Watch You Die (21 page)

The caption read:
Buildings Department project
manager
Abe Starkman talking to a woman at Mafia burial site
.

“Oh my God,” I whispered.

“The caption names him, but not you.”

“But it’s obviously me. I’m on the byline of all the stories.”

“It could be
me
.”

“You’re taller than me, and your hair’s much lighter. It doesn’t look like you at all.”

She didn’t argue because it was obviously true.

“Why would he do this? I mean really
why
?” We both knew “he” meant Joe. Who else? And then I answered my own question: “To spite me in every way he possibly can.”

“Because he loves you.” She rolled her eyes.

“He
loves
me.”

“But do you think that little wimp could actually kill someone? I have a hard time picturing it.”

“You didn’t see his face yesterday.”

“You’re right, I didn’t. But I still can’t picture it.” Courtney leaned back in her chair and looked at me. “It makes a lot more sense that the mob did this; they’ve got so much riding on the trial. This video names Starkman as the Department of Buildings leak that might blow their deal with the city – so Starkman has to die.”

“You actually think the mob took this video?” It made no sense.

“Nope. I think Joe took it and posted it to screw with you for yesterday, and someone tipped Tony T’s people, and
voila
, they plug the leak lickety-split like the good plumbers they are.”

“It’s a good theory, Courtney, but we really don’t know.”

“You’re right. I’m majorly jumping to a conclusion, big J-school no-no. But between us?” She smiled. “I’ll bet you a hundred bucks I’m right.”

“When will we know more?”

“When Stan calls in. Elliot’s on his way. He said he wants to know immediately if Starkman was your source. Which, obviously, he was.”

I nodded. Recalled flickers of Abe: pale eyes wavering between determination and apprehension; beads of perspiration gathering, dripping; yellow helmet radiating chin-cinching straps; wheels flashing; gold wedding ring. “Thank you,” had been his last words to me. Abe had trusted me and now he was dead. It was unthinkable and yet it had happened. It was true. And if Courtney was right, it was all thanks to Joe Coffin. It was awful to realize that he had followed me that morning last week. I had walked to my meeting, in the dark, and felt safe. For two years I had inhabited that false sense of security. For two years I had been followed without realizing it.
Two years
.

“I’m sure the
Times
will throw you a lawyer. They
always
do when the shit hits the fan with an anonymous source.”

“Great.” So now I would have a lawyer and a detective. When would I get a bodyguard? When would I start packing a gun?

I ran to the bathroom where I threw up in the toilet of the first open stall. The smell brought back Joe’s breath yesterday, spewing stink and crazy words into my face.
Abe Starkman was dead
. Could Joe have really done this?
Did Joe have a gun
?

Courtney was waiting in the bathroom’s common area when I came out. She had prepared a wet paper towel and like a mother she wiped my face to calm me. “I don’t think he did it, Darcy. I really don’t. I think he’s just an obsessed kid. There’s no real reason for you to think he’s actually dangerous.”

But she hadn’t seen his face
. I kept coming back to that. I might have agreed with her yesterday before that face came hurtling toward me without warning.

A little while later I walked into Elliot’s office, girded to receive his reaction. He must have seen me coming because he was already standing behind his desk with his arms folded over his chest. No smile. No bounding around the desk to offer a high-five. No invitation to close the door.

“Come on in,” he said. “Have a seat.”

I sat. And waited. Feeling like I was in the
principal
’s office only I hadn’t pulled anyone’s pigtails … my homework partner was dead.

“This whole thing is a nightmare,” he began. “I think we can agree on that. The fact that your source has been murdered, possibly in connection with your story. The fact that this fool has been stalking you and that he followed you here to New York and to the
Times
. So. Your work has been very good in the short time you’ve been here, Darcy. Very good. Promising. And I’ve really looked forward to seeing you develop, and you
wanted
to develop—”

“I still want to, Elliot. I can’t tell you how devastated I am about this—”

The flat of his palm stopped me cold. I was to listen, not talk. But I had to speak because his tone, his direction, was adding pain to pain.

“You’re going to fire me.”

