Burning Blue (17 page)

Cherry dropped me off at the gate to Nicole’s community, or “the village,” as she liked to say. “I’ll call you when my dad gets that info,” she said.

“I don’t know how to thank you.”

“I do.” She waved as she left. I wasn’t exactly sure how, but she reminded me of me. In spite of that, I liked her.

The gate guard phoned the Castros, and another guard drove me to the house. Nicole’s neighborhood was too quiet. The house was big and old. Placard out front: “Historical Landmark, Est. 1844.” The doorknocker was this huge Siberian tiger head, something out of
Anna Karenina,
a book I never read but told everybody I did to sound smart. I felt like I should have been wearing a top hat and cape as I rang the bell.

Mrs. Castro was happy to see me. She said Nicole was out with her dad, but she was supposed to be back soon. “I just made pizza, super-healthy, whole wheat crust, no cheese, just vegetables.”

“Sounds amazing.”
Blehk.

She led me through this enormous house toward the kitchen. The rug tassels had been combed. Even the fire burned neatly, three perfect plumes. “That real?”

“Of course not.”

They needed a golden retriever, and they would have nailed the center spread in
Better Homes and Gardens
. “No dog?”

She made a face and tapped her nose. “Nicole’s allergies.”

She served me this huge slice of vegetable pizza. Alfalfa sprouts on pizza should be a capital crime. “Best I ever had,” I said.

“Do you think you could get your father to sign my copy of his book?”

“No problem.”

She scanned a bookshelf built into the kitchen wall, all art books. She hit the intercom. “Sylvia?”

“What?”
Definitely not pleased. Brief snippet of talent show TV in the background, the final round, crowd roaring.

“Did you see my book, the old one, Steven Nazzaro,
After Beauty
?”

“It’s in your studio, on that small table by the easel.”
She huffed,
“I’ll get it.”

“No, darling, I’ll get it.”

“I’ll
get it, I said.”

Mrs. Castro slumped back in her chair and closed her eyes. “I thought having an only child was the way to do it, you know? Shower her with happiness. But they still get ruined, no matter your watchfulness, your worry, your singular devotion. Ruin. It’s just what comes. People see beauty, and they have to destroy it.” Her blouse was light pink, and tears splattered darkly. She could have been shot twice in the chest. She wiped her eyes and collected herself. “I’m so sorry. Don’t listen to me. Eat your pizza, Jay. Please.” She went to the refrigerator. “They were supposed to be back by now. ‘Just a quick ride,’ he said.” She poured me a glass of milk. “Jay, what are you not telling me?”

I told her about the black Civic and gave her the plate number. I didn’t have to tell her the plates were stolen. Detective Barrone would find that out fast enough.

“They said it wouldn’t happen again, the police,” Mrs. Castro said. “And that godawful Schmidt.” She grabbed the phone. She lit a cigarette while she waited for the call to go through. Her hands shook. “He’s not picking up. They turn their phones off when they’re with each other, because they think they don’t spend enough time together.
Now
he wants to spend all this time with her.” She was talking to herself. I heard the beep. “Rafael, I need you to bring Nicole home.
Immediately
.” She clicked the phone off and then on. I watched her key in the numbers, Barrone’s.

Sylvia came in.

“Hi,” I said.

Sylvia nodded Mrs. Castro’s way. “Now you got her all upset. When she’s upset, she’s not happy until she makes
me
upset.” She dropped my father’s book onto the table. It was a wreck, thumbed and gripped to the point the cover was coming off.

The security company put a car on the Castros’ house. Nicole and I hung out in the kitchen. Her parents were having a low-voices fight upstairs. Sylvia was stabbing a bunch of yarn into something that resembled a sweater in the living room, with a direct line of sight to me. She nailed me with eyes that said if I so much as tried to hold Nicole’s hand, she was going to run a knitting needle through the back of my head. Nicole was eyeing me too. “Are you hacking me?”

“No. No, I’m not, and I won’t.”

“Promise.”

“Promise.”

