Never Tell

She’d felt so lucky back then. Bill Whitmire had lived an amazing life filled with talent, celebrity, travel, music, and beautiful women. Katherine was not his usual fare. Neither a model nor a singer ingenue, she was already in her early thirties when she met Bill. An architect with a modest career, she’d landed her biggest contract yet with the remodel of a Tribeca loft for the lead singer of the Smashing Pumpkins.

She’d been on her way out, blueprints in hand, when Bill showed up for a coffee. Coffee turned into cocktails. Cocktails evolved into dinner. And, much to her surprise, she’d woken up in his bed the next morning.

She expected it to be a one-night stand, her first—and probably only—in a lifetime. But Bill called her three days later, and three days after that. Within two months, she started to wonder if they were actually in a relationship.

And then one day, to put her mind at ease because she was nearly two weeks late for her period, she peed on a stick. And then another, and another. With the trilogy of pink plus signs lined up on the top of her toilet tank, she saw the quick end of her exciting new romance. Bill was fifty years old and had never been married. This story could not have a happy ending.

She gave him the news, fully expecting him to ask when she’d be getting it taken care of. But then, once again, Bill Whitmire surprised her. He smiled and hugged her, and then he cried and said, “Thank you for this.” He held her hair when the morning sickness started. He rubbed vitamin E lotion on her belly every night, promising to love her even if her entire abdomen ended up striped with stretch marks.

Six months into the pregnancy, he asked her to marry him, so they “could be a real family.” They exchanged vows on the beach at Montauk. Elvis Costello officiated with a minister’s certificate from the Internet. Their wedding announcement was placed prominently in the New York Times Sunday Styles section. She changed her name.

When she became pregnant a second time, with Julia, it was Bill who proposed buying a townhouse with ample space for the children to play. The top floor could be an apartment for a live-in nanny to help Katherine juggle the additional chaos that would accompany another child.

Bill Whitmire had settled down. He was a good father. And he’d chosen her to do it with. She remembered actually spinning around with glee on this marble floor that quiet day, staring up at the bright white molded ceiling so far above her, feeling like she’d won the love-and-marriage lottery. She was living a fairy tale, and Bill was her Prince Charming.

Two months later, the house was no longer empty. Billy with his Toy Story bedspread. Julia with her moss-green, elephant-themed nursery. Katherine’s custom closet was bigger than the apartment she’d last rented as a single woman.

Mira, the full-time nanny, had her own living space upstairs.

To this day, Katherine still wondered how long it had been going on—right beneath, or above, her nose—before she realized. She’d come home one afternoon to find the familiar sound of Bill’s music emanating from his study, but no Bill. The elevator parked on the top floor. No sign of Mira, either.

She’d taken the stairs so they wouldn’t hear the elevator. If she was wrong, she could always tell Mira she was just slipping in some extra exercise.

But her suspicions had been right. Bill was the one slipping something in.

Now, more than sixteen years later, she had watched her daughter’s body being wheeled out of that same top-floor apartment. The detectives she had insisted upon were gone. Everyone was gone.

She walked to the bar cart in the sitting area and poured a crystal highball glass full of Bill’s vodka. She hated herself for thinking about his first (known) infidelity when she should be thinking about Julia.

But in many ways, that moment was inextricably entwined with this one. When she saw Bill—panting and sweaty behind the bent-over nanny, his unzipped, age-inappropriate designer jeans clumsily dangling—everything had changed. She should have left him then. She should have taken what the prenup had to offer and made a normal life with her two, still happy children.

But by then, being Mrs. Bill Whitmire had become the very core of her identity. For their marriage to fail would mean that she was nothing but a cliché, the glamorous carriage having turned back into a pumpkin at the stroke of midnight. It would mean that Bill had never really chosen her. She would be just one in a long string of women—the one who’d gotten knocked up.

