Graveland: A Novel Page 15

  By the time Ellen gets halfway there, he’s already in his car and driving away.

  Ellen then veers left and heads for her own car.

  As she’s reaching for the door, she looks back over at the Science Building. Geek Girl is still standing there.

  They exchange nods.

  Ellen then gets into the car and follows Frank Bishop out onto the main road that leads back into the town of Atherton.

  * * *

  Frank orders a Stoli on the rocks. He’s driving, but he really needs a drink.

  Just the one should do it.

  As with the search for a diner earlier, he’s ended up having to settle for considerably less than he hoped for. This place, the Smokehouse Tavern, is the only bar he could find on Main Street. He knows from his previous trips to Atherton that there are a couple of big sports bars over on Railroad Avenue, but he’d never be seen dead in either of those, and besides, he figured there might be a more mood-appropriate dive bar here on Main, an old-school joint with sawdust on the floor and a faint smell of puke in the air.

  Turns out there isn’t.

  Instead, it’s the bland, musty Smokehouse, a place that makes Dave’s Bar & Grill back at the mall look like the Stork Club.

  It’ll do, though. It’s almost empty, and the barman isn’t a talker.

  Actually, middle of the afternoon now and Frank doesn’t feel too bad. At least he’s coming away with something, a plausible scenario, Lizzie and Alex on the road, off the grid, Bonnie and Clyde–ing it around for a few days—but without the bank robberies, or the erectile dysfunction.

  He tried Lizzie’s phone again, and of course there was no answer, so he’s decided he’s going to find a motel room and stick around until tomorrow, wait for her to show up. He’s not going to be pissed off or anything. He just wants to look at her and make sure she’s okay. Tell her he loves her. Tell her to answer her fucking phone once in a while.

  Then he’ll be out of here.

  There’s another reason he doesn’t feel too bad. That encounter he had just now with Leland Bryce. Frank found it pretty refreshing, because what they talked about, and almost exclusively, was architecture. Now an associate professor at Atherton, Bryce used to teach at Columbia, and Frank took some of his courses. It was weird bumping into him again after all these years, and in these circumstances, but apart from mentioning he has a daughter at Atherton, Frank didn’t say anything at all about what was going on. Instead, they reminisced about Columbia for a bit and then got into a thing about the latest addition to the lower Manhattan skyline, F. T. Keizer’s controversial new residential tower, 220 Hanson Street. Not yet complete, and already the subject of extensive litigation, 220 Hanson has notoriously divided architectural opinion in the city. It’s been in the news a lot, and Frank has read about it, extensively, but he was still sort of surprised to find that he had an actual opinion on the matter—as if he’d somehow forfeited the right to have one of those by losing his job.

  Nevertheless, this felt like the first grown-up interaction he’d engaged in for quite a while, and as a result he left the campus feeling a good deal less anxious.

  But he still needs this drink. And might actually need a second. It’s not as if one adult conversation is going to solve all, or indeed any, of his problems.

  He takes a sip of Stoli. As he’s putting the glass down, he looks into the mirror behind the bar and sees movement—someone emerging from the shadows of the Smokehouse Tavern’s dimly lit vestibule area.

  It’s a woman. She’s fortyish, small and slim, with short, dark hair. She’s dressed all in black—in jeans, a T-shirt, and a jacket.

  She approaches the bar and pulls out a stool three along from where Frank is sitting. She lays car keys and a phone down in front of her.

  The barman comes up from the far end where he was stacking some glasses and looks at her, eyebrows raised interrogatively.

  “Club soda, please.”

  She sits down, picks the phone up, and starts … whatever, texting, tweeting.

  He takes another sip from his drink.

  The barman places a glass of club soda with ice and lemon in front of the woman and wanders off.

  There is silence for a while, the thick silence of a slow-moving, aimless afternoon.

  Then, “Frank … isn’t it?”

  He turns. “Sorry?”

  “Frank Bishop, right?”

  The woman is looking directly at him. He’s puzzled. Does he know her? Is he supposed to recognize her?

  “I’m sorry … have we met?”

