Into the Dark (27 page)

“What? No. Better. Tannenbaum.”

Her eyebrows went up. “You do?”

“He doesn’t want to talk to me, though. He says
he’s through trying to explain himself to cops. But I think if you were nice
to
him . . .”

“Yes, fine,” she said quickly. “Where am I supposed
to meet this guy?”

“Westchester County Jail.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes.”

“I’m there.” After she ended the conversation, she
looked at Trent.

“You’ve gotta go,” he said. A statement, not a
question.

Brenna hugged him good-bye and texted Maya that
there was no need for her to hurry home. Then she took a cab to the garage and
got the Sienna out and pulled onto the West Side Highway and within an hour and
a half, she was with Morasco in the lobby of Westchester County Jail, getting
processed for her visit with someone named Orion Nichols who still swore, up
and
down, that on a chilly afternoon back in early October, he’d met Steven
Spielberg on Columbus Boulevard in Mount Temple.

Chapter 21

“W
ho the hell are you?” said Orion Nichols, his face less than an inch away from the
thick glass, nostrils flaring, his voice booming into Brenna’s ear through the plastic
receiver.

Brenna shivered—not because of Orion himself. (Morasco had warned her he was a “little
off.”) But because it was ridiculously cold in here. She wondered if prison officials
kept the temperature in the visiting room so low to save money, or to ensure that
visitors had no inclination to linger after the allotted hours. Brenna and Orion were
alone—aside, of course, from the forty or so other visitors, including the woman to
her left with the very shrill voice who kept saying, “What am I supposed to
do
about this?” over and over and over to the point where you wanted to scream at the
prisoner on the other side of her glass to
just tell her already
. Morasco was waiting in the lobby. Brenna had insisted. Meeting with a cop in front
of his fellow inmates wasn’t going to do Orion a shred of good—Morasco knew that as
well as anybody.

“I’m Brenna Spector.” Her teeth were actually chattering. “Is it this cold in the
rest of the prison?”

“Like a psychiatric nurse’s tit,” he said. “What’s a Brenna Spector?”

“I’ve been trying to figure that out for thirty-nine years.”

He broke into a smile that was not so much a smile as a baring of yellowed, broken
teeth. Orion’s lips were very chapped. His dark skin looked raw at the cheeks and
nose, as though someone had gone at it with a Brillo pad.
What are they doing to you in there, Orion?
What was he doing to
himself
? Jail is a bad place for those who are a “little off.” Brenna imagined that as a
homeless person, Orion had been a lot dirtier and nowhere near as angry.

“And what am I supposed to do about
them
?” shrilled the woman to Brenna’s left.

“It smells in here,” Brenna said. “Like cough medicine.”

“Yep.”

“Tell me about Steven Spielberg.”

Orion moved his face up to the glass again. His eyes were dark and round and opaque,
like eight balls. “You making fun of me?”

“No.”

“Yes you are.”

Brenna exhaled into the receiver. The woman to Brenna’s left was sobbing now. “I can’t
do this alone,” she wailed. “I can’t, I can’t . . .” The medicinal smell was giving
Brenna a headache, and at this point she felt chilled to the bone, her fingertips
aching from it. “Orion,” she said slowly, “do you honestly think I would give up Christmas
shopping in the city with my daughter, just to come here and make fun of you?

He bit down on his crusty lower lip and glared at her. “Why do you care, then?”

“Huh?”

“Why does that cop care? I saw Spielberg go into that damn building three months ago,
nobody believes me. Nobody believes me about the gun. They think I stole it from somebody.
Now, all of a sudden, he comes here. They make me talk to him in an interrogation
room. Then you come here and you want to know about Spielberg and the gun like we’re
old friends. Like you heard it from somebody other than a cop. What am I supposed
to think, other than you’re making fun of me?” He picked a scab on the back of his
hand.

“I’m here because I need your help.”

“Bullshit. I don’t want to do this anymore.” He started to put the phone down.

Brenna said, “
Please help me find my sister
.” It came out cracked, choked, and Brenna realized that it was the first time she’d
ever put it that way, the first time she’d ever said it out loud.
My sister
.

He stopped, looked at her.

Brenna mouthed the word at him.
Please
.

Slowly, he put the receiver back to his ear, and then she said it again, into the
mouthpiece. “Please.”

“You’re telling the truth.”

It was more statement than a question, so Brenna didn’t answer. She just looked at
him, her own words throbbing in her head.

