A Dangerous Fiction (28 page)

“Put it down,” Lorna said. “Gently.”

I set the vase down within easy reach and sank back onto the couch, trying not to cringe. It was a smallish gun, with a long, tubular attachment on the barrel, and it was aimed at my heart. Beside me was a large throw pillow. I clutched it to me.

She sniggered. “Yeah, that'll help.”

Coffee was seeping into the ivory silk rug that Hugo and I bought on our trip to China. It is a testament to my grandmother's hands-on training that, despite the situation, I had an overwhelming urge, as reflexive as a sneeze, to fetch a bottle of club soda and some rags. Maybe Lorna had the same sort of upbringing, for she, too, glanced at the spreading stain with distress.

“Look what you did,” she said reproachfully.

I thought of Mingus then with a regret and longing so intense that I almost expected him to materialize on the spot. He didn't. But it occurred to me that I wasn't entirely weaponless. There was an ice pick in the bar and a poker beside the fireplace.

Lorna seemed to read my mind. “Move one inch and you're dead.”

I wondered why she hadn't pulled the trigger already. What did she want from me? Using the pillow as a cover, I slipped my hand into my pants' pocket, found the BlackBerry, and started easing it out.

“I understand your anger toward me,” I said. “But why take it out on my clients? Why kill Rowena and poor Molly? What the fuck did they ever do to you?”

“You destroyed my life. I wasn't going to put you down till I'd destroyed yours.”

“You organized Rowena's memorial service.” Each new realization was hitting me as a distinct shock; I couldn't get ahead of it. “You sat in that room and listened to the life she led, the kind of person she was. How could you, knowing what you'd done?”

“It was tough,” Lorna said. “Tough to keep from laughing. Rowena was nothing like all that pious bullshit. She was a snotty bitch, so full of herself she never even bothered to learn my name.”

“And for that she deserved to die?” The phone was out of my pocket. I ran my fingers over the keys, trying to visualize the keyboard. Tommy Cullen was number five on my speed dial. I pressed what I prayed was the right number.

“If she hadn't deserved it, she wouldn't have made it so easy.” Lorna smiled in what looked like fond remembrance. “It was so perfect. She opened the door and said, ‘Laura, dear, what are you doing here?' ‘Jo sent me,' I said, and of course those were the magic words. She invited me in, and I didn't waste any time. But here's the kicker. After I shot her, she didn't die right away. I leaned over her, so my face would be the last thing she saw, and I said, ‘Actually,
dear,
it's Lorna.'” Lorna had been sniggering throughout this recital. Now she laughed so hard that she didn't hear what I heard: a muffled voice between my stomach and the pillow saying, “Jo?”

She wiped her eyes with the heel of her free hand. “You have no idea how badly I've wanted to tell that story. And you're such a good listener now.”

Was it Tommy? I couldn't tell. It was someone, anyway. If this ended badly, someone would know.

“And Molly?” I said loudly. “What did Molly ever do to you, Lorna?”

“Nothing,” she said, turning truculent. “Molly was OK, except for thinking the sun shone out of your asshole. But she was your crutch. If you'd given up after Rowena, if you'd stayed down like a normal human being, there would have been no need for Molly to die. But no, you had to be better than anyone else, tougher than anyone else, the invincible Jo Donovan. Molly's your fault. They both are.”

Fear acted like Novocain on my emotions, but I felt the impact of those words. They would hurt later, if there was a later. “Lorna, I didn't know about you and your mother. Maybe I should have, but I didn't. You were treated unfairly; you have a legitimate claim. We can resolve this to your advantage. Look at this apartment. You loved it as a child. It could be yours again. Killing me gains you nothing.”

“Nothing but satisfaction,” she scoffed. “Nothing but achieving my life's goal.”

“People who've been damaged are entitled to compensation. Why don't we settle this the American way?”

She waved the gun. “This
is
the American way.”

“I meant money.”

“And I suppose Molly and Rowena will be our little secret? Damn, woman, you still think I'm stupid. Must be a hard habit to break.”

“Of course I don't think you're stupid, how could I? You fooled everyone. No one looked twice at you.”

