David Ellis: In the Company of Liars

Thursday, February fifth of this year. A cocktail party thrown by Dillon & Becker, Sam’s lobbying firm, an annual party for clients in the city’s offices. Hors d’oeuvres passed by servants in tuxedos, soft classical music playing from speakers in the corners.

The Look, Allison calls it, though she has never spoken of such things aloud, except to Sam. A look of pure, unadulterated lust, a passion that drives men to do things they should not do, the most primitive of emotions. She watches everything about Sam-how he holds his breath, moves his eyes up and down her body-trying to imagine exactly what it is that Sam is imagining, because Allison has no experience with such things, has never seen this look from her husband in the twenty years they were married.

She freezes that image in her mind. She is not sure why. Maybe because it was one of the last pictures that she has of Sam-he was dead two days later-or maybe because it is so staggering to think how far things have fallen.

Allison Pagone sits on the wine-colored couch in the den. The memories always flood back, no matter how fleetingly, when she sits here. Memories of her childhood. She remembers when she was fifteen, when she had a party while her parents were out, a bottle of red wine spilled on the couch, her enormous relief when the wine blended in with the color. Another memory: She was six, sleeping on the couch because she had wet her bed, worrying about her parents’ reaction, then her mother’s soothing hand running through her hair as she woke up the next morning.

She thinks of her daughter, Jessica, and the torment she must be feeling right now, her mother standing trial for murder. And she will not be acquitted. Jessica has read the stories, watched the television coverage, despite the judge’s instructions to the contrary. Regardless of whether she is a witness, nobody is going to tell a young woman she cannot read the cold accounts of her mother’s crime in the paper.

Allison has watched her daughter age over the last three months. Twenty years old, she is in many ways still a girl, but these events have changed that. Allison is to blame, and she can do nothing about it.

She picks up the phone on the coffee table. She dials Mat Pagone’s office. She checks her watch. It is past nine o’clock in the evening.

She gets his voice mail. She holds her breath and waits for the beep. She looks at the piece of paper in front of her. They spelled his name wrong. It should be Mat with one t, short forMateo.

“Mat, I know you’re not going to get this until tomorrow morning. I’m sorry. For everything. I also want you to listen carefully. Jessica is going to need you now more than ever. You are going to have to love her for both of us. You have to be strong for her. You have to do whatever you can to be there for her. You-you have to-promise-”

She takes a deep breath. “Mat, don’t say a word to the FBI. They don’t have anything on you. You hear me? They don’t have anything. Just keep your mouth shut. You can’t help me now so don’t make this worse and talk to them. And take-take good care of our-”

Her voice cuts off. She lets out a low wail. She hangs up the phone quietly and puts her face in her hands, ignoring the man seated across from her.

“That was very good, Allison. Now just one more.”

Allison looks up at the man, then inhales deeply, composes herself. This is the end now, she knows it. She picks up the phone and dials the numbers, reading them off the business card.

You have reached Special Agent Jane McCoy…

She waits for the beep and reads from the paper. “Jane McCoy, this is Allison Pagone. I want you to know that I will not be used. I will not let you rip the last shreds of dignity from my family. You haveme. It’s over for me. If you have a hint of decency in you, you will not deny my daughter both of her parents. I want you to know that you can’t toy with people’s lives like this. I won’t let you turn me against my family. Your little plan didn’t work. So live withthat. ”

She hangs up the phone and looks up at the man sitting on the ottoman opposite her, training a revolver on her. He is dark in every way-Middle Eastern with jet-black hair, dark eyes, a menacing smile, the way he can look pleasant during all of this.

“Excellent,” the man says. “Your flair for drama has paid off.”

“You said you’d leave,” says Allison. “I did what you wanted.”

The man stands but keeps the firearm directed at Allison. “Please stand up,” he says.

An hour later. Ram Haroon checks his watch. It is after 11:45 at night. He looks at Allison Pagone, lying in the bathtub, motionless. He looks over the scene. He is reluctant to go back into the bathroom, to step on the tile, so he leans in from his spot in the bedroom. The scene looks entirely clean. Nothing has been disturbed. There is no reason to suspect that this was anything other than a suicide.

He walks to the study and unzips his gym bag. The statuette-it’s more like a trophy-is wrapped in plastic. He sets it on the desk near her computer and leaves it in the plastic, still covered with the dirt from behind the grocery store, where it was buried.

Perfect. Better than a suicide note confessing to the murder. This is the proof, the trophy used to bludgeon Sam Dillon in February.

He walks back through the house, careful not to change anything. If the light was on, it stays on; nothing can be altered. If the timing of her death were ever fixed by the authorities, and someone saw a light turn off afterward, it would ruin the impression.

He walks down the basement stairs. He came in through a basement window and returns to it now, jumps back up onto the sill. Once out, he sets the window back into place as if he never were there. He makes it through the backyard, over the fence, into the neighbor’s yard. He walks to his car and begins to drive without hitting his headlights.

He looks at his watch. It is exactly two minutes before midnight, before Wednesday. He wonders when she will be found. Some time tomorrow morning, because her trial will resume and she will not show. Someone will rush to her door. Maybe the federal agent whom Allison called-McCoy-panicking.

He picks up his cell phone and hits a speed button. “Done,” he says, and hangs up.

He has to get home now. Final exams start in a couple of weeks and he’s fallen behind.

Ram Haroon already jogged today, so he is annoyed that he has to don the outfit and run again, at the ungodly hour of eleven at night. He is surprised to find that he’s not alone out here, that a few other lunatics are running in the cool air. There is a path that winds around a park near the university, a one-mile loop that begins-and ends-at a marker with a couple of benches and a drinking fountain made of stone.

A runner is kneeling near the fountain, tying a shoe. Ram can hardly make the runner out in the darkness but there’s no doubt. The runner stands and stretches, then starts down the path, presumably for another mile, though Ram is sure that his contact will veer off to a nearby car.

Left in the runner’s wake, on the grass, is an envelope. Ram does not immediately rush over to it, because as long as no other runner approaches, there is no need to act with such swiftness. After a moment of stretching, he makes his way over to the drinking fountain and takes a sip of the icy water. He bends down to tie a shoe that is not untied, and slips the envelope off the grass and into the pocket of his sweatpants.

He is in his student dormitory thirty minutes later. Student housing might not have been the wisest choice, because the courts in America have allowed law enforcement more freedom to search school-subsidized facilities, on the theory that students have a diminished expectation of privacy in government-provided housing. But it made sense, in the end. First, because he lacks the money for a nicer place in the city, but more importantly, because he wants to fit in. He wants nothing out of the ordinary. Besides, there’s nothing for them to find in this room.