Trust Your Eyes (32 page)

Howard could not allow Morris to move forward with his plans while that remained a possibility. The trick was keeping the man in check without telling him why he needed to hold off.

Howard could not tell him the truth.

Howard could
never
tell him the truth.

He was sitting at his desk when the phone buzzed. It was his secretary, Agatha. “He’s here,” she said. She hadn’t even finished that short sentence before the door opened and in strode The Man himself.

Howard was up and around his desk, hand extended. “Hey,” he said. Morris returned the handshake with a firm grip. He walked over to the bar Howard kept in the corner of his office and poured two scotches.

“I had a very interesting conversation this morning,” Morris said, handing one to Howard.

“Who with?” Howard said.

“Bridget.”

“Is that a fact,” Howard said, settling himself into a chair as Morris did the same. “What did you talk about?”

Morris grinned. “A lot of things. We talk all the time, you know.”

“I’m sure you do.”

“But today, it was kind of special. She told me it was time.”

Howard drank. “Did she?”

Morris nodded. “She told me to follow my dream. She said to go for it. She said I’d waited long enough. She told me she didn’t want me waiting any more because of her.”

“Well.”

“Because, honestly, she’s been the only reason I’ve still been waiting, Howard. This thing with Goldsmith, it’s over. When’s
the last time you saw the
Times
do a story on it? The man’s secrets died with him.”

“Other people know. Other people in the agency.”

“They won’t talk, Howard. They’ve closed ranks. It’s over.”

“We can’t ever be certain of that.”

“So what are you saying? That we never move forward? That we never get back on the horse?”

“I’m not saying that, Morris. But we still need to proceed with caution. We can’t lose sight of our long-term objectives. Morris, you can make it all the way. You know that, don’t you? You can get there, right to Pennsylvania Avenue. I know it. I have faith. But it can’t happen if we take the short view. We have to make our decisions with the future in mind.”

Morris knocked back his drink, set the glass on the table between them, and looked down into his lap. He went very quiet.

“Morris? Are you okay?”

“Bridget said something else,” he said.

“Morris, do you really think—”

“She said she forgives me.” He raised his head and looked at Howard. “That’s what she said. She forgives me.”

“Well, that’s good, Morris, but I don’t see how that relates—”

“Do you know what that meant to me? Do you have any idea the guilt I’ve been feeling?”

“Of course I do. God knows, we’ve been over it. And I’ve told you, you don’t have anything to feel guilty about. You weren’t the only one who didn’t see the signs. None of us did. Some people, they keep their troubles to themselves, buried deep inside.”

“I still can’t get my head around it. I asked her, you know.”

Howard swallowed. “You asked Bridget.”

“I did. I asked her, when she appeared to me, I asked her why. Why didn’t she just talk to me? We could have worked it out. You know what she said to me?”

Howard closed his eyes. He didn’t know how much more of this he could take. “What did she say, Morris?”

“She said not to blame myself.”

“Well, that’s terrific. That really is.”

Morris gave his friend a sharp look. “Don’t be flip about this, Howard. I don’t appreciate it.”

“I’m sorry. Really, I am. But, Morris, we can’t move forward based on what Bridget tells you. I’m dealing with the real world. With the press, and federal investigators, a scandal that could still bite us in the ass.”

Morris seemed not to be listening. “It’s just, when you compare what Bridget is saying now, to what she told you on the phone—it’s very different. She told you I was sucking the life out of her. Wasn’t that what she told you?”

“You have to consider her state of mind at the time.”

“What if, at that moment, she was thinking as clearly as she ever had?”

“Jesus Christ, Morris!” Howard exploded. “Enough.”

Morris sat back in his chair as though he’d been shoved.

“You can’t keep doing this to yourself. You have to stop. You have to move on.”

“Haven’t you been listening, Howard? That’s exactly what I want to do, what Bridget wants. You’re the one holding me back.”

“And you should thank God I am,” he snapped back. “While you’re having chats with ghosts, I’m dealing with political realities.” He was on his feet, pointing a finger at Morris. “And you need to wait. You get back into this too soon, those goddamn pundits, you know what they’re going to say? That you got over her pretty fast, that’s what they’ll say. You’ll look insensitive.”