  “No.” She shakes her head. “Someone pointed you out to me. Back there … on the campus. One of the students.”

  Frank shifts on his stool and turns, studying the woman’s face for a moment. She has smooth, pale skin and dark, penetrating green eyes.

  Then something occurs to him.

  “Did you follow me here?”

  She nods. “Yes, I’m sorry. But I needed to talk to you. My name is Ellen Dorsey. I’m a journalist.”

  Frank swallows, a hundred things racing through his head at once, but principally, What the fuck … a journalist?

  This is also—he’s now aware—what the look on his face is saying, and it seems to make her uncomfortable, maybe even a little uncertain. As the seconds pass, he keeps staring at her. It’s as though she’s weighing something and needs more time. But he doesn’t feel like giving her any.

  “Come on,” he says, “you’ve got something to tell me? What is it?”

  She wipes away an invisible speck of dust from the bar before looking at him. “I’m not sure how to say this, Frank, but I think your daughter might be in serious trouble.”

  * * *

  Not exactly how she planned it.

  But in the few moments she was sitting there, the reality of the situation, the complexity of it, overwhelmed her. If she thinks about it now, even for a second, one thing is clear. This man in front of her isn’t just a source, a provider of the next link in a chain of information.

  He’s involved.

  She remembers talking about this to Jimmy Gilroy, about how you get involved—when a story goes a certain way, when you get out of the house and meet people, look them in the eye. It can all get a bit knotty. Ambivalence creeps in.

  She looks him in the eye now.

  He says, “I beg your pardon?”

  Ellen adjusts herself on the stool. “I’m still working on it, okay, but I’ve been investigating something, a story, and a certain name has come up, Julian Robert Coady. The thing is, I think the guy your daughter is involved with, Alex, might be this guy’s brother.”

  Bishop’s eyes screw up as he tries to process this. In his obvious bewilderment and desperation he does his best to formulate another question, but all he can manage is “Story? What story?”

  Ellen takes a breath and pauses. She can’t get straight into it, can she? Not without some prepping. And besides, it’s beginning to feel a little flimsy to her—a T-shirt, a comment made on a radio show?

  What is she doing?

  “I’ll get to that,” she says, “but … do you have any idea where they are now? Lizzie and Alex?”

  “No.” This isn’t quite shouted, but it’s close. “That’s why I came up here. I can’t reach her. She’s not answering her phone.” He raises his left hand, holds it up for a moment, almost threateningly, and then, in frustration, slaps his thigh with it, and really hard. “It’s been almost a week.”

  “Right.”

  It’s sudden, but the sense hits her now—ineluctable, inarguable—that this is over. The situation has reached critical mass. There’s simply no way she can contain it, or hold out for more. “Look,” she says, “I may have it wrong, I may be putting two and two together here and getting five, but…” She exhales and looks down at the bar, at her keys, at her phone.

  How to say this.

  “What?”

  She looks up at him again. “These recent shootings in Manhattan? The Wall
Street guys? It’s my belief that Julian Robert Coady is … involved. Actually maybe both him and his brother.”

  “What the fuck?”

  This he does shout. The barman turns, looks over, but Ellen raises a hand to keep him at bay.

  “Look,” she says, half in a whisper now, “I’ve only literally just put this together myself. It’s still circumstantial, but…”

  A pale Frank Bishop stares at her for a second. Then, as though he’s forgotten something, he turns to the bar, picks up his glass, drains it, and puts it down again.

  He turns back to face her.

  “What did you say your name was?”

  A tremor in his voice.

  “Ellen Dorsey.”

  “Well, Ellen, you’re going to have to explain all of this to me, and you’d better make it fast, because my head is just about ready to explode.”

  So she does. She explains it to him, quickly and efficiently. No point doing it any other way. But passing the story on like this also means it’ll very soon be out of her hands. Because really, in the circumstances, what does she think Frank Bishop is going to do with it?

  “Jesus Christ.”

  His voice is calm now, quiet. He reaches into his jacket pocket and takes out his cell phone. He holds it up.

