Aphrodite Page 4

  She got to the flat roof and even before she hoisted herself over the top, she knew she’d won. She’d been up here many times. She kept a beach chair here, used to come up and sunbathe and read on weekends when the beaches were too crowded. She knew this roof and knew that all she had to do was hop over to the next building, maybe a one-foot jump, no big deal, and there was another fire escape there, at the back. All she had to do was get there and climb down and then it was over. He couldn’t possibly get there as fast as she could. Couldn’t even know which direction she’d go.

  It was easy now.

  She was safe.

  So before she pulled herself onto the roof she looked down. Saw that he wasn’t even trying to follow her. He was just looking up at her. She stared straight into his eyes, studied his face so she could remember to tell the police exactly what he looked like, was startled because he was smiling. Looking up at her and smiling.

  She swung her legs up onto the tarred rooftop. Started running over to the next building. But she got only a few steps before she stopped cold. It was impossible.

  What she saw was physically impossible!

  He was there. The blond man. He was on the roof, smiling at her. The same smile she’d just seen.

  But it couldn’t be. He couldn’t be here! He couldn’t. …

  She was going to scream. That was her only chance. She could scream and hope that someone would hear her. Hear her and help her.

  But she didn’t scream.

  The blond man moved too quickly and the thing she feared more than anything, the pain, was too great. When the blond man spoke, it was quietly, as if he was being respectful of the early-morning silence. “I need to know a few things,” he said.

  So she nodded. She wanted him to understand that she’d be happy to tell him anything she could. He said, “Aphrodite,” and she looked confused, even through the pain, so he said, “What do you know about Aphrodite and who did you tell?” She said she didn’t understand what he was talking about, it was more of a whimper really. He asked her three times and after the third time she couldn’t even answer, she could just moan very, very quietly and shake her head, and he was convinced she was telling him the truth. Then he said, “I need a name,” and she knew the answer to that one, so she told him, she was so happy to tell him, and then he took a small step away from her.

  “Is it over?” she asked, barely able to get the words out. “Do you need anything else from me?”

  “It’s almost over,” the blond man told her. “There’s just one more thing.”

  There were details to be attended to inside Susanna’s bedroom. First her body was carried down the fire escape, put inside, and arranged on the floor, by her bed. Then her nightstand was tipped over, the contents of the one drawer allowed to spill and spread on the floor, the clock radio tumbling and breaking. The sheet and summer quilt were wrapped around Susanna’s feet and legs. From the kitchen, a drinking glass half-full of water was brought in, then thrown down. The glass shattered, the water spilled. Soon it was safe to assume that anyone finding the body would come to the reasonable conclusion that Susanna Morgan had gotten out of bed in the middle of the night, tripped, fallen, and broken her neck.

  Outside, Main Street was absolutely empty. It took less than a minute to reach the car, which was parked in the alley behind Susanna’s apartment. It took less than four minutes for the car to pass the sign that read EAST END HARBOR, TOWN LIMITS.

  It had been a totally professional hit. There was no hint that a crime, much less a murder, had even taken place in the town of East End Harbor.

  Nothing had been overlooked.

  Except for one thing.

  That thing was still up on the roof of Susanna Morgan’s building. And it wasn’t exactly a thing. It was a person.

  It was a woman who had been sitting quietly, as still as could be, cross-legged, in the corner of the flat roof, as she often did in the middle of the night when she couldn’t sleep. She had been sitting peacefully, breathing in, breathing out, appreciating the misty night and the hazy half-moon. She had been thinking about life in general and her life in particular, and what direction it might be taking in the next few months. Up until the blond man had appeared on the roof, she was thinking that her life could move in just about any direction she decided to move it in. After the man had climbed down the fire escape, after she’d looked down to see the car drive away, after she’d seen her friend Susanna murdered, she had a terrible, sickening feeling that that decision had just been taken out of her hands.

  Book One

  1

  The breeze floated in off the bay, bringing in the faint odor of brine and fish and gasoline fumes. Justin Westwood tilted his head ever so slightly, taking a deep breath. His eyes closed, shutting out the world for, at most, a second or two. But it gave him just enough time to think, once again, how nice it would be to shut that world out for a much longer time. Like forever.

  Half of his face caught the full impact of the hot morning sun, half was cooled by the soft wind off the water. A vague confluence of words began to float through his brain. Then they crystallized, and he realized it was a rock lyric. Elvis Costello. What shall we do with all this useless beauty? The plaintive music that went with the words also began to play inside his head. That’s what was usually playing inside him: haunting, mournful songs; rough, ragged rock and roll. Harsh, melancholy words, often blunt and full of undiluted rage. Driving music that fueled his anger and overpowered him with sadness. He pushed the song out of his thoughts. Told himself to force some silence until he could get home, smoke a joint, and let some scotch slide down his throat, then let some real music overwhelm him. He told himself to wait. It was the word he repeated more than any other throughout his days: Wait.

