“Let me know when you’ve talked to your boss.”
She ends the call.
There’s something about his voice. It reminds her, just a little, of her father’s, although she hasn’t actually spoken with him for many years. The miserable son of a bitch.
But he’s always in her head, dear old Dad.
She can still hear him saying, “Jesus Christ, silver? We came all the way to Australia so you could win silver? You know what they say? If you win bronze at the Olympics, you’re just happy to go home with a medal. But when you win silver, when you come within a hair of winning gold, it eats you up for the rest of your life. It’s like being the second guy who walked on the moon. Who remembers him?”
She can still remember the slap she got when she said, “Buzz Aldrin.”
TWENTY-ONE
THE following morning, it was as though it had never happened.
Thomas came down for breakfast like it was any other day. Even though I hadn’t stopped feeling guilty about how I’d handled things after the visit from the FBI, Thomas was going about things the way he always did, which is to say, he stayed in his room and traveled the world.
So many things about him puzzled me. I wished I could get inside his head. He’d always been a mystery to me, even when we were kids. There was this bubble around him, something that kept me from getting through, and him from reaching out. I’d always wondered, why him and not me? Why was he the one to be—is afflicted the right word?—with psychiatric problems, and not me? How fair was that? Did God look down at my parents and think, “I’ll give them one with a good head on his shoulders, and the other—I’ll have a bit of fun with him.”
There was no shortage of theories about why Thomas was schizophrenic. When we were kids, bad parenting—or, more specifically, bad mothering—was often blamed, which didn’t go over well with our mom, who was a patient, loving woman. A nurturing woman, she’d have been more likely to mitigate the effects of someone’s mental distress rather than exacerbate it. Over time, other theories came to the fore. It was genetic. Environmental. A chemical imbalance in the brain. Stress. A childhood trauma. Processed foods. A combination of all of those things.
Or maybe something else entirely.
The bottom line was, no one really knew anything. I could no more explain why Thomas was the way he was than I could explain why I was the way I was. And Thomas, while troubled, was also tremendously gifted. His ability to remember all the things he saw while on Whirl360 was beyond my ability to comprehend. I asked him once if he’d be happier without this so-called gift, and he threw it right back at me. Would I be happier if I had no artistic ability? What I judged to be his curse, he saw as his talent. This was what made him different. This was what made him proud. His obsession was his source of pleasure. And when you thought about it, wasn’t that true of all talented people?
I just didn’t know.
What I did know was that my parents did everything they could to help Thomas, and loved him unreservedly. They took him to doctors. They took him to specialists. They met with all his teachers. They never stopped worrying about him. Often, as the older brother, I was drawn into that circle of anxiety. Once—I think I was fifteen at the time—Thomas had been missing for hours. He’d often get on his bike and wander Promise Falls, mapping it, learning every square inch of it. He’d return, his notebook filled with street plans, detailed right down to the placement of the stop signs and fire hydrants.
This particular day, he hadn’t returned home in time for dinner. That wasn’t like Thomas.
“Go see if you can find him,” Mom said.
I hopped on my bike and headed downtown. It struck me that that was where I’d find him. The crisscross of streets was more intricate downtown, and offered more entertainment value for someone with Thomas’s interests. I couldn’t find him.
But I found his bike.
It was tucked in an alley off Saratoga, between a barbershop and the Promise Falls Bakery, which made the best lemon tarts in the history of the universe. I thought maybe Thomas had gone in there for one, but the lady behind the counter had not seen him.
I went up the street and back, checking into every business, asking if anyone had seen my brother. At one point, I stood on the sidewalk out front of a shoe store, overcame my fear of drawing attention to myself, and shouted: “Thomas!”
When I went back to where I’d found his bike, it was gone.
I pedaled home furiously, getting there about ten minutes after he’d returned. Thomas was particularly sullen, never saying a word through dinner. But that night, I heard him in the basement, arguing with our father, or, more accurately, Dad speaking angrily to him. I figured Thomas was getting chewed out for going AWOL, but when I asked him about it later, he said it was nothing.
Whatever he’d been up to that day never came up again.
I was sitting at the kitchen table, pondering these and other weighty issues and watching Thomas eat his cereal, when I said, “Instead of making dinner, I have something else for you to do.”
He looked up from his bowl. “What?” He sounded alarmed.
“The house. It needs a cleaning.”
He scanned the kitchen and out to the living room. “It looks good to me.”
“It needs a vacuuming. A lot of stuff gets walked in here. I’ll clean the bathrooms, you vacuum the house.”
“Dad always did the cleaning,” he said. When I said nothing, he added, “He just always did it. I’ve never used the vacuum.”
“Do you agree that the house needs to be cleaned?” I asked.
Slow to answer. Finally, “I guess.”
“Well, if Dad’s no longer here, how do you think we should solve that problem? It’s the two of us living here, at least for now, and I want to include you in the problem solving around here.”
“I suppose,” he said thoughtfully, “you could do it.”
