Authors: Alafair Burke
The Ex (5 page)
FROM: [email protected]
DATE: June 7, 2015 9:04
AM
Subject: RE: What did you DO?
Don’t try to throw Buckley under the bus for this. I know for a fact that the thought of me with a woman totally “grosses her out.”
FROM: [email protected]
DATE: June 7, 2015 11:12
PM
Subject: RE: What did you DO?
I can’t believe I’m asking this, but any word?
FROM: [email protected]
DATE: June 7, 2015, 11:19
PM
Subject: RE: What did you DO?
Nothing credible yet but lots of shares and tweets. We’re gonna find her. I feel it. Go to bed.
Sent from Charlotte’s iPhone. Mention typos at your own risk.
FROM: [email protected]
DATE: June 10, 2015, 3:27
PM
Subject: RE: What did you DO?
What did I do, you asked? Found the woman in the grass, that’s what I did! Booya.
Got a whole bunch of prank responses (as usual) but hers is legit, down to the details. Here’s the copy and paste:
Dear Charlotte, I just saw your Missed-Moment post on a friend’s Facebook page. Little did the friend know that I’m the woman you’re looking for. At least I think I am. Check with your mystery man: I have long dark hair and was wearing a bridesmaid’s dress. Oh, and I had a basket with me. Just so he knows I noticed him, too: if he’s the guy I smiled at, he was wearing a T-shirt that said “World’s Okayest Runner.” How great is that? If he wants to reach me, I’m at
[email protected]
. My name’s Madeline.
Here are my thoughts, Jack, whether wanted or not: 1) She uses excellent punctuation. 2) You really shouldn’t wear that shirt in public.
3) The fact that she liked said shirt means you could be perfect for each other. E-mail her, goofball.
FROM: [email protected]
DATE: June 10, 2015, 6:27 pm
Subject: RE: What did you DO?
Me again. It’s been exactly three hours. Did you reach out to Madeline? Do it, Jack, or I may do it for you. And who knows what I might say? (Maniacal laugh.)
xox
I found myself smiling. Here I was, thinking of Jack as the guy to feel sorry for. His mother died when he was in high school, followed by his father our sophomore year in college. Then everything that happened with us, plus Owen, plus the aftermath. Then he starts a new life with Molly, only to lose her so violently.
But he still had Charlotte, who I knew from experience would stop at nothing to look after Jack. He had someone to e-mail at midnight. And he had a daughter who was probably the one to buy him cheesy T-shirts that were right in his humor wheelhouse.
I of all people had no reason to feel sorry for someone who had all of that.
I CLICKED ON THE FINAL
e-mail message from Einer. It was a forward of all the exchanges between Jack and Madeline.
A quick scroll revealed that there was a lot to read, so I jumped back to the top for the important stuff.
Just like Jack had sworn, Madeline was the one to suggest the meet-
up at the football field. She had set the time, the date, and the location. She was the one who told him to bring the picnic basket. She’d bring the champagne.
All good.
I was starting to read the messages from the beginning when an incoming text message appeared at the top of my phone’s screen:
Are you at the precinct? Have you seen my dad?
I ignored the text and continued to skim. Jack’s first e-mail to Madeline explained that the silly T-shirt was a gift from his daughter. Most men wouldn’t lead with the kid, but Jack never did have much game. He asked her what book she had been reading when he spotted her at the pier. She told him
Eight Days to Die
.
Okay,
he responded.
I may need to verify that you’re actually real, and this isn’t Charlotte punking me.
Eight Days to Die
is far and away my favorite book from last year. What are the odds of that? I’ve stopped recommending it to people, because they insist that a person with only eight days to live is “too sad,” but it’s one of those clean, simple novels that proves heartbreaking stories can be life affirming.
Oh dear. Einer wasn’t kidding about the diabetes. Really, Jack? A published author and you can’t do better than that? The next time Melissa pushed me to try online dating again, I’d have to remind her of why I quit in the first place.
Another text message popped up at the top of the screen:
Is my dad under arrest or not? Not knowing is driving me crazy
.
Followed by,
P.S. This is Buckley Harris.
How in the world could she even text that fast? I wouldn’t be giving my cell phone number to any more teenagers.
I scrolled to the final addition to the e-mail chain, Jack’s response to Madeline’s invitation to meet in person:
See you there.
I had to smile at his response, so spontaneous and unquestioning. Some of my best times with Jack had been spur-of-the-moment ventures.
My thoughts about the past were interrupted by yet another text
message.
If you’re trying to protect me . . . DON’T! I can handle it. Just tell me what is going on!!!!
