Hard Stop (35 page)

I brought the laptop back to the cottage and out to the lscreened-in porch. I set it on the table next to Randall’s PC primer and the tumbler filled to capacity with a whole day’s ration of vodka on the rocks. No better way to sharpen the concentration.

I thought peering into the private cyberlife of a recently murdered woman would be a little unnerving, and I wasn’t disappointed. True to the torqued-down professional I remembered her to be, Iku’s folders were clearly labeled and alphabetically arranged. With the exception of headings like “Reports” and “Analysis,” I didn’t know what any of it meant, even after opening the documents. It was all boxes and arrows, tables and rows of data, a familiar language, but in a distinctly foreign dialect. I once had a penchant for deciphering meaning from all forms of data, however alien, but I was out of practice and the sheer, numbing volume of the information was daunting.

I clicked out of the heavy stuff and went looking for easier prey, like “Correspondence.”

After divining a way to open the file “Saved Emails” I ran smack into another form of impenetrability. The language here was unexpurgated corporate-speak—or worse, consultant-speak. In this Iku was so masterfully fluent I almost began to admire the opacity of the prose, her deft handling of euphemism to evade precision, and the use of passive voice to express near-poetic ambiguity. It was clear from the exchanges that, by comparison, her clients and fellow consultants were rhetorical pikers.

Angel Valero, on the other hand, didn’t even compete. His style was refreshingly loutish and blunt, poetic only in the absence of capital letters, as if using the shift key was too big a time commitment. The subject matter of their correspondence was ordinary to the point of banality—though, as with the technical files, I sensed there was meaning in the interpretation. The syntax varied, but the import was the same.

Bobby Dobson was vague and filled with complaint. Jerome Gelb was imperious and brusque, without Valero’s rough charm. Elaine Brooks was flirtatious. Zelda, poetic and erudite, trying to live up to her name. But with an edge, as delicate and keen as a razor. Anger masquerading as clever wit, highbrow repartee.

George Donovan, on the other hand, was tender and kind, and playful. Affectionate in the earnest, self-deprecating way people are when they really mean it. It was an adult affection, restrained only by fear of exposure. But it was clear—Donovan had fallen off the cliff. For him it wasn’t conquest, it was redemption.

I resisted being ensnared by the correspondence and pulled into a deep dive. There was too much surface to peruse, too many layers to peel away, holding areas to uncover and decant.

As I clicked along, my nervous system began to light up. There was a chase afoot and I was getting used to moving the little arrow around and remembering which key did what, speeding the process: validation of Sullivan’s theory that computers addict the unwary. Maybe, I thought, lighting a Camel and sipping the top off my drink, but only if you have an addictive personality.

Whatever success I managed to have on the job was probably based on a knack for pattern recognition, starting with recognizing what were patterns and what weren’t. This is what made me an official problem-solver for most of my professional life. Yet I was always a little superstitious about examining the process, afraid that understanding how I worked through a problem would ruin my ability to do it.

As I cruised around Iku Kinjo’s cyberlife, I could feel the process starting. A scan of the data in search of a gestalt, an image of meaning camouflaged by its context, yet visible to the objective first-time observer.

What I saw, in addition to Iku’s gift for obfuscation, was the burning need to obfuscate. It went beyond conforming to corporate jargon. She had things to hide. Lots of things. But also a need to communicate over a medium that was as insecure as it was indispensable.

The solution was to operate in plain view, by writing messages that conveyed twin meanings—one routine, the other, anything but.

This is what I recognized almost immediately. A thing you know is there, even if you don’t know what it’s telling you. A cipher wrapped in a puzzle inside a code. My favorite thing.

It took the rest of the day, and the balance of the night, but by the time the Little Peconic Bay began to glow with the nascent dawn, and the birds were in full chatter and chirp, I had it cracked.

I had it all.

“Y
OU MUST BE KIDDING ME,”
said Zelda Fitzgerald, through a crack in the window next to her front door. “I’m just sitting down to breakfast.”

“Sorry about the timing. I only need a few minutes.”

She huffed and slammed the window shut. The door lock clicked and the door opened.

“Acquillo, right?” she asked.

“Sam is good enough.”

“For you,” she said, walking away before I had a chance to follow her through the sepulchral dinge inside the house. I made it all the way to the kitchen without getting lost.

“Sashimi and wheat toast,” she said, pointing to a tidy place setting on the kitchen table. “I’d offer you some but I only buy for one.”

“Ever tried North Sea fin tail? It’s all I eat.”

“You want tea?”

I said no thanks and watched her pour herself a cup and settle down in front of her meal.

I picked a small framed photograph of her with Bobby and Elaine off a shelf filled with jars of flour and colorful dried pasta. I looked at it, then looked at her.

“You lied to me,” I said.

Zelda had a hunk of pink salmon gripped between a set of chopsticks, about to shove it in her mouth. She paused.

“Pardon me.”

