Brooklyn Gothic, page 9
“Why don’t you find lawyers you can trust?”
“Casey, you find me lawyers I can trust and I’ll find you a diamond-encrusted unicorn you can fly to your job writing about nip slips.”
“I quit that,” she sputtered. “And at least I earn a living.”
At her jab, he looked so anguished, she was ashamed, and almost reached out to touch him. How is it they’d been so intimate that night and now were here, a vast ocean of space between them, and she couldn’t touch him?
“Sorry,” she said, quietly.
“It’s fine, I deserved that.”
“What happened with the other victim, Ray something?” she asked, wanting to move them past this moment of hurt. “I never got to him.”
He sighed and stroked his espresso cup. A sudden flash of how she had kissed his fingers during their night together came to her and she pretended to brush something off her lap.
“Things went downhill right after and I’ve been so busy with doctors, lawyers, real estate brokers, estate auctions. People coming in and out, buying artwork and antiques. I’m selling the house, though no one can move in until I expire. I don’t have time to do the research and I don’t think I could stomach it. Sharon can’t do it. She’s on a different time zone and would have no interest. My other lawyer, Max, is hopeless with anything except numbers and contracts. It’s so difficult to hire good people.”
Until I expire. Casey hadn’t heard much after that, and wanted to order him not to talk in such a blasé fashion.
He blew on his espresso and took a sip, then sprawled an elbow across the table. “I was wrong to fire you. Sometimes I don’t know how to handle what is happening to me and I make bad decisions. That was a bad one and I want to undo it if possible. I have limited time and I know you can get the job done right.”
Her skin went clammy. “You want me to come back?”
“If you could, for the last one. Ray Albanese, his name is. Are you hungry?” Looking around for the waitress, he said, without looking at her, “And there’s another person I’d like to help. There could be others later.” Seeing that the waitress was busy, he returned his attention to her. “You don’t have to travel unless you want to.”
“I have a new job. It will give me health insurance.”
“I’ll pay you as much as makes it worth it for you.”
Though she was aware that money was a genuine practicality in the world, she was annoyed with how he tried to solve everything through its means.
“Is there any reason Miss Brock wouldn’t want me there?” she asked.
His arm froze with his cup halfway to his mouth. “Miss Brock?”
“The day I left, she said I should stay away from you.”
His mouth quivered a fraction before he took a sip of espresso. “I suppose she heard us. And she… she was my nanny from when I was six years old, mostly at the country home in Greenwich, where we were based during my childhood. She left shortly before my mother died when I was sixteen. My point being, I wasn’t the most admirable child or teen. I was interested in women very early, but not interested in being with any of them for long. Miss Brock saw a lot of girls around the house, crying or arguing with me.”
“So you’ve changed,” said Casey, raising a brow.
“I have changed. Now my reasoning was the exact opposite—that I didn’t want to hurt you. Miss Brock doesn’t understand that I’m not that person anymore. Maybe she had my history in mind when she said that.” He sighed heavily. “Or she didn’t want you to get attached to me, knowing my fate.”
Miss Brock’s blunt tone hadn’t sounded like concern for Casey’s feelings, more like a command, Casey thought.
“I don’t blame you if you don’t want to come back,” Mr. Foster continued. “You could think about it, though I’d need to know fairly soon.”
She watched the yang shape of white froth bobbing in her coffee, feeling as if she were free falling back into chaos. But there was the magnet pull of making a difference in people’s lives, as opposed to the dreck she was now churning out.
And the bare truth: If he had limited time, she wanted to be around him for that time.
“Maybe I can finish,” she said, simultaneously relieved and apprehensive about her decision. “But I’d need six months’ salary. You’re asking me to quit a permanent job for a temporary one. And I need half upfront in case you fire me again without cause.”
“Of course,” he said. “But… would you mind working from home?”
“Why?” she asked, voice flat.
“Well, I mean…” His lips curved to the side in their usual way, and he shrugged, as if the answer should be obvious.
“Mr. Foster, no offense, but I’m not madly in love with you. I can work in your house and be professional. What happened once happened, but that doesn’t mean it has to happen again. And they’re doing construction next to my building,” she lied. “Jackhammers going all day, I won’t get a thing done.” Before he could suggest she work at a coffee shop, she went on, “The house is big enough for us to stay out of each other’s way.”
“Is it?” he asked, smiling a little wearily.
“Yes,” she said, nudging his foot with her sneaker. “It is.”
18
The Fourth Victim
It was a beautiful day, without any hint that one of the most horrifying events in the country’s history about to unfold. The sky was robin’s egg blue, not a whisper of cloud in sight. The air was warm and comforting, almost summery.
Ray Albanese had a meeting at nine a.m. and he glanced at his computer for the time. It was 8:45 a.m. He took a few sips of the coffee he’d bought at the cart outside of the Fulton Street subway, and that’s when he felt it. A rumble, like a medium-sized earthquake, and a pressure drop in the air. The overhead lights flicked and buzzed like hornets.
His coworkers were looking around, asking what had happened. He heard a whoop whoop and an announcement, telling everyone the building was secure and to stay put. But there was a light tap on his shoulder, whether from a coworker or a spectral influence he would never know, and he decided to leave.