  His eyes fluttered open. Squinting directly into the harsh glare through a heat-distorted haze that made it seem as if he was looking into some other dimension, he could see the glittering outline of a sailboat glide away from the dock that jutted from the end of Main Street.

  “Hey, Westwood! What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  Westwood allowed himself to slowly come out of his self-induced fog and shifted his gaze in the direction of the two cops twenty yards away from him on Main. Cops, he thought, with contempt. They weren’t cops. They were children. Summer help. They were lifeguards let loose on un-suspecting motorists who might, heaven help us all, back up several feet to try to catch a precious parking space or, even worse, park in a public space for one second longer than the allotted two hours.

  “Westwood! Seriously, man. What the hell’s goin’ on? There’re two cars that’ve been here more than two hours and you didn’t slap a ticket on either one! What’s up with that, man?”

  Justin Westwood was thirty-seven years old. These summer cops were maybe twenty-three or twenty-four, and they not only thought he was duller than shit, they thought he was a total loser. They wouldn’t be handing out parking tickets in a half-assed, middle-class resort town when they were thirty-seven. They would be police chiefs somewhere where there was real action. Or retire early and own a great bar that served fish and chips and had two big-screen TVs for Monday Night Football and March Madness. Or they’d be working in their daddy’s business, knowing that, thanks to the time they spent in the EEPD, they could bully with impunity any neighbor who dared complain that their music was too loud and they were drinking too much beer. They wore Keanu Reeves sunglasses and walked around with a swagger and a smirk. They liked nothing better than writing up tickets and lecturing drivers who were making somewhere around fifty times their salary. Although they had holsters—cool, black, shiny leather holsters—they didn’t carry guns. They kept cell phones in their holsters, because that would be the single most helpful tool they could carry in case there was ever an emergency.

  Which there wasn’t.

  East End Harbor did not have a lot of emergencies. The occasional case of food poisoning. Plenty of arguments about the level of noise a
nd the amount of garbage generated by the club in the back of the town’s public parking lot. Constant and heated council meetings about the difference between a roundabout and a traffic circle. Politicians came to the Hamptons to raise money and they’d sneak into East End Harbor for a photo op, which raised the town’s blood pressure. A few months ago the vice-president had come, along with several cabinet members. They’d had to shut down Main Street and it caused a hellacious traffic jam, and several store owners went ballistic over the lost business. But that was the extent of it. There were no real emergencies.

  Justin didn’t carry a gun either.

  He did have one, though, back at the station. And it was at times like this—when they tauntingly called him “Westwood,” because he was always looking to avoid confrontation, because he shied away from anything remotely violent and was, let’s face it, out of shape and as far from being a Dirty Harry–type cop as they could imagine—that he was glad he didn’t have his gun handy. He had not kept up on the latest mandatory prison sentences, but he was fairly sure it would still be a lot of years for shooting his fellow police officers in cold blood.

  He took a step toward the two cops—one was named Gary; he didn’t have any idea what the other one was called, even though they’d been working together for at least six months—but he was interrupted by the shrill beep of a car horn. Justin turned back toward the honk and saw an old lady, her car stopped in the middle of the street, frantically waving for him to come over. When he reached her, he tried to say “Can I help you?” but she didn’t give him the chance.

  “There was a truck on my street this morning!” the woman screeched when he was still several feet from her car. There were two cars behind her now. Justin knew the drivers would wait patiently for all of about one minute. Then they’d start honking or sticking their heads out the window to roll their eyes impatiently or ask what the hell was taking so long.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said as politely as he could.

  “I’m in a no-truck zone!” she yelled. “There shouldn’t be any trucks in a no-truck zone!”

  “What street are you on?” he asked. “If I know where you are, maybe we could—”

  “I’m on Harrison Street! And no trucks are supposed to cut through on Harrison Street!”

  “You’re Mrs. Dbinsky,” he said.

  “How’d you know that?”

  “You call us every day to complain about the trucks on Harrison Street.”

  “Yeah? Well, a fat lot of good it does! Every day there’s another truck!”

  “The thing is, Mrs. Dbinsky, even though it’s a no-truck zone, that doesn’t mean that no trucks are allowed. They can come to make deliveries.”

  “These trucks weren’t making deliveries! They were just driving around, making noise! You know how little my street is? And you know how big those trucks are? The walls are cracking in my house from those goddamn monsters!”

  There were six cars behind her now. Any second now, one of them would start getting pissed off and the chain reaction would set in. He started to ask Mrs. Dbinsky if she’d mind pulling over against the curb, but he knew that would set her off again, and he had a feeling there was more on her mind than just trucks today, so instead he said he’d come by her house later this afternoon, how would that be? He’d come by and they’d discuss what he could do about the trucks—

  “What you could do and what you’re gonna do are two different things!” she said. “You could put up signs, you could give ’em tickets. You could get the damn trucks off my street. You’re gonna do absolutely nothin’!”

