She walked beside him with her head down, her arms folded, watching the sidewalk pass beneath her feet. He was learning that the best kind of stuff came from Andy when he allowed her these long, silent times, so he’d ridden beside her in the Uber to the front of his apartment in Dayton in silence, and now he walked in silence, too, watching the colors and expression change in her face as she argued with herself. Or plotted or planned, or came up with lies. It was cooler than it should have been, and windy, and she was walking too fast. He knew that he’d unsettled something in her by turning up in her private space the night before. Felt strangely guilty about it. Sure, Andy’s apartment was set up like the rest of her charade, so the idea that someone could penetrate it had obviously crossed her mind. But she was disturbed now. Off-balance. He had the odd instinct to comfort her, this woman he didn’t know at all, who was experiencing some anguish he couldn’t possibly guess at.
They were standing on the corner of Washington Avenue before he realized it. Andy stopped and turned and took a hair band out from her jeans pocket, swept up her hair. To an outsider, it might have appeared like they’d paused to do that—to allow her to get her hair up out of the wind. But her eyes were on the liquor store on the corner.
“On your mission to find out what happened to Luna,” Andy said, “you door-knocked this street. You were looking for CCTV footage. Trying to discover what people had seen that night.”
“Right,” Ben said.
“You got the guy in the liquor store to let you look at his camera feed,” she continued. “It showed Luna’s car driving along this street toward Gabe’s grandmother’s place at seven twelve P.M. About five minutes after she left your apartment.”
“That’s right.” Ben pointed to the corner. “She turned and—”
“Don’t point. We’re not solving a crime; we’re heading out to breakfast.”
“Okay.” He shoved his hands in his pockets. “She turned and headed up here. I’d dropped Gabe off with her before. It was normal for her to go this way.”
Andy walked. Ben followed. After a few feet, she slipped an arm around his.
“Oh,” he sighed. “So we are back on?”
“If anyone’s keeping an eye on us, Ben, they’d have seen you stay at my place last night.”
“If that person who’s keeping an eye on us is Matt, you better call an ambulance now,” Ben said. “Because he’s about to come grind me into the sidewalk like a cigarette. I said we were holding off.”
“He’ll get used to it.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
They stopped at a café. Andy took a laminated menu from a stand on the street and pretended to peruse it.
“The next piece of CCTV you managed to get a look at was from this café,” she said. Ben glanced inside. The guy who’d let him come into the office at the back of the café and watch the feed wasn’t there. There were a couple of young waitresses in black aprons swirling around, lifting chairs down from tables, setting out napkin holders. The place wasn’t open yet.
“Luna went by at seven thirteen P.M.,” Ben said. He caught his reflection in the windows of the café. He looked like walking dog shit. “I got a better angle on the car. She was alone in the front seat. Gabriel was in the back.”
Andy wrinkled her nose at something on the menu, replaced it and took his hand and walked on. “The only other piece of footage you got was from the furniture place on the corner down there at the intersection.” She looked ahead.
“Right.” Ben couldn’t see the shop. A row of cafés and clothing boutiques stretched before him. “No sign of Luna. It took a lot of convincing, but the woman who runs the store let me check through the whole day and the next day. Luna never went by.”
“So whatever happened to Luna, it happened on this street,” Andy said.
“Maybe.” Ben shrugged as they stopped to peruse, or pretend to peruse, another menu. “Or the cameras were wrong somehow.”
“Possible. But let’s assume they were not. How did her car get out of the street?”
“I thought maybe someone put it in the back of a truck,” Ben said. “But no trucks big enough to load a car into an enclosed cabin went by. Not in the two days I looked at. And by the third day, I was out here walking the street looking for her car, getting the footage. No trucks. These apartment blocks here? I checked their parking lots. I had to sneak in to do that, because none of the residents would let me beg my way in. But I did it. The car’s not there. Same with the hotel.”
He nodded to the Best Western hotel dominating the center of the street. The circular driveway, where a cab was just pulling in.
“The hotel wouldn’t give me CCTV,” Ben said. “They’ve got policies. Privacy. So I just snuck in. I went down to the parking lot, scoped it out. Her car wasn’t there. I checked the loading docks and the staff parking. And I checked again a week later. Walked all four levels. Not there.”
