All Day and a Night: A Novel of Suspense (Ellie Hatcher) Page 5

  It was her brother, Jess, even less stable than she, who had come to the rescue. One of his three million friends was about to give up a rent-stabilized place in Murray Hill to try to make it in Los Angeles. The tiny, dingy place on East Thirty-eighth Street was nothing fancy, but it was affordable, and hers, and even had a separate bedroom. As for decor, though, she could list the pieces of furniture on one hand: a sofa that had been left behind by Jess’s friend, the old leather trunk that doubled as a coffee table, a chair that found its way back to her place after being marked for disposal from the Midtown South Precinct, a dresser from Goodwill, and a mattress set she’d bought new because the one thing she had really missed while she’d been subletting place to place was a bed that was truly hers.

  All five pieces of her furniture collection were still on Thirty-eighth Street, where Jess was now the sole occupant. Being in an apartment filled with Max’s belongings was perfectly acceptable to her, but Max was constantly looking for ways to make the place theirs—hence, the current photograph-hanging project.

  She looked at the notes he had jotted down. “You need math to hang pictures on the wall?”

  Now he was measuring the frames themselves. He took the paper back from her and wrote down more numbers. “You do if you want them to be level. I tried to get the wires even on the frames, but the middle one’s a little lower, so that nail needs to be a quarter inch higher than the other two. And to space them evenly over the length of the sofa, we need a gap of two and three-quarters inches between each picture.”

  “You’re giving me flashbacks to eighth grade geometry. I got daily hall passes from Mr. Rundle in exchange for bringing him back a Snickers from the vending machine.”

  “Admit it: if these pictures were hanging in a line and weren’t perfectly even, it would drive you crazy. And then your way of fixing the problem would be to shift the nails around the wall until you were satisfied. If we ever moved the frames, the wall would look as if it had been burrowed by a groundhog.”

  True, which is why she would have left them in the closet.

  As he measured the final photo, she could see that it was one she had taken of the old-fashioned gas pumps outside the Spring General Store in East Hampton. She remembered the smell of fried chicken on the store’s front porch. She remembered why Max had insisted on taking a weekend trip to walk the beach at Gerard Point: he wanted her to see the beauty in a place where she had been forced to kill a man shortly after she and Max had met. He had been the one to print out the photographs in black-and-white and have them matted and framed as her “housewarming” present.

  Remembering the sweetness of the gesture, she felt the tension of the day begin to slip away. She thought of the promise she’d made herself when she had accepted Max’s invitation to live together. This time she wouldn’t just be a roommate. She would try to become the kind of woman who might be able to build a life with another person.

  She set her nearly empty bottle on the coffee table and picked up a hammer. “Tell me where to make some holes, boss.”

  But as she steadied a nail at the center of a tiny “x” Max had marked on the wall, she silently wished that he had been this methodical about his plan for the Anthony Amaro investigation.

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  By the time Carrie got home, she was infused with three and a half margaritas. Not a regular drinker, her first instinct was to pass out in bed. But as she kicked off her heels inside the front door, she couldn’t ignore the mess piled in the corner: her briefcase, two overstuffed plastic bags, and the philodendron—the leftovers of her surprisingly abrupt goodbye to Russ Waterston.

  She felt restless. Wired. Unfocused.

  Fortunately, she had her own approach to therapy.

  Carrie remembered receiving her first journal, a gift from Mrs. Jenson. Because Mrs. Jenson doubled as a guidance counselor and English teacher, most of the students didn’t take her seriously in the classroom. She was good about referring kids to the free lunch program and asking if they were getting enough sleep, but she didn’t instill the kind of fear most of the kids at Bailey Middle School needed to persuade them to do their homework—or to show up for class, for that matter.

  The first twenty minutes of Mrs. Jenson’s class on Mondays were reserved for “journaling,” as she called it. Her only rule was that their pens had to keep moving on the page. No thesis sentences or five-paragraph formulas required. Just free-flowing thoughts. If students wanted those thoughts to remain private, they could fold the pages in half within the notebook, and she promised not to read those. Most of the kids treated the enterprise as a joke, filling the pages with fart jokes and hallway gossip, and then dog-earing them to test Mrs. Jenson’s word. But for Carrie, those twenty minutes a week were the only peace she ever seemed to find—away from her mother’s expectations, the taunts from other kids, her studies. Away from everything.

  One Monday, Mrs. Jenson asked Carrie to stay after class. She heard a high pitched “oooooh” from a boy in the back row. Next to him, a girl added, “Good girl’s in trouuuu-bull.” It didn’t take much goodness to be a good girl at Bailey Middle.

  Mrs. Jenson waited until the room had cleared to relieve Carrie’s fears with a reassuring smile. “Everything’s fine. I just wanted to give you something.” She unlocked her top desk drawer and removed a journal the size of a hardbound library book. Carrie ran her fingertips across the cherry-red, faux-crocodile cover. She gently opened the snap closure to discover the first blank page, marked with a thin black velvet ribbon. She imagined expensive chocolate. “In case you ever want to write when it’s not a Monday in class,” Mrs. Jenson explained.

