Boston Noir (3 page)

And then she'd heard the vacuum cleaner, and the vacuum cleaner only ran on her floor after 7 o'clock in the evening. She'd come out of her office to find the entire floor abandoned except for the summer intern--Hailey? Hallie?--huddled over the printer. She'd moved toward Trevor's office, slowing down as she went, not knowing if she was more afraid to find him there or gone. He was there, all right. Impossible to miss. Blustery blowhard Trevor holding forth. The voice on the other side of the conversation hadn't been as loud, but she had recognized it. Trevor and Beck talking, voices brimming with excitement and manly good cheer. The tone had been clear, but the words were covered by the sound of the approaching vacuum. She'd thought they might be talking golf.

Her phone is singing again. She reaches for the earpiece and finds nothing but ear. Can't remember taking the thing off. She follows the Bach and finds her cell on the conference table.

"Hello?"

"How you doing, kid?"

"Fine."

"How's Beck?"

"Same."

"I have to ask you to stop hanging up on me. The bosses are getting sick of this thing. You've got bosses. You know what I'm sayin', right?"

He's skipping over the fact that her boss is a corpse in a $6,000 Brioni suit and a TAG Heuer watch and that she's the one who made him that way. He's acting as if she could surrender to him and then go home tonight, eat a banana for dinner, maybe walk over to Emack & Bolio's for a scoop of fat-free vanilla yogurt in a cup. Make it last for an hour while she sits and watches the cool kids on Newbury Street smoking and laughing and texting. Then she could come in to work tomorrow, maybe wearing the dark blue Tahari, and show up at the morning meeting as if nothing had happened. Of course, Beck would be the new MD on the growth team, or maybe they would just slot him into Trevor's job as CIO and promote some other strapping young boy from a fine business school to MD. Pick any of them--Justin, Peter, Shamir. She'd still be a senior portfolio manager. She would always be a senior portfolio manager, which was why she'd had no choice but to take the .22 out of her bag and shoot Trevor through the head.

"I have to ask you this to make sure," Jimmy says. "Don't get upset, but your father keeps calling from New York. Are you sure you don't want to talk to him?"

She knows why Daddy is calling and she knows why Mother isn't. Mother is lying perfectly still in some dark room with a damp cloth on her forehead and a few dozen milligrams of Percocet coursing through her veins. Daddy would be more worried than upset. Worried about his cash flow. "Doesn't matter what they call you," he always tells her, usually in front of her MD brothers, "as long as the bonuses keep rolling in." Bo, James, and Danny were too smart or too selfish or both to keep investing in his hedge fund, which really meant tithing over some growing percentage of her annual bonus and calling it an investment so that Mother wouldn't be humiliated by another of Daddy's busted ventures. Eventually, Daddy had stopped asking her brothers for money. "They're married," he'd told her. "They have families of their own to feed."

Sloan's legs feel like dead weights, so heavy. She walks to the couch and crashes down. "I don't want to talk to him, and if you make me, I swear I will hang up and you will never hear from me again."

"I can't make you do anything, remember? You're in charge. We're doing things your way."

"Then stop asking. Tell him to stop calling."

"Consider it done. Is there anyone you want to talk to? Who's this Rowan?"

She smiles, envisioning Officer Jimmy thumbing quickly through a stack of background information on her that someone has dumped in his lap. "My horse."

"Your horse?" There is shuffling and mumbling. "Okay, I see it here now. Holy smokes, he's a beauty. Is he at your horse farm?" More shuffling. "Where is this Millbrook anyway?"

"New York."

"New York is a big state and I'm sitting here without my Google."

That's a lie. He's probably sitting there with every possible source of data at his disposal, but she doesn't mind playing along with Officer Jimmy. "It's in the eastern part of the state, close to the Connecticut border."

"How long's it take you to get out there?"

"Three and a half hours."

"You just go 90 west?"

"To Route 22."

"Yeah, I have no idea where that is."

"If you keep going on 22 you get to Poughkeepsie."

