It comes sooner than expected, and not from Detective Oscar Rayburn, either.
When she gets to the Seventy-seventh Precinct, she announces herself, and is asked to sit in the waiting area. She takes her phone out and does a quick Internet trawl. To her surprise, there are already several reports of Gilroy’s death. Unsurprisingly, there’s a uniform, sort of planted feel to them. James Gilroy, the journalist who broke the Senator John Rundle story a couple of years back, has been found dead in his Brooklyn apartment, a bullet to the head, suspected suicide… sources say he’d been depressed, and drinking, that his career had gone off the rails…
Sources?
She deflates in her hard plastic chair.
Poor Jimmy.
Ellen’s interview with Rayburn doesn’t help.
He’s distracted and uninterested. Mid-forties, heavyset, sad and unhealthy-looking. Probably underpaid and overworked. When he asks his question again and she gives him an edited version of what they spoke about, adding that Jimmy was happy and untroubled and looking to the future with real enthusiasm… he barely reacts.
Ellen asks him about the weapon used, about ballistics and positioning. He answers each question, without looking at her, by consulting pages and folders on his desk.
She asks him about the state of Jimmy’s apartment, about his computer or laptop.
Rayburn looks up at her, and then back at his pages. He flicks through them, reads something. Checks another page. Then he looks at her again, and shakes his head. “He didn’t have a computer.”
“What the-” Ellen stops and composes herself. “He didn’t have one, or you didn’t find one in the apartment, because you people-”
Rayburn raises an index finger. “Steady, ma’am.”
“Detective, he was a single male, thirty years old, he was a journalist. Are you seriously telling me he didn’t have a computer? How did he send e-mails?”
Rayburn shrugs.
“And I’ll tell you something else, Detective. It’s a hell of a lot less likely that he owned a gun.”
Rayburn shuffles through a few papers and then holds something up. “State of New York,” he says wearily. “License to own a handgun, premises only.”
Ellen nods, her weariness matching his.
She asks about who found him, and about next of kin.
Seems he has a cousin who lives in Queens. And yes, there’ll be an autopsy. Funeral arrangements aren’t yet known.
Ellen gets the cousin’s number.
Rayburn then indicates that time’s up, that he’s really swamped here.
He stands up. She stands up, too.
They shake hands, and she leaves.
In bed, propped up with pillows, Vaughan clicks his way through the pages of the document. He catches words, phrases, names especially, but he can’t focus enough to read anymore, not properly. A sentence or two at a time is about all he can manage.
Nevertheless, it’s infuriating-the idea of some little shit snooping around his affairs like that, talking to people, asking elaborate questions, looking up archives, scrolling down through endless sheets of microfiche in some musty old library basement.
Like a rat.
On a treadmill.
And of course he’s Irish.
Vaughan doesn’t have a great history with the Irish. Got held at gunpoint once in Dublin, on a construction site, on the forty-eighth floor of a new build, albeit by an extremely attractive young woman.
The file arrived this morning as an e-mail attachment, sent by Beth Overmyer.
House of Vaughan.
He nearly got sick.
Sicker than he already is.
He’s been in bed since Friday, hooked up to drips and machinery. He refused to go to the hospital. His doctor argued for it, harangued him about it, but Vaughan resisted. What’s the point of having fifteen billion dollars if you can’t tell your doctor to go fuck himself?
He’s also refusing to see visitors, even though they’re apparently lining up outside.
Who are these people, anyway, but ghosts? Some of them, most of them, not even born when he was in his prime.
He looks out over the room, the machines beeping, the BP values fluctuating.
That doesn’t make them ghosts, though, does it? Isn’t he the ghost?
Whatever.
He’s made sure-as much as these things are possible-that this outrage, this so-called book, will never see the light of day.
Containment.
He’s set it in train. It’s a respectable policy and has a long and fairly rich tradition behind it. It’s been shown to work in the past, it’ll work again.
He comes to the last few pages of the file and tries really hard to focus.
… but instead, Charles Vaughan’s decision to short-sell his Union Pacific stocks only served to further provoke Gilbert Morley…
A pain throbs behind his eyes, and he has to look away from the screen for a moment. There’s a Pissarro out there, on the wall opposite, it’s usually a soothing presence, comforting, but he can’t see it right now. Everything’s a bit of a blur.
He reads on.
… in addition to which Vaughan’s attentions to Arabella Stringham, Morley’s fiancée, were to prove intolerable to the fusty and straitlaced Wall Street speculator. Undeterred, Vaughan pressed his advantage with the beautiful young dry-goods heiress…
This is the one and only Charles A. Vaughan he’s reading about, his grandfather, whom he vaguely remembers from when he was a kid-the mid-1930s it would have been, all those visits to the cottage in Newport, the stiff formality of the man, his gray beard, his tortoiseshell cane with the carved ivory handle.
He was the architect, the great begetter, the patriarch.
But this version of him? The brash young nobody on the make… the schemer, the conniver, the hustler?
It’s a travesty.
Vaughan clicks on to the last page.
… and then early one Thursday afternoon in August of 1878, as he made his way along Broad Street, Vaughan spotted Morley emerging from a tavern…
And farther down.
… but witnesses then report the conversation taking a somewhat violent turn, with Vaughan grabbing the other man by his lapels and shoving him backward…
Vaughan simply cannot believe what he is reading, but he pushes on, increasingly horrified, knowing that if this material ever were to be made public, the humiliation, the exposure, would kill him, and outright-much faster, in fact, than the multiple, advanced, late-stage cancers riddling his body that he has been reliably informed over the last two days are killing him now.
On Utica Avenue, outside the Seventy-seventh Precinct, Ellen wants to scream. Is this how Jimmy ends up? Is this what he’s reduced to? A half hour of inconvenient paperwork on the desk of some stressed-out, overworked cop?
That’s how it seems.
But contrasted with this is an image in her head now that she can’t shake. Jimmy slumped on his couch, gun in one hand, arm twisted back, brains daubed on the wall behind him.
Alone.
But not alone.
A spectral figure, maybe two, gliding around his apartment, placing items, removing items, subtly determining in advance the shape and direction of what will appear in Detective Rayburn’s paperwork.
What makes her sick, and a little dizzy, is the apparent ease with which this can be done. So it’s not something she can let lie. She’s going to have to pursue it, extract more information from Rayburn, dig deeper-maybe get Val Brady to look into it.
But then something occurs to Ellen, a thought that grows-mushrooms, in fact-as she walks the six blocks to the Crown Heights-Utica Avenue subway stop.