Dead Time Page 26

  I spread out some of the linens from earlier in the evening and sacked out on Merideth’s sofa. I expected to find sleep elusive. Just after midnight my ex-wife proved me wrong.

  When my cell rang I was sound asleep.

  FORTY-SIX

  His Ex

  Eric and I kept two club chairs in front of the only window in our apartment that had a partial view of the park. My butt was on one of the chairs. My feet were on the windowsill.

  My mobile came alive.

  I thought Eric was calling from wherever he was. Portland? Sacramento? He would know that I might still be up that late. No one else would guess. Okay, maybe some of my girlfriends would know what I was going through.

  It wasn’t Eric, or my girlfriends. It was Stevie.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “Are you up? This is Stevie.” She didn’t wait for me to reply. “I haven’t been…kind…to you about all this. And I’m so sorry.”

  I tried to imagine what Alan would say right then. For many years I had used him as an internalized model for how to act with compassion, especially at those moments when I wasn’t feeling much compassion. I ended up channeling that side of him more frequently than I would like to admit.

  The Bitch was of no help; she was no better at compassion than I was. And she wasn’t her sharpest in the wee hours anyway.

  I lifted the Alan halo into place. I used a soft voice with Stevie. A nonconfrontational voice. Yes, an Alan voice. “What’s going on, Stevie?”

  Nice, the Bitch whispered.

  Stevie was in determined mea-culpa mode. “I want you to know I’m sorry. Okay?”

  “Thank you. I appreciate it. That was a stressful night for both of us.” I rewound and went back to the start. “What’s going on?”

  Stevie said, “I may have heard from Lisa.”

  Holy effing—I inhaled so that I could scream in relief that Lisa was alive. And if she was alive, that my baby was alive too. But I stifled the scream as I spotted the caution clouding Stevie’s words. She’d said “may.”

  I had questions for her. Where? When? With whom? Why? Why did she run away? I locked them up. I blurted, “She’s okay? The baby is—”

  “I got an e-mail. It must be her. I don’t know who else could have sent it.”

  “Go on,” I said without inflection. I wanted to hear what else. I dreaded hearing what else.

  “It was just an e-mail. That’s all. The e-mail says that Eric might have killed that girl. I’m guessing that’s why Lisa ran, why she can’t let him have the baby.”

  “The baby.” My baby. My baby must be okay.

  I mouthed Thank you to the sky. If Eric’s God heard me, so be it. I said, “The e-mail is from Lisa?”

  “That’s what’s confusing. I don’t recognize the address. It’s not Lisa’s e-mail address.”

  Can’t…have the baby? What? Wait. Eric might have killed that girl?

  What?

  I paused to allow Stevie to say more. Maybe two seconds, that’s all. Alan would have allowed the silence to last much longer. I couldn’t do it. “That’s it?” I asked. The impatience in my voice was, by then, undisguised. My Alan-esque calm had deserted me. I could wear the halo for a while. But not indefinitely. I waited for the Bitch to chime in. Even wanted her to. She had nothing.

  “Do you know what girl they’re talking about, Merideth? I don’t know about any dead girl.”

  Stevie didn’t know about Jaana. “Lisa never talked to you about the Grand Canyon?” I said.

  “The Grand Canyon?” She repeated my words with hushed amazement, as though I were about to tell her details of her sister’s secret sojourn in the Foreign Service in Katmandu. “We aren’t close,” Stevie said. She delivered the concluding line as a seamless combination of accusation and apology.

  I could see myself in a similar situation offering the same confusing contraction to someone else. Stevie and I had some things in common. I made a mental note to tell my shrink what I’d just realized.

  “The girl Lisa is talking about, her name is Jaana Peet. I don’t think anyone knows if she’s dead,” I said. “Jaana…disappeared on a camping trip in the Grand Canyon a few years ago. Lisa and Eric were both there—in Arizona—when it happened. That’s how Eric knows your sister. From that trip.”

  Stevie digested the new information. “And now Lisa thinks your fiancé…what, killed her?”

  Eric? Not a chance. It’s that simple, I thought. Not a chance. I know the man.