And so watching and monitoring and controlling her husband became her full-time job. If Bill said he was meeting a reporter at Babbo, she would walk him there—and step inside to say a brief hello, supposedly “on her way” to some errand or another. If he had to fly to California for the Grammys, she accompanied him—even if the ceremonies coincided with Julia’s first piano recital. When he announced that he was more productive at the in-home studio out in Long Island, she chose to believe that Julia and Billy were mature enough to stay at the townhouse on their own.

She felt the vodka burn its way down her throat. She held in the sting, wanting it to burn, wanting to feel something. She’d seen the way those detectives looked at her. Judging her. Casting her squarely inside whatever stereotypes they held about superficial women who valued their looks, handbags, and silverware above the things that actually mattered.

She knew she deserved every last bit of their scorn. She should have been here with her baby girl. She should have been here to protect her. The least she could do now was to find out who did this to her daughter. The police might be gone, but no way was this over.

The silence was disrupted by the sound of keys in the front door. She knew who would be walking in, but part of her wished it would be her son instead. She’d called Billy at school with the awful news, but even if he made it onto the last flight to New York, he wouldn’t make it to the city before nine tonight.

“Kitty?”

Bill’s eyes were red and damp. He rushed to her and wrapped his arms around her.

“My God. Our Julia. Our baby—” His voice broke.

How many times had she wanted him to run to her like this? To need her. To hunger for her love and loyalty like an addict craving the next hit. She felt tiny and fragile against his smothering embrace.

“It’s going to be okay, Kitty. We’re going to get through this. Together.”

He grabbed her even tighter, palming the back of her head and pressing her face against his cashmere overcoat. She smelled the sweet floral scent of Cartier perfume on his collar and, for the first time in nineteen years, found that she did not care what became of this marriage.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Usually, Ellie enjoyed her time in the Criminal Court Building. She’d heard it described as “hurry-up-and-wait time.” She understood the term all too well.

Other people—usually the lawyers—ran up and down the hallways, struggling to herd witnesses like cattle. They negotiated last-minute deals, always in shorthand. ROR—release on recognizance. JOA—judgment of acquittal. SOR—sex offender registration. Stip-facts bench trial—stipulate that the facts offered in a bench (no jury) trial establish the material elements of the offense. Meanwhile, she sat and chilled on a courthouse bench, usually with some lawyer’s discarded newspaper in hand, collecting her pay—overtime if she wasn’t on shift.

But on this particular day, waiting in the hallway outside Judge Frederick Knight’s courtroom, her thoughts kept jumping back to Rogan’s look of helplessness as she’d shut the car door on him mid-sentence. She could tell her partner was pissed. The last words he said to her before she walked away were: “Should we place an over-under on how long it is before Tucker gets a phone call?”

He was probably right. The Whitmires would call their lieutenant. Or have the commissioner call their lieutenant’s captain to call their lieutenant. Or have the mayor call the commissioner—however those kinds of people managed to pull the strings that were beyond reach of the rest of the population.

But Ellie was the last person on earth who was going to make it easy for them. Nothing about their celebrity or money could change the fact that they’d raised a sad, screwed-up kid who ended it all, drunk and naked and bloody in a bathtub.

“Hey, you. I thought you said you had a callout.”

She had texted Max Donovan, the assistant district attorney handling today’s motion, on their way to the scene on Barrow Street. She wasn’t on a texting basis with most prosecutors, but this particular ADA was her boyfriend.

“Turned out to be a quickie.”

“Wasn’t aware we had quickie murder investigations these days. Oh, there was that case on Wooster last year where a guy thought his neighbor was murdering a woman, but the woman turned out to be a girlfriend doll.”

“This one had a real body, but it was a clear-cut suicide. Well, clear-cut to everyone but the family.”

The amusement fell from his face. “And you’re okay with that?”

“Any reason I shouldn’t be?”

“All right. Forget I said anything. I’m glad you could make it. Maybe time for a quick lunch when we’re done here?”

“That’d be good.”

Owing to their work schedules, they hadn’t seen each other for four days. Given the consistent routine they’d developed over the last year, four nights apart was practically a long-distance relationship.

The bailiff stuck her head out of the courtroom door. “The judge is ready.”

