And West Is West (18 page)

“Of course.”

“I was a defense attorney once. I know liars when I hear them. But maybe I've gotten rusty. To me, this girl did not read at all like a criminal.”

“Don't feel bad, Mr. Clayton. She's clever. She's been eluding us for a while.”

“In hindsight I can see she's a drifter. How many people did she kill?”

“I can't go into the specifics. We'll take care of things from here.”

“I understand, but . . . she's still out there. And I mean, is she like that Wuornos woman, that Florida highway killer?”

“Sir, I can almost guarantee that she won't bother you. Just keep your doors locked tonight. Also, Mr. Clayton, you do own a gun, don't you?”

SOON AFTER DAUGHERTY
disconnects from T. Everett, Pyle crashes—probably his Red Bull overdose is on the wane. He's like a dead man, mouth open, flopped in the passenger's seat. Beside him, under a lulling half-moon, Daugherty is barely keeping the Taurus on the blacktop, even through flatland. And then he either long blinks or dozes and finds himself gliding over an even flatter blackness. They are crossing a lake on a low bridge and ahead the sky glows like a giant tunnel of light.

“Del Rio coming up, Pyle. Your shift.”

The slower Daugherty goes the more conscious Pyle gets. When their car is crawling at the in-town speed limit, Pyle opens his mouth. “Burger King,” he yawns at a sign and Daugherty pulls up. Pyle goes for coffee and Whoppers while Daugherty switches to the passenger's seat, warm with Pyle's imprint. Pyle returns carrying a fast-food sack in one hand and a coffee he's sipping in the other. Inside the car he shakes his head and grins at Daugherty. “ ‘You do have a gun, don't you, Mr. Clayton?' ” Pyle is fully awake now, recaffeinating.

“T. Everett earned a sleepless night,” Daugherty says.

Pyle points his fist at Daugherty, who takes a moment to comprehend that his partner wants a fist bump. Daugherty bumps. It's a brave new world and one that Daugherty is less adapted to every day. But after Pyle puts the car in gear and they've passed the outskirts of Del Rio east—doing ninety in a thirty-five zone—Daugherty thinks about Jessica Aldridge. It's one thing to give headaches to people like T. Everett who deserve it, another to slander the person you're charged with bringing in. Aldridge is no murderer. Her file describes her as an ex-serviceperson with posttraumatic stress and a knowledge of military secrets. In other words, she qualifies as a low-level national security risk. Last November she had disappeared from a VA hospital in Loma Linda and Daugherty's job at the time was to return her there. But his former partner and he may as well have been sifting for a body vaporized by an H-bomb. Aldridge was that gone. Then, with the new year approaching and pressed by other duties, he finalized an interim report on the missing woman.

The rest of winter, spring, and half the summer passed before the higher-ups reprioritized the Aldridge case. The waiting worked, for like a psychic's trick, an electronics records search reconstituted her ghost out of the void. She hadn't started using ATMs or credit cards but had reactivated her military savings account. Unfortunately the information she gave the bank led him and Pyle, his new partner at winter's end, to a nonexistent address. A day later they traced her largest account debit to a bank draft written to a nursing home. The home's accounting department stonewalled them with claims of patient confidentiality. But on their way out Pyle took aside a nurse's aide with a prison teardrop tattoo. According to the ex-con, whom Pyle coerced by asking the name of his parole officer, only one young woman about Jessica Aldridge's age visited regularly—visited, in fact, almost every day. She came to see a dying woman whom the aide called Miss Shelly. At this point, an RN asked Daugherty and Pyle to return to the premises with a warrant.

He and Pyle set up a stake out in front of the facility and by midafternoon had followed the most likely suspect to a cinderblock one-story in a rough San Bernardino neighborhood. Then came the over-the-fence confrontation with the dog they now know as Skittles and the suspect.

To Daugherty, the skinny, tattooed girl looked at best to be a dissolute cousin to the uniformed Aldridge he knew from photos. And so he stopped Pyle from taking her down. Big mistake. Overnight Aldridge submerged again. But at least they'd taken her truck's plate numbers. Those have gotten the agents this far, so far.

Pyle has driven them beyond Del Rio's halo of light and now Daugherty is able to stare at the million stars piercing the southerly night over Mexico. There, over the border, is where Jessica Aldridge would be right now if she were really guilty of something.

“So what's her crime?” Daugherty asks himself, realizing too late that he's mumbled this aloud.

“You still awake?” Pyle says. Then, after two mile markers pass, Pyle responds to the question. “She probably emailed secrets to WikiLeaks.”

