Maggie Terry Page 5

  “Lucy, have you met the latest member of our team?” That was Mike, his hand warmly on Maggie’s back, trying to save her yet again. Poor guy. “Maggie Terry. She is our new in-house private detective. Maggie was my student at Columbia when she did her graduate work in criminology. One of my best teaching assistants. Eleven years at the NYPD and a loyal friend to my family. Now here with us on a permanent basis.”

  Enid squirmed.

  “Nice to meet you.” Lucy smiled, waiting for Maggie to take the lead.

  “What was the victim’s name?” Maggie picked up a pen from a pile in the middle of the table and pulled over a yellow legal pad, laid out so carefully by Sandy in preparation for such an impulse.

  “Jamie Wagner.”

  Sandy came back in with coffee, serving Lucy from the right, cup handle pointed out. Sandy once worked in a restaurant, Maggie noted. A good restaurant. And then added: Maybe she still does.

  “Do you . . . I’m sorry . . .” Lucy was so kind.

  “I’m sorry, my name is Sandy.”

  “Sandy.” Warm smile. “Sandy, do you have soy milk?”

  “No, I’m so sorry.”

  “Almond milk? Cashew? Coconut?”

  “We have two percent.”

  “I’ll have two percent.” Huge smile. “Thank you, Sandy. Thank you so very much.”

  Okay, Maggie was on instinct. Now for the order of events.

  CHAPTER SIX

  2:30 PM

  What do you do when your child is gone?

  Maggie had been worried about bonding at first. She and Frances hadn’t been together that long—okay, a few years—but it’s never enough, sometimes. Then Frances hit thirty-five and decided that she was just going to do this thing. They were already living together.

  “Better you than me,” Maggie had said.

  Later she realized that Frances had had the kid because Maggie was already so far down the rabbit hole; it was a kind of alternative. A way to assert her separateness, to put down the gauntlet so that Maggie would somehow magically get better. Or it was hostility or obliviousness. Or a solo escape plan. But the thing that bothered Maggie most of all was that Frances wasn’t aware of any of this. She thought she just wanted to have a baby. Some people don’t believe in the unconscious. The real truth was that Maggie didn’t want Frances to have a child because she was afraid of change. But that was a secret, so she half-heartedly went along with it, and parenting doesn’t work that way. And then, Maggie showed up late and blasted at the hospital and missed the actual birth, having to stare down Frances’s family, who could not believe she was drunk again. And then, Maggie looked at the little thing, Alina, fighting for some kind of place in the world already, and she . . . identified. It hit her what an opportunity this was, to help someone get started and to be there for them. To maybe do one thing right. And that little girl, her eyes wide open, big and brown, her fists pumping, determined. Maggie fell in love right then, and she wanted her. And—this is the sick part—she thought that maybe this little person would actually love her, unconditionally, and she, Maggie Terry, could finally learn what that was like. She didn’t realize it was supposed to be the other way around. How was she supposed to know that? She had never had a good parent. And neither did Frances, even though hers were at least present.

  What was a good parent? All around her, folks in the same boat had made the wrong choice. There was an arrogance in their assessments. She heard it over and over again at NA and AA. Their parents had given them nothing they needed, so they would give their child everything they never had. Which was, unfortunately, too big to give. Detectives take care of other people, that’s their social role. They come in when things have gotten out of hand and they try to reinstate a sense of order. They ask questions, and try to make people accountable. Society needs that. To get there she had to study and cohere and develop skills and be brave. She had to witness unbearable messes and pain. And she had to be systematic. She just couldn’t do this for herself. But Maggie didn’t want that moment, twenty years hence, when it was her own kid who became the parasite and couldn’t take care of herself or anyone else. She didn’t want to be responsible for producing another manipulator. That was one of her fears.

  Frances did not try to convince her. It was happening. It didn’t matter how Maggie felt. Frances was a nice person with a work ethic. She didn’t come from the rotting privileged class. In her world, women had children. And that was that. She had siblings and they all had kids. She and Maggie just had to socialize on holidays with Frances’s side of the family, and pretend that Maggie’s side didn’t exist. Sounded like a great plan, but they forgot one detail. Maggie was from her side of the family, and even if she never spoke to any of them again, that would never change.

  And Frances used all of that against her in court.

  “Did you tell your partner that you did not want to be a mother?”

  “Yes,” she said, having just barely crawled out of detox, unable to feel the floor or recognize her own shoes.

  “Did you say, ‘Better you than me’?”

  “Yes.”

  “No more questions.”

  But the real stuff was just starting to become clear now. No one had ever tried to understand the reasons. That was something Maggie struggled with in Program, not blaming other people for not asking her, not guiding her through the key questions of self-understanding. Most people have ambivalence about their children but very few admit it. Telling Frances the truth was a reach for intimacy, sharing. She didn’t think it would end up in court. Frances had said okay, and then they let it go. So many times they had skated the surface of everything that mattered, and Frances let her do it. But that was blaming her for Maggie’s own character defects, and she wasn’t supposed to do that. She was supposed to be understanding, as her caring sponsor Rachel G. would explain, substituting the word understand for the word blame.

