44 Charles Street (20 page)

“She thought something was wrong when she walked in. She called me, and I told her to wait outside and call the police. They found her. She was dead in her room. He strangled and beat her. They have him in custody now. We have to identify him today.” He didn’t tell her that Francesca had identified the body the day before. Francesca was lying on the bed, listening to their conversation, with her eyes closed, deathly pale, and he was holding her hand. They were two very sad friends, and he was glad to be there with her.

“Do you want me to come down? We could be there in a few hours.” He noticed the “we” but thought she was confused, with all the strong emotions of the terrible news about Eileen.

“There’s not much you can do. We’re okay.” He said it, but neither of them felt it.

“Are you staying at the house?” The idea of that was shocking, and she wasn’t sure what they would do.

“We’re at the Gansevoort,” he said calmly. And the police had given them the name of a service that specialized in cleaning up crime scenes. Once they had all the evidence they needed, and had taken photographs, the service would come in and strip any evidence of the crime. It would take a few days. If necessary, they would repaint the room. That happened more frequently when there were gunshots involved. It sounded like a grim job to him. “Everything should be in order by the time you get back.” But in order or not, Eileen would never be there again. Francesca had already decided that morning that she didn’t want anyone else in that room. She never wanted to see it again herself, it would make her too sad. She had genuinely liked Eileen, despite her foolishness with men, and had taken her under her wing and into her home. And now she was dead.

“I’m so sorry,” Marya said again. “I don’t want to bother Francesca, but if there’s anything I can do, call me. I’ll get in the car and be there in a few hours if it will help. I’ll try to come back in a few days. Did someone call her parents?”

“The police. They’re cremating the body after the autopsy, to send the ashes to her parents. There’s no funeral in New York.”

“Maybe we can have a little service of our own,” Marya said vaguely, too shocked to think of anything right now. She reminded him to send her love to Francesca, and they hung up.

“What happened?” Charles-Edouard asked her with a look of concern when she hung up.

“Eileen, the little girl on the top floor whom you met, was killed at the house. Beaten and strangled.”

“By a burglar?”

“They think it was by a man she went out with. They have him in custody and are charging him with the murder. He beat her up very badly twice before.” Marya looked sick. She sat down on the couch with a distant expression, and Charles-Edouard sat down next to her and put an arm around her and held her. It was a sad beginning to the first day of their new life. Beginnings and endings, the birth of a relationship and the death of a young woman. The bittersweetness of life. And this was very bitter. Marya looked up at him and then sank into his arms and cried.

The lineup at the police station for the Sixth Precinct on West Tenth Street took forever to begin, and they were a motley group of men as they were led out. There were two tall ones, a short one, and three of medium height. All had tattoos. One had long hair. Three were being held on other charges, one was an undercover cop, one was on parole, and one was Brad. They both recognized him instantly as he stood in profile and full face as he was directed. The men in the lineup stood there shuffling, on the other side of a two-way mirror, and Chris and Francesca confirmed the identification without a doubt. It was him. And then the men were led out. It was over. And he would be arraigned the next day. After that, Chris and Francesca were free to leave.

They walked back to the hotel and needed the air. Ian called Chris while they were walking, and his father said everything was fine, and Francesca sent her love. He had told him he was going to New York to do some work, and to help Francesca at the house. He didn’t want him to worry that something had happened to his mother in jail. Ian was always worried about her, with good reason. But now she had been charged with manslaughter. And Chris doubted that her father would get her out of this one. And no one had been able to stop, sway, or save Eileen. Women who were bent on destroying themselves usually did, as Chris knew too well.

The police had told them that the house should be cleaned up by midweek. They were planning to stay at the hotel till then. Chris had taken his own room before they left for the lineup. And he didn’t care if he used it or not, this way he had the option, and if he sat in a chair in Francesca’s room every night, he didn’t mind that either. That’s why he had come from the Vineyard, to do anything for her that he could. They steered a wide berth of the house on their walk, and Francesca wasn’t sure if she wanted to see it again. She wondered if this would haunt them forever, or if they could live there in peace now. She wasn’t sure.