Her mother was really yelling now. “I want to go up there,” Nicole said. “I want to make them just shut up and look at each other and remember what it was like back when I was little, when they were young, and they were always holding hands. I used to swing from the bridge. You know, the bridge their hands made?”

Her father came downstairs, heavy footsteps. “Nicole, time to change that bandage.”

“Dad—”

“Now, sweetheart. Your mother’s waiting for you.” He eyed me with a frown. “I’ll drive you home.”

“Thanks, but I have my skateboard.”

“That wasn’t a question.” He was about three inches shorter than I was, weighed less too, but I had no doubt he could tune me up. His eyes were just scary. Blue like Nicole’s, but cold.

The interior of Mr. Castro’s BMW was immaculate. He drove right at the speed limit. “I know your father,” he said. “Rather, I met him. But you knew that.”

“Yessir.”

“My wife was never great at keeping secrets. Bit of a hothead, your father, if you don’t mind my saying. How is it for you, living with a critic?”

“Terrific,” I said.

“You smoke?” Maybe it wasn’t a question. “I smell it on you.”

“I think that was Mrs. Castro.”

“She was smoking in the house? Just what Nicole needs, cancer in the air.” We’d come to a light. “Look, we’re both men here. We know that when women are vulnerable,
some
men will try to take advantage. Now, I know you’re not one of those types of fellows.”

“No, I’m not.”

“That’s fine. Good. Because I think my little girl has gone through quite enough these past few weeks, ey?”

The light had turned green. The guy behind us honked, but Mr. Castro stayed put. He kept giving me those mean eyes, sharp green now in the reflection of the traffic light.

“Mr. Castro? I’m not out to hurt your daughter. I’m simply trying to be her friend.”

He nodded and drove. “She likes you a lot. She doesn’t know you, but she thinks she does. And isn’t it always that way, for all of us? But you can’t, son. Right?”

“Can’t what?”

“Ever really know anybody. Not even yourself. Do you agree? Don’t be afraid to disagree with me.”

“I’d like to think that’s not true.”

“Indeed. We all want to think that way. But the sooner you confront reality, the sooner you’ll be able to move on.
Forward
. We must keep moving forward.”

I wanted to get out of that car so bad. “I’m over there, next right onto Valedale. I can get out at the corner.”

He kept driving, right into the lot.

“I can get out here, sir, or just by the mailbox there would be great.”

He drove me all the way up to the lobby. The takeout containers were still there, but the rats had licked them clean. Mr. Castro frowned. “Is he home?”

“My father? Why?”

“Not that I think anybody would be foolish enough to try anything with you, but I promised Nicole and her mother I wouldn’t leave you alone.”

“He’ll be home soon.” Okay, so in this case soon meant two days, but I would have said anything to get out of that car.

He gave me a hard nod and wink. “Thank you.”

“Sir?”

“For the information about that car. For being alert enough to get the license plate. That was well done.”

“No problem.” I tried the door but it was locked with the child-proof safety.

“You were looking out for my daughter. You have my gratitude.” He shook my hand. I thought he was going to break it. “You need a haircut.

“Yessir, I’ll get right on that.”

“Do.” He pulled his hand away quickly and the automatic locks clunked up. I got out, and the BMW zipped out of the lot. On my way in, I picked up the takeout trash and chucked it into the Dumpster.

The Castros had private security, but in my building we didn’t even have security cameras. That woman in the Civic knew where I lived. Now I was the one peeking around corners. I went through the apartment room by room, closet by closet, wondering just what I would do if I found somebody in there. I plugged in my phone for a recharge, and two texts from Angela popped up. The first told me what I already knew, that the license plates on the black Civic backtracked to a red RAV4. The second let me scratch Chrissie Vratos from my suspect list. Angela was able to confirm that Chrissie was at her dentist’s when Nicole was hit. She’d filed a note from her mother with the attendance office, requesting that Chrissie be allowed to leave school early that day for a root canal, but records at the dentist’s office showed Chrissie had come in to get her teeth whitened. All of my female suspects had been crossed off the list, except one: Nicole. I was desperate for any information that would rule her out as somebody somehow involved in the attack.