  The first horn honked now. It came from one of the nine cars backed up behind Mrs. Dbinsky. But Justin Westwood wasn’t concentrating on the honking. Or Gary and the other idiot-boy cop who were smirking at him, enjoying this whole thing. He wasn’t even concentrating on Mrs. Dbinsky. Because from the middle of Main Street, from inside a building somewhere—it sounded like it was near the yoga center—there was a scream. A loud, frightened, and frightening scream.

  People were coming out of their stores now, looking around for the source of the noise.

  Gary and What’s-his-name were running, sprinting toward a small house in the middle of the block.

  Westwood was running too. His hand instinctively went to his belt. Even after all these years that instinct hadn’t left him, and he was shocked when he realized that. But of course there was no gun there, so he dropped his hand, trying to pretend it hadn’t happened, that those instincts were long dead and buried, and just ran.

  And he thought: Son of a bitch.

  East End Harbor has an emergency.

  The girl’s name was Susanna Morgan and Westwood knew her, of course. Everybody in town knew her. She was bubbly and friendly and curious. She had interviewed him a couple of times, nothing serious; she didn’t know anything about his background, hadn’t done any probing before they talked. It was just human interest–type stuff, wanting to know the way the local police force worked and thought. Basically, he had told her that the force worked hard and didn’t think much, and Jimmy Leggett, his boss, had not been too happy with that quote so that was the end of the interviews.

  He’d bumped into Susanna a few times after that. It was hard not to bump into people in East End. There were only so many bars and restaurants. Once he’d seen her at Duffy’s. He hadn’t pegged her for a Duffy’s girl. Not that it was hard-core—nothing was hard-core out here—but it was fairly serious for East End Harbor. Duffy’s didn’t have any real food, just nuts and pretzels in red straw bowls and sometimes sandwiches that were wrapped in plastic and looked like they came out of a vending machine. They served a lot of beer and straight liquor, didn’t keep cranberry juice as part of their stock, and there was a dart-board off to the side, which was about all the atmosphere the place had. It wasn’t a pickup place or a place to take anyone you wanted to impress. It was a place to drink and to be lonely, if not alone. So he’d been surprised to see her there one night. She was with a girlfriend and they drank a couple of beers. He was sitting at the bar when she came in and they nodded at each other. He was still sitting at the bar when she left. She had smiled at him on her way out.

  She was twenty-seven years old, he knew.

  Well, she’d been twenty-seven years old.

  Now she wasn’t anything because she was goddamn dead.

  The woman who’d found her body was Regina Arnold. She worked with Susanna at the paper and when ten o’clock rolled around and Susanna hadn’t shown up for work, everyone got worried. She called Susanna’s apartment, got no answer, then called her cell phone and got nothing there, either. She had a spare key—several people had keys, according to Regina; Susanna tended to lock herself out periodically—so she went over because she knew Susanna had called in sick the day before and wanted to make sure she was okay. She wasn’t okay. Regina found her sprawled on the floor by her bed. That’s when she screamed.

  They’d talked to Regina for ten minutes or so, got everything they were going to get out of her, then they told her she could go. Justin couldn’t decide if she was so anxious to leave because she was so upset by this experience or if she simply wanted to get back outside and start telling everyone what had happened. She was going to be the center of attention for the next couple of days. She’d be talking about this for the rest of her life. Justin knew that from now on, at every dinner party Regina Arnold went to, she’d find a way to tell all about the time she found her friend’s dead body. He wondered how the story would be embellished over time. Would Susanna be still breathing when Regina arrived? Would she have tripped over the body? There’d be something. Something that wasn’t true. There always was.

  Justin almost had his breath back. Jesus, he’d run only forty, maybe fifty yards, but by the time he got to the second-floor apartment he was actually wheezing and was practically doubled over with cramps. He had to sit down in the living room right after he checked the body. Now the two assholes were coming in from the
bedroom, grinning. Justin sucked in a big rush of air, hoping he wouldn’t give the two cretins the satisfaction of watching him have a heart attack.

  “You ever see a dead body before, Westwood?” the non-Gary asshole asked. There was a slight taunt to his words. “Makin’ you a little sick?”

  Justin didn’t answer. Death did make him sick, and more than a little. There was nothing that made him sicker than its finality and its total lack of discrimination. Its ability to strike anywhere and anyone, no matter how undeserving, at any time. It also had rattled his two fellow cops. He’d seen their faces when they walked into Susanna’s room. He’d seen the way they shrank back, the way they hesitated before touching the body. Now that they were protected by twenty feet and a closed door and several minutes of getting used to being in death’s presence, their swagger was returning. Their snide bravado was their way of covering up the fact that they’d been just as frightened as he’d been.