  “I—I have to call … Lizzie’s mother.”

  He gets off the stool and takes a few steps away from the bar. There is a slowness to his movements, an exaggerated steadiness, a concentration, as though he is drunk and trying not to show it. He’s actually in good shape, and handsome, sort of, with tight-cropped, graying hair. But he has a weary look to him as well, tired eyes, tired posture.

  When he is far enough away, Ellen turns to her own phone and checks for messages, e-mails, tweets. Then she uses some of the coordinates she gathered back at that table in the Cabbage Patch for a quick data sweep through the Atherton social mediasphere.

  With one eye on Bishop, who’s managing to keep his voice under control—though not his body language, that’s becoming increasingly agitated—she worms her way through half a dozen Twitter accounts.

  It’s all anyone is talking about. A localized micro trend. Lizzie Bishop, her old man, that journalist.

  Alex Coady.

  Those two guys this morning.

  Ellen stops, rereads that one.

  This is getting a little creepy now. And those two guys asking questions this morning? Feds #noquestionaboutit

  Ellen feels a weird sensation shooting down her spine.

  Feds?

  She quickly finds Geek Girl’s number and sends her a text.

  There were two guys asking questions this morning?

  It’s a long shot. Or maybe it isn’t. She’ll find out soon enough.

  Frank Bishop turns around and looks at her, real fear in his eyes now. He walks the few steps back to the bar and reaches out to his stool for support. “My wife, ex-wife, is freaking out. Of course.” He swallows loudly. “She wants to know who you are.”

  Ellen nods.

  “Because she—Deb’s a lawyer—she says the cops’ll have been getting hundreds of crank calls on this since it started and we’ll need something to get their attention. To break through the firewall. And that’s you.”

  Ellen nods again. “I know. And I know who to call.” She pauses. “I was going to do it anyway, but I wanted to talk to you first.”

  The message alert on her cell phone pings.

  She puts a hand out to pick it up, but then pauses. “I’m going to look at this,” she says. “Okay? It might be relevant.”

  He nods.

  She reads the message quickly.

  Just heard about this from someone else. Two suits, this morning, but asking about Alex Coady not Lizzie Bishop xxx.

  Ellen looks back up.

  “Seems the cops are already on it,” she says.

  * * *

  Twenty minutes after Lizzie gets back to the apartment, she hears the key in the door. She’s sitting at the table, textbook open in front of her.

  Trying to appear normal.

  Heart racing.

  She doesn’t know what she’s going to do, or say—she just has this overwhelming sense of needing to see Alex, to envelop him, to let him know that she knows, and that it’s okay. All week there has been this poisonous tension between them that she’s hated, silences, sighs, deflected looks, things half spoken. She didn’t understand what it was, and attributed it to Julian’s influence over him, to the force of Julian’s toxic personality. She feels awful now, realizing that it was more than likely the unimaginable pressure that Alex had put himself under, and that she certainly wasn’t helping by being needy.

  Also, she’s not allowing herself, at least for the moment, to dwell too much on what Alex has done, and what it might mean—other than what it says about his relationship with Julian.

  Because—to her mind—it reverses things.

  It puts Alex in charge, which is where she’s always thought he belongs. Julian is noisy and pushy, but Alex is the quiet stillness at the center of things. When Julian launches into a rant about the bankers or whatever, all she wants to do is scream or run away. When Alex talks about the same thing, in his subtler, more measured tones, she listens, and is soothed, seduced, won over.

  The door opens now, and when she looks up, she sees it immediately—it’s in their faces, in their body language. No doubt it was there all along, but for her this is a realignment, a correction, and she wants to make amends.

  Julian comes in first, lumbering to the table and heaving his backpack onto it. He grunts something at her, sits down, and starts stroking that ridiculous, barely noticeable goatee of his.

  Alex glides in behind him.

  Lizzie catches his eye and smiles. He doesn’t smile back, but that’s okay. He sits on the arm of the couch, leans forward, and starts massaging his temples.

  On the other days when they’ve come in like this, exhausted, hardly able to speak, Lizzie has remained quiet herself and stayed out of their way.

