Sacred: A Novel (23 page)

I shook my head. “Found something.”

“Well, good for you,” he said and walked off.

Good for me. Yes. Bad for Desiree.

You were so, so close, lady. And then you blew it. Blew it big time.

About a year after I finished my apprenticeship with Jay Becker, he got kicked out of his own apartment by a Cuban flamenco dancer named Esmeralda Vasquez. Esmeralda had been traveling with the road company of
The Threepenny Opera
when she met Jay her second night in town. Three weeks into the run of the show, she was pretty much living with him, though Jay didn’t think of it that way. Unfortunately for him, Esmeralda did, which is why she was probably so irate when she caught Jay in bed with another dancer from the same show. Esmeralda got her hands on a knife, and Jay got his hand on his doorknob and he and the other dancer got the hell out of Dodge for the night.

The dancer went back to the apartment she shared with her boyfriend, and Jay came knocking on my door.

“You pissed off a Cuban flamenco dancer?” I said.

“It would appear so,” he said, placing a case of Beck’s in my fridge and a bottle of Chivas on my counter.

“Was this wise?”

“It would appear not.”

“Was this, perhaps, even stupid?”

“Are you going to rag on me all night or are you going to be a good lad and show me where you keep your chips?”

So we ended up sitting on my couch in the living room, drinking his Beck’s and Chivas and talking about near castrations at the hands of women scorned, bad breakups, jealous boyfriends and husbands, and several similar topics that wouldn’t have seemed half so funny if it weren’t for the booze and the company.

And then, just as the conversation was running dry, we looked up and noticed the beginning credits to
Fail-Safe
on my TV.

“Shit,” Jay said. “Turn it up.”

I did.

“Who directed this?” Jay said.

“Lumet.”

“You sure?”

“Positive.”

“I thought it was Frankenheimer.”

“Frankenheimer did
Seven Days in May,
” I said.

“You’re right. God, I love this movie.”

So for the next two hours we sat, rapt, as President of the United States Henry Fonda clenched his jaw against a coldly crisp black-and-white world gone mad, and a computer foul-up caused the U.S. attack squadron to pass the fail-safe point and bomb Moscow, and then poor Hank Fonda had to clench his jaw some more and order the bombing of New York City to placate the Russians and avoid a full-scale nuclear war.

After it was over, we argued about which was better—
Fail-Safe
or
Dr. Strangelove.
I said it was no contest;
Strangelove
was a masterpiece and Stanley Kubrick was a genius. Jay said I was too artsy. I said he was too literal. He said Henry Fonda was the greatest actor in the history of cinema. I assured him he was drunk.

“If only they’d had some sort of supersecret code word to call those bombers back.” He settled back into the couch, eyelids at half-mast, beer in one hand, glass of Chivas in the other.

“‘Supersecret code word’?” I laughed.

He turned his head. “No, really. Say ol’ President Fonda had just spoken to each squadron pilot privately, gave them each a secret word only he and they knew. Then he could have called them back after they crossed the fail-safe line.”

“But, Jay,” I said, “that’s the point—he couldn’t call anyone back. They’d been trained to think any communication was a Russian trick after they passed fail-safe.”

“Still…”

We sat there watching
Out of the Past,
which had followed on the heels of
Fail-Safe.
Another terrific black-and-white movie on Channel 38, back when 38 was cool. At some point Jay went and used the bathroom, then came back from the kitchen with two more beers.

“If I ever want to send you a message,” he said, his tongue thick with liquor, “that’s our code.”

“What?” I said.

“Fail-safe,” he said.

“I’m watching
Out of the Past
now, Jay.
Fail-Safe
was a half hour ago. New York is blown to smithereens. Get over it.”

“No, I’m serious.” He struggled against the couch cushion, sat up. “I ever want to send you a message from beyond the grave, say, it’ll be ‘fail-safe.’”

“A message from beyond the friggin’ grave?” I laughed. “You’re serious.”

“As a coronary. No, no, lookit.” He leaned forward, widened his eyes to clear his head. “This is a rough business, man. I mean, it’s not as rough as the Bureau, but it’s no cakewalk. Something ever happens to me…” He rubbed his eyes, shook his head again. “See, I got two brains, Patrick.”

“You mean two heads. And Esmeralda would say, you used the wrong one tonight, which is why she wants to cut it off.”

He snorted. “No. Okay, yeah, I got two heads, sure. But I’m talking about brains. I got two brains. I do.” He tapped his head with his index finger, squinted at me. “One of them, the normal one, is no problem. But the other one, that’s my cop brain, and it never shuts off. It wakes my other brain up at night, forces me to get out of bed and think about something that was bugging me and I didn’t even know it was. I mean, I’ve solved half of my cases at three o’clock in the morning, all because of this second brain.”

“It must be tough getting dressed every day.”

“Huh?”

“With those two brains,” I said. “I mean, do they have different tastes in clothes and whatnot? Food?”

He shot me the bird. “I’m serious.”

