It’s all anyone is talking about. A localized micro trend. Lizzie Bishop, her old man, that journalist.
Alex Coady.
Those two guys this morning.
Ellen stops, rereads that one.
This is getting a little creepy now. And those two guys asking questions this morning? Feds #noquestionaboutit
Ellen feels a weird sensation shooting down her spine.
Feds?
She quickly finds Geek Girl’s number and sends her a text.
There were two guys asking questions this morning?
It’s a long shot. Or maybe it isn’t. She’ll find out soon enough.
Frank Bishop turns around and looks at her, real fear in his eyes now. He walks the few steps back to the bar and reaches out to his stool for support. “My wife, ex-wife, is freaking out. Of course.” He swallows loudly. “She wants to know who you are.”
Ellen nods.
“Because she-Deb’s a lawyer-she says the cops’ll have been getting hundreds of crank calls on this since it started and we’ll need something to get their attention. To break through the firewall. And that’s you.”
Ellen nods again. “I know. And I know who to call.” She pauses. “I was going to do it anyway, but I wanted to talk to you first.”
The message alert on her cell phone pings.
She puts a hand out to pick it up, but then pauses. “I’m going to look at this,” she says. “Okay? It might be relevant.”
He nods.
She reads the message quickly.
Just heard about this from someone else. Two suits, this morning, but asking about Alex Coady not Lizzie Bishop xxx.
Ellen looks back up.
“Seems the cops are already on it,” she says.
Twenty minutes after Lizzie gets back to the apartment, she hears the key in the door. She’s sitting at the table, textbook open in front of her.
Trying to appear normal.
Heart racing.
She doesn’t know what she’s going to do, or say-she just has this overwhelming sense of needing to see Alex, to envelop him, to let him know that she knows, and that it’s okay. All week there has been this poisonous tension between them that she’s hated, silences, sighs, deflected looks, things half spoken. She didn’t understand what it was, and attributed it to Julian’s influence over him, to the force of Julian’s toxic personality. She feels awful now, realizing that it was more than likely the unimaginable pressure that Alex had put himself under, and that she certainly wasn’t helping by being needy.
Also, she’s not allowing herself, at least for the moment, to dwell too much on what Alex has done, and what it might mean-other than what it says about his relationship with Julian.
Because-to her mind-it reverses things.
It puts Alex in charge, which is where she’s always thought he belongs. Julian is noisy and pushy, but Alex is the quiet stillness at the center of things. When Julian launches into a rant about the bankers or whatever, all she wants to do is scream or run away. When Alex talks about the same thing, in his subtler, more measured tones, she listens, and is soothed, seduced, won over.
The door opens now, and when she looks up, she sees it immediately-it’s in their faces, in their body language. No doubt it was there all along, but for her this is a realignment, a correction, and she wants to make amends.
Julian comes in first, lumbering to the table and heaving his backpack onto it. He grunts something at her, sits down, and starts stroking that ridiculous, barely noticeable goatee of his.
Alex glides in behind him.
Lizzie catches his eye and smiles. He doesn’t smile back, but that’s okay. He sits on the arm of the couch, leans forward, and starts massaging his temples.
On the other days when they’ve come in like this, exhausted, hardly able to speak, Lizzie has remained quiet herself and stayed out of their way.
Not this evening. She wants to know where they’ve been all day, and what they’re planning next. She wants to open this up, and let them know whose side she’s on-let Alex know it’s alright, let him know that more than anything else they’re alright. But just as she’s about to speak, Julian looks over at her, brow furrowing, and says, “There’s something different about her.”
Alex raises his head. “What?”
Lizzie feels the air thicken around her.
“She knows,” Julian says. “Look at her.” He stands up slowly, and points. “She’s been out. She knows.”
Alex stands up as well, rising from the edge of the couch, and glares at her.
Lizzie pushes the chair she’s sitting in back a little. What is it? Are her cheeks flushed from all the walking? Is she still perspiring?
“Yes,” she says, a crack in her voice, “I went out, so what. I know what you’ve been doing.” She gets up from the chair. “I watched some TV earlier, they showed that clip on the news, but listen-”
Julian bangs his fist on the table. “Jesus Christ.”
“Lizzie,” Alex says, his tone calm, but also direct and clinical, “have you spoken to anyone? Have you told anyone?”
She looks into his eyes. “Oh, Alex…” She pauses, lips parted. If only they could stay like this forever, and let everything outside their line of vision, everything else in the room, in the world-that table, Julian’s backpack, Julian himself, New York, the news-dissolve to nothing. “No,” she says at last, but softly, in a whisper, still maintaining eye contact.
Julian shakes his head. “Dumb-assed bitch.” He turns and scowls at Alex. “I told you a hundred times this was a bad idea.”
There is a pause. Then Alex says, calmly, without redirecting his gaze, “Shut the fuck up, Julian.”
“What?”
Lizzie swallows, and once again the room begins to spin.
But then it stops.
Because there’s… a creaking sound.
They all turn toward the door, then freeze.
“What was that?” Julian says, in a loud whisper.
Alex looks at him. “Someone’s there.” He reaches for the backpack on the table. Then he turns to Lizzie, eyes widening, and nods at the door.
She moves swiftly toward it, and senses equally swift movement behind her. At the door, she narrows her right eye in on the peephole-imagining for a second, she doesn’t know why, that it’s her father she’ll see, a dreamlike Frank in fish-eye, standing there, shuffling anxiously, waiting. What she sees instead-as a rap, tap sounds on the door, followed immediately, almost stopping her heart, by a shouted “POLICE, SEARCH WARRANT, OPEN THE DOOR”-is a retreating mass of black that quickly forms into the shape of a man, revealing behind him a hallway lined with other men, all in black, all heavily armed.
Lizzie spins around.
Julian has his back against the wall and is straining to see out of the window. Alex is standing in the middle of the room with a gun in his hand.
“Jesus,” Lizzie whispers, all her limbs starting to tremble, “there’s a fucking SWAT team out there.”
Alex nods his head again, to the side this time, indicating for her to move.
She hesitates, but then slides over toward the kitchen.
“We’re armed in here,” he shouts. “We’ve got explosives. Back off. Back off now.”
From this angle just inside the kitchen door, Lizzie stares at Alex, and the only thing in her head, the only thought she can process, is that she’s never heard him shout before.
FOUR
When it became apparent in April 1913 that newly elected President Woodrow Wilson was ready to do the unthinkable and concede ground on union recognition, the industrialist, banker, and Vaughan family patriarch Charles A. Vaughan was quoted in the New York Journal as saying, “It would be nice if some day we could have a real businessman as president.”