Social Death: A Clyde Shaw Mystery (8 page)

“I just need one. The new girl, Sabine,” I said, recalling the handful of interactions I’d had with her in the office and on set. Twice she’d saved us from bungling facts on the air with her thorough research, and about a month ago she’d clued us into some online chatter about an alleged cannibal/porn star who may have killed as many as three people in the U.S. and Canada. We were one of the first major news shows to start following the case, thanks to her. Sabine had smarts, good instincts, and ambition. I could use all of that on my team.

“The newbie? You sure?”

“Why not? She’s up for the task. This’ll be a good learning experience for her.”

“She’s all yours if you want her. I’ll let the assignment desk know.”

“Great.”

“One more thing. How are you holding up?”

“It’s a shock but I’m fine.”

“The truth, girl.”

“That is.”

“You have someone to call if you get—”

I cut her off. “Yes. OK? Stop worrying.”

I felt the beginnings of a massive headache as I made my way back to the Haverford. The afternoon sun had warmed the air and burned off the clouds, revealing what could only be described as the perfect fall day: bright blue sky, temperature in the upper sixties, a gentle wind rustling the leaves in the trees overhead. But with the good weather came the spectators. Now, in addition to the PD, media, and paparazzi congregated around the Haverford, there were about a hundred onlookers crowding my way back to the van.

Unbuttoning my coat, I got out my elbows. A few minutes later, I had my head in the door of the van, where Alex and Dino sat talking football. There was a big game on that night—Redskins vs. Giants. Alex liked the Skins, Dino the Giants, and I had to break it to them that they probably wouldn’t be home in time to watch even the highlights.

“You got a new lead?” Jen asked from the back of the van, hopeful. None of us liked being on a losing team.

“Better.” I filled them in on Rachel Rockwell.

Alex offered me his hand for a high five. I hesitated, and then decided to go for it, smacking him hard on the palm.

He gripped his hand. “You hit hard for a girl.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“The girl part? Or the hitting hard?”

“Considering I haven’t been a girl since the eighth grade?”

Dino rolled his eyes at both of us. “My wife’s making souvlaki and dolmathakia tonight,” he complained from the front seat. Sunday hours were usually easy, he’d banked on getting home early.

“We’ll order Greek.” I opened a bottle of water and slugged down three Excedrin from the pill bottle I’d dug out of my red messenger. “And by the way Alex, this is New York. You’d better be a Giants fan.”

“No way. I’m a loyal man.” He winked at me as I crept past him in the van to sit next to Jen.

“Does it ever stop?” she muttered in my ear.

“We’ll find out eventually,” I replied, not bothering to whisper while I waited for my laptop to power up. As it did, I dialed Sabine, and gave her detailed instructions about the kind of visuals I wanted her to find for Olivia and Rachel Rockwell. Next she had to pull Michael Rockwell’s divorce filing and take a news van and team out to Greenwich to start gathering footage of the Rockwell home and neighborhood, and start casing for neighbors and parents of classmates of the Rockwell kids to put on air during that evening’s
Topical Tonight
. “It shouldn’t be hard. Tell them we’ll do hair and makeup and arrange free transport there and back. I’ll do the pre-interviews over the phone.”

“Consider it done,” she said.

I liked her attitude. If Sabine delivered for me, I’d make sure Georgia knew it. Of course, there were a lot of ifs between now and then, including most pressingly, whether my latest scoop would hold until our broadcast.

In the meantime, I needed to know more about Rachel. Everything I knew about her had come directly from Olivia, and it wasn’t much. I hadn’t known she was from South Dakota, for example. But I did know she was a mother of two, devoted to her kids, and in the midst of a divorce. The husband was apparently a workaholic and a bully, and he liked his wife to play the part of the perfect Greenwich housewife. I’d start my search with him.

