Dina was just starting to elaborate on the employment land mines that were now in the ground before him when his cell phone rang. He pulled it from his suit pocket and saw a number he didn’t recognize. He let it ring and the call went to voice mail. When the screen showed that he had a message, he pushed “speaker” and put the phone down on Dina’s desk.
“Mr. Chapman, hi. Cynthia Prescott here. I’m with the New York Post. You probably know why I’m calling and I am sorry to bother you.” She left her number and asked him to call her back.
“How the hell did she get my cell phone number?” he asked Dina.
“Maybe from someone at the party. Maybe not. There are lots of sites now where you can look up a cell number.”
“Really?”
She nodded.
“Can you call her back for me?” he asked. “Bill told me it would be best if you spoke to the reporters.”
“I will. But I see no reason to call her back right now. You haven’t been charged with a crime and probably won’t be. You said the girls may have looked barely postpubertal, but—”
“I said they looked young, but they were definitely of age.”
“I understand. That’s where I was going. That was going to be my point.”
“Don’t I want my side out there?”
She raised an eyebrow and for the first time gazed at him with judgment in her eyes. “And precisely what is your side, Richard?”
He sat there thinking for a moment. He saw the girl Alexandra on the guest room bed, her smile balancing longing and desire without regret. He saw her once more reaching out to him.
He realized that he had absolutely nothing to say.
…
As Richard was leaving Dina’s office, he recalled how he had told the detectives last night that he thought the blond girl—the one who was calling herself Sonja—had killed both of the bodyguards. Abductors. Whatever. But he really had no idea who had fired the handgun. He hadn’t seen it. None of the men had.
Just now he told Dina Renzi the same thing: he thought the blonde had killed both of the Russians, the first with that knife and the second with the pistol she had pulled from beneath the dying thug’s blazer.
And this was, more or less, what he had told Kristin had happened—though when he thought back on his conversation with his wife, most of his focus had been on what he had done (or not done) with the girl with the raven-dark hair.
He knew the other men who had been at the party were not so sure. Some, in fact, insisted that it had to have been Alexandra who had shot the dude in the front hallway. Chuck Alcott said so. Eric did, too. They both assumed it was her. After all, they recalled hearing the gunshots no more than a second or two after the blonde had left the living room. Somehow Alexandra must have wrestled the second gun from beneath the other guy’s jacket and shot him. There had even been some debate about how close to the chest the gun must have been when it was discharged. Blowback. That was the word one of the detectives had used. Blowback. How much of the bodyguard’s heart or lungs or bone was up the barrel of the gun? Then he’d made a passing remark about the possibility of powder and soot on the shirt. Fabric in the wound. Someone would check, he assured them.
But, the truth was, all of the men from the party really knew nothing. Or, perhaps, next to nothing. Philip’s friends agreed that everything had happened so fast—so quickly—that it was hard to be positive about anything. Certainly none of the men had asked the girls for more details when they’d been getting dressed.
And, unfortunately, both guns were gone. And without them and without an actual witness, it was impossible to say who had twice pulled the trigger.
…
Late that morning, a few minutes before Kristin and Melissa were going to leave the apartment for lunch and the matinee, Philip’s fiancée called. Kristin was sitting on the living room carpet with Melissa, helping her study for a quiz the child had on Monday about prime and composite numbers. When she saw on her phone that Nicole was on the line, she kissed Melissa on the top of her head and adjourned to the kitchen so she could speak to Nicole in private.
“I’m in shock,” Nicole said, her voice quavering and hushed. “There must have been an hour after Philip told me what happened when I couldn’t…I couldn’t stop crying.” Nicole was soft-spoken and gentle and kind; she volunteered Tuesday afternoons at BARC—the Brooklyn Animal Resource Coalition—and spent another few hours on Thursday mornings at the assisted living facility where her grandmother was slipping into the confused murk of Alzheimer’s, visiting the woman and her friends and helping them paint and play with clay. She was an immensely talented graphic designer, and while her business wasn’t large, it was the right size for her; she could work from her home and visit the elderly and the cats that made her happy. She was shy and she was sweet, and neither Richard nor Kristin could understand what in the name of God she saw in Philip. They didn’t know Nicole well, but they were confident she was way too good for Richard’s younger brother.