The Eighth Day (2 page)

It was, after all, a murder scene—or that, at least, was the presumption. Unless and until the ME determined otherwise, suicides and accidental deaths were treated by the police as homicides.

“What a corker,” the ME muttered.

Delaney nodded somberly and handed the detective a list that he and Poliakoff had made, enumerating the surfaces that each of them had touched: the doors to the house, front and back; the newspaper and mailbox; the door to the truck; and one of the windows on the side of the house. Hammer and screwdriver, the cinder blocks and light switch. The receipt from Home Depot.

“What kinda sick son of a bitch would do something like this?” Delaney wondered, as much to himself as anyone else.

The ME lit a cigarette and threw him a look. “What do you mean?”

Delaney frowned. “What do I mean? I mean . . . what do you
think
I mean? They buried him alive, for chrissake!”

“Who did?”

Delaney’s frown deepened. Was the ME an idiot? “How do I know? Whoever
did
it. All I’m sayin’ is—”

“He probably did it himself.”

Delaney stared at the man, uncomprehending.

The detective chimed in. “Look at the mortar,” he said, nodding toward the cinder block. “The tailings are all on the
in
side. So’s the tub. And the trowel. Bags of Sakrete.”

“You’re saying he built it
himself
?” Delaney asked.

“Looks like it.”

Delaney cast his eyes toward the tomb, which was almost open now. The deceased was sitting on the floor with his back to the wall, legs splayed, eyes wide. “
No
. Why would anyone do that?” Delaney asked. He didn’t believe it. Even the trowel, lying on the floor at the dead man’s feet, didn’t prove a thing. Who’s to say there wasn’t a second trowel, a second tub, another bag of Sakrete?

The ME didn’t answer him at first. Instead, he told the deputy that enough cinder block had been removed. When the deputy stepped aside, the ME inched into the little room, crouched, and snapped on a pair of surgical gloves. Then he began to search the dead man’s pockets. “People kill themselves for dozens of reasons,” he mused. “Sometimes, there’s a lot of self-hatred.” Extracting a wallet from the pocket of the dead man, he flipped it open and peered at the man’s driver’s license. “Terio.
T
as in
Tom
, -
e
-
r
-
i
-
o
. Who’s taking notes?”

One of the deputies said that he was.

“First name: Christian; middle name: Anthony. D-O-B: six-eleven-fifty-three.” The ME placed the wallet in a transparent plastic Baggie, sighed, and shone a penlight in the dead man’s eyes. “Had a case two years ago,” he said. “Guy decapitated himself—cut off his own head!”

“Bullshit!” Poliakoff exclaimed, coming down the stairs. “How you gonna do that?”

“Well,” the ME told them, “the way
he
did it, he tied a rope around a tree and looped the other end around his neck. Then he got in his car and floored it. Had a Camaro, so it came off pretty clean.”

“But . . .
why
?” Delaney wondered.

The ME shook his head and continued to examine the body. “Depression.”

Poliakoff guffawed—“
I’ll
say!”—and Delaney, disgusted, walked outside, into the rain. It only took him a second to reach his cruiser and get in, but that was enough time to get soaked. Sitting there, with the rain clobbering the roof, he studied the water pearling on the windshield and tried not to think about the basement.

But that was impossible. What he’d seen had rattled him. He had a touch of claustrophobia himself—maybe more than a touch—and the idea of sitting in the dark, waiting to die in that jackleg crypt, was the stuff of nightmares.

And if the ME was right about it being a suicide, then—the idea skittered through Delaney’s head like an insect scurrying from a drain—that made it even worse.

Because this guy, Terio, had obviously changed his mind. Delaney was sure of it. The first thing he’d seen in the flashlight’s beam was the dead man’s hands—or what was left of them. The fingers were stumps, the nails worn away, the torn flesh crusty with blood.

So he’d been trying to get out, Delaney figured. Alone in the dark, he’d tried to claw his way through the stone.