My first hit on Google was a wedding announcement in
The New York Times
from 2003. According to the piece, Rachel Rockwell, née Hart, had graduated with honors from SUNY Albany and New York University School of Law, after placing as first runner-up in the 1995 Miss South Dakota beauty pageant. Her parents were listed as Roseanna, a homemaker, and Vernal, a mechanic, from the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Michael Rockwell had attended Dartmouth, and made law review at NYU Law, after which he worked as an associate for a multinational firm with offices in London, Dubai, and New York. He was the son of Joan, an elementary school teacher, and Peter, a neurosurgeon based in Saddle River, New Jersey. The announcement made much of Rachel’s Sioux heritage and her work for an American Indian legal foundation, less of Michael Rockwell’s upper-middle-class roots and promising career.

Another hit, this one more recent, detailed Michael’s role brokering a big M&A deal, and yet another revealed a picture of the couple dressed in coordinating pastels at what looked like a country-club event. Rachel had a heart-shaped face, high cheekbones, and shiny long brown hair. Rockwell stood a good foot taller and about a hundred pounds heavier. He was holding a pair of beautiful toddler-aged boys. A few more clicks and I had the number of his firm, Bennett & Wayne. It was a long shot that he would be in his office on a Sunday, but from what Olivia had told me, it sounded like he rarely took a day off.

I got lucky. Rockwell was in and, because it was the weekend, he answered his own phone. I introduced myself quickly and, before he could hang up, asked him the last time he’d seen his wife.

“You mean my soon-to-be ex-wife,” he corrected me. “And I already told the police everything I know.”

“Which is?”

“None of your business.”

“Fair enough,” I said, pausing briefly. “How about we talk on background for now? Could you tell me how Rachel knew Olivia Kravis?” If Rockwell wasn’t willing to tell me what he did know, maybe I could get him to tell me what he didn’t.

He didn’t respond.

I restated the question. “Was your wife friends with the murder victim?”

“We’re done here,” he gritted out. “You have any questions? Talk to my lawyer, Frank Uffizo.”

“Is Uffizo also representing Rachel?”

“I said we’re done.”

Michael Rockwell was locked up like a box, but I wasn’t giving up so easy. It was time to try another approach, shake things up by saying something crazy, something that was not likely to be true and that might get him talking. “Is it true you were sleeping with Olivia Kravis?” I asked.

“Fuck you.”

At least he hadn’t hung up.

I took a deep breath. “Mr. Rockwell, I can understand why you don’t want to talk to me. But whether you do or don’t, a lot of things are about to happen to your family. In a few hours, the American public is going to find out about Rachel’s involvement in this case, and starting from that very moment, the public will be forming opinions, opinions about Rachel’s guilt or innocence. Think about how this is going to affect your children. If their mother is branded a murderer, that’s probably going to have some kind of impact. It would be good if there was someone speaking up on Rachel’s behalf.”

Rockwell cut me down with a series of curse words.

“How about you take a few minutes to think about it?”

“Not necessary. The answer is no. Not now, not in ten minutes, not tomorrow. I’m not interested.” And then he finally did hang up.

Rockwell never called me back. No surprise there. But he did call Frank Uffizo, who in turn called Hiro Itzushi, our chief legal counsel, to threaten legal action if we uttered one word about Rachel in connection to the Kravis case. Itzushi went into a tailspin, insisting we pull the Rachel angle from
Topical Tonight
until the police confirmed her involvement in the case on the record. But cooler heads prevailed. Georgia made it known that cowering to Uffizo’s demands was not only ridiculous but also contrary to our mission as members of the press.

Diskin gave us the green light, signing off on our copy at thirty minutes to air. By the end of the show, the emails and phone calls were pouring in by the hundreds. Exactly as I’d anticipated, the armchair detectives in our audience had latched on to Rachel’s wardrobe choice of purple fur. They tweeted. They blogged. They sent our ratings through the roof. Then came the news that
People
was writing a cover story on the case.

In less than twenty-four hours, Olivia Kravis’s murder had become the biggest crime story of the year.

Monday

I
woke up at six a.m. fully clothed and reeking of garlic.