“I thought you were a psychiatrist or a lady cop,” he said. “Or a psychiatric nurse.”

“I’m not,” she said. “I’m not any of those things.”

“Well, I can see that now.” He took a breath. “You got emotions.”

Brenna swallowed hard. “Yep.”

He nodded at her. The anger was gone from his eyes, and he looked different. Almost
sane. “So how the hell does Steven Spielberg know your sister?”

Brenna closed her eyes. “Rob— Spielberg disappeared a couple of months ago. I think
he was with a woman who . . .” Her voice trailed off.

“Who what?”

“She knows stories from my childhood,” Brenna said. “If she’s not my sister, then
maybe she can at least tell me what happened to her.” She looked at him, waiting.

“Your sister an actress?”

Brenna said, “I don’t know what she is,” she said. “All I know is she’s gone. She’s
been gone since I was a kid, and I want her back.”

“She left you,” he said. “Or did somebody take her?”

“Both.”

“Why do you want her back?”

She gave him a long look, the over-air-conditioned visiting room shifting and changing
in her mind until it became September 7, 1981, in the living room of her house on
City Island, late summer sea air pressing through the window screens, warm and wet
and thick like breath. Her mother’s voice in her ears, Clea gone and her mother hating
her for it . . .

“Get out of my house.”

“Clea told me not to tell you, Mom. That’s why. Because Clea made me prom—”

“Two weeks ago, Brenna. Your sister could be dead right now.”

“I’m sorry.”

“If she is dead, it is your fault. It’s your fault she’s gone. Get out of my house.”

Brenna dug her fingernails into her palms. The woman next to her was screaming, “Selfish
pig!” at the prisoner she was visiting, and only then did Brenna realize how much
that shrill voice sounded like that of her mother, twenty-eight years ago.

“I want my sister back,” Brenna said, “because it’s my fault she disappeared.”

“She doesn’t look like you,” Orion said. “But what do I know? I didn’t even know Spielberg
was chunky.”

Brenna’s eyes widened. “Who?”

“Huh?”

“Who doesn’t look like me? Who are you talking about?”

“Your sister. The chick who was with Spielberg. She’s blonde, for one thing, and she’s
built like a brick shithouse.”

Brenna stared at him.
Diandra?

He held up a hand. “No offense. I’m just saying.”

“You saw her.”

“Yeah. When he was filming at the building.”

“You saw a blonde go into a building with Steven Spielberg.”

He shook his head. “They showed up first. He met them there. With his camera.”

Brenna gripped the receiver. “What kind of a camera?”

“Movie camera. Very fancy.”

“The stacked blonde,” Brenna said. “Was she a lot younger than me?”

“I don’t know from ages,” he said. “Spielberg looked younger than I thought he was,
but that could have been all that extra chunk. Or the hat.”

“Hat?”

The woman next to Brenna was yelling, “Fine! Go ahead and dump me! You got some bitch
in there, or what? Your bitch sweeter to you than I am?”

Brenna put a hand up to the side of her face, as if that would be effective in drowning
her out. “What kind of hat?” she said.

“Baseball cap,” he said. “L.A. Dodgers. They wouldn’t let me keep it in here.”

Tannenbaum.
“You took his cap?”

“No, he gave it to me.”

“Before he went in the building, or after he left?”

He blinked at her. “Huh?”

“I hate you!” the woman yelled.

Brenna squeezed her eyes shut, opened them again. She kept her voice measured, said
the words as calmly as she possibly could. “Did Steven Spielberg give you the hat
before he went in the building or—”

“No.” Orion shook his head vigorously.

“No?” Brenna was starting to wish she
was
a psychiatrist—she might get further with him that way. “I sort of gave you a multiple-choice
question there, Orion. Before or after . . .”

“He didn’t give it to me before or after.”

“You stole the hat? Without his knowing?”

“
No!
”

“
I’m outta here!
” the woman screamed.

Brenna said, “Would you
please
help me out here?”

“He wasn’t the one who gave it to me. The film crew guy did, when he left with the
blonde. Why can’t anybody hear me?”

She looked at him. “They left the building separately.”

“No.”

The headache was much worse now. It pressed against the backs of her eyes. “Spielberg
left the building on his own. The film crew guy left with the stacked blonde.”

“
No!
”

“
What the hell, Orion?
”

“
Spielberg never left the building!
”

Brenna froze. She could actually feel the hairs, standing up one by one, on the back
of her neck. “The crew guy,” she said slowly. “What did he look like?”