TWO

The car—Caleigh’s sensible Saturn—was well built, Danny thought. Here they were, five miles out of Nag’s Head, cruising back to Washington at sixty-two miles per hour, and you couldn’t even hear the road beneath the tires. In fact, you couldn’t hear
anything
. And that, of course, was precisely the point. Riding in the passenger’s seat with his eyes on the flat Carolina landscape, Danny was the target of an unmistakable Meaningful Silence.

Which was completely unfair. They’d had a great time in the rental cottage. Just the two of them, a block from the beach. They’d ridden his Boogie board, splashed in the surf, basked in the sun. They’d danced till two
A.M.
two nights out of five. There had been candlelit dinners, thirty-six holes of miniature golf, and long walks on the beach at sunset. Now it was time to go home, and the silence coming off his girlfriend was like a cold front sweeping down from Canada.

He hadn’t proposed.

After all the sunsets and inspired sex, he
still
hadn’t proposed. And it was getting to her, he could tell. Because they’d been together for
three years
and, though they were still crazy about each other, he just couldn’t do it.
The problem,
Danny told himself,
is that I’m too marginal—and she’s too centered.
To put it another way, Caleigh was one year out of B-school and pulling down eighty grand a year, while he was four years out of the Art Institute and pulling down eighty bucks a day.

A portfolio management intern at the John Galt Fund, Caleigh was a born workaholic who logged sixty-hour weeks without complaint. Even on vacation, she’d been up at seven every day to snag one of the four
Wall Street Journal
s at the town’s only newsstand. She’d checked her e-mail twice a day at the local library and had been caught, repeatedly, watching MSNBC with the sound turned off.

For Caleigh, making money was an art and a game, as absorbing and nuanced as the ballet must be to a professional dancer. Not so for Danny, who liked to kid that he was “beyond money—an
artiste
.”

Which was at least half-true—the beyond money part, that is. Most of what little money he made came from moonlighting—not from art. He worked part-time at a gallery, which gave him “exposure” but didn’t pay a whole lot more than minimum wage. The real bucks came from the twenty-five dollars an hour he made freelancing for Fellner Associates, a big investigative firmin the District. The investigative work was easy, if uninteresting: for the most part, he collected filings at the SEC, culled records at the courthouse, and interviewed third-tier sources in connection with mergers and acquisitions and litigation of various kinds. As near as Danny could tell, Fellner Associates was almost always on the wrong side—a circumstance in which the firm took pride. Because, of course, “the wrong side” was where the money was, and that was where Fellner Associates liked to put down roots.

Still, his freelance work more or less paid the bills, though there were lots of things that Danny craved but couldn’t afford—not least of which was a nonlinear video-editing suite that would enable him to make the kind of art that, for now, he could only dream of.

The system he wanted cost twenty thousand dollars—about twenty times as much as he had in his savings account. Which pretty much put it out of reach. He’d never save that much working for Fellner, and as for his art, that wasn’t moving at all.
Not at all, at all,
as Caleigh would say. In point of fact, he hadn’t sold any of his work in months—not since a Latino bank in Mount Pleasant bought a bronze that he’d made:
Forest and Threes.

He leaned back, closed his eyes, and rested his head against the jittering window. Caleigh had the radio tuned to NPR’s
Morning Edition
—one of those whimsical first-person narratives that she liked and he didn’t. He tuned it out, thinking,
If a three fell in the forest, would anyone hear it?

Caleigh must have seen him smile, because she broke the Meaningful Silence to ask, “So . . . what are you thinking about?”

He shook his head slowly, pretending to be half-asleep.
What am I thinking about? I’m thinking about not selling anything, about not having money, about not getting married. I’m thinking about all the
knots
in my life.

“Danny?”

His eyelids fluttered. She could be relentless. “Wha?”

“What are you
thinking
about?”

The truth was, he was contemplating the mystery of how he and Caleigh, who had almost nothing in common, were nevertheless made for each other. Something had ignited when they met, and Danny believed the flame would never go out. When they were separated, even for just a few days, Danny began to languish, a shipwrecked man. It was the same for Caleigh, or so she said. They were magic together. Each of them lit up in the presence of the other. Despite their entirely different career tracks and backgrounds, they were so attuned that half of the time they could read each other’s minds.
Same brain,
they’d say when one spoke aloud the thought of the other.