“You never even looked once,” she said, with a lifetime's worth of contempt. “Fooling you was easy. I knew you'd never suspect me. ‘Poor dumb Lorna, such a good little filer. Just don't ask her to walk and chew gum at the same time.'”

“I never said anything like that!”

“Thought it, though, didn't you?”

Odd, I thought, that the truest lines in this conversation were coming from the crazed murderer. “I think we've established that I had no idea who I was dealing with. The point is, you'd never get away with this one. The doorman saw you; Jean-Paul knows you came to my apartment. If you shoot me, you'll be caught in two seconds and rot in prison for the rest of your life. Where's the justice in that?”

I was afraid, mentioning the apartment for the second time, that Lorna would catch on. But she was too busy gloating, proud of herself and eager to show off her cleverness. “No one saw me. I came in the basement door and I'll leave the same way. Thanks for the keys, by the way; good of you to trust me with them. After I finish with you, I'll go around front and deliver that manuscript to the doorman, just like your little boyfriend told me to. With you gone, the agency will fold; and I'll drift away, the way little people like me do.”

“They'll find you, Lorna.” I hoped Tommy had gotten the message by now, because if I said her name once more, I thought she'd shoot me on general principle.

She shrugged. “It'd be worth it if they did, but they won't. It's a big country, and I've got the perfect invisibility cloak: a few extra pounds and some dowdy clothes. Worked with you, didn't it?”

“I hope you don't expect a reference.”

“Good one, Jo. Too bad it's just you and me here.”

“Seriously, think it over. Everything else aside, it's a hell of a time to be out of a job.”

She flushed. “Everything's a fucking joke to you, isn't it? You should be on your knees, begging for your life.”

“Like that's gonna help.”

“You never know. I might take pity, if you beg hard enough.”

Finally I understood what she was waiting for. Humiliation, the final station of the cross. She must have pictured it for years, fantasized about it. The Lorna I'd thought I knew was rigid in her routines and expectations. I had a feeling this Lorna wasn't so different.

I didn't budge. She raised the gun and took aim, left hand supporting her right. “Kneel before me, you evil witch!”

Even though she held the gun and all the power, her voice was shrill, shaking like a child's. And suddenly I knew that voice. I'd heard it before. The memory rushed over me.

“Put him on, witch. Put Hugo on.” A young voice, high-pitched and agitated.

I move the phone away from my ear. “Stop calling. Leave us alone.”

“I need to talk to him right now!”

Noises in the background: men shouting, a woman screaming. Some vile prank, I think.

“I can't hear you,” I say, and hang up the phone.

Now I looked at Lorna, and I could see the young girl from the photo in her face. “You called the apartment.”

“Oh, so now you remember. I called many times. I called the day they took my mother away. You hung up on me.”

“I thought you were one of his girlfriends.”

“No, you didn't,” she said flatly. “On your knees!”

I heard the elevator stop on my floor.

If Lorna had any sense, I'd be dead already. But she must have envisioned this moment a thousand times, me on my knees, begging for mercy, and she didn't want to settle for less. She'd heard the elevator, though, and it spooked her. As she threw a quick glance over her shoulder, I jumped up, raised the crystal vase above my head, and hurled it at her.

I missed. The vase flew past her head, hit the wall, and shattered in a shower of glass shards, mums, and roses. Both of us were on our feet. There were footsteps in the hall. Someone banged on the door. “Help!” I screamed.

Lorna raised her arm and sighted down the barrel. I grabbed the closest thing at hand, my wedding photo, and aimed for her chest. She ducked, but the heavy metal frame clipped her shoulder. As she staggered backward, the gun roared.

I felt a searing pain on the side of my head and fell back onto the couch. Blood dripped past my eyes like a red bead curtain. Through it I saw uniformed policemen rush in, shouting, guns in hand. “Drop it. Drop the gun!”

I heard a thump; then Lorna spoke with astonishing composure. “Don't shoot. It's not what it looks like. She attacked me.”

I wanted to deny it, but my head was on fire. A large body knelt beside me. A man's voice said, “She's shot. Call a bus.”