“I walked them, too,” Andy said. “Yesterday. Before I followed you to Matt’s place.”
Ben stopped.
“The car’s not there,” she confirmed.
“So what are you getting at?”
“I’m getting at how the car could possibly have been there,” Andy said, “without you seeing it.”
Ben stared.
“Let’s sit.”
Ben felt his legs give way as she pushed him into an outdoor chair. They were at a café directly across from the Best Western. He tried to focus on the menu she slid under his fingers, but his eyes kept flicking back to the stained cream exterior of the four-floor building, the uniform red-and-green curtains hanging in every window. A stain-disguising, chaotic, triangular print. On the second floor, a guy with a business shirt undone to his round belly seemed to be staring right back at Ben, brushing his teeth.
“Before it was a Best Western,” Andy said, “that used to be a Marriott. The land was acquired and the hotel was built under the Marriott brand, and that’s what it opened as. The owner was a guy named Raymond Fresco. Longtime hoteling family.”
“So?”
“So, the Best Western we’re looking at right now has a few more interesting features than your regular Best Western,” Andy said. “Because a whole bunch of money was sunk into it when it was created. Before it went bust and changed owners. Raymond Fresco was trying to create a hotel that would appeal to international travelers coming into Newark Liberty who didn’t necessarily want to feel like they were staying at the airport. What he didn’t realize is that people aren’t dumb enough that they’re going to book a nice hotel just outside the airport limits. You’re either resigned to the aircraft noise, and you stay at the airport, or you get somewhere nice in the city.”
“You’re losing me here.” Ben held his head. The waitress had come by, and he looked at her pleadingly. “Coffee, please. Black. Strong. I’m talking jet-fuel strong.”
The waitress smirked and took Andy’s order and went away. Andy pulled Ben’s hands down from his skull and held them.
“The reason you didn’t see Luna’s car in the Best Western parking lot three days after she went missing may have been because it was underneath another car,” she said.
“Underneath?”
“The hotel has hydraulic parking stackers. On the very bottom floor.”
Ben frowned.
“Underneath twenty of the parking spaces on the bottom level is another parking space,” Andy said. “A hydraulic lift tilts the top car backward, revealing a hidden space underneath. When the bottom floor of the hotel parking lot is full and all the cars are level, it just looks like a regular lot full of parked cars. But there’s a hidden layer underneath. Raymond Fresco installed the hydraulic system to add an extra twenty spaces because he wanted the hotel to be able to accommodate everyone’s car if the hotel reached capacity.”
Ben’s mind raced. He felt sick.
“You can see the parking out here is terrible.” Andy gestured to the street. “It’s one-way. What fine hotel doesn’t have space for everyone’s car? Fresco didn’t have enough money to add a whole other level to the hotel lot but he had enough to add a row of hydraulic spaces.”
“Do you know the car isn’t down there right now?” Ben’s chest felt tight. “Can we go look?”
“No. I’m not sure it’s not there right now,” Andy said. “It may be. But we can’t look. And chances are, it isn’t there.”
“How do you know that?”
“I don’t know,” Andy said. “I don’t know any of this for sure. I’m working on it. But I have a theory. See, the only people who can access and operate the hydraulic stacked car spaces are the valets, right? So Luna would have had to give her car over to a valet for it to have ended up in a hidden space. But the stacked spaces are the very last spaces the valets would have used that night. Because it’s a pain in the ass to get a car out of the stacked space. The hotel would need to have been at capacity for my theory to work.”
“Was it at capacity that night?”
“It may have been.” Andy nodded.
“All this may, may, may.” Ben gripped his head. “Nothing’s for certain.”
“Not yet,” Andy said. “You’ve got to be patient.”
He let out a long breath.
“I’ve found social media posts suggesting there was a wedding at the Weequahic Golf Club that night,” Andy said. “It’s one street over, across the park. Makes sense for a lot of the guests who didn’t want to fork out and stay at the club to have been staying at the Best Western instead. And the wedding started at six P.M. So by the time Luna rolled along at seven thirteen P.M., the parking lot under the Best Western would have been pretty full. She may have ended up in a hydraulic space.”
