In This Rain (37 page)

She still held the phone in her hand and she still didn’t call.

What then? Nothing? Backed blindly into a corner by that bastard again, and again, do nothing?

But call Joe? Have him sympathize, see what it was she should have seen, understand what it was she should have understood? Have him know how she’d been played, this time— and the time before?

No.

Cheeks burning, she stared at the ghostly peonies. She couldn’t call Joe.

But do nothing?

The peonies seemed to reach toward her, out of the dark. Friend or foe?

They’re just flowers. Joe had said that years ago, spreading his slow smile, when she’d told him the daisies he’d brought in seemed to lean away from the lantana as though they didn’t want to be in the same vase. They don’t have opinions about each other the way we do. He’d moved the stems around, and everything was harmony again.

In the twilight Ann lifted the phone and dialed, but not Joe.

“Lowry.”

“Greg, I’m glad I caught you. We need to talk.”

Pause. “The hell we do.”

“You’re going to want to hear this.”

“I don’t want to hear anything from you.”

“You’re wrong. I’ll come in. Fifteen minutes.”

“Dammit, Ann, don’t make it worse.”

“Fifteen minutes. Greg, it’s a bombshell.”

“Like the last one?”

“I’m on my way in.”

“Goddamm it!” He hissed out a breath. “All right, but not here. I don’t want to be seen with you.”

“A lot of that going around.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Where do you want to meet?” Sunset Park, maybe?

“The Village. Dublin Six, on Hudson Street. You know it?”

“I’ll find it. I’m not making it worse, Greg. I’m going to make it better.” She clicked off and trotted down the steps to hail a cab.

Dublin Six turned out to be a bar where the action was going strong. Irish fiddle music and after-work drinkers flowed out the open front to the sidewalk. On the curb, Ann flinched. The jolly crowd, the noise and bustle: usually right up her alley, but now she felt like she was facing an icy stream when she was already freezing and exhausted.

But she waded in. Figuring Lowry wouldn’t want to be planted with her where all the world could see, she bypassed the outdoor tables, found a secluded corner, ordered a pinot grigio. Greg Lowry arrived just after her wine did.

“Ann— ” He pulled out a chair.

“Greg, just listen.”

“No, you listen! Whatever you want, you can’t have it. Just coffee,” he snapped at the waitress, who raised an eyebrow and backed away.

“A couple of things have come up,” Ann said.

“I don’t want to hear them. I only came here to keep you away from the office. I have a career I’d like to salvage. And believe it or not I’m trying to do you a favor, too.”

“How did Sonny O’Doul know to call me?”

“What the hell— what are you talking about?”

“O’Doul called me when he found the chain. Why me?”

Lowry looked at her as though she’d asked why the earth was flat. “You were the investigator on the case.”

“He didn’t know that. Someone had to tell him.”

“So someone told him.”

“It was Glybenhall— ” Ann stopped, waited while the waitress set Lowry’s coffee down. “Glybenhall told O’Doul that Dennis was off the case and I was on. He told him, if he had anything to say to DOI, to call me. He gave him my direct line.”

“So what? And more important, how do you know?”

“O’Doul told me.”

“When?”

“This morning.”

“Are you fucking nuts?” Even in the swirling racket, heads turned. Lowry dropped his voice. “You went to see O’Doul? Are you crazy?”

“That chain? Morgenstern made it, like all the other pieces. None of them are fakes. The bling we found at Glybenhall’s, it’s Kong’s. But that chain O’Doul claims he found isn’t. Morgenstern made it for Glybenhall.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Kong was never on that roof. He was only on the Mott Haven site once, before the first accident, the scaffold collapse. He never went back. And Blowfish hasn’t been down to the river in two years. He never saw anyone down there, no white man with Kong. That was a lie. It was all a trap, Greg. And I fell right into it.”

Lowry gave her a long, level stare. “It’s loud as hell in here. I’m having trouble understanding you. It sounds as though you’re saying you’ve been talking to witnesses in this case. I know you wouldn’t do that when you’re on desk duty. Must be the noise.”

“Don’t you get it? Why do you think he produced the gun so late, and it was the wrong gun? And the jeweler, and Blowfish, first one story and then another. It wasn’t that he got to them after. He had them from the beginning. It was the whole point!”

“What was?”

