Cassie picked up her margarita and ran her tongue along the very last of the salt on the rim. The glass was otherwise empty. “I’m taking my niece and nephew to the zoo tomorrow,” she said, her voice a little numb in her ears. It was as if she had headphones on. Then: “Will I be fired?”
“The zoo. Your job. Really? Are you hearing a word I’m saying?”
She nodded. “I am.”
“The union will have your back. My uncle will have your back. Call him tonight and let him know what’s going on. I’ll call him, too. I rather doubt the airline can fire you. Presumption of innocence and all. But at some point they may put you on a leave of absence. There is a whole branch of law that studies precisely when you can fire an employee for off-duty conduct—and when you can’t.”
“I see.”
“I’m not sure you do. I’m really not.”
“You know what’s the damnedest thing?”
“Right now? After you decided to just drop by Unisphere yesterday afternoon? After your performance with the FBI today? That’s one hell of a high bar. I don’t know. Tell me.”
“It’s this, that expression you just used. Presumption of innocence. Who knows what I’m capable of when I’m that blotto and the memory’s collateral damage. But I really do know in my heart that I didn’t kill Alex. I do stupid things when I’m drunk and I do irresponsible things, but I don’t do…that. I don’t cut people’s throats. And so if the hammer comes down hard on me this time, it will be a kind of awful irony.”
“Cassie?”
She waited.
The waves of Ani’s anger were receding now, and in their wake was only sadness and worry. “I promise you: you’ve done nothing so bad that you deserve what might be coming.”
* * *
? ?
Cassandra, Troy-born daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba, knew the future, and no one believed her. At least most of the time that was what occurred. Apollo gave her the great gift of prophecy because he was confident that she was going to sleep with him; when, in the end, she refused, the god spat in her mouth, leaving behind the curse that no one would ever believe a word that she said. And so she lived with frustration and dread.
Cassandra, Kentucky-born daughter of no one who would ever be construed for royalty, pondered the disbelief that she, too, left in her wake and the apprehension and fear that now marked her every step. The reality of what she had done (and what she had not done) had become incontestable fact in her mind, but she rather doubted the FBI ever would believe it if she were to volunteer the chronological truth: she said good night to Alex Sokolov and left the palatial digs that existed behind the door to room 511 sometime around twelve thirty or one in the morning and then wandered the hallways in search of an elevator. He was most definitely still alive at that point. But she never made it to the elevator. She just never found it. And so she collapsed, an appalling, drunken, boneless marionette on an ornate Middle Eastern divan, and dozed. When she awoke, she still didn’t reach the elevator, either because once more she couldn’t find it or because she hadn’t even remembered that it had been her original destination. Either way, she returned to Alex’s suite, stripped naked, and climbed into his bed…utterly oblivious to the fact that he was dead. Or almost dead.
No, in the morning she had seen his neck. He had bled out quickly. He was dead.
And she had slept the rest of the night beside his corpse. In the same sheets. Her head on the pillow beside his pillow. His blood clinging to her hair.
This was a spectacular, revolting fail even by her standards for indignity and mortification. She guessed if she weren’t already such a lush, the revelation would have driven her to drink.
* * *
? ?
And yet, for whatever the reason, despite her performance at the FBI office that afternoon, the authorities did not come for her that night. She and Ani shared a cab uptown, Cassie exiting on Twenty-Seventh Street, and she was back in her apartment by a quarter to six. She called Derek Mayes, Ani’s uncle at the union, and he actually seemed considerably less shocked by the story she shared—beginning with the body in the bed and building to her confessing to the FBI that she had spent the night with Sokolov—than she might have expected. She attributed this more to his rather low expectations of her as a person than to his experience with flight attendants generally. He assured her that he and Ani would talk and together they would look out for her. He was comforting. He reminded her that she hadn’t definitely killed anyone, though he did add, a dig that was more ominous than funny, “at least that’s your story this week.”
And then, buoyed by Mayes’s generally can-do attitude and the Washington State Riesling she opened and poured over ice, she called Buckley. Didn’t even text him. The actor suggested they meet for a drink later that evening, after he’d seen a friend’s show at the Barrow, and since it was rare for her ever to say no to a drink, she said yes. They picked a bar in the West Village this time, one near the theater.
Then she collapsed onto her couch and stared up at the Empire State Building. She pulled the paperback Tolstoy from her purse and sipped her wine and read, hoping to lose herself in the narrative and escape the reality of her life—and yet somehow also to glean insights into Alex Sokolov’s. It was an impossible balancing act: if she was reading to learn more about the man who had died on the sheets on which they’d made love, then certainly she wasn’t reading to take her mind off the utter precariousness of her future. Before returning to “Happy Ever After,” she paused on one particular paragraph about Ivan Ilyich that had stayed with her: “He had an affair with a lady who threw herself at the elegant young lawyer.” But the relationship meant nothing to him, “it all came under the heading of the French saying, ‘Il faut que la jeunesse se passé.’?” Translation? Youth must have its fling.
It made her feel old. She reminded herself that she had viewed Alex as but a harmless romp, too.
Eventually she phoned her sister, who was already at her hotel in Westchester, and they picked a time to meet tomorrow morning at the zoo. They’d rendezvous at ten thirty at the fountain near the sea lions, just inside the Fordham Road entrance. She was grateful that she wasn’t going to be alone with the kids. She was actually relieved. It would be such a disaster if she were alone with her nephew and niece when she was arrested.
* * *
? ?
Buckley took her hand as they walked from the bar to his apartment. It was only a few minutes after midnight, and so the West Village was still vital and vibrant, the narrow streets crowded, the bistro tables along the sidewalks full.
“You were checking your phone a lot,” he murmured. She had told him nothing, nothing at all. Either he hadn’t seen the photos in the newspapers that day or he had looked at them so quickly that the fact they were her hadn’t registered.
“I haven’t been reserve in years, but the airline asked me to be available,” she lied.
“Didn’t you say that you’re flying to Rome on Sunday night?”
“They might want me for another route tomorrow instead.” The air was cool, and she wished that she had brought more than a sleeveless blouse. She felt the hair on her arms rising.
“Would you still get to go to the zoo tomorrow? I’d hate to see you miss the sea lions—and your family.”
“We’ll see,” she said, though in her mind, she imagined herself replying, If I’m not at the zoo, it’s probably because (best case) I’m meeting my lawyer and getting my cheek swabbed for DNA. Worst case? I’m being arrested for murder. But she didn’t say any of that. “Tell me more about your audition,” she said. “Tell me more about the pilot. You said it’s a drama.”
“Sort of. Based on the script, there’s also a lot of very dark humor. It’s about a Staten Island drug family. Apparently there will be a lot of scenes on the ferry and a lot of nighttime shooting—and shooting during the shooting. It looks crazy violent. I’d be one of the brothers. Think Edmund in King Lear. I’d be the younger brother and a bastard—literally and figuratively.”