Despite all the trouble she's caused them, Pyle's crack irritates Daugherty. “I doubt that. She got an honorable discharge.”

“She's still a skank, boss. You going sentimental on me?”

“Yeah,”
Daugherty says, dissembling.

“So, shall we just let her go?”

“Sure. But let's catch her first. If she's too small, we'll throw her back.” Pyle's badass attitude is infectious. And maybe anyway he doesn't trust the sympathy he's beginning to feel for their fugitive.

Pyle starts in again, talking over the tires' hum. “I'll give her that she conned a dumbass lawyer into giving her a ride. The bitch is clever.”

In the windshield a distance sign appears. Daugherty calculates they'll reach San Antonio in forty minutes, if their engine doesn't blow or a tire burst. “More than clever. Smart enough, according to her file, to make drone pilot,” he says.

“And that's why she's in for a world of hurt after we catch her,” Pyle says.

“How do you figure?”

“First of all, the case file DC gave us is Swiss cheese redacted, so we know that whatever she's wanted for is big.”

“You mean, over-our-security-level big?”

“I mean, congressional-hearing big.”

Again, Daugherty finds himself defending Jessica. “If it was that serious, DC would have told us.”

“Not if the CIA's behind it. Think about it. We know that Langley directs the Air Force's drone ops. And we know it can't run all the ops it wants because there's a pilot shortage. My guess is they're trying to develop a program to put more drones in the air. That's where ex – Technical Sergeant Aldridge comes in.”

“How?”

“Maybe she fucked up a mission she was pilot on, which if word got out would put the drone program under scrutiny. Or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe she
is
Julian Assange's latest pen pal.”

Daugherty doesn't buy the latter scenario. “If she sent secrets to WikiLeaks, it would be news already.”

“I'll give you that,” Pyle says.

Groggy from their twenty-hour chase, they are speculating like conspiracy-minded bloggers. But all they factually know is that somebody up the food chain wants, wants badly, Jessica Aldridge brought in.

“Could be she's not guilty of a damn thing,” Daugherty says, ready to end the conversation.

“Right,” Pyle says as they overtake a livestock trailer. “I'm sure she's a
real
innocent.”

A POSTER OUTSIDE
the McDonald's in San Antonio's Market Square offers Daugherty a McRib—which sounds like how he feels, double punched in the kidneys. He tells Pyle to pull up by the sign so he can use the restroom. Inside, gray faced, he cups his palm under the running faucet and slurps down a Cardioquin for his arrhythmia.

He'd been a healthy subject until his divorce six years ago. At least he'd had no major complaints. Now, at forty-seven, he also takes pills for his prostate and blood pressure. And once a year something new blows up on him. If his knees keep aching the way they do, he'll probably be due for replacements before the next national election.

“Get over yourself,” Daugherty says to his pale, self-pitying scowl.

“Sir?” a young woman's voice calls through the bathroom door. “The restaurant is closing now.”

“LOOKS LIKE YOU
just woke up in a morgue freezer,” Pyle says, arms folded, leaning against the Taurus.

They take a short walk across the parking lot to the Motel 6, where they catch the night clerk surfing porn on a laptop. He's so voyeuristically entertained by the agents' tale of a young woman and her dog that without asking he magnetizes a key card with Aldridge's room number. Though she'd paid in cash, he'd insisted on seeing her ID.

“Company policy,” he explains. “Also, I should go with you when you take her.”

“You'll cool your fat ass right here,” Pyle says.

“Your cooperation is appreciated, sir,” Daugherty adds with a smile he does not attempt to make real.

Taking the long way to room 211, around the back parking lot, he and Pyle find no escape routes. A perimeter walkway provides access to the rooms, which must abut a common inside wall. Some may have adjoining interior doors. But 211's will be locked since Aldridge only paid for one room.

When they reach her wing, Pyle mounts the stairs first and Daugherty follows. Daugherty sees that Pyle has taken along pepper spray. “In case the bitch gets jumpy,” he explains.

“Her dog, you mean,” Daugherty says, imagining he's still in charge.

“No,” Pyle replies. “I mean the fucking bitch we're hunting.”

Aldridge, Daugherty sees, is probably still awake in her room—light is bleeding from the edges of 211's curtained window. Since he's not expecting a shotgun blast greeting, he stands in front of the door and knocks. It's not a policeman's knock, but it is firm. This shouldn't be a hard arrest, not physically. “Jessica,” Daugherty calls more softly than intended.

