Trust Your Eyes (31 page)

Len must have noticed my father was in pain and asked what he’d done to himself. Maybe Dad had related what happened, but not made a big deal about it. Len had said Dad made excuses for Thomas, which seemed to match the version of the tale my brother was telling me.

But what was Dad sorry about? And why didn’t Thomas want to talk about it? What did my dad think he wouldn’t want to forgive him for?

I said, “There’s something, some incident, Dr. Grigorin said you won’t talk about. Is it this? This thing Dad was apologizing for?”

Thomas nodded without hesitation.

“You need to tell me,” I implored. “I need to know.”

“No you don’t. It doesn’t matter. He’s not going to hurt me again.”

“Dad? Dad can’t hurt you anymore?”

Thomas shook his head. I didn’t know whether he was saying no, or dismissing me. “Dad would have believed me if you’d looked up at the window,” he said, but when I asked him to explain, he walked away.

AT
dinner, it struck me that Julie was not digging into her fish sticks with much enthusiasm, although the same could not be said about her jam jar glass filled with pinot grigio.

“Sorry,” I said. “When I went to the store the other day I kind of loaded up on stuff that would be easy to throw together.”

“No, it’s great,” Julie said. “You’ll have to give me the recipe.”

Thomas said, “You just take the fish sticks box out of the freezer, put them on a metal tray, and put them in the oven. And then you put a glop of tartar sauce on them from the jar. Isn’t that right, Ray?”

“Yes, Thomas,” I said. “That’s pretty much it.”

“I could make this,” he said, nodding proudly to himself. Unlike Julie, he’d wolfed down the fish sticks and the french fries, which had also come out of a bag from the freezer.

“Really, it’s great,” Julie said. She looked across the table at me and said, “You’ve been kind of quiet.”

“I guess I’ve got a few things on my mind.”

“Like calling the police?” Thomas asked.

“What?”

“You said you were going to call the police in New York.”

“I haven’t done that yet,” I said. “I’ll get right on that tomorrow.”

If Thomas suspected I was being anything less than sincere, he didn’t show it. He got up from the table, took his plate to the sink and rinsed it off, and said he was going up to his room.

“Let me clean up,” Julie said.

“Just leave it,” I said. “Come on.” We took our jam jar glasses of wine into the living room and sat down on the couch.

“You’re not going to call the police, are you?” she asked. I had filled her in, briefly, on my trip to New York, Thomas’s call to the landlord, and my pledge to get in touch with the NYPD.

I shook my head. “No.”

Julie kicked off her shoes and curled her legs up on the couch. “I guess I get that.”

“You guess?”

“Yeah. I mean, it would be hard to explain, and hard to get anyone to listen to you. A blurry white head in a window. What the hell is that, anyway? I love Thomas, I do, but after what you told me about the FBI coming to visit, maybe keeping a low
profile is a smart thing.” She knocked back the rest of her wine. “More?”

I nodded.

She hopped off the couch, opened another bottle, and brought it back. She refilled her glass and mine.

“There was something in your voice when you called me this afternoon,” Julie said. “You sounded kind of, I don’t know, shaky.”

I let the wine surround my tongue a few seconds before answering. “I was having a moment of self-pity, I guess. Thinking about my dad, about Thomas. It was all getting me down at the moment. Look, I don’t want to burden you with all this shit.”

“It’s okay,” she said. No one spoke for a few seconds. Then, “I remember you in school, how you were always drawing things. Sometimes I’d see you, sitting on the floor in the hall, leaning up against your locker, a hundred kids shuffling around you and yelling and goofing around and slamming their lockers, and you’d be sketching something in your book, totally oblivious to everything that was going on around you. I’m like, always looking around at what’s going on, but there you were, in your own world, doing your thing.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess.”

“I think you and Thomas are more alike than you might think. He’s wrapped up in his world, but I can picture you, back in Burlington, up in your studio all by yourself, just you and your airbrush or your pencil or your CAD program, letting out some image, some picture that’s been trapped in your head, setting it free.” She had some more wine. “I think I’m starting to feel this a little.”

I was, too, but not so much that my mind wasn’t still racing. “I keep thinking about how Dad died. The key in the OFF position, the blades—”

Julie put a finger on my lips. “Shh,” she said. “What was it you told Thomas? Let it go. Let it all go, just for a while.”

