Hard Feelings (21 page)

I went to the front desk where Karen was sitting, wearing her headset.

“I was just wondering,” I said, “did someone, by any chance, call yesterday or today, asking for my e-mail address?”

“Not today,” she said. “But I was out sick yesterday and a temp was here. Someone could have called then.”

“Thanks anyway,” I said.

I returned to my cubicle. Staring at the message again, I thought about sending a reply. I was about to do it when I decided it could be a big mistake. It was important to show that I was strong, that I wasn’t afraid or even concerned. Then a few seconds later, opening my jacket and looking at my sweat-stained shirt, I realized how impossible this was going to be.

On the way home from work, as hard as I tried to act as if it were just a normal Friday, I couldn’t stop looking over my shoulder. At one point, I was so convinced that this guy with red hair was following me that I stopped and waited for him to pass by before I turned the corner and continued on. Then, a few minutes later, I became convinced that a black Volkswagen bug was trailing me. I remembered seeing a black bug near Fifth Avenue and now there was one double-parked on Park. I had no way of knowing whether it was the same car or not, but I decided to hail a cab anyway. The bug followed the cab for a few blocks, but when the cab turned right on Sixty-fourth Street, the bug stayed on Park.

Paula was lying on the couch in the living room, listening to one of her old George Michael CDs, reading a magazine. I kissed her hello.

“Sorry I was so nasty this morning,” she said. “I’m feeling a lot better now.”

I told her I was still feeling “under it” and that I needed to lie down.

I changed into sweatpants and a T-shirt and got into bed. I tried to relax, but I couldn’t stop obsessing about the e-mail.

Paula came into the bedroom and lay next to me. She kissed me lightly on the forehead then said, “How are you feeling?”

“Little better,” I lied.

“Good,” she said. “I’m glad.”

She started telling me about her day at the office, about a new project she was working on. I was barely listening, but I kept the conversation going by saying “right” and “really” and “okay” at the appropriate times.

Then, in a suddenly sexy voice, Paula said, “We can start trying next week.”

“Trying?” I said, distracted. “Trying for what?”

“To have a baby,” she said.

“Sorry,” I said, “I forgot. Not
forgot
—I just didn’t hear what you said.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. A long day, that’s all.”

Paula hugged me and we were both silent. I felt awful for keeping secrets from her. I wanted to tell her the truth about everything, including the murder. If she loved me as much as I thought she did, then she’d understand.

“It’s not true,” I said, aware of my face suddenly getting hot.

“What isn’t true?” she asked.

“It wasn’t just a long day at work—something happened today. Something important.”

“What?”

I hesitated.

“Well?” she asked.

“I was sort of offered a promotion,” I said, and then I told her about my lunch with Bob and Alan. She told me how proud she was of me, and she suggested taking me out to dinner to celebrate. I said I wasn’t really in the mood to go out tonight and, besides, there really wasn’t anything to celebrate yet.

Friday evening we stayed in, watching a movie on pay-per-view. I couldn’t concentrate on the plot and I fell asleep halfway through. During the night, I woke up several times, imagining the publicity the story would get. The media loved it when ordinary men like me were exposed as killers. It could even become a national news story and I imagined my parents finding out about it. My father was so self-absorbed he’d probably be upset for a few days and then forget about it altogether. But my mother would be devastated. She would probably spend the rest of her life in church, begging Jesus for forgiveness.

On Saturday, Paula went to Bloomingdale’s and I went to the gym. I had no energy to lift weights so I spent a few minutes doing ab exercises. Then I went into the sauna, hoping to relax. Unfortunately, sweating only made me more tense, and afterwards my skin itched all over.

On my way home, walking down Second Avenue, I saw a black Volkswagen bug double-parked across the street. The driver was a man with red hair. I remembered how yesterday I had thought that a red-haired man walking behind me was an undercover cop. I couldn’t tell if this was the same man or not, but he looked similar enough. I stopped and stared at him, but he didn’t look in my direction. Another man came out of a pizza place, holding a pizza box, and got into the car. The red-haired man drove off.

That night, I decided I needed to get out of the apartment, so Paula and I went out to dinner at a Mexican restaurant. When we came home, the phone was ringing. I answered it, but there was no one there. I realized how the same thing had happened a couple of times during the past week. I asked Paula if she’d gotten any hang-ups and she said, “Maybe one or two.” I wondered if the calls could have been related to the e-mails. When Paula went into the bedroom I took the portable phone into the dining room and dialed *69, to automatically call the person who’d phoned last. A Puerto Rican–sounding woman answered,
“Allo,”
and I hung up, feeling like an idiot.

The next day, Sunday, Paula and I rented a car and drove to Westchester. We drove around through the quaint small towns of Scarborough and Harmon, several miles above Tarrytown on the Hudson. Then, just for the hell of it, we stopped at a real estate office and the agent took us to see a few houses. They were all big and spacious with large bedrooms and big backyards. One of the houses was eerily similar to the perfect suburban home that I had fantasized about living in someday. It was sad, walking around the house with Paula, talking about which would be the baby’s room and where the dining room table would go, knowing that I was probably going to prison. I regretted that I had agreed to look at houses in the first place.

Riding back toward the city along the Henry Hudson Park-way, approaching the George Washington Bridge, I looked in the rearview mirror and spotted a black Volkswagen bug. It was hard to tell for sure, but the driver seemed to have red hair.

“Did you notice that car before?” I asked.

“Which car?”

“The one behind us—the black bug.”

Paula turned around to look then said, “No. Why?”

“Never mind,” I said.

I slowed down until the bug angled to the left lane and passed me. I looked over at the driver—a woman with dirty blond hair—and she glanced at me briefly and then looked back at the road.

