Social Death: A Clyde Shaw Mystery (15 page)

He leaned forward, his handsome face mere inches from mine. “I’m not a saint, Clyde. But I didn’t kill your friend and I have no idea where Rachel is.”

He grabbed his leather jacket and left.

I was pissed as hell, cursing myself for being attracted to him, cursing myself for not getting closer to the truth. I grabbed my bag and trench coat and filed out onto the street. It was a quarter to eight, the sky still cloaked in gray. The sidewalks were crowded with school kids in backpacks and uniforms, the streets with rush-hour traffic. I inhaled the cool autumn air and tried to tell myself that I was making progress, even though it felt like I was spinning my wheels. I had Rockwell in my sights, Andrey on the run. One of them was bound to slip up and tell me something useful.

I hailed a cab and directed it to the FirstNews building. As we inched down Lex, I looked out the window and bit down hard on my bottom lip to keep from crying. I’d made a bargain with myself: I could cry as much as I wanted in the privacy of my own home, but come daylight, the pain had to go back in the box. I had a job to do and a murderer to catch, and doing anything less than that would be failing Olivia.
Get it together, Clyde
, I hissed at myself, my hands balled in my lap.

“Get it together.” Olivia’s voice was in my head as I recalled a memory I’d pushed out of my consciousness for good reason. It was four years after I’d started at FirstNews. I was thirty. I had my act together at work—Georgia had just promoted me from assistant to segment producer—but after-hours I was still drinking too much, too often, and with men who were less than honorable. Olivia, meanwhile, had taken over her father’s foundation, and recently bestowed a grant to a group of American plastic and reconstructive surgeons to travel to Guatemala to help children suffering from various disfigurements. She invited me to come down on the charter with them and assist the team.

Believe me, I tried to weasel out of it. I had two weeks of vacation, one of which was spent upstate with my father at Christmas. The other I’d reserved for a hedonistic retreat by myself to someplace warm, like Jamaica. I’d always wanted to go there.

Olivia kept pestering me, though. Every day for a week she emailed me pictures of the kids and their parents, with little blurbs about each. “We’ll be changing these people’s lives forever,” she wrote in the last email. “Don’t you want to help?” I wrote back that I what I really wanted to do was drink a piña colada on a white sand beach. Five minutes later, she called. “Seeing such a profound sense of joy on a mother’s face. It’s like a high, Clyde, and no drug can come near it.”

“You’re clearly taking the wrong drugs,” I told her.

But I ended up going.

On the first morning of our trip, Olivia took me to the clinic where the surgeries were going to be performed. I held Magdalena, a baby with a cleft palate who cooed into my ear when I held her against my chest, and played checkers with Avril, a five-year old with a tumor the size of grapefruit growing out of her face. I met their parents, saw the hope in their eyes, and finally understood why Olivia had wanted me there. In the van home that night, she turned to me and said, “I knew you’d get it.”

“Yeah,” I’d merely replied, because by then I’d already made up my mind about what I was going to do next. Seeing those mothers who would do anything for their children had reminded me of my own mother. I’d never know her or understand how she could do what she did.

That night, after Olivia went to bed, I stole off to the bar, got wasted on rum and cokes with one of the doctors—the very married, fifty-year-old plastics man from Iowa City. Olivia found me next to him the next morning, naked, condom wrappers and empty minibar bottles strewn about my room. She let him leave before she started slamming doors and banging into anything that made noise. I clutched my ears in pain. “Stop, OK. Just stop.”

She stood panting in the middle of the room, glowering down at me. “You’re thirty years old, and life—real life—is passing you by. When are you going to grow up?”

“I fucked up, Olivia. What else can I say besides I’m sorry?”

“Don’t apologize to me. I don’t want apologies and I don’t want excuses. This was for your benefit, Clyde. I did this for you.”

I put my head back down on the bed. It hurt too much to be held upright. “I don’t need your help.”

“Oh really? Who got you your job? Who co-signed for your apartment?”

I lifted myself back up. “Don’t be a bitch.”

