The Venus Fix (17 page)

“Sorry, Judge. But I’m looking at their badges.”

“Okay, Jimmy, send them up.”

He stood in his hallway waiting for the elevator to stop on his floor. He was a New York City Supreme Court judge. The police treated him with respect. They certainly didn’t show up at his home at eleven at night unannounced. But apparently that’s exactly what they were doing.

Watching the numbers light up, charting the detectives’ progress, he tried to imagine what had brought them here at this time of night.

Someone he was responsible for putting in jail must have been released. He would listen, nod, reassure the detectives that he was not only careful but was well guarded both in his luxury apartment on upper Fifth Avenue and in his downtown office. The city in the post-September 11th world did not take the safety of its officials lightly.

The elevator door opened and two men stepped off, their coats still flecked with snow. Alan nodded to them as they
stood there stamping the last of the slush off their boots. He recognized both of them, welcomed them, and then ushered them inside.

He liked to watch people come into the apartment. Despite his high-profile job, it was his wife’s salary that paid for them to live floating above the city. No one was unimpressed by the floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over Central Park. At night, the view crept up on you, seduced you, pulled at you. The sparkling lights from thousands of apartments across the park, on the West Side, looked like stars.

Leightman led the detectives into his den and motioned to the seating area. Detectives Jordain and Perez sat down side by side on a couch. The judge took a chair facing them. A coffee table piled with papers and leather-bound books separated them.

“Would either of you like a drink? Coffee? A cigar?”

“I wouldn’t mind some coffee,” Perez said as he rubbed his hands together, warming them up.

Leightman nodded and looked at Jordain. “And you, Detective?”

“Sure, if it’s not too much trouble.”

“None at all. I just hope you’re not here about something that’s going to be too much trouble.” He chuckled.

“It may be, Judge.”

W
aiting for Leightman to return with the coffee, Jordain looked around the room, taking in the two walls of fine walnut bookcases.

“How many books would you guess there are in here?” Perez asked, following his gaze.

“More than you could ever read in a lifetime, my friend.”

Perez gave him a sideways glance.

“Okay, I’m underestimating you. About three thousand more than you could read.”

“That leaves how many that you think I could read?”

“Maybe ten.”

The sideways glance now included arched eyebrows. Perez was famous for looks that spoke volumes. Jordain laughed quietly. “That one I deserved.”

The judge came back with a silver tray that Jordain recognized as the classic Georg Jensen acorn pattern that had enjoyed huge popularity more than fifty years earlier. The teaspoons, sugar spoon and coffee service belonged to the same pattern. He wasn’t surprised. Not everyone could incorporate this kind of style into their lives, but in apartments like this, it was almost expected.

“It’s a little late for a social call,” Leightman said as he poured the coffee. “So I’m assuming this is urgent.”

“Urgent and a little uncomfortable, I’m afraid,” Jordain said as he took the fine bone china cup. Bringing it up to his lips, he tasted the steaming liquid, and over the gold rim, watched Leightman’s reaction: There was curiosity and concern but no panic, no looking away, no discomfort.

“Judge Leightman, is your e-mail bob205 at standard dot com?” Jordain asked.

Leightman hesitated. He only used that e-mail for accessing porn sites; how did they know about it? Why were they asking? For a moment, he ran through possible reasons to hold back this early in the conversation. Could they find out what his e-mail address was if he didn’t admit it? What would they think if he refused to discuss it?

“One of them, yes.”

Jordain and Perez didn’t look at each other, but a muscle in Jordain’s jaw throbbed and Perez nodded almost imperceptibly.

“We have e-mail that was sent from you to a woman named Penny Whistle, and e-mail that was sent from you to another woman named ZaZa, no last name. We retrieved both pieces of e-mail off the women’s hard drives.” As Jordain spoke, he watched the judge take in this new information. First, Leightman’s face expressed recognition. Next, relief, which was confounding. And finally confusion.

“You have e-mail sent by
me
to these two women?”

