Peter Spiegelman - Red Cat

We were drinking tea, and she put out orange slices and fortune cookies. Her eyes went to my splints.

“Nothing new since last night,” I said.

She nodded. “Slow day, huh?”

“It doesn’t happen that often.”

“No? I guess I’ve just been lucky to see so much of it.”

“It comes with the job now and then.”

“You say it like you’re talking about carpal tunnel syndrome or something. Coming home cut and bruised and broken, it’s not quite the same thing.”

“It doesn’t happen-”

Clare stopped me. “ ‘Doesn’t happen often,’ ‘part of the job’- I heard you the first time. And I’m not asking you to justify it. You love it- that much is clear.”

“You think I love getting beat up?”

“No.” She smiled. “I don’t think you’re quite that twisted. I meant your work- it’s clear you love your work. Enough so that you’re willing to get the crap beat out of you on a semiregular basis to do it.”

I shrugged. “I don’t know that I’m cut out for much else.”

Clare squinted at me. “What bullshit!” she said. “There are a zillion other things you could do, or you could sit around and do nothing at all. But you don’t- because you love your work. You love running around town, and digging around on-line, and talking to people, and finding things out. And I think there’s a part of you that likes being- very quietly- the smartest guy in the room. Mostly, though, I think you want to help people, as corny as that sounds. I think you want to do good. You love your work, and you get all morose and weird- weirder- when you don’t do it. So don’t be shy about saying so. I guess all I’m saying is: be careful.”

I looked at her. Her hair had fallen forward, and soft shadows lay across the planes and angles of her face. Through a blond curtain, her gray eyes were shining, and larger than I’d ever seen them.

“I didn’t realize you’d given it so much thought.”

“Go figure,” she said, and she ran a fingertip around my ear.

“I don’t know how much good I’ve done lately, though.”

“For your brother?” she asked. I nodded. “You’re still at it?”

“For what it’s worth.”

She smiled. “I’ll put coffee on.”

Clare made a large pot and I went back to my laptop. I got through another hour of Holly and David, and then I walked around the room and tried to force some oxygen into my lungs. It had been more of the same, and maybe more embarrassing toward the end. At least he hadn’t hit her.

There were other hotel clips on the disk, though they were much shorter than the ones with David. They showed Holly with two other men, one tall and bald, the other pale and very hairy, and from the dates on the video files, in March and May of the previous year, I guessed that they were outtakes of earlier works, and that these guys had already had their final interviews. There was nothing in the sequences to make either man a more likely suspect than David, and nothing to identify them.

Clare ran a hand over the back of my neck and went into the bathroom. I heard water running in the tub and I thought about joining her, but didn’t. I clicked on another folder and found another video file, this one dated from last summer.

I played it, and I thought of some things Jamie Coyle had said: “She’d always come by to shoot the shit, though- it didn’t matter if I was on the door or behind the bar or wherever.” And: “She had in mind making different kinds of films- documentaries, maybe…” I wondered if this clip was Holly’s first attempt.

It was more hidden-camera work, most likely taken from a handbag, and it was all about Jamie Coyle. The camera looked up at him, and there was something worshipful and larger than life in the perspective. The soundtrack was muddy and the background filled with club clatter- music, laughter, glassware, the hum and buzz of many bodies- but Coyle’s voice was close and intimate, and so was Holly’s as she interviewed him.

“What about that guy?” she asked. “Do you think he’ll cause problems?”

“That guy there- with all the gel and the soul patch? He’s coming up all hard and loud, and he’s had too many mojitos, but he’s no trouble. Just look at his hands- the guy’s got a fucking manicure, and my mother had thicker wrists. Plus he’s got a BlackBerry on his belt. A guy with a BlackBerry and a manicure, nine times out of ten he’s gonna do what you tell him.”

She asked about how he decided who to let in, and how the VIPs behaved, and what about the girls who waited tables, and in his answers Coyle was relaxed and funny and supremely competent, or at least Holly had made him seem that way. Her infatuation with her subject was obvious, and I wondered if Coyle had ever seen the video. Maybe when this was all over…

When that video ended, I clicked on a folder labeled “Brookfield,” and found a dozen more. I played one and let out a deep breath.

He was the husk of a handsome man- thick hair gone white, rheumy blue eyes, a strong, straight nose cratered and darkened by broken blood vessels, white skin sagging from high cheekbones, graceful fingers clawed, mottled, shaking. His voice was still strong and sonorous, which made his bewilderment all the sadder and more frightening. Fredrick Cade, Holly’s father. I knew for sure when she called him Daddy.

There were no hidden-camera shots here; it was all hand held, and Holly’s point of view. She panned around a room that was a cross between hospital and Holiday Inn- oxygen tank, IV stand, pink wallpaper, blond wood trim, bright, bland fabrics- and came to rest again on her father, wrapped in a plaid robe and sitting in a chair.

“It’s me, Daddy, it’s Holly. Look this way, Daddy- here, into the camera. No, goddammit, over here! That’s right, at me. Now, tell me about Mrs. Manton. Do you remember her, Daddy- my seventh-grade teacher? Tell me about you and Mrs. Manton.”

In the hotel rooms, with the faceless men, Holly’s questions were instruments of contempt and punishment and power, and with Coyle, they were tokens of affection. But this was…something else- petulance, pleading curiosity, a child’s desperate search for attention. Fredrick Cade couldn’t answer her, of course- I wasn’t sure he even knew who she was- but Holly kept at it. Most of the short clips ended with the camera focused on the vinyl floor, and with the sound of her ragged breaths. A lump formed in my throat as I watched, and a dull ache grew in my chest.

Not all of Holly’s questions to her father were about his other women, though. In several of the clips she asked about her mother, and in others she questioned him about something called Redtails. Didn’t he remember that Mommy promised it to her? How could he not remember? Why would he give it away? Fredrick just looked at her. I wrote the word in my notebook, with a question mark beside it.

I pushed the laptop away and stood by the window. Sixteenth Street was quiet, Clare was asleep, and my coffee was long cold. And useless anyway. My eyes were filled with grit, and my bones were heavy with a fatigue that was beyond the power of caffeine to cure, beyond even sleep. I thought of what Clare had said-“You love the work; you love finding out.” Not so much just then.

I’d found out more than I wanted to about David and Stephanie: the orthodox faГ§ade of success and self-satisfaction they labored to maintain; the unhappiness and anger and self-loathing that lay behind it; what a desperate, fragile structure it was. More than I wanted to know, but nothing that would help them.

I’d learned much about Holly too- about her obsessions and anger, her cruelty and taste for retribution, her prodigious talents, her bleak artistic vision and her terrible commitment to it, her secretiveness, and dangerous faith in her own ability to control things. I’d learned much, but not yet who killed her. “The smartest guy in the room.” It was a tough sell just then, even standing all alone.