The Decoy (22 page)

'Yeah?'

Claire sighs. 'There's this, er, surveillance operation. I've been helping the police.'

'So why did they follow you, Claire?'

'Oh, for Christ's sake,' Claire says, exasperated. 'It's only a twelve-dollar CD.'

Ryder's face is a mask. 'Why was the detective following you?'

She feels so tired, she just wants to go home and sleep and have all of this go away. 'Look,' she says, 'they think I killed someone.'

'Killed who, Claire?'

'If you phone Frank Durban at Homicide he'll explain.'

'Detective Durban, huh?'

'That's right.'

'Wait here.' She leaves Claire with the guard and goes in search of a phone and higher authority.

Claire waits. The CD is still on the table in front of her. It's a band she's never heard of.

'You're in luck,' Ryder says, returning at last. 'It's a borderline case. Charlie's supervisor has agreed to drop it after all.'

Claire stammers her thanks, but Ryder cuts her off. 'Forget it. You pay for that CD now and I'll give you a ride back to where you say you're staying.'

===OO=OOO=OO===

She insists on coming up.

'Nice place,' Ryder says, looking around. 'Big, for Manhattan. How much a month?'

Claire shrugs. 'I'm not sure. I don't pay for it.'

Ryder looks at the mess on the floor quizzically. 'Who's your landlord?'

'You people, I suppose.'

'The city?'

'The police. It's a police apartment.'

'No, really,' Ryder says. 'See, I'm looking to rent round here myself. How much would I be looking at?'

'It's part of the operation,' Claire says dully.

'Are you a sex worker, Claire?' Ryder asks. 'It's OK, you know. You can tell me.'

'No.' She can't get her head round all of this. 'Look, didn't you speak to Durban?'

'He wasn't there.'

'Oh.'

'Tell me about this operation, again?' Ryder suggests.

Claire takes a deep breath. 'This won't make any sense to you, but this whole apartment — I don't really live here, you see — is full of wires and microphones and closed-circuit cameras. They have these really, really small cameras that you can hardly see with the naked eye.' She stops, aware that she's gabbling.

'Would you excuse me, Claire?' Ryder walks into a corner and murmurs into her radio, her eyes on Claire. Then she listens. When the conversation is over she says, 'Claire, I'm getting one of my colleagues to come over. There's a few things here I want to follow up.'

===OO=OOO=OO===

The other cop's name is Murphy. He's younger and fitter than Ryder.

'I can see that this is news to you, but I've been involved in a surveillance operation,' she says yet again. 'This apartment is full of cameras. Your colleagues watch everything from an apartment downstairs.'

'Watch what, exactly?'

'Me and Christian Vogler.'

'This would be… activities of an intimate nature we're talking about here?'

'Sex. Say it, for God's sake. Sex. Detective Durban asked me to have sex with Christian Vogler.'

'Do you take any medication, Claire?' Murphy asks carefully. 'Prozac, Lithium, insulin, anything like that?'

'No.' She's getting impatient now. 'Look, why don't you just call Frank Durban and ask him?'

'I did. Detective Durban is on leave,' Murphy says. 'He has been for some weeks.'

Once again she has a sense of vertigo, of standing in an elevator in which somebody has pressed the top button when she wasn't looking.

'Do you have a doctor in the city, Claire? A therapist, anyone like that?'

'I can prove it. Look, I know it sounds farfetched, but I can prove it. Let me show you the apartment downstairs, the one where Durban's been hanging out.'

'OK,' Murphy says. 'Go right ahead.'

===OO=OOO=OO===

She leads the way down the service stairs to the floor below. 'Here, this is it.'

'You sure?'

'Absolutely.'

Murphy reaches past her and bangs on the door. They hear footsteps.

Claire nods at the door. 'This is going to be really funny,' she says.

The door is opened by a tiny Korean lady. 'Yes?'

'Police, Madam.' Murphy shows a badge. 'Is this your apartment?'

The woman nods and says in broken English, 'Apartment of my husband's company. Terlo company.'

'How long have you lived here?'

The woman looks confused, and he repeats, 'How long?'

Understanding dawns. 'Three year,' she nods.

'Wait,' Claire says. 'This isn't right. Ask her if they've been away.'