“You said Bobby brought Iku home to Vedders Pond, but it wasn’t Bobby. It was Elaine.”

She ate the salmon and shrugged.

“It was one of them. I wasn’t too with it myself that night.”

“It wasn’t the first time Elaine dragged somebody home in a drunken stupor. But this was different. Iku Kinjo wasn’t just another girl. She was a force. A brilliant, beautiful force. Attractive doesn’t even begin to describe her. You’ve known that since living with her at Princeton, where she made you feel invisible. You were half in love with her yourself.”

She tightened up and slammed her chopsticks down on the table.

“That’s enough,” she said.

“It’s like a nightmare. Your rival, long since gone from the scene, suddenly back again. Bobby and Elaine fawning all over her. Inviting her to stay at the house. I can see you watching Elaine as she watched Iku’s every move, licking her chops.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“What part?”

She took a bite of her breakfast, then pointed her chopsticks at me, as if taking aim.

“I loved Iku,” she said. “But not in that way. I admired her. Look what she did with her life, coming from next to nothing.
And look at me. Coming from everything and achieving nothing. I was worried when she started staying at the pond, I admit it. Even if I don’t have to. But it wasn’t long before I only felt pity. I’ve never known a person so stressed out and exhausted. And heartsick.”

“Heartsick? What do you mean, heartsick?”

“Oh, please.”

“Tell me,” I said.

“In love? Ever heard of that? The poor girl was gone, all the way. Weeping like crazy over George, whoever the hell George is.”

“You didn’t ask?”

“Don’t know, don’t care. All I know is she thought she’d betrayed him somehow, ruined his life. You want to talk about guilt. Half of it was pure babble, but I got the gist. He started out as the devil and ended up St. George. She’d gotten mixed up in an illegal business deal, and in the process betrayed him. She said she was afraid to ever face him again. When I tried to talk her out of it, she said she was too ashamed. She wanted to go to the cops, to make things right, but was worried about George. After watching her down endless bottles of Campari and spill her guts all over the place, I could see the problem. Those creeps she worked for sent her in to entrap George, and instead she gets trapped herself. Ms. Genius falls in love with the old bastard. Like crazy in love.”

I sat across from her at the kitchen table and plucked a piece of salmon off her plate.

“So how did it feel to finally have the upper hand?” I asked. “Which came first, the pity or the triumph?”

“What a strange thing to say.”

I suddenly didn’t like being that close to her, so I stood up from the table to get a little distance.

“Ah, come on. Quit with all the phoney sanctimony. Having Iku around wasn’t the best thing that could have happened to you. It was the worst. The best was having her dead.”

She finally put the chopsticks gently on the table, capitulating to the inevitable: this was not going to be just another lively tit for tat.

“I want you to leave,” she said.

“When I’m ready. If you don’t like it, call the cops. They’d love to get in on the conversation.”

Her shoulders dropped, and she cast her eyes down to where her hands were clenched in her lap.

“If I’m not mistaken, you’re about to accuse me of something,” she said.

“Why’s would I? Because you invested hours consoling and extracting dangerous information from the very woman who was ripping up your carefully crafted world? A woman you might have admired, likely envied, but most certainly feared and loathed, who is conveniently found murdered in the bedroom next to yours.”

“You don’t honestly think …”

“Who else?” I asked, in a voice that was likely louder than I meant, because it made her jump in her seat.

“You can’t,” she said.

“Who else knew?”

“Knew what?”

“About Iku’s change of heart? Who else knew?”

Zelda grabbed the abandoned chopsticks and snapped them in half. “What difference does it make?” she said. “It wasn’t exactly a secret around the house. Everybody knew. Elaine. Bobby was just sick about it. Just sick. And her boss, what’s his name. He was concerned, too.”

“Jerome Gelb.”

“That’s right, he called too. On Iku’s cheap little cell phone. She was passed out, and I thought, what’s the harm? He was a very interesting man. Very articulate.”

“What the hell did you tell him?”

“I don’t remember. We just talked.”

“You told him how she felt about George.”

“I guess. Probably. What was the guy’s name again?”

“Jerome Gelb,” I said.

“That’s right. Jerome. He said he wanted to come see her, so I gave him directions to the house. Didn’t do him much good. Couple days later she was dead.”

“So you told Gelb where Iku lived, even though she made you all promise to keep it a secret.”

Zelda dismissed the thought with a sneer.

“Ridiculous. There are no secrets in this world.”

She used the back of her hand to sweep her half-eaten meal and the broken chopsticks off the table. There was more I could have said to her, but we both knew it was pointless. So I let myself out into the glimmering East End light, where I stuck my face in the freshening breeze and fled the evil banality that clung like mist to her grim fairytale home.

Hoping to hide from caller ID, I drove all the way back to North Sea so I could use the landline in my kitchen to roust Angel for the second day in a row—with any luck, jet-lagged and groggy from his trip in from the Coast.