The Flight Attendant(62)

“And when you return the room is dark?”

“At least the bedroom is,” she answered. “Maybe there was a light on in the living room.” She had to believe that even she wasn’t ever so drunk that she would knowingly crawl into bed with a corpse. Still, the reality of what she was suggesting was beginning to become clear.

“God, Cassie. What if Alex was killed at one or two in the morning? That’s why you take the Fifth.” Ani’s frustration was evident as she paused to take another long, last swallow of her drink. “I wish I knew more about how precise an autopsy could be at pinpointing a time of death.”

“Aren’t you glad I told them about Miranda? At least now they have a suspect other than me.”

The lawyer stared at her but said nothing.

“Look, I’m sorry,” Cassie said. “I am. I’m just built…weird.”

“Irresponsible would be a more precise word. So would insane.”

“Will we know what happens before I fly to Rome?”

Ani put both of her hands on Cassie’s knees. “You are assuming that the next time I see you isn’t after you’ve been arrested—at, let’s see, a bail hearing. You are assuming that you haven’t turned over your passport by then. You are assuming you still have a job.”

Cassie picked up her margarita and ran her tongue along the very last of the salt on the rim. The glass was otherwise empty. “I’m taking my niece and nephew to the zoo tomorrow,” she said, her voice a little numb in her ears. It was as if she had headphones on. Then: “Will I be fired?”

“The zoo. Your job. Really? Are you hearing a word I’m saying?”

She nodded. “I am.”

“The union will have your back. My uncle will have your back. Call him tonight and let him know what’s going on. I’ll call him, too. I rather doubt the airline can fire you. Presumption of innocence and all. But at some point they may put you on a leave of absence. There is a whole branch of law that studies precisely when you can fire an employee for off-duty conduct—and when you can’t.”

“I see.”

“I’m not sure you do. I’m really not.”

“You know what’s the damnedest thing?”

“Right now? After you decided to just drop by Unisphere yesterday afternoon? After your performance with the FBI today? That’s one hell of a high bar. I don’t know. Tell me.”

“It’s this, that expression you just used. Presumption of innocence. Who knows what I’m capable of when I’m that blotto and the memory’s collateral damage. But I really do know in my heart that I didn’t kill Alex. I do stupid things when I’m drunk and I do irresponsible things, but I don’t do…that. I don’t cut people’s throats. And so if the hammer comes down hard on me this time, it will be a kind of awful irony.”

“Cassie?”

She waited.

The waves of Ani’s anger were receding now, and in their wake was only sadness and worry. “I promise you: you’ve done nothing so bad that you deserve what might be coming.”



* * *



? ?

Cassandra, Troy-born daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba, knew the future, and no one believed her. At least most of the time that was what occurred. Apollo gave her the great gift of prophecy because he was confident that she was going to sleep with him; when, in the end, she refused, the god spat in her mouth, leaving behind the curse that no one would ever believe a word that she said. And so she lived with frustration and dread.

Cassandra, Kentucky-born daughter of no one who would ever be construed for royalty, pondered the disbelief that she, too, left in her wake and the apprehension and fear that now marked her every step. The reality of what she had done (and what she had not done) had become incontestable fact in her mind, but she rather doubted the FBI ever would believe it if she were to volunteer the chronological truth: she said good night to Alex Sokolov and left the palatial digs that existed behind the door to room 511 sometime around twelve thirty or one in the morning and then wandered the hallways in search of an elevator. He was most definitely still alive at that point. But she never made it to the elevator. She just never found it. And so she collapsed, an appalling, drunken, boneless marionette on an ornate Middle Eastern divan, and dozed. When she awoke, she still didn’t reach the elevator, either because once more she couldn’t find it or because she hadn’t even remembered that it had been her original destination. Either way, she returned to Alex’s suite, stripped naked, and climbed into his bed…utterly oblivious to the fact that he was dead. Or almost dead.

No, in the morning she had seen his neck. He had bled out quickly. He was dead.

And she had slept the rest of the night beside his corpse. In the same sheets. Her head on the pillow beside his pillow. His blood clinging to her hair.

This was a spectacular, revolting fail even by her standards for indignity and mortification. She guessed if she weren’t already such a lush, the revelation would have driven her to drink.



* * *



? ?

And yet, for whatever the reason, despite her performance at the FBI office that afternoon, the authorities did not come for her that night. She and Ani shared a cab uptown, Cassie exiting on Twenty-Seventh Street, and she was back in her apartment by a quarter to six. She called Derek Mayes, Ani’s uncle at the union, and he actually seemed considerably less shocked by the story she shared—beginning with the body in the bed and building to her confessing to the FBI that she had spent the night with Sokolov—than she might have expected. She attributed this more to his rather low expectations of her as a person than to his experience with flight attendants generally. He assured her that he and Ani would talk and together they would look out for her. He was comforting. He reminded her that she hadn’t definitely killed anyone, though he did add, a dig that was more ominous than funny, “at least that’s your story this week.”