Graveland: A Novel (20 page)

This is getting a little creepy now
.
And those two guys asking questions this morning? Feds #noquestionaboutit

Ellen feels a weird sensation shooting down her spine.

Feds?

She quickly finds Geek Girl’s number and sends her a text.

There were two guys asking questions this morning?

It’s a long shot. Or maybe it isn’t. She’ll find out soon enough.

Frank Bishop turns around and looks at her, real fear in his eyes now. He walks the few steps back to the bar and reaches out to his stool for support. “My wife,
ex
-wife, is freaking out. Of course.” He swallows loudly. “She wants to know who
you
are.”

Ellen nods.

“Because she—Deb’s a lawyer—she says the cops’ll have been getting hundreds of crank calls on this since it started and we’ll need something to get their attention. To break through the firewall. And that’s you.”

Ellen nods again. “I know. And I know who to call.” She pauses. “I was going to do it anyway, but I wanted to talk to you first.”

The message alert on her cell phone pings.

She puts a hand out to pick it up, but then pauses. “I’m going to look at this,” she says. “Okay? It might be relevant.”

He nods.

She reads the message quickly.

Just heard about this from someone else
.
Two suits, this morning, but asking about Alex Coady not Lizzie Bishop xxx
.

Ellen looks back up.

“Seems the cops are already on it,” she says.

*   *   *

Twenty minutes after Lizzie gets back to the apartment, she hears the key in the door. She’s sitting at the table, textbook open in front of her.

Trying to appear normal.

Heart racing.

She doesn’t know what she’s going to do, or say—she just has this overwhelming sense of needing to see Alex, to envelop him, to let him know that she knows,
and that it’s okay
. All week there has been this poisonous tension between them that she’s hated, silences, sighs, deflected looks, things half spoken. She didn’t understand what it was, and attributed it to Julian’s influence over him, to the force of Julian’s toxic personality. She feels awful now, realizing that it was more than likely the unimaginable pressure that Alex had put
himself
under, and that she certainly wasn’t helping by being needy.

Also, she’s not allowing herself, at least for the moment, to dwell too much on what Alex has done, and what it might mean—other than what it says about his relationship with Julian.

Because—to her mind—it reverses things.

It puts Alex in charge, which is where she’s always thought he belongs. Julian is noisy and pushy, but Alex is the quiet stillness at the center of things. When Julian launches into a rant about the bankers or whatever, all she wants to do is scream or run away. When Alex talks about the same thing, in his subtler, more measured tones, she listens, and is soothed, seduced, won over.

The door opens now, and when she looks up, she sees it immediately—it’s in their faces, in their body language. No doubt it was there all along, but for her this is a realignment, a correction, and she wants to make amends.

Julian comes in first, lumbering to the table and heaving his backpack onto it. He grunts something at her, sits down, and starts stroking that ridiculous, barely noticeable goatee of his.

Alex glides in behind him.

Lizzie catches his eye and smiles. He doesn’t smile back, but that’s okay. He sits on the arm of the couch, leans forward, and starts massaging his temples.

On the other days when they’ve come in like this, exhausted, hardly able to speak, Lizzie has remained quiet herself and stayed out of their way.

Not this evening. She wants to know where they’ve been all day, and what they’re planning next. She wants to open this up, and let them know whose side she’s on—let Alex know it’s alright, let him know that more than anything else
they’re
alright. But just as she’s about to speak, Julian looks over at her, brow furrowing, and says, “There’s something different about her.”

Alex raises his head. “What?”

Lizzie feels the air thicken around her.

“She knows,” Julian says. “Look at her.” He stands up slowly, and points. “She’s been out. She
knows
.”

Alex stands up as well, rising from the edge of the couch, and glares at her.

Lizzie pushes the chair she’s sitting in back a little. What is it? Are her cheeks flushed from all the walking? Is she still perspiring?

“Yes,” she says, a crack in her voice, “I went out, so what. I know what you’ve been doing.” She gets up from the chair. “I watched some TV earlier, they showed that clip on the news, but listen—”

Julian bangs his fist on the table. “Jesus
Christ
.”