  “I haven’t seen the e-mail. I’ve seen the news reports from back then. They all describe her as…missing. There was never any evidence that she was dead. Fear, sure. Presumption, yes. But that was all.”

  “There’s an attachment of some kind with Lisa’s e-mail. I can’t open it on my laptop—I have all this anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-everything protection on it. I can’t open half the stuff that’s sent to me anymore. I think it’s a video file—only because Media Player is trying to open it. My husband’s asleep. He’ll be able to get it going for me in the morning.”

  “Please send it to me,” I said. “I can open it.”

  “Now?”

  “Now.” I dictated my e-mail address. “I’ll take a look at it and call you in the morning. Okay? You can get some sleep.”

  Stevie forwarded the e-mail. The note was written from a gibberish Gmail account. Could’ve been Lisa’s. Could’ve been anybody’s.

  Before I opened the attachment, I forwarded a copy of the e-mail to my IT guy at work, along with a note, asking him—okay, telling him—to track the message’s electronic origins as well as he could. I didn’t expect much—the Gmail account was probably defunct already—but in my business a dead end wasn’t a dead end until a few days after you got to the part with no place to go. I would press until I got there.

  I was able to open the attached video file on my laptop without a problem.

  The first time I played the video on my Mac, I learned little. The clip was twenty-two seconds long, taken in the dark by an amateur with bad equipment. Grainy as a piece of cheap oak. I thought the clip had been shot outside, but the resolution was so poor I couldn’t be certain.

  There was audio on the clip too. The background noise was loud, a rustling sound almost crushing out all other sounds. Almost.

  I could hear voices.

  Six seconds in: “Is that? Who is that?” Voice one, hushed, female.

  Eight seconds in: indecipherable. Voice two, female.

  Nine seconds in: “Oh, no. No. No.” From farther away. Voice three, male.

  Eleven seconds in: indecipherable. Voice two again? Or a new voice? I wasn’t sure. Female.

  Fourteen seconds in: “Please, please, please. Oh…please. You—” A new voice, or the same one as at eleven seconds. Distant. Female. Maybe. Intense.

  Twenty-one seconds in: “Shhhh.” Voice four. Gender? I couldn’t say.

  I called one of the video guys on my staff. My ace editor. I woke him up, which surprised me. I’d pegged Dru as a man who saw the light of dawn more often on the back end of a night than on the front end of a morning.

  He wasn’t happy I woke him. I didn’t care. Dru knew I didn’t care. We had a good relationship. He didn’t pretend with me. I didn’t pretend with him.

  “I need to lighten up a video clip on my Mac,” I said. “It’s dark. How do I do it?”

  Dru—his full name was Druid Lebeq—was a cornrowed thirtysomething man who finessed video signals the same miraculous way Stevie Wonder juggled melodies. Dru was the brightest gem on my fine production team. I say that even though he was late for work as often as he was on time, and even though he took more suspicious sick days than the rest of my staff combined.

  I cut him slack for his indiscretions at work. If the latitude I granted wasn’t sufficient to cover his ass, he knew I would cut him more. He could get away with twice as much shit as he actually did and still not get fired. He knew that, too. I actually granted him bonus points for not taking advantage
of me.

  Alan had once explained to me about the concept of idiosyncrasy credits—the fact that certain individuals in systems are so valuable that they aren’t required to adhere to the same norms as everyone else.

  If idiosyncrasy credits were real money, Dru would live sixty floors above Columbus Circle and drive a Bentley coupe to work.

  Suffice it to say that waking Dru to clean up this crappy twenty-two-second clip was like calling Thomas Keller at five a.m. to make a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich for your kid’s school lunch.

  “’Chu got?” Dru asked.

  He kept all the annoyance out of his voice. I noted the effort and doled out more idiosyncrasy drachmas.

  “Low res, probably night, probably outside, amateur, available light. YouTube-ish at its worst.”

  Pause. “Now?”

  He was somehow able to ask the question with no you-got-to-be-kidding frosting. I was impressed. More bonus points.

  “Dru,” I said, “would I call you now if I needed it tomorrow?”