“So wait…” Ben pressed his fingers into his aching eyes, trying to block out the light, the noise of the street. “Luna gave her car to a valet. It went into a hidden hydraulic space. Two days later, when I came looking for it, it was still in that hidden space?”
“Possibly.”
“What about seven days later?” he said. “When I checked again? Would the valets have just let it sit there?”
“I don’t know.”
“We have to go look!”
“We can’t,” Andy said.
“Why the hell not?”
“Because you’ve accepted that Luna ran out on you.” She patted his hand, smiled. “And we’re just a pair of firefighters having breakfast on their morning off.”
Ben took his hands from hers, clasped them hard between his knees to stop himself from hurling his cup at the wall. “We have to tell the detective. Simmley.”
“We can’t do that.”
“Why? Why, Andy?”
“Because as far as Detective Simmley knows, the case went away. Only me and Newler, the guy who hired me, know it’s being worked on right now. And that’s how it’s going to stay. For your safety, and mine.”
“But that’s not true,” Ben said. “The dog walkers.”
“Those people who you saw in the street, they’d be a surveillance team of Newler’s,” Andy said. “They wouldn’t know the full picture. And the cop you targeted with the letter—Johnson. Once he handed your case over to Newler and the FBI for a check-over, he’d have been told to walk away.”
Ben wrung his hands. “So when are you going to go look if the car’s there?”
“I’m working on it.”
Ben gripped his head again.
“I don’t think it’s there.” Andy pulled his hands down. “But I’m not sure what their policies are. I’ve been watching the valets, and there’s one who’s kind of shifty-looking. A little weak. I’ll need to do my research, see if he’s got a background I can use. I’m planning to approach him, tonight maybe, and see if I can get some information out of him. About whether someone came back for the car after a week. About how long the hotel would allow an unclaimed car to sit in its lot if someone didn’t come back, and which towing company would have picked it up if the owner couldn’t be located. I would assume they’d give an owner a week to claim their car.”
Their coffees came. Ben snatched at his, gulped it. It was too hot but he didn’t care.
“If no one came back for the car after a week, would they have called the police?” he asked. “I mean, they’ve got the towing fee to try to recover, right? And the days it sat there running up a parking tab.”
“Maybe.”
“We gotta get the guest list for the hotel,” Ben said. “And the valet sheet. They’d have written up all the cars they booked in.”
She just sipped her coffee and looked over the rim at him. Ben sighed.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. I’m sorry. Turns out you’re not just baiting me. You’re not an insolent beat cop.”
“Indolent.”
“Whatever. You have been working on this the whole time.”
He stared at his coffee; it tasted like acid on his teeth. He could see gathering storm clouds beyond the café’s flapping awning reflected in it. Grave imaginings were swirling in his mind, about Luna meeting someone in one of the rooms in the hotel above them, about that meeting going bad somehow. Luna strangled on a bed. Gabe drowned in a bathtub. Their bodies loaded into suitcases, wheeled through the lobby or downstairs to the parking lot.
“Why did she come here?” Ben asked. He couldn’t look at Andy. Didn’t want to see the knowing in her eyes. Because she would have an idea. She’d have seen this a lot, throughout whatever dark travels she’d been on before she wound up with him. Women who had secrets; those secrets getting them killed. “Whatever she was doing that night—why’d she have to keep it from me?”
He finally dared to look at her, and again he thought he caught a flash of the real her, whoever she was. She looked like she was genuinely sorry for him. Like she was feeling the hurt and confusion coming off him, and the hands that were holding his now were trying to cradle that hurt, ease the weight of it. She’d told him in the cab before she organized to have his ass beat that she wasn’t sorry for him. That he was a thief. A criminal. But Ben was almost certain that before she turned away, something connected between them. A shared longing, sparking, sizzling, being hidden away.
Thunder rumbled somewhere, and the wind lifted Andy’s ponytail off her shoulder. He watched it tangle in the breeze, had a vague memory of her body next to his in the bed, a nightmare quickening her breath. He’d lain there and listened to the dream coursing through her body until it peaked with a gasp and a jolt and a trip to the bathroom to wash her face. An hour or so later, when a second storm broke on the plains and wildlands of her mind, he’d reached down between the sheets and gripped her sweaty palm until it passed.
