Dangerous Illusions

1807

CHAPTER I

IAM NOT A PARTICULARLY SUPERSTITIOUS MAN, but if something inauspicious were to happen—if a bullet should somehow find its way into my head, if I should fail to find my way home some evening, if any untoward accident should suddenly occur—I thought someone should know the truth. Perhaps I should start with the night Eugene Livingston was killed, though in actuality it all began much earlier. Of course, I didn’t realize that at the time.

As we stepped out of the office that evening, I asked Laura if she would call the police. I had the overwhelming task of telling Charles Livingston of his brother Eugene’s death.

At first, I was unable to find him among the profusion of smiling faces that crowded the living room. As I moved through the circles and triangles of conversation that surrounded me, I was acutely aware of the specific sounds of many different voices, the rising and falling cadences of varied accents, the pitch of laughter, and all of the ambient sounds of the festivities throughout the room. I caught a fleeting trace of an exotic perfume as I walked past a journalist engaged in a heated conversation with three of her colleagues about politics, finance, and fraud. She looked out at me through blue eyes and black lashes, her revealing comments as pointed as the bare breasts concealed beneath her gown. Everything around me contrasted so sharply with what I had just seen that it was impossible to quiet my mind, and I was still reeling by the time I found Charles.

Charles was standing under the archway between the living room and the dining room, speaking with Yvette St. James. The conversation was quite lively and they were laughing. Kate Livingston stood nearby, perched at the corner of the dining room table, pecking away at her plate as she observed them, obviously annoyed by her husband’s laughter.

As I walked toward them, the ensemble played against the rising sound of the storm in an ostinato pattern filled with uncertainty and irregularity. There were touches of darkness to the chords and flourishes of the piano. The guitarist fretted along unable to maintain his usual level of pensive concentration. The bassist frenetically stroked and plucked the strings of her instrument, struggling to keep pace with the storm.

Charles and Yvette both smiled as they saw me approaching, but Yvette’s smile waned almost instinctively. As I tried to summon words that would somehow soften the blow, Charles continued to smile, which only made the task more difficult. The appropriate words, which had already been said too often to Charles, seemed entirely insufficient. Perhaps I had also heard these words too recently to think anything meaningful could be said.

In the long moment after the words had been spoken, he and Yvette both stared at me in silence until a rush of boots thundered into the apartment as a squad of six uniformed officers descended upon the gathering, aggressively pushing their way through black suits and saffron, vermillion, and indigo dresses. The men were uniform in their official blue attire, in their weaponry, in their substantial bulk, and in the geometry of their shaved round heads. Only the irregular protuberances of the cranium and varying vascular patterns beneath their bare scalps distinguished one officer from another. This shorn uniformity, so often associated with the fascist, the mercenary, the convict, or the psychiatric inmate, seemed to confirm a fraternal order.

The guests scattered in terrified confusion as the police advanced into the room.

Once the initial terror had subsided, a state of uncertainty remained. Some of the guests, by virtue of education or natural inclination, were accustomed to a healthy skepticism of authority and were not afraid to observe, even study, the police. Those of a more timid disposition, though still unsure of what had happened, clearly felt safer now that the police had arrived and just as clearly wanted to be told what to do. But most of the guests simply kept their eyes down. Some looked nervous, while others evidently did not want to get involved.

As I approached one of the uniformed men, the distinct scraping sound of the elevator gates cut through the silence and two additional police officers entered the apartment, the first, taller and more aggressive, the other, much thinner and clearly his subordinate, in appearance if not in rank. The other officers immediately deferred to them and I led the two men across the living room and into the office.

Neither spoke as they stared into the interior of the room. The taller officer began to rub his jaw and chin, his fingertips rasping across the shafts of the coarse stubble of his beard, clearly unsettled by what he saw. The other policeman began to retch and looked away, trying to suppress a succession of dry heaves.

Eugene Livingston sat across from my desk, his head pitched forward unnaturally, the wavy hair across his right temple wet in glossy streaks of crimson, black, and orange. Blood flowed from a pool collecting in the well of his ear, dripping down along his cheek and neck. Eugene’s lax expression was almost unrecognizable. He stared out lethargically, a gaze of simple and degrading stupidity fixed in his eyes, the front row of his teeth resting effortlessly on his lower lip in an unfamiliar overbite suggesting the lazy inclination of thoughtlessness. The back-left side of his skull was missing, along with his many thoughts and ideas and the grey cerebral matter that had generated them. What had evidently been a river cascading from Eugene was now reduced to a trickle and flowed over a pebbly streambed into an estuary forming in front of the terrace doors and swelling with the incoming rain.