She hadn’t eaten since the day before, and Chris finally convinced her to go to Da Silvano for some pasta. They gave them a table outside in the usual hustle-bustle of the popular restaurant, and she couldn’t touch her food. All she could think of was Eileen. They walked back to the hotel after that, went to Francesca’s room, and Chris turned on the TV. There was a baseball game on, and as he watched it from a chair next to the bed, she fell asleep. She stirred several times, had nightmares once or twice, and got up to go to the bathroom, and other than that, she slept until morning. He slept in the chair, fully dressed, with the TV on. But they both felt better the next day.

They ordered room service, and Marya called to see how they were. She talked to Francesca this time, and they both cried for Eileen. It made Francesca miss Marya more than ever. She hadn’t said anything about the new developments with Charles-Edouard, their good news didn’t seem appropriate now in the face of their collective grief.

“Do you want to come back to the Vineyard with me for a few days?” Chris suggested over breakfast, but Francesca didn’t.

“I don’t know what I want to do,” she said, still looking dazed. “I don’t want to see people. I have to open the gallery and get back to work.” She was grateful for the distraction. She could also stay at her father’s house in Connecticut, if she needed to get away. He and Avery had just returned from Aspen.

She called Avery that afternoon and told her what had happened. She was horrified.

“Maybe roommates weren’t such a great idea after all,” Avery said quietly. She was so sorry for Francesca, and wondered if the house would be forever tainted for her now. Francesca was mulling over the same thing. She wasn’t sure. She’d have to see how it felt when she went back. “What are you going to do now? Sell the house?” It seemed an extreme decision, but living in a house where a young woman they liked had been murdered wasn’t going to be easy either, for any of them. And Francesca had a lot of sad memories in that house now. Avery suggested that maybe it was no longer worth the struggle to keep it. She asked if Francesca had called her mother.

“Not yet,” she said with a sigh. “I’m not sure I will. She doesn’t need to know. She’ll just hound me about it, tell me she was right all along about what a bad idea this was to keep the house and have roommates, and pressure me to sell. I need to figure that out for myself, if that’s what I want. I just don’t know yet.”

“You will, at the right time. It’s too soon, unless you’re sure you want to sell it.”

“I’m not. I still love the house. I just hate what happened there. I keep wondering if there was something else I could have done, or been stronger with her. But I was her roommate, or landlady, not her mother. I couldn’t forbid her to see him. All I could do was tell her she couldn’t have him to the house, but she did anyway when I was gone. And I kept begging her to get help, and stop picking up guys on the Internet. I think she was a lot more complicated than she appeared, with a bad history of abuse from her childhood. Maybe she was drawn to people like that, and she would have found a Brad anywhere. She didn’t need the Internet to do it. We all have our secrets and our problems and our issues. I’m still trying to get over Todd, Marya the death of her husband, Chris is dealing with his heroin addict ex-wife and trying to keep his son safe. We all have our struggles, and I guess things aren’t always what they appear. They weren’t with Eileen. And look what happened to her.” Francesca was crying again when she said it, she had really liked her. And no one she knew had ever been murdered. It seemed like such a terrible way to die, strangled and beaten in her own bed. But he had given her plenty of warning that he was a dangerous man, and she’d still tried to turn it around, instead of running as fast as she could in the opposite direction, which would have been the sane and healthy thing to do. Eileen just wasn’t healthy, and she had been addicted to Brad and his abuse, and had paid the ultimate price. Avery reminded her that the statistics on abusive men and abused women were horrifying. Seventy-five percent of men who threatened to kill the women they were involved with actually did. Now Eileen was just one more statistic instead of the sweet freckle-faced girl upstairs. Her dating games with total strangers and her lack of judgment about them had been her downfall.