Of
course
they’d get married, someday when he felt a little more grounded, when he was getting somewhere, when he was at least making some kind of money.
Maybe I’ll have to get a
real
job
, he thought,
if something doesn’t break for me soon
.

“Danny?” Caleigh said again. “The mind police want a report from your brain.”

He opened his eyes. Blinked. “I’ve got a sunburn.”

“Poor baby!”

“And I’m all gritty from the sand.”

“Awww . . .”

“And I was thinking . . . maybe I’m too old to be a ‘Danny.’ Maybe it’s time I became a ‘Daniel.’ ”

She thought about it. Frowned. “No. I don’t think so.”

“I’ll be twenty-six tomorrow.”

“So? You’re having a birthday. That doesn’t mean you have to change your name.”

He shifted in the seat. “Let’s not talk about me,” he said, taking Caleigh’s hand in his and bringing it to his mouth. Kissing her fingers, which tasted like salt. “Let’s talk about you.”

Caleigh giggled. “What about me?”

“I bet you can’t wait to get home. Short GE. Buy a ton of pork bellies. Put some calls—”

“You don’t ‘put calls,’ ” she told him.

“Well, whatever. . . .”

She sighed and clicked off the radio. “I know you think it’s boring—”

“But I don’t,” he said. “I think business is probably more interesting than art—I mean, as
a scene
.”

Caleigh giggled. “You’re just saying that because you have to go to Jake’s opening and suck up to all the gallery owners.”

He winced but was relieved the cold front seemed to have passed. “Wanna come?”

She shook her head and sent a sloe-eyed smile in his direction. “Well . . .”

“So you’d rather wash your hair, watch
Wall Street Week in Review
—”

“I didn’t say that.”

“No, you didn’t say it, but . . .”

She laughed. “Same brain.”

Danny groaned. “Maybe I’ll stay home and wash
my
hair—it’s got enough sand in it.”

Caleigh shook her head. “You can’t!”

“ ‘Can’t’ what?”

“Bail on Jake. And I can’t, either. He’s counting on us. And, anyway, it won’t be that bad.”

“Yes, it will,” he told her, and let his head fall against the window with a soft
thunk
.

The opening was at the Petrus Gallery in Georgetown.

A single room with high ceilings, batteries of track lights, and rosy brick walls, the gallery was in a part of the city that Danny had always found interesting—and even mysterious. This was K Street, Down Under. Half a mile to the east, the street morphed into a canyon of glassy high-rises, housing law firms and NGOs like the Pan American Health Organization. But here, in what used to be a ghetto of freed slaves, it ran for half a dozen blocks beside the Potomac River—and
under
the elevated Whitehurst Freeway.

From the standpoint of “urban planning,” this stretch of K Street was a disaster. And for Danny, the opening wasn’t any better.

If he heard the words “coolest July on record” one more time, he swore he’d take off—even if that meant thinning an already emaciated “crowd.” There were only a couple of dozen people, and none of them seemed remotely interested in the monster canvases that hung from the walls. Judging by the accumulating empties in the recycling bins, the gallery’s clientele were there for the free booze, not the paintings.

A voice to his left insisted that “they didn’t even
start
to keep records until 1918, so it’s really only the coolest since
then
.”

That’s it,
Danny told himself.
We’re outta here.
Caleigh, trapped in a conversation with Jake’s earnest mom, had been throwing him
let’s go
glances for fifteen minutes. He’d already done his best with the various luminaries in attendance—the
Post’
s critic, the writer from
Flash Art
. There was no reason to stay and he was halfway to Caleigh’s side when a whispery voice cooed in his ear, “Is that
you
, Danny Cray?”

Lavinia. No one knew exactly how old Lavinia was, but there were photos of her with JFK and Andy Warhol, Peggy Guggenheim and Lou Reed. The doyenne of the D.C. arts scene, she ran the Neon Gallery in Foggy Bottom and the Kunstblitz in Berlin.

“It is,” he said as he and Lavinia came together for a ritual embrace. “At least, I think so.” He rubbed his hand back over his short spiky hair.

