“Thank you,” he says softly when I’m finally seated. “I know what you think about me, Ella. And I don’t blame you for hating me. I hate myself for what I did. I know you don’t believe me when I say this, but I truly loved Charlotte. And, I think, in her own way, she loved me too.”
“She wouldn’t love you now.”
“Probably not. But I think she’d understand why I did what I did.”
“Help me with that, Zach. Because to me, it seems like you didn’t give a flying fuck about Charlotte. All you cared about—all you ever cared about—was Zach.”
To my surprise, these words seem to sting him. His eyes begin to tear, and although my first instinct is to remind myself that he’s a trained actor, I actually believe that his emotion is sincere.
“That’s just not true. Your sister . . . she was the most amazing person I’d ever met . . . I mean, I don’t have to tell you. I never could see what she saw in me. And part of me, I suppose, knew that she’d figure it out soon enough, and then it would be over. But I didn’t care because every day I was in her company I was a better man for it.”
“So you repaid her for making you such a good man by lying to the police so they couldn’t find her?”
“No. No. No. That’s not the way it happened at all.”
“Then tell me. How did it happen?”
He sighs loudly and exhales a mouthful of air. Then he shakes his head, as if silently rejecting his own advice not to talk to me.
“I don’t remember exactly when I first started to think about it, but around Christmas, I got the sense that something had changed. She was out a lot. Much more than usual. And then when I questioned her about it, she’d claim that she was at rehearsal until one or two in the morning, or something equally implausible. I understood what was going on. I knew there was someone else.”
“So it’s all Charlotte’s fault. Is that what you’re doing here? Blaming the victim?”
“No,” he says with another shake of his head. “The motherfucker who did this to Charlotte . . . if I knew who he was, I’d fucking kill him myself. But what I’m trying to say is that your sister was out a lot over the past few months, and I decided that two could play that game, so I went to Carly’s for the night. I didn’t realize that Charlotte hadn’t been home on Tuesday night because I was out all night. When she was out late the next night, I figured it was because she was pissed at me. That’s why I wasn’t worried. To be honest, I was sure she was safe and sound—in somebody else’s bed. So of course I wasn’t calling the police. But when none of her friends knew where she was, and I couldn’t track her iPhone . . . that’s when I called you.”
I follow Zach’s train of thought and know full well what dysfunctional relationships can make you do, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to cut him any slack.
“I couldn’t care less who you’re fucking. I feel sorry for her. That’s all. But you crossed a very serious line when you lied to the cops. That lie might have cost Charlotte her life. You’re going to have to live with that, and I’m going to hate you forever for it.”
“I know. And I . . . I can’t even begin to understand what this has been like for you. But at the same time, I don’t think you can begin to understand what it was like for me when she disappeared. I mean, I’m her boyfriend. I’m a black man. I’m cheating on her. I think she’s cheating on me. And now she’s missing? Who’s going to believe that I didn’t kill her?”
“You got that right.”
“But I didn’t. I swear to God, Ella. I didn’t. I never would have hurt Charlotte.”
“I know that’s not true, Zach. You hurt her plenty.”
24.
Dylan arrives at my place exactly at seven. He’s clad in blue jeans with the kind of fade that only comes with years of ownership, and a dark, long-sleeved, collared shirt that’s tight enough to remind me of what he looks like without it.
While getting ready, I briefly considered breaking into Cassidy’s wardrobe for an outfit, but then I realized that he’d seen the real me at Riverside Park, which meant that I should stop pretending around him, especially given the circumstances. So I opted for something that was in keeping with Ella Broden’s life—jeans and a loose-fitting top, although I did select my favorite of each.
Dylan hands me a bottle of wine. “I don’t know much about wine,” he says. “But the guy in the store said that this was good.”
I can’t help but contrast Dylan’s unabashed ignorance about wine with Paul’s flawless pronunciation of the fancy chardonnay we ordered at Mas. I much prefer Dylan’s unpretentiousness.
“My motto is that every wine goes with Italian food,” I say. “There’s this great little place I always order in from. They have pastas and small pizzas, so I thought maybe we’d have a carbfest and do one of each.”
“I’m in your hands,” he says.
The wine turns out to be a rosé, which must have been refrigerated in the store because it is reasonably cold. Over dinner—pizza with prosciutto and figs, and penne alla vodka—Dylan Perry tells me his life story. He’s thirty-nine but has no trepidation about turning forty and has never been married, although he lived with a girlfriend for three years in his early thirties, claiming, “It was fine, but I kind of knew all along that she wasn’t the one.” He was born in Wyoming, of all places, but spent most of his formative years in Manhattan, Kansas, where his father taught in the English department at the university. “So, I like to tell people that this is the second time I’ve lived in Manhattan, even though I actually live in Brooklyn.” He attended college at Duke—“Go Blue Devils!”—and med school at Johns Hopkins, practicing for a few years in San Francisco before coming to New York to work with Doctors Without Borders. He’s spent the last six months in Peru.
He asks about my time as a prosecutor. I answer the way I always do, telling him that the best part of the job was knowing you were making the city safer and delivering justice for the victim and her family.
It isn’t until I’ve emptied the last of the bottle of wine into our respective glasses that he asks the question I can only assume he’s been dying to pose since he learned my true identity: “What was a nice girl like you doing all vamped out under an alias at open-mic night at Lava?”
“I’m a cautionary tale,” I begin. “I went to the high school for the performing arts here in New York City. You know, the one that the movie Fame was based on. College at Columbia, majoring in theater, with every intention of becoming a singer after graduation. Then my mother died the fall of my junior year, and . . . I guess it made me feel like I needed to do something more solid, more grown-up. I suppose a shrink might also surmise that I wanted to curry favor with my father. Anyway, I went off to law school. Fast-forward fifteen, sixteen years, and here I am, wishing I had made vastly different life choices.”
I’ve never said it so forcefully before. But there it is. The tragic story of Ella Broden in less than a hundred words.
“And that’s why you turn into Cassidy at Lava?”