I closed my eyes and waited to die.

A
fter the sentencing, Max and I left the courthouse together. The Criminal Court building was an imposing white edifice on Centre Street, whose carved portico and columns made the perfect backdrop for the attorneys who were already outside talking to the press. We skirted the knot of reporters, our faces averted, and crossed the street to the little park on Foley Square, where we sat on a bench facing the courthouse. A year had passed since Lorna's arrest; winter had come again, but the weather this week had been unseasonably warm, almost sultry.

“Well,” Max said, wiping his brow and the dome of his head with a red handkerchief, “that's that.”

“Thanks for coming, Max.”

“No thanks necessary. It was worth it just to hear the words ‘consecutive sentences.' She'll never get out. That's something to celebrate.”

“Yes,” I said, but I didn't feel like celebrating, and I didn't believe he did, either. Lorna hadn't testified during the trial, but a great deal about her early life had come out in the sentencing phase. She was not, as she had claimed, Hugo's daughter. Lorna was four years old when her mother, a Russian immigrant named Irina Kassofsky, quit her job with Jolly Maids and moved into Hugo's apartment; she was seven when they left it.

Nor had Hugo thrown them out on the street. He'd rented them an apartment in Brooklyn, paid the rent for six months—those receipts I'd found in his study—and turned over to Irina a bank account with $20,000 in it. It was a perfunctory, businesslike dismissal, particularly cruel to the child, though I doubt Hugo ever considered that. Nevertheless, it was a loss Lorna could have overcome if her mother had moved on with her life. Irina did not. Her ascent had been too steep and her descent too precipitous. She obsessed endlessly over Hugo and especially over me, and she made her daughter into her confidante. Growing depressed, she began to use and eventually sell drugs. Child services got involved. For the next five years, until she hanged herself at Rikers, Irina shuttled in and out of prisons and hospitals. Each time she got out, she regained custody of her daughter; and the cycle began again. For Lorna, the intervals with her mother were devoted to retelling the story of their betrayal and plotting elaborate schemes of revenge, while the stints in foster care were spent waiting and planning.

Which, I supposed, was how she got so good at it. It took Lorna years to carry out her revenge: to acquire skills that would be useful to me, to insinuate herself into the agency, and to learn what she needed to know to strip me of my life before taking it.

The judge wasn't impressed by Lorna's miserable childhood; perhaps he was inured to hard-luck stories. In his sentencing statement, he spoke about the astonishing degree of premeditation that went into her crimes, as well as their cold-blooded cruelty. My feelings were more conflicted. The jury had found her guilty on all counts, as did I. Rowena and Molly could finally rest easy; their murderer would never again walk free. And yet I remembered, as the court could not, desperate phone calls from a voice I chose to hear as a woman's; and I knew there was guilt enough to go around.

“The worst part,” I said to Max, “is that none of it had to happen. If I'd known back then, if I'd allowed myself to know—”

“Hugo knew,” Max said firmly. “They weren't your responsibility. Nor his either, really. You ask me, he treated that woman more than decently. She got three good years and a windfall in the end. There was no need to make a soap opera out of it, much less drag the kid into it.”

“Haven't you noticed? Everyone's life is a soap opera.”

“Nuh-uh. Mine's a Broadway musical.”

I laughed, thinking of his books. “But a dark one, like
Sweeney Todd
.”

“Not at all. Something frothy, with Julie Andrews in it.”

“
Somebody's
happy.”

“It's called marital bliss. Highly recommended, Madame Workhorse.”

“Been there, done that.”

“Done what?” said another voice.

We turned. Tommy Cullen was approaching, looking cool and businesslike in a charcoal suit. I should have been prepared; I'd glimpsed him in the courtroom and lost track of the proceedings for five full minutes. But I was unexpectedly struck dumb, and Max, for the second time, stepped into the breach.

“Detective Cullen, our savior!” He stood and shook Tommy's hand warmly. “Which, you should know, is not something a Jew says lightly.”