Morris looked away. “Two wives,” he said.

“What?”

“It would be hard enough for a man to have one wife kill
herself. But two? What does that say about a man? What does that say about
me
? First Geraldine kills herself in the garage. And then Bridget.” He looked imploringly at Howard. “Just what kind of monster am I?”

“You see?” Howard said. “This just proves that you’re not ready to get back into the game. You still need time to heal. Morris, trust me. I’m your friend. And I’m telling you this, as your friend, that this is not the time.”

Yeah, I’m some friend
, Howard thought.
I sent someone to kill your blackmailer, and ended up killing your wife instead.

Sometimes Bridget spoke to Howard, too, but she was far less forgiving.

FORTY

IT
is August.

Allison Fitch has worked her usual shift, and would normally be sleeping now, this time of day, but she is up early. She’s had a phone call, and now she has an errand to run. She’s dressed, ready to go out. She has to run downstairs to the scarf store. She had managed, the week before, against all odds, to get them to accept a personal check for $123.76 for two silk scarves. “I live on the block, practically above your shop,” she’d told them. “I’m in here all the time,” she’d said. She’d shown them her ID, a driver’s license. Gave them her cell phone number. The girl on the cash register was new and finally relented.

Check bounced.

The manager has called. Three times. Most recently, fifteen minutes ago. Told Allison that if she isn’t there with $123.76 in cash in the next hour, she’s going to call the police and tell them Allison Fitch has defrauded them.

As it turns out, Allison has more than five hundred dollars in cash in her purse. A bunch of dickheaded traders from a
prominent Wall Street firm had a party at the bar last night. They’d made some kind of killing in the market and were celebrating. Throwing money around. Tipping big. And, earlier in the day, Allison had gone to the ATM and taken out a couple of hundred. With all that cash, she figures she could go on a shopping spree when she gets up the next day. A warm-up before the
really
big money comes. She figures Howard Talliman will be in touch anytime now to set up a meeting, where he’ll hand over the cash in exchange for her silence.

Boy, she thinks, the expression on his face when she let him believe she’d heard Bridget having some kind of top secret chat with her husband. Guy looked like he’d just eaten a rat sandwich. She’d just figured it stood to reason a man like Morris Sawchuck had secrets, and that he might discuss them with his wife.

Suppose she’d heard some of them?

Hilarious thing is, she never heard a goddamn thing. But now she’s more sure than ever that she’s going to get that one hundred grand. Pretending to hear the call was just the icing on the lesbo-affair cake she needed to seal the deal.

So she figures, what the hell, she’ll pay off that bitch for the scarves, then come home, go back to bed.

She is slipping on her jacket, throwing the strap of her purse over her shoulder when she gets a buzz from the lobby.

Allison hits the button. “Yeah?”

“It’s me. We need to talk.”

Shit.
Bridget.

Allison lets her in and half a minute later Bridget is at her apartment door.

“Hey,” Allison says, closing the door as the woman comes into the kitchen.

“What did you tell him?”

“What?”

“What did you tell Howard? What did you tell him you heard?”

Allison holds up a hand. “Look, we met, we came to an arrangement, and everything’s okay, so don’t worry about it.”

“What did you hear?”

“I’m not getting into this with you. And listen, if anyone’s got a bone to pick, it’s me. You should have been up front with me. You should have told me who you really were.”

“Allison, listen to me. You’re making a mistake, pushing Howard too far.”

“We got along fine. Everything’s cool.”

“Whatever he’s agreed to give you, you have to promise him you’ll never, ever, hit him up for more. He’ll do anything to protect my husband. If you’re smart, you’ll call it all off. You’ll tell him you don’t want any money, that he doesn’t need to buy your silence, that you’ll never say a word about us to anyone, that you never heard any—”

“Look, this is fun and all, but I really have to go. I’ve got to run downstairs and deal with this bitch who says I owe her money. I’ll be, like, five minutes. Stay here, make yourself at home, whatever, we’ll talk when I get back.”