Others were gathering up their belongings and leaving too, so Ray followed them out a side exit. In the hallway, a large crowd of people was headed down the stairs, and nervous babble amplified within the staircase walls.
A plane had clipped the North Tower. It had to have been pilot error, or pilot heart attack, or one of those small plane daredevils who wanted a close up of the building. Remember some crazy person did that a few months ago? Some people cracked jokes. Going to get my exercise today, bad day to wear heels, bad day to be fat, ha. Ray figured he would have an interesting story to tell his wife that evening.
Down, down, down they went, in a single file line, slowed up by the twisty stairwell with its frequent landings.
Then a double boom exploded over their heads, boom BOOM. Then a sound like a million windows shattering, a million tons of metal screeching against metal, like the world’s biggest, loudest, most spectacular car crash. The building swayed, and Ray’s stomach fell out from his ribcage. He had the absolute certainty the tower was about to snap in half and plummet. But, slowly, with a deafening creak, creak, creak, the building groaned upright. The gassy smell of fuel hit Ray’s nostrils, so strong it shimmered before his eyes.
All around him came the word bomb. Bomb, bomb, bomb. Terrorism.
A woman was listening to a small transistor radio. “Another plane hit the building!” she screamed. Another plane? Ray could not take this in. Two planes, not a bomb. Two planes.
Then another woman blundered up the stairwell, breathless and choking. “We can’t go down there.” She described a hellish scene of pitch black smoke and debris-blocked stairwells. “We need to go to the roof.”
People clustered together, debating. One woman said she thought the roof was locked. A man said it wasn’t, and that was the best place to get help, helicopters could pick them up. Several people disengaged from the discussion and slid down the stairwell, confusing everyone with their determination to head into certain death. Those who were left behind turned and slogged back up the stairs. Even with the urgency, it was a slog. Ray made the split second decision to join them.
He had passed the 80th floor when he heard a far away cry. He stopped, listening. The stifled cry again, more like a rising scream now, and the words coming through to him, “Help, I can’t move! Help!”
Much of the door to the 81st floor was blown off and he turned to the side and slithered through. Bitter billows of smoke stabbed his eyes. He drew his shirt up over his nose and mouth, holding his breaths shallow at the top of his lungs, and spitting them back out as soon as he could.
Then, he’d felt what he would later tell the day’s documentarians was a large pocket of clean air. It engulfed him like a fresh breeze splitting open a blanket of stultifying humidity.
“Help, help, help!” the man kept screaming.
Ray found the man under a desk with debris tent-poled on all sides of him.
“Hold on, buddy,” Ray said. “We’re getting out of here.”
Ray began hurling aside torn lights, wires, blasted air conditioning ducts, and hunks of metal and concrete from the disemboweled ceiling. Using Ray’s shoulder as a crutch, the man lugged himself to his feet. His face was covered in what looked like early frost, hair and eyelashes completely white.
It was so dark, with only the dim, eerie glow of emergency exit signs casting light. There were large, white, rectangular snowflakes swirling all around them, snowflakes Ray came to realize were thousands of floating papers.
Halfway to the stairwell, they heard high-pitched, desperate, unintelligible cries.
Ray and the man hobbled about, calling, “Where are you?” and “Keep talking!” They found two women trapped in the bathroom by a large slab of wall that had sliced down from the floor above, their frantic fingers clutching at the top. It was too high for them to jump over.
Ray let go of the injured man. He found a chair and pushed it against the slag of drywall. He stood on it and peered over. The women’s faces were freeze-framed with terror.
“Give me your hand!” he ordered.
The women flapped their arms as if they were being dragged under by rip tides.
“You first! Quickly!” He pointed at the smaller woman. Her fingers flittered over his and he felt her coal-hot palm. Pumped to superhuman strength with adrenaline, he dragged her up and over the wall. He did the same for the other woman.
The four of them held onto each other and wound their way through the ash and rubble and blizzard of papers. They pushed on, the clean pocket of air surrounding them.
In the stairwell, they descended as rust-colored pipe water sluiced under their feet. The injured man leaned on Ray and told him, “Brother, you’re my brother now and forever. I had a dream not to come in and so I didn’t come in. Yesterday. Some premonition, eh? Very helpful.”
Their deep laughter echoed around the stairwell.
Down they went, pushing aside debris and slags of mangled sheetrock, down, down, down, hearing cracking deep within the building, like a frozen pond expanding and contracting.
They would be four of the last people to escape Tower Two from above the impact zone.
Ten years later, shortly after the anniversary, Ray Albanese returned to his Long Island home from a barbecue at two a.m. On the moonlit and lonely side street, his skull was crushed.
The news reports Casey read said it appeared to be an attempted carjacking, the weapon likely a hammer; Ray had been caught at a stoplight near his house.
Casey figured Ray had unwittingly made himself an easy target. On social media, she found his old account, where he’d shared several pictures of his brand new car, a beet-red Range Rover. He’d also announced he was going to a barbecue the night he was killed.
