The Ex (21 page)

“You’re missing the point. Trust me, on the job, I’ve seen plenty of men with side pieces. I thought if I told him what I knew, he might drop the facade and tell me the truth about what really happened with him and Neeley. I asked him point blank: did you do it? No luck, but it was worth a shot.”

“I think that’s called a violation of his Sixth Amendment right to counsel.” Even as I spoke the words, I remembered the various times I had also tried to get Jack to open up to me in the last month. About his hospitalization. His feelings about Malcolm. Us. Jack had specifically told me that Molly was the “only one” after me. Had there been others during his marriage?

“I’m telling you, Olivia. You don’t know that guy the way you think you do.” He was shaking his head as he walked away.

Jack didn’t bother with a hug or any other greeting when he opened his apartment door. His back was already to me as he walked down the front hall. “I didn’t know you were coming by.”

He was obviously still upset that I had leaked the information to a reporter about Tracy’s phone calls, but, in typical Jack fashion, was sulking instead of telling me he was angry.

“I figured we hadn’t talked for a couple of days, and I want to keep you up to date. How about you? Anything to report on your end?”

“Ha-ha. I can see it now, my next book,
A Diary from Home Confinement
. Riveting stuff.”

Apparently I was going to have to ask him about Ross Connor’s visit. I made myself comfortable on his sofa. “This is a crazy question,” I said offhandedly, “but I could have sworn I saw Owen’s old partner leaving your building.”

“Oh, yeah, I guess I did have one break from routine. Man, I can’t believe you recognized him. Ross Connor, after all these years.”

“I’ve always been good with faces. So what did he want?”

Jack shrugged. “Just to see how I was holding up. He went through corrections and got approval to come by and everything. Pretty nice of him, don’t you think?”

All those times I had lied to Jack, it had never dawned on me that he might be the better liar. This was masterful.

“I guess so, but he’s also a cop. He didn’t ask you about the case?”

“Nah. Just shooting the breeze. A little awkward, I guess, but still—it’s the thought that counts, right? So, you said you have an update?” It was a nice pivot. Just like that, no more Ross Connor talk.

As I told him the information I’d gotten from Tracy’s mom and sister, I was struggling to keep my thoughts straight. If Jack had cheated on Molly, did it change anything about his case? Maybe he was only lying about the reason for Ross’s visit to avoid the awkward topic of an old infidelity. But once again, I was wondering whether I’d been too quick to assume Jack was innocent.

I forced myself to focus on what mattered: Tracy’s connection to the Sentry Group. “My best guess is that she was looking at Max—or maybe Malcolm—as a potential sugar daddy. If it was Malcolm, she
might have been at the waterfront to meet up with him when Max killed his father. Or if she was seeing Max, he may have sent her there to get rid of them at the same time. Two for one. Either way, it plays into our theory that Max Neeley’s the one behind this.”

“I know we’ve been throwing Max’s name around, but do you really think he did this?”

I thought about the contempt Max had revealed in my office. At the time, I thought I was looking into the face of a killer. But maybe his anger was a perfectly natural response to our not-so-subtle suggestions that he had killed his father. “More likely him than you, right?”

If Jack sensed my suspicions in the question, he didn’t show it. “Jesus, what a family. Neeley trained his mentally ill son to use guns as if it were any other hobby, like it was golf or scuba or coin collecting. He made the other one hate him so much that he was driven to murder. Malcolm Neeley blamed those boys for their mother’s death. His own stories about the ways he tried to parent them are like a handbook on how to screw up your kids. Ticking time bombs, the both of them.” He shook his head. “So is that it?”

“No, I’m afraid not.” I slipped a copy of the People’s motion to reconsider bail from my briefcase and handed it to him. The title of the motion was self-explanatory.

When Jack looked up, he tried to hand the papers back to me as if that would make them go away. “But I haven’t done anything wrong. Honestly, I find myself staying feet away from the door when I open it, even for you, just in case I accidentally set it off.”

“They’re not saying you violated your release conditions. They’re alleging that you shouldn’t have had them from the beginning. Basically, the state’s saying the court got it wrong from the get-go.” The hearing was in three days.

“You sound awfully calm.”

“It’s just Scott Temple wanting a second bite at the apple. Without
new evidence, I’m sure the judge will keep the status quo. So unless you know something I don’t know . . .”

“So okay, then. I’m sure it will be fine.”

I said good-bye like it was any other visit, promising to contact him with new developments. I placed one foot in front of the other, through his apartment, down the hallway, into the elevator. The second the doors closed, I felt myself tremble.

Golf. Scuba. Coin collecting. Those “stories” Malcolm Neeley had told about his parenting had come straight from Malcolm’s deposition—the one that Jack swore to me he had never read.

