Peter Spiegelman - Red Cat

He was descending the stairs to his own basement when a battered brown Ford rolled past me and into the Van Winkle parking lot. Two people got out, and I didn’t need the binoculars to recognize McCue’s aggressive gut or Vines’s cropped blond hair. They headed right for Kenny Hagen’s building. Half an hour later, Vines came out. She got into the Ford and started the engine, but didn’t go anywhere. In a minute or two the windows fogged, and she became a hazy silhouette behind the wheel.

She sat there for fifteen minutes, and emerged again when a Tarrytown police cruiser pulled into the space beside hers. A uniformed cop got out and shook hands with her, and a minute later another crappy sedan pulled up. A big guy who might have been one of the cops in David’s apartment that morning climbed out. He spoke with Vines and the Tarrytown cop, and the three of them walked toward Kenny’s basement. And then the big guy bent his head and said something to Vines. She stopped and turned and he pointed at my car, and Vines began to walk- then jog- toward me.

I fired the engine, shoved the car into R, and prayed that no one was coming up the street. The Nissan swerved and slid as I popped out of the space and onto the road, and I saw Vines sprint across the Van Winkle parking lot. Her coat was open and she was reaching inside and I flicked on the car lights and hit the brights. Her hand went to her eyes and I tapped the gas. For one sick instant my wheels whined and spun and rooster tails of sandy brown snow flew up. Then the car shuddered and slewed, and I was gone.

I called Mike from the Saw Mill.

“I don’t think she made me, though I’ll find out soon enough if she did.”

“And Coyle?” Mike asked.

“He’s gone, but not far, and I’m pretty sure Uncle Kenny knows where. I’ll give it another go tomorrow, assuming McCue and Vines haven’t beaten me to him or yanked my license by then.”

“Not too early tomorrow, though,” Mike said.

“Why not?”

“David finally got in touch with Stephanie. He told her what happened this morning, and explained that there are questions she has to answer. She said she’d come back to town tomorrow morning, to talk.”

“It’s about time,” I said, “but what does it have to do with me?”

There was a long silence at Mike’s end, and then he cleared his throat. “She says you’re the only one she’ll talk to.”

The maid met me at the door. Her lined face was empty of expression, but her blue eyes were anxious and more than a little curious. I knew how she felt. She led me through the foyer and down a hallway, and left me to wait in a khaki-colored room. The walls were mostly bookshelves, and the furniture was low-slung and leather. The views were of the park, a wedge of the Guggenheim, and blue, blue skies. It was ten-thirty, and traffic was contentious on Fifth Avenue, but no street sounds intruded on the apartment’s thick quiet.

David, I knew, was at work, though from the message Liz had left me, I doubted he was working well.

“He started drinking at around six, and there was nothing I could do to stop him. I stayed until eleven, at which point he passed out and I went home. He’s a bad drunk, and the whole thing left me wishing I was an only child. You and Ned owe me, and an explanation of what the hell is going on would be a good start.”

Around six: that would’ve been after he’d spoken to Stephanie. I could only imagine how that conversation had gone, and reaching for a bottle wasn’t an incomprehensible reaction. And what had he made of Stephanie’s insistence on talking only to me? Mike had repeated it twice, and I still didn’t get it.

I shook my head and wandered around the room. The bookshelves were filled with slender, buff-colored volumes of identical dimensions. They were all about modern architecture and all in Italian, and to the best of my knowledge David was ignorant of both. Of course, I’d learned lately that when it came to my brother- and his wife- the best of my knowledge wasn’t very good. Maybe he was fluent in Italian, and had a thing for I. M. Pei, or maybe Stephanie had. Maybe it was just the decorator. What did I know?

There were photos on some of the shelves: David and Stephanie smiling stiffly at a black-tie function; Stephanie in the yard of their East Hampton place, looking washed out against the red front door; David, Ned, and Liz in the cockpit of Ned’s sailboat. They were soaked, and Ned and Liz were grinning widely. The door opened and Stephanie came in.

She was pale and barefoot, and dressed in jeans and a gray wool sweater. She wore her hair loose. It fell in a dark wave to her shoulders, framing her sharp features and softening them. Her eyes were red and shadowed and larger than ever, and her face had lost its typical tics and tensions. She had instead a remote, distracted look, like a convalescent, preoccupied with the waxing and waning of her symptoms and pains. Her steps were stiff and careful across the room, as if her bones were hollow and a sudden gust might carry her away. She curled in a deep chair and tucked her small white feet beneath her. She had a glass of water, and she sipped from it and held it in her lap. There was something almost shy in the way she looked at me.

“It’s not a conversation I expected to have,” Stephanie said, and managed the thinnest of smiles. There was a tremble in her voice, and a deep fatigue.

“You and me both,” I said.

“It’s hard to believe the mess he’s made of everything- that woman, the videos, and now this. I should be worried about the police, but I keep thinking of TV, of all things- the way the cameras chase people down the street…what they’d do to us. I try to think of who would still speak to me, whom I could look in the eye.” Stephanie shook her head and picked at a seam on her jeans. “Do you know why I wanted to talk to you?”

“Not because we’ve been so close.”

Stephanie shook her head. “It’s more because we never pretended to be,” she said. “We’ve never liked each other-” I started to speak but she waved it away. “Don’t bother, John, not now. We’ve never liked each other, but we’ve never faked it, either; we’ve never lied to each other that way. In fact, you’re the only one in this nightmare who hasn’t lied to me.”

“Mike Metz-”

“I don’t know Mike Metz from Adam. Maybe he’s as good a lawyer as everyone says- I pray to God he is- and maybe when I get to know him I’ll trust him. But right now he’s just a voice on the phone, and I don’t have it in me to talk to a stranger about this, not yet. What I want now is someone I know, and someone who won’t bullshit me.”

“Even if it’s someone you don’t particularly like?”

Again a fragile smile. “Strange, huh, trusting a person you don’t like?”

“Not the strangest thing.”

The little smile turned rueful, and then disappeared. “Not as strange as being married to a person you don’t trust, for instance.”

“It happens,” I said, and I took a deep breath and took out my notebook. “There are questions I have to ask.”

She nodded. “And I don’t want to be arrested. So if that’s the price, go on.”

If only it were that simple, I thought, and then I asked and she answered.

“I guess I’ve known, in a general way, for a while,” she said. “I didn’t catch him in bed with one of them, or anything, but he gets a certain tone, irritated and guilty at the same time, when I ask an inconvenient question about where he’s been or where he’ll be. And he has a certain look sometimes when he comes home, furtive and a little smug. It took me a few years to catch on, but eventually I did. I suppose there was a part of me that didn’t want to know. Not surprising, I guess.