There is no response. Pyle moves in and starts pounding the door, making its frame rattle. “Aldridge! Jessica Aldridge! We know you're in there!” Bang, bang, bang.

“Great. Let's invite the neighbors,” Daugherty tells him, envisioning an assortment of red-blooded gun owners peeved by their noisemaking. Dragging off a young woman in the middle of the night is a surefire way of turning a citizenry's ire into stupidity. Daugherty can already foresee the bullet holes in their car.

Pyle stops banging. “Come on. The goddamn key card,” he says as though Daugherty has gone senile. They have been in each other's unbroken company for too many hours and the rush of the imminent arrest is compounding their irritation. Daugherty swipes the key and, with the toe of his shoe, pushes open the motel room door. It swings in all the way, unchained. Pyle lowers the pepper canister and shoves past. Daugherty almost doesn't follow; he can tell that no one's home.

While Pyle checks the bathroom Daugherty realizes that his heart is racing—fluttering but not pumping blood. He deflates onto the bed—into an indent that Aldridge or her dog must have made. He puts up his feet and lies back.

Pyle comes out of the bathroom with a trashcan. “She was here,” he says, rummaging, pulling out a McDonald's bag. Then he sees his partner lying on the bed. “What the hell you doing, Daugherty?”

“The trail is cold,” Daugherty says and shuts his eyes. “The room is paid for.” He is trying to sound worldly and nonchalant, coolly above any disappointment over losing their target again. “May as well get some rest.” In truth, though, Daugherty wouldn't be able to move if the bed were on fire.

CHAPTER 35

New York City

“Juliette, damn it, I should be there for Ethan. For Zoe,” Alex says, his eyes masked by the low-battery warning on Juliette's iPad. They have been video arguing for far too long.

“And miss the deadline for Sergei's mural? Right now he is very important to us.” Juliette is again being the schoolmistress, reminding her difficult student of his error.

“Yeah,” Alex says, “but Russians appreciate tragedy. Sergei will give me a few days off for a funeral.”

“Alex, you are an artist. Stay there and put your feelings into paint. Besides, you did not even like this Zoe, not after all she did to your Ethan.”

“You mean forget the dead and collect my paycheck. What's the Bible say? ‘Gain the world and lose your soul.' ”

“Now you are religious? And a million rubles is hardly the world. Thirty thousand dollars. Your work is what counts. That is your soul.” Juliette clicks away another battery warning. She cannot recharge because this Starbucks has blocked its power outlets.

“My
work
. You talk like I'm Picasso. It's scary how you hype me.”

“I only see what others see. What your
ami
Ethan saw before anyone. That's why I respect him.
Oui
, I do. You see, part of him says he wants you home to say goodbye to Zoe. But his other half wants you to succeed. Don't forget, he has two dozen of your paintings, your best early work. They are worth a lot by now.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I did not want to distract you but your show has all red dots. There is a buying frenzy. I have even just heard that Dean Cato resold
Money Shot
.”

“But it's still hanging in the gallery.”

“His hedge fund manager bought it for twice what he paid us. People are betting on you to be big. Basquiat big.”

“Basquiat is dead.”

“Basquiat is what they are saying. Some very influential people. Financiers. Bankers.”

“What do those people know about art? It's just an investment to them.”

“They are the new Medicis,” Juliette says, “and they can make you great.”

“You mean
rich
. You know what? I should have kept the original title on Cato's painting—
Blood Money
. That would have scared away the speculators.”

“When you want people to see, you don't throw acid in their eyes. And
Blood Money
wasn't your title anyway.”

“Just because it came from Ethan—”

“
Écoute-moi
, Alex.” When Juliette gets heated she slips into her French Canadian. “Listen, your Ethan is bitter because he has lost his job, his apartment, all his money. He is going down while you are coming up. I do not even think he will take Sergei's job, after all my work. Don't let misplaced guilt hold you back. You are not responsible for his failure.”

“Ethan is my friend. And
Blood Money
came from his anger.”

“But your art is not about the words. It's about the
painting
. Ethan will understand.”

“The
painting
. Jesus. I can't believe Cato resold
Money
before he even took it home.”

As Alex says this Juliette senses him relenting, finally if just barely, to pride. He is, as he should be, not displeased with his success.
Their
success.

“This is your moment. Your chance to be famous.” Ideas pounce through Juliette's head. “You know, maybe you
should
come back for a few days. The
Wall Street Journal
is asking for images. Perhaps I can get the
Times
interested in a profile. Then Sergei wouldn't mind your coming home. It would give his mural more prestige.”