Julie put our glasses on the coffee table and snuggled in closer to me. I slipped my arms around her and placed my mouth on hers. This went on for a while until Julie said, “This ain’t high school anymore. We don’t have to stay on the couch.”

“Upstairs,” I said.

“I was thinking my place,” she said, clearly a reference to Thomas clicking away upstairs.

“He won’t be coming out of his room. Sometime around midnight, or later, he’ll hit the bathroom and brush his teeth and pack it in. We’re not going to see him before that.”

So we slipped upstairs. I steered Julie into the bedroom at the end of the hall, and over to the queen-sized bed my father had slept in, alone—so far as I knew—since my mother’s passing.

“Isn’t this your dad’s room?” Julie asked.

“This is where I’ve been sleeping. Would you like to go out to the car, like last time?”

She gave me a look. “No, this’ll do.”

I barely had the door closed when Julie started unbuttoning my shirt. I slid my hands under her sweater and felt her warm skin under my palms. My mouth was on hers as we moved to the bed. Julie pushed me onto my back and straddled me, reaching down and unbuckling my belt.

“I know some excellent stress reduction techniques,” she said, swinging her legs back off me so she could slide off my jeans and boxers. She tossed them onto the floor, got back on top, crossed her arms to the opposite sides, and whisked her top off in one swift motion, exposing a lacy, purple bra. She gave her head a shake to get her hair back into place.

“Purple?” I said. “Is that the same—”

“Oh please. I was a skinny, 110-pound school brat.”

“Just asking.”

She reached behind her back in that way women can that makes you think their elbows are going to snap, and unhooked and tossed her bra in the direction of my jeans.

“Come here,” I said. She leaned over, allowing her nipples to brush lightly across my chest.

“Ray!”

Julie sat bolt upright. “Jesus!” she said under her breath.

My heart went off like a trip-hammer. “Fuck,” I whispered.

I could hear Thomas’s door open. “Ray! Come here! Ray?” I’d never heard him call for me this way before.

I went to call out, then stopped myself. I didn’t want to bring him in here. Julie half-naked. Me entirely so.

“Where are you?” he called. I heard the guest bedroom door open. “Ray? Are you in Dad’s room?”

Julie looked at me, wide-eyed. She whispered, “You have to do something.”

“Thomas! Give me a sec—”

The door flung open. Thomas walked straight in. Didn’t even look at Julie as she hopped off me and grabbed the bedspread to cover herself. As she did so, she exposed me, and my current state, completely.

“Ray!” he shouted. “It’s gone!”

“Thomas, for Christ’s sake, can you see—”

“It’s gone! The head’s gone.”

“What?” I said, swinging my legs off the bed and reaching down for my boxers. “What are you talking about?”

“You have to see this!” he said. He exited the room and ran back down the hall to his own.

I followed him, wearing nothing but my underwear. Julie had struggled back into her top, not bothering with her bra, and came along after me.

As I went into Thomas’s room I saw that he had all his monitors
focused on the window on Orchard Street. It sure looked like the same window, except this time there was nothing in the frame. It was black. No more bag-wrapped head.

“What the hell?” I said.

Thomas stood there, pointing. “Where did it go? What happened to it?”

I stammered, “They must, they, I guess, they must have updated it. Taken pictures of the street again.”

“No!” he said. “Everything else is exactly the same! The same people on the street. The same cars! Everything’s the same except the head is gone!”

I dropped myself into Thomas’s chair and looked at the screen. “Son of a bitch,” I said.

Thomas grabbed a sheet of paper off the table and handed it to me. A printout of the original image, like the one he’d sent with me to New York. “It’s exactly the same, right?”

I studied the printout. “It’s the same, Thomas, it’s the same.”

Julie sidled up next to Thomas, then took the printout from me and studied it, not saying anything.

“Why, Ray?” Thomas asked. “Why is it gone? Why is it gone, right after you went into the city to check it out?”

I was shaking my head. I couldn’t make any sense of it. In the last twenty-four hours, someone had gone into this site and wiped out the image. Since I had been down there. Since I’d knocked on the door and had a few words with the neighbor.

