Social Death: A Clyde Shaw Mystery (10 page)

WE NEED TO TALK.

IT’S TIME YOU KNOW THE TRUTH.

I read it again, noting the time stamp, 6:05 on Friday evening, about twenty minutes after she’d tried calling me.
It’s time you know the truth.
What truth? What did she want to tell me? I looked up at Ehlers. He had a small notebook open and a pen poised to write. “I didn’t get the text,” I said, my hands trembling so hard the phone slipped from them and skidded across the table. “I didn’t get it.”

“Are you in the habit of ignoring texts from friends?”

“No, of course not,” I replied, flustered and defensive. “But sometimes they get buried under a bunch of other texts and I miss them. I didn’t ignore her text. I didn’t see it,” I said, repeating myself.

“And you didn’t think to check your phone after you found out your friend was murdered?”

“What? No.” I shook my head. I was still trying to wrap my mind around the fact that Olivia had wanted to tell me something before she died.

“What does that text mean, Ms. Shaw?”

“I don’t know. Obviously she had something to tell me. It sounds like it was something important. How am I supposed to know what it was when she never got the chance?”

“You have no idea?” He sounded dubious.

I scoured my memory for answers, for a clue, and came up with nothing. I thought I’d known all of Olivia’s deepest, darkest secrets. Clearly I hadn’t. “No,” I said at last.

He nudged the phone closer to me. “Read it again.”

I did, trying this time to set aside my emotions and think analytically
.
I read the whole thing aloud again to Ehlers.

“Anything?”

“It sounds urgent.
We need to talk
. That’s urgent, right? And the words,
it’s time
, makes it sound like this thing she wanted to tell me wasn’t something brand new, like she’d been keeping something from me for a while. My God, do you think this has something to do with why she was killed?” A chill shot down my spine. This was too much of a coincidence.

“We have to investigate everything.”

I felt the world bob and shift around me, my vision darkening. I was going to faint.
Breathe
, I told myself.
Breathe.

Ehlers didn’t give me long to find my equilibrium. “Did you recently have a fight with Ms. Kravis?”

“No.”

“When was the last time you saw her?”

“Two Wednesdays ago. I went to her apartment. We ordered in from an organic soup place and drank wine. I went home close to midnight. Everything was fine.”

He wrote down what I said. “Was Ms. Kravis in a relationship?” he asked without looking up from his notebook.

I froze.
What did they know?
“Not that I’m aware of,” I said plainly, keeping my tone in check.

He sucked his teeth. “You sure?”

“Olivia’s life, like mine, revolved around work. Her priority was the foundation, like mine is this network.” It wasn’t a lie.

Ehlers got up. “Thanks for your time.”

“Wait.” I jumped out of my chair, blocking the exit. “What about the time of death?”

“It’ll be in the report later.”

“That’s not fair. I just gave you information, now how about you return the favor?”

“Actually, you didn’t tell me much I already didn’t know.” He zipped up his windbreaker. “And as for time of death, it’ll be in the ME’s report.”

“What do you guys know about Rachel’s whereabouts? Has she fled the country?”

He answered me with an annoyed glare.

“Is she the only suspect?”

Again, silence.

“Where on the head was Olivia hit? Do the wounds indicate that the person who murdered Olivia was taller than she is, or the same height? Because Rachel is small, five-five, five-four, max. If the wounds are higher, there’s no way she could have committed this crime by herself.”

Ehlers pushed my chair gently aside. “I’d ask if you ever heard of high heels, Ms. Shaw, but I can see that you’re wearing some.”

I shut my mouth.

“The department thanks you for your cooperation. I’ll let you know if I have any further questions.”

T
hree p.m. I was in the lobby of the FirstNews building waiting for Delphine Lamont.

