Night Film(99)
She looked over at me as if asking a question.
“He didn’t know where that was. I said Times Square. He took me right there. There were people everywhere, lights like it was the middle of the afternoon. And I knew I was going to be fine. Because I was right where I was supposed to be. I’d spent my whole life feeling like I was waiting to be someplace else. For the first time, I didn’t.” Nora turned to me, her hands clasped over her knees. “I never told anybody.”
“I’m glad you told me,” I said.
It took a moment to hear it all; the story seemed like a toxic vapor wafting through the room that needed time to dissolve. I felt at once sick to my stomach and an overwhelming need to make sure she was all right, to extract the memory of such a thing from her head. It was never the act itself but our own understanding of it that defeated us, over and over again.
“You didn’t want to go to the police?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t want to waste another minute on it. My life was meant to begin. The bad things that happen to you don’t have to mean anything at all. And anyway, he’ll answer to God for what he did.”
She announced this with great certainty. For a girl with nothing to her name but a parakeet, to have such unwavering belief in the reckoning of evil in the world—a belief I could never bring myself to have, having seen, time and time again, depravity go unchecked—it awed me, and it was some time before I could bring myself to speak.
Outside, a car cruised down Perry Street, and the night’s stillness made it sound drowsy and relaxed; it might have been a rowboat wafting by.
“You are a magnificent and powerful person,” I said.
I hadn’t intended to say that, exactly—it’d never been my strong suit, whipping out the right words to mend that ever-present wound in a woman’s heart—but it made Nora smile. She slipped toward me, mattress creaking, kissed me on the cheek, and hopped off the bed, a blurred blueish figure floating through the dark.
“I’m a fan,” I added. “And that’s an unconditional lifetime warranty. I’m like Victorinox luggage and Darn Tough socks.”
She laughed sleepily, slipping out of the room. “Night, Woodward,” she whispered over her shoulder. “Thanks for listening.”
I don’t know how long I sat there, staring into the darkness, the hardened shadows thawing as the minutes passed, the only sounds night-shivers of the city outside. After a while, when I was half asleep, her presence lingered as if some wild creature had been inside my room, a fawn or iridescent bird, or maybe a kirin.
71
“He was held overnight in the Tombs,” Blumenstein informed me over the phone. “I sent a junior associate downtown to get him out. They dropped burglary in the second degree, but he’s facing criminal trespass. Bail will be around five thousand dollars.”
“Why so high?” I asked, wedging the phone against my ear as I pulled my coat out of the closet and pulled it on.
“He has three priors. Assault of a police officer in Buford, Georgia. Petty theft in Fritz Creek, Alaska.”
“Alaska?”
“And two years ago. Possession of a controlled substance for the intent of sale. This was in Los Angeles.”
“What was the substance?”
“Marijuana and MDMA. He served two months, did a hundred hours community service.”
I told Blumenstein I’d cover the bail, then, hanging up, quickly relayed the conversation to Nora as we prepared to leave for the meeting with Olivia Endicott. I’d made Nora an omelet this morning, but as soon as she saw it, she announced she wasn’t hungry, her face red. I chalked this up to that bizarre black box of feminine behavior that defied explanation, until I realized—cursing my stupidity—it was because of what she’d told me last night. She didn’t want me to treat her with kid gloves, didn’t want to be handled like some fragile thing with a crack through it. So I brutally chucked out the omelet and announced that Moe Gulazar’s black sequin leggings and Captain Sparrow blouse didn’t suit a meeting with one of New York’s most elegant swans. I ordered her to change her clothes, which made her smile with relief as she raced upstairs to do so. Within minutes, we were out the door, hurrying down Perry Street.
It was a gray day, the sky threatening rain. We headed for the subway because we were already late. And if there was one thing I knew about New York’s wealthiest, they loved to keep you waiting, not the other way around.
72
“Mr. McGrath. Welcome.”
The woman who greeted us at the door of apartment 17D was in her fifties, dressed in a dust-gray suit. She had the dimmed-bulb face of someone who’d lived a life in servitude. Her eyes moved inquiringly to Nora.
“This is my assistant. I hope it’s all right if she joins us.”
“Certainly.”
Smiling, the woman ushered us into the foyer, where an old codger wearing a rumpled burgundy jacket appeared—seemingly from the walls—to take our coats. Wordlessly he drifted with them back down another dim hall.
“Right this way.”
She led us in the other direction down a dark gallery. The wine-colored walls were plastered with paintings, the way scaffolding downtown was covered with ads for concerts: only these happened to be Matisses and Schieles, Clementes, the odd Magritte, each painting sporting its own bronze lamp like a miner’s helmet. Between these masterpieces were dark open doorways, and I slowed to glance inside. Every room looked like a grotto, dank and stalactited with brocade curtains and Louis XIV chairs, vases and Tiffany lamps, busts in marble, ebony sculpture, books. We passed a formal dining room, the walls celery green, a crystal chandelier like a frozen jellyfish floating midair.