  “Understanding why things happen is the opposite of blame,” Rachel said on the phone, in person, and over coffee, three decades sober and sponsor to the world’s worst cases. “People make mistakes and take wrong turns. Being mortal is about being vulnerable.”

  But Maggie knew that no one outside of a meeting felt that way. Everyone else walked down the street thinking of themselves as pure and clean. They had it together because they were better, and the job of people who are better is to point out the ones who are worse and punish them. All of society seemed to be organized like that. Whoever could, would punish. It was linked to opportunity. Like the judge who took away her child, who ruled no visitation. He was fine with treating her so badly, then when he went home, no matter how much pain he had caused, he was better than someone. He was better than her.

  After her mother’s self-destruction, the new wife Julie came along with a permanent martini in her left hand. Maggie might have been eight, she might have been lost, she might have been thinking about all the ways she wanted to die, the ways that other girls did not. She might have been alone and living with so much pain, too much for her small body. But there was one thing in her already-ruined short life that actually made sense, and that was drinking leftover cocktails as a way to fall asleep. First mother, then self, then Frances, then Alina, then alcohol, Xanax, heroin, cocaine, crack, Klonopin, and grass. That’s a lot of absence. Also career, income, status, the trust of others, and her dear Julio. His patient presence, side by side in that car, the station house, the deli, the park. That was her catalog of loss. And now it was all her fault. When the person who does you wrong is you, really, what else is left to go?

  Sandy returned to the conference room with two-percent milk.

  “Thank you, Sandy.” Lucy smiled and softened her eyes like it was a huge favor, one which can never be repaid.

  Having fulfilled her mission, Sandy was now trustworthy enough that Lucy Horne continued to talk openly in front of her. She was a good servant, after all, loyal, meaningless, amnesiac, and invisible.

  “I told the police officer
nothing, of course,” Lucy assured the room. She knew her way around the corner and would never be a liability. After all, Lucy had handled things the people in that room could never imagine and had no way to consider.

  “I see.” Michael made notes.

  “I didn’t lie.”

  “Of course.” He made more notes.

  “I am about to do a Disney musical. You know what they’re like.” She whispered now, not to be overheard by the gods, the kings, the people who had the power to make her afraid. “They won’t tolerate any scandals.” She was trembling. “I’m older now. If I want to keep working at a level that is . . . appropriate, if I want to have a meaningful life, I have to be very, very clean. No whispers. No outrages. And no scandals.” There was a silence around the table, and everyone realized that for the first time that afternoon, Lucy Horne was actually being genuine. “It could all be all over. Like that.” Snap! And then, she regained her dignity. “It is raining outside, but it cannot rain inside. You understand.”

  “McMaster!”

  That was Sandy, still blotting up the coffee she had sloshed over Enid’s cup.

  “Absolutely.” Lucy beamed. But she was irritated. “John McMaster. I did his Tulips in the Summer Months at the Taper, in LA.”

  “I love his work,” Sandy said. And then she had the misfortune to recite. “It is raining outside, but it cannot rain inside, Father. You understand, don’t you?”

  Okay, so Sandy reads plays, Maggie noted. She surely can’t afford to go see them. But even more interesting was what the receptionist had revealed about Lucy. She used lines from plays as part of everyday banter. In other words, there was always a script.

  Sandy blushed and exited the room to resume her role as someone nobody wanted to notice.

  Michael backed up his wheelchair and repositioned it at the table, in the manner of an able-bodied man crossing his legs to indicate a shift, or the necessity of one, in attention. “Lucy, we are your legal team. Everyone here is under confidentiality, and this conversation is entirely protected.”

  “I understand.”

  “Lucy.” He was kind now. His strength, now. Understanding, given everything. “Do you know anything about this young girl’s murder?”

  Lucy smiled to herself on purpose. This meant that she would either dismiss the implication as absurd, or . . . “I know who did it.”

  Just then Sandy reentered with a fresh napkin for Enid and a plate of cookies that only Craig would eat. She placed a cup next to Maggie’s yellow pad and whispered in Maggie’s ear, “I brought you a mint tea.”

  How did she know? Maggie scanned her own range of misbehaviors over the day and landed right on her moment of entry when she had placed her takeout deli cup, already half on her blouse, on Sandy’s desk and rudely left it there in the hubbub of ambivalent welcome. Sandy had had to throw it in the wastebasket, to clean up after her. On her first day. Was this mint tea an act of intimidation or care?

  “Who?” Michael’s voice was soft. He had bedside manner. “Who is the killer?”

  “That young girl confided in me.” Lucy shuddered and looked to the window, where, in an off-Broadway play, there would have been a crack of lightning, and at Lincoln Center, a full downpour. She wrapped her arms around her torso in a way that accentuated her breasts and then released them in an act of resignation. “She was being stalked.”

  Stalked. That word again. Maggie wrote it on her pad in quotation marks. It was one of those words that made everyone stop and defer, defying normal questioning, which then became its own act of aggression. It was a game changer.

  “That was the word she used. Stalked.”

  “By who?” Michael knew his lines.