I imagined Michael Rudnick laughing, the same way he used to laugh when he was chasing me around the Ping-Pong table.

After we returned the car I walked Otis. It was a warm, oppressive night. Back home, I took a long shower. With the ice-cold water beating down on my head, I had a brainstorm.

16

THE NEXT MORNING at nine o’clock, I burst into Steve Ferguson’s office and shouted, “Son of a bitch!”

“What the hell?” Steve said as if he didn’t know what was going on. He was at his desk, sipping a cup of coffee.

“Look, I know it was you and it’s not going to work,” I said, “so you might as well admit it.”

He started to smile, in that slick, phony way.

“You’re gonna have to slow down, Richie,” he said, “because I’m still on my first cup of coffee here and—”

I moved closer to his desk and swatted away some papers to show him how serious I was.

“Hey,” he said, standing up to face me, “what the hell’s the matter with you?”

“I don’t appreciate your pranks,” I said, my
P
s spraying saliva. “Maybe you think we have a little rivalry going here and if you can distract me I’ll stop making sales and then maybe Bob and Alan will promote you before me. Well, it’s not gonna work, no matter how many e-mails you send me.”

Now he wasn’t smiling anymore.

“E-mails? What the . . . Are you fucking crazy or something?”

I left his office, slamming the door hard. I dropped off my briefcase by my cubicle, then I went into the bathroom. Staring at myself in the mirror above the sink, I noticed the deep bags under my eyes.

At my desk, I booted up my computer and checked my e-mail log. I had four new messages—three work-related and one from you_are_a_liar.

WE’RE STILL WAITING, ASSHOLE. DON’T THINK YOU’RE GONNA GET AWAY WITH THIS, YOU JERK-OFF, BECAUSE YOU’RE NOT. YOU HAVE NO FUCKING CHANCE.

The message had been sent at 9:29 last night. I read the note again and again, searching for clues. The grammar wasn’t great and I had a feeling the sender wasn’t very intelligent. I started focusing on “WE’RE,” wondering if more than one person had written to me.

Steve still could have sent the message, but I realized I had probably made a big mistake blaming him. Would he really go to all this trouble just to drive me crazy?

Figuring I had nothing to lose, I decided to send a reply.

I thought it over for a couple of seconds, then I typed:

Who are you? I think you might have the wrong guy.

Then, after giving it some more thought, I deleted this and typed:

Sorry, wrong e-mail.

Perfect. I sounded casual and distracted, as if I were too busy to be concerned by some crank e-mails. I read my note several times, liking it even more, then clicked SEND.

I started working on some new hardware quotes that Jim Turner had requested, but it was hard to stay focused.

Then, at about eleven-thirty, my phone rang.

“You didn’t think we forgot about you, did you?” Detective Burroughs asked.

“What do you want?” I asked, wondering if the call had something to do with the e-mail I’d sent.

“I’m afraid we’re going to need you here at the police station this afternoon,” Burroughs said.

“What for?” I asked.

“We need you to appear in a lineup.”

“A lineup?” I said, trying to stay calm. “What for?”

“A witness came forward and we want to see if he can ID you.”

“Look, I’m very busy today and—”

“This isn’t optional,” Burroughs said. “A car’s already on its way to your office to pick you up. I was just calling to make sure you were in today.”

I thought about calling Kevin Schultz, the lawyer I had spoken to on the phone, but I decided that this would be a bad idea. Demanding to have a lawyer present would only make me seem guilty, as if I had something to hide. It would be better to wait and see if I was really in trouble before calling Schultz. Besides, no lawyer, no matter how good, could stop a witness from identifying me.

“You’ll see, you’re making a big mistake,” I said, “but if you want me to be in a lineup, I’ll be in a lineup.”

Bob was busy in a meeting and I knew I couldn’t just disappear for the day with no explanation. I remembered that one of my new clients, Ken Hanson from the accounting firm on Seventh Avenue, said he was going to be out of town all this week, so I added a bogus 12:30 meeting with him to my Lotus Notes appointment program.

As Burroughs had promised, at noon a police car was waiting for me in front of the office building. It was a nice day and the street was crowded with people going to lunch. I looked around carefully, trying to make sure no one from my office was watching, then I entered the back of the car quickly. I kept my head down until the car pulled away.

The driver—a young, blond officer—didn’t say anything when I got in. Jazz was playing on the stereo at a low volume.

Sitting in the back of a police car, on my way to a lineup, probably should have made me nervous, but I was surprisingly calm.

There was hardly any traffic and we made it to the police station in central Jersey in a little over an hour. I expected Burroughs to be waiting for me, but he wasn’t there. I was led into a waiting area where two other men were seated. One of them looked drunk and homeless, the other one was a typical New Jersey hick, with a ripped denim jacket, an unruly goatee, and a chewed-up toothpick dangling from the corner of his mouth.

We sat there for at least fifteen minutes. I was getting impatient. Finally, a female officer told us to take off our jackets. She asked me if I had on anything under my shirt. I told her I was wearing a T-shirt and then she told me to take off my tie and dress shirt as well.

The officer led us into a room where two other men in T-shirts were waiting. One of the men looked sixty, and one of them looked like he was twenty. The only thing that all five of us had in common, as far as I could tell, was that we were all white. I was the only one who looked like I worked for a living and like I didn’t have some kind of disease.

The officer asked us to line up, with our hands by our sides, in front of a large mirror. She told us to try to maintain a “natural expression,” and to keep our heads straight and eyes open.

After about thirty seconds, the officer returned with five pairs of sunglasses. They weren’t similar to the pair I’d been wearing the night of the murder, but it was frightening that the police knew about this.