“I’m already doing the grocery shopping. And I’ve been making the meals. And dealing with the lawyer. And, Thomas, I have a job. I’m either going to have to nip back to Burlington—”
He started to say it, but I held up my finger as a warning and stopped him.
“I’m either going to have to nip back to Burlington, or I’m going to have to work here. Either way, I have things to do.”
“Me, too,” he said.
“That’s true. I figured, if I have to cut into my work time to get errands done, then it’s only fair that you should, too.”
Thomas’s eyes darted about nervously. “I don’t know where the vacuum is.”
I pointed to the closet near the back door. “It’s right in there.”
“When did you want me to do this for you?” he asked.
“You have to understand, Thomas, that you’re not doing this for me. This is something for the household. Pitching in, sharing chores, we do that for each other, and for ourselves. You get where I’m coming from?”
“Yes. I guess so. So when do you want me to do this?”
I raised my hands. “What about now? You get it out of the way, you’ve got the rest of your day free. That’s all I’m going to ask you to do today.”
“How many rooms do I have to do?”
“All of them,” I said.
“The basement?”
“Okay, skip the basement.”
“What about the stairs?”
“Yes, the stairs.” His shoulders slumped, already feeling the weight of the assignment. “Go haul out the vacuum, I’ll show you the basics.”
He pushed back his chair, went to the closet, and dragged out the machine with all the grace and familiarity of a yak handling a set of golf clubs.
“How do you plug it in?” he asked. “The plug only comes out an inch. It won’t reach the wall.”
“Press your foot on that pad there—no, right next to that—and then you can pull out the cord. Keep pulling until it won’t come out any more.” I stood up. “Let me show you a few things.”
I gav
e him a brief lesson. How to turn it on and off, when to use the power head, and what the various attachments were for. “This is for carpet,” I said, “and this is for bare wood floors.”
“What about tile?” he asked.
“Same as a bare wood floor. Just keep going over the whole floor. Nothing to it.”
I might have looked like Thomas did had someone dropped me into the cockpit of the space shuttle. At my urging, he flipped the switch and the machine roared to life. I shouted, “I’ve got some mail and stuff to deal with, so I’ll leave you be.”
I’d come back to Promise Falls in such a rush that I hadn’t packed a laptop; I was using the e-mail program on my cell, and any correspondence that required a reply of more than a few words was a pain to type out on the phone’s keypad. Plus, I knew I had a few bills that needed to be paid, which I could do online.
Dad had a laptop, the second he’d owned. “This one is lighter, faster,” he’d said to me in a message a few months ago. He’d started reading newspapers online, but still bought a print one every day. He said it was for the local ads, but it was really about the ritual of getting into the car and driving down to the store to buy one. It was his daily morning adventure. He always got a coffee, too, and was still home in time to make Thomas breakfast.
He kept the computer on the kitchen counter. I took it out with me onto the porch. The wireless signal worked out there, and I wanted to get away from the noise of the vacuum. I took in Thomas’s technique as I walked past. He was stooped over as he wandered the floor, like he was actually hunting for the dust he had to suck up. He evidently believed the power head needed to rest atop each section of carpet for several seconds to do its job. At this rate, he wasn’t going to get up to his room until noon.
I sat in one of the wicker chairs, opened up the computer, and hit the power button. I probably could have used a sweater out there, but it wasn’t cool enough to make me want to go back inside and find one.
I entered the password to get into my e-mail program. Some junk, a couple of notes from Jeremy Chandler, a message from an editor at the Washington Post praising my last illustration, which depicted Congress as a sandbox full of children.
Inside, it sounded like the vacuum had just sucked up a squirrel. Thomas had undoubtedly caught the carpet fringe. He’d figure it out.
I found the Web site for the Promise Falls Standard. I couldn’t find a specific e-mail address for Julie, but under Contact Us it said you could reach a reporter by typing in their first initial followed by last name and then @pfstandard.com.
So I was able to write Julie:
Thanks for the beer, and making the time to talk. It was nice to see you again. Like I said, if you’re driving by, pop in and say hi to Thomas.
I hit “send.”
She’d been on my mind since our meeting at Grundy’s, and I was hoping she’d take me up on the invitation. I hadn’t spent much time with her, but it was long enough to realize she was easy to talk to. You could speak plainly to her, no bullshit. And I didn’t have many people to talk to these days. I really couldn’t talk to Thomas. I mean, could I? When all he really cared about was getting back to his Whirl360? He was more concerned with assisting the CIA with a nonexistent global catastrophe than he was with helping me figure out what to do with the house and him.
I sighed and opened up Safari. I wanted to look into the residence Laura Grigorin had suggested might be a good place for Thomas. I went up to the corner of the screen to enter some key words into Google.
As soon as I began to type, a list of previous searches popped up onto the screen. These would have been the things Dad was looking up the last time he used this computer. Before he died.
I glanced at the list. It was short. Three items.
smartphones
depression
child prostitution
I stared at the list a long time. Felt the world getting ready to open up and swallow me whole.
The door opened. “I think the vacuum’s broken,” Thomas said.