“Beard,” he said. “Light brown hair. Great teeth. Man, I wish I had teeth like that.
Looked like a real winner.”

Shane Smith.

“ ‘You keep yourself safe,’ he said to me. And he handed me that gun and the hat.
And I kept waiting for Spielberg to show up and take that hat back, but he never did.”
His gaze drifted off. “Never came out of there.”

“You sure you didn’t miss him?”

“That was where I lived. Right across the street from that building,” he said. “I’m
a light sleeper and I didn’t move from there, ever. I would have seen a world-famous
director if he left that building.”

A voice came over the PA system, announcing visiting time was over. Brenna thanked
Orion. On her way out, she put fifty dollars into his account at the canteen.

Then she found Morasco in the lobby. He started to ask her how it went, but she cut
him off. “Did you find out from Danny exactly where Orion was arrested?”

“Vacant lot next to a parking area. Middle of Columbus Boulevard,” he said. “Why?”

“Because I think Robin Tannenbaum was shot to death by Shane Smith. And if we go into
the building across the street, we’ll find his body.”

M
orasco called both Danny Cavanaugh and his grandfather Wayne and arranged for them
both to meet him—along with Wayne’s partner, Danny’s partner, and a team of squad
cars from the Mount Temple station—at the parking lot on Columbus Boulevard where
Orion Nichols had been arrested. “Got a tip on a possible murder in the building across
the street,” he said to Wayne, who followed up with his office, no questions asked.
That’s the type of clout Morasco had now. Brenna
and
Morasco, actually, thanks to the Neff case. When Morasco let Danny Cavanaugh know,
over the phone, that private investigator Brenna Spector was coming, he told her that
the young officer had “squealed. Literally. I kid you not.”

Flattering as it was to know that she’d made a cop squeal, the best part of all this
was that Brenna no longer had to sneak onto crime scenes—at least not in Westchester
County. She hoped it would last.

She was in her Sienna, following Morasco’s car to Mount Temple, when her cell phone
chimed. She looked at the screen, recognized the number of Gary Freeman’s new disposable
phone. Finally, he was returning her call of this morning.
About time
. She hit send, activating the Bluetooth in her ear.

“Yes, I’m alone,” she said, before he could ask. She really couldn’t stomach that
question one more time.

Gary Freeman said, “You found something out about RJ Tannenbaum?” His voice sounded
strange. Slurry. From what she’d read about him online, Gary Freeman didn’t drink.
Plus, even if he did, it was before noon in California. Maybe it was just the connection . . .

“Yes. I found out two things,” Brenna said. “The first is that three years ago, RJ
Tannenbaum broke into your house.”

He breathed thickly into the phone, not saying anything for close to a minute. Brenna
followed Morasco onto the ramp for 287. They’d already passed the Katonah exit by
the time he finally spoke.

“What’s the second thing?”

“Mr. Freeman,” Brenna said.

“
Please don’t call me that
.”

“Uh . . . Okay, Gary. You can’t just change subjects on me.”

“That’s still the same subject. You told me the first thing. Now I’m asking you for
the second.”

He pronounced it
shecernd
. Definitely drunk. “Is something wrong?” she said.

“I don’t give a shit about RJ Tannenbaum. I don’t know who he is. I hired you to find
Lula Belle.”

There was something so strange about him—and it wasn’t the fact that he was clearly
lying about knowing Tannenbaum, or even that he was early morning drunk-calling her
after posting an essay on the Wise Up Foundation’s blog November 25 called “Why I
Always Say No to Drugs and Alcohol.”

No, it went beyond that. Gary Freeman of the warm character actor’s voice, Gary Freeman,
whom Brenna had decided she liked, without really knowing why—that Gary Freeman seemed
to have disappeared.

“I explained to you,” she said, as patiently as she could. “RJ Tannenbaum was, in
all probability, with Lula Belle when she disappeared.”

“I don’t care about him! He’s a fucking nobody!”

His voice roared in Brenna’s ears. She gritted her teeth. “He went to your alma mater.”

“Only for three months.”

Brenna’s eyebrows went up. “You do know him.”

“No.”

“He called your agency four times in late September,” she said. “What did you talk
about?”

“I never spoke to him.”
Schpoke
.

“Do you know Shane Smith, Gary?”

“No!”

“How about Diandra? I don’t have a last name on her, but that’s an unusual enough
first name, I’d think you’d—”