Chapter 22
On the way out, Kat called Chaz and gave him the Swiss bank and account number. She could almost hear his frown over the phone.
“What the hell do you want me to do with it?” Chaz asked.
“I don’t know. It’s a new account. Maybe we can find out if there’s any new activity on it.”
“You’re joking, right? An NYPD cop asking for information from a major Swiss bank?”
He had a point. This was indeed the long shot of all long shots. “Just send the number to Treasury. I got a source named Ali Oscar. If anyone issues an SAR or whatever in the future, maybe it will get a hit.”
“Yeah, okay. Got it.”
Brandon was oddly quiet on the subway back uptown. Kat had expected him to be all over her, demanding to know why he had to leave and what Martin Bork had told her. He hadn’t. He sat in the subway car, deflated, shoulders slumped. He let his body sway and rock without putting up the least resistance.
Kat sat next to him. She imagined her own body language wasn’t much better. She let the truth sink in slowly. Jeff had proposed. Or should she call him Ron now? She hated the name Ron. Jeff was a Jeff. He wasn’t a Ron. Did people really call him that now? Like “Hey, Ron!” Or “Look, there goes Ronnie!” Or “Yo, It’s Ronald, the Ronster, Ronamama . . .”
Why the hell choose the name Ron?
Dumb thoughts, but there you go. It kept her mind off the obvious. Eighteen years was a long time. Old Jeff had been so antimaterialistic in the day, but New Ron was crazy in love with an über-rich widow who was buying him a house in Costa Rica. She made a face. Like he was her boy toy or something. Ugh.
When they first met, Jeff was renting this wonderful craphole overlooking Washington Square. His mattress had been on the floor. There was always noise. The pipes shrieked through the walls when they weren’t leaking. The place always looked like a bomb had just exploded in it. When Jeff was writing a story, he’d get every photograph he could on the subject and randomly thumbtack them to the walls. There was no organization to the process. The mess, he said, inspired him. It looked, Kat countered, like when the cops on TV break into the killer’s hidden room and find pictures of the victims everywhere.
But it felt so right with him. Everything—from the smallest, most mundane activity to the crescendo, if you will, of making love—felt true and perfect with him. She missed that wonderful craphole. She missed the mess and the photographs on the wall.
God, how she had loved him.
They got off on 66th Street near Lincoln Center. There was a chill in the night air. Brandon still seemed lost in his thoughts. She let him stay there. When they got back to Kat’s apartment—she really didn’t think it would be good for him to be on his own right now—she asked, “Are you hungry?”
Brandon shrugged. “Guess so.”
“I’ll order a pizza,” Kat said. “Pepperoni okay?”
Brandon nodded. He collapsed into a chair and stared at window. Kat called La Traviata Pizzeria and placed the order. She took the chair across from him.
“You’re awfully quiet, Brandon.”
“I was just thinking,” he said.
“About?”
“My dad’s funeral.”
Kat waited. When he didn’t say anything more, Kat prodded gently. “What about it?”
“I was thinking about Uncle Marty’s—that’s what I call Mr. Bork—I was thinking about his eulogy. Not so much what he said, though it was really nice, but what I remember most was when it was over, he kinda rushed out of the chapel or whatever you call it. So he finished and he hurried out. I followed him. I don’t know. I was still blocking on the whole thing. It was like I was just at some service and I was removed and it had nothing to do with me. Does that make any sense?”
Kat remembered the numbness at her own father’s funeral. “Sure.”
“Anyway, I found him in some back office. The lights were out. I could barely see him, but I could hear him. I guess he held it together for the eulogy but lost it after. Uncle Marty was on his knees and crying his eyes out. I just stood in the doorway. He didn’t know I was watching him. He thought he was alone.”
Brandon looked up at Kat.
“Uncle Marty told you that my mother called him, right?”
“Right.”
“He wouldn’t lie about that.”
Not sure what else to say, Kat went with “That’s good to know.”
“Did he tell you why she moved the money?”
“Yes.”
“But you’re not going to tell me.”
“He said your mother asked for confidentiality.”
Brandon kept his eyes on the window.
“Brandon?”
“My mom dated another guy. Not someone she met online. He lived in Westport.”
“When was this?”
Brandon shrugged. “Maybe two years after my father died. His name was Charles Reed. He was divorced. He had two kids who lived with their mom in Stamford. He got them on the weekends and some night during the week, I don’t know.”
“So what happened?”
“Me,” Brandon said. “I happened.” A strange smile came to his face. “When you visited Detective Schwartz, did he tell you I’d been arrested?”
“He said there had been some incidents.”
“Yeah, well, they cut me a lot of slack, I guess. See, I didn’t want my mom dating anyone. I kept picturing, you know, this guy taking over for my dad—living in my dad’s house, sleeping on his side of the bed, using my dad’s closet and drawers, parking his car in my dad’s spot. You know what I mean?”
“Of course,” Kat said. “Those feelings are natural.”
“So that’s when I started ‘acting out’”—he made finger quotes—“as my therapist used to say. I got suspended from school. I slashed a neighbor’s tires. When the police would bring me home, I’d be smiling. I wanted her to suffer. I’d tell my mom it was all her fault. I’d tell her I was doing this because she was betraying my father.” He blinked hard and rubbed his chin. “One night, I called her a whore.”
“What did she do?”
“Nothing,” Brandon said with a faraway chuckle. “She didn’t say a word. She just stood there and stared at me. I will never forget the look on her face. Never. But it didn’t stop me. I just kept at it until, well, Charles Reed was gone.”
