Gail Bowen - The Brutal Heart

“How do they know it wasn’t an accident or suicide?”

“They don’t know,” Zack said. “Cristal’s condo was on the fourth floor. She could have fallen or jumped, but her body had been pulled towards the side of the building so the other tenants wouldn’t discover it when they came home from work.”

I felt my nerves twang. “Zack, the police don’t think that you – ”

His laugh was short and humourless. “There aren’t a lot of advantages to being a paraplegic, but I think even the cops would see that a guy in a wheelchair would have trouble pushing a healthy thirty-four-year-old woman over a balcony railing, then zipping down to the place where she fell so he could pull her body out of sight.”

I walked over and pressed my forehead against the cool glass of the patio doors. The rain was falling hard now, and the trees at the bottom of our yard were thrashing in the wind. “Thirty-four,” I said. “Mieka’s age.”

“Too young to die,” Zack said. “Also too young to have lived the life she lived.” He moved his chair to the place beside me, and for a moment, we were silent, looking out together at the night.

Finally, I said. “How did they connect you with this?”

“Through one of my more egregious fuck-ups. I thought I was handling the blackmail threat exactly right. I played hardball. I told Cristal I knew she’d been taping her clients, and I wasn’t going to deal until the camera was turned off. It was in a smoke detector on her bedroom ceiling, angled to pick up the bed and a special chair she reserved for what she called boutique requests . Of course, while she was boutiquing , her camera was able to get a nice clear shot of her client.”

“Including you?” I said.

Zack shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t know. Logic would suggest that I’d be worth taping – I have money and people know my name – but she never approached me.”

“But the police called you . They must have found something.”

“They did indeed. They found the camera that I so shrewdly insisted she turn off. She must have forgotten to turn it back on.”

“So as far as the police know, you were the last one to see her alive.”

“Right,” Zack said, “but looking on the bright side, they didn’t hear me offer her $10,000 for the Osler DVDS.”

“So they don’t know about Ned’s involvement with Cristal.”

“No, and I’d like to keep it that way.”

“Had she agreed to take the money?”

“I thought she had. She brought out the DVDS. I put one in the machine to make certain I wasn’t paying $10,000 for Bambi . I watched long enough to see what I was buying, then I took out the envelope with the cash. That’s when it got weird.”

“Weird how?”

“Cristal wouldn’t take the money. She said she never dreamed that Ned would commit suicide. In her words, his death was just ‘tragic collateral damage.’ ”

“That sounds as if she had a larger agenda.”

Zack sighed. “No flies on you, my love. I should have picked up on that myself, but at that point, Cristal started to cry. She said she knew she’d made a mistake. She’d deleted the files from the camera, but she wanted me to know she was trying to rectify what she’d done. Giving me the DVDS was the first step.”

“Why did she care about what you thought?”

“She’d been at Ned’s funeral. I didn’t notice her, but there were hundreds of people there. I probably wouldn’t have recognized her anyway. She’s changed her hair – it’s lighter or something. I don’t know – she just looked different. Anyway, she told me she couldn’t stop thinking about that poem I used in the eulogy. Remember? It was the one Ned e-mailed to me after 9/11.”

“ ‘September 1, 1939,’ ” I said. “Auden really made the rounds after the World Trade Center was attacked.”

“I don’t exactly travel in literary circles, but I must have received six copies of that poem,” Zack said. “Anyway, Cristal latched on to what I said about how Ned never let the darkness engulf him and how he believed it was our duty as human beings to show ‘an affirming flame.’ Then she announced she was going to change.” Zack pounded his palm with his fist. “It really pissed me off.”

“Why would that piss you off?”

“Christ, Jo. If you knew how many times I’ve had to listen to people bleat on about how sorry they are for what they’ve done, and how they’re going to reform. Usually, I just watch the clock and let them pile on the billable hours, but Cristal had driven a decent man to suicide. It was a little late for tears.”

“Did you tell her that?”

“Nope. I didn’t say anything. I tried to leave, but Cristal stepped in front of me and blocked the way. She asked me if I believed in evil. I said I wasn’t a theologian; I was a lawyer. She said that the people who thought she was evil were wrong – that all she did was let people live out their fantasies.”

“Had she ever said anything like that before?”

“Not to me. Of course, she and I didn’t talk much. And today, I just wanted to get the hell out of there, so I told her I didn’t think she was evil. I thought she was like me, someone who provided a necessary service.”

“And that satisfied her?”

“I guess so. She let me leave, and I had the DVDS in my possession. Thank God for that. I wouldn’t want the boys and girls at the cop shop to be sitting around watching those right now.”

“Were they that bad?”

“Objectively, no. As sexual acts go, what Cristal did to Ned was pretty tame. In the romantic language of the courtroom, she fellated him.”

“Why would Ned kill himself over that?”

“Because all the time Cristal was fellating him, Ned called her ‘Evvie.’ ”

“His dead wife’s name.”

“Right, and when he was finished, he closed his eyes, stroked Cristal’s hair, and thanked her for taking him into her mouth and letting him be part of her private world.”

Except for the sound of rain splashing through the eaves-troughs and hitting the ground, the room was silent. “That breaks my heart,” I said.

Zack stroked my arm. “You’re a gentle soul. Ned was a realist. He knew that most people would just see the tape as sordid – an old man getting a blow job and fantasizing.”

“So you made sure his private life was kept private.”

“It was the least I could do,” Zack said. “Ned has always been on my side. The legal community here is tight. Everybody knows how everybody else operates, and everybody knows that the Law Society has rapped my knuckles on more than one occasion. A lot of people would be delighted if I really stepped on my joint and got disbarred, but Ned was a friend. If he heard that I was getting too close to the line, he’d invite me for a drink and, in the most gentlemanly of ways, remind me that discretion is the better part of valour.”

I touched his cheek. “I’m glad you got the DVDS.”

“I am too,” Zack said. “When I was trying to talk Ned out of committing suicide, I told him he had many, many reasons to live.”

“But he didn’t see it that way.”

Zack shook his head. “No. He said that in the end everybody loses everything – the only choice we have is deciding the order in which we lose the things that matter to us.”

“And Ned decided he’d rather lose his life than his reputation.”

“It wasn’t his reputation Ned was concerned about; it was Evvie’s. He didn’t want people to know the man whom Evvie had loved for all those years was incapable of remaining faithful to her memory. He said that satisfying himself with a prostitute cheapened everything he and his wife had been to each other.”

“So he shot himself?”