Die for You (15 page)

“I don’t believe this,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” said Detective Crowe, scribbling in his little book.

“Hey, are you done?” Some guy waiting impatiently behind us, shifting from foot to foot, gripping a cell phone in his hand. “You’re holding up the line.”

We moved from the queue and I ducked into a doorway, just so that I could lean against something, get out of the sidewalk crowd. People hurried past; the traffic on Broadway was a river of noise.

“How much are we talking about here?”

“Those are just the liquid accounts,” I said. The concrete beneath my feet felt like sand, shifting and unstable. “I don’t know, maybe around seventy thousand between the four of them?”

He nodded, not offering judgment, just writing, always writing in that stupid little book. I wanted to say something, but inside I was in a free fall, wondering about everything it had taken me so long to earn and grow. I wondered about the investment accounts—the IRAs, the pensions, the stocks. Of course, they would all be gone, too. The weight of it was starting to hit me; everything was gone. A hollow space was opening in my middle and I thought of my mother again.

That’s Margie.

Except for the night she told us that she planned to marry Fred, I have never seen her lose herself—not in happiness, not in grief. She would smile but never indulge in a belly laugh. She would frown but never yell. As a younger woman, it was hard for me to imagine her as a girl buffeted by the same passions, desires, and ambitions that rocketed me through my education and career. I couldn’t imagine her lost in passion or crushed by disappointment. She seemed as stoic and steady as a stone column. This was a comfort in some ways, because she was always a place to moor in rough weather.

Years after I left home, after I’d graduated NYU and made my first real money, my mother told me about the months after my father’s death, about the staggering debt of which she’d been ignorant, the gambling addiction that drained him of everything he owned, including his will to live. It only took a week for her to discover that our home was about to go into foreclosure, our vehicles about to be repossessed, that everything she thought she owned, down to the new range, belonged to a bank that hadn’t been paid in months.

In the throes of grief for her husband, she was forced to face the reality that during their marriage he had lied about everything, spent all their money and beyond, and then abandoned us to live with his deceptions and mistakes. We were weeks from being homeless.

“I felt as though I’d swallowed drain cleaner,” she told me. “Everything inside me
burned
. I’ll never forget those nights, how I worried. How angry I was at your father, at myself for being so ignorant and weak. I had nowhere to turn. No one in our family had the kind of money I needed in order to save us. But then, of course, there was Fred.”

He’d loved her for years, she said, respectfully, from a distance. They’d met at church, where my mother had always gone alone on Sunday mornings. He was a wealthy man, came from money, inherited several very successful grocery stores, then made a fortune selling out to one of the big chains, made wise investments. He paid off all the debt my father left behind, the mortgage on our house.

“I don’t know what would have happened to us if it weren’t for Fred.”

“But did you love him, Mom?”

A pause, a sip of coffee where a monolithic emerald glinted in the sunlight. We watched Fred from the window as he filled a birdhouse with seed in their expansive backyard. Their Riverdale home was palatial; I’ve never heard them fight.

“I learned to love him. He’s a good man,” she said finally. “Anyway, it’s overrated, romantic love. Maybe it doesn’t even exist.”

I remember them holding hands while Fred drove us all in the Mercedes to the city for lunch and museums, plays. He was always kind to us. But he was not my father. For years I neither loved him nor disliked him. We did, however, form a friendship over time, a kind of mutual tenderness and respect that was somehow forged by our love for Margie.

“Why are you telling me this now?” Sitting there with her, I suddenly, vividly remembered that night when she told us she planned to marry Fred. These were the things she wouldn’t share then.

“Because you’re a grown woman, just starting out in your life. I want you to know things no one ever taught me.”

She got up and walked to the coffeepot on the counter, warmed her cup and carried the pot back to the table and refilled my mug, too. She was still beautiful; the years hadn’t robbed her of that, though she claimed they had. She complained about her neck, the skin under her eyes. But she was too afraid to go under the knife for vanity. Her words. “It’s like asking God to punish you for your silliness and then laying yourself out on a table for His ease.” She was more regal, more powerful than I remembered her when I was growing up.

