Джеймс Паттерсон - The Black Book

Stewart once told me, when we got around to discussing funerals—a morbid topic but an unavoidable one at the time—that funerals weren’t for the dead, they were for the living, to give them an outlet to grieve.

But I wanted to tell myself that I was doing this for him. I didn’t want to be here, but I owed it to him. In many ways, Stewart saved my life in that ICU.

I found Grace, his daughter, the one whose own daughter died in that ICU. Her face was washed out from so many tears, her body language showed she was worn down, but she smiled sweetly at me, and we hugged. She introduced me to her siblings, one of whom I’d met before. “This is the guy I was telling you about, the police detective,” she said, and they all knew me that way. They all thanked me for the jokes. They reminded me, each of them, that the first thing Stewart did every morning when he got up was turn on the laptop computer and look for Facebook videos from me.

“You kept him going when Annabelle died,” one of his sons said to me, pulling me aside, referring to the granddaughter Stewart lost. “He said he couldn’t have made it through without you.”

I made my way into the visitation room and waited my turn at the open casket. He looked like some semblance of my Stewart, a bit waxy and artificial, but the makeup artist did a pretty good job. I touched the casket and said a prayer, not knowing if it made a difference but covering the bases all the same. Then I took a seat in one of the chairs and sat quietly. I didn’t know anybody else there and didn’t plan on staying long. I needed to leave, in fact, but I wasn’t ready to let go just yet.

I thought of what Stewart’s son said to me. It didn’t feel like I was propping Stewart up in the ICU. It felt like the other way around. He gave me an outlet, someone to talk to, a shoulder to cry on. He let me crack off-color jokes so I didn’t have to sit there every waking moment for more than twenty-three agonizing days—561 hours, to be precise—wondering how in God’s name it made sense, how it was okay, how it could possibly be part of God’s plan that my beautiful angel, my three-year-old daughter, had to die.

Oh, was Stewart a feisty, foul-mouthed ball buster. He used to demand the straight scoop from the doctors. Stop coddling me, he’d always say, and just tell me what’s what. He always told me that at some point in your life you get tired of bullshit. You just want the truth. You just want what’s real. Decide what matters in life, he said, and focus on that. The rest is bullshit.

I was wondering if I was reaching that stage myself, though I was less than half Stewart’s age. I was so tired of the lies. It was enough that I spent my career chasing bad guys—and sometimes bad cops. The bad guys I could deal with. Somebody needed to separate us from them, and I was as good as the next person to do it.

But now people close to me were in my line of sight, and what was just as bad was that I was in their line of sight, too. Patti and I had all but accused each other of killing Ramona Dillavou. Kate and I had all but accused each other of stealing the little black book. Amy initially wanted to tear my head off, and now we set off fireworks every time we touched.

I didn’t know whom to trust anymore. I didn’t know how. I didn’t know how to love. Even Stewart, my friend Stewart, even someone for whom I had nothing but the deepest gratitude and affection. Sure, I kept in touch, but I did it remotely, not visiting him in the nursing home and brightening his day, not taking him out to lunch or grabbing a beer or getting some fresh air. No, I sent him videos of my stand-up routines and random jokes, bringing sunlight into his day, sure, okay, but doing it from a distance, over the Internet. I was the comedian, the guy who made you feel good from a stage, holding a microphone and talking to a crowd shrouded in darkness or sending videos over Facebook. I felt good doing it—but it was nothing intimate, nothing up close and personal.

Everything from a distance. Because it hurt too much to get close.

I got up on shaky legs and turned to leave.

Amy Lentini was sitting in a row of chairs three south of mine, dressed in black.

I walked over to her.

“Just in case you needed someone,” she said.

She put her hand in mine. I took the other hand, too, gripped them tightly, and looked directly at her. When the words came out of my mouth, they were rough, like sandpaper, coming as they were from a throat garbled with emotion. They came out as a whisper, maybe because of our surroundings, but more so because I meant them more than ever, and I was afraid of the answer she would give.

“Can I trust you?” I said. “I mean, really trust you?”

She peered into my eyes. She didn’t know what was swimming through my head, but under the circumstances, knowing how I met Stewart, knowing my backstory, she could take a pretty good guess. She seemed to recognize the weight in my question, that I’d never said anything more serious in my life.

“You can trust me, Billy,” she whispered. “I promise.”

Sixty-Two

I DROVE my car behind Amy’s, following her. Tomorrow the pretrial hearing would begin—the case of the brownstone brothel, which had ensnared the mayor and archbishop of the nation’s third-largest city as well as a dozen other of its VIPs. The entire country would be watching. All eyes would be on the prosecutor, Amy, and me, the star witness, as defense attorneys from across the United States, some of the highest-paid lawyers in the business, took their turns trying to dissect my testimony like Lieutenant Mike Goldberger had dissected the eggs on his breakfast plate.

Those lawyers would spend today sharpening their knives, engaging in mock cross-examinations with their colleagues, looking for any hole they could find in the dam of my testimony, probing for any possible way to show the judge that I had no reason to raid that brothel, that my arrests violated the Fourth Amendment, and that all their clients should go free on a legal technicality.

So Amy and I were going to do a final practice round, too.

But Amy, heading down Lake Shore Drive from Winnetka, did not make it all the way downtown to her office. She turned off earlier, at Irving Park, and I followed her through some of the side streets in Wrigleyville until she parked.

She got out of her car, hiked her purse over her shoulder, and walked up to a low-rise condo building. I got out, too, and followed her. She typed a number onto a pad, and her door popped open with a buzz.

I followed her without saying a word. We walked through the foyer to the elevator, then took it up to the sixth floor. We walked down the hallway to her apartment. She opened the door and walked in. As soon as she was inside, she turned to me and pressed her lips against mine.

We undressed slowly, savoring it, my hands running over her shoulders as I eased the blouse off her. Dropping to my knees to slide off her pants, running my hands up the curve of her leg. She smelled so fresh, not a particular scent I could identify, but fresh, clean, new.

We walked together, her forward, me backward, into the bedroom and fell into bed. We kept our slow pace, enjoying every moment, every touch of the skin, every gentle moan. She held me in her hand and left it there, just feeling it, feeling me, taking it all in, before it was time to accelerate. But I didn’t want to accelerate, didn’t want to speed this up; I wanted to remember every moment, wanted time to stand still so this could be all that was happening in my life—not the lies, not the suspicion, not the pain. Just this.

She sucked in her breath as I entered her, looking me in the eye until her head lolled back and her breathing escalated. I felt so much heat, so much energy inside me that I felt like I would explode, but as we moved in sync, as our bodies rose and fell together, I felt something else, too, something I could only describe as peace.