Olivia walked two steps to the end of my bed, her nostrils flaring, but when she spoke again the thunder was gone, and in its place, disappointment. “Don’t you want to get married, start a family?

“You really think I should get married? Have a kid? Could you imagine
me
with a kid?” Of course I wanted to have a normal life, to come home to a handsome, adoring husband and a kid or two every night instead of my empty apartment and a box of takeout. But I knew myself well enough to know I’d be a terrible wife and an even worse mother. Just the idea made me nervous, made me itch for my next drink. I’d come to terms with what was in the realm of possibility and what wasn’t. Why’d she have to stir that shit up in me? Show me a bunch of saintly mothers loving their poor, disfigured children.

I peered up at her, my voice like ice. “Come on, Olivia. Have a family? We both know it’s not going to happen—for either of us.” By then Olivia had come out to me but none of her other friends or family members, and my comment was designed to make her feel as bad as I did.

She crossed her arms. “No we don’t. I have every intention of having kids one day.”

“How’s that going to work? You going to marry a man and stay in the closet forever? That sounds like a great life.”

“Now who’s the bitch?”

“You pretend to be so perfect, so much better than me, but you’re living a lie, Olivia. Your whole goddamn life is a lie. What are you so afraid of? Charles disowning you? Losing the foundation? You’re a coward. I may be a drunk and a slut, but at least I don’t pretend to be someone I’m not.”

She left after that, slamming the door on her way out. I ordered some hair of the dog, packed my bags, and hailed a taxi for the Guatemala City airport. I didn’t leave a note.

Olivia wouldn’t talk to me for almost a year after that, and when we did finally begin seeing each other again, our friendship was never quite the same. After Guatemala, Olivia rarely confided in me about her love life. If I tried asking questions, she made it clear she didn’t want me prying. Rachel was just one of a string of girlfriends about whom I’d known embarrassing little. Yet as upsetting as it was to be frozen out of such an important part of my best friend’s life, I had no choice other than to respect Olivia’s boundaries. It was only now, after reading the text on my phone, that I realized she might have been keeping other—potentially bigger—secrets from me.

Five blocks from the office, my cab wasn’t moving. I killed time checking my email and found at the top of my inbox a message from my dad asking me to come up for the weekend. I wrote him back that as much as I wanted to, I doubted I’d be able to get away. He was worried about me, but I wasn’t going to solve Olivia’s murder moping around my father’s house. I needed to be here, in the city. “Sorry, Dad,” I tapped out with my thumbs. “I’ll come up as soon as things get more settled at work.”

When I clicked back to my inbox, there was a new email from Georgia. “Deep shit,” read the subject line, and in the body of the message: “You’re in it, girl. Call me as soon as you get this.”

I dialed her cell. No answer. So I dialed Alex. Also no answer.

This wasn’t good.

I had the cab pull over and ran the rest of the way to the bureau.

Georgia was waiting at my desk. I was surprised to see her. “What happened?” I asked, panting.

She looked grim. “Let’s go. Everyone’s waiting.”

“For me?” I dumped my bag under my desk. “Where are we going? What happened?”

“Diskin’s office. GSBC landed an interview with Olivia’s housekeeper.”

“Ilsa Chavez?” I’d had the woman’s name, but never followed up with Sabine to see if she’d tracked down her number. “What did she have to say?”

“She found the body.”

“I know that. So what?”

Georgia pressed the elevator button. “It’s a fucking barn burner, Clyde. GSBC is way out in front now. You’ll have to see for yourself.”

In network news, you’re only as good as your last scoop, especially when it came stories like these. It’s not enough to land one big interview, you have to land them all. Get out in front and stay there. Dominate the competition. This is what we do, and anything less will earn you a pink slip and one-way ticket to Des Moines. “How pissed is Diskin?” I asked.

“On a scale of one to ten, he’s an eleven.”

Alex was already in Diskin’s office when we got there. So was Hiro Itzushi, our chief legal counsel. I wasn’t quite clear why he was there other than that he’d been personally vetting everything we reported on Olivia’s murder and was, for better or worse, a member of the team covering her case.

