Best Intentions (26 page)

“She must have told him the truth about the pictures, about Sam, that he had borrowed money from her and that's all it was.”

“It's one of the things we will have to ask him.”

“When you find him,” I remind her.

“Yes. When we find him.”

The walls of the small room are closing in on me. I try to inhale but the air catches in my throat.

“I'm sure you're very tired,” Gibbs says. “It's been a rough thirty-six hours. We'll stop for now.” She rises and begins to lead me out. “In the meantime, it would be helpful if you could remember where you walked the other night after you left Deirdre's, if anyone saw you.”

I stare at her blankly. No one sees anyone on the night streets, no one wants to. We look away, all of us.

“One last thing,” she adds as she holds the door open for me.

“Yes?”

“Borrowing money from someone doesn't necessarily preclude the possibility of having sex with them, does it?”

W
hen I get out of the room, Callahan is standing alone in front of his desk, restlessly flipping through a large tattered Rolodex without looking at it, a diversion he readily gives up as soon as he sees us. He and Jamison exchange glances before Callahan turns to me. “Your husband is waiting downstairs for you.” His sympathetic air of yesterday has been replaced by that of a disappointed teacher, as if we have somehow not lived up to our potential. He had thought better of us.

“Thank you.”

“We'll be speaking,” Callahan says as I turn to make my way back through rows of desks cluttered with computers, phones, crumpled candy wrappers and piles of papers to the staircase, my eyes focused straight ahead.

Downstairs, Sam has his back to me, staring out of the smudged window in the reception area, his fingertips drumming a staccato rat-a-tat against the glass. He starts when I touch his back.

“You ready?” he asks impatiently, barely turning to me.

“Yes.”

“Good. Let's go.” He pushes open the heavy door and we head out onto the street, lined with diagonally parked police cars nosing their way onto the pavement like sharks.

“Where to?” Sam asks as we begin strolling aimlessly up the block.

“I don't know.”

We have walked out into a different city than either of us normally inhabits, one of quiet streets and strollers, meandering college kids, men and women with laptop computers and big ideas and nebulous jobs, a parallel, more leisurely universe that goes on without us on weekdays between eight and six while we are someplace else entirely. We look around and have no idea what to do. We are no longer inhabiting our own lives.

“Let's get some coffee,” Sam suggests, and for a few blocks, this gives us a direction, a goal. We hardly speak, a silent if mutual agreement to wait until we have settled someplace. The residue of the police station still clings to us.

We head to a coffeehouse on the ground floor of a nineteenth-century brownstone that we used to frequent on winter weekends when the girls were younger, snowy days when this would be our only outing, an escape from the apartment, from the bickering and the dishes and the toy-strewn floor, from the inertia that left us loopy but seems so luxurious now. The girls would get mugs of hot chocolate, a dense soupy mixture that made anyone past puberty ill but was manna to them, and we would sip cappuccinos, which seemed at the time a uniquely adult, almost guilty pleasure, a reward. If we were lucky and had timed it just right the girls would nap when we got home and Sam and I would make love in that syrupy afternoon way, one ear always primed for a restless child.

As we make our way down the three worn stone steps into the darkened room a wave of dizziness washes over me and I take Sam's arm to steady myself. I feel constantly in danger of losing my balance, tipping over, dissolving.

“Why don't you find us a table and I'll get our drinks,” Sam suggests.

While he goes up to the counter to order, I glance around the room filled with tiny round tables and clusters of chairs in random and chaotic order. I squeeze past a man in a puffy bright red down vest, his gray tousled head buried in an alternative paper favored by people half his age and two hopped-up models trying to figure where
to put their impossibly long legs. They glare at me when I trip over their size eleven feet.

I find a table in the far corner next to a group of three young mothers balancing babies, bottles and lattes as they gossip and catch up. They seem a continent away from me, these midday women, all three slim and long-haired and chicly disheveled, tired perhaps, but with so much ahead of them, so much yet to be determined. One of them catches me staring at her and, embarrassed, I pretend to be looking over her head for my husband, so handsome still, though if you look closely there are blue rings under his eyes, my husband in his khaki pants and wool coat, lost in thought as he carries our drinks to the table, oblivious of the women. We are in our own tunnel now, everything else is just a rumor of the existence we once had.

