Win (Windsor Horne Lockwood III #1)(32)

I stop and tell her this.

“You hated me,” Jessica says.

“No.”

“You viewed us as rivals.”

“You and I?”

“Yes.”

“For?”

“For Myron, of course.”

Jessica shifts on the bed. She is still clothed. I remain in my bathrobe. “You know I wrote a piece on the Jane Street Six for the New Yorker.”

“When?”

“It was on one of the anniversaries of the attack. Twenty, maybe twenty-fifth, I don’t remember. You can probably find it online.” She tucked her hair behind her ear. “It’s pretty fascinating stuff.”

“How so?”

“It’s a perfect storm of what-if tragedy. The six had originally planned to hit another USO dance hall a month earlier, but Strauss had come down with appendicitis. What if he hadn’t? Several of the six were getting cold feet and threatened not to show. What if one or two had backed out? They were just stoned kids wanting to do some good. They didn’t set out to hurt anyone. So what if? What if that one Molotov cocktail hadn’t gone astray?”

I’m not impressed with this analysis. “Everything in life is a what-if.”

“True. Can I ask a question?”

I wait.

“Why isn’t Myron helping you? I mean, all the times you played Watson to Sherlock…”

“He’s busy.”

“With his new wife?”

I don’t feel right talking about Myron with her.

Jessica sits up. “You said you need to watch the documentary on the Jane Street Six.”

“I do.”

“Let’s watch it together and see what happens.”

*



Jessica lies on the right side of the bed, I take the left. Our bodies are close together. I prop up the laptop between us. She puts on reading glasses and flips off the lamp. I click the play button. We start watching the documentary in surprisingly comfortable silence. I find this whole experience odd. For me, Jessica was just an annoying and inconvenient extension of Myron, never her own being. To see or experience her with no attachment to him feels somehow uneasy, not in spite of the comfort but because of it. For the first time, I am seeing her as her own entity, not just Myron’s hot girlfriend.

I am not sure how I feel about that.

The documentary begins by pointing out that the group was never called the Jane Street Six. They were just six seemingly random college students, a ragtag splinter quasi-group from the Weather Underground or Students for a Democratic Society. The nickname Jane Street Six was given to them by the media after that disastrous night for the very simple reason that the famed photograph of the six of them had been taken in the basement of a town house on Jane Street in Greenwich Village. “It was down in the dark dwelling,” the serious narrator informed us, “that they brewed the most deadly cocktail of all—the Molotov cocktail.”

Dum, dum, duuuum.

The narrative then went back in time to how Ry Strauss and Arlo Sugarman originally bonded as sixth graders in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn. They flashed up an old black-and-white classic team photo of Ry and Arlo on a Little League team, half-standing, half-kneeling, dramatically using red marker to circle the two young faces on the far right.

“Even then,” Mr. Voiceover gravely intoned, “Strauss and Sugarman stood side by side.”

The documentary mercifully skipped those poorly acted and poorly lit reenactment scenes, the ones you always see on true crime drama. They stuck to real footage and interviews with local police, with witnesses, with survivors from the bus crash, with families and friends. A tourist had snapped a photograph of Ry Strauss and Lake Davies running away. The photo was blurry, but you could see them holding hands. The rest were behind them, but you couldn’t make out any faces.

The documentary did a bit on the seven victims—Craig Abel, Andrew Dressler, Frederick Hogan, Vivian Martina, Bastien Paul, Sophia Staunch, Alexander Woods.

Jessica says, “Remind me to tell you about Sophia Staunch when we’re done.”

The documentary focused in on five teenage boys from St. Ignatius Prep who had gone to New York that fateful night to celebrate the seventeenth birthday of Darryl Lance. Back in those days, bars and clubs were not strict about proof of age—and the drinking age had only been eighteen anyway. It came out later that the boys had gone to a strip club with the subtle moniker Sixty-Nine before hopping on the late-night bus heading back out to Garden City. Darryl Lance, who had been in his mid-forties when they filmed the documentary, spoke about the incident. He’d only suffered a broken arm, but his friend Frederick Hogan, also age seventeen, died in the crash. Lance welled up when he described the flames, the panic, the bus driver’s overreaction.

“I could see the driver turn the wheel too hard. We went up on just two wheels. I could see the bus start to careen out of control and head for that stone wall. And then we plunge off the road almost in slow motion…”

They then replayed the press conference where Vanessa Hogan absolved the Six. “I forgive them totally because it’s not my place to judge, only God’s. Perhaps this was God’s way for Frederick to pay for his own sin.”

I turn slightly toward Jessica. “Is she saying God executed her son for going to a strip club?”