SoHo Sins (29 page)

She had invited a bevy of old acquaintances, mostly third-rate artists, and a few junior-level museum people. Two catering tables were overloaded with wineglasses, liquor bottles, smoked salmon, and cheese—enough for a crowd twice the size. The few attendees passed each other at awkward distances, like mutually distrustful scavengers at an accident scene. Only when the drinks took effect did the conversations start to rise in frequency and tone.

I poured myself a vodka tonic and went to see how Angela was doing.

Pretty rotten, it turned out. She was standing alone in the kitchen, scooping unneeded ice cubes into a silver bucket. “This isn’t working,” she said.

“What isn’t?”

“This bloody party, the show, my so-called career.”

“Give Michael a chance. You’ve been away for a while.”

“Too long, I know.” She stared down at the mound of ice. “There are times when I just hate art,” she said.

“You don’t mean that, Angela. It’s about all we have—the likes of us.”

“That’s the worst of it. My work was supposed to make life just dandy again after Philip left. Well, it didn’t. And now what? I can’t pray like your friend Hogan, and all I have to show for my efforts are those damned fiberglass witches.”

“That’s quite a lot, actually.”

Angela shook her head. “A dozen wretched, oversized dolls—do you know what they tell me, Jack?”

“No.”

“Art is no match for flesh and blood. Only love is love; only Philip is Philip.”

Suddenly, I wanted to touch her, to put my good arm around her waist as we stood by the softly humming refrigerator. But I didn’t dare.

“He wasn’t exactly sweet to you after he took up with Mandy,” I reminded her. “And he’s not exactly Philip now.”

“No, he wasn’t sweet. Not at the end.”

“Was he ever?”

“Wonderfully, in the first years. I can’t begin to tell you. But he’s a man like any other. He threw away the best thing he had. Sometimes I think that’s how we all keep ourselves going.”

“Why not just move on yourself, then? You certainly don’t lack for options.”

Her head shifted minutely, slowly, from side to side. “After Philip left, I tried to cut him out of my soul like a cancer. Later I realized the cells had metastasized.”

“Are you really that far gone, Angela?”

“All the way. What I felt for him—what I feel—is not a thing I can control.”

“I just hate to see you go through this misery for a second time,” I said.

She looked straight ahead, past me, past everything. “It’s hell to live without hope, Jack.”

“I know.”

Angela’s voice dropped to a whisper. “I wouldn’t wish that on Philip. So don’t wish it on me.”

“All right, whatever you say.”

Her eyes returned, powerfully. “I want the right, real thing, that’s all. Nothing less. I’m tired of everything else, and I’m too damaged to fight anymore—damaged nearly to death.”

“You deserve whatever you want.”

“I’m no fool, Jack. I know that someday—not so very long from now—this ridiculous pain, these crazed thoughts and feelings, will slowly end. I’ll be myself again, calm and reasonable and rather dull. But in the meantime, I have to think them and feel them. There’s no shortcut, no exemption for being smart.”

“No, I don’t suppose.” I finished my drink, placing the glass on the countertop. “At least you have Melissa.”

“Yes, I have my daughter.” Angela seemed to find herself again. “We have each other. The two of us, no matter what.”

Angela picked up the ice bucket and forced her thin lips into a party smile.

“Missy’s been looking for you, by the way,” she said. “She’s in back by the stereo, waiting with something quite important to ask you.”

“That’s funny. She never likes my answers very much.”

At the rear of the loft, I found Melissa cross-legged on the floor, flipping through her mother’s old albums.

“What are these things?” she asked. “Like clay tablets or something?”

“Nothing you recognize?”

“It’s all super-ancient.”

“Angela said that you wanted to see me.”

“I was waiting for you.”

“Waiting for what?”

“Just good practice. For our future.”

“Oh, right. I forgot.”

“Did you think about me at all today?”

“Every moment.”

“No, you didn’t. Phony talker. Pretender.”

“Am I?”

“Fake, fake, full of cake.”

“It’d be better for us both if I were.” I sat on the edge of an ottoman near her. “Actually, I was thinking today about an adventure we could go on together. A secret party. Would you like that?”

“Can I wear my birthday present dress?”

“No, they want to see you in your school uniform.”

