John is understandably distraught when he appears, but after a long silent hug, Frank leaves most of the talking, and explaining, such as it is, to Lloyd.
And in this way Saturday rolls on and folds into Sunday.
The media barrage in the morning is relentless, the papers, the talk shows, but Frank ends up being shielded from a lot of it-and again, here, thanks are due to Lloyd, whose crisis management skills are operating at full tilt.
But what Frank realizes after a while is that he doesn’t want to be shielded from it, because in the absence of being able to feel anything, he finds that all he can do is think, and to do that he needs input, he needs information.
In the apartment, there is a lot of walking on eggshells, and whispered conversations, and tea drinking, and Frank knows he won’t be able to bear this for much longer. On Sunday evening, therefore, he has a quiet word with Deb, an even quieter one with John, and then he takes his leave. He borrows a coat and hat of Lloyd’s, so that when he exits the building he’s able to slip by the photographers unnoticed.
He’s not sure what he’s going to do, though.
He doesn’t want to go downtown to retrieve his car-doesn’t want to go anywhere near there, not yet. Besides, he’ll have to stick around town for a few days, to find out what’s happening. To find out about the release of the body.
So he wanders aimlessly for an hour or two, and eventually checks into a cheap hotel, the Bromley, in midtown, near Seventh Avenue. For a cheap hotel, the Bromley is still fairly expensive, but Frank doesn’t care. He has a credit card, and some money in the bank.
Not that any of that matters anymore.
He settles into his room, which is musty and could do with a lick of paint and a change of carpets, and turns on the TV.
He flicks around the channels looking for any reference to, or analysis of, the events of Friday. Incredibly, it seems that the story has already receded somewhat, and other stuff has come to the fore. But he does find a bit of coverage, which he watches with mute incomprehension-and as soon as it’s done, he flicks on through the channels to look for more elsewhere.
He’s also very hungry, he realizes, but he does nothing about it.
Eventually, he falls asleep on the bed, in his clothes, the remote control in his hand.
“Well, I wasn’t paying attention. I was actually pretty busy on Friday.”
“Yeah. Guess I called that one wrong.”
It’s Sunday night, and Ellen is at the bar in Flannery’s having a drink with Charlie. She raises her glass and says, “You might not have been the only one.”
Charlie nods. “Quite the spectacular fuckup, wasn’t it?”
Ellen doesn’t say anything. She can still hear the gunfire in her head, and feel the resultant knot in her stomach. She’s had the weekend to get over it, to digest what happened, but it now appears that that’s not going to be enough.
“Three dead kids?” Charlie goes on. “That’s a bad day’s work, no matter what the circumstances. Okay, this wasn’t Kent State or anything. They shot those banker guys, I get that. But still.”
Ellen doesn’t know how old Charlie is exactly, but his casual reference to Kent State as a sort of touchstone for this says a lot.
“Anyway.” She doesn’t really want to talk about Orchard Street. It’s not that she doesn’t have anything to say on the matter. She does. That’s the trouble. She wouldn’t know where to start. “So, counselor,” she says, upbeat, “what’s going on? What’s the latest?”
Charlie’s obsessive interest in the Connie Carillo murder trial is almost as amusing as the trial itself. It’s like a soap opera for him, something to watch and then ironically tear apart and analyze in the bar with his co-retirees and anyone else, like Ellen, who’ll bother to listen.
“Okay,” he says, “on Friday morning Joey Gifford finished up, so after lunch they called the next witness.” He glides a hand through the air, as though conjuring up something magical. “Enter Mrs. Sanchez, the housekeeper.” He lets that sink in for a moment, but when it doesn’t get the reaction he was obviously expecting, he hammers the point home. “It means we get our first glimpse inside the apartment. And even if Mrs. Sanchez is no Joey Gifford, she’s going to have a lot more to dish up on the day-to-day stuff chez Carillo.”
Dutifully, Ellen raises her glass again. “What’s not to like?”
“Exactly.”
But as Charlie goes on with his account of Friday’s proceedings in the courtroom, Ellen finds her mind wandering back to Orchard Street, and to an image she has of Frank Bishop standing alone at the barrier, stooped, motionless, waiting for Lenny Byron to reappear.
She and others were shunted away at that point.
Near the outer barrier she had a quick word with Val Brady, and then stood around on Delancey for a while before wandering off and eventually-once again-heading home.
Here there were more voice messages and e-mails inviting her to address Twittergate-or, as it should perhaps more generously be called (it being the only -gate he’s ever likely to get), Rattgate-but she ignored them. She turned on the TV, went online, grabbed her phone, and started following the Orchard Street story across as many platforms as she could handle. Unlike earlier, she accepted now that she was a civilian where this was concerned. But she was a committed one and wanted answers.
She wanted to understand.
And over the course of Saturday and Sunday she has come to understand quite a bit, even managing to piece together for herself a plausible-ish picture of how and why the whole thing happened. Unsurprisingly, though, certain key questions remain unanswered-questions about the different guns the Coadys used in the shootings, about whether or not there actually were any explosives in the apartment, and about the exact sequence of events at the very end. She knows from experience that when these issues come up for official processing they’ll either be dealt with head-on and honestly, or they’ll be fudged, spun, and subjected to such extensive redaction as to be rendered meaningless.
But in the meantime there’s plenty of speculation and theorizing and opinion, endless rivers of the stuff, in fact-and of every color and shade. Today alone, for example, in the papers and online, the Coadys and Lizzie Bishop have been vilified, lionized, psychoanalyzed, diagnosed, caricatured, and satirized. Members of their respective families have been followed, hounded, and photographed. Ellen even found herself watching a brief YouTube clip of Frank Bishop standing outside an apartment building with a couple of other people on the Upper East Side somewhere.
What was the point of that?
Who knows? She doesn’t.
What she does know, however, is that she liked Frank Bishop, and she feels for him. On the drive down to the city from Atherton they talked a lot, at least for the first part of the journey, and she got a real sense of what makes him tick, of how he thinks, and especially of how important Lizzie was to him. Maybe that last part is to state the obvious, but it certainly puts things into perspective for Ellen.
As she listens to Charlie talk now about the Carillo trial, she feels no real connection to any of the key players in it. Sure, Connie is on trial for her life, and may well be innocent, but as a semi-public figure of some years’ standing-socialite, opera singer, mob wife, and politician’s daughter-she’s been so mediated and filtered already, before this, that she doesn’t come across as authentic or relatable in any way.