The table rocks as he places the cups down. The foam threatens to spill over the edges and yet somehow, defying gravity, doesn't.

“So,” Sam says, stirring in two sugars, an indulgence he rarely allows himself, “that was rather smooth of them.”

“What was?”

“The way they separated us.”

“They were only doing their job.”

“Their job is to find Jack and stop wasting time dicking around with ridiculous insinuations.”

I lick the cinnamon-flavored froth from the back of my spoon. “What kind of ‘ridiculous insinuations'?”

Sam frowns. “Callahan had the gall to ask me if I knew where you were Monday night, what time you got back.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That you were walking around, upset. Mistakenly upset,” he emphasizes. “And I wasn't sure what time you got back. I thought around ten, ten thirty.”

“You didn't tell them I went to Deirdre's?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

He takes a cautious sip of his cappuccino, unsure how hot it is. The foam is never an accurate indication and it is dangerous to be too cavalier. “I didn't know if you would have wanted me to.”

“Why wouldn't I?” I ask, taken aback.

He studies me and then shakes his head. “No reason.”

“Well, I told them.”

“All right. I'm sure it's fine.”

I lean forward and the table rocks again. “I don't need you to protect me. I'm not hiding anything, for God's sake.”

“I know that, Lisa. I didn't mean anything by it. It was just instinctive. Jesus, I can't think clearly anymore. Something about being in that room was so unnerving. Maybe it's just a knee-jerk reaction to authority or to being questioned, but it got under my skin. I resent how they are handling this. We're trying to help, they should be able to see that.”

“They asked me what time you got home Monday night, too.”

“Of course they did. Why else would they have tag-teamed us? It's outrageous but until they find Jack we seem to be all they've got. They need something to report to their boss so it looks like they're making progress, no matter how bogus it is.”

I'm not sure if I completely believe this. I'm not sure he does. I'd be asking us questions, too, if I were them.

“Did you give them the name of the person you were meeting with?” I ask.

“You know I can't do that. The piece is on a potential bank cover-up that could have high-reaching implications in the mortgage business. Shocking as this might seem to them, I actually think it's an important story to get out. Aside from that, if I go against my word not only would my source lose his job, I'd destroy my reputation.”

“These seem to be extenuating circumstances.”

“I am not going to break every rule of journalistic integrity to make their lives easier.”

“You could at least tell them where you met. Someone must have seen you.”

“We met outside on a park bench. He didn't want to be seen. That's kind of the point, isn't it? I gave them Marissa's number to verify what time I got back.”

I can't help but smile. “That should be interesting.” Marissa, with her fluid relationship to time, who is still convinced that real artists are beyond such petty bourgeois concerns. She somehow hasn't gotten the memo that they have their own PR agents now, ever-increasing rents and alarm clocks, that even inspiration is working on a tight schedule. “They'll be lucky if she remembers you came home at all.”

Sam smiles, too, and there is a flicker between us, a recognition of things only we share.

We become quiet again, almost shy of each other.

“Gibbs told me that Deirdre had sex before she died,” I remark carefully, playing with my drink to avoid his eyes. It feels so invasive to be talking about Deirdre like this. I am not yet used to the way death obliterates the normal boundaries of privacy, how everything becomes fair game.

“Yes, so I hear.” Sam leans forward on his elbows and the table sways. He looks down angrily at its spindly legs before he turns his attention reluctantly back to me. “They asked me to take a DNA test. Just to rule things out, they said. They seemed to use that term a lot.”

I can feel, beneath the tingling weariness, that my heart is racing though I make every attempt not to betray that.

“I refused, by the way,” he adds.

“Why?”

“I want to talk to a lawyer first.”

“Do you need a lawyer?”

“It wouldn't be such a bad idea. For either of us.”

“Sam?”

“There's nothing. Nothing I haven't told you. We should get some advice, that's all. That's what people do. In fact, I don't think we should speak to them again without lawyers present.”