So many exclamation points. I texted a quick response:
Cautiously optimistic that we’ll have your dad home soon. Be patient. I promise to call when I know more.
I had just hit Send when my cell phone rang. Buckley, I assumed, demanding more detail. But the number on the screen was the outgoing number for the district attorney’s office.
It was ADA Scott Temple. “The lab called. Two hours, just as they promised. Jack Harris’s hands are clear, at least of GSR.”
Even though I’d been expecting this, I felt a wave of relief wash over me. “That’s great.” I assured him that Jack would not leave the jurisdiction while they continued to investigate, and began piling on ways of backing up the promise: turning over his passport, electronic monitoring, the works.
“Save all that for the bail hearing, Olivia. Boyle’s processing him now for transport.”
“Then why have I been stewing on a bench here all day? Is this some kind of joke? What was the whole point of waiting for the GSR testing?”
So much smugness and indignation. It was a posture I struck well. Outrage can work wonders to shame people when you’re right, and they’re wrong.
But here’s the thing: you better be right.
“Look, Olivia, it’s not my business, but you called me for a reason. I respect you, and I listen to you when you stick your neck out. But you’re wrong on Harris. I don’t blame you. The Penn Station widower thing may have clouded your judgment.”
“My judgment’s just fine.” Even I knew I sounded defensive.
“His hands were clean, but we tested his shirt, too. The GSR test came back positive. Sorry, Olivia. Your guy’s guilty. He played you.”
I
STILL HAD
my phone in hand as I marched through the squad, calling out for Detective Boyle. A younger female detective rolled back her chair and rose to meet me in the middle of the room. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. You can’t just be storming through here.”
Boyle appeared at the back of the squad room, his hands pressed on either side of the doorway leading to the hall containing the interrogation rooms. He was intentionally blocking my view.
“Ramos is right, Counselor. This is our house, not yours.”
I saw the movement of officers in uniform behind him. The white cotton of a T-shirt. It was Jack. They were moving him.
“I need to talk to my client. You are interfering with his right to counsel.”
“Nice try, but I know a little bit about the law. We were done questioning him long before your arrival, Ms. Randall. I did you a favor letting you back there the first time. You don’t get to ride in the car at his side.”
“Just five minutes, Detective. He has a daughter. I need to know where—”
“Most everyone we’ll arrest this week has kids. Just because his is white and rich doesn’t make him special.”
I ran to Detective Boyle and craned my neck to get a better view of Jack being led down the hall. “Jack!”
Boyle exchanged an amused look with the female detective and shook his head.
I wanted to push Boyle out of the way but knew there would be nothing more I could do once I made it past his guard post. I called out loudly but calmly, “Jack, don’t say anything to anyone—not police, not prosecutors, definitely not other prisoners. Do you hear me? Not a word.”
I managed to catch one final glimpse of him as he struggled to look back at me as two flanking officers led him away. I had never seen anyone appear so terrified and utterly confused. His knees seemed to buckle when I said the word “prisoners.”
The last Jack knew, I was working on getting him freed. I had walked out of the conference room to take a phone call. Now he was being processed into the system with no explanation of what had changed.
OUTSIDE THE PRECINCT, THE TYPICAL
end-of-day Tribeca traffic was at a standstill on Varick Street. Trucks lurched forward a few inches at a time, honking horns as if the sound might somehow blast a clear path through the line of cars fighting for a spot in the Holland Tunnel. A stocky man in a Mets tank top stood next to a cooler, selling bottles of Poland Spring water to drivers at a buck a pop. A street vendor told me that my outfit could use one of his necklaces. A man who passed me on the sidewalk made an “mmm-mmm” noise and suggested it was “too damn hot for all those clothes” I was wearing.
I could see and hear all of it, but none of what was happening outside my head mattered. My phone was buzzing in my hand—dueling
calls from Don and Buckley, according to the screen—but I kept walking.
I had to make a decision: Door A or Door B. Door A is what Don would want: call another firm, bring them up to date, get them to represent Jack. Door B: stay on the case.
Lawyers say it doesn’t matter whether a client’s innocent. It’s not our job to know. We fight zealously no matter what. What a bunch of crap.
I’m not good at everything. Or, to be more honest, I’m pretty bad on some fairly major metrics. I’m selfish. I feel entitled to things always going my way. I despise hearing about other people’s problems, because I don’t like most people, especially people who would be described as normal. They say ignorance is bliss? I think bliss is for the ignorant. But before he met me, Jack was normal and good and blissful, and made the mistake of loving me anyway. And he got burned for it.