He jogged up the steps to his front door before looking at who was standing under the awning, taking shelter from the rain. The shoulders of Jake’s T-shirt were damp, and he had glassy, hungover eyes.
“What are you doing here?” Ben brushed the rain out of his hair. An icy thump hit his sternum, as he imagined Jake having seen him part with Andy on Washington Avenue only minutes before. But oh, she was good. So good. Little snatches of chance, coincidences and alignments, could sink them, and Andy knew that. If Jake had indeed seen them around the corner, he’d have seen them holding hands. Arms linked, maybe. “You been waiting long?”
“Nah, nah, I just got here.” Jake watched him buzz his way through to the foyer. “I was over at my mother’s place mowing the lawn.”
Jake’s mother had a small place over in Metuchen, Ben knew, about a half hour away from where they stood, a property he and his sister had inherited and didn’t seem to be able to agree on selling. While Ben’s place was kind of on the way home to Harlem, where Jake had a share apartment, Ben had so much on his mind that it took him a second to put together why Jake was there.
“I was about to send you a text. I need a favor.”
Ben stopped dead. “Don’t tell me.”
“Well…”
“Jake.” Ben turned, lowered his voice. “You just got paid a hundred grand yesterday. Don’t tell me that it’s all gone already.”
Jake swiped back his damp hair, his cheeks were rosy.
The humidity in the stoop had spilled inside. New York’s stinking heat sliding languidly around the streets like a great yellow snake, squeezing out all the breathable air.
“You got a fucking problem.” Ben shook his head. “And that’s—”
“It’s not what you think.”
“—that’s a problem. For all of us. These dirtbag loan sharks you’re dealing with: How long before they start wondering where the hell you’re getting all this money from? They’re gonna find out you’re dirty. You could bring us all down with this, Jake.”
“I know. I know.”
“You’ve got to go to rehab. They have groups for this. It’s an addiction.”
“I’ve stopped.” The kid held his hands up. “I stopped a while ago.”
“Bullshit.”
Jake shoved his hands in his pockets and looked toward the doors like he was considering throwing the whole favor in. “The hundred k from yesterday was supposed to get me square with everyone. I just forgot about the vig on one loan. It’s only five grand.”
Ben opened his mailbox and raked the mail out, stuffed it in his back pocket. He was muttering to himself, so angry the words were actually coming out. About how much five grand would have meant to him when he was Jake’s age, when he was trying to raise his little brother on food stamps and cash construction work.
“Five grand,” Jake pushed. “And then—”
“And then what?” Ben slapped the elevator button. “You’re penniless until next payday. So it’s not really five grand, is it, Jake? It’s five-five. Because you know that if I’m nice enough to loan you money, again, to stop you getting your toes cut off, I’m probably nice enough to make sure you don’t have to wash windshields for lunch money as well.”
Jake stared at his wet shoes.
“But you weren’t going to ask for the extra cash,” Ben said. “You were going to wait for me to offer. We’ve done this dance so many times, I’m starting to feel like I should just tell you where my stash is and you can go help yourself when you need to.”
“Benji, can I have the money or not?” Jake whined. “I feel enough like a piece of shit.”
“I don’t have it with me.”
“What?”
“I left my cut at Matt’s. I didn’t go home last night.”
Jake frowned, then one brow lifted. Ben tapped the elevator button twelve more times in rapid succession.
“I can’t go to Matt’s,” Jake said. “He said if I ever come to him asking for money again, he’s going to grind my bones into powder and snort them like cocaine.”
“So I’ll send you a bank transfer.”
“Cash is better.”
Ben just looked at him. Jake winced. “Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Ben. I owe you one.” The elevator doors pinged open. “Oh, there’s a dude up there waiting for you.”
Ben froze in the threshold of the elevator, a blue strip of lights inside each door marking his presence. He turned around. “What dude?”
“I don’t know. Some guy. Like, a buttoned-up guy. I tailgated one of your neighbors through the front doors and went up and he was already there, so I came back down and waited outside.” Jake gestured to the street. “It was awkward. Two dudes standing in the hall waiting for you like that.”
“A ‘buttoned-up’ guy?”
“Yeah.”
“He say his name?”
