“Send him up, by all means.”
The detective who arrives a few minutes later, admitted by a clearly curious Victoria, does not fit any archetype that Gerry knows, but then every detective archetype Gerry knows is from television or literature. He is not a slow-talking good ol’ boy with a shrewd intelligence under his coarse, buffoonish manners. He is not a Black Dapper Dan with an ornate vocabulary. He does not wear a rumpled raincoat. He is a man of indeterminate race named John Jones, who looks as if he were made in a factory. His one distinctive feature is his glacial blue eyes, but those only make him seem more android-like.
“I’m with the NYPD. A woman—Margot Chasseur—has gone missing. We believe you may be one of the last people to see her.”
Dates are fuzzy for Gerry, but that’s to his advantage. There was nothing momentous about his final meeting with Margot. Okay, his penultimate meeting, and she attacked him, forcing him to push her hard enough that it might have left bruises, not that there’s any skin left to inspect. Still, he honestly can’t remember the date.
“I’ve seen her twice since my accident. Both were unexpected visits.”
“When was the last time?”
“I couldn’t say. Maybe a week or two ago?” Because it’s not an important date to me because I didn’t kill her, I really don’t think I killed her, does it count if you’re on Ambien, if you can’t remember anything?
“According to Amtrak, she bought a round-trip ticket here on March 12. Was that the last time you saw her?”
“That sounds right. Dates, days—they mean less to me now. When you’re in my condition, the days run together.”
“But she was here?”
He is aware of Victoria, bustling around in the kitchen, taking an inordinate amount of time to make tea. A nosy parker, his mother would have called her. Gerry realizes he has no idea what a nosy parker is. His mother’s speech had been full of mysterious anachronisms, a by-product of her voracious, indiscriminate reading.
“Yes, she was. My assistant was there that day. Victoria, do you remember the date?”
“It was the day before you sent me to Princeton—yes, the twelfth.” Victoria takes her tea and goes downstairs. Eavesdropping is one thing, but she apparently has no desire to be pulled into the conversation. Good. Gerry wouldn’t want her to share what she saw that afternoon. But if the detective asks to talk to her, he supposes he will probably have to let him.
“That train ticket is the last thing we can tie to her. She hasn’t answered her phone or used her credit cards.”
“Oh my God, are you suggesting—” Gerry catches himself. Because he does not know she’s dead, he would be distraught, this news is unexpected. He is a character in a novel. He knows how to do this, how to inhabit a character’s POV without authorial omniscience.
“She never returned to New York.”
“Oh.” He feigns relief. Because a normal person, an innocent person, would default to optimism, right? “Margot is a … an impulsive woman. She could be in St. Barts. Or anywhere warm. She hates New York in the winter.”
“Winter’s pretty much over, though.”
“You live there, Detective. You know how the cold weather creeps along into April, and then it goes straight to summer by late May.”
“Her mother is worried.”
Margot has a mother? The news is not only surprising, it is infuriating. How dare Margot have a mother when Gerry has none? She never mentioned having a mother. Margot does not deserve a mother.
“I don’t know what to tell you.” True enough.
“The thing is—she bought a round-trip ticket. Amtrak confirmed her ticket was scanned for the trip down. But her ticket for the trip back was never used.”
Gerry thought about Columbo, another show he and his mother had watched together. The hubristic rich villains always fell into the trap of trying to explain inconsistencies. But if you’re not the killer and you’re not the detective, why would you bother?
He said: “How do they know?”
“Everything’s computerized now. She bought the ticket online. There’s a, whatchamacallit. A little square that the conductor scans. Anyway, she was in the reservation system, scheduled to travel back the next day.”
Gerry yearns to tell the detective that it’s possible to be overlooked on Amtrak, that he has made the trip between New York and Baltimore more than once without anyone asking for his ticket. Or he could say Margot, dismayed by the quality of the food on the trip down, might have chosen another way to return to New York, which, come to think of it, would be pure Margot. But, no, that’s what the big-name guest stars always made the mistake of doing, trying to help Columbo with his case. Again, it’s not on him to figure out why Margot didn’t use her return ticket.
“Interesting that she booked her return for the next day. The first time she visited me, she expected to spend the night here. I made it clear that she was not welcome and had Victoria put her on the next train.”
“What did you talk about?”
“Which time?”
“The last time.”
The truth, or at least a portion of it, seems the best gambit. “She had no place to live. She was distraught. She could not accept that I had sold my place in New York, that she had to find her own apartment.”
“Why did she expect you to help her out when you had already told her you wouldn’t?”
Gerry sighs. Strangely, he has almost forgotten the body on his floor, the blood, the disturbing noises in the night, the buzz of the cordless handsaw, the freezer that has come and gone. He feels fatherly toward this younger man and wants to warn him about women, what the worst ones can do.
“Margot was—is, I hope, I hope she’s alive, I wish her well—Margot is a woman who makes a habit of taking things for granted. Last year, I moved down here to care for my mother, having been told that she had a very short time to live. I expected to be here a month or two, but it stretched out for much of 2018 and it became apparent that I needed to sell my apartment, where Margot was ensconced. My mother’s decline, her death—it exposed the—I wouldn’t call it superficiality, but the lack of seriousness in our relationship. It’s easy to fall into arrangements as one ages. To re-create patterns that look like things we call ‘relationships’ or ‘marriages.’ But it was, for want of a better phrase, a passing fancy. When I relocated to Baltimore, I assumed Margot would move on to another man. She never went long without the company of a man. I’d bet almost anything she’s found someone else to support her.”
“If that’s so, it’s news to her mother.”
“Well, the fact that she even has a living mother is news to me.”
“She lives on Long Island. Gertrude Chessler. Appears Ms. Chasseur changed her name legally when she was in her twenties.”
Gerry tries to remember what Margot had told him of her past. Very little, he realizes. She had always presented herself as an Aphrodite, rising on her clamshell in New York circa 1995, young and lovely and feral. He had not known her then—he was back in Baltimore, living with Gretchen, teaching at Hopkins—but Margot had shown him the photographs taken of her in her heyday, the little society squibs in which she made appearances. He had pretended to care.
He repeats, stuck on the fact: “I never even knew she had a mother.”
“Why would Ms. Chasseur come see you if she knew she couldn’t stay here?”
“Because she wanted money.” He allows himself another sigh. “It’s all she ever wanted from me.”
It’s depressing, this accidental truth. He was a meal ticket; she was a gold digger. He never saw it this way before now. Their relationship was completely transactional. All Margot’s relationships were transactional.
“Did you give it to her?”