A day later I met Jane’s parents in the lobby of the hospital where, despite what the police told the press to the contrary, their daughter was being held prisoner.
Mrs. Branigan had never liked me. A matron who had started life on a farm upstate and who had eventually become the wife of a successful trial lawyer, she used her good fortune as a kind of judgment about others. Anybody who had not done as well as she and her husband were ultimately to be found lacking. Some longstanding moral curse, perhaps.
Mrs. Branigan wore a tweed coat cut to hide the abundant flesh of her middle age. She had more luck with makeup, which almost took the hard edge off her otherwise handsome face. She held her sixty years with an imperious regard, like a weapon.
Her husband was her twin, a ruddy, white-haired man whose girth in his vested suit and whose melodramatic style suggested both alcoholism and a minor case of megalomania. He had once told me during a holiday visit to the family manse—it was not quite a mansion, but it didn’t miss by much—that he had once been a Catholic, but was now a Presbyterian because he’d gotten tired of the joshing at his country club. I’ve always admired people of deep conviction.
When I first saw them I got the distinct impression that they might be plotting to hire an assassin. Rage burned in their faces and gave them a nervousness that was almost ugly. When they saw me their rage only deepened. Here was the man their daughter had not only lived in sin with—the lower-class man who’d been previously married—but worse, whom she’d wasted time with. At one point in our relationship her parents had tried to bribe her away from me by offering her a free and extended trip to Europe. She’d been thirty-four years old at the time.
I wasn’t sure why I went in there. Maybe there’s some real masochistic compulsion in me. More likely it was because, on my way up to see if the police would let me see Jane, I wanted to know if the Branigans had learned anything new.
I didn’t offer my hand. I knew better. I wasn’t that much of a masochist. Instead, I said, “I don’t think she did it.”
“How reassuring,” Mrs. Branigan said tartly.
Branigan had the grace to look embarrassed. “I’d forgotten. You were a cop once, weren’t you?”
I nodded.
“Have they told you anything?”
“Nothing since yesterday,” I said.
“She didn’t do it.” He said it absolutely.
“No. I don’t believe she did.”
Mrs. Branigan said, “You hadn’t been seeing her again, had you?”
“Don’t trouble yourself,” I said. “We really had broken off, Mrs. Branigan. I hadn’t put my filthy hands on her in over a year.”
Mrs. Branigan looked as if my language made her physically ill.
Mr. Branigan slammed a big fist into an open palm. “My God, I can’t believe this. This just isn’t possible.” He started pacing.
Mrs. Branigan watched him. I watched Mrs. Branigan. She said to me, “The police have said that she called you.”
I tried to take some of the anger out of my voice. “Yes, Mrs. Branigan, she did.”
“I want to know why.”
“I suppose because I used to be a policeman. I suppose she thought I could help her.”
Now Mrs. Branigan softened her tone. Even some of the contempt went out of her eyes. “Well, as a former policeman, what do you think?”
“Do I think she’s guilty?”
“Yes.”
“No.”
Mr. Branigan said, “He was a real bastard. She was calling us nearly every night all the time he was breaking things off with her. He went out of his way to make the end as unpleasant as possible.”
“He even—he even brought another woman to their apartment one night when he thought Jane had to work late,” Mrs. Branigan said. There were tears in her eyes. “I suppose I have to say that much for you—you treated her well.”
“There’s something you never quite seemed to understand, Mrs. Branigan,” I said. “Jane broke up with me—not the other way around. She convinced herself I was this really terrible guy so that she could justify going off to live with Stephen Elliot. I know that’s not a particularly noble thing to say at a time like this, but I think we should set the record straight.”
Mr. Branigan pushed out his hand. He looked as if he might consider shaking hands with me, then put his hand away quickly.
“Did you get a chance to talk to her?”
“Not much,” I told him. I sketched in our meeting in the park.
“Then she didn’t mention the older woman in the museum?”
“No.”
“She followed him one night. He went to this museum. He spent several hours there with a much older woman.”
“Do you think that has some bearing on what happened?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did she say anything else about the woman? What museum it was, for instance?”
Mrs. Branigan spoke up. “Only that there was a traveling Van Gogh show.”
“Over the next week,” Mr. Branigan said, “he met with this woman several times. In a restaurant there was a scene between them. The woman slapped him.”
Elliot seemed to have had a predilection for scenes. Spitting in Carla Travers’s face. Getting slapped in a restaurant by an older woman.
“When Jane asked Elliot who the woman was he got very upset and told her to never mention the woman again—if she wanted to live.”
“He actually threatened her, physically threatened her life,” Mrs. Branigan said. Her voice had started to keen again. For the first time in my life I found myself feeling something resembling warmth for her. At least a bit.
I put my hand out and touched her shoulder. She surprised me by not jerking away. “I’m going to do all I can to help her.”
She looked at me. It would be nice to say that she offered me a warm embrace and told me how wrong she’d been about me and that I was a wonderful guy. But all she said was, “We would appreciate that, Jack. Very much.”
But that was something. She had never called me “Jack” before. Somehow she’d managed to talk to me without ever using my name.
“Yes,” Mr. Branigan said, “yes, we certainly would appreciate it. Very much. We’ll be staying at the Hilton if you need to get in touch.”
I nodded and went upstairs on the elevator.
The uniformed cop listened to my story patiently, walked down the hall with squeaky shoes, and called his superior. He came back shaking his head.
They weren’t going to let me see her.