On the kitchen counter the clunky old landline message machine blinked. I hit
PLAY
, expecting to hear my father’s voice and an apology for being bombed when he called in the night before. The caller was Detective Jessica Barrone:
“This is a message for Steven Nazzaro. Steve, I’ve left word for you twice now. I’d appreciate a call back.”

After my ride with Mr. Castro, I had to face the possibility that my father was somehow involved in this thing—inadvertently, not as the acid thrower, of course, but maybe as an unwitting causal agent. Whatever had gone down between Mr. Castro and him must have been pretty bad to keep Mr. Castro mad so many years later.

I wormed into my father’s email. He’d gotten a warning from E-ZPass about approaching a tollbooth too quickly, seventy miles south of Brandywine, down I-95, at an exit called Marathon. I didn’t know anything about the place, except that it wasn’t near Philadelphia, where he was supposed to be. I clicked up some history on the area, heavily industrial, at least until the economy tanked. Now it was a wasteland of abandoned factories. He’d gotten off the highway at 21:36 last night, and then back on at 23:19. What was he doing down in no-man’s-land for an hour and forty-three minutes?

I burned through New Jersey Traffic’s firewall, back-doored my way into the E-ZPass database and scrolled through his E-ZPass statements. Two months earlier, he’d done the same thing on his way to a show in DC, exiting the highway at Marathon. That time he was MIA for a little less than two hours.

Girlfriend? He’d dated exactly two women after my mother died, maybe five or six dates total, and he’d never tried to hide them from me.

This was not the big break in information I was hoping for.

My bedroom doorknob twisted. The lock was broken, but I’d wedged a chair under the handle. I grabbed my baseball bat.

“Let me in. Jay, open
up
.” My father.

I slapped down my laptop screen and cleared the chair from the door. “I thought you weren’t due back till this weekend?”

“Your assistant principal called.”

“Dad, seriously, Kerns totally started it.”

“We’ll get to that later. Why were you blocking the door?”

I told him about the black Civic.

He rolled his eyes. “People are down there hanging out all the time, smoking drugs, fooling around, whatever else. They
sleep
in their cars.”

“In their
trucks,
after they’ve been driving all night.”

“You’re being paranoid. The woman came to pick up her husband at the train station, crashed for half an hour until his train arrived, woke up late and sped out of the lot.
There
. Nobody’s after you, Jay. Relax.” He took off his tie and headed for the kitchen. “I picked up a pizza. C’mon, we need to talk.”

I couldn’t tell him that the Civic’s plates were bad. He’d know I was hacking. If he knew that, he’d figure out that I was hacking him too. So much for asking him about Marathon.

“He squirted me with—”

“
Water
, Jay.”

“How was I supposed to know that?”

“You’re lucky his hand isn’t broken. It was a sprain, his mother said. The thumb. Still, it’ll be two weeks before he can get back.”

“Two weeks from school for a sprained thumb?”

“From
wrestling
. You know, his ticket to Harvard or wherever.”

“You’re always telling me to stick up for myself. What was I supposed to do?”

“You definitely didn’t need to choke him.”

“He—”

“
Hey
. I can’t afford to get sued, okay? Neither can you. If we have to hire a lawyer, we’re out on the street. C’mon, man. Use your head.” He poked my temple with his index finger as he got up to get himself a Diet Coke.

“Did you get that message from that detective?”

“Gimme a break, Jay. ‘
That
detective’? You mean the one you had coffee with?”

I should have known Pete would cave. In my experience, when adults give you their word about something, half the time they’ll break it, invoking the old standby clause: I know what I said, but I had to do what was best for you.

My father settled in his chair, rubbed his eyes, eyed me. “The Castro girl. Stay away from her. You’re in enough trouble with this suspension crap. And stay the hell away from Barrone too. She’s a pain in the ass. I helped her kid on a paper once—”

“She told me.”

“Did she tell you the daughter was sending me these book-length emails, calling me three and four times a day at the office?”

“What was it, Dad? Your beef with Mr. Castro.”

“Now how the hell did you find about that?”

“Mrs. Castro.”

He frowned. “He insulted an artist I happened to think was a hell of a talent.”

