And you’d be appreciative?
Ha. Of course. I’m always appreciative.
You know that.
Let me think about it.
Okay—and let me know if there’s anything I can do to sway you. I can be very persuasive.
I’m well aware of that.
It’s already gotten me in way too much trouble.
Katrina
FIVE DAYS BEFORE
Caffe Reggio is a New York City institution filled with lots of dark wood and antique framed photographs of Hemingway and Dorothy Parker. At nearly 6:00 p.m. on a Tuesday evening, it was also packed with cranky NYU students waiting for a table, shooting daggers at the middle-aged lady who’d been hogging a table to herself for fifteen minutes.
Aidan was late, as usual. The only real question ever washowlate he would be. Aidan ignored banal things like time, like these concerns were beneath him. Of course, once you had a child, someone needed to keep an eye on the clock—a child needed to eat at set times, go to school, have a regular bedtime. That someone had always been me. Not that it had curried any lasting favor with Cleo. And fair enough. Just because I’d been denied basic caretaking as a child, providing it for my own daughter didn’t make it some kind of prize.
Also, Cleo might have preferred a little more chaos in her childhood in exchange for a mom who was less of a drill sergeant.
Cleo had, of course, taken Aidan’s call about the two thousand dollars. According to him, talking in person over coffee about what Cleo had confided would be “more productive.” That had ulterior motive written all over it, but what choice did I have?
And so I’d been left to worry all day about Cleo, on top of grappling with my strange and unexpected grief about Doug. Itdidn’t help that I had no one to share it with. I hadn’t met Doug’s daughter or any of his friends. I knew he had two brothers, one in Chicago who was a doctor, and one in San Francisco who was a teacher. They both had families. But what was I going to do, call them and say, “I dated your brother for three weeks and I was really starting to like him and I’m sad”? Besides, what I felt was mostly loss for what Doug and I might have been someday—not what we had already become.
I couldn’t suppress a nagging tug of suspicion about his accident, though. It could have been my overactive work brain, but the timing seemed an odd coincidence given the whole college blackmail situation. Doug had decided to ignore that first text a few days ago, hoping that they—whoever they were—would go away. Not a terrible tactic. More often than not, blackmailers didn’t escalate, certainly not to some kind of, what, assassination by automobile only days later? Was that what I was thinking? Not a great strategy to kill people before they paid up, much less so quickly. But, according to Doug, they had made at least two further demands within only a couple days. And criminals didn’t always behave in ways that made sense.
I’d already done some poking around through my contacts at the NYPD. I had a Rolodex filled with connections I’d spent years cultivating with favors: free legal advice (real estate, wills, divorce), legal-assistant positions for college-aged children, firm box seats to games, and theater tickets. Among them were therapists, criminal defense attorneys, immigration and licensing officials, people who were good at breaking into places and good at keeping others from doing so. People who could be called upon at a moment’s notice to lend a hand. My contacts were loyal. And discreet. I was very attached to some of them.
“Not an accident,” Detective Larry Cross of the Bronxville Police Department had said after my old pal Gil Suffern, a lieutenant in the Central Park Precinct, of all places, had convinced him to talk to me. “That’s all we know.”
I’d felt stunned, even though that was exactly why I’d called—to confirm my suspicion that it hadn’t been an accident.
“What do you mean?” I’d asked.
Detective Cross cleared his throat. “Indicators at the scene don’t align with an accident. Looks intentional.”
“Intentional?” I asked.
“A suicide,” he said, like this should have been obvious.
The thought that Doug might have killed himself felt even more absurd than the idea of a blackmailer killing him before he’d paid up. Or was that because I didn’t want to think he would have committed suicide when I thought we were falling for each other?
After I ended the call, I’d found myself on the Advantage Consulting website, unsure of exactly what I was looking for beyond proof that I was right. The site was predictably unremarkable, the testimonials about their tutoring and application support glowing, the descriptions of their successes suitably over the top. That said, it all looked very professional and slick. It made no sense that they’d blackmail their own, very lucrative clientele.
But maybe it wasn’t peopleinthe office itself, but someone associated with the scheme who’d demanded money from Doug. That person could be an amateur, the type who went too far, too fast in applying pressure, and Doug had accidentally ended up dead.
When I called the office, I’d spoken with an assistant who said that Brian Carmichael, president and owner of Advantage Consulting, would call me back. I was still waiting. My plan was to get in there and feel around a bit. If I couldn’t grieve for Doug in a way that felt satisfying, I could at least try to get to the bottom of what happened to him.
I’d also had a client emergency crop up, which had been a helpful distraction. Ben Bleyer, the CMO of Play Up, a new, shockingly successful site dedicated to kids’ sports, had run afoul of yet another inpatient rehab, this time for trashing his very expensiveroom. I’d spent two hours on the phone with the director, convincing her to give him another chance. Play Up was about to go through Series C funding. They needed Bleyer at the meetings, and they needed him clean. He could not seem to stay sober, but he wasverygood at his job. Lucky for Play Up, so was I. Because it had been one of those exhausting situations where the director was simply a good person, trying to do the right thing for all her patients, which meant my only choice was to muster up the emotional energy to convince her not only that I—Ben’s best friend from parochial school in Kansas—was also a good person but that deep down Ben was, too. In reality, he’d seemed like a childish prick the one time I’d met him.
I scanned the sidewalk through Caffe Reggio’s front window. Aidan was now nearly forty-five minutes late. The irony, of course, was that it was Aidan’s confidence that had drawn me to him. He was ten years older than me, with a failed acting career behind him and a new, just-as-uncertain career ahead as a documentary producer when we met. And yet he’d been so self-assured. In retrospect, there had been something a little entitled about it, but Aidan was also infectiously charming, which made that easy to overlook. And what a relief it was to be with someone who moved through the world sure that everything would work out fine. Especially when he was also sure about me.
We’d actually met in a café similar to Caffe Reggio, way uptown, near Columbia. I’d been studying for law school exams when Aidan had appeared at my table.
He was very good-looking and tall, with an electrifying smile.