Before either detective answered, Leightman stood and walked away from the detectives, over to his desk, where a silver laptop sat open. He put his hand on the computer top and lowered it.

“Yes,” Jordain responded, the one word drawn out and definitive.

The judge stood eight feet away from them, looking down
on them with a disdain that had not been in his eyes when he answered the door. “What do you want?”

“Do you know who these women are?” It was Perez’s turn to take over the questioning.

“Can you explain precisely why you have come to my home, in the dead of night, to question me about this?” Leightman asked.

“Because these women are dead and because there is e-mail on their computers from you to them.”

“Why is that relevant? There must be a lot of mail in those women’s computers.”

“The nature of the e-mail suggests that the person who sent it was involved with the women’s deaths.”

The judge opened and closed his mouth like a fish gasping for air, and then he regained his composure. “Someone is setting me up. Do you realize how many people know my e-mail address? This is clearly something you need to investigate, and I commend you for coming to me first, but I have nothing to do with this.”

“Judge Leightman, it will save us a lot of time and you a lot of embarrassment if you talk to us now—”

“No,” the judge interrupted Jordain. “I’d like you to leave. Immediately. I’ve never been so outraged in my life. How dare you come here and question me like this. You know how easy computer fraud is?” Leightman was whispering his shouts, so while they were not loud, they were resonant with fury.

“We’re going to need to take your computer with us,” Jordain said.

“Absolutely not. You won’t invade my privacy for some wild-goose chase. Now, please, get out. Tomorrow morning you can call my office and my secretary will give you the name of my lawyer and his phone number and you can pursue this travesty through him.”

“Judge, I’m sorry. I’m very sorry. But we have a search warrant. We need your computer.” Jordain watched the judge’s eyes narrow and his lips purse into one thin line. A vein throbbed in his neck.

Jordain felt sick to his stomach. He hated doing this to a guy who had a reputation of being a fair judge.

“I’d like to see the warrant.”

Perez walked across the room and handed it to him.

For the next sixty seconds, Leightman read every single line as if he had never seen a court order before. “So. Larry Rosen signed this.” Leightman laughed viciously. “He must have loved that. Well, you can arrest me and put me in jail and deal with the repercussions, but I am not letting you take my computer with you no matter what kind of paperwork you have.”

Jordain and Perez had talked about the possibility of the judge pulling rank and flat out refusing.

If he was guilty, they’d figured he’d do something exactly like that. They had no choice but to insist. If they didn’t take the computer, the judge could easily erase his files or destroy the hard drive overnight. They couldn’t allow that to happen. Two young women had died. A third was still in the hospital. The only thing that they had in common was mail from a man whose e-mail address had been traced back to Alan Leightman. In both e-mails, he asked that the women use the gifts he’d sent. The gifts that had killed them.

Jordain nodded at Perez, who moved to the desk. Leightman lunged. They were well matched. Jordain ran over, pulled out his handcuffs and rushed the judge before he and Perez could hurt each other. The sound of the metal clicking shut stopped Leightman. He looked down, real horror on his face. “What the fuck are you—”

“I really don’t want to do this. But I
will
arrest you if you interfere with us taking your computer.” Jordain was thinking
about the bodies, about the description of what the poisons had done to the women’s insides. He knew how tortured their last hours had been. How ill Tania still was.

Sweat broke out on the judge’s forehead. “Okay. Take the fucking thing, but be forewarned, Detective, I’ll have your ass for this. By tomorrow morning, the two of you won’t know what hit you. Now—this minute—you take these off me.”

While Perez unplugged the laptop and put it in a case he’d brought with him, Jordain fished in his pocket for the key to the cuffs.

At just that moment, they all heard the noise of the front door opening and closing, and before anyone could move, Kira Rushkoff was standing in the room looking at the scene.

The expression on her face was strangely calm.

“D
ulcie, your mother is right,” Mitch admonished. “You owe her an explanation. Actually, you owe me one, too. You never told me that Mom didn’t know you were coming here.”