“Well, no. Not exactly.”

“Because it sounds as if you are.”

“Darcy, jumping to conclusions won’t serve anyone. You of all people should know that.”

“You’re right.”

“As I was saying … well, I’ve lost my train of thought. The point is, we think the smartest course of action right now is for you to do your work from home. Until we know who murdered your source – Abe Starkman, if I’ve got his name right.”

“You do. He seemed like a good man; he talked to
me
because he needed to tell someone.”

Elliot’s posture deflated as he sat in his chair. “That’s always why they call us. If no one had any conscience, we wouldn’t have any sources.”

“But the thing with Joe,” I said. “It seems so sudden. Out of nowhere – and now
this
.”

“Everyone here’s feeling stumped by it. But as an employer, we have to take the most conservative position. Let the police do their work, get the facts on the murder, and then we’ll reassess.”

“So I should work from home?”

“On your other stories. I’m putting Stan on the bones; he’ll work with Courtney.”

“But, Elliot—”

“It’s not a punishment, Darcy. It’s a tactical maneuver to keep people here safe. You understand that, of course.”

“Yes.”

“This is silly, but … here.” He reached behind him into his briefcase and withdrew a child’s drawing with a pink butterfly, a blue flower and my name spelled D-O-R-S-I cockeyed across the top of the page.

“Katherine –” one of his daughters “– must have overheard me and my wife talking this morning. She drew this. Well, I thought it was sweet.”

“It’s very sweet, Elliot. Thank you.” I took the drawing and stood up to leave.

“The other stories you’re working on are also important,” he said, leaning up to half rise out of his chair as if he intended to see me out. Which he didn’t. He hovered a moment before sitting back down.

“I know.” Of course they were but the truth was I didn’t care about them anymore. I only cared about Abe Starkman, the man who had given his life to meet with me and point me in the direction of buried bones in a questionable patch of land.

As I left his office, Elliot followed me with words meant to console: “Remember, Darcy, it’s just a relocation until we have more information and things calm down. You’re still on staff here. I expect daily updates on your work.”

I turned to smile at him. “Tell your daughter thanks for the beautiful picture.”

Things calm down
. It was one of those wonderfully innocuous expressions, open-ended on both sides. If
things calmed down
I would be invited back to the newsroom. If they didn’t, would I be cut loose? But how could I not understand Elliot’s heightened sense of caution? If Joe
had
killed Abe Starkman, how could I and my shadow-stalker be allowed to endanger my colleagues? If I had been my editor, I would have made the same decision. So, Stan would be taking my place alongside Courtney on the bones story – a story that had grown from a
small
environmental piece to one on corruption and now murder. A story that had catapulted out of my hands and into my life.

Home. I arrived with a thwunk; at least that was how it felt walking in my door that morning. I set down my bag, heavy with laptop and files, on the hall floor. Marched to the kitchen and magneted Elliot’s daughter’s drawing onto the fridge.

Home
. Where I hunkered down, fearful of over-exposure. Like a shade flower, I felt I might shrivel if I stayed too long in the light. I closed all the curtains and blinds and stopped answering the door. Periodically the phone burst into angry spasms of constant ringing. Thirty, forty, fifty times, and I could not figure out how to turn off the ringer.

I had already called Jess to tell him what had happened to Abe. Now the ringing phone reminded me that I’d forgotten to mention I had the box and planned to drop it off at the precinct on my way to pick Nat up from school later. I used my cell phone to call Jess for fear of accidentally answering one of Joe’s calls if I lifted the landline receiver.

“Don’t bother delivering the box,” Jess said. “I’ll have a patrol car swing by for it.”

“Tell him to wait after he rings the bell. I’ll have to get to the window and take a look before I open the door.”

“Will do. And how about I send a car over to pick Nat up after school?”

“A police escort?” I could just see Nat’s face: stunned, ashamed, angry. “No thanks. I’ll get him myself.”

“You sure?” His tone managed to express as much sympathy as doubt. But Jess was a parent and understood that dealing with Nat was something I had to do myself.