'Suppose you show us where in your apartment you think these cameras are,' Murphy says to her.

Silently they all go back upstairs. She takes hold of the edge of the wallpaper and rips it, looking for wires.

Nothing.

She tries to remember where the camera was that took the footage of Christian looking through her laundry.

'In the bedroom,' she says. 'There's a camera in the bedroom.'

She hears the female cop sigh.

'It should be right here,' she says, fetching a chair. 'Right here by the light hanging.'

But it isn't.

'OK,' she says at last. 'I know how to do this. There's a building out in Queens where the FBI people are staying.'

'FBI, huh?' She sees the look that Ryder gives her colleague. A look that says, do we really have to waste our time with this?

'Fine,' Murphy says, deadpan. 'Let's ride out to Queens.'

===OO=OOO=OO===

She knows, even before she gets there, what they're going to find.

The long, low building is empty, its doors locked. The billboard of a real-estate vendor covers one window.

Ryder peers through the window at a darkened office and shrugs. 'Hasn't been used in a while.'

'There's a lecture room in the basement,' Claire says desperately. 'They had Internet access and telephones. They were using electricity, for Christ's sake. It'll show up on the records.' She starts to cry. 'I'm sorry,' she says. 'I'll be all right in a minute.'

But she isn't. She isn't all right. For some reason she just can't seem to stop crying.

Murphy closes his notebook and pulls out a cellphone. 'Listen,' he says gently, 'I'm going to arrange for you to see a doctor. I think that's best, don't you?'

After the funeral service for Rachel, the girl who died in the car crash, the Hopkins family and their staff are invited back to the house for the funeral tea. After politely accepting a soda, Glenn goes outside and waits by the hearse. He has a book, and he reads it quietly in the sun.

'Hi there.'

He looks up. Alicia Hopkins has come out of the house and is standing in front of him. Like him, she's dressed in black, but she's softened the severity of her funeral outfit with a light-blue cardigan.

'What are you reading, Glenn?' she asks. She comes and stands next to him to see, leaning, like him, against the warm hood of the car. Their shoulders brush. He has a sudden sense that she is standing slightly closer than she has to. 'Is that poetry?'

He turns it over and shows her the cover.
'The Collected Works of Charles Baudelaire,'
she reads aloud. 'I never read any of his stuff before. In school my favourite poet was Frost.'

He forces a grin. 'Baudelaire is nothing like Frost.'

'Read me one?'

'Well, uh, some of them aren't suitable for the occasion.'

'I won't be shocked,' she says, and just for a moment her eyes glint mischievously. 'You mustn't judge us all by Daddy's standards, you know.'

He smiles nervously. 'Why don't I try to find one that
is
suitable?' he suggests, thumbing the pages. 'Let's see, there's—'

'Did he write any love poems?' she interrupts. 'I like hearing love poems.'

Glenn thinks for a moment. 'There's this one,' he says, turning towards the back of the volume. 'It's called "Tranquillity".' He clears his throat and reads:

Let us now be tranquil, O my sad and restless soul.

You wanted evening: see, now it is here.

Dusk has engulfed us in its dark embrace,

which brings to this man peace, to this one fear.

Now, while the vile multitude strip bare

and squeal as Pleasure's whips strike home,

numbing their feelings of sorrow or despair,

come, take my hand: let us stand back and watch.

Let us stand back: above us in the sky

ghosts will watch with us in the fading light,

dressed in the costumes of a time gone by.

Let us stand back: the weakened sun

is slowly slipping out of sight:

Death, triumphant, sweeps in from the sea:

Listen my love, listen to the sweet approach of night.

'I like that,' she says when he's finished. 'It's weird, but I like it.'

He nods and smiles cautiously. 'He's pretty neat.'

She thinks for a moment. 'Do you find people react to what you do, Glenn?'

'What do you mean?'

'Like, when I'm at a party, someone will always go, "Hey, everybody, this is Alicia. She's a mortician." But they never go, Hey, this is Phil, he's a retailer, or a mechanic, or whatever.'

'People laugh at things to do with death because it frightens them.'

'That's so true,' she says. 'Maybe that's why I feel more relaxed with other morticians. Like in your poem: "Let us stand back and watch." How did that go again?'