“Money is power, Isabel,” she said, looking at something above and beyond me. “It’s freedom. It’s choice. No, it won’t buy you happiness. But it will buy you everything else. Unhappiness is a lot easier to bare when you have money.”

“Mom,” I said. She held up a hand.

“In my love for your father, I turned everything over to him. I never wrote a check in all the years of our marriage. I didn’t even know how much money he made. It seems foolish now, but I suppose I was a foolish girl who went from my father’s house to my husband’s house. I never learned to take care of myself.”

“You took care of us. Not everyone can do that.”

She nodded. “I knew how to do those things—bake cookies and bandage knees, listen to worries and sew up dolls. But this is something more important. Something I have to tell you because I couldn’t show you.”

“Don’t worry, Mom. I have my own money,” I said. She reached for my hand and gripped it hard.

“That’s good. But hear this. When you find the right man and fall in love, Izzy give yourself heart and soul, if you must. But don’t
ever
give him your money.”

She was watching me urgently, the same way she had when she told me never to get in a stranger’s car or never to get behind the wheel if I’d been drinking, the dire consequences of those actions having already played out in her mind. I found myself growing annoyed, uncomfortable. I wasn’t the same kind of woman she was; I didn’t need a man to take care of me.

“Okay, Mom, okay,” I said, drawing my hand back from hers. “I get it.”

“I have to get out of here,” I said, lifting my arm to the traffic. A yellow cab pulled over immediately.

The detective didn’t move to stop me, though he looked as if he wanted to. I saw his arm lift and then drop back to his side. He seemed still, careful, trying not to frighten a butterfly he wanted to net.

“Stay in touch with me,” he warned. “Don’t make me think I have to worry about your role in this.”

I turned and grabbed the door handle and got into the cab quickly. I saw the detective shaking his head—in confusion, in disapproval, I couldn’t be sure—as the taxi pulled into traffic. He put a hand to his jaw, his eyes still locked on the disappearing vehicle.

“Where to?” asked the cabbie. I could see only the back of his bald head; in his picture on the dash he looked like the Crusher.

“I’m not sure yet. Just drive north.”

Only now, alone, in the quiet of the cab, did I allow myself to look again at the text message on my phone. The second one was not from Linda, but from Marcus.

I flashed on scenes, a woman who knew him in a Paris nightclub, who called him by another name and touched him lightly on the cheek before he pushed her hand away and said there had been some mistake. The voice mail from just a couple of weeks ago:
Marcus, my friend, it’s Ivan. Just in from Czech. There’s so much to talk about
. His tone, light and friendly, still managed to sound ominous. He left a number to call. Marcus seemed to go stiff as I relayed the message, then claimed he had no idea who it might have been. “Erase it,” he said. “Wrong number.” When I pressed him about it, he said, “Who knows? Someone from Czech, looking for a job, wanting something for nothing, thinking I owed something to a fellow countryman. No thanks.” I let it go, even though I was sure there was more to it. If he didn’t want to talk about it, there must have been a good reason.

There was something else, too. Something recent and strange that I had ignored. I kept receiving bizarre e-mails in the mailbox on my Web site. Normally, I received multiple messages a day from fans, detractors, booksellers inviting me for events, conference invitations, and the like. Every now and again, I’d get an e-mail from someone who wanted me to write his story or from someone with a “brilliant idea” for my next novel. And sometimes the mail was just from crazy people, with threats, rantings about mistakes they thought I’d made, inappropriate requests for pictures, and blatant come-ons.

Over the last few weeks, I’d received two or three messages from someone claiming to have information about my husband. “You’re in danger,” I remember one e-mail reading. “Your husband is not who you think he is.” I’d had so much strange e-mail over the years that I just pressed
Delete
, without giving it so much as a second thought. Now I racked my brain for the name of the sender, for more of what had been included in the text of the messages. But I’d barely glanced at them; deleted them and forgotten them.