Ellie’s testimony took all of sixteen minutes. She was there to defend against a murderer’s postconviction motion for release. The defendant alleged that his attorney had offered ineffective assistance of counsel by allowing Ellie to interrogate him about the death of his girlfriend. The necessary information was straightforward. The defendant had been the one to call the police, claiming he’d come home and found her bludgeoned on the kitchen floor of their shared Chinatown apartment. He wasn’t in custody. He wasn’t even a suspect. His alleged “counsel” was a real estate lawyer who lived in the apartment next door and came over to offer friendly support.

It wasn’t the lawyer’s fault that Ellie noticed the tiny lacerations marking each blow on the victim’s body, or the sharp, raised edge of the defendant’s pinkie ring, or the red marks on the defendant’s knuckles. Just a single, plainly phrased question about a possible explanation for those three circumstances had been enough for the defendant to break down.

It would have been a straightforward hearing if it weren’t for the fact that Judge Frederick Knight was known throughout the New York criminal justice system as the Big Pig.

Maybe the term was unfair, a reference to his considerable weight of at least three bills. But Ellie suspected the nickname would never have come into play if the man did not strive at every second to out-misogynize Andrew Dice Clay.

The nonsense began as she rose from the witness chair after testifying.

“I know you.”

If Ellie had been at a nursing home in Queens, she would have expected the line from a patient—the really, really old one, who didn’t know anyone anymore.

“Ellie Hatcher, Your Honor. This is my fifth time here.” She rattled off the defendants’ names. She always remembered them. She could tell you the dates of the arrests, too. Probably their dates of births as well. Ellie’s brain was weird that way.

It was all a blur to Judge Knight, who shook his head with her mention of each case. “Only five times here, and I remember you? Take that as a compliment, Officer.”

Detective.

“You keep yourself in shape. That’s good. Pretty girl there, right, Donovan?”

Max didn’t miss a beat. “No one’s as fit as you, Your Honor.”

Corny, Ellie thought, but what was the right response to that question, under the circumstances?

“And what do you, Mr. Donovan, think about your witness’s attire today?”

“Your Honor?” Donovan asked.

“Off the record for a moment,” he said to the court reporter. “Only five visits to the courthouse and yet I remembered this witness. And let’s be clear here. We all know what it is about her that would have stood out in my recollection. And now here she is in these butch pants—trousers, let’s say.”

Part of Ellie wanted to tell this man that beneath her simple gray flat-front pants she wore a black thong bikini, but she dressed for court this way for a reason. She dressed this way because most judges and jurors had expectations. And they weren’t the same as Knight’s expectations.

Knight wasn’t interested in her inner monologue. He was on his own roll.

“When I first joined the bench, I heralded the first wave of lady litigators. They always wore skirts. High heels. Silk blouses. And then came the menswear trend, and these women started showing up in trousers and oxford shirts. Now the gals have it back to the way it was. Dresses. Skirts. Legs. Heels. Except for you, Officer. Hatcher, you said? You’ve got your best assets covered up. You look like a boy. Not to mention, my clerk tells me that you and Donovan here are quite the item. I mean, what if Donovan showed up here tomorrow in a dress? How would you feel about that?”

She saw Max looking at her. Willing her. Begging her. Don’t. Do. It.

“I would like to see that, Your Honor. But ADA Donovan was just telling me he wore out his best red silk number modeling it for you.”

Max was doing his best in the hallway to appear annoyed, but he couldn’t help breaking a smile.

“Red silk? Really? Seems a little hoochie-momma.”

“Oh, you’d be much classier as a lady fella, I’m sure. Brooks Brothers. Burberry. All those blue-blood labels. Sorry, I sort of lost it with the Big Pig.”

“Whatever. The motion’s a slam dunk. Even the defendant’s own allegations make clear he was playing the grieving boyfriend at the start. Besides, there’s no way for the state not to be all right with Knight. He sides with the prosecution like he’s on autopilot. I could tell him the court should enter an official finding of alien invasion, and he’d do exactly as I said.”

“I’m praying I’ll still get home at some reasonable hour tonight. You?”