I felt a chill. And not just because I was sitting there with almost no clothes on.

Julie touched my brother gently on the arm. “Okay, you know what, Thomas? Start from the beginning. Tell me all about what you’ve seen, and what you think it means.”

THIRTY-NINE

LEWIS
Blocker called Howard Talliman Monday morning.

“It’s done.”

Howard said, “Hold on.” He put the cell phone on the granite counter in the kitchen of his Upper East Side brownstone and supported himself on the countertop with both hands. He hadn’t slept in days and he felt like his body was shaking all the time, like he was walking around in a world with nonstop low-level earth tremors.

This was the call he was waiting for, and now that he’d received it, he had to steady himself, take a few breaths. He picked up the cell again and said, “I’m here.”

“Go to your computer.”

Howard hauled himself up onto one of the barstools and opened the laptop on the raised stretch of counter. He entered the Whirl360 address into the Web browser and found his way to that Orchard Street window.

The head was gone.

“Lewis,” he said.

“I’m here.”

“I looked. It’s gone.”

“Yeah. She got it done.”

Howard was pleased, but he wasn’t about to shower any accolades on the woman who’d screwed this thing up from the get-go. “Any complications?”

“Some.”

“Any that could blow back and hurt us?”

“No.”

“Okay. Where are we on the other matters?”

“She’s gone back to Dayton to babysit the mother. Still waiting. And I’m still looking for our visitor.”

“It’s nice to have a little bit of good news for once,” Howard said. “But we’re still deep in the woods.”

“Yes.” Lewis paused. “I’ll keep you posted.”

Howard ended the call, slid the phone across the counter, and put his head into his hands. God, he needed a drink and it was only eight. He needed his strength. He had an appointment with Morris Sawchuck this morning.

THE
man was becoming increasingly restless. He wanted to reactivate his campaign plans. Announce formally, after delaying for nine months, that he would be seeking the office of the governor of the State of New York.

It had made sense, back in August, for Morris to put his ambitions on hold. One very personal reason that had become very public, and another—his complicity in the CIA director’s deal with terrorists—that he’d prayed would never become public at all.

And a third reason he knew nothing about.

Oblivious, Morris believed there was no longer a reason to put his career on the back burner. Enough time had passed. Had he known a woman named Allison Fitch was still out there—and that she could destroy him—he might well have felt differently.

Every day, Howard Talliman lived with the fear the woman would surface. He checked Web sites on his phone before he was even out of bed. He grabbed the TV remote, turned on CNN in his bedroom, flipped back and forth between it and the
Today
show. Imagined Wolf Blitzer saying, “And now, in a CNN exclusive, we talk to a woman who’s come out of hiding to accuse Morris Sawchuck and the people around him of trying to have her killed. Not only is she accusing the New York attorney general of attempted murder, but of being complicit in the disgraced former CIA director’s plan not to pursue charges against—”

That was when Howard imagined turning off the TV, getting his hands on a gun, and blowing his brains out.

Not unlike what Barton Goldsmith ultimately decided to do.

While Howard and Morris fretted that the attorney general’s involvement in the CIA director’s deal with terrorists would become known, Goldsmith was feeling the pressure as well. He was going to be called to testify before a congressional committee. Everything was going to come out.

So Barton Goldsmith rose early one morning, walked into the backyard of his Georgetown home, stood among the beautiful flowers in his garden, put the barrel of a pistol in his mouth, and pulled the trigger.

God bless him, Howard thought. Morris, as was his nature, was circumspect. “A terrible thing,” he said in an interview. “Such a loss.” Inside, Howard believed, Morris had to be dancing a jig.

So with Goldsmith out of the picture, Morris felt that threat had been neutralized. But Howard knew a bigger one remained. If Fitch surfaced, and talked, everything would start spilling out. Howard didn’t know what, exactly, Fitch had heard, or thought she’d heard, Bridget saying on her cell phone during that Barbados vacation. But she’d intimated she knew something.

Sooner or later, Fitch would overcome her fear of the authorities. When an attorney general, or at least those working on his
behalf, orders a hit on you, it’s bound to make you hesitant about going to the police. But one day, Howard believed, she’d screw up her courage.