THAT NIGHT, IN BED WITH
Ryan, I was starting to doze off but couldn’t stop thinking about Ross Connor and Jack. “Do you know any married men who use condoms?”

“With their wives?” He laughed.

“I’m serious. And this isn’t about you and Anne. It’s for one of my cases. A married man had condoms in his briefcase: what does that mean to you?”

“I’d say, sure, it’s just birth control. Not every woman wants to be pumped full of hormones. But in his briefcase? Wouldn’t they go from shopping bag to nightstand?”

“Plus the wife had a hysterectomy.”

“Then that dude was stepping out.”

I of all people knew that having an affair didn’t make you a murderer. But it did make you a liar.

Jack had lied about his fidelity to Molly. He had lied about Ross Connor’s visit to the apartment. And he had lied about having read Malcolm’s deposition, which meant that he knew long before the shooting that Malcolm could be found at that football field every Wednesday morning. What else was he lying about?

Ryan kissed me on the shoulder, crawled out of bed, and began
getting dressed. “You realize next month, we’ll have known each other two years?” I asked. Ryan had called me after not making partner. Preston & Cartwright always breaks the bad news at the end of August.

“I’ve known you a lot longer than that. I was one of the many summer associates who was terrified of you years before.”

“This wasn’t supposed to go on for two years.”

He was standing next to my bed, his shirt half buttoned, being beautiful. “I’m happy. I thought you were, too. If anything, I wanted more. You were the one who—”

“I know. I don’t want more. But I also don’t want . . . this. We need to stop.”

“We tried that before, remember? And it was my own
wife
who asked you to come back.”

“It wasn’t supposed to be for two years. She didn’t know what else to do, Ryan. You were sad and damaged and convinced you had failed at work and therefore had failed as a provider, and for some reason, I made you feel better. But you’re not damaged anymore. You need to go home.”

“Anne’s okay with us.”

“Well, I’m not. Not anymore.”

“So, what? This is good-bye?”

“Yes,” was all I could say. I didn’t think it would be this hard. I was never supposed to care about him.

He leaned over and kissed me on the forehead. “You’re a better person than you give yourself credit for, Olivia. Don’t forget that.” He touched my hair one last time and left.

When he was gone, I blocked his number and then deleted it from my phone. When I say good-bye, I mean it.

I
WAS BACK
at my conference table, thinking about all the same evidence I had reviewed yesterday. How could everything look so different today?

Yesterday, I thought we had a good shot at explaining the GSR on Jack’s shirt. I had multiple witnesses who would confirm that Jack had gone to the West Side gun range a few times in the months before the shooting. And I’d get an expert to explain that residue could in fact linger on fabric for long periods of time. But now I was picturing those same witnesses on the stand. Though they weren’t positive, they seemed to recall Jack wearing T-shirts—as if he was trying to fit in—and not the checked collared shirt in question. And then there was the added problem of Jack not having any writing to prove that he’d gone to the range for research, instead of training to kill Malcolm Neeley.

Same thing with the Madeline e-mails. I could tell a jury that someone else had suggested the football field for the meet-up, but Scott Temple would have a field day on cross-examination. Because the e-mails were anonymous, I couldn’t prove Jack didn’t send them himself. Same
thing with whoever hired Sharon Lawson to pose as “Madeline” on the waterfront.

Then there was Jon Weilly, the co-plaintiff Temple planned to call to the stand. With more specific questioning than I’d been willing to risk, the prosecution had refreshed Weilly’s memory of hearing Jack say he hoped Malcolm Neeley would someday learn how it felt to have a gun-happy madman ruin his life. I would argue it was just a comment made in anger; the prosecution would call it evidence of intent.

The murder weapon turning up in the very basket Jack had carried to the waterfront? Was it literally a smoking gun, or even more evidence that Jack was framed?

Like every circumstantial case, every piece of evidence had two sides.

The case looked different today from yesterday because I was no longer on the side that believed Jack. And it wasn’t just the case evidence I was seeing in a new light. In ten years as a defense attorney, I had never encountered a crime as calculated as this one. Hiring a prostitute to pose at the pier. Telling Charlotte about the sighting, knowing how much she loved missed-moment posts. Working the camera coverage to his advantage. Sending e-mails to himself as “Madeline,” using a location from what was supposedly his favorite book, all to create an explanation in the event someone happened to see him at the football field where Malcolm Neeley could be found every Wednesday. A person doesn’t suddenly become that cunning and manipulative.

How had I failed to recognize that part of him?

When his father died, did Jack come to me because he really thought of me as an important part of his life, or did he use his father’s death as a way to get closer to me? I thought about all the times he tried to convince me that he loved me just the way I was. Was that real, or was being “the good one” his way of trying to control me? I had spent the last twenty years feeling guilty for what I’d done to Jack, but maybe
my gut had been telling me that something was seriously wrong. He had tricked me into spending five years with him.