TWENTY-TWO
HOWARD Talliman is sitting on a bench in Central Park, just north of the Arsenal, south of Sixty-fifth, waiting for Lewis Blocker.
For years, Howard has employed the former New York police officer. It started as the occasional freelance job, but that meant there might be times when Howard needed Lewis when he was busy doing work for someone else. That didn’t work for Howard. So he put Lewis on an annual salary, twice what he’d made as a cop, so he could be confident that whenever Lewis’s skills were required, he would be available.
Howard needs Lewis right now more than he ever has before. He’s never had a crisis quite like this one.
Howard looks south, sees Lewis. The man is just under six feet, and if he had any hair on the top of his head he’d probably top out at six-one. Thick neck, broad shoulders, a bit soft in the middle. But that’s just padding over the six-pack. Howard knows that if he drove his fist into Lewis’s gut with everything he had, the guy wouldn’t move, and Howard would end up with a broken wrist. His eyes are small and penetrating, flanking a nose that’s bent slightly to the left. He’d had it broken years ago and chose not to get it fixed. It let people know he’d been hurt, and survived, and didn’t have any qualms about getting hurt again.
Lewis Blocker nods at Howard and sits down next to him.
“Well?” Howard asks.
“You could give her the hundred grand,” he says, “but that won’t be the end of your problem.”
“Go on.”
“I asked around,” he says. Howard does not have to ask Lewis whether he has been discreet. That’s what Howard pays him to be. Lewis knows how to find things out without drawing attention to himself.
“Allison Fitch owes money. She bounces checks. She borrows money and doesn’t pay it back. She hasn’t been paying her share of the rent and her roommate wants to kill her. When she gets money, instead of paying back the people she owes it to, she blows it on herself.”
“Okay.”
“I think, if you give her that money, it’ll blow her mind. She’ll go through it like shit through a goose. You ask me, that hundred grand will actually put her in deeper debt. She’ll get her own place, she’ll lease a flashy car, she’ll open a charge account at Bloomie’s. The hundred grand’ll be gone, and she’ll be on the hook for another hundred in no time.”
Howard nods thoughtfully. “So she’ll be back.”
“No question. And the way she’s going to spend that money, it’s going to attract attention. A lot of attention. People are going to wonder where she came into this fortune. Some people, they shake you down and they’re smart about it. Tuck the money away, save it for a rainy day, that kind of thing. But those kinds of people, they’re in the minority. You find someone who’s sensible with money, they’re not typically into blackmail. You know?”
“I get it,” Howard says. “What if—I can’t believe I’m suggesting this—we gave her more money, from the outset, but made it clear there’ll never be any more. Ever.”
Lewis looks disapprovingly at him.
“Okay, I know, dumb idea,” Howard says. “Maybe, what we do is give her the hundred, but you have a word with her. You can be very persuasive. You scare the shit out of her, make her understand that if she flashes the money around, draws attention to herself, or comes back for more, it might not be in her interest.”
“Hurt her,” Lewis says. “A little.”
Howard can’t look the ex-cop in the eye. He’s watching a Filipino nanny corral three small Upper East Side children, all clad in Burberry, as they head in the direction of the zoo.
“That’s your call, Lewis,” Howard says. “You’re the expert.”
“Yeah,” he says. “That’s why I think you should hear me out on what I think you need to do. Because, you know, we haven’t even addressed your other problem.”
Howard looks at him. “About what she might know.”
Lewis nods.
“I spok
e to Bridget,” Howard says. “She thinks it’s possible Fitch might have overheard one of her phone conversations with Morris. And it’s possible they may have discussed his problem.”
“But she doesn’t know for sure.”
Howard shakes his head. “No.”
“But it’s not the sort of thing you want to leave to chance.”
Howard rubs his hands together. “Maybe, if you had a chat with her, you could determine what she knows and what she doesn’t.”
Lewis looks down at his feet. A couple of pigeons are pecking at some specks of popcorn near the toe of his left shoe. He kicks suddenly, catching one of the pigeons in the head. The bird staggers off like it’s had too much to drink.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Howard. If she doesn’t actually know anything, we’ll be telling her we’ve got more to hide than the fact that Bridget swings both ways. Gives her even more leverage.”
“Jesus,” Howard says under his breath. “What a fucking mess. And honest to God, Lewis, how the hell did you miss this about Bridget?”
His eyes narrow. “Maybe because you didn’t ask me to do anything but a superficial check. Finances, criminal record, unpaid parking tickets. She came out smelling like a rose, there. She was so perfect for Morris you didn’t want to dig too deep and run the risk of fucking it up.”
Howard sighs because he knows this is true. But he can’t stop himself from adding, “Well, you should have done it on your own initiative. You should have done what you knew was most prudent.”
“Interesting you should say that,” Lewis says.
“What?”
“I’m going to recommend what I think you need to do about Allison Fitch.”
Howard looks wary. “What?”
“You have to make it so she won’t be a recurring problem.”
“How the hell do we do that?”
Lewis says nothing, waits for Howard to figure it out.
Once he has, his face blanches. “Oh no, you can’t be serious.”
Again, Lewis says nothing.