Marty smiled at her. “I am different,” he said, patting his flat stomach. “About ten pounds different, right around my middle.”
“That’s not it,” she said. “You’re more relaxed. Your guard is down. You seem more settled. It’s as if you’ve let something go.” She lifted the damp hair off his forehead and combed it back with her fingertips. “Can I ask you something?”
“Shoot.”
“Why did you leave?”
At some point, he knew she’d ask that question, but he was surprised by the suddenness of it here. “I don’t know if I can answer that,” he said tentatively.
“Can you try?”
He owed it to her, but how to get it out properly? “I needed to get my act together,” he said. “When I met you, I was still in love with Gloria. We had two kids together. I love my kids. I miss them every day. I thought maybe there was another chance for us-even a third chance. Until I straightened my head out, I decided it was cruel to be in a relationship with you if all of me wasn’t here for you.”
“Where do you stand with Gloria now?”
“We’re finished,” he said. “We have been for a while.”
“Are you in love with her?”
Marty thought about that, thought of all the years and all the guilt and all the love won and all the love lost, and wondered what it all had meant. Was he a better man now for having loved Gloria? Besides his daughters, had anything good come out of those thirteen years together?
“I’ll always love her,” he said. “She gave me Katie and Beth. We have a history that I can’t just swipe away. But she’s changed into somebody I don’t recognize. She wants to be something else. She wants to be a celebrity, which I don’t understand. It’s a different kind of love I feel for her. It’s not sexual, but based on our past. We made two fantastic girls together, and that’s about all we got right. Does that make sense?”
Jennifer bent to kiss him on the lips. “I always knew you were a good man. I waited for you, you know?”
“You waited for me?”
She shrugged. “I love you,” she said. “I’ve always been in love with you. Of course, I waited for you. I knew at some point you’d come around and we’d give it another try.” She paused. “If that’s what you want.”
Marty was still for a moment. He felt overcome and grateful, but not confined. He realized he also loved her. And for the first time since he’d known her, he told her so.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Spocatti threaded through the crowds on lower Fifth, Maggie Cain so close he could reach out and slice her throat.
He’d been tailing her since early afternoon and he was enjoying it. She was attractive. Dark brown hair falling to her shoulders and swinging like scarves. Olive green shorts, white shirt, matching green shoes, legs tanned and shining in the sun. The scar on her cheek made him go weak with the mystery of it. He wondered how she smelled and how she tasted. She reminded him of the only woman he had ever loved, dead now ten years by his own hands.
He cut left and hung back to give her some room. On the street, a city bus rumbled past, its joints squealing like stuck pigs, a flood of yellow cabs pooling around it like an impatient school of fish.
Maggie Cain paused to look behind it. The sun hit her square in the face and lit up her eyes. Spocatti thought she was striking. In the past hour, he’d followed her to two bookstores, her agent’s office on 13th Street, and the post office.
At the first bookstore, a trio of young women recognized her, pulled her books down from the dusty brown shelves and tentatively surrounded her, their mouths split wide and smiling. Spocatti watched her sign her name. She listened and nodded and laughed with them, but none of it was real-her thoughts were elsewhere. And that intrigued him.
But not as much as her scar.
She stopped on the corner of Fifth and 8th, and waited. The light turned, traffic stopped, the WALK sign flashed, but she didn’t move. She didn’t cross and Spocatti had no choice but to stroll past her. It would be too obvious if he didn’t. He walked by and caught her looking at him out of the corner of her eye, saw what might have been a smile on her lips. For him?
He moved to the other side of the street, lost himself in the crowds, shielded himself on the other side of a hot dog kiosk and turned back to look at her. Now she was facing uptown. He followed her look and saw only the crush of a thousand cars bearing down on Washington Square.
Carmen.
He removed his cell and hit her number. Two quick rings. Her voice: “What?”
“Are you inside?”
“Of course, I’m inside.”
“How long?”
“Thirty minutes.”
“Any problems?”
“Her security system’s good, but not that good.”
“What have you found?”
“Nothing. Not even a hint of something on Wolfhagen.”
“Not even a hint,” Spocatti said. “That certainly seems strange for someone writing a book about the man, wouldn’t you say?”
Carmen didn’t say.
“Maybe she isn’t writing a book,” Spocatti said. “Maybe you got that wrong, too.”
“You heard what Hayes said, Vincent. I wasn’t imagining it.”
“So you weren’t,” he said, and paused. Cain was checking her watch. “You’ve checked her phones?”
“I’ve hit the redial button on every one I’ve come across.”
“And?”
“A call to her agent, one to her dry cleaner, another to someone in L.A.”
“Who’s the someone in L.A.?”
“I have no idea. No one picked up. No answering machine.”
“You’ve scanned the numbers?”
“No, Vincent, I’ve ignored them. Jesus, give me some credit. Where is Cain now?”
“Corner of Fifth and 8th.”
“What’s she doing?”
“I have no idea. She’s just standing there.”
“You have no idea,” Carmen repeated. “Has she spotted you?”
He smiled. “She might have.”
“Think you can handle this, Vincent?”
“Touche, Carmen.”
He lowered the phone from his ear as Maggie Cain stepped to the street. He watched her lift the strap of her handbag higher onto her shoulder and finger her hair away from her face. She waited and Spocatti saw what she was waiting for.
A black limousine pulled sharply to the curb and the rear passenger door shot open. Looking tense, Cain leaned down, said something, shook her head, glanced at him and then stepped inside.
Spocatti pushed forward to the street.
The limousine pulled away from the curb, took a left on 8th, drove straight past him. Vincent leaned down, but the tinted windows were so dark, he couldn’t see inside. He searched the street for a cab, glimpsed one halfway down 8th, and swore to himself.
So far away and yet he needed that cab. He couldn’t lose her now. He cut through the flock of pigeons dawdling on the sidewalk and ran in the wake of their beating wings.
Carmen stood just outside Maggie Cain’s living room, looking across to the black cat poised on the edge of the grand piano. It was staring at her, its golden eyes gleaming. She stomped her foot at it, hissed at it, but it made no effort to move. She switched the phone to her other ear and said impatiently: “Are you there, Vincent?”
But he wasn’t. He’d hung up.
She snapped the phone shut and glared at the cat. It would have to be black. In this business, luck was as important as skill and Carmen, raised by parents who instilled in her a fear of broken mirrors and the otherworldly, was superstitious enough to know with certainty that her luck was being challenged.
Time.
She had to move. She wanted to be out of here in twenty. She did another surveillance of the living room, but there was nothing for her here. She went back into the hallway, grabbed the knapsack she left at the front door, tossed the phone inside, and took the staircase to the second floor.
To the right of the bedroom was Cain’s office, a large space that overlooked 19th Street-tall shelves lined with books, heavy damask curtains that pressed out the sun, an acrylic cylinder filled with tropical fish that stretched from floor to ceiling and cast blue flares of light along the pale hardwood floor.