  The teacher must have seen Carrie’s reluctance. “Take it,” she said. “Someone did the same for me when I was about your age. My journal didn’t just make me a better writer. It probably saved my life.”

  Now Carrie was thirty-five years old, and “journaling” remained a constant habit. She even bent a page in half on occasion, just to remember how special it felt at fourteen years old to put a secret into undeniable words—to see it in black ink on white paper—without having to share it with anyone else.

  She reached into her briefcase, removed the most recent journal, and wrote down everything she hadn’t said to Bill:

  It wasn’t the fact they were watching me that made me so uncomfortable. It was the fact that I knew how shocked they were that I was leaving—and the reasons for their shock. Anyone perusing the firm’s attorney profiles would have spotted me as the one who was luckiest to be there.

  The hardest part was telling Mark. How long had it taken me to get used to calling him Mark instead of Mr. Schumaker? When we met, he was an alumnus doing Fordham a favor by serving as a moot court judge my 3L year. The topic was the constitutionality of GPS searches. I felt so awkward, participating in the contest even though I was ten years older than the other students. But he told me afterward that my brief was one of the best demonstrations of appellate advocacy he had ever seen from a young lawyer. I was shocked when he invited me to interview.

  Mark never hid the fact that my personal background had played a part in his decision to go to bat for me. My written work had been good enough to get me through the door. But he told me it was my answer to the question “How have you dealt with any adversity in your life?” that got me the offer.

  I nearly made the mistake of declining to answer, never wanting to be anyone’s charity case. But then Mark pointed out the backgrounds of the other recent hires: the son of a senator, the niece of the White House chief of staff, nearly everyone from private schools from kindergarten on. There’s no such thing as merit separated from biography, he had told me. The only question is whether you’re going to let your biography hold you down or help you up.

  Tonight, I had to remind him of his words when I broke the news that I was leaving to work for a big-haired, big-mouthed, grandstanding lawyer like Linda Moreland.

  He had laughed at first, assuming I was
joking. Just the previous week at P.J. Clarke’s, we had caught a glimpse of Linda screaming at Nancy Grace on the television. Mark made a joke about the two of them being the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote of the criminal justice system. He was surprised to learn that just a few years ago, Linda Moreland had been the visiting professor in charge of CUNY’s criminal trial advocacy program when I was a 1L there, before I transferred to Fordham.

  But last week’s surprise didn’t come close to matching his shock when I told him that I was leaving Russ Waterston to work for the woman.

  It’s like you said, I told him. Biography is part of merit. I know that, objectively, working for Linda Moreland is a step down from a job at Russ Waterston. But she has a case that I just can’t walk away from. This is the case that made me want to be a lawyer. It’s like it was meant to be.

  She felt the warmth of the tequila still in her stomach, definitely still in her brain. The words were flowing, straight from her mind to her fingers to her pen.

  I have always believed that Donna was different. “She was exactly like those other girls,” my mother used to say. Even my father, when he was still alive, told me that there were things about Donna that he wished weren’t true—things that put her in danger.

  But I’m not a child anymore. I know the difference between wishful thinking and instincts rooted in fact. Not only was Donna different as a person; her case wasn’t like those other victims’.

  I have spent my whole life trying to do what was expected of me, never taking risks. I panicked tonight at dinner because I was scared I had made the wrong decision, but big decisions require risk, and this was a decision I made from instincts—instincts that I have never really learned to trust. But from Utica to Cornell, back to Utica, to Cortland State, to CUNY and Professor Moreland, to Fordham and Mark Schumaker and Russ Waterston: It was all leading me to this job.

  I will finally find out what happened to my sister. I will find out who killed Donna.

  Carrie closed her journal and tucked it into her briefcase. She did not know it yet, but for the first time since she received a red, faux-crocodile notebook from her seventh-grade English teacher, her journal pages would no longer remain private.

  CHAPTER

  EIGHT

  Helen Brunswick had been murdered in Park Slope, considered by some to be the paradise of New York City. Its name deriving from sprawling Prospect Park, the neighborhood drew to Brooklyn upper-middle-class families who might previously have opted for Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

  The 78th Precinct that serviced Park Slope was on Sixth Avenue, just off of Flatbush, a couple blocks south of Atlantic. This was considered Prospect Heights, not Park Slope. There was a time, just a few years ago, when that geographic third of a mile represented a far larger cultural gap. When Ellie thought of Park Slope, she immediately conjured a stereotype of well-to-do mommies pushing strollers between natural-food co-ops, book clubs, and baby-and-me yoga classes. Prospect Heights, by contrast, was known for an eclectic mix of ages, incomes, and races. But now, thanks to an influx of big money from the Barclays Center and Atlantic Yards development project, younger, richer, whiter people were pouring into the area.

  Even the precinct house looked the part. A nice, neat, five-story cube of stone and brick, the building seemed more like a public library or historic boutique hotel than a police precinct.

  Ellie paused as she reached for the front door’s handle. “We’re sure we don’t have a friend who can help smooth over the introduction?”

  “Sorry.”

