palms again. “I never asked him, point-blank, whether you knew. All these months, whenever we ran into each other, or doing benefit stuff, I always wondered. But I couldn't say anything, not unless he brought you in himself, to my office. It was privileged. You understand.”

She nodded. She did understand. She was bound to her own clients the same way. But then, she didn't know the people in their lives. She didn't walk to school with them or sit on committee meetings with them. It wasn't fair.

“And it's still privileged, technically,” Sylvia went on. “I should not be having this conversation with you. The fact that he's a suspect now, or that we're friends, it's not relevant. And I can't take the slightest chance of being disbarred.” She stopped. She seemed to be waiting for something from Grace, but Grace wasn't sure what it was.

“I can't be disbarred. I'm a single parent.”

She waited again. Grace just looked at her.

“Grace, do you want me to continue?”

“Oh,” she said, getting it. “Yes. I understand. I wouldn't do that to you.”

Sylvia sighed. “All right. He only came once. He didn't like the advice I gave him, which was to apologize to hospital administration, and accept any arrangement they offered. Just to try to avert outright dismissal. That was not what he had in mind at all.”

“What…did he have in mind?”

“He wanted to go after his bosses. He said one was a plagiarist, another was a pedophile. He wanted me to let them know he'd talk to the press if they went ahead with the hearing. He thought he was paying me for that, and I'd just do it. It's pretty common for clients to make that kind of assumption,” she said, as if she were trying to be kind. “But even if he had some proof, even if it was relevant to his circumstances, somehow, which it obviously wasn't, I just don't have the stomach for that in my practice. I need to look at myself in the mirror when I brush my teeth, you know?”

Grace nodded, but she was losing the drift. Which one was the plagiarist? Was it Robertson Sharp-the-Turd? It was hard to believe that Jonathan, in all of his rants about Robertson Sharp-the-Turd, had never mentioned a crime as egregious, and easily proven, as plagiarism.

“I looked over the paperwork he brought me and I told him, There's too much here. They have more than enough to fire you. Go in and plead with them, say you'll take rehab—”

“Rehab!” Grace practically shouted. “For what?”

“Whatever they wanted,” Sylvia said tightly. “However they wanted to package it in terms of a disability, that would have been ideal. And they were offering him something like that, but he wouldn't consider it. He told me…”

But she stopped herself. She took a deep breath, lifted her mug again, and then remembered and set it back down.

“Actually,” she said, aiming for something sardonic, something less than horrific, “he told me to go fuck myself. But you know, he was under enormous pressure. I wished him good luck, and I meant it.”

Grace squeezed her eyes shut. She had to stop herself from apologizing.

“I don't even know what happened with the hearing,” Sylvia said.

She took a breath. “According to the police, they fired him,” she said. It came out sounding miraculously like old news. “I didn't know anything about it till last night. All these months…” She took a breath. “I guess, when he told me he was at work, he wasn't.” It sounded so utterly lame, she thought. It was perhaps the single lamest sentence she had ever uttered. “I don't know anything. I don't know how I'm supposed to do this.”

“Well, let me help you,” Sylvia said earnestly. “I can try, anyway. So listen to me, because I have two things to tell you. First of all, if you know where he is, tell them.”

She shook her head vigorously. “I don't. I don't have any idea. I've already told them so.”

Their waiter was back. Were they going to order anything? Sylvia asked for the check.

When he went away again, she said, “It's very important that you cooperate with them. The sooner they make it clear you're not involved, the better you'll be treated in the media.”

“All right,” Grace said, though she hated the thought of “cooperating” with Mendoza and O'Rourke.

“And the other thing, actually the most important thing you can do right now is get yourself and your kid out of the way.” She leaned forward, moving aside her full coffee mug. “Jonathan, whatever his reasoning, did not stick around for this. So he gets to miss the circus, whenever it happens. Tonight. Or tomorrow at the latest. But you're here, and they have to point the camera somewhere. Take Henry and find somewhere to go. Somewhere out of New York.”

“Why out of New York?” she said, horrified.

“Because right now it's a New York story. And as long as it's a New York story, news crews from outside the city aren't going to be as dedicated. And the New York outlets aren't going to field crews to…I don't know, Arizona or Georgia. Not for the wife. With him, it would be different, but right now you can't think about him.”

Grace, who'd managed, more or less, to follow until this last part, asked her to explain what that meant.