“They who?”

“Paul and his friends. They want you to dance.”

“You told them? It was just for you that day.”

“I know. But if you make Paul like it too, maybe we can find out who hurt Aunt Mandy. Then your dad won’t be in trouble anymore.”

“And the police will stop bugging Mom with so many questions?”

“That’s right.”

“Why doesn’t Paul just help us, without any dancing?”

“He’s a little bit selfish.”

“I know.”

“Was he ever selfish with you?”

“In a way. He told me about that other kind of kissing. The one men really, really like.”

“He just talked or he showed you?”

“We looked at pictures on the Internet. I thought they were pretty rank.”

“Paul makes video shows like that. That’s why he wants you to dance for his friends. I want to bust them, so the cops can get them to tell us what really happened to Mandy.”

“Will Paul go to jail?”

“He might. If we learn enough.”

She seemed to contemplate the prospect at length while a Roy Orbison song played.

“How do you know his friends will even like me?” she asked.

“They’re men. They won’t be able to help it.”

I was glad to get home that night, away from the gallery opening, away from the lingering party chatter that I could still hear below me—down in Angela’s loft—where Melissa, too, was shut away in her room for the night. I stretched out, but sleep eluded me. This was the same bed, I thought, where I had made love to Nathalie countless mad times, and where I used to lie awake after she was gone, wishing I could make my body shut down, my heart stop its beating. I wanted to die there, quickly, with no pain or fuss. Unfortunately, you can’t erase yourself from the world without violence. Even the strongest human will is not enough to paralyze your lungs, to reduce your vital processes to zero. You can fight sickness with sickness but not life with life. No, it takes a stronger poison than that.

A joke came into my head in the dark. What if Hogan’s God Almighty had gone slightly nuts like Angela’s ex? It was a funny thought. The result might be the world as we know it. I don’t care what Hogan says, there’s a flaw in the universe, and its name is death. How’s that for profundity—or was it blasphemy? Great, I said to myself, now I’m doing theology on sleep meds and vodka. No wonder that Jehovah, like Hogan, comes into my mind at the oddest times. Often they arrive together.

Nathalie once had everything but innocence, I thought, and now I had everything but faith. Hogan says I lack the daring. You have to be willing to fight—and maybe die—for an innocence that you’ve already lost and no longer believe in. He calls it thinking like a soldier—a Christian soldier no less. According to him, it’s the very absurdity of faith, its evasion of logic and evidence, that makes it the only sane response to an irrational world. Or was it the other way around? Anyway Christ, to Hogan, is like a criminal whose dossier can never be closed. God is a crime against reason—the only one he condones. His theory makes no sense, but I understand it completely. Sometimes I think about Missy that way.

I awoke far too early the next morning. To soothe myself in the first quiet hours of the day, I spread some of Mandy’s e-mails around me on the bed, reading them randomly, for nostalgia and amusement and for their welcome soporific effect. That changed when I came across a message to Angela dated April 28, six days before the murder. Somehow, in my preoccupation with the exchanges between Amanda and Paul, I’d overlooked two sentences buried in a long tedious thread. The Oliver wives, past and current, were sparring about Melissa’s school schedule, taxes on the Westchester house, insurance.

“You’re right, my dear,” Amanda wrote near the end. “It’s pointless to try to settle anything through Philip. That Italian hussy has turned him upside down and inside out, the old fool. We should talk. Call me, and we’ll set a time to meet next week while he’s away.”

I waited until Melissa left for school, then dropped in on Angela with the pretext of morning coffee.

“Thanks for helping out last night,” she said.

“I didn’t do much.”

“You listened. It’s a rare courtesy.”

“Seems like the least I can do, what with you being the angel of mercy to Philip these days and all.”

She shook her head. “Sometimes, when I look at him now, I think death is the only real kindness.”

We sat together amid the post-party clutter, in the same ensemble of sofas and chairs where Missy and I, weeks before, had sipped drinks and grown strangely intimate.

“Now I have to be impolite,” I said.

“Really, how?”

“I have to ask you if you came to see Amanda the week she was killed.”

Angela tested the temperature of her coffee with a fingertip. She lifted a droplet to her lips and tasted it thoughtfully.

