“I’ll be there in a minute,” he called out now, tapping his cigarette in the ashtray. His notebook was no longer in his hands, but he’d reread his interviews enough times he had them memorized. He closed his eyes and he could still hear their voices, too: Mrs. Buchanan’s sultry tones, Miss Baker’s brash and husky denials, and Miss McCoy, whose voice had trembled throughout their whole interview. They were all lying to him. But how—and why—he couldn’t put his finger on that yet.
Frank, why are you obsessing? Dolores had asked him over dinner. I read it in the papers—they already said that Mr. Wilson killed him after Gatsby ran over his wife. They found Wilson on the property dead, killed himself right after with the same gun. The New York Times said the case was closed.
I just have a feeling, he’d told her, vaguely.
But she’d nodded, understanding, by now, that was enough to take him seriously.
Dee was right, though—officially, the case was considered closed. Jay Gatsby had hit Myrtle Wilson with his car in front of Wilson’s garage on the ashiest street in Corona, killing her. The next day, her grief-stricken husband, George, had gone out to West Egg and shot Gatsby dead in his pool. Then he went out into the woods behind the house and shot himself.
But there was something else, something more among the ash heaps and millionaires that Frank couldn’t quite let go. Something didn’t smell quite right. For one thing, why didn’t Gatsby just stop the car? Witness accounts said Myrtle Wilson ran right out into the road, didn’t even look. The neighbor said George Wilson had kept her locked up and maybe she’d run in front of the car on purpose, trying to escape. So why didn’t Gatsby stop? If that had happened to Frank—if that had happened to most men—he would’ve stopped the car, stayed at the scene of the crash. No one would’ve blamed the driver.
But then he supposed Gatsby hadn’t been most men, living in that big mansion of his out in West Egg, throwing all the lavish parties. He was rumored to have been a war hero, or a bootlegger. Or both. Frank tended to lean toward the bootlegger theory himself, confirmed in his mind when Meyer Wolfsheim had come to the precinct yesterday morning and sought Frank out. Wolfsheim offered to pay Frank fifteen grand if he could find out the truth of what really happened.
Why me? Frank had asked Wolfsheim.
You’re the one who solved the Calibrisi murder, Wolfsheim had said, matter-of-factly. It had been in all the headlines last year, a schoolteacher found shot dead by Flushing Creek. They’d arrested her husband, but Frank had thought something hadn’t smelled right then, either, and six months later, he’d been the one to figure out she’d had a boyfriend on the side who was responsible.
Frank had nodded. But what makes you think we don’t already know the truth?
George Wilson didn’t have the guts to do it, Wolfsheim said, sounding so certain.
Frank briefly wondered how Wolfsheim and Wilson knew each other and also why Wolfsheim cared so much about Gatsby’s death. But Frank had been fixating on something else—and this was the other thing he couldn’t let go of, something Wolfsheim couldn’t possibly know about. The diamond hairpin. Frank turned it over in his palm now.
Myrtle Wilson had died in a hit-and-run in his jurisdiction, and he’d tied her death to Gatsby’s car the following morning. He’d driven out to West Egg, only to find Gatsby himself had just been shot. He’d decided to look around, and that’s when he’d found this hairpin, on the ground in the shrubs behind Gatsby’s pool. His Long Island colleagues had dismissed it—surely Gatsby had had lots of women out at his pool this summer. Any one of them could’ve lost the hairpin at any time. And anyway, they thought they already had the case all sewn up: Mrs. Wilson, Mr. Gatsby, Mr. Wilson, all dead by one another’s hands. Open and shut.
But Frank wasn’t so sure. The grounds were immaculate, and he didn’t think the hairpin could’ve been there for long without a caretaker noticing it. He himself had picked it up as the six tiny diamonds had glinted with sunlight, catching his eye.
What Wolfsheim didn’t know was that Frank wasn’t ready to let this go yet, money or no money. He’d already started poking around on his own time, talking to the women. Might as well try and make this money too. Dee could be skeptical all she wanted, but with a payday of fifteen grand, he could make her happy next summer. She’d always dreamed of renting a house up in East Egg for the season, and houses there, even just to rent for a few months, were not something Frank would ever be able to afford on his detective’s salary. She deserved it after all she’d been through these past few years. They both did.
“Frank!” Dolores called him again now.
“Coming, Dee,” he called back. He put his notebook and the hairpin back in his desk drawer. He extinguished his cigarette in the ashtray and turned out the light.
But as he stood and walked down the hallway to go to bed, something Nick Carraway said about his cousin Daisy, which had struck him funny at the time, struck him again: She’s dead inside, Nick had said. I don’t know what she’s capable of.
What exactly had Nick meant by that?
Daisy 1918
LOUISVILLE
A FULL MONTH AFTER CHRISTMAS day, our tree still sat naked in the parlor. Its branches, our house, devoid of any holiday cheer. Rose’s perfect ornaments sat packed away in the box on the hard pine floor by the fireplace, untouched. I didn’t think I could ever touch them again. Ever have Christmas again. The tree was dying, withering, but no one made a move to remove it, either. It looked exactly how I felt inside.
The train crash had been so bad that Daddy and Rose had come home in one single box, delivered with a letter from the railroad company saying they could not guarantee that all parts of their bodies had made it back to us. I read those words, pictured my dear sweet Rosie torn up into pieces, and I vomited right there on the spot, in the middle of the parlor. Then I tore the letter to pieces and threw it in the fire, so Mother could never read it.
Mother spent nearly a whole month in the dark in her bedroom, crying. “How will we survive?” she murmured to me, when I went in to check on her each morning. She knelt by her bed, praying through her tears. “Daisy Fay, pray with me,” she’d whisper, the snow goose hoarse, faltering.
It seemed a cruel joke, that God had cured Rosie of polio only to put her on a train that was going to run off the tracks a year later. And that he would be so spiteful to take Daddy with her. I did not believe that a god that hateful would exist, and then what was the use of praying to him any longer?
“I’m here,” I said to Mother, kneeling beside her. Instead of clasping my hands in front of me, I put my arm around her shoulders. I pulled her close to me. “You have me,” I promised her.
* * *
THE SECOND I read the telegram about the accident, everything changed.
Any sadness I’d thought I’d felt over Jay leaving was nothing compared to this. And I knew I could not follow Jay to New York as I’d promised him. I could not leave Mother, not after Christmas, not any time after that either. I sent Jay a telegram and told him what had happened, that I couldn’t come to New York to marry him now.