  I’d bumped into him once in the corridor at work when my head was turned. It felt like I’d walked into a walnut tree. I bounced off of him. The man was grounded in every possible good sense of the word. I didn’t know if he was gay or straight. Attached or single. I didn’t want to know. Dru’s significant other could be the source of some considerable relationship envy for me.

  “’Bout you jus’ send it t’me?” he said. The next sound in my ear told me he was fighting either a sigh or a yawn. “Jus’…do it myself.”

  He made “myself” into two words, the accent hard on the first. I asked, “How long?”

  “’Bout a tent’ of the time it’ll take if I try to s’plain t’you how t’do it. No ’fense, Boss.”

  I said, “None taken. It’s on the way.”

  Nobody else called me Boss. No one else had figured out that I liked it.

  I’d been avoiding alcohol since Lisa’s in vitro because I wanted to feel at least a little pregnant while she was a whole lot pregnant. My vow slipped from my grasp as I waited to hear back from Dru about the clip. I did two shots of Drambuie, back-to-back. I only drank Drambuie when I was alone and upset.

  It wasn’t party booze for me. I don’t think I had ever had a sip of the stuff in a restaurant or a bar. Maybe once in a crappy hotel bar while I was on a trip to Kansas City to produce a piece. I may have resorted to Drambuie after I’d been hit on by two different members of the New York Jets on the same night. The second of the two players had bloodstains on the sleeve of his shirt.

  My in-box dinged after fifteen minutes. I had an e-mail. The subject line read NHNCD AUD 2. Dru figured I couldn’t translate the text-talk. Ha. I loved beating expectations.

  I opened the nhncd file and adjusted the volume to listen to the nhncd audio, 2.

  I played the clip once. My lips were together when it started. My mouth was wide-open at the end.

  I played it again. And again.

  I pecked out an e-mail to my favorite video doctor. “You’re off until one tomorrow, Dru. Sleep in, or whatever. Thx.”

  Then I started crying.

  I fell asleep, I thought, just before two o’clock, the images from the clip frescoed on my dura. My fiancé was getting a—okay, okay, I’ll clean it up—my fiancé was being fellated by a long-haired woman only yards from the banks of the Colorado River on the floor of the Grand Canyon.

  Lisa, or Jaana? Jaana, or Lisa?

  I awoke covered with sweat. The clock beside the bed read 2:42. The same images, of my fiancé getting a blow—sorry—of my fiancé being fellated by a long-haired woman, instantly resumed its Technicolor assault on my consciousness. I didn’t need to play Dru’s nhncd clip anymore; I apparently had the damn thing committed to involuntary memory.

  My brain had added Stevie’s voiceover, too: “The e-mail says that Eric might have killed that girl.” Eric might have killed that girl.

  Jaana. That girl.

  Not a chance. But until I knew more, I wasn’t about to call Eric to hear his side of the story.

  I was having a difficult time deciding which was worse: Eric and my surrogate together or Eric and a dead girl together.

  I called Alan.

  Though it was three hours earlier in L.A., Alan didn’t sound any happier to hear from me than Dru had been. Unlike Dru, Alan didn’t try to hide his displeasure. Unlike Dru, Alan had no desire to accumulate any credits I might be doling out.

  After Alan’s predictable “It must be late there, Meri”—as though I didn’t know that—I said, “Lisa and my baby may be alive. Stevie got an e-mail. It might be from her.”

  “That’s terrific. Do you know where she is?”

  “No,” I said. “And it’s not all terrific. The e-mail says that Eric may have had something to do with…what happened to that girl, Alan.”

  Alan’s voice grew soft. “I’m sorry,” he said. I could tell he meant it. The man had a good heart. It was one of the things that had attracted me to him.

  At the beginning of our relationship he loved to put me first. Why it became such a problem later on, I still don’t understand. I didn’t surprise Alan with my myopia. My self-focus was there from the beginning. He’s the one who changed. Not me.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “That’s it? That he may have been involved? No details?”

  “It actually says he may have killed her.”

  “Jaana was killed?”