He let one hand wander to her waist. “As soon as I’m done here, I have to go out to Rikers. Gang shooting. Guess a few weeks in a cell has someone second-guessing his loyalty to a coconspirator. I’ve got to hammer out the cooperation details.”

“Could the good citizens of New York please stop fucking killing each other for a night?”

“Do you at least have time for that lunch? I’ve got a few minutes.”

“Depends. You still got that red silk dress?”

“Those pants are a little butch.”

“Not underneath,” she said. He returned her smile. When her cell phone buzzed at her waist, she tensed up at the sight of Rogan’s name on the screen. He had predicted a shitstorm to follow their walking away from the Whitmires’ townhouse. Apparently it had taken little more than an hour for Julia’s parents to work their way through their network back to her cell phone.

She held up a finger while she took the call. “Yeah?”

“We shouldn’t have left. You told me yourself Donovan didn’t really need your testimony.”

“I take it Tucker tore you a new one?”

“It’s not just the Lou. We should have at least gone through the motions. Like I said: Protect the crime scene, talk to the friends, do what we do.”

“Like I said, it’s a waste of time.”

“That’s why I let you convince me to leave. But we screwed up.”

“And how exactly did we do that?”

“I’ll tell you when I get there. Meet me out on Centre Street. I’m three minutes away.”

Neither one of them said goodbye.

Three hundred and seventy-five miles northwest of the city, in Buffalo, New York, Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Sugarman took a call from the front desk. “There’s a James Grisco here to see you.”

“Okay. Send him back.”

She had heard all the terms used to describe the other stars in the office. Dan Clark was a natural born trial lawyer. Joe Garrett was a genius in front of a jury. Mark Munson was a courtroom machine.

Munson? Really? She’d popped in on him in trial one day to see what the fuss was all about, only to hear him argue that the defendant’s story was all an “elaborate rouge.” He even touched his fingertips to the apple of his cheek, just in case she was wondering if she’d misheard the word that was supposed to be “ruse.” An elaborate rouge. What an idiot.

Jennifer Sugarman? Ask around the office, and they’d say she was a hard worker. Diligent. Detail oriented. Conscientious. Burns the midnight oil. When men were good, they were born that way. If she was just as good—better, even—it must have come by way of tremendous effort.

She didn’t mind those descriptions, though. She’d made it out of misdemeanors into felonies faster than any ADA on record and was now first-chairing murder cases after only five years in the office. Rumor was she’d be named a unit chief in the next round of promotions. And when the big boss finally retired, her reputation for working hard would come in handy. Voters liked to know they were getting their money’s worth with public employees. She planned to be Erie County’s first female district attorney.

And she was, in fact, harder-working than most. Take the call she got from the jail this morning about Grisco, for instance. Most of the ADAs would have blown it off. At most, they would have passed the information on to the parole officer and forgotten about it.

But she had been the one to negotiate Grisco’s release from prison, and she knew ex-cons feared the official power of a prosecutor much more than they feared the often-empty threats of parole officers. If there was some reason for a person to call the prison inquiring about Grisco’s whereabouts, she wanted Grisco to know she hadn’t forgotten about him. She wouldn’t hesitate to pull his ticket if it came to that.

He removed his baseball cap when he entered her office. It was a good sign he knew who was in charge. She told him about the call that had been made to the prison that morning. She reminded him of his release conditions, going so far as to read them aloud from his file.

“You don’t need to remind me, ma’am. I got no plans of messing this up.”

“Good to hear, Jimmy. I stuck my neck out for you.”

“Yes, ma’am. I appreciate it.”

She shook his hand and walked him to the hallway. As she watched him make his way toward the exit, she found herself hoping he might actually find a decent life for himself. He wasn’t even forty yet.

It wasn’t until she returned to her office that she realized she should have covered up the note pad on her desk, the one on which she had scribbled the information she’d received from the prison. It was a stupid mistake, but Grisco hadn’t seemed to notice. His eyes had remained on his shoes the whole time, anyway.

She flipped the pad to the next page. It was nothing. She was certain of it.

