Cartwheel (32 page)

But the usual approach, Eduardo saw, would not work with Sebastien LeCompte, and would only bore them both. He feigned another note on his pad. “You knew Lily Hayes how long?” he said, not looking up.

Eduardo could hear Sebastien drumming his fingers softly on the muslin. “I already gave a statement to the police.”

“Jog my memory,” said Eduardo, looking up. “We’re starting over. You knew Lily Hayes how long?”

“About a month.”

“And how did you meet?”

“The Carrizos invited me over for dinner. We struck up an acquaintance.”

“And how would you characterize your relationship with her?”

“Mind-bogglingly sexual.”

On the whole, Eduardo would have preferred talking to almost any of his usual characters—a small-time drug dealer with oily facial hair, a clinical sociopath, a burbling schizophrenic—to talking to Sebastien LeCompte. It was important that Sebastien not see this. “You were close, then?” said Eduardo.

Sebastien leaned back and crossed his arms and appeared to cogitate. “Might we define our terms here?”

Eduardo folded his hands neatly in his lap. Indulging some stalling only underscored its futility.

“When we say ‘close,’ what do we mean?” said Sebastien. “I mean, in a sense, we were as close as two people can possibly be, and in another sense, we knew each other not at all.”

“Could you be more specific?”

“Probably not.”

“You were sleeping together?”

Sebastien’s jaw dropped open theatrically. “Truly, you push my chivalry to its limits. How is one to answer such questions and remain a gentleman?”

“You were having a romantic relationship with Lily?”

“I was trying to, certainly.”

“Tell me about the night Katy died.”

“I think if you’ll refer to your file, you’ll see you have the whole sordid tale right there.”

Eduardo could feel the dull blade of a headache beginning to saw against his temple; he fervently wished he could tell this child to quit wasting both of their intelligence on such small battles. “You know,” he said, wedging his voice into its most avuncular tone. “You’re really not helping Lily this way. Maybe you’re not trying to. I wouldn’t want to presume.
I understand you’re a legendarily unknowable fellow. But if you want to be helping Lily, you should probably understand that you aren’t.”

Sebastien’s face was blank. A breeze blew through the window, making a faint rustling sound in the curtains.

Eduardo leaned forward. “Tell me about the night Katy Kellers died.”

“Lily and I spent the night here. As I have frequently said.”

“And what did you do?”

“We watched a movie.”

“What movie?”

“Are there no limits to your sadism? You people are really going to make me admit to this again?”

“What movie?”

“
Lost in Translation
. We watched
Lost in Translation
. If I’d known you were going to be locking her up the next day, if I’d known I would have to tell so many strangers about it, I would have been sure it was something more obscure.”

“And you fell asleep when?”

“Probably around four.”

“And you woke up when?”

“Around eleven.”

“And Lily was with you the whole time?”

“Yes.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“Yes.”

“Might she not have stepped out while you were asleep?”

“Not possible.”

“How do you know?”

“We sleep tangled in each other’s arms. Shared lucid dreams, sex every hour on the hour. Truly a cosmic connection we have.”

“I see.” Eduardo made another note, his pen scratching dryly. “And, given that connection, how do you imagine Lily felt about your liaison with Katy Kellers?”

Sebastien made a guttural sound, the dregs of what was probably
supposed to be a disbelieving laugh. “Liaison?” he said. “Is that what they’re calling such things these days?”

Eduardo gritted his teeth but was careful to keep his lips slack. “Something shorter? A onetime incident, perhaps?”

“I suppose you’d call it a zero-time incident, if you’re really interested in crunching the numbers.” Sebastien’s voice now was something well beyond flat—it was polished, it was Simonized.

“You are saying you did not sleep with Katy Kellers?” said Eduardo.

“Goodness, you’re tedious.”

“Not once? That’s your statement?”

“Not once. Never. I am fairly sure I’d remember.”

“That’s not what Lily Hayes reported.”

“On this, and on this alone, I fear Lily Hayes is mistaken.”

Eduardo’s headache was moving from the flanks of his head into its center; it was burrowing down, settling into itself, getting ready for the long haul. Eduardo would not let it bleed onto his face. “You don’t have to lie to me,” he said, because of the headache. It was his first misstep.

