The Flight Attendant(33)

Cassie wondered just how much her uncle actually knew. She had a feeling he must have suspected more than he had revealed at breakfast. “He does.”

“Go on.”

“I’m curious: what area of your expertise did he think I needed?”

She shook her head. “I have no idea. My uncle gives out my business cards like the Easter Bunny gives out jellybeans. I’m the daughter he never had. You called me this morning. Let’s start there.”

Cassie glanced down at the Band-Aids on her left hand. There were five of them on the two cuts. Did they make her look hapless or inept? “You probably assume I have some labor issue with the airline.”

“I assume nothing.”

“Did your uncle tell you about the FBI?”

“He said they met a flight you were on when it landed. That’s all.”

She looked at the books over Ani’s shoulder. They were beautiful, leather the color of a saddle, lettering the gold of a general’s epaulets. Inside, she knew, were pages and pages that could probably substitute for the melatonin tabs she took on occasion when she was combating jet lag. Behind her, on the other side of the door, she was aware of a distant, faraway-seeming conversation. She heard, she thought, a copy machine. She thought of the two photos of her that were online, and then she thought once more of Sokolov’s body in the bed. She saw it from the vantage point of the hotel room drapes as she sunk, hungover, to the lushly carpeted floor. This was probably her last chance. And so she spoke.

“I called you because the other day I woke up in a hotel room really far away from here, and the man beside me was dead.” It was just that simple.

Ani raised one of those immaculate eyebrows but didn’t say a word. And so Cassie went back to the beginning, starting with the flight from Paris to Dubai last week when she first met Sokolov and ending with the broken wineglass last night in a Murray Hill bathtub. She told her about Miranda. She showed her the two security camera images of her from the Dubai news story on her phone. She admitted to trying to wipe the suite of her fingerprints as best she could before leaving but said she may have left behind her lipstick and a lip balm in one of the rooms. Occasionally Ani interrupted her with a question, though none of them seemed tinged with judgment, and sometimes she asked her to pause while she jotted down a lengthier note on the yellow legal pad in her lap. When Cassie was done, she said, “I honestly can’t say how much trouble you’re really in—and I’m working on the assumption that you didn’t kill this man.”

“That’s correct. Well, it’s mostly correct. I’m pretty sure I didn’t kill him, but I’m not one hundred percent sure.”

“You’re not one hundred percent sure?” Ani asked, the surprise evident on her face.

“That’s right. I can’t be completely confident,” Cassie said, and then she explained her tendency to drink and even, on occasion, to succumb to—or, arguably, to court—the no-man’s-land where memory hadn’t a chance. “And then there was the bottle,” she said when she had finished.

“The bottle?”

“In the morning, I found a broken bottle of Stolichnaya vodka. I vaguely remember when we broke it the night before. It was the vodka Miranda had brought. Alex was having trouble with the top. Anyway, the shoulder—you know, the neck and the shoulder of the bottle—were intact. Sort of. The top of the bottle was like a weapon and it was by the bed. I took all the pieces I could find and threw them away after I’d left the hotel.”

“So, are you telling me that you might have killed him? You used the broken bottle as a weapon and cut his throat?” Her voice was flat. Toneless.

“Here’s the thing,” Cassie murmured. She recalled how when people had something utterly ridiculous to explain, they always seemed to begin, It’s complicated. She took comfort in the fact that she hadn’t begun with those two words. “I’m not violent when I black out. I’ve never been told I hurt someone. I may do stupid things and risk my own life, but I don’t attack people. If sometime in the night Alex had tried to have sex with me again, I don’t think I would have stopped him. It’s probably happened to me before. I mean, I know it has.”

“Men having sex with you without your consent.”

She nodded. “Look, I know it’s not a gray area. I just know that when I’m that drunk, I’m not prone to say no. Or, I’m sorry to say, care.”

“You’re right, it’s not a gray area. It’s rape.”

“But I don’t think Alex would ever have tried to rape me. Either I was so drunk I was oblivious—”

“That’s not consent, Cassie!”

“Let me finish. Please. Either I was so drunk I was oblivious, or I was happy with whatever was happening. But if I did ask Alex to stop, I believe he would have. He was a really gentle guy. I mean, he washed my hair in the shower. So, why would I have taken the broken bottle and fought him?”

“Is it possible that you killed him while he was sleeping? Is that where this is going?”

“It’s possible, but…”

“But…”

“But I don’t think so,” Cassie said. “That’s not me. And I’ve thought about this a lot since it happened. And…”