“No,” she said. “I’m not big on self-abuse.” She took a first cautious sip. “What on earth would make you think that?”

“I’ve been reading Mandy’s e-mails.”

“Not very tactful of you.”

It was my turn to make her wait.

“Do I have to check the files again to see what exactly you wrote back?” I asked finally.

“Don’t bother. I didn’t reply by e-mail; I phoned. We had business to settle about Missy’s new school. And some details of her inheritance.”

“Was Mandy happy about that?”

“Probably not. She wasn’t exactly thrilled to talk to me for any reason, let alone money.”

“What did she say when you met?”

“We didn’t. She invited me, but I was far too busy getting ready for my show and the Katonah benefit.”

“And you wouldn’t want to leave Missy alone in the house in Westchester.”

“Of course not.”

“Not even with the nanny?”

“The one I had then, no. She wasn’t nearly as reliable as Emmanuelle. You remember her—the French au pair Philip hired years ago? A lovely girl. Good for language lessons, but not the best role model for Missy. Still, so far, I haven’t found anyone more trustworthy.”

I nodded, watching her over my coffee mug. “You have to be very careful these days.”

“Yes, it’s terrible.”

“Some days,” I said, “and some people, are worse than others.”

“Anybody special in mind?”

“Paul Morse.”

“That scum.” Angela caught herself, seeming to realize that she’d tipped her hand.

“What’s wrong with Paul?” I asked.

“You tell me, Jack. You’re a man.”

“I thought you were fond of the guy.”

“I was until Missy and her friends caught onto him. The girls call his kind ‘grody dudes.’ They’re everywhere. The bastard even tried to use Philip to get to Missy. ‘Come on, sit closer. Let’s type in your dad’s name on Google. I’ll bet we get a thousand hits.’ She didn’t fall for it, thank God.”

“Not the way you fell for Hogan’s protection?”

Angela looked at me sharply, surprised. “Well, what can you expect?”

It was a pretty good question. Impatient with my silence, Angela went on.

“Just look at us in this city,” she said, “The way we run around. We’re all killing each other in the name of a good time.”

“Is that what you call it?”

“Occasionally. A good time, sure. Or lack of knowing how to do anything better.”

“There’s emotional killing,” I said, “and then there’s the real thing.”

“You should know—about death by heartbreak, I mean. Once upon a time you were the master. Remember?”

“I have a vague recollection.”

“Tell me, then. Tell me one good thing that came out of all your affairs and fake romances, Jack.” She waited for me to meet her eyes. “You can’t.”

I searched my memory. Unfortunately, the findings didn’t do much for my self-defense.

“Entertainment,” I offered finally. “That’s something. For years, I got and gave harmless laughs. What more would you like?”

“Something beyond ourselves.”

“Talk to Hogan,” I said. “That’s his specialty.”

Angela regarded me across her coffee mug, savoring its contents. Her voice turned softer. “Why didn’t you ever have a child, Jack?”

“I wasn’t in the mood.”

“You see? Don’t be flip. I know Nathalie desperately wanted one.”

“Nathalie wanted a lot of things. Unfortunately, they didn’t all fit together.”

“It’s not too late. Not for you, a man. Of course, you have to want the whole chaos of it.”

“Want it for what?”

“Oh, making up for our mistakes, I suppose. Going on is what saves us, and children force us to slog ahead no matter what. With a smile, too. Even though they disrupt everything, the little savages.”

“Thanks, I’ll give it some thought tonight before I sleep.”

That afternoon, I called Hogan. We didn’t discuss fatherhood issues. Instead, I told him about Amanda’s “let’s meet” message to Angela, and he gave me the lowdown on the
Virgin Sacrifice
distribution ring.

“The master tape goes out of a warehouse in New Jersey, packed in with a gross of O-Tech instructional videos. Like you said, the only thing that distinguishes it from the others is that red X on the upper-right corner of the label.”

“Where does it go?”

“To the Oliver Industries headquarters in Shanghai, and out the back door to a pirate video mill behind the counterfeit goods market.”

“Xiang Yang.”

“Whatever. The Chinese can dupe anything overnight.”

“Yes, I’ve seen their work.”

“How is it?”

“Good enough for porn.”