Kat leaned toward him. “Why are you telling me this now?”
“Because I blew that for her. He was a nice enough guy, I guess. Maybe he would have made her happy. So I’m asking you, Kat. Am I doing that to her again?” Brandon turned and met her gaze. “Am I screwing this up for my mom, like I did last time?”
Kat tried to step back and look at it like, well, a detective. What did they really have? A mother goes away and doesn’t contact her son. If that had been out of character or unusual, hadn’t Martin Bork clarified her reasons for that? As for the ATM transaction and surveillance tape, what had Kat really found? A black limousine and a driver waiting for her—which perfectly fit into the explanation Dana Phelps had given her regular limo company: Her boyfriend had sent the limousine for her.
Take another cold, hard step back: What evidence did they have that Dana Phelps was in trouble?
None.
Brandon was a scared kid. He had loved his father and felt that his mother dating other men was a betrayal. Naturally, he would twist what he saw into some kind of conspiracy.
So what was Kat’s excuse?
Sure, some of Jeff’s behavior might be considered bizarre. But so what? He had changed his name and was living his life. He had made it clear that he didn’t want to go back to the past. Kat had been hurt. So, naturally, she too saw conspiracy rather than rejection. The past—her father, her ex-fiancé—was all coming back at her in a rush.
There was nothing more to discuss. It was time to put this behind her. If the man Dana Phelps ran off with had been someone other than Jeff, she would have let this go a long time ago. The problem was—a problem she had really never wanted to face—she had never let Jeff go. Yes, this thought was a corny “ugh,” but in her heart (if not her mind) it had been because they were somehow destined to be together, that life would take some weird twists and turns, but somehow—and no, she never consciously thought this—she and Jeff would end up back together. But now, sitting on the floor, eating pizza with Brandon, Kat realized there was probably more to it. Yes, it had been a period of her life of so much upheaval, so much raw, concentrated emotion, but more than that, it had all been cut off before its time. It felt incomplete.
Falling in love, the murder of her father, the breakup, the capture of the murderer—all of it demanded some sort of closure, but she never got it. In her heart, when she looked past all the ridiculous lies she’d told herself, Kat had never really understood why Jeff ended it. She had never understood why her father was murdered or why she had never believed that Cozone ordered a hit carried out by Leburne. Her life hadn’t just taken detours or even gone off the rails. It was as though the rails had vanished beneath her.
A person needs answers. A person needs them to make some kind of sense.
They finished the pizza in record time. Brandon was still groggy from the earlier assault. She blew up the air mattress and gave him some pain meds she had picked up at the twenty-four-hour pharmacy. He fell asleep quickly. She watched him for a while, wondering how he would handle his mother’s upcoming big news.
Kat slipped under the covers of her bed. She tried to read, but it was pointless. The words on the page swam by in a meaningless haze. She put the book away and lay in the dark. Concentrate on the possible, she thought. Dana Phelps and “Ron Kochman” were beyond her reach.
The truth about her father’s murder, even after eighteen years, still needed to be unearthed. Focus on that.
Kat closed her eyes and fell into a deep, black sleep. When her phone rang, it took some time to swim back up to consciousness. She reached blindly for her phone and put it to her ear.
“Hello?”
“Hey, Kat. It’s John Glass.”
She was still groggy. The digital clock read 3:18 A.M. “Who?”
“Officer Glass from the Central Park Precinct.”
“Oh, right, sorry. You know that it’s three in the morning, right?”
“Yeah, well, I’m an insomniac.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not,” Kat said.
“We caught the guy who assaulted Brandon Phelps. Just as we suspected. He’s homeless. No ID on him. He won’t talk.”
“I appreciate the update, but I’m thinking it could have waited until the morning.”
“Normally, I’d agree,” Glass said, “except for one weird thing.”
“What’s that?”
“The homeless guy.”
“What about him?” Kat asked.
“He’s asking for you.”
? ? ?
Kat threw on workout clothes, wrote Brandon a note in case he woke up, and jogged north the twenty blocks to the Central Park Precinct. John Glass met her at the front door, still in uniform.
“You want to explain?” he said to her.
“Explain what?”
“Why he asked for you.”
“Maybe I should see who he is first?”
He spread his hand. “This way.”
Their footsteps echoed through the near-empty bulletproof glass atrium. From Glass’s brief description on the phone, Kat had some idea of who would be waiting for her in the holding cell. When they arrived, Aqua was doing his tight-formation pace. His fingers plucked at his lower lip. It was an odd thing. Kat tried to remember the last time she had seen him in something other than yoga pants or at least women’s clothes. She couldn’t. But right now, Aqua wore beltless jeans that sagged like an insecure teenager’s. His shirt was torn flannel. His once-white sneakers were a shade of brown you might achieve if you’d buried them in mud for a month.
“Do you know him?” Glass asked.
Kat nodded. “His real name is Dean Vanech, but everyone calls him Aqua.”
Aqua kept pacing, arguing under his breath with some unseen foe. There was no sign that he had heard them enter.
“Any clue why he’d attack your boy?”
“None.”
“Who’s Jeff?” Glass asked.
Kat’s head spun toward him. “What?”
“He keeps muttering about some guy named Jeff.”
Kat shook her head, swallowed. “Can I have a few minutes alone with him?”
“Like for an interrogation?”
“He’s an old friend.”
“So, like his attorney?”
“I’m asking a favor, Glass. We’ll do the right thing here, don’t worry.”