Sebastien scoffed. “If I had anything to lie about, I would absolutely have to lie to you,” he said. “But as it happens, I don’t. And I did not have any kind of conjugal relations with the deceased. And I’m frankly appalled you’d even ask such a vulgar question.”

Eduardo pressed on. “Lily and Katy,” he said, “were seen having a fight at Fuego on the night of Lily’s birthday.”

At this, there was some little sub-physical twitch in Sebastien’s face, some kind of barely suppressed psychomotor agitation. Eduardo stared at Sebastien long enough to let him know he had seen it. He never commented on changes in facial expression during interviews—if he did, it would become clear to the interviewee how ephemeral such things were, how easy it was to dispute another person’s perception, how quickly two people’s interpretations of an event became equal and opposing forces and canceled each other out. Leaving facial clues obviously registered and pointedly unremarked upon made people feel that they had revealed something significant but as yet unutilized. This threw them off and edged them closer to actually saying
something valuable, which, of course, was all that could ever actually matter.

“You’re telling me that it wasn’t you they were fighting about?” said Eduardo.

“I assure you it was not,” said Sebastien, recovering mastery over his face.

“What, then?”

“I don’t know. What do women fight about? Bra size? Sexual dominance? Competing predictions about the likely consequences of Mercosur’s limits on trade restrictions? I don’t know.”

“Tell me what you heard of it. Maybe the two of us can piece it together.”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t there.”

“You weren’t at Fuego that night?”

“No.”

“You are telling me that you did not attend your own girlfriend’s birthday party?”

“As it happens, no.”

“We can check that, you know.”

“Modern police work is becoming so terrifyingly good.”

“Why did you stay away? Because it didn’t seem like a good idea to have to deal with Lily and Katy in the same room?”

Sebastien LeCompte raised his head. “I stayed away because I was not invited.” His voice had to be some new category of deadpan; it was his singular invention in this life, his sole contribution to this world.

“It doesn’t do you any good to lie to me about these sorts of things,” said Eduardo. This was actually true. The little lies could not possibly help.

“I marvel at your continued insistence on this point.”

“Why wouldn’t Lily Hayes—your girlfriend, the girl you were sleeping with—have invited you to her birthday party?”

“I think that’s probably a better question for Lily. Do let me know what you hear.” There was a fibrousness in Sebastien’s voice now, and Eduardo suddenly understood that he was not lying about this—and,
though it might not be the only true thing he had said so far, it was the only true thing that actually meant anything to him. As such, it was a detail that would now need to be energetically pursued.

“That’s a pretty aggressive thing to do, wouldn’t you say?” said Eduardo. “To not invite your own boyfriend to your birthday?”

“Well, I might not say aggressive. It was certainly very
emancipated
of her. These twenty-first-century women, right?”

Eduardo knew by now that there was no tonal variation between sincerity and irony when Sebastien LeCompte talked, and he could tell that this strange speech characteristic—this sort of semantic monotone—was deep and ubiquitous and actually authentic to him, though, of course, perhaps somewhat amplified by the context of the interview. The implication of this was that even if Sebastien LeCompte was rarely serious, he was not absolutely always joking. Eduardo decided to try something new.

He leaned forward, then pulled back and shook his head a little and leaned forward again. “You know,” said Eduardo, making his voice sound confiding, conspiratorial, as though he were an actor who was tired of being in the same bad play as Sebastien and it wouldn’t hurt if they took a cigarette break backstage for a moment. “My wife is rather erratic, too.”

Sebastien’s eyebrows rose in studied amusement, but he said nothing.

“She gets angry at me every other day, and to be honest? I have no fucking clue what it’s about half the time. I truly do not. It’s a giant guessing game. Did you find that with Lily sometimes? No, it’s okay, you don’t have to answer that. Of course you did.” Eduardo almost added something like
We’ve all seen her Facebook posts, after all
, but he decided against it. Alluding to some widely known fact about Lily here might not be a bad idea—it might actually induce Sebastien to chuckle ruefully, naughtily—but referencing material that had been acquired in the course of the investigation could only snap Sebastien back away from Eduardo. If he’d bent to him at all already. Which, it was quite possible, he had not.