  “I don’t know. It’s cryptic. You learn anything at the Olive Garden?”

  “We ate at A.O.C. Nothing that will help you with Lisa. Carmel doesn’t seem to know much, or isn’t eager to share what she knows. I did learn some things later. Lisa had—”

  I stopped him. “Alan, have you seen the clip?”

  “What clip?” he asked.

  “There’s a piece of short video from the Grand Canyon. It was attached to the e-mail Stevie sent.”

  “No,” he said. “I don’t think so anyway. I got something in my e-mail earlier, but I’m not real good with my phone.”

  “Check it,” I said to him. I knew what was coming next.

  “While we’re talking?”

  Exactly what I expected. Alan is a tech moron. “Do you need help?” I asked.

  My ex-husband said, “I do.”

  FORTY-SEVEN

  Her Ex

  I explained to Merideth that I preferred to call her back on the landline while I tried to figure out if the clip she was talking about was already on my cell.

  I also needed to decide whether to tell her that Eric was in L.A., and that he had stopped by the condo. I had hoped to postpone sharing that news until the next morning. I had also hoped that by then I would have learned something helpful.

  I phoned her from her condo phone and began to explain my mobile-telephone challenges. I would ease into the Eric news later in the call. “I have this brand-new phone. There are some messages and…things…on it, but I don’t know how to open them. Jonas was going to teach me, but…he’s—Can you…walk me through it?”

  With the practiced frustration of an ex-wife who was way too familiar with her ex-husband’s technological impairments, she asked me what kind of messages. “Texts, or e-mails?” she said.

  I told her I didn’t know. “I think one’s a map to A.O.C.”

  She asked what kind of phone I had.

  I told her the brand. “Do you have the same one?” I asked hopefully.

  “Doesn’t matter,” she said. “Remember ‘schema,’ Alan? Piaget? He was a psychologist? Ring a bell? This is all schema.” She asked two simple questions about the configuration of buttons on my phone. I was able to answer one of them. At my failure regarding the second one, she said, “Never mind.”

  It took her about ten seconds to explain the process of opening the attachments to me. I felt stupid when I hit the final button and a video file began to load.

  “Got it,” I said.

  “It’s going to be dark,” she said.
“The clip.”

  “I think I can handle it,” I said.

  “Not that kind of dark,” she muttered, almost under her breath. Almost. Merideth was careful with knives. When she didn’t wish to draw blood, she didn’t draw blood. With me, however, she always seemed to make sure the tip of the blade scraped some flesh so that I would be reminded how good she was with the weapon.

  The clip started playing. I was watching a short film of Jonas boogie-boarding at the Atlantic shore. I could spot his smile from three thousand miles.

  I said, “That was from Jonas. He’s at the shore with his cousins. He’s boogie-boarding.”

  “That’s it?” Merideth asked.

  “There’re more attachments. Hold on.” I pecked at the phone. I got the map to A.O.C. “Wait. There’s another one.”

  I repeated the steps with the final attachment. A second video started to load, then began to play. Twenty-two seconds later—my cell did the timing; I didn’t—I said, “I’m not sure what I just saw. It was dark. Some movement. Some voices, maybe. There’s lots of noise on the audio. Crackles. White noise.”

  “Was it clear enough that you could make any of it out?”

  “No. I’ll play it again, but I don’t think it will help. It’s very dark.”

  “Told you.”

  “What is it, Merideth?”

  “I don’t want to put any ideas in your head. I want you to see it yourself. Do you have a computer with you? I’ll send an enhanced version. My video guy cleaned it up.”

  “I don’t have a laptop with me.” I didn’t tell her I didn’t own a laptop. “You’ll have to send the enhanced version to my phone.”

  I couldn’t believe I’d just said that.

  “Okay.” I heard her typing. She said, “Who sent you the clip first? The dark version you just saw?”

  “Don’t know.” My suspicion was that Mel had sent it, only because I couldn’t imagine anyone else doing it. “Just a second. It’s from a…Yahoo account—I don’t recognize the name. Oh…there’s a YouTube link too. In the subject line. Lot of numbers.”