Reaching for his iced tea, Frank looks at her, and it’s as if he can hear what she’s thinking.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“For what?”
“This. The long preamble. I haven’t really been able to talk to anyone. Since the other day.” He sips the tea. “It’s funny, you know. When I was working-as an architect, I mean-all my friends were architects, or in that world, and when you lose that, the work, when you get kicked out on your ass, you lose the friends as well. No one wants to get infected. And hanging out with other people who got canned isn’t much of an option either.”
She nods along. “I know. It’s more or less the same with journalism. I’ve seen it happen.”
“Yeah. So. Anyway.” He puts the glass down. “Here’s the thing. That’s not my daughter I’ve been reading about for the last two days. Political activist? Militant?” He shakes his head. “Lizzie was a bright kid, but she… I never once…” He seems reluctant to pin it down. “She wasn’t interested in politics.”
“Maybe so,” Ellen says, “but this was a lot more than politics. Plus, she was at college. Shit happens at college. People change, they get into stuff.”
“I know. I know. But-” He looks out the window, and then back at Ellen. “That’s what I wanted to ask you. Who you spoke to up there, what you heard, if you met anyone or saw anything. I know you told me some of this stuff at that bar, but I wasn’t exactly at my most focused.”
She thinks about this for a moment. The thing is, Ellen’s understanding of what happened is that Lizzie became central to events only when she spoke to the negotiator. Up to then it was all about the Coadys. They were the ones who carried out the shootings, who had a backstory and a supposed motive. Lizzie was just the girlfriend. She barely figured. But then she spoke, she read out those demands-this girl, this kid-and suddenly the story lit up like a fucking pinball machine… out here, in the media, but maybe in there as well, in the apartment. Maybe Lizzie’s real involvement started right at that point, when she answered the phone, and once she got involved there was no route back. Once she voiced those demands, it was an easy next step to picking up the gun and pulling the trigger. Though why she was the one who answered the phone in the first place, and read out the demands, is-and probably forever will remain-a mystery.
But is that what Frank Bishop wants to hear?
Probably not.
In any case, it’s only a theory-pieced together from her conversations with Val Brady and others, from what she’s read and from her general feel for these things, her instincts as a journalist.
And she may be wrong about all of it.
Besides, he didn’t ask for her opinion.
“Well,” she says, deciding to simply lay out the facts for him, “I did speak to a few people at Atherton. But remember, when I went there I didn’t have any names, and Lizzie’s only came up at the very end, which is why I went chasing after you.” She stops and glances for a second down at her grilled chicken sandwich. “It was what I found in the library, and in the archives, that led me to Julian Coady’s name. And this was stuff that more or less underpinned what they were about, what they did. In an ideological sense.”
Frank looks at her. “Ideological? Really?”
“Well… yeah.” Ellen is aware that a lot of the big-name protest groups have been dissociating themselves from anything to do with the Coadys and Lizzie Bishop, almost as if the whole thing were an embarrassment to them. Much has been made-in certain quarters-of the list of demands and how naive, or generic, or even just derivative, it was. But actually, on reflection, there was nothing that Ellen came across in the Atherton Chronicle pieces, in the radio interviews, in the opinions expressed on the Stone Report or by Farley Kaplan, that was in any way inconsistent with mainstream activist thought. The only dividing line-apart maybe from tone, and register, and levels of paranoia-was the question of whether or not the use of violence could be justified, and that question was as old as the hills. She turns and looks out the window, at a passing limo, a black streak of light on the avenue. “I don’t know,” she then says. “They certainly put a lot of thought into what they were doing.”
“They?”
Ellen hesitates, then picks up her sandwich and takes a bite out of it.
“Yes,” she says, chewing and nodding. “Look, there were three of them. They were in that apartment together, and for a week. During which time two, nearly three, assassinations were carried out. That didn’t just happen. They talked about this stuff, they planned it. And probably for months.” She puts her sandwich back on the plate, realizing that she’s straying here from hard fact, drifting back to opinion. But it’s difficult not to do. “Alex and Lizzie were a couple, Frank. And Alex and Julian were brothers. In and out of each other’s lives. However misguided it was, what they did was planned. It also didn’t come out of thin air, it was based on… stuff they were exposed to. Ideological stuff. They weren’t just going around shooting people randomly. This was a program.”
“What do you mean?”
Ellen pauses, thinking. She picks up a french fry.
Dips it in ketchup.
He’s staring at her, waiting.
In all the coverage of the shootings she’s read, seen, or heard, the victims have been referred to simply as Wall Street bankers-they’ve been lumped together into one easily identifiable, monolithic group.
But-
Her coverage, if she’d gotten to do any, would have been more specific, more nuanced.
“What do I mean?” she says. “They had a program worked out. Of assassinations. They weren’t just randomly shooting bankers. They wanted one from each of the three pillars of the system… one guy from an investment bank, one guy from a hedge fund, and one guy from a private equity firm. They got two and narrowly missed the third, the private equity guy.”
She pops the french fry into her mouth.
Frank continues staring at her. She wants to nod at his chicken sandwich and say, Come on, eat up, but the moment isn’t right.
“How do you know this?” he says quietly. “Are you guessing?”
“No.”
She’s guessing to some degree-about the dynamics in the apartment, about what went on between Julian and Alex and Lizzie. But she’s not guessing about their overall plan. She explains to Frank about ath900 and Farley Kaplan’s interview on What Up?
He seems stunned. It’s a level of detail he hasn’t heard from anyone else.
“The cops,” he says, “the authorities, the FBI, they’ve all been really cagey about telling us anything.”
“That’s pretty normal, I’m afraid. But this is stuff I came across by myself.” She picks up her iced tea and takes a sip. “The FBI possibly doesn’t even know any of this yet. They came to the case by a different route. They had an informant, apparently. Inside the group Julian was associated with. We just happened to converge.”
There’s a lengthy silence here, during which Frank, head down, seems to be processing what Ellen has told him.
“Come on,” she says, taking her chances. “Eat up.”
He glances at the sandwich, and shrugs.
“You look like shit, Frank. If you don’t take care of yourself you’re going to get sick.”
He raises his head. “The private equity guy?”
“Yeah?” She gives a quick, puzzled shake of her head. “What about him? Scott Lebrecht. Black Vine Partners. The one that got away.”
“Black Vine Partners. What do they do?”