Nevertheless, this felt like the first grown-up interaction he’d engaged in for quite a while, and as a result he left the campus feeling a good deal less anxious.
But he still needs this drink. And might actually need a second. It’s not as if one adult conversation is going to solve all, or indeed any, of his problems.
He takes a sip of Stoli. As he’s putting the glass down, he looks into the mirror behind the bar and sees movement-someone emerging from the shadows of the Smokehouse Tavern’s dimly lit vestibule area.
It’s a woman. She’s fortyish, small and slim, with short, dark hair. She’s dressed all in black-in jeans, a T-shirt, and a jacket.
She approaches the bar and pulls out a stool three along from where Frank is sitting. She lays car keys and a phone down in front of her.
The barman comes up from the far end where he was stacking some glasses and looks at her, eyebrows raised interrogatively.
“Club soda, please.”
She sits down, picks the phone up, and starts… whatever, texting, tweeting.
He takes another sip from his drink.
The barman places a glass of club soda with ice and lemon in front of the woman and wanders off.
There is silence for a while, the thick silence of a slow-moving, aimless afternoon.
Then, “Frank… isn’t it?”
He turns. “Sorry?”
“Frank Bishop, right?”
The woman is looking directly at him. He’s puzzled. Does he know her? Is he supposed to recognize her?
“I’m sorry… have we met?”
“No.” She shakes her head. “Someone pointed you out to me. Back there… on the campus. One of the students.”
Frank shifts on his stool and turns, studying the woman’s face for a moment. She has smooth, pale skin and dark, penetrating green eyes.
Then something occurs to him.
“Did you follow me here?”
She nods. “Yes, I’m sorry. But I needed to talk to you. My name is Ellen Dorsey. I’m a journalist.”
Frank swallows, a hundred things racing through his head at once, but principally, What the fuck… a journalist?
This is also-he’s now aware-what the look on his face is saying, and it seems to make her uncomfortable, maybe even a little uncertain. As the seconds pass, he keeps staring at her. It’s as though she’s weighing something and needs more time. But he doesn’t feel like giving her any.
“Come on,” he says, “you’ve got something to tell me? What is it?”
She wipes away an invisible speck of dust from the bar before looking at him. “I’m not sure how to say this, Frank, but I think your daughter might be in serious trouble.”
Not exactly how she planned it.
But in the few moments she was sitting there, the reality of the situation, the complexity of it, overwhelmed her. If she thinks about it now, even for a second, one thing is clear. This man in front of her isn’t just a source, a provider of the next link in a chain of information.
He’s involved.
She remembers talking about this to Jimmy Gilroy, about how you get involved-when a story goes a certain way, when you get out of the house and meet people, look them in the eye. It can all get a bit knotty. Ambivalence creeps in.
She looks him in the eye now.
He says, “I beg your pardon?”
Ellen adjusts herself on the stool. “I’m still working on it, okay, but I’ve been investigating something, a story, and a certain name has come up, Julian Robert Coady. The thing is, I think the guy your daughter is involved with, Alex, might be this guy’s brother.”
Bishop’s eyes screw up as he tries to process this. In his obvious bewilderment and desperation he does his best to formulate another question, but all he can manage is “Story? What story?”
Ellen takes a breath and pauses. She can’t get straight into it, can she? Not without some prepping. And besides, it’s beginning to feel a little flimsy to her-a T-shirt, a comment made on a radio show?
What is she doing?
“I’ll get to that,” she says, “but… do you have any idea where they are now? Lizzie and Alex?”
“No.” This isn’t quite shouted, but it’s close. “That’s why I came up here. I can’t reach her. She’s not answering her phone.” He raises his left hand, holds it up for a moment, almost threateningly, and then, in frustration, slaps his thigh with it, and really hard. “It’s been almost a week.”
“Right.”
It’s sudden, but the sense hits her now-ineluctable, inarguable-that this is over. The situation has reached critical mass. There’s simply no way she can contain it, or hold out for more. “Look,” she says, “I may have it wrong, I may be putting two and two together here and getting five, but…” She exhales and looks down at the bar, at her keys, at her phone.
How to say this.
“What?”
She looks up at him again. “These recent shootings in Manhattan? The Wall Street guys? It’s my belief that Julian Robert Coady is… involved. Actually maybe both him and his brother.”
“What the fuck?”
This he does shout. The barman turns, looks over, but Ellen raises a hand to keep him at bay.
“Look,” she says, half in a whisper now, “I’ve only literally just put this together myself. It’s still circumstantial, but…”
A pale Frank Bishop stares at her for a second. Then, as though he’s forgotten something, he turns to the bar, picks up his glass, drains it, and puts it down again.
He turns back to face her.
“What did you say your name was?”
A tremor in his voice.
“Ellen Dorsey.”
“Well, Ellen, you’re going to have to explain all of this to me, and you’d better make it fast, because my head is just about ready to explode.”
So she does. She explains it to him, quickly and efficiently. No point doing it any other way. But passing the story on like this also means it’ll very soon be out of her hands. Because really, in the circumstances, what does she think Frank Bishop is going to do with it?
“Jesus Christ.”
His voice is calm now, quiet. He reaches into his jacket pocket and takes out his cell phone. He holds it up.
“I-I have to call… Lizzie’s mother.”
He gets off the stool and takes a few steps away from the bar. There is a slowness to his movements, an exaggerated steadiness, a concentration, as though he is drunk and trying not to show it. He’s actually in good shape, and handsome, sort of, with tight-cropped, graying hair. But he has a weary look to him as well, tired eyes, tired posture.
When he is far enough away, Ellen turns to her own phone and checks for messages, e-mails, tweets. Then she uses some of the coordinates she gathered back at that table in the Cabbage Patch for a quick data sweep through the Atherton social mediasphere.
With one eye on Bishop, who’s managing to keep his voice under control-though not his body language, that’s becoming increasingly agitated-she worms her way through half a dozen Twitter accounts.