My daughter gave her father a withering look—one you’d barely expect a much older teenager to manage. A glance that not only accused him of treachery but also conveyed her disappointment in him for not taking her side.

She was sitting on the oversize white couch in her father’s living room. Her arms were crossed over her chest and her chin was lifted high into the air. Mitch was sitting next to her, and I, the outsider, the enemy, was on the opposite couch.

In the last ten minutes, she had yet to speak directly to me.

The ignoring tactic was my mother’s trick and yet my daughter had learned it on her own. I’d hated it so much when my mother had done it, I would never have repeated it.

So how did it come to be part of my daughter’s repertoire? No matter what I knew about science and nature and genes and what we inherit, I was still shocked by how much my daughter was like her grandmother, despite having been born eighteen years after she’d died. Even the way she held her
head, thrust out her sharp chin, flipped her hair, widened her eyes, contradicted her smug words with sweet facial expressions—all were just like my mother.

Sometimes it comforted me that my mother lived on in my daughter. Other times, like that night, it made me furious. The rage I’d felt when I’d walked in, which had been stoked by the twenty-minute panic of not knowing where Dulcie had gone from the theater, had not dissolved. I wanted to scream at her and shake her and tell her what it felt like to have your heart fall out of your chest from worry.

“Daddy, I want to move back here. For good.”

“Even if you stay here, you can’t do the TV series. Your father is one hundred percent with me on this. Aren’t you, Mitch?”

“Absolutely.”

“I know that,” she said, talking to her father as if he was the only one in the room with her. “I’m not staying here because of that. You understand me. If you won’t let me do the series it’s not because of your problems, it’s because of me. So that’s it. Decided.”

“Talk to both of us, Dulcie. Not just to me.” Mitch’s voice was raised. “And before we discuss anything else, I want you to apologize to your mother for scaring her half out of her mind, and I want you to do it now.”

She glared at him. He stared her down.

“I’m sorry.” She said it low and under her breath and without looking at me.

“You don’t want to know what is going to happen if you don’t turn around and face your mother and apologize to her loudly enough that she can hear it. Now.”

Finally, reluctantly, she turned toward me but looked somewhere to the right of my face. Mitch couldn’t tell this from where he sat, and I debated whether or not to bring it up.

In a voice that was devoid of any emotion at all—as if auditioning for a part she did not want to get—she said, “So, I’m sorry, but I’m staying here. With the parent who understands me. Not with the one who wants to rule my life because of stuff that’s not about me. At all.”

I stood up. I knew Dulcie, I knew myself, and I knew Mitch. This was not going to get solved tonight. “Mitch, is there somewhere we can talk?”

Yes, I wanted to speak to him, but I also wanted my daughter to know that, try as hard as she might, she was not going to get us on opposite sides of her battle.

He followed me out of the living room and then led me to his bedroom. If it was an odd choice of rooms, I didn’t think of that then.

Mitch sat on the upholstered window seat and I sat on the edge of the bed, facing him. The duvet cover was cool to the touch and my fingers sunk into the fluff. I was suddenly overcome with a desire to lie down on the bed and pull the coverlet up over me and sleep. To have all of us rest under one roof again. It was the last thing I expected to feel, and it took me by surprise.

“I don’t think you should try to force her to go home with you,” Mitch said.

There were four pillows on the bed; if I lay down, they would cushion me.

I faced my ex-husband. Mitch, at forty-two, had thick, dark brown hair and a boyish smile that included dimples. He hadn’t changed as much as I thought I had over the past few tough years. Suddenly I was picturing him, in the hospital, holding Dulcie in his large hands only minutes after I’d given birth to her. There were tears on his cheeks and he kept shaking his head and saying,
Look at her…just look at her….

“I thought we’d straightened it out the last time.”

“So did I.”

“Well, we didn’t do a good job. This is even more serious now that she’s playing us a second time. We need to work this out once and for all. She can’t keep running away from me every time she doesn’t get what she wants.”