"If you say so. How often do you get out there?"

"Every weekend."

"Wow. You must really like the place."

There isn't a word strong enough to describe how she feels out there. Millbrook is her escape. She makes the drive every Friday after work, rain or shine, happy or sad. She stays through Sunday night and drives straight to work on Monday. There is space out there. There is grass and air that smells nice. In the winter there is clean snow that stretches on forever.

And Rowan.

She closes her eyes and conjures him. She smells his barn and feels him moving under her hands as she curries his withers. The grooms always put him on the crossties to clean him, but not Sloan. She scratches all his favorite places and smiles when he curls his neck around to give her a playful nudge every time she finds another with the hard bristles. Then she rides him and feels his calm and coiled anticipation as he gathers himself for a jump, then the explosion, the thrust high into the air and that feeling of flying, just Rowan and her, her face so close that his mane brushes her cheek.

She pushes at the tears with the back of her hand and gets to her feet. "I'm turning off the lights. It's too hot in here. I'm also putting up one of the blinds, just so you know."

"Just so
you
know, I don't control the snipers. I'm not the one in charge of the scene."

"I don't even have the gun. It's on Trevor's standing desk." She looks around for her earpiece so she can have both hands free, hopes the battery hasn't run down.

"What the hell is a standing desk?"

"All the CIOs have them. It's a power thing."

"What's a CIO?"

"Chief Investment Officer." She finds the earpiece on the floor near Beck's chair and switches the call over. "But Trevor didn't want one like everyone else, so he...actually, he had his assistant Nicole do all the research and she found this mahogany antique that was used by Charles Dickens. It cost the firm over $100,000 to have it restored and shipped from London."

"A hundred grand? Jeez, that would have covered both my kids' college tuition."

The light switch is by the door. This time as she passes Trevor, she reaches down and tips the chair off of him, setting it back on its feet. She flips the lights off and feels instantly better, cooler. She rolls up one of the fancy shades and then, what the hell, does them all. She opens all the windows of the corner office to the nighttime view. It is magnificent, even at 2 o'clock in the morning. She feels as if she's floating out over the harbor, just another of the lights moving across the water. They must be ships, those lights, and she wonders what life would be like living on a moving vessel. Logan has airport lights: red ones, green ones, bright beacons, flashing fast and slow. The runway lights look like jeweled bracelets laid out on a black velvet pillow.

The glass window feels cool, so she presses her cheek against it, the side without the earpiece. "Will the snipers shoot me?"

"Why would they shoot you while we're still talkin'? And so long as you're leaving Beck alone? How is Beck? Does he need any water?"

"Do you care what happens to me?"

"I've spent all night talkin' to you. What do you think?"

"I think you care about what happens to Beck."

"I do. And I care about what happens to you. That's no bullshit. I want you to walk out of there."

Trevor's body is hard to see in the dark, but she knows it's there. "Why would you care? Why would anyone care? I'm a murderer." She's been trying all night to feel the weight of that word and how to wear it. Mostly she feels how Mother will wear it.

"Listen, kid, I deal with all kinds in this job. I can tell the wackos and I can tell the ones that just got pushed too far. You get pushed around and pushed around until you can't do it anymore and then something happens. It's just a wrong-place-wrong-time-bad-chain-of-events kind of a deal, and if one thing had gone different yesterday, maybe none of this happens. Am I right?"

The sky is another sight to behold. The moon lights the clouds from behind, making them seem transparent and solid at the same time as they rush through space.

"What are the names of the islands, Jimmy?"

"What islands?"

"Isn't there something out there called the Harbor Islands?" She's seen them a thousand times from Trevor's office.

"Sure, but there's somethin' like forty"--
fawty
--"of 'em out there. You never went to any of them?"

"I never did. Tell me some of the names."

"Long Island, Sheep Island...There's a little one called Grape. I went swimming once with my brothers at Spectacle. It used to have great beaches, but then the city used it for dumping all the Big Dig dirt, so I don't know what it's like now. Deer Island is where they have the shit plant."