I am extremely good at one thing, though. I am good at tearing apart a prosecution. And from what I already knew, Jack needed someone good.
I owed this to him. And maybe I owed it to myself as well.
I PULLED UP A NUMBER
on my cell phone and hit Enter.
“Café Lissa.”
The woman at the other end of the line was the Lissa of Café Lissa. We met when I was eighteen years old through the luck of the draw that was Columbia University’s roommate matching system. A quarter century later, Melissa Reyes was still my best friend and quite possibly the only person I had ever met who truly understood me.
“Hey there.”
“Hey, I was hoping to hear from you. You’ve been incommunicado since a very late text last night about bumping into Ryan at Maialino. I’m afraid to ask.”
“It’s the same old thing. It’s . . . whatever.” Anyone else, if they actually knew that story, would start in with a lecture. But like I said, Melissa understands me. “Can you make a point of checking to see if Don’s swinging by the café tonight? He’s not real happy with me right now, and I need to talk to him.”
Don, in addition to being my law partner, was Melissa’s uncle. Her mother’s brother, to be precise. And, like me, Don could be found at Lissa’s multiple times a week.
“Sure, but won’t you see him before I do? What’s going on?”
“I can’t explain now. But it’s important.”
True to form, Melissa didn’t hesitate. “No problem. I’ll get him here.”
Once I hung up, I started typing a new text message to Jack’s daughter, Buckley.
Where are you?
I SHOULDN’T HAVE BEEN SURPRISED
that Charlotte’s apartment was in a luxury building on Central Park South. Even in college, she made no effort to hide the fact that she benefited from family money. She was one of the kids who could whisk away a friend to Paris for a weekend or show up with enough weed for the entire dorm. Her room, down the hall from Melissa and me, was a single, despite supposed campus policy that all freshmen have roommates. Rumor was, her grandfather was on the board of trustees. When Jack and I first moved in together to a place off campus, she showed up with a four-thousand-dollar espresso maker that took up half the counter space in our galley kitchen because she couldn’t stand my “Mr. Coffee mud drip diner sludge.”
These days, at least she earned some of her money on her own. Charlotte launched an online magazine back when people used to ask, “Who would
possibly
rely on information from the Internet?” The Room was part gossip, part politics, part news, focusing on life in New York City. The revenue started off slowly, with an occasional paid
advertisement from an Eighth Street shoe store or yet another midtown pizza stand claiming to be the “original” NYC pie.
The big splash came a few years after Jack and I broke up when the Room began encouraging people to send in their local celebrity sightings. All tips were compiled on a map. With just one click, any member of the public could find out who was where, wearing what, and with whom—preferably with photos, the less flattering, the better.
A media star was born.
I was with Jack for five years, which meant I was with Charlotte Caperton for five years, because for reasons I never quite understood, she was his best friend. They certainly weren’t cut from the same cloth. Jack only knew her in the first place because his father was the caretaker for the Capertons’ summer place in Long Island. Somehow two little boys from Glen Cove—Jack and his big brother, Owen—and a little girl from the Upper East Side became joined at the hips, playing Marco Polo a few times a year in a luxury pool overlooking Long Island’s north shore. Charlotte and Jack never could remember which of them decided to opt for Columbia first, but where one went, so did the other.
Like a protective mother, Charlotte never did approve of me as an appropriate partner for her best friend. The only good thing I could say about her then was that at least I didn’t need to be jealous. Charlotte was a 100 percent Gold Star Lesbian.
The lobby of her apartment building would be up to any discerning New Yorker’s standards, even Charlotte’s, with overstuffed furniture, gleaming white tables, and fresh flower arrangements the size of beach balls. I was in the process of confirming that the walls were lined with leather when Charlotte’s attentive doorman ended his quick phone call and gestured toward the elevator at the far end of this luxury fortress. “Miss Caperton is expecting you.”
As I stepped out of the elevator on the twenty-fifth floor, I saw her waiting for me at the end of the hall, the apartment door open behind
her. For some reason, I’d been expecting an older version of 1990s Charlotte—super-short brown gender-neutral hair, oversize clothes, a self-proclaimed “fat butch.” But she’d grown her hair out into a bob with blond highlights and was probably two jean sizes smaller than she’d been in college. She was wearing makeup and, if I wasn’t mistaken, a Helmut Lang tank top I’d been tempted to purchase on my last Bloomingdale’s trip. At her side was a tan pug looking warily with big black bug eyes at the new arrival.
“It’s about fucking time.”
She hadn’t completely changed. “Nice to see you, too, Charlotte.”