The phone was ringing. I croaked hello as the Caller ID registered. It was Olivia’s work line at the foundation. “Who is this?” I rasped, now fully awake, scrambling out of bed. There was a brief moment of silence before I heard a click. The caller had hung up. I dialed Olivia’s number, my fingers shaking, and listened as the line rang and rang. When the foundation’s answering service finally kicked in, the sound of Olivia’s voice rendered my adrenaline to tears faster than I would have thought possible. I got back in bed and sobbed into my pillow, then got up again, gulped down two Excedrin with a mouthful of lukewarm instant coffee. What I really needed was three hours more sleep and a week of therapy to get over the shock of losing my best friend. Neither was going to happen. I was due at work in an hour.

Stumbling toward the bathroom, I made a pit stop at the linen closet for a fresh bath towel. By New York standards, my apartment was a respectable size. Everywhere else it would have been called a shoebox. It suited me just fine. At the entrance was a small foyer outfitted with a wood console, lamp, and a painted ceramic bowl I dumped all my mail and keys into every night when I got home. On the left was a kitchen, just big enough for a café-style table and a pair of iron chairs. The butcher-block countertop held the main attractions: the coffee maker, microwave, and a small wine fridge that I used to store bottles of mineral water. Beyond the kitchen was a den, decorated with an antique rug, a couch I’d bought on line, a flat-screen television mounted on the steamer trunk I’d taken with me to college, and a treadmill I’d used maybe twice. Then the bathroom—nothing exciting there—and my bedroom, where I kept my desk, computer, a queen-size bed, and a side table, on which stood a stack of non-crime-related books I aspired to read one day.

After a quick shower, I brushed my teeth and got dressed before spending another few minutes trying to deflate the inner tubes under my eyes. It was a lost cause. I grabbed a pair of dark sunglasses and headed out the door.

I was almost at the FirstNews building when my phone rang again. It was my father. He’d seen the news. “Why didn’t you call me?”

Eight years ago, after I moved out, my father sold our old apartment in the city and bought a house upstate, about two hours north of Manhattan. It was a sweet hundred-year-old colonial with exposed wood beams, stone fireplaces, and a kitchen overlooking a cornfield. I visited him as much as work would allow, which wasn’t often enough as far as he was concerned. “I was busy,” I said. “They put me on the story.”

“Do you want me to come down? I’m worried about you.” I could hear his dog, Milton, yapping in the background, and the concern lacing his voice. He knew Olivia was my rock, and was probably worried that her death would cause me to fall back on some old bad habits. That wasn’t going to happen.

“Dad, I’m fine. Or I will be. But I wouldn’t be able to see you anyway. I’m going to be working this case 24/7.”

“I don’t mind if you’re out all day. I can keep myself busy during the day and just be there for you when you get home.” There was a long pause before Dad sighed. “All right, Cornelia. Let me know if you change your mind. Email me when I can expect to see you again. I want to see my daughter. And Princess,” he said, pausing briefly, “promise not to make this about your mom.”

“OK Dad, I promise,” I said before saying goodbye.

My father’s not-so-secret opinion was that I’d chosen my profession because I was still determined to solve the unsolvable. In a way, he was right, because here I was, once again looking for clues I’d probably never find. The first time was thirty years ago.

My mother never picked me up after my first day of kindergarten. She’d gone home that day, run a few errands, and killed herself by jumping off the fire escape. A neighbor found her body on the concrete slab in our building’s courtyard and called the police. I’d arrived home before they’d had a chance to remove her body and, barreling through a sea of adults, thrown myself on top of her.

Several weeks after her funeral, once time had worn down the sharpest edges of my grief and I’d finally grasped that she hadn’t fallen, but deliberately thrown herself off our building, I started asking questions. I wanted to know how people could kill themselves, knowing what pain they were causing the people they left behind, and why my mother would possibly do that to us, to me. Nothing my father said satisfied me, and the counselor at school was no better, so I began going through my mother’s drawers and papers, hoping to figure out why she’d done what she had. Why she’d hated her life, why I hadn’t been enough to keep her happy, why plunging to her death seemed like the only or best option. If my mother had left a note, it would have been easier to accept her choice, but she hadn’t, and all I was left with was a succession of horrifically clear memories: the sight of all those police cars outside my building; the feel of her still-warm hand—chafed and red—in mine; the look on my father’s face when he pried me off her dead body.