"Excuse me?"

"Sewage plant. One of the Brewsters has the oldest lighthouse ever. Georges Island has a Civil War fort. I went to both of those on school field trips when I was a kid. There's a Sarah's Island. I always remember it because that was my ma's name."

"Where are you from?"

"Haverhill."

"Where are you right now?"

"I can't tell you that."

She scans the building at State Street and Congress, the only one tall enough for him to be looking down at her. But it's a huge black mirrored tower that reveals nothing. "Can I see you?"

"I'll spend all the time in the world with you, but you gotta let Beck come out of there. And you need to come out too. What you have to keep in mind is that you're still young and you deserve to come out of there in one piece. You need to give yourself that chance."

Another requirement. Another trade-off. Another contingent offer. She slides down the window and sits with her back to the north, looking out over the water. "Was it supposed to rain today, Jimmy?"

"If it was supposed to, it never did."

"It just struck me as so odd that he was wearing a raincoat because I hadn't heard anything about rain today and the whole time we were having our meeting he never took it off."

"Trevor?"

"I was standing outside his office listening to him talking to Beck. And then Beck came out and I wanted to go in. I assumed it was my turn, that he was just running late with his meetings. I didn't want to look too eager, so I went to my office and packed my things and came back."

"Make it look all casual, huh? Like you were just leaving and stopped by."

"I was standing there trying to get up the courage to walk in, then he walked out and nearly ran me over. He wasn't happy to see me, I could tell, but he wouldn't show it. You know what he said? '
Bril
liant!' As if it was a stroke of grand good luck that I was standing right there. 'Of course I'm still here, you bastard. You told me yesterday not to leave today without seeing you because you would have good news for me, which is why I spent the entire day locked in my office afraid to go to the bathroom, because I was waiting for you to call me, you pompous, self-centered ass.'"

"You said that to him?" Officer Jimmy's voice holds a hint of respect, and for a moment Sloan feels as if they really are buddies in a foxhole. But she hadn't actually said any of those things to Trevor.

"We came into the office and he stood behind his desk."

"His hundred-thousand-dollar standing desk?"

"I've never seen him use that. No, he stood behind his sitting desk, but he didn't sit and I could tell he didn't want me to sit, but I did anyway. Then he opened his desk drawer and without looking reached in and took out an envelope, and I tried as hard as I could to come up with a good reason why my bonus check was the only one left in the drawer, and why it was after 7 o'clock and the only reason he was talking to me at all was because I'd caught him trying to slip out, and why if it was good news he hadn't already given it to me."

"I hear you."

"When he pushed the envelope across the desk, he gave me one of his looks where he cocks up an eyebrow. 'I think you'll be very pleased with that.'" She tries to capture not just his accent, but his condescending tone. "I just sat there with this pain in my stomach and a horrible sensation running up and down my back and I thought...I really thought I was just going to die sitting right there waiting for him to tell me."

"You sound like you were in shock."

"But he just stood there, still in his raincoat, doing one of those things where you glance at your watch without wanting someone to see that you're doing it."

"Prick."

"Then he said, 'Aren't you going to open it?' and I said, 'I didn't get it, did I? I didn't get MD.' He looked at me and I could see what he was thinking right on his face.
You bitch. You ungrateful little cunt
. I know that's what he was thinking because I've heard him say that word before and he wasn't even trying to hide it, how much he hated me. How much he loathed me for not letting him go home or to the cigar bar or...wherever. That's when I knew."

"What did you know?"

"That I was never going to get MD."

Sloan pushes herself up from the floor, but falls back against the window. Her skirt comes all the way up her thighs as she tries to find her balance. No food for almost two days. No water since early afternoon. The heat. It's all starting to catch up with her and she'll pass out soon. She finally makes it to her feet.

"No matter how good I was, no matter how much money I made for them, they were going to keep telling me I was
this close
and to hang in there and that next year would be my year. And then next year would come around and they'd promote someone like Beck because they like Beck and they can talk about golf with him."