“I mean, when they find him, and they're going to find him, it will be everywhere. Just…be somewhere else until it happens, and be somewhere else
when
it happens.”

She paused. “I forget. Are your parents here?”

“My father,” Grace said.

“Siblings?”

“No.”

“Close friends?”

Vita
, she thought immediately. But she had not spoken to Vita in such a long time. And there was no one else. How had she let this happen?

“Not really. It was always…”

Me and Jonathan
, she was going to say.
Jonathan and me.
They had been together nearly twenty years. Who made it to twenty years anymore? Who had those long-and-great marriages that her parents' generation enjoyed, with multigenerational safaris to Africa and family compounds on a lakefront or a shore somewhere, and big raucous parties for the milestone anniversaries?
Only marriage therapists
, she thought ruefully.

“But…,” she started to say. She was thinking:
my patients
. She could not walk away from her patients. That was not allowed. That was not ethical. Lisa and her missing gay husband and bewildered children, Sarah and her enraged, failed screenwriter who had deigned to move back in. She had responsibilities.

And her book. What about her book?

She could not bear to think about her book.

And then she felt as if she had taken hold of the very tight lid of a very old jar, very, very deep inside her, and let the tiniest breath of its contents escape through the tiniest of breaches, and even that was enough to bring her down. Acrid shame. The most powerful, the most poisonous, of human essences. It took only an instant to be absolutely everywhere.

“I'm sorry,” Sylvia said, though if she felt real pity, she was kind enough not to show it. “Listen,” she said with great care, “I know we don't think of ourselves as close friends, but I do want you to know you can call on me.” She stopped. Then she frowned at Grace. “Should I say that again?”

Grace shook her head and said no, but the truth was that she had stopped listening again and really wasn't at all sure.

T
hey're upstairs,” her doorman told her, unnecessarily. She had seen the cars and the two vans, one marked NYPD, one something else, she couldn't make it out, as soon as she'd rounded the corner from Madison, and for a long time she had stood there, alternately resigned to it and not, then trying to understand why she could not seem to stand up straight while she worked it out. (
Because of food
, she reminded herself.
Because you need to eat something soon—idiot—or just give up completely.
) And then she went on, little lamb that she was, down the lane to the slaughterhouse.

“Okay,” she told him. Then, ridiculously, she said thank you.

“They had a warrant. We had to let them in.”

“Sure,” she said. His name was Frank. She had bought a baby gift for his newborn, back in the summer. Julianna, that was the baby's name. “How is Julianna?” she asked absurdly, and he smiled but said nothing. Instead, as if it were any other day, he walked alongside her to the elevator and waited until the door closed.

Inside, she leaned heavily against the elevator wall and closed her eyes. How far down would this go? she wondered.
If I get through today, if I get through tomorrow.
How long would it last? On which morning would she get to wake up back in her own life?

But even as she stood—leaned—thinking about that life, it was leaking away, disassembling itself, little bits of it detaching and flying off. So much lost, so quickly; she could barely track the slippage. Ever since Wednesday, and the news about Malaga. No, since Monday, the day of Jonathan's departure. The day Malaga had died. (She couldn't think about that yet. She was nowhere near ready for that.) But wait, of course it had begun far earlier—long, long before that. How long? How many years? How far back did it go?

But that was an equation for another day. The elevator stopped at her floor, and when the door slid open she saw the official notice, photocopied into a blur, fastened to the front door with a kind of tape that was bound to strip paint on removal, and realized to her own immense sadness that she didn't even care, because she didn't live here anymore.

How many times had she left home? Once to go to college. Again to set up a household with her husband. Each time had taken her further from the place of her childhood, where she had crawled, then walked, then run, and played hiding games with her friends, and learned how to cook, and how to make out, and how to get an A in virtually any course. But at the end of the day, and no matter where she might be living at the time, these particular rooms and hallways had always meant home, and Grace had always found them beautiful. She could not remember a time when she'd wanted more space or a better address or even a nicer view: This was her place, and it was more than good enough. They had been renting the unlovely postwar on First Avenue when her father met Eva, long ensconced in eight high-ceilinged rooms on 73rd that she had not the slightest wish to leave. The day he suggested transferring the title to Grace—rather nonchalantly, over lunch, she recalled—she had gone home and wept in relief. How else would she and Jonathan—without a Wall Street salary or hedge fund between them—ever have afforded to give Henry the New York childhood she had wanted for him? They'd have been in that white brick box, or one just like it, until Henry himself had left for college.