I held up a hand. “Seriously,” I said, “I sorta know what you’re talking about.”

“Nah.” He waved his hand. “You’re still too green. But you will know. Someday. This second brain, man, it’s a pisser. Say, you meet this person—a potential friend, a lover, what have you—and you want this relationship to work, but your second brain starts working. Even if you don’t want it to. And it sets off alarm bells, instinctual ones, and you know deep in your heart that you can’t trust this person. Your second brain’s picked up on something your regular brain can’t or won’t. Might take you years before you figure out what that something was—maybe it was the way the friend stuttered over a certain word or the way the lover’s eyes lit up when she saw diamonds even though she said she couldn’t care less about money. Maybe it was—Who knows? But it’ll be something. And it’ll be true.”

“You’re drunk.”

“I am, but that doesn’t mean I’m not speaking God’s truth. Look, I’m just saying, I ever get whacked?”

“Yeah?”

“It’s not going to be by some mob ice-man or scumbag drug dealer or somebody I’d smell a mile off. It’s going to be by someone I trust, someone I love. And maybe I’ll go to my grave trusting them. Most of me.” He winked. “But my second brain, I swear it’s a bullshit detector, and it’ll tell me to set up some sort of safeguard against this person, whether the rest of me wants to do it or not. So, that’s it.” He nodded to himself, sat back.

“That’s what?”

“That’s the plan.”

“What plan? You haven’t said a thing that’s made sense in at least twenty minutes.”

“If I ever die, and someone who was close to me comes up to you and says some bullshit about having a message about
Fail-Safe,
then you know you got to take them out or take them down or generally fuck up their shit in a big way.” He held up his beer. “Drink on it.”

“This doesn’t involve slicing our thumbs with razors and mingling the blood or anything, does it?”

He frowned. “Don’t need that with you. Drink.”

We drank.

“But what if it’s me who sets you up for a hit, Jay?”

He looked at me, one eye squinted shut. “Then I’m screwed, I guess.” And he laughed.

He refined the “message from the grave,” as I called it, over the years and beers in between. April Fools’ Day was added as a second joke on the person or persons who might hurt him and then try to befriend me.

It’s such a long shot, I used to tell him. It’s like placing a single land mine in the Sahara Desert and expecting a particular guy to step on it. One guy, one land mine, a desert three and a half million square miles.

“I’ll take the odds,” he said. “Might be a long shot, but that land mine goes off, people are going to be able to see it for miles. Just remember that second brain of mine, buddy. When the rest of me’s in the ground, that second brain might just send you a message. You make sure you’re there to hear it.”

And I was.

“Take them out or take them down or generally fuck up their shit in a big way,” he’d asked me all those years ago.

Okay, Jay. No problem. My pleasure.

“Get up. Come on. Get up.” I threw back the curtains and the hard sunlight poured into the room, filled the bed.

Angie had somehow managed to turn herself completely sideways on the bed while I’d been gone. She’d kicked the covers off her legs, and just a slim triangle of white sheet covered her bottom as she looked up at me through bleary eyes, her hair hanging in her face like a tangle of black moss.

“Ain’t you just the Romeo in the morning?” she said.

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go.” I grabbed my gym bag, started stuffing it with my clothes.

“Let me guess,” she said. “There’s money on the dresser, it was swell, but don’t let the door hit my butt on the way out.”

I dropped to my knees and kissed her. “Something like that. Come on. We’re in a rush.”

She rose to her knees and the covers dropped away and her arms slid over my shoulders. Her body, soft and warm with sleep, crushed against my own.

“We sleep together for the first time in seventeen years, and you wake me up like this?”

“Unfortunately,” I said, “yes.”

“This better be good.”

“It’s better than good. Come on. I’ll tell you on the way to the airport.”

“The airport.”

“The airport.”

“The airport,” she said with a yawn and stumbled out of bed and went into the bathroom.

The forest greens and coral whites, pale blues and burnt yellows dropped away and turned to square quilted patches as we rose into the clouds and headed north.

“Run this by me again,” Angie said. “The half-naked part.”

“She was wearing a bikini,” I said.

“In a dark room. With you in it,” she said.

“Yes.”

“And you felt how?”

“Nervous,” I said.

“Whoo,” she said. “Wrong, wrong answer.”

“Wait,” I said, but I knew I’d signed my death warrant.

“We made love for six hours, and you still felt tempted by this little bimbo in a bikini?” She leaned forward in her seat, turned, and looked at me.

“I didn’t say tempted,” I said. “I said ‘nervous.’”

“Same thing.” She smiled, shook her head. “Guys, I swear.”

“Right,” I said. “Guys. Don’t you get it?”

“No,” she said. She raised her fist to her chin, squinted so I’d know she was concentrating. “Please. Elucidate.”

“All right. Desiree is a siren. She sucks men in. She has an aura, and it’s half innocence, half pure carnality.”

“An aura.”

“Right. Guys love auras.”

“Okeydoke.”

