Empire of Lies (32 page)

"Look, I don't know what happened..." Lauren said.

I told myself not to respond to that—not to take the bait—but I couldn't help it. "What do you mean you don't know? I just told you."

"Yeah, well."

"Yeah, well what, Lauren?"

"Serena's sixteen years old, Jason. She's this little ... fucked-up sixteen-year-old adolescent like every other fucked-up adolescent in the world. I mean, okay, you want to tell me she does drugs. You want to tell me she's doing unprotected sex or whatever. But she's not a terrorist, for Christ's sake! She doesn't even watch the news. What's she gonna be a terrorist about? 'Give me more pink camis or I'll blow up The Gap?' Can I ask you something?" Her tone changed instantly, became instantly casual. That
Can I ask you something
—it sounded as if she were about to ask
me where I'd bought my shoes. "Did you two, like ... get into something together?"

"What?" It came out of me like a chicken's squawk.

She leaned in toward me confidentially. "Well ... you know."

I stared at her. "No, I don't know. What are you talking about?"

"You know, Jason," she said out of one sly corner of her mouth. "I don't mean you and her were, like, doing anything together, obviously. But ... well, I mean, I know you, Jason. I mean, you have to admit: You can get up to some shenanigans yourself when you're in the mood."

I opened my mouth to answer her, but I didn't answer, and I shut my mouth again.

We were close together in that small room, face to face. I could see the eyeliner around her eyes and the eyes themselves, the true feelings in them. I could see the micro-expressions at the corners of her lips, the little giveaways. It was all there, I just hadn't noticed it before. I had been too busy thinking about the cops watching me behind the mirror. I had been too worried that I might seem guilty to them, that I might somehow reveal to them my private sins and peccadilloes. I had been so fearful that they might come to suspect me of some wrongdoing in Serena's disappearance that the whole, awful truth of the situation hadn't really struck me. But now I saw it. Now I thought:
Of course.
This was what had been bothering me all morning, what had caused that sense of foreboding in me when I looked through the cruiser window at the roiling clouds.

The truth was: The police suspected me already. It was just as I imagined it, just as I worried, exactly as I feared. They already knew my private sins and failings—whatever Lauren could tell them, and no doubt she'd told them all with relish and malicious glee. And then she had come in here. They had sent her in here,
to catch me off guard, to get me talking, to get me to confess to ... what? To what? What the hell could they suspect me of?

I didn't know—I had no idea—and I was afraid. I felt cold sweat gathering on the back of my neck. I felt the fear show itself plainly in my expression, in my eyes. Lauren saw it. I could tell she did. I could tell she liked it, too. She had to fight down a smile.

"Something," she said with a horrible knowingness. "You got up to something, didn't you, Jason?"

I turned my back on her.

"What was it?" she said.

I stepped to the mirror. I glowered into my own frightened eyes, at my own battered face. Lauren's leering image was at my shoulder.

"What was it, Jason?" she said behind me.

"Get the hell in here," I said to the mirror. "This game is over."

I'd hardly finished speaking—I was still looking at the mirror—when the door to the interrogation room opened and Detective Curtis came in. He held the door ajar with his shoulder while he worked the sleeve of his jacket over his other arm. There were no apologies from him, no pretenses.

"Mr. Harrow" was all he said, slipping his jacket on. "Would you come with me, please?"

Of course, it wasn't really a question at all.

Detective Curtis walked rapidly down the cinder-block hallway. I had to hurry to keep up with him. "What the hell's going on?" I said.

He didn't answer me—didn't say a word—just walked on, straightening the sleeves of his jacket, shooting his cuffs as he went.

"Excuse me," I said a little more sharply.

"I'll explain on the way," he said. And he just walked on. I followed, irritated—and sick with fear.