When Buckley first called me to the precinct, Jack had pleaded with me to take his case instead of passing it on to another lawyer.
You know I didn’t do this, but some other lawyer won’t.
He had counted on me being blinded by my own guilt.

I heard a knock at the office door, and Einer poked his head in. “Sorry, I know you didn’t want to be interrupted, but Charlotte’s here. She wouldn’t wait in the lobby. I think she was too uncomfortable with our sexual energy. She insisted on coming back here.”

“It’s fine.”

As Charlotte slipped past Einer, he said, “I could turn you if you gave me a chance.”

“Dear boy, I would
break
you.”

Once the door was closed, she made herself at home in my chair behind the desk.

“So what’s up, Charlotte?”

“The DA’s about to revoke Jack’s bail, and Jack says you haven’t returned his calls all day. What the fuck do you think is up?”

“I’ve been busy.”

“Nice. Well, now I know why Jack’s wondering if he needs a different lawyer for this bail thing. What’s going on, Olivia?”

So when Jack first got arrested, he only wanted me. Now that I saw the truth, he was ready for someone else. “Maybe he should switch counsel. He could probably get an adjournment. Buy himself some more time.”

“You’re really going to drop him? Are you even allowed to do that after what I’ve paid you?”

“Really, Charlotte, this is about your money? Remember why you guys pushed me to take this case from the beginning? Because I knew Jack, so I’d believe him and work harder for him. Well, I don’t believe him anymore.”

“Will you just tell me what’s going on? Jack said he messed up and lied to you about someone coming to the apartment, but you’ve got him so trained only to talk to his lawyers that he clammed up after that. Did someone mess up his bail by coming over? Jack can’t control that.”

“Do you remember Ross Connor? Owen’s old partner?”

“Drunk gropey Irish boy who tried jamming his sloppy tongue down my throat at Bowery Bar?”

“That’d be the one. I tried to get him to vouch for Jack at his bail hearing, and it led to this whole conversation about Ross thinking Jack has a secret side to him. He said that when he went to tell Jack that Molly was killed, Jack dropped his book bag and condoms fell out. But now Ross has found out that Molly couldn’t even have children anymore. He went to Jack’s apartment hoping he’d say something incriminating.”

“Because of a suspected affair? I hear some people cheat, and it doesn’t make them murderers.”

“The point is, Jack lied to me, and not just about Ross’s little social visit. It’s bad, Charlotte. Seriously bad.”

She rose from my desk and sat next to me at the conference table.

“I’ve had some girlfriends over the years, a couple of them who were really pretty great. But I’m not sure I’ve ever loved anyone the way I love Jack. The way I loved Owen.”

“You guys are like siblings.”

“Not
like
siblings. We are
family
. Except better—truly connected. But Jack’s not perfect. No one is. We both know that Owen wasn’t.”

I turned and caught her intense gaze. She knew. I had never told anyone except Melissa the complete story of what happened that night.

That Seiko Jack found on our bed? If he’d looked a little closer, he would have recognized it. The watch belonged to his brother, Owen.

Owen had been with me. Only once, and not for very long. There had always been a silent recognition that we were more alike than Jack and I. Jack even mentioned once that his brother and I had the same
kind of energy in the way we talked and moved. We may have looked at each other too long across the table a few times, but neither of us had ever even mentioned the possibility of an attraction.

He stopped by unexpectedly after testifying at the courthouse. I’d just gotten the final rejection letter on my applications for a federal judicial clerkship. It was a plum job, practically a requirement in some circles. It also would have been a reason to bump the wedding for another year. I let Owen console me, and then made it very difficult for him to stop. Like I had convinced myself about Gregg,
it just happened.

That’s how Owen was able to meet Jack so quickly after his distraught phone call. Had he come clean with Jack? Or had he just nodded along as the two of them drank into the night?

I still had no idea. All I knew was that six hours after Owen ran out of our apartment saying he couldn’t believe what we had done, he died in a car accident. For the next month, I would sleep on the sofa because I couldn’t bring myself to climb back into that bed.

“How did you know?”

“Owen came to my apartment that night, after you guys—
ugh
. He was frantic, completely out of his mind. I was pissed as hell, screaming at him for letting himself become yet another notch in your very busy belt. Jesus, Olivia, what the fuck were you thinking? I always had a feeling you were messing around on Jack, but his brother?”

“I know.” I had nothing else to say for myself.

“And then Jack called Owen’s cell phone, needing someone to talk to. I should have stopped Owen from going. He’d already had three drinks at my place, plus whatever he had with you—and I knew Jack was going to want to drink, too. Owen would have been drunk as a skunk by the time he was driving home. The police somehow managed to leave that out of the reports.”

“Does Jack know?”

She shook her head. “At least, not from me. I’ve never told him, and I never will.”