I shrugged. “So he didn’t like his stuff. Free country.”

“
Her
stuff. The artist was his wife. He killed her dream the night of her debut.”

“What, he like started slashing her paintings?”

“Pretty much. He and I are standing in front of the same painting. I’m smiling, he’s frowning. I tell him I think the work is remarkable, and he says, ‘a remarkable burden.’ He goes on to explain that he’s footing the bill for all these ‘castles in the air,’ as he calls them, gesturing to the paintings. Says he can’t even get his wife out of the studio long enough to take her to dinner. She’s obsessed, he says. What she really needs to be doing is getting down to the business of having kids and ‘being happy,’ as he put it. I argue that it’s all worth it, the time apart, putting the family thing on hold, because she’s great. And Castro’s exact words were, ‘She’s not great. She’s very good, and that’s not good enough.’ Anyway, Elaine had gone to get her husband a Perrier or whatever the hell he was drinking, but she’d come back in time to hear most of what he said. She’s standing right there as Castro says, ‘The difference between a Pablo Picasso and an Elaine Castro is that Picasso
needed
to paint, and filling Elaine’s head with ideas that she has the same need just isn’t fair to her. It can only lead to crushing disappointment, and I don’t want to have to see my wife suffer like that.’ Then he notices Elaine. She’s putting up a brave fight, smiling, but she can’t hold back the tears and excuses herself. Castro hurries after her, apologizing. It’s a scene, you know? A sad one. The damage is done, party over. People are leaving the gallery. I’m getting my coat, and here’s Castro again, giving me this sarcastic thank you, like this was all my fault. I had toasted Elaine earlier with something to the effect that she was one of the best I’d ever seen. I was young, but I had a guest column in the
Times
back then, and I guess what I said carried some weight—not a ton, mind you, just the tiniest bit maybe, but I guess it was enough to get Elaine Castro believing in herself a little anyway, which is all I was trying to do. Give her some support, you know? I told Castro he was an asshole, and I left. Actually, I might have said a bit more. Maybe a lot more. The gallery was still half full, mostly his banking buddies, I imagine, lots of Brooks Brothers suits. I embarrassed him in front of his friends, and I meant to. I embarrassed myself too, apparently. I was a little—”

“Drunk?”

“I kept an eye out for Elaine, but she never exhibited again, not publicly. I ran into the husband a few years ago at a gas pump, of all places. He said she was still painting, but strictly as a hobby.” My father folded himself another slice of pizza, shaking his head. “Guy’s a bona fide prick. He killed her. He killed his . . .” He let the pizza fall to his plate, sat back in his chair, looked up at the ceiling and let out a long breath. “Shit,” he said. He glared at me.

“What’d
I
do?” I said.

“Do we have any Tylenol?”

“It’s expired.”

“You double the recommended dose, it still works.”

I got him the Tylenol and then Mrs. Castro’s copy of his book. “Could you sign this for her?”

He studied the paint splattered over the book. Mrs. Castro had flagged a page with a Post-it. My father flipped to it. He smiled sadly. “She picked my favorite. Not that I don’t mention that fact in the book at least five times.”

I was looking at the picture upside down. She’d tagged a Picasso and written on the Post-it: “his best.” It was the only one I knew,
Guernica,
his most famous one.

“Should we give her a fresher copy?”

“After it’s taken her so many years to get this one like this?”

“Hey,” I said. “How come you never painted?”

“I’d have to send you on a Heineken run before we got into that conversation. I know about your fake ID, by the way.”

“Seriously, Dad. Why didn’t you pick up the brush?”

“I did. I painted for years.”

“And?”

“I burned them.”

“Why?”

“Fear.”

“That the critics would kill you?”

He shook his head. “I couldn’t figure it out. What the great ones knew. Inokuma. Picasso. I mean I knew it on an intellectual level. But not in my heart.”

“Knew what?”

“What comes after beauty.”

“Have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Not sure I do either.” He flipped the book to the title page, inscribed it and, yawning, headed for bed. I checked the inscription: “To You Who Know What Comes After Beauty.”