“Lizzie,” Alex says, his tone calm, but also direct and clinical, “have you spoken to anyone? Have you
told
anyone?”

She looks into his eyes. “Oh, Alex…” She pauses, lips parted. If only they could stay like this forever, and let everything outside their line of vision, everything else in the room, in the world—that table, Julian’s backpack, Julian himself, New York, the
news
—dissolve to nothing. “No,” she says at last, but softly, in a whisper, still maintaining eye contact.

Julian shakes his head. “Dumb-assed
bitch
.” He turns and scowls at Alex. “I told you a hundred times this was a bad idea.”

There is a pause. Then Alex says, calmly, without redirecting his gaze, “Shut the fuck up, Julian.”

“What?”

Lizzie swallows, and once again the room begins to spin.

But then it stops.

Because there’s … a creaking sound.

They all turn toward the door, then freeze.

“What was that?” Julian says, in a loud whisper.

Alex looks at him. “Someone’s there.” He reaches for the backpack on the table. Then he turns to Lizzie, eyes widening, and nods at the door.

She moves swiftly toward it, and senses equally swift movement behind her. At the door, she narrows her right eye in on the peephole—imagining for a second, she doesn’t know why, that it’s her father she’ll see, a dreamlike Frank in fish-eye, standing there, shuffling anxiously, waiting. What she sees instead—as a
rap, tap
sounds on the door, followed immediately, almost stopping her heart, by a shouted
“POLICE, SEARCH WARRANT, OPEN THE DOOR”
—is a retreating mass of black that quickly forms into the shape of a man, revealing behind
him
a hallway lined with other men, all in black, all heavily armed.

Lizzie spins around.

Julian has his back against the wall and is straining to see out of the window. Alex is standing in the middle of the room with a gun in his hand.

“Jesus,” Lizzie whispers, all her limbs starting to tremble, “there’s a fucking SWAT team out there.”

Alex nods his head again, to the side this time, indicating for her to move.

She hesitates, but then slides over toward the kitchen.

“We’re armed in here,” he shouts. “We’ve got explosives. Back off.
Back off now
.”

From this angle just inside the kitchen door, Lizzie stares at Alex, and the only thing in her head, the only thought she can process, is that she’s never heard him shout before.

FOUR

When it became apparent in April 1913 that newly elected President Woodrow Wilson was ready to do the unthinkable and concede ground on union recognition, the industrialist, banker, and Vaughan family patriarch Charles A. Vaughan was quoted in the
New York Journal
as saying, “It would be nice if some day we could have a real businessman as president.”

—
House of Vaughan
(p. 164)

10

O
UT ON
M
AIN
S
TREET,
in front of the Smokehouse Tavern, with Frank Bishop standing next to her, Ellen finds the number and calls her contact in the NYPD. She lays it out for this guy, a homicide detective, just as she did for Bishop inside at the bar, but this time she does it faster, and almost in a sort of code, or shorthand. The contact listens, interjecting only once with a low whistle of disbelief. This is when she mentions that the Feds might already be involved. He says he’ll run it up the line and get right back to her.

Then Ellen suggests to Bishop that they return to Manhattan without delay. The shootings took place there, and if there’s going to be another one, or any development at all, that’s more than likely where it’ll happen. Any Atherton-based information about the Coadys they can get by phone or online.

Bishop is still in a state of shock, and Ellen has to prod him into a response. They eventually come to an arrangement—Ellen will drop her rental off locally, and then they’ll head back together in Bishop’s car. Ellen offers to drive, but Bishop says he’s fine, that it’ll be a distraction.

Within half an hour they’re on I-87.

Ellen isn’t great at making small talk, so she just fires questions at him as though it’s an interview. She can’t take notes—or at least can’t be too blatant about it, not in these circumstances—but if something significant comes up she can always use the phone in her hands to record the conversation.