“You have to believe me,” Bridget says. “You’re in over your head.”

“Fine, fine, we’ll talk about it when I get back.” Allison slides her purse strap higher onto her shoulder and heads out into the hall, pulling the door closed behind her.

Bridget stands briefly in the kitchen, then, feeling restless, moves farther into the apartment. She walks into the living room area, where the pullout couch Allison sleeps on is extended, the covers a mess. She reaches for a
Cosmopolitan
on the coffee table, looks at the cover featuring Ashley Greene and the headline “60 Sex Tips,” notices the issue is months old. She drops it back onto the table.

Bridget goes to the living room window, gazes down the street, looks at the traffic. There’s a car down there with something funny on top of it. A small car, a Civic maybe, with a short pole fixed to the roof with brackets, and something mechanical-looking on the end of it.

Bridget steps away from the window, still restless. She wanders into the bedroom, casts her eye upon this second unmade bed. She walks around it to the bedroom window and stands there, listens to the muffled sounds of the city through the pane of glass, feeling anxious. She berates herself, for at least the hundredth time, for allowing herself to get into a compromising relationship. For putting everything at risk. Herself. Her husband. His future.

I’m such a fool,
she thinks.
Such an idiot. I have everything and I’m throwing it away. Need to control my impulses. There’s that weird car again. What is that on—

Hears something behind her. Starts to turn.

Everything goes white.

She cannot breathe.

NICOLE
is finished. She has retrieved the cell phone from the target’s purse. She is preparing to leave when she hears the door open. It’s too soon for the cleanup crew. She has only just made the call.

The roommate
. It must be the roommate. She’s supposed to be at work. She’s come back to the apartment during the day.

Shit shit shit.

From the kitchen, a woman calls out, “Bridget?”

Bridget?

Nicole’s briefing for this job included two names: the target, Allison Fitch, and Courtney Walmers, the woman with whom she shares this Orchard Street apartment.

If the woman Nicole has just killed is Bridget, then the person
entering the apartment could be the target. Or it could still be Walmers.

Doesn’t much matter. It could be goddamn Britney Spears, for all Nicole cares. It’s a complication she must deal with.

Nicole intends to move around the bed, flatten herself up against the wall before the woman comes into the bedroom. But before she can make the move, the woman appears in the doorway.

Her eyes move from Nicole to the dead woman and back again. In an instant.

That’s all it takes for Nicole to see who she is. She recognizes her from the photos she was provided beforehand.
This
is Allison Fitch. She’s about the same size and height as the dead woman. Roughly same color hair.

Fitch screams, turns, runs.

Nicole knows she has to move quickly to shut the woman up. Forever.

Twice the work for the cleanup crew. They’ll have to deal with it.

Nicole intends to take the same shortcut out of the room that she used to enter it. Straight across the bed. Sees the moves in her head without even having to think about them. Push off the floor with left foot, right foot hits the bed, left foot lands on other side.

Should save her a full second.

Fitch has just slipped from her sight, tearing through the kitchen for the door. Nicole leaps onto the bed, but her foot gets tangled in the rumpled bedspread. Nicole tumbles forward off the far side of the mattress, dragging the bedspread with her as she slams into the wall.

She untangles her foot from the spread, comes through the bedroom door like a sprinter charging out of the blocks. The door to the hall is open. She can hear frantic footsteps, at least a floor below.

Not good.

Nicole descends the two flights of stairs three steps at a time. Bursts onto the street. Stops, looks both ways.

No sign of Allison Fitch to the north.

No sign of Allison Fitch to the south.

Nicole takes out her cell and calls Lewis. “You’re not going to like this,” she says.

LEWIS
calls Howard. Tells him the wrong woman was killed. That Fitch got away. And that it’s even worse than that.

The dead woman is Bridget.

“Mother of God,” Howard says. “What are you telling me?
Bridget?
She killed
Bridget
?” He is saying all this in heated whispers so Agatha will not hear him on the other side of the office door.