The taller officer was still stroking his chin and staring undecidedly at Eugene’s body when Laura entered the office.

When I found him, Laura said, Eugene was—

And who are you? the officer asked, eager to assert his authority and just as clearly mindless of our loss.

Laura Arden, she said.

When I want to hear from you, I’ll ask.

Laura stared at the officer, studying him with an anthropological curiosity until he turned away and looked at me.

And you are? he asked, with equal contention.

Eliot Sexton.

Well, Mr. Sexton, he said, a churlish smile shifting the heavily shadowed terrain of his face, I’m Officer Armstrong. I’m the guy who takes you down to the station.

Officer Ripperger, his partner said, introducing himself in a low, barely intelligible mumble.

A moment later, two paramedics arrived. Observing Eugene Livingston’s body, they shook their heads with a sense of futility and disgust. But for a perfunctory examination and a few questions to collect the requisite data, they left the room without further comment.

Armstrong began to interrogate first Laura, then me, the questions elliptical in their repetition and accusatory in their tone. He grew frustrated with our answers, as if we weren’t telling him what he wanted to hear. We had been through this responsorial ritual three times when he waved us out of the office and began to survey the guests.

Ripperger watched Armstrong in silence, waiting for direction.

Let’s start taking some names, Armstrong said, ready to impose his authority on the room.

Soon afterwards, a detective arrived with four men in familiar uniforms carrying unfamiliar equipment. A New York Police Department photographer, also with a great deal of equipment, entered almost immediately after them. The detective took off his raincoat and tossed it at Armstrong—relegating Armstrong to a post at the front door with a few short words—and then proceeded slowly into the living room, pulling his badge from the breast pocket of his pale grey suit and displaying it as he studied the apartment and guests.

The small circles and triangles of hushed conversation dispersed as he walked through the room, his eyes running over those along his path. He stopped directly behind Blair Lockhart, pausing to examine the smooth skin exposed by her backless dress, water pouring off him, streaming from his hair and rolling down his nose, which had clearly been broken in three places. Drops of rain fell from the tip of his nose in rapid succession, splashing onto his suit and darkening its fabric, but he seemed too preoccupied with Blair to notice.

Rain continued to fall from the detective and his men as Ripperger ushered them into the office, adding to the water already beginning to accumulate on the narrow oak floorboards in front of the fireplace, the smell of rain intermingling with the scent of apple, cherry, and cedar wood burning in the fire. One of the caterers followed in their wake, applying one kitchen towel after another to the floor to soak up the water they had left behind. When the caterer had finished in the living room and returned to the foyer, Armstrong looked down at his feet, clearly annoyed by the activity of the young woman mopping up around him.

The office door had been closed for several minutes when a series of flashes began streaming through the airspace between the door and the doorjamb.

The murmur of voices grew as the minutes passed. A few of the guests who had been particularly enthusiastic in their enjoyment of the wine and champagne that had been crisscrossing the room throughout the evening still didn’t seem to grasp the seriousness of the situation. Near the center of the room, a financial correspondent from one of the few remaining New York dailies, a famously boring but well-fed man, preoccupied himself with a colossal prawn, while his pretty young wife studied the somewhat younger man sitting beside her. The man, a newly tenured professor, didn’t seem to notice her. He was thoroughly engrossed in the much worldlier older woman opposite him, much to the consternation of both the young woman he had arrived with and the correspondent’s bored wife.

When the detective opened the office door a quarter of an hour later, the ultra-bright white photographic flashes emerged strobe-like in their rapidity and intensity. Officer Ripperger pointed in my direction and the detective walked over to me, taking another long look at the apartment and the guests as he approached.

Detective Garelik, he said, in curt introduction. You own this place?

Yes, I said.

Live here alone?

Yes.

Divorced?

I shook my head.

Never married? He looked skeptical, as if being neither married nor divorced was cause for suspicion.

Widowed, I replied.

A bit young to be widowed, aren’t you?

It wasn’t something we planned.

He glanced down at my hands. Own any guns?

No.

Have you fired or handled a gun recently?

No, I haven’t.

He smiled and signaled two of the men who had been in the office with him.

Put your hands out in front of you, Garelik said.

I felt the eyes of the room on me as the officers tested for evidence of gunshot residue. They collected samples from each hand, front and back, and then collected additional samples from the cuffs of my shirt and the sleeves of my suit jacket.

When they had finished, Garelik dismissed them and continued with his questioning.

The man who was shot in your office was a friend of yours?

Yes, a good friend.

Nobody heard anything?

Not that I’m aware of.

And a musical instrument was stolen?

Yes.

In oyster black pearl, he said, more as a statement than a question.

I nodded.