“I didn’t ask.”
Ben let the elevator doors slide closed on Jake. He put a hand on the wall and tried to suck in air as the numbers ticked upward, but no oxygen was reaching deeper than the top quarter of his lungs. And then it was the top five percent. His mind was swirling, trying to decide what would happen if Jake had just seen a cop standing waiting for him at his apartment. Or the guy “Newler,” who Andy had mentioned. Surely it was one of them. Surely that was who was waiting. And there would be no convincing Jake not to tell the others, Engo or Matt, or he’d make it clear that there were secrets he was keeping from the crew. No lies. Not even about something as trivial as whose puss you’re in. Who would Jake assume the guy was? Or would he not assume at all—would he ask him about it next time they spoke? Would he ask him in front of Matt and Engo?
Ben was unsteady as he exited the elevator and turned down the hall. He had to force himself around the last corner, his legs numb and vision clouded with red throbbing panic as he laid eyes on who it was standing there.
“Oh Jesus,” Ben said. Suddenly the breath came. He sucked in a chestful of sweet, precious air. “Kenny. What the fuck?”
“‘What the fuck’ right back at you.” Kenny was trying to frown, but the Botox or surgery or whatever the hell he’d done to his brow wouldn’t let him. He looked Ben over like he was a homeless guy staggering in from the street. “You look like shit.”
Ben went to the door and unlocked it. His brother smelled as he usually did these days: like a new car. A new Italian car. Ben had a weird impulse to hug him but didn’t. The days when they hugged and Kenny smelled like cheap deodorant and pimple cream were long gone.
“What are you doing here?”
“Just joining the queue of people waiting to see you, I suppose.” Kenny came into the apartment and popped the collar of his business shirt, and the cuffs, which was something he did whenever he walked into a room. Ben didn’t get it. “Who was the little punk with the ponytail? Is he responsible for the black eye?”
Ben went in and pulled two coffee mugs down from the cupboard, and then he put one back up, because fuck Kenny. “You have a key. I don’t know why you didn’t just come in here and wait.”
“Didn’t seem appropriate, given how we left things.”
“Why are you here?”
Kenny was still fiddling with his shirt. “I just came to, uh…”
Ben stopped what he was doing, looked Kenny right in the eye.
He had stepped in as a pseudo-father when his brother was fourteen and he was twenty-two. He couldn’t possibly figure how many times he’d said sorry to Kenny in his life. He’d said sorry for not being able to rescue him out of the system when he was eighteen and legally old enough to take custody of the boy. It didn’t matter that Ben hadn’t even been told about Kenny’s existence until he was nineteen. Or that it had taken another three years to get that custody. He was sorry, and he told the kid that. Over and over. He was sorry about what happened to Kenny in those four years. He was sorry that he’d ignored Kenny completely for another eight years after he had him, because he was in and out of the apartment like a ghost working his ass off to keep Kenny fed and clothed and happy through high school and then college so he could do something with the natural smarts he had. He was sorry that even though Kenny was a walking rags-to-riches story, the pain was still there. He made a shit ton of money, and the pain was still there. He was one of the state’s most sought-after plastic surgeons, and the pain was still there. Ben had done everything he could think of, and the pain was still there, and he was sorry about that.
Kenny had never said sorry to Ben for anything in his life. Nobody ever had. But that didn’t stop Ben standing there now, in the kitchen, looking at Kenny, wondering if today was going to be that magical day.
“So what happened?” Kenny said. He was looking at Ben’s face.
Ben set the coffee maker off and used the seconds to fish around inside his brain for something that would satisfy his brother.
“Went to a garbage-fire callout,” he said. “The guy didn’t want us to put out his fire until all the trash was burned up. He grabbed the hose. I grabbed it back. Things went from there.”
Ben smiled at the lie, felt a weird kind of pride. The story was appropriated from a callout he had attended once, a guy who had really fought him for the hose. In real life not much had happened. The guy had spat in his face. Ben had kicked him in the nuts. He’d spent the next four hours sitting in the ER having blood drawn for AIDS tests and the like. As close to the truth as possible. He was getting good at this whole undercover thing.
“You do those stitches yourself?” Kenny asked.
Ben felt his forehead. “They’re fine.”