We came into another room. It was bigger than the interrogation room, but still small. There was a gunmetal desk in each of the four corners, all of them chaotic with papers and coffee cups and files. Three of the desks were unoccupied, as if their residents had been overwhelmed and fled. At another, a harried man sat bent almost double in his chair, leaning urgently into a cell phone as if he were talking a possible suicide off a bridge. There were lots of cheaply printed flyers papering the walls, cheerful pastel pages, some covering the messages on others.
DO YOU HAVE INFORMATION ABOUT ... PROTECT YOUR CHILD ... PATROL YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD
...Somewhere the city was paying someone to print up more flyers to cover over even these. On one wall, an open door led into a connecting office. A dapper, silver-haired man was sitting at the desk in there, signing papers with a mournful expression
on his face. He looked as if he'd been signing papers forever, and would go on signing them, always with the conviction that they were no more useful than the unreadable flyers on the wall.

The place had a strange embattled atmosphere. I couldn't quite pinpoint it at first, but after a while it occurred to me: It felt like an imperial outpost in some rebellious tribal backwater.

Curtis crossed to one of the empty desks. He snapped a clipboard from the mess on it. Handed the clipboard to me.

"Read that and sign it."

I stared at the page on the clipboard.

"It's your rights," he went on in a monotone. "You can remain silent. You can have a lawyer. It's all there."

I looked up from the page into his pale, passionless eyes. "Do you suspect me of something?"

"We have to inform you of your rights," he said. "It's routine." He didn't even try to sound convincing.

There was a pen wedged in the clip. I pulled it out and signed the paper. It didn't even occur to me to demand an attorney. Why should I? I hadn't done anything wrong.

I handed the clipboard back to him. He tossed it down onto the desktop as if it held no more interest for him. Then he grabbed a set of keys off a hook on the wall and walked out, leaving me to hurry after him again.

There was an unmarked car parked among the squad cars out front, a dark blue Dodge. We drove downtown in that. I sat in the front seat next to Curtis. The Dodge merged with a thick current of cabs and delivery trucks, moving slowly along the edge of the university campus. The campus and the street formed a corridor running to the low, churning gray-black sky ahead: classical buildings to the left of us, amidst lawns and pathways; scarred brownstones and ragged awnings to the right. Curtis kept his hard
face forward as he drove, his hard eyes on the windshield. He still wasn't saying anything. I got the feeling he wouldn't say anything unless I badgered it out of him.

"Where are we going?" I asked. Angry as I was, worried as I was, I was still gauging my tone, gauging my words, just as I had when he was watching me through the one-way glass. I was trying to sound forceful now, but without sounding hostile. I thought I deserved some information but I still wanted to come across as one of the good guys, ready to cooperate in every way.

It was a long time before Curtis answered me. We drove another block in the stuttering flow. When he did finally speak, it was in a slow, reluctant drawl, as if he were doing me a favor. "Downtown. There's something I think you should see."

"Is this about Serena?"

"That's what I'm trying to find out."

"Look, could you tell me what's going on, please?"

"We're investigating your daughter's disappearance."

My daughter.
That had to have come from Lauren. I was about to tell him Serena wasn't my daughter, but I didn't. What if she was? Would he think I had lied?

Instead I said, "You sent Lauren into that room to question me, didn't you?"

I thought I saw the faintest hint of a smile play at the corner of the detective's thin lips. "There wouldn't be any point to that. You hadn't been Mirandized. We wouldn't have been able to use any of your answers in court." He rolled his tongue around his cheek. "We just asked her if she wanted to see you—that's all."

It took a moment but then I got the joke. I managed a short, bitter laugh. I could picture that scene, all right. I could just imagine Lauren in the detectives' office, that chaotic little outpost of the empire with the four gunmetal desks. I could see her with a tall mocha latte the cops would've brought her from Starbucks.
Slouched in a chair beside Curtis's desk, laughing off my ideas about some sort of—get this!—terrorist conspiracy involving Serena. The other detectives would've tilted back in their own chairs with their hands behind their heads, listening, laughing along. I could see that, too. And I could hear Lauren describing me as if I were some sort of puritan evangelist, some sort of pinched, intolerant hypocrite, raining fire and brimstone down on her because she was a poor single mom doing the best she could. As the chuckling cops encouraged her, she would've grown more expansive, favoring them with detailed descriptions of our sex lives more than a decade and a half ago. That Night in Bedford—that never-ending night.
He could get up to some shenanigans, that Jason, when he was in the mood.
Then, when they thought she was really primed, the cops would've brought her into the observation room, the room on the other side of the one-way glass. They would've stood around her, snickering with her, as she watched me pace and drum my fingers and stew.
Hey, y'know, you're welcome to go in and talk to him if you want—-for old times' sake or whatever.
They wouldn't have had to spell it out. She'd have known what they wanted her to do. She would have jumped at the chance to get me to confess....

