Mallory had to catch her breath. “You’re the one who gave me the strength to divorce Michael.”
“Don’t put that on me.”
She reached across the table and took his hand. “No, I’m not blaming you. Michael and I were headed for divorce, I’m sure of it. You gave me the strength to accept it.”
He withdrew his hand and wrapped it around his beer bottle.
“I’m grateful to you,” she said, trying to smile. “Let’s face it: If it had been any other man but you, I would have been caught cheating long ago.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I don’t have what it takes to pull off something like this. You knew all the tricks to keep Michael from suspecting.” She squeezed his hand, but he pulled back.
“This isn’t going to work anymore, Mallory. Get it? I’m outta here.”
Her body stiffened. She’d never heard this tone from him before, and she was beginning to wonder if she had ever seen the real Nathaniel. After a day like today, it was making her downright angry, and she suddenly found a new kind of courage.
“An interesting thing happened in court today. Michael’s lawyer informed the judge that there was spyware attached to that ‘happy birthday’ e-mail we sent to Michael.” Her eyes narrowed, and she said, “Do you know anything about that?”
He shot her a look that cut to the bone. “This is exactly the kind of shit I’m talking about. I have no interest in getting caught in the cross fire of nasty accusations flying back between you and Michael.”
“I just asked a simple question.”
“Go to hell, Mallory. If you want to ask questions, go ask your husband why he flipped his lid and shot Chuck Bell in the head.”
“You don’t know that.”
“It’s what everybody is saying. Do you think I want my picture on the front page of the Post when this shit unravels?”
Mallory collected herself, then said, “You’re married, aren’t you.”
“No,” he said, scoffing. “I’m too smart for that.”
She took that as a direct shot at her second failed marriage. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing,” he said, and then he rose from the booth. “Look, we all have to make our own choices. I choose not to be part of your mess. So let’s agree to do you, me, and your divorce lawyer a big favor: Keep me out of it.”
He left a ten-dollar bill on the table for his beer and walked away. Mallory didn’t watch him go. She stared at the money on the table and half laughed, half cried.
It was the first time Nathaniel had ever paid for anything.
33
I WAS IN JAIL. I COULDN’T BELIEVE IT. I WAS ACTUALLY BEHIND bars.
Before leaving Rockefeller Center, the arresting officers had patted me down, run a background check through their databases, and satisfied themselves that I wasn’t actually carrying a bomb. But that didn’t stop these men of the Midtown North Precinct from hauling me downtown. Technically speaking, it wasn’t jail. I was in a holding pen in the Manhattan Detention Complex, where prisoners were held for relatively short periods of time pending arraignment or some other court appearance. Not that this was a step up from jail. I was locked in the very same cell in which a seventeen-year-old boy had used his shirt to hang himself the summer before.
“Got two more bodies,” the guard announced.
The guards had a habit of calling us “bodies” when talking among themselves. It seemed kind of ghoulish, especially since the Manhattan Detention Complex was known as “the Tombs” to police, lawyers, criminals, judges, and anyone who had ever watched an episode of Law & Order. The nickname fit. Over the past two hours, I had climbed up and down several flights of stairs and in and out of three different holding pens. I had lost track of what floor I was on. I had been shackled, unshackled, and shackled again. The body search had been especially memorable, not so much for what actually had happened, but for fear of what might. On a sign on the wall, some joker had scribbled in the word “anal” between “Male” and “Search.” Fingerprinting took another hour. The state-of-the-art machine kept delivering error messages: rolling too fast, too slow, not a clear image, multiple fingers detected (odd, since my other fingers weren’t even on the screen), partial finger detected. At that point, I was willing to forgive the inaccuracy of one of my all-time favorite films, American Gangster, in which Denzel Washington’s character is shown leaving the Tombs-a temporary holding facility-after a fifteen-year stay.
This could actually take fifteen years.
The mug shot was the final indignity-a real beaut that I was sure would end up all over the Internet, if not in the tabloids. Finally, the guards brought me back to my cell and gave me dinner, though I passed on the soggy bologna-and-cheese sandwich. It smelled so awful that I was going to flush it down the toilet, which was in open view in the corner of the cell. Instead, my cell mate tore the sandwich into pieces, rolled them into balls, and one by one pitched them into the toilet from various positions behind the imaginary three-point line.
Around seven o’clock, the guard returned.
“It’s your lucky day, partner. You can go.”
He opened the cell door and led me down the hall. We passed a window that was open just a crack, and I was certain that I could smell spring rolls. We were that close to Chinatown-and I was that hungry.
At the end of the corridor the guard pushed a button, a buzzer sounded, and the iron door slid open. Kevin was on the other side of the chute waiting for me, a look of complete disbelief all over his face.
“What the hell is wrong with you, Michael?”
“Good to see you, too,” I said.
“You’re lucky I have friends in the D.A.’s office,” he said. “They’re not charging you.”
“They shouldn’t. I didn’t have a bomb.”
Kevin clearly had much more to say, but the guard was standing just a few feet away. We went downstairs to collect my belongings-including Papa’s old trench coat and Italy golf cap. When he saw what I’d been wearing, Kevin just shook his head and said, “We need to talk.”
The lobby of the station house was far from private. Uniformed police officers coming and going, two prostitutes in a territorial dispute, a drunk with a bloody nose, and a homeless guy with vomit all over his shoes sitting on the end of a long wooden bench. It was like something out of that show Hill Street Blues that Papa used to watch when I was a kid.
Kevin led me down the hall to a small room. I could see the stenciled words ATTORNEY CONFERENCE backward on the glass as he closed the door. It was a stark room with yellow walls of painted cinder block, a small wooden table, and two oak chairs. Kevin asked me to sit, but after two hours on the hard benches of the holding cell, I didn’t want to. We just stood on opposite sides of the table.
“You could have been in a heap of trouble,” he said. “Two witnesses said it was the homeless guy-you-who ran off with a college girl’s camera and started the whole panic by threatening to set off a bomb.”
“That’s not what happened. A woman shouted that I had a bomb. And then it was chaos.”
“Did you steal the camera?”
“No. I was taking a group picture for these girls and then I…I saw something, and I had to run.”
“What did you see?”
“I’m pretty sure I saw Ivy,” I said.
Kevin groaned, and then his expression turned serious. “I’m worried about you.”
“Why?”
He took a breath, as if to calm himself. “I’m worried that it’s more than you-more than anyone-could handle. The divorce, the identity theft, the attack on Saxton Silvers, the pillaging of your financial accounts, the lack of sleep. You aren’t thinking clearly-dressing up like a homeless guy, setting off a panic attack in one of the most popular urban tourist areas in America, all this talk about seeing Ivy.”