She burbled, as if what he’d said was somehow witty, and eyed him through her heavily mascaraed lashes in a way that was almost flirtatious. Caleigh, spotting him with Lavinia, raised her eyebrows and volleyed an encouraging smile. “Well, I
hope
it’s you,” Lavinia said, “because you’re the man I’ve been looking for.” She held out her empty wineglass. “Plonk, please—
white
. . . then there’s something I want to talk to you about.”

They went out to the little garden behind the gallery so that Lavinia could have a cigarette. The air was so leaden and oppressively humid that the smoke didn’t seem to rise but hung in the air like ground fog. He did his best to pump her for a reaction to Jake’s show (because, of course, Jake would ask), but she dismissed the subject with a shake of her famous blond mane. “Not my cup of tea,” she told him.

“Why not? He’s good!”

She shook her head dismissively. “No, he’s not ‘good.’ His palette’s muddy and he’s derivative. But look,” she said, changing the subject. “That’s not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about . . .” She pushed him in the chest with one red-enameled finger. “You!”

It took about a minute, and then he was floating. She told him that she’d seen a sculpture of his at the Banco Salvador in Adams-Morgan and that she’d been very impressed. So much so that she’d sought out his other work. She’d seen some lithographs that he’d loaned to a restaurateur in Georgetown, a painting the Cafritzes had bought and which was hanging in their music room, and an installation that he’d done for the Torpedo Factory in Alexandria. “I loved it.”

“Which?” he asked.

“It! Them! All of it!”

“That’s great. Really!”

But that wasn’t the point. The point was: A “window” had opened up in the exhibition schedule at Neon. “Actually,” she confided, “it’s more like a skylight: two weeks in October. You’d open Friday, October fifth.” Was he interested?

“Well . . .”

“You’d install on the Wednesday and Thursday, the third and fourth.” A thought occurred to her. “You
do
have enough work . . . ?”

He nodded without thinking. “Sure, but—what happened? I mean . . .”

She made a tsking sound and cast her eyes to the heavens. “One of my ‘projects,’ ” she confided. “Young, bright . . . and thoroughly bipolar. I don’t see him getting out of bed before Christmas, and I can’t wait for that—I’m running a business, not a clinic.” She paused, a look of bemusement on her face. “So?”

He hesitated for the better part of a second, shrugged unconvincingly, and said, “Yeah—sure!”

“Wonderful!”

After that, he had to stay because, somehow, it didn’t seem right to leave before Lavinia did.

A minute later, Caleigh materialized at his side, with Jake and Jake’s mom in tow. “Wasn’t that Lavinia Trevor?” she asked, excited. “What did she
want
?”

Danny didn’t want to say anything with Jake right there. The Neon was a much bigger deal than the Petrus. He shrugged. “Someone to fetch her some wine and keep her company while she had a smoke.”

“She say anything?” Jake asked. “About the show? What did she think?”

Danny shrugged again. “Sorry. All she talked about was a friend of hers who’s bipolar.”

Caleigh peeked at her watch. Mondays she had to get up at five-thirty in order to read the early papers and write her online column before the market opened for the week. Danny squeezed her hand. “I think you should head home. I’ll catch a ride with someone.” Caleigh smiled. She knew something was up with Lavinia.

It was half an hour after Caleigh’s departure that Lavinia finally left, tossing Danny a conspiratorial little wave as she made her exit. At this point, Danny decided he’d better stay to the end. Jake was half in the bag and in no shape to drive.

On the way home, Jake was looking for reassurance. “That sucked,” he said, swigging from a half-empty bottle of merlot.

“It was fine,” Danny told him.

“Really?” Jake asked, skepticism and hope vying in his voice.

“Absolutely! It was a home run.”

His friend made a grumbling sound and looked out the window. “Nothing sold.”

“That’s not the point,” Danny told him, although it sort of was. “First you show—then you sell. It takes a while.”

“You think?”

“Yeah.”

Jake cocked his head and regarded Danny with suspicion. “What are
you
so happy about?”

“Me?” Danny scoffed. “I’m not happy. I’m depressed!”

His friend thought about that for a moment, then nodded to himself and closed his eyes. “Good,” he said, and, almost immediately, began to snore.