Chris went back to the Vineyard the next day to pick up Ian and promised to return as soon as he could. Francesca insisted she was all right. She opened the gallery, and kept her room at the Gansevoort. Her suitcases were still in the front hall of the house from when she arrived, and she had them brought to the hotel. And she told Marya that she didn’t need to rush back either. There was nothing for them to do. Eileen’s room was being stripped and steam-cleaned and repainted, the furniture removed. Her things were being boxed and sent to San Diego after the police went through them and took what they needed as evidence. And then Francesca was planning to close the room and lock it. She didn’t even want to go in there. She was eliminating the top floor of the house for the time being. She couldn’t imagine anyone who would want to live there, knowing someone had been killed in that room. It meant that she would be paying half the mortgage payment, instead of a quarter, with four of them there. It was what she had paid when she lived with Todd. But she couldn’t figure out any other way to do it for now. She didn’t want another tenant to replace Eileen, just Chris and Marya, and of course Ian. They were adults, used good judgment, lived sane lives, and put none of the others at risk, nor themselves. She couldn’t go through the trauma of someone like Eileen again, no matter how much she liked her. And you just never knew what people did in private. Neither she, Marya, nor Chris even had relationships or partners. They were three adults on their own, and one small child, whom they all loved. Eileen had been too immature and too damaged to be responsible, and Francesca blamed herself for not understanding it sooner, before something like this happened. Maybe in another living arrangement, she wouldn’t have been killed. They had all been gone all summer, and she had been easy prey for Brad.

The police informed her that Brad had been arraigned and bound over for trial. He had pleaded not guilty, on the advice of the public defender who represented him. He wanted his day in court, although they said he might plea-bargain in the end. But there wasn’t much they could do with cold-blooded murder. The initial DNA tests had linked Brad to the murder. They said it would take about a year to come to trial, and he would be in jail, without bail, until then. It reminded her of Chris’s ex-wife, who was still in jail, pending her trial too. They were trying to make a deal for her, but the district attorney wasn’t letting her off the hook. She was responsible for the addict she had shot up with, and to whom she had supplied the drugs. It was an ugly scene. And poor Ian had watched while he died, and then his own mother nearly died. And he had told Chris that he had seen them shoot up, just as he had before. Chris was planning to use it all as evidence in the custody case. He didn’t want his son living with a woman who did drugs in front of him, even if she was his mother, and had unsavory people around, like drug dealers and other addicts. And he was going to ask for supervised visits when she got out of jail. He didn’t want Ian alone with her ever again. And he had no hope she would clean up. She never had, despite all the fancy rehabs she had gone to for years. Her parents wanted her to clean up, and so did he, but she never did. She was too much of an addict to care. All she wanted were her drugs, at whatever price. Just as Eileen had wanted Brad. He had been her drug of choice, as lethal as heroin had been to Ian’s mother’s friend. Now they were both dead.

Chris called Francesca several times from the Vineyard, concerned that she was alone. She had moved back into the house. She sounded down, but reassured him that she was doing all right. She didn’t admit that she would be happy when he and Marya got back to New York, and that it was upsetting being there by herself.

Marya was in no rush to come back to the house either, and thought it would feel very sad. She still hadn’t shared her good news with Francesca, it just felt like the wrong time. But she and Charles-Edouard were happy in Vermont, and exploring facets of their relationship that they’d never had access to before. There were no limits for them now, since he was getting divorced. He had spoken to his lawyer twice from Vermont, and everything was on track. His wife wanted to get out quickly, so she could marry his sous-chef. She wanted half of what Charles-Edouard had, and after thirty years together, he thought it was fair. He told Marya he had enough to split it in half with Arielle and still have a comfortable life. They were content with that, and she didn’t want anything from him. Just a good life, and they were off to a wonderful start. She had never expected to wind up with him, or with anyone, after John. This was all an enormous surprise, and an adjustment, but they were both good sports about it and flexible and tolerant of each other’s quirks. They were both kind-hearted people who enjoyed life, and loved each other, now as much more than friends. He still wanted to get married, and was pushing her to it. And she was still firm about wanting him to prove himself faithful to her, and that he was capable of it. After a great marriage to John for thirty-six years, she wasn’t going to marry a cheater now, or even stay with one. And Charles-Edouard had been one all his life, and made no claims otherwise. He said it was cultural and the fact that he didn’t love his wife. Marya didn’t care, she wanted no part of a man who had affairs. He swore he wouldn’t.