“Listen, Jess, if it gets to the point that I can’t pick my kid up from school, then we’re out of here.” As soon as I said it, it occurred to me that maybe waiting was a bad idea. Maybe
now
was the time to leave. Leave the life we had started to build here and the people we had started to care about. Certainly we were capable of leaving; we had abandoned a whole life on the Vineyard. But where would we go?

“Don’t,” he said. “You’re safer here, where we can watch you. And watch him.”

A good point; but still, it was obvious that Joe’s obsession could spill onto Nat sooner or later. The prospect of his following my son, watching him, documenting him, terrified me more than anything.

The cop came and went with the box.

Mid-afternoon I walked to my car, parked one block over, feeling and sensing and fearing and hating Joe every step of the way. I arrived early at the school and glued my eyes to the exit until Nat
came
out with his friends. When he saw me, he pulled away from the cluster of boys, waved and jumped into the back seat of our car.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Hi, honey. How was school?”

“Good. Aren’t you working today?”

“I wasn’t feeling well so I came home early.”

“If you’re not feeling well, why’d you pick me up? I could have gotten home on my own.”

“I know. I felt better so I hopped in the car.”

In the rearview mirror, I saw his skeptical expression: the thick eyebrows pinching above his nose, the mind working behind his eyes.

Back in Boerum Hill, I parked as close to our house as I could and tried to act casual as we walked back home. But as soon as we entered the apartment, its eerie shade-pulled darkness contrasting with the bright afternoon outside, Nat froze, his bookbag slung over one shoulder. He looked at me with the same expression as when he was five years old and asked, “Why is the sky some color, Mommy?” I knew exactly what he’d meant:
any
color, as opposed to no color at all.
Why is the sky blue
?

This was something for which I now had an explanation, having researched it for an article, but at the time I had been unable to answer. The atmosphere of the earth is bathed in white sunlight.
Visible
light is made up of every color: red, orange, yellow,
green
, blue, violet, and all the other variations in the spectrum. Most colors are absorbed, passing right through molecules in the air, but not blue. Blue bounces off molecules, scattering, and so we see it. All the other colors are there, just invisible.

But as little Nat had looked at me and waited for an answer, I found myself at a loss. My own mother had told me, “The sky is blue because it
is
,” a wholly unsatisfactory explanation.
Her
mother had told her that God had painted it with blueberry juice. My answer, automatic and absurd, fell somewhere in between: “The sky is blue so when we look up high there’s something beautiful to see.” A non-answer, but it had served the moment; Nat went back to blowing the fluffy white pollen off spent dandelions on our Vineyard lawn.

This time, the questioning expression on Nat’s face would require a real explanation:
Our home is dark midday because
… But with all my heart and soul, I did not want to pollute my son’s mind with one man’s vile obsession, not if I didn’t absolutely have to.

“I had a really bad headache. The sunlight was bothering me.”

“Uh huh.” He dropped his bookbag in the middle of the hall floor and went to the kitchen, which was the brightest room in the house as those windows were uncovered and faced the back yard. Opened the
fridge
door. Failed to find anything tempting. Closed it. Faced me.

“The test for specialized high schools is in two weeks, on a Saturday. I signed up to take it. Is that OK?”

“Of course.”

“All the other moms are going on tours, looking for high schools.”

“I plan to.” Yet another lie: I had thought there was plenty of time for that. The New York public school calendar had struck me as overwrought. I had not only failed to master the instruction tome but had set it aside in one of my piles and completely forgotten about it until now.
Bad mother
, concentrating on work and survival instead of playing possum with the fact that my son did not possess the test scores necessary to apply to top city high schools because he had never taken the tests because we had lived elsewhere where tests weren’t necessary where his father had died before which we had been happy and never planned to leave or even imagined we’d end up in New York City, pretending we – I – weren’t being stalked by a madman. Back in the Vineyard where buried bones would have long ago been dug up by a wild animal and scattered, returning piecemeal, over time, to the earth. Where memories were not buried to be dug up and stirred but floated in a gentle, perpetual cloud. A suffocating cloud, which I had fled.