But now her home had an official NYPD notice affixed to the door, which itself was slightly ajar, and through the opening came the sound of talking and shoes on the parquet floor, and the flash of a white uniform, as if some very unpromising party were already in progress. For a moment, she actually fought the impulse to knock.

“You can't come in here,” a woman said when she was barely inside.

“Oh no?” said Grace. She didn't have much fight in her. But she didn't really want to leave, either. Where was she supposed to go?

“Who are you?” the woman asked, rather obtusely, because wasn't it obvious?

“I live here,” Grace told her.

“You have some ID?”

Grace found her driver's license, and the woman—the officer, she supposed—took it. She was heavyset and very pale. Her hair had been badly dyed a color that could not have flattered anyone, and Grace was not remotely sympathetic. “Wait here,” the woman told her, and left her there on her own doorstep while she walked away down Grace's hallway and into the corridor leading to Grace's bedroom.

Two men in white jumpsuits came out of Henry's room and stepped around her as they passed into the dining room. They said nothing, neither to her nor to each other. She leaned forward a little, trying to see past them, and she did see the corner of a table—a portable table—that did not belong to her. But she didn't really want to move off the spot she'd been told to occupy. It had become a kind of challenge. And actually, the more she saw of what was happening here, the less she really wanted to know.

Mendoza arrived and handed her back her driver's license. “We're going to be awhile,” he told her shortly.

Grace nodded. “Can I see the paperwork?”

“Yes, you can.”

He sent the policewoman into the dining room, and she came back with a longer version of the document taped to her front door. “I'm going to read this,” she said quite stupidly, but Mendoza, kindly, did not smile.

“Of course,” he said. “Why don't you have a seat?”

And he gestured, bizarrely enough, in the direction of her own living room.

Grace walked down the corridor, holding her purse in one hand, the stapled-together papers in the other, and sat in one of the armchairs. It was not the same chair her father had always favored in this room, but it occupied the same position: between the two windows overlooking 81st Street, facing the hallway. He would sit here in an imposing but not very comfortable throne-like chair he had taken with him to Eva's, one long leg flung over the other, usually with a Scotch in one of the heavy crystal tumblers still kept in the bar in the corner (he was not sentimental about them, apparently, the way he was about the chair). From this seat he held forth, rising occasionally to make drinks for the others or another for himself. They had been—her father and mother—in the style of their era, very fine entertainers, with the routines and division of labor between them established and smoothly attuned. Everyone drank more then, and none of them had (or else all of them had) “a problem,” and who was to say it wasn't better that way? There had even been silver boxes full of cigarettes on some of the side tables, boxes she had sometimes opened and inhaled deeply, imagining herself Dorothy Parker, smoking away while making a comment of great wit and insight. The boxes, naturally, were long gone, but the bar remained—it had been fashioned out of a piece of furniture, something English that had probably been built to hold sheets or folded clothes—and was actually still full of bottles from her parents' time: rye and crème de menthe and bitters, stuff nobody needed anymore. When she and Jonathan had had guests over for dinner, they served wine, or at the most a gin and tonic or a Scotch, which they went through at such a slow pace that the occasional holiday bottle from a patient's family kept them more than well enough supplied. Though, actually, it now occurred to her, she couldn't remember the last time they'd had guests over for dinner.

She turned to the search warrant in her hands and tried to make sense of it but quickly became entangled in the specific turgidity of legal documents.
The Criminal Court of the City of New York. The Hon. Joseph V. DeVincent. You are authorized and directed to search the following premises.

And below that, her own address, the address of her entire life, from birth until today:
35 East 81st Street, Apartment 6B.

And below that:

You are hereby authorized and directed to search for and to seize…

Here the type got smaller, as if they were going to attempt to cram too many things in. Which made no sense, because there was only one item listed:

Cellular phone of unknown make and model.

But she would have given them that, or at the very least told them where to find it! They only had to ask. She was the one who'd confirmed the phone was here!

And then she realized: That wasn't the point. The point was to find Jonathan or possibly even to connect him to Malaga—her life or her death. Anything they came across while looking for the phone that might help them do either one of those things would be fair game. She closed her eyes and listened. The older buildings didn't leak sound the way the newer ones did, but she had lived in this apartment too many years not to recognize where people were moving around. There was quiet talking in the dining room and rustling in the hall closet. She heard Henry's closet door shutting and the
thwap
of the Sub-Zero in the kitchen. How many in all?