Bishop is forthcoming on most things and speaks, in fact, as though he
were
being interviewed. It’s something Ellen has noticed before—how without declaring your hand up front you can establish a sort of determining rhythm to a conversation. In any case, she finds out quite a lot about him, and also about his daughter, Lizzie—whom Ellen pegs at once as a likely piece of collateral damage in all of this.

After about an hour on the road, they pull in at a rest stop to get some coffee. Ellen stays in the car and takes the opportunity to call Max Daitch. She exchanged a few texts with him back at the Smokehouse Tavern, during which they agreed that Ellen should call her NYPD contact ASAP. But with Bishop now occupied she’s able to explain in more detail what’s been happening.

“Why didn’t you tell me all of this before?” he says.

“Because I’ve only just put it together myself. What I told you yesterday was guesswork. It’s taken me until now to flesh it out.”

“Okay, okay.” He sighs. “Look, I’m trying to get clearance from legal to see what we can post online right now, if anything. Because by tomorrow morning, maybe even by tonight, this’ll be everywhere.”

“I know. My NYPD contact said he’d get back to me. I’ll text you as soon as he does.” She checks the time. “We should be back in the city by about seven. This guy here, the girlfriend’s father, I’m talking to him all the time, so at least we’re ahead on that angle if we need it.” She looks up. “Okay, I’ve got to go.”

Bishop gets back in the car, and they sip their coffees in silence for a while. It’s gray and murky out, and the relentless whipsaw of the passing traffic out on 87 is giving Ellen a headache.

Did she really use the word
angle
to Max just now? We’re ahead on that
angle
?

She fucking did, didn’t she?

That
is
where this is going, though—she knows that, they’re not carpooling here for convenience. She’s going to have to broach it with him, and it’ll depend on how things play out, but exclusive access is the prize.

It’s what she’s after.

She looks at her half-reflection in the windshield and rolls her eyes.

Then Bishop says, “This is going to be rough, isn’t it? If it’s true, I mean. If these … brothers, these pricks, if they’re the ones, and Lizzie’s with them, it’s going to mean a lot of attention, media attention, isn’t it? A lot of intrusion?”

Ellen turns and looks at him. “I hate to be the bearer of bad news, Frank, but what the fuck do you think
I’m
doing here?”

“Yeah.” He exhales and half-smiles. “I know. It just … doesn’t feel like that. Not yet, anyway.” He pauses. “And I meant it more from Lizzie’s point of view.”

“Well, if it is true, and let’s face it, that’s the way it’s looking, yeah, it
is
going to be rough. On her, on you, on her mom.” Ellen shifts in the seat and leans forward a bit. “So look, this is where I make a reasonable pitch for you to give me exclusive access, and in return I do my best to minimize your exposure, minimize the bullshit you have to put up with. Protect you.” She pauses. “But the thing is, Frank, there is no protect. There’s only exposure. And that’s a beast
no one
controls.” She clears her throat. “If you want my honest pitch, here it is. One way or another, I’ll be writing about this. It’s what I do. But I have a pretty decent reputation, so I won’t write anything that’s a lie, I won’t exaggerate, and I won’t withhold anything from you.” She pauses again. “That’s it.”

“Okay.”

“Okay what?”

“
Okay
. Presumably you know people. Cops. You have contacts. You can find out stuff. You understand the system. I’m going to need that.” He looks at her and waves a hand between them. “You know, give and take.”

She nods. “Yeah. Sure. Of course.”

He puts his coffee down and starts the car.

After about ten minutes back on the road, Ellen’s phone rings.

It’s her NYPD guy.

She sits in silence and listens. He explains that the situation has moved on somewhat. Those guys at Atherton this morning were indeed Feds, and right now in fact, together with members of the New York Joint Terrorism Task Force, they’re involved in a siege situation in an apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan with three suspects, two male, one female. The situation is extremely volatile, and there’s even a possibility that explosives might be involved. This news, he says, is barely fifteen minutes old. It hasn’t gotten out yet, and he’s only telling her now because the info she provided earlier gave
his
guys a little leverage with the Feds and the JTTF.

Ellen swallows. She wants to ask questions, she wants clarification, but not with Frank Bishop sitting next to her driving the fucking car.