Back at Livingston, I’d remembered my best friend’s older stepsister as one of the all-stars. She was an A student and a born competitor, a star athlete who excelled in every sport she tried. She had every gift known to mankind except for, perhaps, good looks, having inherited a prominent nose and diminished chin from her natural father, a French playboy who had died in a powerboat accident when Delphine was just a baby. Both the nose and chin had been fixed by the time she left high school, although neither seemed to impede her ascent to the top rung of Livingston’s student hierarchy. At sixteen, however, Delphine had showed enough promise as a skier to be sent to a Swiss boarding school, where she could train all winter long. Olivia, it was decided, was to be sent with her to keep her company, although I never understood why. They had never been particularly close, and Delphine wasn’t the type to get homesick.

I, on the other hand, was rudderless without my best friend. I’d developed early, getting breasts and hips before anyone else in my class. The girls teased and alienated me and made me feel ashamed of my body. The boys had the opposite reaction. They loved my curves and gave me the attention I craved. I took to my role of sex object with gusto. At fourteen, I gave a boy a blow job in the bathroom of the Ziegfeld Theater. At fifteen, I met Ethan Wilcox.

He was a senior at Collegiate with a fringe of dirty blond hair and a tall, athletic build that his school put to good use on the basketball court. His parents lived in an apartment on Park Avenue, a duplex with a grand staircase and long hallways paneled in dark wood. When he called—out of the blue—he said his parents were going to be gone for the night or out of town, I can’t remember which. What I do remember was that Ethan had invited a friend over, and that we played pool and drank something syrupy and potent from heavy glass mugs, and that midway through the game Ethan lifted the hem of my skirt with the end of his cue.

“I see London, I see France,” he said, setting down his pool stick to lift me on the green-felt-covered table. Off went my sweater, down came my skirt. Ethan snaked his fingers beneath the pink lace of my bra, his head traveling lower, his tongue swirling between my legs. It wasn’t until he was inside of me, my legs straddling the air, that I remembered his friend. He was standing at the end of the table, dick in hand, waiting his turn.

Later, I convinced myself that I’d been drunk; that’s why I’d done it, why I’d let them do what they did to me. But alcohol wasn’t solely to blame, and I’d hardly been a passive participant once things got going. In fact, it was the opposite—the power and control I felt—that spurred me on and gave me a high no drug could match. It was only afterward, once I was home, and in the days to come, when the other girls inevitably found out, that I felt dirty, slutty, and worthless. But that didn’t stop me from screwing around, again and it sure as hell didn’t stop me from drinking. In a cute boy’s arms, shit-faced on Hawaiian Punch and rum, I found a reprieve, however brief, from the loneliness and despair that dogged me every other second of the day. Sex and alcohol. Alcohol and sex.

When it came time for me to apply to college, even my father could see that the farther away I got from Manhattan, the better. He’d tried talking to me, enforcing a curfew, then therapy that cost him an arm and a leg and made no difference in my behavior. My grades slipped even further; I couldn’t sleep without taking a Tylenol PM and a nip of Benadryl. By some miracle I scored well on my SATs—which my father took as evidence I still had a brain inside my head, despite all my efforts to prove the contrary—and had my pick of Midwestern colleges. In August, we drove west in a rented Honda packed with my belongings. “Go get your fresh start,” Dad told me at the gates of Macalester. “Everyone deserves at least one.”

Except I failed to turn over a new leaf in Minnesota, my home for four frigid years, and failed again in Washington, D.C., where I earned a graduate degree in journalism by the skin of my teeth. I returned to my dad much the same as I had left, and God help him, he loved me anyway. I don’t know how. Because all I ever saw in the mirror was trouble.

Then Olivia stepped back in to my life. She got me that FirstNews job, and then she lent me the money to get my own apartment. But the news business isn’t the best place for a person with my kind of tendencies. People party. People fuck. For the first four years at the network, I was able to keep my work and partying mostly separate, but then I got promoted to segment producer and started pulling longer hours and going on the road with my colleagues, plenty of whom were cokeheads and big drinkers like me. I started having trouble drawing the line between blowing off a little steam on a Friday night and going on a 12-hour bender that left me incapacitated for an entire weekend. I was spinning out of control, worse than ever before. It wasn’t until Georgia Jacobs finally gave me an ultimatum—get help or get out—that I left the worst of it behind.