“Any guy gets around her, she turns this aura on. Or maybe it’s on all the time, I don’t know. But in either case, it’s pretty strong. And a guy looks at her face, her body, he hears her voice and smells her scent, he’s a goner.”

“All guys?”

“Most, I’d bet.”

“You?”

“No,” I said. “Not me.”

“Why?”

“Because I love you.”

That stopped her. The smile left her face and her skin paled to eggshell, and her mouth lay open as if it had forgotten how to use words.

“What did you just say?” she managed eventually.

“You heard me.”

“Yeah, but…” She turned in her seat, looked straight ahead for a moment. Then she turned to the middle-aged black woman sitting in the seat beside her who’d been following our conversation since we got on the plane without any pretense to be doing otherwise.

“I heard him, honey,” the woman said, knitting what appeared to be a small beaver with lethal-looking needles. “Loud and clear. Don’t know about all this aura bullshit, but I heard that part just fine, thank you.”

“Wow,” Angie said to her. “You know?”

“Aww, he ain’t that good-looking,” the woman said. “He maybe rate a ‘gee’ but he don’t rate no ‘wow,’ seem to me.”

Angie turned back to me. “Gee,” she said.

“Go on,” the woman said to me, “get back to telling us about this slut made you coffee.”

“Anyway,” I said to Angie.

She blinked, closed her mouth by placing the heel of her hand to her jaw and pushing up. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Back to that.”

“If I wasn’t, you know—”

“In
love,
” the lady said.

I glared at her. “—with you, Ange, yeah, I would’ve been a dead man in there. She’s a viper. She picks guys—almost any guy—and she gets them to do her bidding, whatever that may be.”

“I want to meet this girl,” the woman said. “See if she can get my Leroy to mow the lawn.”

“But that’s what I don’t get,” Angie said. “Guys are that stupid?”

“Yes.”

“What he said,” the woman said, concentrating on her knitting.

“Women and men are different,” I said. “Most of them anyway. Particularly when it comes to their reactions to the opposite sex.” I took her hand in mine. “Desiree passes a hundred guys in the street, at least half of them will think about her for days. And when she passes, they won’t just go, ‘Nice face, nice ass, pretty smile,’ whatever. They’ll ache. They’ll want to possess her on the spot, melt into her, inhale her.”

“Inhale her?” she said.

“Yes. Men have a completely different reaction to beautiful women than women do to beautiful men.”

“So Desiree again is…?” She ran the backs of her fingers up the inside of my arm.

“The flame, and we’re the moths.”

“You ain’t half bad,” the woman said, leaning forward and looking past Angie at me. “If my Leroy could talk that sort of sweet bullshit you talk, he’d have gotten away with a lot more than he did these last twenty years.”

Poor Leroy, I thought.

Somewhere over Pennsylvania, Angie said, “Jesus.”

My head came off her shoulder. “What?”

“The possibilities,” she said.

“What possibilities?”

“Don’t you see? If we invert everything we thought, if we look at things from the perspective of Desiree being not just a little screwed up or slightly corrupt, but a black widow, a machine of relentless self-interest—then, my God.”

I sat forward. “Run with it,” I said.

She nodded. “Okay. We know she put Price up to the robbery. Right? Right. And then she gets Jay thinking about getting that money back from Price. She plays the opposite. You know, ‘Oh, Jay, can’t we be happy without the money?’ but of course, inside, she’s thinking, ‘Take the bait, take the bait, you fool.’ And Jay does. But he can’t find the money. And then she realizes where it is. And she goes there, but she doesn’t get caught like she said. She gets the money. But now she’s got a problem.”

“Jay.”

“Exactly. She knows he’ll never stop trying to find her if she disappears. And he’s good at his job. And she has to get Price out of the way, too. She can’t just disappear. She has to get dead. So…”

“She killed Illiana Rios,” I said.

We looked at each other, my eyes as wide as hers, I’m sure.

“Shot her point-blank in the face with a shotgun,” Angie said.

“Could she have?” I said.

“Why not?”

I sat there thinking about it, letting it sink in. Why not, indeed?

“If we accept this premise,” I said, “then we’re accepting that she’s—”

“Totally without conscience or morality or empathy or anything which makes us humane.” She nodded.

“And if she is,” I said, “then she didn’t just become that way overnight. She’s
been
that way for a long time.”

“Like father, like daughter,” Angie said.

And that’s when it hit me. Like a building had fallen on me. The oxygen in my chest swirled into a vortex created by a single instant of horrifying clarity.

“What’s the best type of lie in the world?” I asked Angie.

“The type that’s mostly true.”

I nodded. “Why does Trevor want Desiree dead so badly?”

“You tell me.”

“Because he didn’t set up that murder attempt on the Tobin Bridge.”

“She did,” Angie said in a near whisper.

“Desiree killed her mother,” I said.

“And tried to kill her father.”

“No wonder he’s pissed at her,” the woman beside Angie said.

“No wonder,” I repeated.