“Glad you could fit us into your schedule,” Diskin said to me as I took my seat facing the wall of monitors. He hit the play button on his remote, and Harlich’s perfectly symmetrical face filled the screen. As the camera panned back, I could see that she was in one of GSBC’s studios. Sitting across from her was a shapely Latina dressed in a black-and-white striped blouse and black knee-length skirt.

“I’m here with the woman who discovered the body of slain heiress Olivia Kravis. Her name is Ilsa Jimenez Chavez,” Penny said. “She’s here to tell us about what she saw.”

The interview started out innocuously enough with Ilsa explaining in heavily accented and broken English why she’d gone to Olivia’s apartment on a Sunday morning. Apparently, she’d missed a day of work because of a family emergency, and was making up for lost hours. Then Penny said, “I know it must be hard for you, but can you tell us exactly what you saw on Sunday morning, Ms. Chavez?”

Ilsa described the murder scene in detail, explaining how she dropped her coffee when she discovered Olivia’s body and dialed the police. Penny squinted her eyes Couric-style. “How long had you worked for Ms. Kravis?”

“Nine year.”

I glanced over at Georgia. I didn’t understand what all the fuss was about.

“Here it comes,” she mouthed at me.

Penny uncrossed her mile-long legs and leaned forward. “What was Olivia Kravis like?”

“She was good boss. She work hard. I no see her that much.”

“Was she in a relationship?”

“I no think so. But one day I come in, regular time and she still home. I usually start by cleaning the sheets on the bed. But the bedroom door is locked. I wait, clean the kitchen. Finally Miss Kravis, she come out. And there was someone else with her. A woman. And she say, Ilsa, ‘I like you to meet my girlfriend.’”

D
eep down, I knew this would happen.

Olivia was a lesbian, and now everyone knew.

Georgia snapped her fingers, directing my attention to the television monitor and the fact that GSBC—and God help me, Penny
Ho-stick
—had scooped us yet again. I had a lump the size of Alex’s ego in my throat. But it wasn’t over. Ilsa Jimenez Chavez had another bombshell to drop.

“What was the name of the woman who came out of the bedroom?” Penny asked.

“Rachel.”

“Rachel Rockwell?”

The housekeeper nodded. “Yes.”

Diskin stopped the tape. “Shaw, goddamn it, we should have had this.”

I crossed my arms. “You’re telling me you would have let me report that our right-wing founder’s daughter was a lesbian? Hiro, back me up. There’s no way this would have made it to air.”

Hiro cleared his throat. “I’m sure there would have been a discussion.”

“Moot point.” Diskin ripped off his glasses. “How could you let GSBC scoop us? It’s
GSBC
for crying out loud.”

Not just GSBC, but
Ho-stick
.

“You have no other job at this moment than getting this story. Not to mention, Olivia Kravis was your friend.” Diskin continued. “How could you have not known this about her?”

“I thought our policy was pretty clear on this stuff,” I replied, side-stepping his question. “I think what we should really be talking about is where GSBC gets off outing Olivia and Rachel’s relationship. Since when is it OK for a news organization to do that to a private citizen?”

“I’ll tell you when,” Diskin said, his voice growing louder than I’d ever heard it. “When that private citizen is no longer living and at the center of a major news story.”

I knew that. But I also knew that as recently as a day ago Diskin was warning me off reporting on Rachel Rockwell’s rumored affair with the doorman—in case it led to an unpalatable discovery about Olivia. Welcome to the news business, where prerogatives changed by the hour. “Stop me if I’m wrong,” I said. “But I was under the impression you wanted to keep our coverage of the Kravis case PG.”

“I never said that. What I said is that we had to have corroboration before going public with anything that was remotely scandalous. All the information you’ve brought me so far is secondhand. This is
your
story. You’re supposed to own it. You should have had the housekeeper, just like you should have had Uffizo. That’s two strikes, Clyde.”