  “A fan?” Enid asked.

  “A fan? Jamie Wagner had not accrued any fans, poor thing. She played the serving girl. Brought in the coffee. Brought it out.”

  Maggie felt that somehow Sandy was being implicated. She looked around the table, but no one else seemed to notice.

  “No,” Lucy answered plainly. “It was an ex-boyfriend.”

  Everyone nodded. This was universally understood: ex-boyfriends stalk. Police officers, Irish lawyers, disabled shooting victims, divorcées, black IT geniuses, serving girls, actresses, receptionists, and drug addicts all accepted this reality of modern life. It was a fact in the same way that mothers’ boyfriends molest, handymen expose themselves in school basements, priests are predators. Anyone who watched TV knew these incontrovertible facts. Ex-boyfriends always had a lot of explaining to do.

  “The most important thing—” Lucy faltered, realizing that what she was about to ask for was in fact not the most important thing. “What I mean is . . . can you keep me out of this? Can you find the killer and make this all go away?”

  “Of course.” That was Michael, promising whatever needed to be promised.

  “I hope we can bring this to a close before Disney and I start rehearsal.”

  “What’s the show?” Michael, always on cue.

  “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. I play the Indian queen who starts out as a curiosity but ends up winning Bill’s heart, and in this way civilizes him. A more progressive reversal on the old cliché that asks who really is the primitive.”

  Maggie noticed Craig googling with such intensity that he should have been gasping for breath. Was he the kind of black man to say something about a white matron playing an Indian woman? She guessed not. Not after the reprimand from Mike for objecting to killer-cop Eddie Figueroa getting off scot-free. Maybe at home with his family he would riff on the ofays and their blond-haired Native American princesses, but Maggie would put money on his silence here.

  She looked at him.

  He stared at his device.

  “Lucy,” Enid asked, prepared to wrap this all up by the beginning of the first read through of Buffalo Bill, and anything else the famous actress and her corporate megapolis would want. “Do you know his name?”

  “Steven Brinkley.”

  Craig searched.

  “That sounds familiar.” Enid scratched it out on her pad.

  “Got it!” Now Craig could channel all his exasperation and put-uponedness into something acceptable and that got the job done. “National Book Award–winning author of The Mere Future.”

  Triumphant, he held out his coffee cup for Sandy to refill. She jumped up and reached for the pot, but it was empty. Another failure. She scrambled out to make more while Craig turned his cup over in its saucer.

  “My memory isn’t what it used to be. I just read that with my book club.” Enid, ever the participant, reached into her purse, pulled out her Kindle, and waved it around, shaking her head at her own disappearing mind.

  Maggie, always alert to potential tools of deception, noted that one could claim anything about a Kindle. It was like the cooking shows permanently playing on the community television in rehab. The only program she could actually stand was Chopped, a competition featuring real people, many of whom were fat or gay or brown or immigrants or some combination thereof, the kinds of people who fill the world but are only seen on television if they were accused of crimes or leading nations. They had to cook meals for “celebrity” chef judges she had never heard of out of absurd ingredient combinations like bubble gum, pig intestines, eggplant, and fish sauce. The judges would taste gingerly, and then declare how briny, soggy, light, or undercooked the concoctions were, and praise the cooks for heat, texture, and blended flavor that spectators could never experience. Maggie always thought the judges were lying. They didn’t really eat that slop. There was no way for viewers to know what was truly on that plate, and how it actually tasted. They had to trust. Same with Enid’s Kindle. It could have contained bondage porn or be broken, and the observer would never know. Perhaps she’d purchased it with the best of intentions but couldn’t actually figure out how it worked, and carried around the empty thing looking to snag a brawny husband number three with her need for assistance; perhaps it was her mantrap.

  “A
full search of Jamie Wagner,” Craig reported, “reveals that aside from her murder, and an appearance on Law and Order, there is almost nothing of note. She was in a production of George Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man at the Berkshire Theatre Festival. That’s about it.”

  “So what does that tell us?” Mike finally drank his now cold coffee.

  “Well, what I want to know,” Craig teased, genuinely smiling for the first time, thereby revealing that he was only happy when he knew something no one else had ever considered. “Why would a famous, successful man be dating an unknown actress? Steven Brinkley has five hundred thousand hits.”

  “Ah, men.” Enid sighed.

  Ignoring her undermining of his moment of glory, Craig showed his phone to the room. They passed around a photograph of a fairly average intellectual, white someone who did something right and was treated fairly. Brinkley looked healthy in a way that could translate to “good-looking” but might only have reflected that he was rested, had had a few facials in his lifetime, was an appropriate weight, and had gotten some sun.

  “That is the killer,” Lucy said, a bit less than aghast.

  “Did you meet him?” Mike asked. “When he picked Jamie up from the theater?”

  “I wouldn’t know. A minor player’s boyfriend is not someone who I would spend time with, it doesn’t work that way. After the show I am swarmed with fans asking for autographs and then a car takes me home.”

  “Okay, then.” Mike looked at his watch. He had a personal training session coming up at Equinox. “Craig, it’s your case.”