I had just broken up with Jack Slane. It was late March, still cold enough to snow. My crew and I had been covering a child-abduction case in Maine and had been stressed to our eyeballs, going on four hours of sleep a night for ten days straight. We’d flown home that morning, put on a huge show, and adjourned to Coyote Cinco’s en masse, ready to drink the place into the ground. I did a few shots with Doug, one of our cameramen, a big guy with about five tattoos on his body. Around midnight, we screwed in the alley behind the bar, then I went back inside, kept drinking, and asked one of my underage interns, a college girl doing her semester-at-work, for a couple of the OxyContin I knew she was carrying. I swallowed two, maybe more, and the next thing I remembered I was on my kitchen floor. Georgia at my side, kneeling on the floor, a phone pressed to her ear.

Later I’d learn that there had been a break in the case we’d been covering—the police had found the girl’s body buried beneath a blanket of snow in a icy ravine less than a mile away from the strip mall where she’d been abducted—and Georgia hadn’t been able to reach me. She’d taken a car to my place on her way to the airport, persuaded my landlord to let her in, and found me on the floor, passed out in a pool of my own urine. She threw a bucket of cold water on my face and made a call to Hilltop, a recovery center in Connecticut. “They’re expecting us in a couple of hours,” she said. “You have ten minutes to shower the stink off your body. I’ll pack a bag.”

With effort, I managed to lift myself to a sitting position. “I overdid it last night. That doesn’t mean I need to go to rehab.”

She shook her head. “Girl, we both know this isn’t the first time.”

Georgia was referring to the last time I’d passed out. It was nine months earlier. I was in a bar on the Bowery, knee-deep in vodka tonics, a couple of codeines working their way through my system. I came to in the emergency room of St. Vincent’s. After the doctor pumped my stomach, I got a visit from the psychiatrist on call. She sent me on my way with a baggie of pamphlets on alcohol abuse, once she figured out I hadn’t been trying to kill myself. Not intentionally, anyway.

I pushed the hair off my face. “Georgia, I’m not going.”

“Then you’re fired.”

“You can’t do that. You can’t just fire me,” I sputtered.

“I absolutely can and will, if you don’t get your ass moving this instant.” She pulled me to my feet, ushered me to my bathroom, and put me in a cold-water shower fully clothed. When we finally were in her car, she gave her driver a new set of directions. “Change of plans.” I slept most of the way and woke up as we were pulling into the facility, a red brick building sitting on a high hill, overlooking a glassy pond and plenty of snow-covered acres. Georgia sat next to me in the waiting room, ignoring all the calls and messages that must have been coming in on her phone. She was missing a breaking news story, and that’s when I realized she really cared about me, and that I owed it to her and everyone else who had tried, unsuccessfully, to help me, to make myself better. I started to cry. Georgia put an arm around my hunched-over back. “Stay here as long as you need. Don’t even worry about work. All that will be waiting for you when you’re ready.”

I stayed at Hilltop for three weeks. Georgia, I later learned, footed the whole bill. My roommate was a forty-year-old recovering meth addict from Ohio who read romance novels and looked like a PTA president. I wore hospital-issued sweats, took showers in a communal bathroom, and had twice-daily sessions with a therapist named Elaine.

Elaine had gray, spiky hair, and an office decorated in half-dead plants and Russian nesting dolls. Within the first week she looked me square in the eye and said, “You’re not borderline and you’re not bipolar, so what are you?”

I shrugged. “Why don’t you tell me?”

“An alcoholic?”

“No.”

“You realize that’s what every alcoholic says.”

“I slipped down a bad slope, but that’s over with now.”