But to what? Confess to what?

"Look," I said to Curtis, "why don't you just ask me whatever you want to know? I haven't got anything to hide." That only got me more silence. So I said: "What is it exactly you suspect me of?"

He turned those cold eyes on me again. He wasn't smiling anymore. "I don't recall saying I suspected you of anything."

I felt my stomach curdle as if he'd caught me out at something, some revealing error. "Come on," I said. "You leave me waiting around for an hour. You send Lauren in to weasel information out of me. You read me my rights. What am I supposed to think?"

"I'm just trying to find your daughter, Mr. Harrow. That's all."

"You sure seem to be taking your time about it."

"We're doing what we can."

He had turned back to the windshield. His hard gaze seemed to stare right over the red brake lights ahead of him and the taxis' yellow rooftops, straight into the distance, at the liquid steel of the sky.

"Do you understand that the people she's with may be terrorists?" I asked him. "They may be part of that Wall Street attack they were planning today—you know that, right?"

He gave a slight, almost-imperceptible shake of his head.

"What?" I said. "You don't believe me?"

"According to our information, it seems unlikely."

"You don't think these guys murdered Casey Diggs, then, the way Serena said?"

"We're checking that story out."

I couldn't tell whether he meant he was checking Serena's story or checking my story about Serena's story or what. I was afraid to ask. In fact, every time he spoke, I felt that clammy chill again on the back of my neck, that sour bubbling in my stomach. It was not that there was anything accusatory or suspicious in his tone. There was only that mild, disdainful curiosity as to exactly what kind of scumbag I was going to turn out to be.

We turned east after a while and headed across the park. I brooded out the window on the clustered autumn trees, their red and yellow leaves. The sight made me ache for the suburban woods of home. It occurred to me that if I checked my phone right now, there'd probably be a message on it from my wife. She probably called me back while I was in the interrogation room where there was no reception. I didn't check the phone. I didn't think I could bear to hear her voice.

We came out of the park onto Fifth Avenue. The Metropolitan Museum of Art lorded it over the boulevard with its majestic columned front, like some palace in an imaginary Rome. The cars
were moving faster, and the blue Dodge sped along beneath a line of yellowing sycamores. Wherever we were going, we were getting there faster now—which made me grow even tighter with suspense. The anxiety was making me jittery—jittery and increasingly pissed off. This bastard—his silences—I couldn't tolerate them anymore.

I turned on him. "Do you know about Diggs, about Casey Diggs?" He didn't answer. "You know about his theory about Professor Rashid?" Detective Curtis chewed the inside of his lip. "If the guys who took Serena killed Diggs, they were probably protecting Rashid, weren't they? Which means they were probably in on the Wall Street attack." Again, I caught that nearly imperceptible shake of the head. "You keep shaking your head. Why don't you believe me?" No answer. "What about the fact that one of the terrorists they arrested today was one of Rashid's students? What do you make of that?"

Finally, I got something out of him. We had stopped at a light at Grand Army Plaza. The buildings were low here and the boiling sky was big. The massive, mingled, steely clouds rolled and raced over the mansard roof of the hotel, over the statue of General Sherman on horseback, over the narrow side streets leading to the river. Curtis turned to look at me. What a look—I could almost feel him rifling my soul. I could see him going over the contents of my conscience with his dour cop intelligence. What must it take, I thought, to turn a man into a man like this? A whole lot of hours bearing witness to the blood toll of human malice and folly, I had no doubt. It must've taken a lot of dead bodies on a lot of floors to make Curtis Curtis.