CHAPTER EIGHT

As Casey Heinz jogged up from the 6 subway train at Bleecker, he was thinking that, all in all, it had been a good day.

Ramona’s school had some kind of teacher in-service Monday, so she’d been able to spend the day with him, starting with a snack at AJ’s. On a day without Ramona, he might have had only a chocolate-chip muffin, forcing himself to chew slowly, careful not to show his hunger. The fact that he was getting sick of that particular food option would have helped to slow the pace of his eating. He was tiring of nearly all the choices at AJ’s, one of the only places left on the Lower East Side that allowed them to hang out without buying too much. A cup of coffee first. A couple hours later, a muffin. Sometimes Brandon or Vonda would drop in with enough collected change for another cup of java.

AJ’s was starting to feel like home.

But, today, time wasn’t a problem, because Ramona was there. Girls who carried themselves like Ramona were never asked to leave, no matter who they consorted with.

Cost wasn’t an issue, either, when Ramona was around. He appreciated how Ramona paid. Not just the fact that she paid. Of course she would, given their different circumstances. But it was cool how she did it. Always ordering something for herself, too, even when Casey knew she wasn’t hungry enough to finish it. And she always seemed to order the things that Casey liked. Today it was chicken breast, mozzarella, and basil on a baguette. She’d picked off a bite or two, then, when Casey had finished his muffin, she’d pushed the sandwich toward him, insisting, “I’m so full. Here, can you finish this?”

As they had walked through SoHo after lunch, he had studied her profile. He’d never known a girl as pretty as Ramona. She wasn’t classic pretty. Or even cute pretty, the way most straitlaced high school girls were, with their misplaced confidence and upturned noses. Ramona was actually sort of funny-looking. Her nose was a little too long and flat, and he knew from memory that one of those big eyes of hers fell a little lower than the other. And her lips were on the thinnish side, her smile a bit crooked. But all of those features together? Ramona was, by any definition of the word, a stunner.

Even cooler was the fact that she didn’t try to be pretty. No highlights in that short jet-black hair of hers, the ends chunky as if cut with a razor. Plus, she wore way more vintage clothing and black eyeliner than acceptable among Upper East Siders. Plus, she hung with the likes of Casey.

Usually, they goofed around the neighborhood, making fun of the pretentious, surreal art galleries and the wannabe punk kids. And usually one of them had someone in tow—he with Brandon, or her with Julia. But today it had been just the two of them.

And they hadn’t just goofed around. Today, Ramona had really talked to him.

“I’m worried about my mom. I think she’s depressed or something.”

Casey couldn’t imagine what Ramona’s mother could possibly be depressed about. From what he could gather, her full-time job was to shop and work out, but he held his tongue.

“I called Julia last night. She thinks I should talk to my dad. Tell him that she’s spending so much time holed away in her room all day.”

“See this?” Casey had pointed to his own face. “This is a look of pain and humiliation that you talked to Julia about this before me.”

“Sorry.” She had leaned over and grabbed his shoulders from behind in a quick half-hug. “She’s just constantly in contact, you know, with text and IM and everything.”

Texting and instant-messaging. Two other conveniences of a normal life that Casey did not enjoy. At Promises, there was a fifteen-minute limit on computer use unless it was related to a job search, and residents didn’t have their own phones. Anyone who wanted to contact him had to leave a message at the front desk. Or with Joy, who worked the register at AJ’s from noon to five on weekdays. She was a sweetheart that way.

The pain and humiliation were feigned, in any event. Ramona and Julia Whitmire had known each other since the single-digit years. Casey’d met Ramona only last December, when they were both hanging out in Washington Square Park. Casey would probably never be Ramona’s best friend, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t his.

Julia was supposed to meet them today at AJ’s but had once again been a no-show. In her absence, he made a few comments at her expense.

“Julia thinks you should tell your dad because as much as she bitches about those parents of hers, she’s a daddy’s girl. She’d love nothing more than a chance to tattle on her own mommy to get a few brownie points from her dear, distant dad.”