The diner booth was comfortable, the coffee was hot and bracing, and the bagel was warm and crisp, but as hungry as Brandon was, he could hardly get it down. Had he inadvertently killed Lucy Merchant? How would he live with himself if he had? Should he go straight to the police?
A heavy anchor was dragging him down into a place with which he was all too familiar. His arms and legs felt numb. The sensation, he knew, was depression invading his body, taking hold, supplanting all the happy and hopeful feelings he’d felt this morning after leaving Judith Greenwald’s office.
He signaled the waitress to bring his check, still trying to make sense of what was happening. Why had Baiba really asked him to lie about the contents of that cup? Had she known that something bad was in it? Had Hodges known, too? Were they trying to set him up, to make it look as if he had killed Lucy? If that were so, then running away from Park Manor tonight would only make him look guiltier.
He paid his check and left the diner. He stood on the street, not knowing where to go. If he got on a train and went home right now, the anchor would drag him all the way to the bottom. Voices in that blackness would speak to him, and he knew what they would say. You’re all alone. You have no one. You don’t even have a job. Give up. It’s too hard.
Instead he turned west and walked toward Fifth Avenue. He sat on a bench a block north of the Metropolitan Museum. His hands were cold and his ears burned. He fished in his backpack for his knit cap. The lanterns along the edge of Central Park were lit, and the sky in front of him, facing east, was charcoal. Behind him, on the west side of the park, the final rays of setting sun would be casting a deep purple hue across the sky. In the Nostalgia Neighborhood, Mr. Lane would be wandering—he always wandered at this hour. Maybelle would be saying Where Brandon gone to? and Josie would be saying We better off without him. Or her, he thought. She would probably say We better off without her.
Then Baiba’s bloodshot eyes stared out at him from his mind. Baiba had pretended to care about him all these months. She was always touching his arm, winking at him, telling him how good he looked. And she had given him the three thousand dollars. Her act of generosity—what he thought had been generosity—had given him so much hope and confidence. She had made him feel special. It wasn’t the cold hard cash she had placed in his palms; it was the fact that this beautiful woman, who would never in her life have to apologize for who or what she was, had accepted who he wanted to be and was helping him on his journey. But it was all an act. He had never been special to her. And for all he knew, the money she’d given him had come straight from her banker boyfriend.
Tears burned in his eyes. Well, he didn’t want that money. He certainly wasn’t going to use it to pay for his operation. He didn’t want to have to think about Baiba having sex with Thomas Merchant every time he looked at his new chest in the mirror. Goddamn you, Baiba, he thought. Why did you do this to me?
And then he remembered Baiba telling him why she kept going back to Merchant. He brought flowers. He gave me another little Tiffany bag. If she really hadn’t liked what he did to her, would she have gone back to him just for flowers and jewelry? He told me he had to see me or he would go crazy. Had she really fallen for that?
Brandon rubbed his palms together to get the blood flowing to his numb fingers. What if Baiba wasn’t an innocent victim? There was no denying she’d had choke marks around her neck today, but what if she’d enjoyed getting those marks as much as Merchant had enjoyed putting them there?
Brandon closed his eyes, and all these thought fragments shifted together like tangrams into one monstrous picture in his mind. Baiba had set him up. She had murdered Lucy Merchant. She hadn’t called him over this morning because she’d needed him—her whole rape story was a big lie. He took me to the Four Seasons, she had said. It was so romantic. Baiba was mesmerized by Merchant’s wealth and attention. And she was afraid it would all go away. She knew better than anyone that Lucy Merchant could easily live five more years in her Nostalgia cocoon and that Merchant couldn’t possibly divorce Lucy without looking like a scoundrel. And she probably knew that sooner or later, he would tire of her and move on to a different attractive blond—that all the Tiffany gifts and meals at the Four Seasons would become a thing of the past—unless she seized her opportunity and became the new Mrs. Merchant. And so she had planned a murder using Brandon as her devoted pawn.
He rocketed off the bench. How would Baiba answer to those charges, he wondered. He stepped off the curb and waited for an opening in the downtown traffic. Then he jaywalked across Fifth Avenue and headed back in the direction of her apartment. What other lies would she tell him?