“Setting me up.” Her voice was steady but she had to swallow before she could go on. “Because of— because of the past. He wanted me to find huge amounts of evidence, because he knew I’d buy it. He wanted us to arrest him! Because he’d already set the case up to fall apart. So when it did, he could sue. It’s all about the money, Greg. It always was.”

“Jesus Christ,” Lowry said, voice full of wonder. “You really are obsessed with Glybenhall, just like he says.”

“No! No! He knew you’d all think that. That’s why he did it this way. Goddammit, Greg, he set us up!”

Lowry, tight-jawed, picked up his coffee. He drank it as if it were medicine. When he put it down he said, “Ann, you have to help me out here. You have to back off.”

“That’s what he wants. That’s what the lawsuit’s for.”

“No, the lawsuit’s for fifty million dollars!” Lowry flared, then went on quietly, patiently. “Ann, you’ve shown incredibly bad judgment. Earlier, and especially now. But I’m sure that’s all it is. I don’t think you planted any evidence— ”

“Of course I didn’t!”

“I know that! I don’t think you did anything at all that’s actionable. Certainly nothing criminal.”

“Criminal?”

“You must know Mark Shapiro’s looking into making a case against you. Standard in situations like this, to cover the department’s butt. They did it with Joe Cole, had a case ready to go, but the DA liked the NYPD’s better.”

“Both were garbage. And so’s this. Mark Shapiro’s worrying about covering the department’s butt? Three people are dead— ”

“One accident and two unrelated gang killings.”

“You can’t believe that. The sabotage— ”

“Construction accidents.”

“Oh, come on! You read Sandy Weiss’s report.”

“Expert witnesses can be wrong.”

“Greg, you can’t just sweep this under the rug!”

“Goddammit, Ann, get ahold of yourself!” Hands around his coffee mug as though to keep it from escaping, he dropped his voice. “What are you telling me? That Walter Glybenhall went to a huge, complicated amount of trouble to make Ann Montgomery look like an idiot?”

“No. He went to all this trouble for a multimillion-dollar settlement and a Teflon coating.”

“What does that mean?”

“Look at it! No city agency will dare touch Glybenhall now! After a false arrest for homicide and a giant lawsuit? Building permits, licenses, variances, waivers, they’ll fall all over themselves giving him what he wants. Any site in New York and anything he wants to build on it. Block A, in Harlem. Corrington was working with us— ”

“With you!”

“Yes, yes, with me! And because of that he’s disgraced. He’ll never get that site, he may even have to resign from his foundation. You think that wasn’t part of the point, too? A huge dollar settlement is nice. But look what else Glybenhall gets! Corrington’s been put in his place, Glybenhall’s shown Charlie Barr who’s boss, I’m ruined— and Glybenhall’s untouchable. Untouchable! Think of what that’ll be worth over the years. Other developers will be coming to him, people who weren’t giving him the time of day will be begging to be part of his projects. He’ll be king! Greg, he engineered this from beginning to end.”

Lowry sat unmoving. Quietly, he said, “The trouble with this theory of yours— besides the fact that it’s insane— the specific trouble is that Glybenhall would have to have known Dennis would be moved off the case and you put on. Because when all this started you were still in Siberia. Where I wish to hell we’d left you.”

“And why didn’t you?”

“Because I wanted you back! Because you were good. I thought. Before I knew you were crazy.”

“So you just hauled me in from the boonies?”

“Are you shitting me? I busted my ass lobbying Shapiro for you. Jesus, talk about digging my own grave.”

“And he said, ‘Sure’?”

“No, he’s a lot smarter than me, obviously. He said maybe. He said let’s wait until we have— ” Lowry stopped abruptly.

Ann forced herself to say nothing, to not move, though she felt like a lava flow trying to keep from coursing down a mountain.

“No,” Lowry said. Slowly, deliberately, he went on, “If you are assigning any part in your paranoid fantasy to Commissioner Shapiro, I’d suggest you reconsider.”

“Greg.” Ann heard the tremor in her own voice. “Just look at it. As a cop. As though you didn’t know any of these people.”

Lowry’s gaze was stony. “You need to get help, Ann. You may be a danger to yourself. You’re certainly a danger to my department and me.”

“Why would Shapiro agree to put me on this case, this sensitive case? A loose cannon like me? He and Glybenhall had to know each other from the power-player tuxedo circuit, over the last twenty years. Glybenhall cooked this up and sold it to him!”

“The Commissioner,” Lowry said, “agreed to put you on this case because I asked him to. Because, I can see now, I temporarily lost my mind.”