“But you know, Sebastien, the thing is, when my wife is angry with me and I have no fucking clue why and I have to guess—the thing is, sometimes I do actually guess right. If I really, really think about it. Maybe only a quarter of the time, but still, that’s not statistically insignificant, you know? So tell me. If you had to hazard a
guess
, why do you think Lily might have been angry with you that night?”

Still, Sebastien said nothing; his face was so blank that it did not even look like a blankness that was orchestrated to conceal. Eduardo would not have thought it was, if he hadn’t known better.

“And, of course, Lily was angry with you and Katy both,” said Eduardo. “We know that much. So that’s probably a clue. What might have made Lily angry with you and Katy at the same time?”

Still, on Sebastien’s face, an expression of total noninvolvement. It was not blatantly evasive—he did not look down, he did not look away, he did not fidget or blink too much or touch his hair. He sat with his hands curled lightly at his lap; his pose was one of total calm and attention and patience, as though he were the one awaiting the answers, not the other way around. He was pretty good at this, Eduardo thought. Maybe he should have gone into the family business.

“Well,” said Eduardo, standing up and handing Sebastien his card. “Think about it. Don’t worry. Sometimes it takes me a while to get it, too. But do get back to me with whatever you come up with.”

And at this, Sebastien—finally rousing from his fugue state and showing Eduardo to the door—responded that he assuredly, enthusiastically would.

Andrew and Maureen stood drinking on the hotel balcony and did not speak. A floor above them, in Andrew’s room, Anna was sleeping. Three miles away from them, in jail, Lily was waiting. Andrew and Maureen were sipping mini-bottles of vodka straight, letting the alcohol macerate their mouths. Across the street was an office building, dark except for a single room that glowed like an illuminated postage stamp. Above it, the stars were opalescent pinpricks, looking so cold
and distant that Andrew couldn’t quite believe they were fire. It was not right that he could stand here and see these things when Lily could not. Once, years ago, while flying over the North Atlantic, Andrew had spotted an eerie pale dot in the black ocean below him. It had reminded him of that famous picture of the earth from space—tiny and luminous, like a glowing pearl in the void—which everyone had thought, for about thirty seconds, might bring world peace. Squinting at the dot, Andrew had thought it was an iceberg, or the reflection of the moon on a whale, or some heretofore undiscovered Arctic bioluminescence. Or maybe, he’d thought, just maybe, it was something else. Andrew was surprised at how ready he was to believe it might be something else—how ready he was, also, to keep quiet about it, to make it a secret between him and the universe. He’d been almost all the way to England before he realized it was only the reflection of the airplane.

The rest of the interview with the lawyers that afternoon had been repetitive and interminable. Andrew had tried to take notes but had eventually fallen into a fretful underlining of the notes he’d already taken. After the revelation of Lily’s drug purchase from Ignacio Toledo, nothing new was revealed; she’d stuck faithfully and reassuringly to her story about the day of the crime, and in its repeated tellings the narrative seemed to move from the specific to the archetypal—like a Bible verse or a Beatles song, it became too familiar to actually hear. Lily told the story so many times that Andrew nearly felt he was watching it unfold before him: He could almost see the ghostly shadow of stoned Sebastien LeCompte, he could almost hear the coppery yelping of the game shows that Lily had watched while Katy’s undiscovered body—good God—lay a floor below her in the basement.

By the time the lawyers finally left, Andrew and Maureen’s visit was over. Maureen had tried to persuade Lily to eat the rest of her sandwich, but she did not; they’d left it on a crusty pile on the table, even though Lily said that the guards would probably make her throw it away. Then they’d both kissed her on the cheek, and she’d clung to Maureen for longer than the security guards had liked, and then it was time—again—for them to leave her.

“Come on,” said Maureen, tugging on Andrew’s wrist. “Let’s go inside.”

Andrew followed her into the room, vodka between his forefinger and thumb, and shoved aside a pile of newspaper clippings so that he could sit on the bed. In the corner of one of the articles, he could see the edge of that awful picture of Lily from her own camera, standing in front of the church with the immodest décolletage and the too-bright smile. Andrew turned the newspaper over, and Maureen joined him on the bed. She smelled like moss and cedar and some new late-in-life perfume. She smelled mostly like a stranger.