A Good Marriage(37)

While Millie got on the phone, I made my way up the steps, trying not to look too closely as I stepped around the blood in my stocking feet. At the top, well past all the blood, there was what looked to be fingerprint dust, so the NYPD had indeed done something. Upstairs, I passed Case’s spotless but cheerfully childlike bedroom and headed onward to Zach and Amanda’s master suite at the front of the house. I used the edge of my shirt to open their door.

The master bedroom was massive, spa-like and serene. Every surface was bright white—from the linens to the curtains to the walls—and yet somehow the exact right shade so as not to be sterile or cold. I tried to imagine Zach and Amanda snuggling in that huge fluffy bed late on Saturday, Case in between them, but I just could not picture it.

I turned away from the bed and headed toward the closet in search of the golf clubs or, as Millie had said, anything else that might be useful. A vast walk-in, with warm lighting and a small bench in the center, the closet had artfully arranged floor-to-ceiling racks and cubbies and endless amounts of extremely expensive clothing on hangers. I knew such closets existed in mansions somewhere, but in Brooklyn—even in a house as nice as Zach’s—it was hard to process. It also wasn’t a closet for golf clubs. Downstairs, maybe, or wherever they kept the rest of their sporting equipment. They had a child. They probably had a designated area for such things.

But first I needed to take a closer look in the bedroom closet. As Millie had pointed out, there could be something helpful tucked somewhere, though it already felt uncomfortably intimate, standing there in the doorway in my nearly bare feet. Lingerie, sex toys, there was no telling what I might find. After all, Zach and Amanda had been at a sex party that night. And now, here I was mixed up in whatever they had done. As if I didn’t have enough of my own problems. It had been so reckless to ask Paul about Zach’s case. Stupid, actually. I braced myself as I finally stepped inside the massive closet.

I opened one drawer after another. Clothes and more clothes, that was all. There was actually nothing very personal anywhere, much less anything scandalous. I lifted the lid on a jewelry box to an eye-popping collection—necklaces, bracelets, and earrings with colored stones and, yes, plenty of actual diamonds. It seemed to rule out a robbery, unless Amanda had interrupted the burglar before he’d found the stash he was looking for. Maybe I’d cut short his return trip to finish the job.

I headed back out into the bedroom, where I looked over the built-in bookshelves. There were dozens of classic novels, Shakespeare plays, and Nietzsche, separated every dozen books or so by a short cluster of coffee-table and art books stacked on their sides. Amanda’s, surely. Back when I’d known him, Zach hadn’t been much of a reader, a fact he’d seemed to offer as a challenge to anyone willing to judge him. Amanda—poor background, uneducated, but a big reader and a great mother, not to mention gorgeous. A jury was going to make somebody pay for what had been done to her.

As I turned back from the shelves, a nearby nightstand caught my eye. The top drawer was open slightly. I made a note for myself in my phone: Fingerprint nightstand drawer. Then I used the edge of my shirt to open it.

The orderly, impersonal contents of the top drawer bore no resemblance to my own overstuffed night table, with its tangled headphones and receipts for store credit that had long since expired. There was a small tube of very pricey, very female hand cream next to a thin box of tissues—it was Amanda’s nightstand, presumably. The only genuinely personal item was a card from Case that—judging from the childish handwriting—had likely been written years earlier: I luv u momy. You ar the best and only momy.

My throat tightened. That poor little boy off enjoying camp somewhere, having no idea the loss that had already befallen him. It was a loss I felt daily, even all these years later.

The bottom drawer of Amanda’s nightstand was empty, apart from a single Moleskine journal. Using tissues, I lifted it out. As I flipped through the lined pages—empty, it turned out—a small card with a modern drawing of two roses at the top fell to the carpet: Thinking of you xoxo. No signature. Maybe Zach wasn’t such a lousy husband after all. I picked up the card from the carpet, careful to hold it only by the edges. On the back was the name of a florist in stylish typeface: “Blooms on the Slope, Seventh Avenue and St. John’s Place.”

I set the florist’s card down on the nightstand for safekeeping, only to have it fall promptly back to the floor. When I bent to retrieve it a second time, I caught sight of something under the bed. Something large and dark shoved up near the headboard.

I got down and pressed my face to the carpet, using my iPhone flashlight for illumination. More journals under the bed. Dozens of them. Stacked neatly and carefully and pushed deep against the baseboard, in a place where officers might easily have missed them.

Using the tissues, I grabbed a few of the journals from different stacks. Unlike the pricey Moleskine in the drawer, these journals were mismatched, very worn, and much cheaper looking. I flipped quickly through the first few pages of each. One seemed to be from Case’s first year, two from Amanda’s late childhood and early teen years. I felt guilty invading Amanda’s privacy, but the journals could provide a gold mine of alternate suspects. Hopefully, I wouldn’t need to read much to find one good one for a jury to latch onto. But reading through Amanda’s journals in any kind of detail wasn’t a project for right now. A trial and the actual need for exculpatory evidence like alternate suspects was months away. Instead, I needed to finish up at Zach’s house and get back to the office to write the habeas writ. That was Zach’s only way out of Rikers.