“Thank you.”

“It’s not for you. It’s for him. That’s not something he needs to learn about his only brother. You know why I never liked you with Jack?”

“Because you and I are so much alike?” I gave her a small smile, which she actually returned.

“You never really understood him. You treated him like a one-dimensional character—the sweet, preppy guy who loved you more than anything. But Jack’s always been more complex than you realized. He loved his parents, but they did a fucking number on him, because that’s what all parents do. His dad was always angry—resentful that he didn’t have more to give his family. And his mom was always trying to keep the peace. It made Jack learn how to be passive. It’s why he’s always got to play the good guy. It’s not healthy. Everyone’s got to be bad on occasion. Don’t you realize that he was drawn to you because you let him be a little bit naughty? The condoms Ross Connor saw? Jack had affairs. Multiple.”

“I can’t picture that.”

“He loved Molly—don’t get me wrong. It’s like Molly was to Jack, as Jack was to you. Does that make any sense?”

Unfortunately, it did. I had known in my head that I should be devoted to Jack. That I should love him and marry him and grow old with him. But we never actually felt
right
together. Being with him was so much work, like I was constantly pretending to be a nicer, better, more generous person than I really was. “This sounds awful, but our relationship was so—”

“Uninspired?
That’s what Jack said to me once about his relationship with Molly.” Charlotte began to fiddle with a pen on the table. “Eventually third parties got involved—no one that really mattered, but who filled the gap in his life with Molly and Buckley. It’s kind of ironic: you always thought Jack was too nice for you, but he always had an edge, a darkness, that he didn’t show you.”

“How dark? Dark enough to kill three people? Because, I’ve got to be honest, Charlotte: I think that’s what we’re looking at.”

“That’s why I came here, Olivia. To tell you, I honestly don’t know if Jack did it or not. The minute Buckley pulled out Jack’s laptop at my apartment, I thought, maybe somewhere deep in her unconscious, even she knows it’s possible her father did this.”

“You’re the one who’s been telling me the whole time that it’s ridiculous to even imagine Jack hurting another person.”

“Because I wanted you to help him. I still do. And I was probably lying to myself, too. But I’m not blind; I’ve seen the evidence trickling in. The reason I’m here is because I’ve thought about it: Jack could tell me he did this horrible thing, and I’d still fight for him to my last breath. I’m not talking about excusing him. I’m talking about supporting him. I still love him, and I need to know that you’re still fighting for him.”

What she was saying would probably sound crazy to someone who wasn’t a criminal defense lawyer, but I knew exactly what she was talking about: the parents, spouses, and siblings who came to understand their loved ones were guilty, who helped them get through the court process, who visited in prison. People don’t stop existing just because they’ve done something terrible.

“I don’t know, Charlotte. I’ve been lied to by clients, but this is Jack. It feels personal.”

“That’s because it is. You owe him, Olivia. Help him however you can.”

I WOKE TO THE SOUND
of people screaming at each other. My left ear, resting on my pillow, was killing me. I slipped my hand beneath my cheek. I had fallen asleep with my earbuds in, repeat episodes of
Law & Order
still playing back-to-back on my iPad.

It was four in the morning. A half-empty bottle of wine was open on my nightstand. I resisted the temptation to pour another glass.

There was a reason I had jammed those earbuds in. Without the distraction of a television show, I kept hearing the clash of competing voices in my head. Ross Connor, saying Jack had a dark side. Scott Temple, telling me that Jack was playing me. Then the sound of Jack, begging me to do what I could to keep him out of prison. Followed by Charlotte, saying that I owed him.

I pulled out my earbuds, sat up, and opened my nightstand drawer. I found the black velvet box at the very back, covered in dust. I hadn’t looked inside it for years. I pulled out the watch first and placed it next to the clock. The necklace was tangled but I managed to smooth out the chain and slip it around my neck. It was Jack’s present to me for my twenty-first birthday, the first time I’d ever received a little blue box with a white ribbon.

I had returned his mother’s ring to Charlotte after the breakup, but these things I’d kept: the watch because how could I return it, and the necklace because I wanted it. The tiny silver clasp locked on the second try, still a familiar maneuver after all these years.

I rolled onto my back, closed my eyes, and ran the tip of my index finger around and around the infinity-shaped pendant. Over the last twenty years, my relationship with Jack had been condensed down to a single day—no, the single moment when he had walked into the apartment and seen the evidence that would finally convince him to leave. But there had been all those other moments when he had stayed.

THE LAST TIME I SAW
my mother in person was during winter break of my senior year in college. It was January third. I remember the date because Dad put her in the emergency room with internal bleeding in the early hours of the New Year. The next-door neighbor called me on the second because she thought I “ought to know.” From what she’d heard, the emergency room had called the police, and my father was in custody.