“I'll pass, if you don't mind,” Tommy said with his old, easy smile. “You folks are tough on saviors. Saw you in the courtroom. Guess I'll be reading all about the case in your next book.”

“I don't think so,” Max said. “Fiction's easier on the heart.”

“Too bad. I already had the movie cast.”

“Yeah? Who plays you?”

“That would be Matt Damon.”

They laughed, but I thought Matt Damon wasn't a bad choice. Same all-American type, though Tommy was even better-looking. He turned to me, and a scrim of wariness fell over his face. “How are you?”

“OK,” I said. “Better than the last time we met.” In the ambulance, that had been. The sound of his voice calling my name had roused me; I'd opened my eyes to an ashen version of his face, bending over mine. That stricken look had given me hope; I didn't see how it could come from an indifferent heart. But he hadn't come to the hospital, where other detectives took my statement. I thought he would call after I got out, but months stretched into a year and Tommy never sought me out.

Not that I sat home waiting. In my free time I tended the garden of hardy friendships that had sprung from the soil of my devastation. Though Rowena and Molly were irreplaceable, friendship itself turned out to be fungible. In my free time I saw Gordon, Keyshawn, and my legacy friend, Leigh Pfeffer. Max and Barry were family; I was with them in L.A. when baby Molly took her first steps.

There wasn't much free time, though, because despite three new hires to supplement Jean-Paul and Chloe, I was busier than ever. Sikha Mehruta had delivered an exquisite novel, as good as her first two but more accessible. I thought it could be her breakthrough book. Her publisher agreed, and with just a little prodding doubled her advance and offered a three-book contract. Chloe sold Katie Vigne's book,
I Luv U Baby, but WTF?,
to a new imprint at Penguin. Keyshawn's novel had come out to respectful reviews and sufficient sales to pave the way for a second book, which he was busy writing. Despite Harriet's decampment, the agency was thriving.

Other things had changed in my life. I'd given Rowena's bequest to her charities and ended up on the board of one of them, a fund that supports rural libraries. Most of Molly's money went to endow a college scholarship fund for students from Hoyer's Creek. I acted anonymously, for I had a horror of ever going back there; but like Rowena, I had opened a door for others.

And yet I yearned for more. The fierce hunger for life that had gripped me in the face of death didn't dissipate once the threat was removed but grew stronger as the shock wore off. Appetites had wakened that were not easily satisfied. I thought a lot about Tommy Cullen. Fantasized about him. Thought of calling him, but resisted every time. If he'd wanted to see me, there was nothing to stop him. I figured he had his reasons. He didn't owe me a second chance; and anyway, what were the odds that a straight, good-looking man like Tommy would be unattached in a city full of hungry women?

“How's the head?” he asked now, sitting beside me on the bench.

I pushed back my hair to show him the scar on my left temple. The bullet, skimming past, had torn off a swath of flesh and bruised the bone, but left the skull intact. One inch to my right, the doctors said, and the story would have had a different ending. As it was, I got away with a concussion and a scar. A plastic surgeon could have fixed the scar, but that didn't feel right. I hadn't emerged unscathed, and shouldn't look as if I had.

“Max is right,” I said. “You sent in the cavalry and saved my life; then you rode off into the sunset, before I even had a chance to thank you.”

“Like the Lone Ranger,” Max said.

“Like Shane,” I said. The first movie that ever made me cry.
Come back, Shane! Shane, come back!
He hadn't, though.

“You've got nothing to thank me for,” Tommy said. “You were smart and gutsy enough to make that phone call right under her nose.” He nodded toward the courthouse. “Were you satisfied with the outcome?”

“It doesn't bring Molly and Rowena back,” I said. “But the sentence was just. She deserves it.”

“She deserves worse,” Max said darkly, “but New York doesn't have the death penalty. What bothers me is not knowing the whole story. I'd have liked to know how Drucklehoff fit into the scheme. Was he part of it? Did Lorna deploy him, or just take advantage of his appearance?”

“We wondered that, too,” Tommy said. “We kept searching for a connection, but we never found any. I think she was biding her time, collecting intelligence and making plans. When that nutcase came along, she seized the opportunity to use him for cover.”