  They’d been on the receiving end of what was about to happen. Feds took over a local angle. Once it had been the state police. The worst was when cases were reassigned to another team based on nothing more than budgetary considerations. Whatever the reason, they both knew what it was like to be pulled from a case. And they both knew it was hard not to blame whoever was taking over, no matter what the circumstances. But here they were, about to take away a high-profile case because some obscure unit in the district attorney’s office had said so.

  They told the civilian aide at the front desk they were there to see Detective Tommy Santos. Ellie had asked around about him before heading out to Brooklyn. He was a fifteen-year veteran. Supposedly hardworking, the older of the two partners. The smarter, as well. Straight arrow. Married. Kids. Church. He had promised to be available to meet with them.

  Before the assistant was out of his chair to show them the way, they heard a loud voice from the squad room. “I got ’em, Roxie. They’re getting the luxury treatment. I got a room booked and everything. Champagne on the nightstand.”

  So that’s how this was going to go.

  But when Santos greeted them, he seemed utterly sincere. “You two here to steal the front page from us, huh?” Once again, it was the kind of sentence that could easily be construed as snide, but the visual cues told a different story. Santos approached them with outstretched arms, then offered each of them a vigorous handshake. Even his eyes smiled. If not for the bumps in a nose that Ellie guessed had been broken at least twice, she wouldn’t have imagined a confrontational side to the man.

  The reserved room turned out to be an interrogation room down the hall. No champagne in sight.

  “Sorry Mike couldn’t make it.” Michael Hayes was Santos’s partner. “He’s interviewing a witness in federal custody down at MDC, but I can tell you everything you need to get started.” Ellie had spent more than enough time dealing with the bureaucracy of the Metropolitan Detention Center to understand why they weren’t waiting for Hayes.

  “We appreciate the cooperation,” Rogan offered. “We all know how it feels to have a case reassigned midstream.”

  “No kidding, midstream. Like pissing into a urinal and realizing it’s the queen’s china. Got to cut it off quick, you know. Sorry, no offense.”

  “None taken,” Ellie said.

  “This won’t even take long. A lot of cases, what you read in the paper isn’t even close to what we’re actually working. This one? Media’s got a lot of the story right. Helen was exactly what she seemed: respected therapist, good mom, no problems until the divorce. Not like what usually lies behind the front page, you know?”

  They did know. Crime reporters loved to spin tales of good versus evil: innocent people minding their own business until they ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time. The more tawdry papers used words like fiend, lowlife, and scoundrel for the perpetrators; honor student, devoted husband, and beloved mother for the victims. But more often than not, the truth behind those cases was more complex. Honor students could be bullies. The apparently devoted husband could be frequenting prostitutes on the side. And sometimes beloved mothers sold drugs to other beloved mothers at the health club to help cover private tuition. Wrong place, wrong time, but more complicated than the fairy tales would suggest.

  Santos was saying that there was no evidence that Helen Brunswick had been living a secret, more dangerous life.

  “I gotta admit,” he said, “even I kind of lost it when we saw the kids at the house. You guys—you look young, but you know how you get used to it. So imagine an old guy like me. We see the two kids crying with their dad when he gives them the news. And then we check out the apartment and it’s all done up. Decorated. It was supposed to be a real family night.”

  “Watching the Academy Awards?” Ellie had read that detail somewhere.

  “Yeah. I guess the parents always made a big deal out of things that they could all enjoy together at home. Any kind of event—Super Bowl Sunday, election night, the Grammys, Golden Globes. They’d dress up and decorate. Cast ballots or make little bets. You should have seen the lengths these kids had gone to.” Ellie could tell he was reliving the moment in the Brunswicks’ townhouse. “It was a Sunday, and the dad—Mitch Brunswick, he’s an endocrinologist—I guess they’re for diabetes and whatnot. He was scheduled to bring the kids back to the mom that night for a custody swap. But an evening drop-off wouldn’t leave time to set up for
the award show. So Mitch brings the kids to Brooklyn early, right when Helen heads to the office for her weekend appointments, and the three of them all work on the preparations together—even though Mitch isn’t staying. Those poor kids, man. They were devastated.”

  “When was Helen supposed to be back?” Rogan asked.

  “Her last appointment was at four o’clock. An hour appointment is actually only fifty minutes in therapist time, plus a few minutes to wrap up, plus the walk home, so she had told the kids five-thirty at the absolute latest. The kids even made a signature drink, no booze. Anyway, at five forty-five, Mitch starts calling Helen’s cell phone.” Santos acted out a phone with his fingers against his ear. “The kids start worrying when red-carpet time starts without Mom, but as the hour hand moves, Mitch admits he started getting angry, thinking she was doing this to blame him for her having to work extra hours on the weekend. By the time the opening monologue starts without her, he’s fed up. He leaves the kids alone and walks up to her office. Gets no answer on the outside buzzer. Has to stand around on the street until a screenwriter who uses the top floor as a writing space shows up with a key. Screenwriter tells him to fuck off—he’s not letting anyone into the building—until Mitch pulls out his ID. Shows him that his last name matches the plate on the building for Dr. Helen Brunswick. Tells the guy he’s free to call the police if he’s worried it’s not legit. They walk into the office together and find her body on the floor. Two bullets in the chest.”