Then, suddenly, I knew where to go. Somewhere safe, somewhere where I could use a computer, get on the Internet and figure out what to do next, try to find those e-mails, which might still linger in my trash folder. The thought gave me a new energy, a feeling of purpose and strength. One thing I wasn’t going to do? Move on. If Marcus thought I was just going to crawl under the covers and grieve him, I was as much a stranger to him as he was to me.

“Where’d she go?” Breslow at his elbow.

“She freaked. Her accounts are close to empty.”

She nodded as though it was news she expected. “What’s she going to do?”

“My guess?” he said, still looking up Broadway in the direction of the cab that had sped Isabel away. “Something stupid.” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Jez nod her agreement.

“Let’s find Camilla Novak,” Breslow said after a moment. “I think we have to go back to that point to figure out what’s happening here.”

Grady shrugged. He didn’t have any better ideas. But he stood rooted in place; there was something else nagging at him. He couldn’t quite get a hold on it, though.

“
Today
, Crowe,” said Breslow impatiently. “I’ve got to pick up Benjy at three in Riverdale.”

“The doorman,” said Crowe.

“Who? Shane?”

“Yeah.”

“Never showed up at his apartment today.”

“Let’s get a warrant and search his place first.”

“I don’t think we’ll get a warrant just because the guy didn’t turn up at home after work.”

“He had opportunity to let the intruders in, he left his post before the next guy showed, and he withheld information. Let’s try.”

She raised her eyebrows at him and gave a quick nod, took her phone from her coat. She always made these kinds of calls, had more finesse, more relationships and less of a temper. Things just always seemed to go easier when Jez handled them. Crowe found he could rub a certain kind of person the wrong way. He had no idea why.

His ex had called the night before last. He knew it was her when he heard the phone ring, though she hadn’t called him in months. He’d just finished working out on the weight bench he kept in the basement of the Bay Ridge row house they’d shared.

“Keep it, Grady” she’d said of the house when they were splitting up assets. “I hate Brooklyn. And I hate this house.” They’d inherited the house from his grandparents and hadn’t been able to afford to change much. So they walked over the same linoleum floors his father had as a child, endured the same pink-tiled bathrooms, and climbed the same creaky steps. But he loved that house, and it was theirs free and clear—paid off long ago, taxes insanely low.
So we sell it. Buy something that’s ours
. He wouldn’t, couldn’t sell the house where his father had grown up, where he had, too, essentially. Their first and angriest arguments were about that house.

He was breathless, his shirt damp with sweat, when he heard the phone ringing. Something about the way it traveled through the house, how he heard the ringing through the floorboards, made his palms tingle. He took the stairs two at a time and got to the phone, an avocado-green wall unit, by the third ring.

“Crowe,” he answered.

Just silence on the line. But it was her silence. He’d know the sound of her anywhere.

“Clara. Don’t hang up.”

A round release of air, as though she was trying to cloud cold glass with her breath. When she spoke, her voice was taut. “How did you know it was me?”

“Every time the phone rings, I think it’s you. I just happened to be right tonight.”

“Stop it.”

“I miss you. Clara,” he said, and it sounded like a plea, “I could die from how much. I keep thinking about the last time.”

He heard the sharp intake of breath that he knew meant she was going to cry, and he felt close to tears himself, a thickness in his throat.

“Come back to me.” It wasn’t the first time he’d begged.

“I have to go. I shouldn’t have called you.”

“Wait,” he said quickly. She hung up and he leaned his head against the wall. “Wait,” he said again into dead air. He drew his fist back and punched the wall hard. The plaster buckled in a near-perfect circle and he brought his hand back fast to his chest. The pain started dull, slow, then radiated up his arm, his knuckles split and bleeding.

“Fuck,” he whispered, though he wanted to scream. The pain felt good. He’d rather have physical pain than the raw gnawing he’d had in his chest since Clara left. Unfortunately, now he had both.