“They’re too tight. Let me redo them.”
“No.”
“It’s what I do, man.” Kenny laughed.
“What do you want, Kenny? Fuck!” Ben set the milk down on the counter hard.
Kenny shrugged, adjusted his collar. “Luna’s not back yet, so I hear. And I just wanted to say that I … I really regret what happened. With me. And her. And you.”
“Uh-huh, thanks,” Ben said. “Jeez. You better sit down. That was the closest you’ve ever gotten to a real-life apology. You must be exhausted.”
“I’m sorry I haven’t come to see if you were all right,” Kenny said. “To help.”
“Wow. Who is this person? What did you do with Kenny?”
“I don’t know if she told you…” Kenny gestured at him. “But Luna sort of cleared the air with me about it. So if you’re thinking that she ran away on you because of what happened between us, then—”
“What do you mean she ‘cleared the air’?”
“She emailed me.”
“When?”
Kenny fished around in his back pocket for his phone. Ben was surprised he could get the device out, his pants were so tight. No idea how he got it in. Kenny scrolled with a manicured thumb.
“I mean, I don’t know the exact date she left you. I just remember it was a week before that. Assuming you told me right away.”
“I did tell you right away. I’m worried she’s been fucking murdered, Kenny.”
He tried to frown again. Failed. “Surely it’s not that.”
“Show me the email.” Ben did what he could not to snatch the phone out of his brother’s hand. In close proximity, he could feel Kenny looking closely at his face. The guy probably studied faces and breasts the way house painters studied shutters on old buildings. Ben ignored him and read the email from Luna’s work account to Kenny’s.
I just wanted to tell you it’s all good between us. There’s no hard feelings.
“I could just take those out real quick and redo them.” Kenny reached for Ben’s face. “I’ve got a kit in my car.”
Ben slapped his hand away. It was sickeningly soft and covered in some weird substance. “What did you write back?”
“Nothing.” Kenny shrugged. “I didn’t know what to say.”
“And you didn’t think you should tell me about this?”
“I figured she would,” Kenny said. “Then, I wondered if she had. Ergo: This delightful exchange we’re currently having.”
Ben sighed and handed the phone back. Kenny was still eyeballing him.
“You’re gonna end up with a big ugly scar.”
“I hope I do,” Ben replied. “Whenever we’re in the same room from now on I’ll show it to people. I’ll say ‘Look. My brother did this. Kenny Haig. Eight years in med school, and this is his work. He’s a butcher. Call Dateline.’”
Kenny smiled his weird, plumped-up smile and Ben tried not to smile his unaltered one back.
“Seriously, though,” Ben said, putting as much space between them as the kitchen would allow. “I want to tell you something. It was always cool between us. Even with the, uh, the thing that happened. So if you coming here was also about us—”
“I know. I know.”
“I’m being real, though. I’m trying to say that if anything happens, in the future, uh…” Ben waved a hand. Kenny stared, not getting it. Willfully not getting it. Ben had no idea why it was so hard between them. It was like they spoke two different languages, and they were trying to communicate in a third that was unfamiliar to them both. “I’d rather you didn’t sit around wondering if it was all cool between us. Because it is. And it was. And it will be.”
“Okay…?” Kenny said.
“… When it happens.”
“When what happens?”
“Jesus, Kenny, I’m just talking in hypotheticals!”
“Why? Why are you talking in hypotheticals?”
“Look, if I have to go somewhere, and I…” Ben struggled, stared at the ceiling. “What if I went into a coma, for example? If that happened, I wouldn’t want you to come and visit me, Kenny. I’d want you to go and live your life. You don’t owe me anything for what … for what I’ve done for you. College and all that. Okay? So if anything happens to me, I don’t want it to drag you down as well. That’s not right.”
Kenny just stared at him.
“Just say you understand,” Ben sighed.
“But I don’t.”
“Kenny!”
“Okay! I understand!”
“Are we done?” Ben asked. “Is that all you wanted?”
“Yeah.”
“Go, then.” Ben flapped a hand at the door. “Go find somebody to put tits on.”
Kenny smirked and went to the door. “Love you, man.”
“Yeah,” Ben called.
He grabbed his phone and called Andy.