She guessed the perpetrator had waited for him to get home, and perhaps hit Ray thinking the blow would stun him, not kill him. Or Ray had put up a fight and the perpetrator had panicked or become angry.
She also figured whoever had done it must live nearby to have gotten to the scene without a car, or had been working with someone. The person had also avoided committing the crime in Ray’s driveway, where it may have been caught on home security camera.
In the end, Ray hadn’t even been killed for his car, as the perpetrator had fled after hitting him, probably realizing the mistake that had been made.
Because of Ray’s heroism in the World Trade Center, his murder was widely covered in the press. Ray had two sons who were now sixteen and seventeen. Since their father had survived the terrorist attack, they hadn’t qualified for scholarships for children of victims of 9/11. In her report, Casey suggested Mr. Foster pay for their college educations.
Since the pair was avoiding each other, she dropped the report on Ray Albanese outside of his closed study door.
Downstairs, she headed to the pale violet room below Mr. Foster’s study, where Miss Brock had shown her the stripped wall, blaming it on a burst pipe leak. Casey had seen workmen traipsing in and out for the past few days and was curious about their progress. The room was misty with white dust, and the lath was still in place, but the plaster had been scooped out. Wondering if she could see inside the wall, she walked up to it, leaving a fingerprint on a dusty slat.
“I said I would.”
Mr. Foster’s voice rung so closely that she looked behind her, expecting to see him, but he wasn’t there.
“You said that before.”
Miss Brock sounded farther away, slightly muffled, but Casey could still make out every word. They were above her in his study and their voices were slipping out of the denuded wall. She turned her ear to a thin hollow in the lath.
“I’m only advising to take a precaution,” Miss Brock said. “It would be sensible. Considering what you’ve asked of me.”
“Yes, thank you.” Footfalls hammered the ceiling. “I said I would and I will. But I need to find the key.”
“Samuel.” There was a pause. “I don’t understand letting her have the run of the house.”
“Oh, not this again.”
“I’m telling you what I saw.”
“I’m sure it’s fine, Gladys. She’s only here to do a job.”
The clicking of heels. Another pause. “Not from what I heard.”
More footfalls. “Well, that was a mistake. I guess there’s still some manhood left in me after all. It won’t be happening again. But you act as if you aren’t with me anymore. Are you backing out?”
“I never said that. I’m only advising you to be more cautious. Find the key.”
The footfalls intensified. Casey realized Mr. Foster was leaving the study. She blew dust on the slat to cover up her fingerprint and dashed out of the room. He was coming down the stairs and she fiddled inside her tote, as if searching for something.
“Still here, Casey?” With a blank look on his face, he stopped on the staircase and checked his watch. “Little late for you?”
“Hi!” she burst out, staring up at him with a rictus smile. “The report is outside your door. Didn’t you see it?”
“I saw it. Did you leave it just now?” He shifted and gripped the banister.
“No, earlier.” Her hand leaped up and waved at him. “See you tomorrow.”
Outside, she was wound up from the close call. He’d likely thought she’d put the report outside of his door at the moment he and Miss Brock were having their conversation.
I don’t understand letting her have the run of the house.
So it wasn’t Casey’s imagination. It had never been her imagination. Miss Brock didn’t want her around. But why? And what had she “seen” Casey do?
You act as if you aren’t with me anymore. Are you backing out?
Be more cautious. Find the key.
These two were up to something. But what it was, Casey had no clue.
19
“Case, we need to talk.”
Astrid was standing in the living room, looking mopey. Still trying to pull strands of clarity out of the conversation she’d overheard between Mr. Foster and Miss Brock, Casey was in no mood for a talk. Plus she could tell from the expression on her roommate’s face that this wouldn’t be good.
“Tyler really needs to get his career going, so he’s moving to LA.”
“But there’s plenty of restaurants in New York,” Casey said, a wink in her tone.
Astrid’s green eyes went wide. “Come on, you know he’s an actor. He’s got an agent willing to take him on out there. And I’m sick of New York and the high rent and have wanted to try acting myself. So, why not go with him?” She shrugged.
Casey sighed. She’d been waiting for something to make her decision for her, and here it was. “Well, I’d miss you like crazy but of course you should go for it if that’s what you want.”
Astrid nodded, pressing her lips together.
“In fact, I’ve been thinking about moving myself after the project ends,” Casey said. “I could stay with my parents, save money while I look into grad schools.”
They laughed at each other with jittery excitement and awkward sadness, and then hugged.
“I’d love to have my name off the lease by the end of next month. What about you?” Astrid asked.
“I’m not sure. He’d said there would be another beneficiary, but he hasn’t given me anyone. I might ask him if I can work from my parents’ house. It’s not like he needs me there, he barely talks to me anymore.” Her voice sounded more dejected than she’d intended.
“Sorry, Case,” Astrid said, knowing for once when to drop a subject. “Oh, I forgot.”
At the kitchen island, she plucked an envelope out of a sea of junk mail. “I know you ignore your mail. And looook. Handwriting.”
Casey didn’t recognize the handwriting and there was no return address. She slit the envelope open with a paring knife.
