All Day and a Night (6 page)

He leaned behind her to begin measuring the length of the sofa.

“Fine, you win. What’s up with the measuring?”

He smiled and gave her a quick kiss. “I’m finally getting around to hanging those photographs.” He jotted down another number, picked up the second bottle of beer, and clinked it against hers.

She said, “Oh, right.” But her initial blank expression was a giveaway: she had no idea what he was talking about.

“Those pictures from Montauk?” He pointed to three framed photographs leaning against the side of the couch. “We agreed we’d hang them on this wall?”

Now she remembered. They’d taken them together on a weekend beach trip last summer, and Max decided to have three of them printed and framed: the train station, surfers on the waves, and—something else. All she remembered was finding room for them in a closet when they were still in the phase of unpacking boxes. Now that they’d been in the apartment for three months, and she knew precisely where to find her clothes, shoes, and other essentials, she was used to the place as it was. If she lived alone, those photographs would remain in the closet until the next time she moved.

That was one of many differences between Ellie and Max. Before their joint move, he had lived for eight years in the same Nolita apartment. It was on a high floor of a doorman, elevator building. At least by the time Ellie saw the place, it was neatly decorated with coordinated furnishings like the dark-gray sectional sofa she was sitting on, and the modern coffee table with the glass top that was now ringed with two watermarks because she’d forgotten, once again, to use coasters. Max even had lime-green throw pillows that managed to match the decorative vase perched on the cabinet beneath the television.

Max had taste.

Ellie? She had good taste when it came to food and people. She had
a
taste—not sure everyone would say it was
good
—when it came to her clothing. But in terms of decorating, she had no preferences whatsoever. She’d never had the luxury to make choices.

In Kansas, she’d always lived at home. The scholarship awards she’d cobbled together on the Kansas teen pageant circuit had barely covered part-time tuition at Wichita State. Then, when she’d followed her brother, Jess, to New York City, she had been one step above transient, moving from one ratty sublet to the next, waiting tables to cover rent.

Her first year on the NYPD, she had a brief respite from the constant shuffling when she’d accepted her then-boyfriend’s invitation to let her sublease expire and stay with him. The boyfriend was an investment banker, and his apartment looked it. But it had been decorated, inch for inch, by a designer hired for the job, so it didn’t reflect his taste, let alone Ellie’s. Ellie had never even thought of the place as her own. In an entire year, she never got to the point of answering the apartment phone or getting a copy of the mailbox key. It was more like she’d been crashing there a lot. When the boyfriend made it clear that he didn’t understand why Ellie insisted on working as a cop when she could be not-working as an investment banker’s wife, she knew she had to get out.

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.

B
y 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.

H
elen 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.