Now, while the vile multitude strip bare

and squeal as Pleasure's whips strike home,

numbing their feelings of sorrow or despair,

come, take my hand: let us stand back and watch,

he reads again.

'Pleasure's whips sounds like the Beat Box on a Saturday night,' she says. 'Plenty of stripped-off multitudes in there.'

He doesn't respond.

'Maybe we should go and watch them sometime.'

'Maybe,' he says. After a moment, he picks up the book again and riffles through the pages.

'Is that a sketch?' she says suddenly.

'What?'

'There. Go back.' She turns a few pages back. Her hand brushes his. 'Did you do that? What is it?'

'It's just a drawing. It's a study of one… one of the poems.'

'It's good,' she says. 'I knew you were artistic.' She turns her head sideways. The drawing is a fragment of a nude, a female nude, reclining on a bed. 'Did you do life classes?' She giggles. 'Silly question. You don't need to do life classes. You're like Leonardo da Vinci, aren't you?'

'Why him?'

'Because he learned his anatomy from bodies, of course.'

She smiles at him and wanders back inside.

The psychiatrist to whom the police medic has referred her is called Dr Bannerman. He's young and slightly obese, with the bad skin of the chronically overworked. He spends a long time tapping Claire's reflexes and shining lights into her eyes. To her surprise and shame she begins to shake uncontrollably.

'Are you suffering from any physical stress or trauma that you know of?' he asks.

'I already told you. I've been involved in undercover work.'

'Nothing like a car crash? Or a mugging?' He peers into her eyes once again with the little torch.

'Nothing,' she says through chattering teeth.

'Have you suffered from traumatic stress disorder before?'

'Never. What do you mean, before?'

'Any nervous conditions? Epilepsy, hypo-glycaemic attacks, psychotic episodes?'

'I killed a doctor once.'

The light flicks off.

'Joke,' she adds. He doesn't smile.

'Any thoughts of self-mutilation or suicide?'

She looks at her hands. 'Not recently.'

'Have you taken any controlled substances or non-prescription drugs in the last twelve months?'

'Some E, occasionally.'

He makes a note on his pad.

'Look,' she says, 'someone killed a woman called Stella Vogler. They used a trick to get me in front of this shrink, and then she subjected me to all these tests. I guess I didn't eliminate myself, because she tricked me again into signing a whole bunch of consent forms so that they could film me and use the films as testimony. They took me out of my apartment, they followed me with cameras night and day.' She stops, aware that she's getting overexcited.

'What tests?'

'Sorry?'

'You said she gave you some tests. What were they?'

'Oh.' She tries to remember. 'We just talked. About my parents mostly, and my job.'

'Weschler Memory Scale? Minnesota multiphasic personality inventory? Benton tests? Visual Reasoning? An EEG?'

'Um, she did suggest hypnosis. I said no.'

He makes another note.

'Do you believe me?'

'Of course,' he says.

'Really?' She's surprised. 'Thank God. You know, for a moment there it sounded pretty crazy, even to me.'

Still writing, he says, 'I once had a patient who believed he had a tree growing in his stomach. He thought he'd swallowed an apple core, you see, and that the seeds had germinated inside him. He was suffering from agonizing stomach cramps. Once we'd given him medication to relieve the stomach pains, he stopped worrying about the tree. He convinced himself it must have died and been excreted.'

'But he was still mad,' she says, not quite understanding the point of this.

'Was he?' Bannerman finishes writing his notes and tucks his pen away in his top pocket. 'We all inhabit our own reality, Claire. Like, let's see' —
his eye falls on his computer — 'like a computer network. Different computers on the network run different software. Sometimes there are little glitches, compatibility problems if you like. Then they have to be fixed by tech support. Do you see what I'm saying?'

'Not really,' she says.

He glances at his watch. 'Let me put it this way. There are some little chemical imbalances in your system that need to be tweaked. Then you can be rebooted and you'll be right as rain again.'

'What do you mean, tweaked?'

'I'm going to admit you to the hospital for a few days, Claire. That way we can be sure that the regime we suggest is the best one. Sometimes these things take a little time to sort themselves out.'