She got up and walked back to the edge of the living room and peered down the corridor to her bedroom. The door, which she was certain had been left open this morning, was shut. They knew the phone was in there, Grace realized. They had looked in, seen it, and closed the door to prevent themselves from “finding it” too soon, so that they could keep looking for it everywhere else. For a moment, she felt so routed by anger that she couldn't move. When that passed, she went back and sat down again.

Two officers went past and turned down the foyer. One was carrying the desktop computer from Jonathan's room. The other had a box of files.

Well, she'd expected that.

And the drawers in that same room, full of old checkbooks? His date books? She knew he kept them somewhere. They would find those, she supposed, because unlike herself, they would have the wherewithal to look.

The first of the officers, the one who'd carried the computer, passed her again, returning to the same room. This time he brought out the box of files she hadn't looked through the night before.

The other officer came back again and turned into the corridor. This time she could hear Mendoza. He was speaking. He was standing at her bedroom door. Grace could hear the door opening. She wondered which of the two of them had opened it.

In her own dining room, a woman laughed.

Grace sat back, letting the deep couch catch her. She was imagining the two of them going in, looking around, perhaps “noticing,” perhaps “not noticing,” the cell phone she had placed on the bedside cupboard. How long would they be able to legitimately “not notice” it? And what else could they see while they were “looking”?

There were items of clothing on the floor. They shouldn't be on the floor, but Mendoza wasn't going to know that, was he? He wouldn't know that the ugly shirt marked “Sachs” was anything but an ugly shirt. Perhaps he would not even note that it was ugly. He wouldn't understand what a rip through her life that single condom had made. Mendoza wasn't going to care where a scarf had been purchased or what had happened to a strand of gray pearls. He wouldn't know about the pearls in the first place, or the sapphire necklace that had been her mother's, or the leather gym bag. But he might know about other things. He was looking for answers to questions she had never asked. Grace took a breath, forcing the air far down into her lungs, where it nearly hurt. For the first time in years, she wished she had a cigarette.

Mendoza walked down the corridor and turned toward the front door. He seemed to have forgotten her existence. Grace, in disbelief, saw that he was carrying a plastic bag containing Jonathan's hairbrush.

Unmistakably Jonathan's hairbrush: the expensive wooden kind from that fantastic, barely reconstructed pharmacy on Lexington and 81st, with the bristles from some animal, she couldn't remember what. It was supposed to last forever. The mere fact of it was like a syringe of purest adrenaline. No New Yorker who had lived through 9/11 and its aftermath could ignore a hairbrush in a plastic bag. It was one of those objects that had been ripped away from normalcy and thrust into a museum of the iconography of torment: the falling body, the airplane, the “Missing” poster, the tall building, the hairbrush in a plastic bag. It meant…well, it could mean a couple of things, but they were all terrible.

She had forgotten, for a brief moment, that it was already terrible.

“Hey,” she shouted, surprising no one more than herself. “Wait a minute.”

She was already up and across the room. She ran out into the foyer and stopped him. She was pointing at the hairbrush.

“Is he dead?” She had to choke it out.

Mendoza looked at her.

“Is. My husband. Dead,” Grace said again.

He was frowning. He looked convincingly perplexed.

“Do
you
think he's dead?” he finally said.

“Don't give me that Freudian shit,” she hissed at him.

It was exactly—but exactly—what her patient Lisa had said to her, only…when? The day before?

He seemed much calmer than her. She didn't even think she had upset him.

“Mrs. Sachs, I have no idea. Why do you ask me that?”

“Because!” she said, intensely frustrated. “Why are you taking his hairbrush?”

Mendoza looked down at the bag. He seemed to be thinking deeply about it. “We're taking a number of things that might help our investigation. Are you concerned with the legality of the search warrant? Because I can have someone explain it to you.”

“No, no.” She shook her head. “Just…explain to me why his hairbrush is relevant to this.”

He seemed to consider this. Then he asked her to go sit down in the living room again. He would be with her in a couple of minutes. He would explain it all then.

And just like that, she did what he asked. She felt so docile, so pliable. If there had ever been fight in her, she couldn't remember when. She went back to the chair in the living room and crossed her legs, and folded her arms, and waited. He didn't make her wait very long.