Start Reading #8
I move the photographs around. My dad and his old dogs—two of them dead, one in a coma. This stunning woman whom I think I know somehow, from long ago. The drug dealer of my youth.
“I guess I don’t understand what this has to do with my father.”
“I don’t either,” he says as we pass the photos back and forth.
We’re both looking at them the way investigators do, hoping for the thing we didn’t see at first glance.
“But last month, someone killed Borys Shevchenko. It was an organized hit, clean and swift, no evidence, no leads. Someone shot him in his car outside the Blue Room.”
Crime scene photographs now. But I don’t look at the body slumped in a big SUV, blood on the windshield, shattered glass on the ground.
I look at Roxanne, wailing in the arms of an older man, who’s also crying.
Her face, a mask of horror. Her pain—I feel it—visceral and personal.
Yes, that’s what I saw in the elevator photo.
A kind of enraged grief. Something taken from you that you can’t get back, no matter how loud you scream.
So why bother screaming? You might see that same expression on my face, if you were looking closely enough, there beneath the layers of practiced calm.
Finally, I look away. Fatigue is a cloak around my shoulders. I could wrap myself up in it and sleep for days.
“So what’s your theory?” I ask.
The detective takes a surprisingly dainty sip of tea, offers a sigh.
“To be honest, I don’t have one. The hit was clean and tight.
Naturally there are no security cameras in the parking lot of the Blue Room, and it’s isolated.
Borys Shevchenko had no shortage of enemies.
Really could have been anyone from within his organization or without. ”
I shift out the picture of my dad and his friends. “What about them? What did Roxanne have going on with my father?”
“You tell me.”
“I wish I knew.”
There are things I could share with the detective.
I have evidence that might help him—the cigarette butt with lipstick, my father’s phone sending a signal from a house in the woods, the one pictured here with Roxanne and Borys out front.
There’s the hidden room with the gun case, a filing cabinet, a safe.
I’m guessing whatever connects my father to Roxanne Shevchenko, it’s down there.
But I’m not inclined to share just yet.
Honestly, I should just turn it all over to this guy, take the money, and run, as Lenny suggested. Go home—work on my marriage, track my daughter on LifeWatch at night, make sure she gets back to the dorm. Maybe try to drop ten pounds.
Ah, but I can’t. That fire to know, to understand, it’s burning white hot. It’s nearly a physical ache. This might be the closest I’ll ever get to knowing my father, now, after he’s gone.
“I wish I could be of more help,” I say honestly. Well, sort of honestly.
He’s watching me, and I can tell he knows I’m hiding something.
“Where were you tonight?”
“Out for a drive. Walls closing in on me here. You know what they say—you can’t go home again.”
“Where’d you drive?”
“Around. Aimless.”
“All night?”
I shrug and earn another nod, a slight smile. He rises and puts his cup in the sink, runs the water, rinses it out. Considerate.
“Do you have any theories about your father?” he asks.
My dad. He was obviously up to something. Business he conducted in a secret room in his basement. All that money. Maybe not from day-trading? There was a woman. His friends have been poisoned—one dead, one in a coma. If I had to guess, my dad went freelance. Maybe not as a photographer.
“I don’t,” I say. “As I mentioned, we were estranged.”
“Not curious?”
Oh, I’m very curious. We lock eyes, and there’s a knowing between us. “I can’t help you, Detective. I’m sorry.”
He comes back over to the table and puts his card down. “Call me when you’re ready to talk. In the meantime, stick around?”
I don’t answer. He can’t make me “stick around,” as we both know. But I’m not going anywhere, and maybe I will call him.
After he leaves, I call Lenny. I don’t worry about the hour. Lenny never sleeps. I tell him everything.
“My initial assessment remains. You didn’t know your father. You should take the money and go.”
I stay silent.
“Which you’re obviously not going to do. Because when’s the last time you took good advice?”
I search my memory and can’t come up with a single time.
“So think,” he says. “Borys Shevchenko was killed. A hit. Your father has a case of guns in his basement, a boatload of money that he didn’t make as a photographer for the FBI or as a bird-watcher. Don’t make me trot out one of the razors.”
“My father was a . . . hit man?”
Silence from Lenny.
“No,” I say.
“Why not?”
“Because. No.”
“The good news is that it’s not your business. Who he was—what he was. It’s over now. And you can walk away.”