Nobody saw it walking out the front door, he added. It just vanished.

I ignored his sarcasm.

That’s your story? More than seventy people saw nothing?

And so I was taken down to the station.

CHAPTER II

THE FORCE OF THE WIND bent the rain at a forty-five-degree angle as Armstrong and Ripperger led me outside. Despite the short distance to the police car, the cold rain saturated my clothing. Armstrong held the car door open and I sat in the back seat of a filthy, beat-up NYPD police car. The rear seat was lower in height than in a consumer automobile and the disintegrating cushions sagged so low that I had to strain to see above the cage barrier. There was something peculiar and foul and strangely unrecognizable in the smell of the car.

The station house was in no better condition. It had clearly been built prior to the last century and little had been done since to maintain it. The patina of the original and evidently only coat of chalk-green paint on the walls and molding was so alligatored that the underlying plaster and wood surfaces were plainly visible. Globe light fixtures filled with dust, insects, and indistinguishable dehydrated forms hung from a tarnished tin ceiling, casting a grey-green incandescent light.

The floorboards sagged and creaked as we walked past the elevated booking desk and the sergeant behind it looked up and paused in the processing of his paperwork. A small line of suspects, very wet and obviously down on their luck, also looked up at our arrival. A group of young men and women in their early twenties, perhaps even in their late teens, were standing directly in front of the booking desk, though they looked more like students than criminals. One of them was speaking with the sergeant.

Could you please tell me where he is, then? the young woman asked.

The sergeant did not respond.

When will I be able to see him?

The sergeant continued to stare straight ahead, not quite at her but through her, without a trace of emotion or concern, his indifference absolute.

You can’t just arrest him for speaking at the Great Hall, she said. He’s a student at Cooper Union. We all are.

She was obviously upset and I turned to see what was happening, but Armstrong pushed me along toward the staircase at the far end of the room.

Why won’t you tell me where he is? she said, her voice carrying up through the stairwell as Armstrong, Ripperger, and I climbed a dark flight of stairs to an even darker hallway.

Half the light bulbs were out and the air was cold and still. Armstrong and Ripperger told me to wait and entered an unmarked door at the end of the hallway. Darkly stained chairs and benches lined the long corridor and the worn floorboards, eroded by countless hours of restless pacing, served as a testament to more than a century of detainees.

The young woman’s voice floated up from the stairwell and continued to carry along the hallway as she made one futile appeal after another to the desk sergeant, the concern and anxiety in her voice escalating, more disconcerting with each new appeal. I stood in the near darkness and watched the rain pounding against the glass of the stairwell skylight, listening to her intermittent pleas through the staccato patterns of the rain for well over an hour before one of the hallway doors opened.

Two officers came out and escorted a young man toward another room across the hallway. His hands were cuffed behind his back and fresh blood was spattered across his face, his hair, and his white cotton shirt in wild patterns of scarlet and alizarin. His fair skin was battered and purple, his eyes blackened, one of them swollen shut, an overripe plum ready to burst with the slightest pressure.

He heard the young woman’s voice climbing through the stairwell and called out to her, his words slurring from the swelling around his mouth. When the young woman heard him, she cried out, but before he could say anything more one of the officers punched him in the small of his back and they swept him into the room, closing the door behind them.

A few minutes later, Armstrong and Ripperger reemerged into the hallway.

The lieutenant says he doesn’t need to see you after all, Armstrong said, the churlish smile returning to his otherwise vacant expression.

As we walked down the stairs, the sound of the young woman’s voice grew stronger.

We haven’t done anything wrong, she said. Why won’t you tell me what you’ve done with him?

She was crying now, but her pleading still had no effect whatsoever, and the sergeant maintained his complete indifference.

Ripperger smirked at the young woman while Armstrong was informing me that I wouldn’t be able to return to my apartment until the police had finished the initial investigation of the crime scene.

We’ll bring you to a hotel, Armstrong said.

That’s quite all right, I can take a cab.

No, he said. We’ll take you.

I really didn’t want to get back into the patrol car. I’d prefer to take a cab.

We’re taking you back, he insisted.

This was clearly not an act of courtesy on his part. He was determined to put me back in that car.

The young woman turned to look at us as we walked past the booking desk. She was very tired and sad and lost, the other students were worried, and the small line of suspects was a little longer now, though no less wet and certainly no less down on their luck. As I turned to look back at her, Armstrong pushed me along toward the exit.

On our way back to Park Avenue and Thirty-ninth Street, the undercarriage of the patrol car scraped exposed granite cobblestone protruding through shoddy asphalt and I began to ache as the car slammed its way from one crater to another.

There were two hotels located in the