“I’m not passing the buck, Clare. I can’t live with that.”
“Can you live with a demotion? A public censure?”
“It won’t be public. We did everything right, and the Fourteenth Floor isn’t stupid enough to open us up for a raft of civil suits, although that usually happens anyway. This is internal stuff I’m talking about. I’ll still be on the force. I’ll just be reassigned to precinct work, probably Siberia. Some outer borough desk—”
“I can’t believe your captain would let that happen!”
Mike’s laugh was sharp. “My captain was the one who told me to take this meeting solo. He expects me to offer up one of my crew to the political gods. That’s why I came in here so wrecked. But then I slept on it, and when I woke up, I had my answer. I don’t have to sacrifice anybody’s career but my own.”
“Mike, no—”
“That’s it. My decision’s made.”
I wanted to talk him out of it, but I couldn’t think how. Then my pocket started ringing. “Listen, there must be another way—”
“Answer your phone, Clare.” He gently squeezed my shoulder. “I’ll see you at the party tonight. I’ve got to get going.”
As he moved toward the bedroom, I pulled out my cell, checked the screen to see who was calling—although I really didn’t need to, the La bohème ringtone was signal enough.
I had so many questions (not to mention unbridled rants) for my former mother-in-law, I didn’t know where to start. I took a breath, let the call go to voice mail, and stepped into the bathroom.
A long, hot shower, that’s where I start.
Nine
Planning was overrated. She knew that now. The goal itself was paramount.
“Unexpected hurdles may spring up tonight,” she whispered to the image in the bathroom mirror, “but you must remain calm, evaluate quickly, counter with flexibility . . .”
Her first execution had taught her that.
She’d written out everything three years before—details worthy of a textbook flowchart. The result was a rough job at best. Stealing that van, for instance, had been harder than she thought, then pacing the judge’s SUV, lining up the accident . . . so much had been trickier than she’d anticipated. Luckily, on winter nights, most of the roads around the country club of Bay Creek Village were dark and empty.
With the “fatal crash” coming down as little more than a fender bender, improvisation became the order of the day. Idling the engine on the stolen van, she waited for just the right moment. When the judge stumbled out of her banged-up vehicle, down went the gas pedal!
The morning news called it an accident, “a terrible, tragic, hit- and-run . . .”
Boo-hoo for the judge’s husband and family—the same family that cared not a whit about the fate of her own!
By the next day, the idiot box was spinning the story another way: “Police are investigating the suspicious hit-and-run that killed longtime Long Island judge . . .”
“The authorities,” she was continually told, were “actively looking” for the driver. “Was it a tragic accident?” the anchor posited. “Or a premeditated act of vengeance?”
Day after day, it went on. She’d been sick in the bathroom for most of it. The police were going to find her! She was sure of it. They would drag her to prison like her poor mother!
But no one came for her. No one. And the relief was transcendent . . .
She waited after that—an entire year. Then she struck again, her very own act two. The second kill had been as problematic as the first, but she’d succeeded.
Once more, subsequent news reports seemed unfair, relentless, at times even ridiculous, but there was no getting sick in the bathroom. For some reason, she found the second evacuation much easier to swallow.
No one came for her, of course, and she felt even freer to do as she pleased. Still, she wasn’t stupid. She went back to waiting, this time even more than a year . . .
And now the waiting was over.
The world was her stage again, her theater for new trials. “Tonight,” she confided to the mirror. “Tonight begins act three . . .”
Ten
“I can’t believe you slapped me!”
Esther glared at Tucker, shaking her reddening hand, though she managed to hold on to the cookie she’d purloined from his silver tray.
“If you touch another Cappuccino Kiss,” Tuck warned, “I’ll whack your fingers again.”
“There’s no another. That was my first.”
My two senior baristas had been bickering since we got here. Happily, there were no witnesses. Arriving guests were immediately ushered into the rooftop Garden while we set up inside.
And where was inside, exactly? The seventh floor of a skyscraper in the legendary Rockefeller Center, a sprawling complex in midtown Manhattan, home of the GE Building and NBC television.
I had to admit, Alicia chose an impressive address to launch her new product. Crowning this art deco tower was “the Top of the Rock,” a multistory observation deck, somewhat lesser known than the Empire State Building but with equally breathtaking panoramas. Down here on the seventh floor, the Loft & Garden served as a popular space for society weddings and corporate parties. On the east end of this glorified rectangle sat the open-air Garden. It boasted a fountain and reflecting pool. At the west end was the Loft interior with floor-to-ceiling windows and space enough for a reception of two hundred.
As twilight deepened into darkness, the tall windows treated us to views of Radio City’s neon marquee and the fairylike lights of Rock Plaza’s courtyard, where a bronze-cast statue of Prometheus attempted to offer the gift of fire to oblivious tourists strolling below.
From what I remembered of the Greek myth, in repayment for Prometheus’s heroic act of bequeathing fire to humankind, Zeus ordered him chained to a rock where an eagle visited him daily to dine on his liver.
No good deed goes unpunished sprang to mind. Mike occasionally muttered the aphorism in reference to police work.
Today I knew why.
Mike’s visit to the NYPD’s version of Mount Olympus was certainly over by now, but he had yet to return my call. With every passing hour, I worried a little more. Sure, Mike sounded firm in his decision to protect Sully and Franco by resigning, but that was only in theory. In my experience, hard facts hit you in the face with a whole lot more impact than airy little theories.
So where was he now? I wondered. Is he with his squad? Or in some pub across town? Did he seek out some shoulder (other than mine) to cry on?
Punishment for good deeds, or at least good intentions, had me reconsidering my own morning. After my long, head-clearing shower, I’d returned Madame’s call, absolutely insisting on straight talk. Thank goodness, she agreed. No more equivocating.
Like me and the Fish Squad, Madame believed Alicia had been targeted for some sort of nefarious scheme. She even volunteered to question the woman, but I’d specifically asked her to get Alicia here early so we three could hash things out. At this late hour, my calls went unreturned, and I had yet to see either lady.
I was beginning to feel like Prometheus’s brother, Atlas, whose bronze likeness was power-lifting a weighty sphere on the other side of this complex. With my own worries heavy on my shoulders, I focused instead on that universally acknowledged painkiller . . . chocolate.
Like the Greeks and their theory of fire, the Aztecs thought of chocolate as a gift from a god, one who’d stolen the cocoa tree from paradise and delivered it to us mortals on the beam of a morning star.