“What about Roxanne? I think I knew her once. When we were kids.”
“The angry widow. The one who answered your father’s phone and lured you out to her property. Trust me. No good will come of you trying to get close to that. She wants something from you. Maybe she doesn’t even know what.”
The silence between us expands. He issues a cough that sounds like a bark.
Then he says, “Walk away, Rae.”
“Yeah, maybe,” I lie.
“And in the meantime, don’t eat any mushroom soup.”
After I hang up with Lenny, I crack that frosty cold bottle of vodka.
I tear the place apart, rifling through drawers and files, old picture albums, pulling boxes down from the high shelf in the closet.
All the while drinking. I cast about for the safe code, any scribble of numbers.
I flip through books on his shelves. Downstairs I look under his bed, through all the cabinets in his bathroom and the kitchen.
There’s nothing. How could there be so much nothing?
Down to the basement room. The blinking red light on the camera has gone dark. What does that mean? I think about Roxanne, those bonfire nights partying out in the woods. Was she there? Who was she then? Now? Her mask of grief. Her radiating rage.
Was my father a hit man?
I’m sorry. Maybe I didn’t know him the way I should. But I know this. He wasn’t a hired gun.
The file cabinet is locked tight. If I try the safe code again, I’m worried I’ll get locked out for good. So I give up on both, though it’s probably all in there.
I spend some time looking at the guns in the case. It’s a sweet collection, each piece lovingly cleaned and buffed. Finally, I go back upstairs. When I leave here, I’m definitely taking some of those guns.
Frustrated, exhausted, I lie on the couch in the dark, alternating between watching my father’s phone blip on his laptop and watching Amelia flit around New York City before finally arriving back at her dorm.
I keep drinking. The television is on, but the sound is off.
Law she laughs at me in the woods, tells me I’m a spoiled little girl who has no idea what the world is really like.
I wake up with a start, angry crying. It takes a second, lying in the flickering glow of the television, but I realize almost immediately that there’s someone in the house.
Then, that telltale creak on the basement stairs, the one that always alerted us that my parents were coming down.
I lie still, remembering that my gun is disassembled on the counter. My head pounds, heart pulsing. I sit up quietly, peer over the back of the couch. I’m vaguely nauseated. Still pretty rocked, actually. Not much of a drinker these days.
The door to the basement is open; a buttery rectangle of light shines on the floor.
The steps creak more, and then there’s silence.
A moment later, the beep-beep-beep from the coded door.
I move fast, grab and assemble my weapon, and then head downstairs, careful to avoid the noisy spots on the steps.
Lights on, doors open. Not someone interested in stealth.
I peer carefully through the open door.
For a second, I think it’s him. A shock of white hair, skin wrinkled and pale, a hospital gown under a raincoat. What? My heart lurches with relief, with a love I hadn’t known I felt.
And then I realize, obviously, it’s not him. It’s the man from the photograph; I grapple for his name. Buster. He’s crouched in front of the safe.
I move into the doorway with my gun drawn, wait for his situational awareness to kick in. I’m assuming he’s unarmed, given his attire, but you can never be too sure. I keep my eyes on his hands.
The safe door swings open. Then he freezes, sensing my presence, maybe, or catching me in his peripheral vision.
Then he says, “You must be Rae. I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“Can I help?”
“You can put that gun down.”
“You’re trespassing.”
He comes to stand, arms lifted, wobbles a little. Then he sinks into the chair behind my father’s desk. He really looks awful—pasty, sweating—and I think I should probably call 911. I can smell him from here, something antiseptic.
“I thought you were in a coma.”
He nods, puts his head in his hand. “I was, until just a few hours ago. Apparently, I’m hard to kill.”
Most of these old fuckers are. They really do cling to life, to their old ideas, their ways.
“What was so important that you’d come here in the middle of the night still in your hospital gown, having just awoken from a coma?”
He nods toward the safe. I hesitate a second, assess him again for threat level. None that I can see. Then I walk over, gun still drawn, to take a look. It’s stuffed with cash. Tidy stacks fill every shelf. I can’t even hazard a guess at how much is there. A lot.
His breath is raspy, his slouch deepening. He’s sweating copiously now, face a terrible gray.
“Hey, Buster,” I say, offering a hand. “Let’s get you back to the hospital, okay?”