“No. She’s an adult woman in her fifties. I feel no obligation to support her. Truthfully, I never officially asked her to live with me. She just moved in, bit by bit. If I hadn’t sold my New York apartment, I’m not sure how I would have gotten her out of it.”
“Her mother says that her daughter was saying she knew something about you.”
There it was again, the vague threat. To what could she possibly be alluding? Gerry’s conscience was clear. Except for the part about Margot dying.
“She knew a lot about me. We were together for several years.”
“Her mother said she said she had a secret about you. That she was going to confront you.”
“Yes, and she did, but it was nothing more than an empty threat.” His gaze is level and cool. He is a man immobilized by injury. He cannot be a suspect in anything. “The sad truth is that Margot was—is—a hysteric. She’d say anything to get what she wants. She was very angry at me. She attacked me in my bed. Victoria, my assistant—she was here, she’ll tell you what happened. Margot hit me, she scratched my face, I managed to push her off with this walker I can’t yet use.” He indicates his walker, his trusty sentry. “I could have filed a police complaint. I let it be, because—well, she was a delightful companion once. I preferred to remember the good times. My scratches are no longer visible, but the night nurse saw them. She bought me some Mederma to help them heal.”
Detective Jones smiles ruefully. “Women.” Then: “I’d like to talk to your assistant. And maybe your nurse?”
Shit, shit, shit. As competent as Aileen has proven herself to be, Gerry does not think this is a good idea. Why had they not anticipated this, agreed on a mutual version?
“She wasn’t here when it happened. Only Victoria. It was the afternoon and my nurse is here at night. You can check that with the front desk.”
“Yes, I asked the young woman if she remembered Ms. Chasseur. She did. She says she arrived here that afternoon, then ran out about fifteen minutes later.”
Then how did she get back in, in the middle of the night, without being heard or observed by anyone? Gerry has to stop himself from asking the detective that question.
“It is baffling,” he says instead. “Did she get a cab, take an Uber?”
“No one knows. She vanished into thin air.”
Gerry turns the cliché over in his mind, wondering why it’s always thin air. It’s not as if people disappear only at high altitudes. He also wonders where Margot spent the hours before she returned, how she got into the building. The front desk was unmanned—unwomanned? unPEOPLED?—after nine P.M. Another resident could buzz one in, but otherwise, someone would have to have a key card to enter the lobby, and a key for the twenty-fifth floor. It was also possible to take the elevator from the garage straight to the apartment. But, even then, one would need the elevator key.
Oh my God—he knows. He knows, he knows, he knows. He sees Margot, picking herself up from the floor, then taking his wallet and eliciting several bills, saying the least he could do was pay her cab fare. His security card for the building was in his wallet. Obviously he had no use for it, wouldn’t notice it missing. And his keys, they hung by a hook next to the front door, under the mirror where she had stopped and fussed with her hair. Margot would have been able to identify his key ring, a sterling silver loop from Tiffany’s. She had given it to him. He would bet anything it’s not there now.
“It’s a dangerous city,” Gerry says. “That’s all I can tell you.”
“But not a city where a fifty-one-year-old white woman disappears without a trace.”
“I guess you’ve never heard about Susan Harrison.” Gerry decides to distract the detective with his knowledge of the 1994 case, which he had researched for a novel he ended up abandoning. A woman and a man in a folie à deux, although that term was considered politically incorrect now, he supposed, given that the man had almost certainly killed the woman, and where was the “folie” in that? Gerry had been drawn to the fact that a drunk, an unsubtle man with little intellect, seemed to have committed the perfect crime almost by accident. But as he burrowed into the material, he could find nothing more to say about it. The story almost begged to be written as a dark comedy, a nasty Candide or another riff on Being There, and even Gerry realized that was not going to fly in the twenty-first century.
The detective listens politely, but he is clearly bored. Good, that’s what Gerry intends. He plays the part of the garrulous old man shut-in, rambling and desperate for company. It is discomfiting how easily this persona comes to him, how readily this younger man accepts this version of him. He is sixty-one, not eighty-one! Two months ago he was in vigorous health, a person who required no medications beyond a daily vitamin.
He wonders if the detective is indulging Gerry’s wandering narrative, in part, because he hopes Gerry is going to offer up some inconsistency on which he can pounce. But one of Gerry’s great strengths as a writer is POV. The man in his bed is not him. The man in his bed is “Gerry Andersen,” an injured writer who has no idea what has happened to his former lover, Margot. Where did Margot go, he wonders. How did Aileen dispose of her?
He thinks about the incinerator where he and his mother used to drive their crab feast refuse. She was particular about this; they must never allow the shells and cartilage to stay on their property overnight. She believed they would lead to terrible odors that could never be eradicated if left inside the house. But in a trash can outside, they would attract raccoons, who would scatter them across the backyard. So they would wrap up the newspapers littered with crab carcasses and put them inside garbage bags and drive them all the way into town, to that terrible hulking furnace.
It was one of the favorite moments of his youth. His father had done this task before he disappeared, but always with reluctance and complaint, and refusing to let Gerry accompany him. Once he was gone, Gerry joined his mother in the front seat—remember when kids could ride in the front seat?—and he had felt powerful, grown-up. There was a sense of mission about the journey.
If it wasn’t too late, they stopped at Windy Valley for soft-serve and he patted the ponies that were penned there.
He is aware of his brain working on all these levels—Gerry the writer, telling the story that will bore/beguile the detective; Gerry the twelve-year-old riding in that old Ford station wagon with his mother. He sees himself as Duncan in The World According to Garp, reaching for his brother’s hand as they descend into the hellmouth of their driveway, toward the literal and figurative collision of their parents’ failings, failings that will take one child’s eye and another child’s life.
“Well,” the detective says as Gerry finally winds down, “you’ve given me a lot to think about.”
Of course, no one says that unless they mean the opposite, so Gerry is pleased. He has bored the detective into submission.
“Happy to help.”
“Okay if I talk to your assistant?”
“Sure. She’s downstairs.”
The detective gone, Gerry pulls his smartphone out from under his blanket. He turned on the audio recorder when Victoria opened the door to the detective. He has fallen in love with his phone, for its capabilities and potential. It is a smart phone. It is smarter than anyone who works for him, that’s for sure. And generally silent, bless its heart. He will listen to the recording later, commit his own words to memory.
2012
“SO I WON’T be able to speak in class tomorrow, but I don’t think that should affect my grade.”
Without his class roster in front of him, Gerry could never remember this student’s name, only that she kept reminding him that it rhymed with the name of a character in a Judy Blume book, as if that would be helpful to him. He thought of her as Wizard Girl because she submitted fantasy stories about wizards and warlocks and vampires. Never had fantasy been less fantastic.
“Just so I understand, tomorrow is a day of solidarity for gay people—”