“Christ,” Alex says, sighing, “you're always minding the store. We should be talking about my coming home to help Ethan, to say goodbye to Zoe, not to leverage this . . . whatever this madness is that's going on.”

“
Je comprends
,
mon chéri
. I know. It's sad about Zoe. But you can do nothing for her. Truly you cannot. In fact, you are
upset
. So maybe it is better you stay at work on the mural. We must be very careful about your image.”

“And what about Ethan? He needs me.”

“
Chéri
, I will see to Ethan. Didn't I introduce him to Sergei, find him his new apartment? So let me help him again. You have only been crippling your friend, letting him hang around in the studio. He has lost his independence, his pride. Did you see what he wore to your opening? Dean Cato thought he was
homeless
.”

“So you're going to turn Ethan back into a presentable friend for me,
the great artiste
.”

“Come, Alex. You know you can't help him.”

“Where do you get this great confidence?”

“I have helped you, no? And it is not confidence I have. I do what is realistic. That is all anyone who is responsible can do. I will help Ethan for
you
.”

As Alex pauses to consider her promise, Juliette's iPad warns again of her diminishing power. She will lose Alex soon. But she is almost finished.

“All right. I'll stay here. Who knows if I could get there in time anyway. But I won't make excuses to Ethan about missing the funeral.”

“I will take care of him. Now, what have you done today?”

Alex sighs out of Juliette's screen. “Not much. I'm not really into it yet.”

“Point your phone. Let me see,” Juliette says, inflecting her voice with energy as if their twenty-minute quarrel has not drained her.

“I've had some ideas,” Alex says defensively.

“Remember, it is Sergei's fiftieth in two weeks. He is planning a grand unveiling. There is a deadline and—”

“Christ, I'll do what I can. But stop it. Stop being the fucking shopkeeper!”

And then, with no further warning, her iPad goes dark.

“I WILL TRY
to be not so much the shopkeeper,” Juliette tells Alex through her recharging iPad. She has migrated two blocks to Astor Place, to a Starbucks that is freer with their power receptacles. She is not looking at Alex but is observing the wall on which he is to complete Sergei's mural. The area, prepared with a coat of plaster, sits between the room's grandiose curved staircases. Juliette sees that after his third day at work Alex has very little paint on the ten-by-twenty-foot space. He is not progressing as he normally does, in bold swaths. He has only put down a jumble of unsure slashes.

“I'm just not getting any traction yet,” Alex says. “And it's not looking anything like the sketches we gave Sergei.”

“Alex, you are the most talented artist I know,” Juliette says.

She tells him this because she also needs to believe it. She needs to justify the last ten months of her emotional life, the monthly rent on his Chelsea studio, the social IOUs she'd called in to make his Medusa opening succeed, the professional promise she'd given Sergei that Alex Carr would produce for him a brilliant mural. Has she pushed Alex beyond his abilities? “Paint anything. Sergei will be pleased with whatever you do,” Juliette says. But this is a fib, for unlike most of her clients Sergei
has
an eye. There will be no convincing him to accept anything mediocre.

“Whatever you say,” Alex replies.

“And I will take care of Ethan tomorrow at the funeral.”

“All right. Thanks.”

“Really, you don't need to worry about a thing,” she tells Alex. As the shopkeeper,
she
will keep up the accounts.

THE NEXT AFTERNOON,
beneath a sidewalk canopy, Juliette meets Ethan with what she imagines are mutual looks of disregard. Juliette's has to do with Ethan's appearance—the beltless pants, the scuffed loafers, the nest of hand-combed hair, the business jacket grimy from being used as a smock in Alex's studio. Ethan seems in the final stages of unmaking what he once was, a currency trader entrusted with millions of dollars, according to Alex. Yet even in the wreck that stands before her, Juliette can sense his former competence.

And what does Ethan see as he looks at Juliette? She can guess—that
petite
salope
who prevented Alex from being here to say goodbye to their former lover.

“
Bonjour
, Ethan,” Juliette says with all the sympathy she can feign. Attempting to peck his cheek she smells alcohol seeping from his pores.
“Ça va?”
she asks nervously. “You are okay?”

Ethan's breath is toxic. “Supposed to be my funeral. Didn't invite
him
. He's already inside.”

Juliette can partly decipher this gibberish only because, following her promise to Alex yesterday, she began to burrow into this Zoe business. After locating a helpful detective in the Seventh Precinct, Juliette learned that, lacking next of kin, Zoe's remains were released to the first person willing to cover the burial costs. A friend of Zoe's from Washington had balked at getting more deeply involved and so Detective Chen had called Ethan.
So
, it is
his
funeral, in that he is paying for it. Who the uninvited party already inside might be, however, Juliette does not know.