THE GIRL INSIDE THE DOORWAY,
though only a few years from being a beautiful woman, was still small enough to have been hidden from view by Charlotte’s imposing frame. Once Charlotte stepped inside the apartment, I was able to get a good look at her. Even without context, I might have immediately known her identity.
Buckley Harris had her father’s thin nose and angular chin, and her mother’s strawberry blond hair and a sprinkling of freckles. She was one of those kids who looked like a photo mash-up of her parents. Her shoulder-length hair fell in loose curls, and her light green eyes were enormous. To me she looked haunted, but maybe I knew too much about her life.
“You must be Buckley,” I said, extending my hand. “I’m Olivia Randall.”
When she didn’t immediately return the gesture, Charlotte nudged her. “Sorry,” Buckley muttered. She did not sound sorry. “I’ve been going crazy wondering where my dad is. When is he coming home?”
I suggested to Charlotte that perhaps she and I should talk alone. Buckley interrupted with a firm no. “
I’m
the one who called you. I can handle it.”
Charlotte closed her eyes. I’d known her long enough to guess that
she was counting silently. Old habits, etcetera. When she opened her eyes, her voice remained calm as she led the way to her living room. “Olivia, Buckley may look like Taylor Swift’s little ginger-haired sister, but she’s an old soul with the IQ of—I don’t know, some person too smart for me to have heard of. And, Buckley, not everyone gets you, okay? Get over it. Now, both of you: sit. Why the fuck is Jack under arrest?”
I looked at Charlotte to make sure this was really how we were going to do this, and then launched in, telling Buckley that her fears were correct. “The police think your father was involved in the shootings this morning at the waterfront. If I had to guess, they’ll be making an announcement any minute now.”
“
Involved?
” Charlotte asked. “Like, how is he
involved
? They can’t just go around holding witnesses, can they? Don’t they need a material witness warrant? Some special order from a terrorism court or something?”
By now, Jack would be getting booked at MDC. He’d soon experience the shock of his first encounter with a real jail cell. He’d be wondering whether he’d ever sleep in a room alone again, on a mattress more than three inches deep, or use a toilet that wasn’t made of metal, or take a private shower.
“They’re not holding him as a witness.” I fixed my gaze directly on Buckley. “They think your father did this. They think he was the shooter.”
Buckley looked five years younger as her face puckered with confusion, then outrage. She looked like what she was: a terrified little girl. A terrified little girl with one parent dead from a mass shooting, the other an accused killer. As if sensing her sadness, the pug managed to leap onto her lap. Buckley gave her a pat and muttered, “Good Daisy.”
“I know it’s hard to process. But this isn’t the end of anything; it’s the beginning. At this point, he’s only under arrest.” I saw no point in telling them that a senior ADA had already made up his mind about
Jack’s guilt. “From what I can tell, a large part of whatever evidence they have right now is based on motive. One of this morning’s victims was Malcolm Neeley.”
Buckley sucked in her breath at the mention of his name. She and Charlotte simultaneously launched into the same arguments I had raised at the precinct—that suing someone wasn’t the same as wanting to kill him, that other people blamed Neeley for his son’s actions just as much as Jack did.
I cleared my throat to interrupt. “There’s a complication.” I didn’t want to run the risk of them learning about the GSR evidence on the news. In dry, clinical language, I explained the process for testing for gunshot residue on a person’s clothing. “I’m told the test came back positive.”
Buckley fell back against the sofa, all the fight in her suddenly gone. Charlotte threw me a sharp look. So much for wanting me to give it to the kid straight.
THE GRANITE ISLAND IN CHARLOTTE’S
kitchen resembled the set of a cooking show, covered by an array of fresh ingredients, already chopped and measured, waiting to be assembled. I wondered if she’d done the preparations herself or had a chef for that.
“You realize you basically just told that girl you think her father’s guilty?”
I could tell she wanted to yell, but didn’t want Buckley to hear us from the den. “You’re the one who said she was an old soul.”
“That’s because I didn’t think you’d pull a total mind fuck on her. I treat Buckley the way I do to make up for all the tiptoeing everyone else has done around her since her mother died. She needs at least one person in her life who doesn’t act like she’s made of glass.”
“Jack said she could be sensitive.”
“No shit, Olivia. Some kid shot her mother at random. Kind of
shakes your faith in the world, don’t you think?” Perhaps realizing there was no point to this conversation, Charlotte shifted the conversation back to Jack’s arrest. “So someone actually killed that asshole Malcolm Neeley?”
“According to the police. And I don’t see why they’d lie about it.”
“And two bystanders?” she asked.
“At least the way they describe it.”