Beach Wedding(52)

“The number belonged to your father, Mr. Rourke. Philip was in contact with Sean Rourke when he died.”

I sat there with my mouth open.

“What? My father? This Philip was talking to my father?”

Julian nodded. “They were going to meet. Then Philip died. And then your...father died from drowning. Don’t you see?”

I shook my head, my eyes wide. I didn’t see anything. I didn’t want to see anything.

“Philip must have seen something the night of the murder and finally reached out to your dad once he returned from England.”

I sat there stunned.

“Then both of them died in suspicious accidents three days apart.”

I felt hot, suddenly dazed.

“That’s why Kelsey wanted to do the book. Philip and your father were about to meet, and someone didn’t want that to happen. That was the bombshell Xavier was going to reveal.”

My father, I thought.

Murdered? My father murdered?

“No,” I said, suddenly finding myself on my feet. “No, you’re wrong.”

I needed to get out of there. I felt dizzy as I stumbled to my feet.

I almost knocked down the maid bringing the coffee into the storybook living room as I headed for the door.



70

Numb and stupefied, I burst out of the building into the street. Instead of heading to get my car up on Columbus, I crossed Central Park West and started walking south in the shade of the overhanging branches.

It had gotten hotter in the time I’d been inside Julian Sutton’s apartment, muggier, the heat off the sidewalk and street palpable and oppressive. After a half dozen blocks or so, I found an empty bench near Columbus Circle and sat in the swelter.

Still out of it, I stared up at the black glass of a building across the street from me for a while. People walked by. A short muscular woman jogging, a Black guy in a beautiful blue suit, a bald guy in a white Adidas jacket and aviators speaking French into an iPhone. I gaped at everything around me like an escaped mental patient. It felt like I’d just taken a blow from a blunt object to the head.

My father, I thought.

Murdered?

I tried to process it.

What did I know about my father’s death?

There had been an autopsy. Alcohol in his system, but the cause of death was determined to be accidental drowning.

But what if it wasn’t?

My phone clattered to the cobblestones as I fumbled it out of my pocket. I picked it back up and dialed Viv.

“Viv, I need you to do me a huge favor. Are you in the bedroom?”

“Yes. What is it, honey? You okay? You sound funny.”

“I’m fine. Bad connection. Viv, in the box with the Sutton case file, there are some of my father’s things. I’m looking for his planner, his old planner. Do you see it?”

“No. Wait, yes. I have it.”

“Good. Turn to the week of August 6, 2000. Does it say anything?”

“No. It’s blank. But there’s something on the eighth.”

I waited. Please, I thought.

“‘Dentist 10:15 a.m.’”

“Nothing else?”

“No.”

I thought about that. My father was very organized when it came to work. OCD level. I let out a breath.

“Wait. There’s also something on the tenth,” Viv said. “‘Meet with PO at 9 a.m.’”

PO.

Philip Oster.

I felt like I was about to vomit. Then it wasn’t just a feeling. I jumped up as I puked all over the Central Park stone wall beside the bench.

Murdered. They’d murdered him.

They’d murdered my dad, I thought as I wiped at my mouth with the back of my hand.

“Terry?” my wife said as I ran across the street to get a cab.



71

I was down on Waverly Place, sipping a ginger ale to get the taste of puke out of my mouth as I watched the evening invade the Greenwich Village street in front of Lucas Brody’s town house.

I’d rung his buzzer when I first arrived about an hour and a half before, but there was no answer, so now I was watching and waiting.

I figured if Brody weren’t out of town, he’d be coming back soon. Or if he were inside and didn’t want to speak to me, he’d eventually be going out.

As I waited, I went over everything again and again in my head. But no matter how much I turned it over, things weren’t adding up. If Disenzo killed Noah Sutton and then died in a motorcycle accident, who in the hell killed Philip Oster? And most importantly, who in the hell had killed my dad?

I didn’t know but it didn’t matter.

I ricocheted the empty can of Canada Dry off a garbage pail on the corner and watched it roll clattering into the golden sunlit street.

Because I was going to find out. I was getting to the bottom of this now, no matter if I needed a pickax, a shovel, and maybe even some dynamite to get there.

“I knew it,” I said when I saw a light go on in Brody’s ground-floor front window around 8:15.

He was in there. There was a camera beside the buzzer, so he had seen me knocking. But apparently, I couldn’t come in.

“Good luck with that,” I said, seething, as I continued to wait.

It was twenty minutes later when I saw the delivery guy on the bike stop in front of Brody’s place and padlock his ride to the lamppost. I was across the street, waiting, right behind the delivery guy as he rang Brody’s buzzer.