“I suppose,” I say halfheartedly.

It makes sense, but I can't help but worry that asking for a lawyer will taint us, make the detectives even more suspicious. I understand rationally that looking out for your own interests is not a shameful act, that you don't win points for being unwilling to make waves, but it goes against my nature. It is one of the things I have always counted on Sam for, his ability to take whatever action he deems best regardless of external opinion, while I have a tendency to tie myself up in knots.

“I'm sure the police know more than they're telling us,” Sam says. “There must have been other clues in Deirdre's apartment.”

I stare down disconsolately at the brown dregs at the bottom of my cup, tears forming in the back of my throat.

“There's something I keep thinking about,” I say quietly. “About Deirdre. For all of our closeness, we never really talked about what we would want.”

“Want?”

“You know, religious beliefs, last wishes.”

There were no churches or synagogues either of us frequented, no rites we upheld beyond present-giving at holidays. The most spirituality either of us engaged in was chanting in Sanskrit at the yoga classes we sometimes took on Saturday mornings. Neither of us had the slightest idea what we were saying. “Has it ever occurred to you that for all we know we could be chanting ‘Death to all Americans'?” Deirdre asked as we rolled up our mats one day. I have no idea what she believed happens after you die. That kind of speculation is for the very young or the very old. It's not that we thought we were immune, we just assumed we had time.

“I want to do the right thing, I want to do what she would have wanted.” I am crying now. The young mothers are trying not to look over at us but they can't help it. “But I have no idea. How could I not know? I should know this.”

There are so many things I long to ask Deirdre, to say to her. I will never have the chance again.

“I keep wondering what it was like, if she was scared, if she felt pain.”

“Lisa, you can't think that way.”

“How can you not?” I ask tearfully. Her face, her crumpled fallen body has been before me every second since Detective Callahan walked through our front door. “I'm not sure I can do this,” I murmur.

“Do what?”

“Any of it. Live with it. With what happened.”

A few feet away, the mothers fumble in their diaper bags for money, juggling sippy cups and toys and tissues as they rise and make their way slowly out.

“We'll make it through this,” Sam promises. “Somehow we'll make it through this.”

“Ben still doesn't know. I've left messages for him on his cell phone. I'm sure it works internationally, he travels so much, but he hasn't called me back.”

“Did you tell him what it was about?”

“I couldn't very well spell it out. Can you imagine? But I said it was important. Maybe they confiscate cell phones at the ashram.”

“When is he due back?”

“I don't know. I suppose I could try to get ahold of his assistant to find out, but I don't really see the point. He'll be home soon enough. And then he'll be where we are.”

“Well, not exactly.”

“No, not exactly. Still, they were in each other's lives one way or another for a long time.”

“Not Deirdre's wisest choice.”

“It doesn't matter anymore.”

Our drinks are gone, the room is emptying out of its late-morning customers and not yet filling up with lunch people. “Now what?” I ask.

“I thought I'd go into the office for the afternoon,” Sam says. “Is that okay?”

“Yes.” I can't think of an alternative plan. Just what are we supposed to be doing? We have no guidelines for a day like this. The very notion of plans, a future, has lost all meaning.

“I want to make some calls about UniProphet to see if there's any progress.”

“On what?”

“UniProphet. The start-up.” He looks at me with some frustration. “You know, if you would just hear me out, maybe you would understand why I was drawn to it.”

“All right,” I say, with little enthusiasm. It seems so beside the point to me, though not to him, even after everything, not to him.

“Good,” he says before launching in. “Okay, here goes. For years everyone from Amazon to tiny mom-and-pop sites has been trying to target what products to push to their users judging by their previous purchases, but no one has figured out how to do it with any degree of success. There are too many variables. The best rate anyone has managed to achieve is about ten percent accuracy. But these guys have come up with an algorithm that combines all sorts of data no one has used before. They have the highest rate yet of figuring out what people are most likely to be interested in buying. Do you have any idea how many companies will pay big bucks for the technology?”

His confidence seems willfully naïve to me and it strikes me again how even the smartest of men can be blinded by their faith in their own business acumen despite all evidence to the contrary.