It’s over.
Don says everything he has to say to save his ass, as expected. For the purpose of Don’s hearing, the Feds—who showed up hoping Don would reveal a vast interstate criminal conspiracy—love me. When it’s all over, the police, in the form of Agent Birdwell, keep coming at me, looking for contradictions I don’t provide. When I come out of Interrogation Room A, I’ve been in there for five hours straight.
My mother’s in the hall thanking Mr. Ferro when Nicolette comes out of Interrogation Room D with her lawyer, who looks like she eats alligators for breakfast. Nicolette looks like she just crawled out of an avalanche, white and traumatized. Esteban Mendes is standing half an inch from her, holding a little pink case with her dog, Gertie, in it.
I want to wrap my arms around Nicolette. I want to take her hand and run out the emergency exit and into the street.
“Nick, are you all right? Can we talk for a minute?”
Mendes says the most definitive no I’ve ever heard.
Ferro tries to steer me to the opposite side of the hall.
Birdwell, just behind us, close enough to grab me in case someone tells him in his earpiece that he gets to arrest me, says, “I would advise against that.”
Mr. Ferro loves getting under this guy’s skin. “You dropped all the charges. You can’t stop them from talking.”
Mendes extends his arm in front of Nicolette, as if they’re in a car that’s about to make a sudden stop, and he won’t let her lurch forward when he hits the brakes. But there’s something about not being allowed to do pretty much anything that galls her. She says, “Steve, don’t. Let me. Just this once. Please.”
He says, “You want to cross me on this?”
“Fifteen minutes. Please.”
Mendes says, “Fifteen minutes is right.”
Her lawyer reaches back and opens the door of the room they just came out of. It’s a lot nicer than the room I just came out of, upholstered chairs, wooden table.
Ferro says, “The recorder still switched on in here? No, thanks,” and pulls open the door to an adjoining break room with a coffee maker and a microwave.
Our lawyers follow us in.
Nicolette says, “I can take care of myself.”
They don’t seem so sure about this, but they leave us alone.
Nicolette stares out the window across the skyline to the steel grey river.
“I’m so sorry,” I say to the back of her head. “If you could forgive me, ever—”
“Stop it!” She turns, and I’m looking at her real eyebrows, pale brown, and her hair bleached back to the blond it’s supposed to be. She looks like a badly disillusioned angel. “You’ve more than paid.”
I say, “I told the truth.”
“I know,” she says. Then she whispers in my ear, “God will probably smite me for lying to the police, but I’m not putting you in prison.”
I hold her while she cries. I’m surprised she lets me, but maybe it’s an any-port-in-a-storm kind of thing. Her body is still so warm, still the only girl I can imagine wanting. And it’s not just lust-wanting. I’m capable of lust-wanting anyone. I could probably lust after her scary lawyer stripped down if you dared me. I want Nicolette like wanting to be in the same room with her forever, wanting to take care of her even though she can take better care of herself than I ever did.
But even in the middle of her narrative, which is saving me; and Mr. Ferro’s narrative, which has kept me ten paces ahead of the law; and Birdwell’s narrative, which has me as a cold-blooded killer who heartlessly fucked his victim before kidnapping her and dragging her off to be murdered, I have to know what really happened in Esteban Mendes’s kitchen.
I open the door to a balcony that runs along the outside of the room. We stand in the far corner, facing into the noise of the traffic below.
I say, “Baby, how well did you know Alex Yeager?”
89
Nicolette
As if it’s nothing, as if it’s just something to say between bites of burger, Jack says, “Is Alex-the-creep-from-Ann-Arbor Alex Yeager?”
I know how to do, Yikes, busted! I do. I’m the reigning princess of the cute confession. If cute confession was classified as an official talent, I’d be Miss Ohio Teen USA.
But I don’t know how to do this.
“How . . . ?”
“Your friend Olivia. She thought I might be him in Cotter’s Mill, when I was looking for you.” He pauses, waiting for something I don’t give him. “And there was the car. There was a red Camaro at the end of your driveway.”
I start to cry, which is a key element of cute confession, but it’s completely real. Real and unstoppable.
Plus, I have a headache. I don’t even get headaches. But this is like an ax hacking off the top of my head.
“Don’t be mad at me.”