“Good… Mr. Vaughan, what… what are you doing?”
“Nothing… I…”
He looks at the counter, at the mess he’s made, spilled coffee beans, the grinder on its side.
He got distracted by the TV.
But that doesn’t explain the look on her face. He glances down and sees that his robe is open, and that he forgot to put his boxers back on after the shower.
Damn.
He then sees his reflection in one of the glass cabinets, tousled wisps of gray hair, two-day stubble.
Pale as death.
He stands there, not entirely unaware that several seconds have already passed and he hasn’t closed his robe yet.
What is wrong with him?
“I’m sorry,” he says, closing the robe, the room starting to spin slightly-a glimpse of Meredith up on the TV screen, eyes shining, lips ruby red.
A kaleidoscope.
He reaches out for the counter to steady himself, and starts coughing.
“Mr. Vaughan?”
It takes him a few moments to get it under control, but he does eventually, and when he looks down at the marble countertop, he sees that it is speckled with blood.
The call comes on Monday morning. Ellen is at her desk, keying in notes from her Atherton interviews.
She reaches for the phone, her hello as distracted as they come.
“Is this Ellen Dorsey?”
“Yeah.”
“My name is Detective Oscar Rayburn from the Seventy-seventh Precinct in Crown Heights in Brooklyn. Are you acquainted with a James Gilroy?”
“Yes.” She sits up. “Is he okay?”
“No, ma’am, I’m afraid he isn’t.” She tenses. “Mr. Gilroy was found dead in his apartment yesterday afternoon. We believe he took his own life.”
“What? But that’s-” Her incredulity, instant and all-encompassing, prevents her from going on.
“Ms. Dorsey?”
“That’s… not possible. He was-” She wants to mention the champagne, how he talked about cracking open a bottle of champagne, the word exploding like a supernova in her brain-champagne, champagne-but she doesn’t, she can’t, and resorts instead to a dense, slow, loaded “Oh… my… God.”
“I’m sorry, Ms. Dorsey.” He pauses. “How well did you know Mr. Gilroy?”
“Not that well. We worked together. I’m a journalist, and so was he. We were colleagues, and friends, but…”
She’s babbling.
“The reason I called you, Ms. Dorsey, is because it appears the last person he spoke to on his cell phone was you.”
“Yeah, on Thursday. Thursday evening.”
“Can I ask what you guys talked about?”
“Er…” Ellen pauses and swallows. She stares at a page of scribbled notes on the desk, her mind beginning to glaze over. Then something kicks in, some kind of professional survival mechanism, where gears shift and extra adrenaline is pumped into the system. She leans forward on the desk. “I’m sorry, Detective, did you say the Seventy-seventh Precinct? In Crown Heights?”
“Yes, I-”
“Are you there for the next while, the next hour or two? Because frankly I’d prefer to do this face-to-face.” She swallows again, and winces, as though there’s suddenly something toxic in the air. “I think I’m probably going to have as many questions as you have, if not more.”
“That won’t be nec-”
“Yes, it will.”
They tussle over it for a bit, but Ellen’s determination wins out. She gets the impression that this case is only one of many on Oscar Rayburn’s roster, that he hadn’t figured on it needing anything more than a phone call, and that she has blindsided him, maybe even inconvenienced him.
But what, she’s supposed to give a fuck?
It’s his job.
She puts the phone down, and the next short while, the time between ending the conversation with Rayburn and getting into the back of a cab on Columbus Avenue, goes by in a blur-no coherent thoughts, just bathroom, jacket, notebook, phone, keys, stairs, street. Sitting in the cab, though, city flickering past, is a different story. Here the thoughts are all too coherent, and they revolve around a single, awful word, suicide-in most cases awful for the obvious reason, in a certain few cases awful for a less obvious one. In these few cases, the victim is usually a journalist, or a whistleblower, or a troublemaker of one kind or another. In these few cases, it’s suicide as a weapon.
But, of course, in these few cases it’s not suicide at all.
And that’s her most coherent thought, the one that’s keeping others at bay, the one that’s keeping emotion at bay.
Or not.
She tightens her fist into a ball, squeezes it hard. It doesn’t work. She starts crying.
The little bastard. He stormed into her life one afternoon, out of the blue, walked into her apartment, sat down, and started talking, unspooling this incredible web of intrigue and malfeasance, of corruption and venality. He was almost ten years younger than she was, but he had none of the arrogance or sense of entitlement you often get with guys that age, journalists that age, who think the world owes them an era-defining scoop, and are themselves defined, chiefly, by impatience. He wanted her help, and he was respectful, because all he really wanted was to make sense of what he had in front of him and to write it up.
They were thrown together by necessity-she had the experience and connections, and he had the story-but people she knew, people in the business, were shocked to find that the notoriously uncooperative and prickly Ellen Dorsey was actually collaborating with someone.
It was easy, though.
Because the guy was basically a sweetheart. He was good-looking, and kind of cute, but there was never anything between them. He felt like a really smart kid brother that she could boss around and-
She was going to say protect.
But that could never be part of the equation, not in this job. She’s not so sentimental as to think that that’s why she’s crying.
She’s crying because she liked him and respected him, and now he’s dead.
She sniffles and gets out a tissue. Blows her nose, sighs, says fuck a few times under her breath.
Looks around.
Driver taking in the show, surreptitiously, through the rearview.
She goes back to her most coherent thought.
Why would Jimmy Gilroy want to kill himself? No discernible reason. Plus, he was talking about cracking open a bottle of champagne and celebrating. Why would someone else want to kill Jimmy Gilroy? For a very discernible reason. Plus, he’d already been threatened.
There’s a depressing, all too familiar pattern here. She could list off other cases, Danny Casolaro, Steve Kangas, Gary Webb, half a dozen more. She doesn’t know if these people were murdered or not, but the official line on each of them is the same-they were depressed, they drank too much, life closed in on them… nothing to see here, please move along. Meanwhile, relatives are baffled, and files go missing, and legitimate lines of journalistic inquiry dry up.
Thing is, it’s an airtight method, it’s foolproof, because anyone who cries foul can easily be dismissed as a conspiracy theorist… and a fool.
And Ellen doesn’t know. She’s ambivalent. Believing isn’t enough, and people do commit suicide.
She looks out the window, the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge rippling past in the sunlight.
She knows where Barstool Charlie would stand, and that always gives her pause. But at the same time she has to steel herself here, because even from this distance, she can feel it coming, feel it in her bones…
The dreaded official line.