Up the block a church bell chimes the hour. It is time but Ethan stays rooted to the sidewalk. “Are you ready, Ethan?” Juliette says. She enlaces his arm and turns him about. He is leaden and they weave through the funeral home's entrance.

A mournful-appearing man directs them into a chapel the size of a living room. It is set up with rows of chairs, all unoccupied. When Juliette lifts her eyes to the bier she understands Ethan's reluctance to enter. Half the coffin lid yawns open.

“You asked for a viewing?” Juliette says, diminishing her surprise.

“I . . . I have to see her again.”

Almost ceremoniously, arm in arm, Juliette and Ethan pass up the aisle. A Bach arioso infiltrates their ears. Aside from another couple, an older man and a youngish woman standing not far from the bier, the room is empty.

“Did you not send out an announcement?” Juliette asks Ethan, perhaps sounding critical.

He doesn't respond.

“I could have helped,” Juliette says, but she is talking to herself.

They are close enough now to look into the coffin, into the overly made-up, unevenly puffy face of the young woman. Laid out as she is, like a collapsed puppet, it is difficult to imagine this Zoe alive.

Ethan pulls away from Juliette's arm. “What's this?” he asks as if the corpse would tell him. Juliette can only stare as Ethan reaches into the coffin and lifts Zoe's wrist. He pulls at something attached to her hand.

“Ethan,”
Juliette whispers.

“Pardon me?” says the older man. “Pardon me! Stop that!”

He is dressed with the bland authority of a Washington politico—navy jacket, diagonally striped tie, light blue shirt. With his intellectually longish hair, he also radiates the pompous self-seriousness common to the capital. Having stepped back politely when Ethan approached the bier, he now takes a threatening step forward.

His companion tries to hold him. “No, Dr. Coombs. He is suffering,” the woman, who has a scar on her face, says. Her voice is pleasantly cadenced despite its alarm.

“This engagement ring,” Ethan says loudly. “How did it get on her finger?”

“Please stop. It belongs to her,” says Coombs. “It was from me.”

“But she didn't accept it. Did she? Not when she was alive,” Ethan shouts. No, not shouts, screams. He wrenches at Zoe's finger. “Why would you think she wants it now?” Ethan is pulling so hard at the ring that Juliette fears some morbid accident.

She grasps Ethan's shoulder to suggest restraint. But with a frenzy of elbows Ethan shrugs her away and Juliette topples backward off her platform shoes. Folding chairs spring like mousetraps as she crashes into them.

Juliette lifts her head from the wreckage and flips down her upturned skirt to cover her thighs. She raises a hand toward Ethan. On her feet, she accepts a tissue from Coombs' companion.

“Your temple. It is bleeding,” the woman says, her brow knit.

CROSSING FIRST AVENUE,
a block from the funeral home, Juliette pursues Ethan—who has set a smart pace as if he suspects what she intends: an intervention. Platforms are not running shoes; however, she has made a vow to Alex and tries to catch up. “Ethan!” she calls, then she is alongside. She is uncomfortable about being the shopkeeper on this day of mourning. But she may not have another chance to speak with him. “You have not worked for a long time, no?”

Speed walking even faster, Ethan retorts violently, “Don't I work in Alex's studio almost every day?”

“But this is not your real work.” Jogging in his wake, Juliette thinks that they must make a curious sidewalk pair—the woman in black Helmut Lang chasing the disheveled homeless maniac. Fortunately no one cares. This is not Quebec.

At Second Avenue, a light corners Ethan. Juliette catches up again. “Ethan, please listen.”

“No! You just want me to stop coming to his studio.”

“I only think—”

“You think I'm Bartleby?”

“Who?”

“A man who wouldn't go away. And I won't. Not unless Alex tells me to go.”

“But you know he would never do that.”

“I'm not holding him hostage.”

Though tempted, Juliette does not reply with the truth—that it is Ethan who is hostage. Ever since college he has been living through Alex—first by buying his friend's paintings and then by stretching his canvases and cleaning his brushes.

“I'll explain it simply,” Ethan says. “I've lost Zoe and now you're taking Alex away.”

“What? Ethan, no.”

“You want me to work for Sergei a hundred miles away. Maybe . . . if Zoe were . . .” Ethan has stopped walking. “I can't breathe,” he says.