Marisha Pessl - Night Film

Beckman had purchased the locked box from a black-market memorabilia dealer. It was allegedly a prop stolen from Cordova’s film set Wait for Me Here. In the film, it’s a personal possession of the serial killer, Boyd Reinhart. Though the audience never learns what’s locked inside, it’s supposed to hold the object that caused him to kill, something that had mentally broken him as a boy. Yet, according to the collectibles dealer, due to a problem with the provenance documentation, there was a possibility that the box hadn’t come from the film set at all, but had been stolen from the FBI evidence files for Hugh Thistleton, the copycat killer who’d mimicked Boyd Reinhart from his way of murdering down to his flamboyant clothing.

Beckman loved showing the box to people, letting them pass it around. “There it is,” he’d say reverentially. “The box represents the mysterious threshold between reality and make-believe. Is it Reinhart’s? Is it Thistleton’s? Or is it yours ? Because every one of us has our box, a dark chamber stowing the thing that lanced our heart. It contains what you do everything for, strive for, wound everything around you. And if it were opened, would anything be set free? No. For the impenetrable prison with the impossible lock is your own head.”

The last time I was here, when Beckman disappeared into the kitchen for another bottle of vodka, I — quite bombed and egged on by one of his attractive female students — had the brilliant idea of jimmying the lock with a penknife to find out what was inside, once and for all.

The tarnished brass lock didn’t budge.

Beckman had caught me in the act. He’d thrown me out, shouting, “Traitor!” and “Philistine!” His final words to me before slamming the door in my face were: “You couldn’t even see where it opened.”

Olga was carrying in two platters piled with sardines — enough food for the entire otter exhibit at SeaWorld. She set them down on the faded carpet, the cats sniffing them.

“The problem with you, McGrath,” said Beckman, draining the bottle into our glasses, “is that you’ve no respect for murk. For the blackly unexplained. The un-nail-downable. You journalists bulldoze life’s mysteries, ignorant of what you’re so ruthlessly turning up, that you’re mining for something quite powerful that”—he sat back in his chair, his dark eyes meeting mine—“does not want to be found. And it will not.”

He was talking about Cordova.

“Anyway,” he added softly, “a man’s ghoulish shadow is not the man.”

I nodded and held up my glass. “To the murk.”

We clinked and drank. I stood up, bowed deeply at Beckman — he had a soft spot for royal treatment — and stepped past him. He said nothing, slumped helplessly in his chair, trapped in the avalanche of his thoughts.

As I rode down to the lobby, I found myself not only guilty over what I’d done, browsing so brazenly on his computer, but also regretting the direction of the conversation. Thanks to that vodka, I’d been a little too candid. Beckman would have no doubt now that I was back on the trail, after Cordova once again, and I had no idea what he’d do with that information.

I checked the photo I’d taken of his computer screen and couldn’t believe my luck. The picture was blurry, but I could still make out the convoluted URL. In all the years I’d known Beckman, it was the most useful piece of information I’d ever extracted from the man.

I closed the photo and made a quick note in my calendar.

Peg Martin. Washington Square Park. Sunday at 6 P.M .

The girl in the Four Seasons coat check was eating handfuls of colored jelly beans and reading a thin yellow paperback.

I’d read in the witness report in Ashley’s police file that the coat-check girl’s name was Nora Halliday and she was nineteen.

Every time a party of diners arrived — midwestern tourists, finance dudes, a couple so elderly they moved like they were doing a form of tai chi — she whisked off her black-rimmed eyeglasses, hid the book, and with a cheerful “Good evening!” took their coats. After they moved upstairs to the restaurant, she put her glasses back on, brought out the paperback, and started reading again, hunched over the counter of the stall.

I was watching her from the opposite side of the lobby on a seat by the stairs. I’d decided it was best to wait here, because I was slightly more bombed than I realized, thanks to the jet-fuel vodka back at Beckman’s. At one point, she glanced curiously in my direction. No doubt assuming I was waiting for someone, she smiled and resumed reading her book.

According to the police report, she’d been working here only a few weeks. She was about 57″ and scrawny as a question mark, with pale blond hair in a French twist — curls around her face channeling alfalfa. She wore a brown skirt and brown blouse too big for her — the restaurant’s uniform — visible shoulder pads sitting unevenly on her frame.

At last, I stood up and walked over to her. She closed the book, turning it facedown on the counter, though not before I glimpsed the title.

Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen.

A tragic play featuring what was widely believed to be the most neurotic female protagonist in all of Western literature.

I had my work cut out for me.

“Good evening, sir,” she said brightly, removing her glasses, revealing big blue eyes and delicate features that would have made her an “it girl” about four hundred years ago. But this being the era of fish pouts and spray-on tans, she was pretty, certainly, but old-fashioned — a turn-of-the-century Twiggy. She was wearing harsh pink lipstick, which didn’t look like it’d been applied in good light or within two feet of a mirror.

She did look friendly, however. And easy enough to get talking.

She grabbed one of the silver hangers off the rack and held out her hand for my coat.

“I’m not checking it,” I said. “You must be Nora Halliday?”

“I am.”

“Nice to meet you. Scott McGrath.” I removed my business card from my wallet, handing it to her. “I was hoping we might chat, at your convenience.”

“Chat about what?” She squinted at the card.

“Ashley Cordova. I understand you were the last person to see her alive.”

She glanced back at me. “You’re police?”

“No. I’m an investigative reporter.”

“What are you investigating ?”

“I’ve done cover-ups, international drug cartels. I’ve been getting some background on Ashley. I’m interested in your perspective. Did she say anything at all to you?”

Biting her bottom lip, she set my business card down on the stall door and carefully shook multicolored jelly beans into her hand from a bag that contained about four kilos of them. She shoved the pile into her mouth, chewing with her lips clamped closed.

“Everything you tell me can be off the record,” I added.

She covered her mouth with her hand.

“Have you been drinking?” she asked.

“No.”

She seemed to take issue with this, swallowing with a gulp. “Are you dining with us this evening, sir?”

“No.”

“Are you meeting someone at the bar?”

“Probably not.”

“Then I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

I stared at her. She was definitely not from New York. This one screamed Recent grad of Ohio State with a degree in the dramatic arts. Something told me she’d probably played a Pink Lady in some abysmal production of Grease and when someone asked her who she was, she said I’m an actor in the same breathy voice I’d seen people in AA announce I’m an alcoholic. Girls like her moved here by the truckload, hoping to be discovered and to meet Mr. Big but too often ended up in bars in Murray Hill wearing black dresses from Banana Republic, Band-Aids over the blisters on their heels. They’d get their I’ll Take Manhattan taken off them soon enough. To live in this city for any extended period of time required masochism, moral flexibility, skin like an alligator’s, and mad jack-in-the-box resilience — none of which these faux-confident twenty-very- little s could even begin to wrap their heads around. Within five years she’d be running home to her parents, a boyfriend named Wayne, and a job at her old high school, teaching movement.