  Not this evening. She wants to know where they’ve been all day, and what they’re planning next. She wants to open this up, and let them know whose side she’s on—let Alex know it’s alright, let him know that more than anything else they’re alright. But just as she’s about to speak, Julian looks over at her, brow furrowing, and says, “There’s something different about her.”

  Alex raises his head. “What?”

  Lizzie feels the air thicken around her.

  “She knows,” Julian says. “Look at her.” He stands up slowly, and points. “She’s been out. She knows.”

  Alex stands up as well, rising from the edge of the couch, and glares at her.

  Lizzie pushes the chair she’s sitting in back a little. What is it? Are her cheeks flushed from all the walking? Is she still perspiring?

  “Yes,” she says, a crack in her voice, “I went out, so what. I know what you’ve been doing.” She gets up from the chair. “I watched some TV earlier, they showed that clip on the news, but listen—”

  Julian bangs his fist on the table. “Jesus Christ.”

  “Lizzie,” Alex says, his tone calm, but also direct and clinical, “have you spoken to anyone? Have you told anyone?”

  She looks into his eyes. “Oh, Alex…” She pauses, lips parted. If only they could stay like this forever, and let everything outside their line of vision, everything else in the room, in the world—that table, Julian’s backpack, Julian himself, New York, the news—dissolve to nothing. “No,” she says at last, but softly, in a whisper, still maintaining eye contact.

  Julian shakes his head. “Dumb-assed bitch.” He turns and scowls at Alex. “I told you a hundred times this was a bad idea.”

  There is a pause. Then Alex says, calmly, without redirecting his gaze, “Shut the fuck up, Julian.”

  “What?”

  Lizzie swallows, and once again the room begins to spin.

  But then it stops.

  Because there�
��s … a creaking sound.

  They all turn toward the door, then freeze.

  “What was that?” Julian says, in a loud whisper.

  Alex looks at him. “Someone’s there.” He reaches for the backpack on the table. Then he turns to Lizzie, eyes widening, and nods at the door.

  She moves swiftly toward it, and senses equally swift movement behind her. At the door, she narrows her right eye in on the peephole—imagining for a second, she doesn’t know why, that it’s her father she’ll see, a dreamlike Frank in fish-eye, standing there, shuffling anxiously, waiting. What she sees instead—as a rap, tap sounds on the door, followed immediately, almost stopping her heart, by a shouted “POLICE, SEARCH WARRANT, OPEN THE DOOR”—is a retreating mass of black that quickly forms into the shape of a man, revealing behind him a hallway lined with other men, all in black, all heavily armed.

  Lizzie spins around.

  Julian has his back against the wall and is straining to see out of the window. Alex is standing in the middle of the room with a gun in his hand.

  “Jesus,” Lizzie whispers, all her limbs starting to tremble, “there’s a fucking SWAT team out there.”

  Alex nods his head again, to the side this time, indicating for her to move.

  She hesitates, but then slides over toward the kitchen.

  “We’re armed in here,” he shouts. “We’ve got explosives. Back off. Back off now.”

  From this angle just inside the kitchen door, Lizzie stares at Alex, and the only thing in her head, the only thought she can process, is that she’s never heard him shout before.

  FOUR

  When it became apparent in April 1913 that newly elected President Woodrow Wilson was ready to do the unthinkable and concede ground on union recognition, the industrialist, banker, and Vaughan family patriarch Charles A. Vaughan was quoted in the New York Journal as saying, “It would be nice if some day we could have a real businessman as president.”

  —House of Vaughan (p. 164)

  10

  OUT ON MAIN STREET, in front of the Smokehouse Tavern, with Frank Bishop standing next to her, Ellen finds the number and calls her contact in the NYPD. She lays it out for this guy, a homicide detective, just as she did for Bishop inside at the bar, but this time she does it faster, and almost in a sort of code, or shorthand. The contact listens, interjecting only once with a low whistle of disbelief. This is when she mentions that the Feds might already be involved. He says he’ll run it up the line and get right back to her.