“Are you sure it wasn’t his idea?”

“Until a minute ago,” Lowry said, shoving his coffee aside, “you were on desk duty. Now you’re fired. You have no professional standing and you will stay away from everyone involved with this case. If you have a problem with this, your union rep can call me.”

“Greg, please! At least talk to the people I’ve talked to. You’ll see.”

“I’m not talking to anyone! I will not be dragged into this insanity again.”

“What about Sandy Weiss at Packer?”

“You will stay away.”

“Weiss’s report is still good. Glybenhall has no leverage with him.”

Lowry, instead of answering that, studied her for a long moment. “Ann? When this started, you told me you thought you had something on the scaffold collapse, and that you were sending it to Weiss at Packer.”

“What do— ”

“If Weiss hadn’t seen it yet, why did you think you had something?”

“The bolt holes— ”

“You’re not an engineer. What made you think you had something?”

This time it was Ann who said nothing.

Lowry’s face purpled. “Jesus fucking Christ. That’s what you were doing upstate, isn’t it? You took those photos, you took our fucking evidence photos straight to the prison and you showed them to Joe Cole!”

“Joe’s out,” Ann said quietly. “Six months now.”

“You did, didn’t you?”

She didn’t answer. She heard the fiddle music start up again; she hadn’t realized it had stopped. The devil was reputed to play the fiddle, wasn’t he?

When Lowry finally spoke his voice was hard. “I’m about one inch from arresting you. I swear to God, if I don’t leave I’ll do it right now. And if I so much as hear your name again, Ann, you are fucked. I promise you, completely fucked.”

He stood, pushed through the crowd, and left.

Sutton Place

From the tone of Joe’s messages, their content, and their number— three on her cell phone and three at home— Ann had known last night that he was worried. She’d gone to bed with that knowledge, tossed and turned with it, and, with it, reached for the shrilling phone as the morning sun stabbed through the window.

“Joe?”

“Are you all right? Why didn’t you call last night?”

“I’m sorry. I’m fine. It got late.”

He was silent, not contesting that, waiting for the answer to the question he’d called six times last night to ask.

“It’s complicated, Joe.”

“I have time.”

“And it’s bad.”

“We were wrong?”

“We hadn’t thought it through.” We hadn’t thought about how people can be counted on to make the same mistake over and over again, like a night moth beating its wings against the glass.

“There was more?” Joe asked. “So? That happens a lot. But we were on the right track?”

“I missed so much.”

“But you see it now?”

“Yes. But I can’t tell you about it. I have to go.”

“Ann, what’s wrong?”

“I have to go.”

“Ann— ”

“Jen’s memorial service is this morning. I’ll call you when it’s over.”

“I’ll be at work.”

“Tonight, then.”

“I’ll call you, when we take a break.”

“If you want. Don’t worry, Joe, please. I’ll talk to you later.”

She slipped out of bed and stood at the window. Sun glittered off the East River; it was glaringly bright but she wondered how far into the water it really penetrated. She hadn’t meant, when the service is over. Though what it would mean for all this to be over she didn’t know.

*

Ann showered quickly, did her makeup, dressed in charcoal gray. She phoned the garage and asked them to bring the Boxster out front. She locked up and slipped her earrings on as she hurried down the hall. Tapping her foot until the elevator doors opened, she flipped through a mental map, looking at the streets and the likely traffic so she could choose the best route. All this rushing, all this velocity; and in the back of her mind the barely acknowledged truth: it was counterfeit. She was on a treadmill, dashing madly forward to outrun the fact that she couldn’t move.

She parked in a garage a block from the funeral home. As she rushed down the sidewalk she turned her phone off and dropped it in her bag. Someone’s phone was bound to ring during the service; these days, during anything, someone’s always did. But she didn’t want it to be hers. Though Jen would have been the first to get a case of the cover-your-mouth giggles over that.

She entered the funeral home through a revolving door. Jen would have found that funny, too. The steamy June morning with its smells of diesel fuel and take-out coffee, its syncopated traffic and shards of conversations, vanished instantly, replaced by thick cream carpet and silent cool. A respectful young man asked whom she was “here for” and indicated the chapel, his charge to make sure loved ones didn’t bow their heads in grieving reverence at the wrong funeral. Although, Ann thought, as a tribute to Jen, who’d always treated getting lost as an adventure and never could read a map, that was temptingly appropriate.