“Lucky break for her,” Max said.

“Yeah, she got a lot of mileage out of him.”

“So you never suspected her?”

“We suspected everyone,” Tommy said reprovingly. “But she wasn't a focus of the investigation till we caught Drucklehoff. Then we started wondering why he hadn't been on our radar before. I went back and checked the printout of submissions that Lorna had given us. Drucklehoff wasn't on it, and neither was his novel. She kept those records; so either she just happened to miss that particular one, or she'd purged it from the list to impede our investigation. We already knew from background checks that she'd changed her surname, but we didn't know why. We were about to bring her in when she made her move on you.”

Poor Sam Spade, I thought. They'd dropped all charges against him after Lorna's arrest, and let him go with a warning to stay away from me. All he ever did was write a really bad book and try to get me to read it. And I said such vicious things to him.

“I keep thinking I should write him a note,” I said.

“Hell, no!” both men replied as one. They looked at each other, and Max gave a go-ahead wave.

“Don't even think about it,” Tommy said earnestly. “This is still a guy with a major obsession, and you don't want to feed it.”

No, I did not. As it was, I kept looking over my shoulder. The ordeal I'd been through had left scars less visible than the one on my temple. I'd become hypervigilant about my surroundings and the people near me, looking outward with the same critical eye I'd honed on the interior world of fiction. This change was, perhaps, not so surprising, but others were unexpected, like the feeling that cataracts had been removed, not just from my eyes, but from all my senses. Color flooded the world; details emerged. My appetite returned, and I'd put back all the weight I'd lost. Even my sense of smell seemed more acute, and strangely infused with emotion. Tommy's odor, for example, a blend of Ivory soap, pine-scented aftershave, and sweat, brought back a time when I'd known it well.

An ambulance shouldered its way through rush-hour traffic, siren blaring. Tommy glanced at his watch. This is it, I thought. In a minute he's going to say good-bye and walk away, and we could share this city for the rest of our lives and never meet again. I didn't have to ask myself how I felt about that.

“I don't know about you guys,” I said, before he could speak, “but I could use a drink.”

“Sounds about right,” Tommy said at once.

Max grimaced. “Wish I could, but I'm afraid I have a plane to catch. In fact”—he glanced at his watch and stood—“I've got to run.”

I stared at him. His flight wasn't until late that night, and we'd planned to have dinner together.

The men shook hands; Max kissed my cheek. “See ya, Jo. Remember what I said.” As he stepped toward the street, raising his arm, an empty taxi glided to the curb. He climbed in and waved good-bye.

“Impressive,” Tommy said.

“He leads a charmed life.” I felt embarrassed being alone with him, like a schoolgirl on a blind date, which was ridiculous. “Where should we go? I don't know the neighborhood.”

“I do. There's a place just across the square.” He hesitated. “Kind of a cop hangout, though. You'd probably want something nicer.”

“They got scotch?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Let's go,” I said, and we fell into step as if we'd been doing it every day for a lifetime. It was four thirty, and lawyers in dark suits streamed from the courthouse like ants from a colony. When Tommy's arm brushed mine, I felt a heat that spread inward. On West Broadway we passed a bookstore with a full window display of Teddy Pendragon's
An Audacious Life.
Eighteen months from contract to publication: Teddy and Random House had pulled out all the stops to capitalize on the publicity surrounding Lorna's trial. It would have been impossible if Teddy hadn't done so much of the work in advance for
Vanity Fair
; even so, I feared the haste had taken a toll on the work. On the front cover was a photo of Hugo in his midforties, with a wild shock of prematurely gray hair and a penetrating stare. I kept walking and would have averted my eyes if I weren't trying to quit that habit.

“Did you read it?” Tommy asked.

“Not yet.” My copy, fulsomely signed by the author, lay untouched on a shelf in my study. It was strange to remember how obsessively I'd worried about this book, dreading the exposure of secrets I never even acknowledged to myself. Someday I'd read it and finish the job of sorting the marriage I'd thought I had from the marriage I actually had. For now, I was focused on the present, not the past.

“I did,” he said.