He found Annalisa in her prettily decorated office, researching something on the Web. When he appeared in the doorway, she jumped and quickly hit a button on her computer. “What are you doing home?” she asked in alarm. “Has something happened?”
“Nothing at all.”
“Is everything okay?”
“Of course,” Paul said. “Why shouldn’t it be?”
“Considering what’s gone wrong in this building in the past two months,” she said with an edge of sarcasm, “I don’t know.”
“There’s nothing to worry about now,” Paul said, heading upstairs to visit his fish. “I’ve taken care of it. From now on, everything is going to be fine.”
Billy Litchfield spent the two days leading up to Sandy Brewer’s arrest in a haze of fear. He called no one, not trusting himself to behave normally, afraid, if asked, that he would inadvertently blurt out the story of his involvement with the cross. Four or five times, he considered leaving the country, but where would he go? He had a little bit of money, but not enough to stay away forever. Perhaps he could go to Switzerland, where he’d be able to collect some of his money. But the fear paralyzed him. Although he spent hours on the Internet Googling Sandy Brewer’s name to see if anything had happened, the reality of booking a flight and packing a suitcase overwhelmed him. The very thought sent him to his bed, where he curled up in the fetal position under the covers. He had random, unhealthy, repetitive thoughts and kept thinking about a line from a ghost story that had terrified him as a kid — “I want my liver.”
It also occurred to him that maybe Sandy Brewer wouldn’t be caught, and they’d both go free. Who knew how much evidence the detective had? Perhaps it truly was nothing more than a rumor that might persist for a while and then go away. Mrs. Houghton had kept the cross on her bureau in her bedroom in One Fifth Avenue for years with no one the wiser. If he wasn’t caught, Billy vowed he would somehow change his life. He had predicated his entire existence on social obligations, on the desire to be with the right people at the right time and in the right place. Now he saw all too clearly his mistake. He’d thought that this desire for the best in life was going to add up to something substan-tial and concrete. It hadn’t.
Trapped in his apartment, he remembered the many times in his life when he had told himself, “Who needs money when one has rich friends?” He wondered how his rich friends could help him now.
Staring out his living room window at the same view he’d had for years — the Episcopal Church, the stones brown with grime — he saw that a scaffolding was being erected around his building. Of course. The owners were renovating to prepare for the conversion to co-op. He’d done nothing about his apartment situation, not knowing if he would be able to stay in New York City. Was it too late? Would it even matter? Taking himself back to bed, he turned on the television.
The story about Sandy Brewer’s arrest was all over the evening news.
The clip of Sandy being led out in handcuffs and then, with a policeman’s hand on his head, pushed into the backseat of a squad car, played over and over. The newscasters claimed Sandy Brewer had been caught in possession of an invaluable English treasure believed to have come from the estate of one of the city’s most important philanthropists, Mrs. Louise Houghton. There was no mention of Billy.
Immediately, Billy’s house phone and cell phone began ringing inces-santly. Friends or reporters? he wondered. He didn’t answer either line.
His apartment buzzer went off five or six times — apparently, whoever was trying to get in had made it up to his floor, because then there was a pounding at his door that eventually went away. Billy took refuge in his bathroom. It was only a matter of time before they came for him.
He, too, would be all over the newspapers and the Internet, and there would be clips of him on the news and on YouTube, his head bowed in disgrace. His behavior was justifiable, perhaps, because he needed money, but no one would see it that way. Why hadn’t he immediately turned the cross over to the Met? Because it would have besmirched Mrs. Houghton’s name. But she was dead, and now her name was besmirched anyway, and he was probably going to jail. In despair, he even wondered why he had ever moved to New York in the first place. Why couldn’t he have stayed in the Berkshires and been happy with what life had handed him in the beginning?
He opened his medicine cabinet and took out all his pills. He had several kinds now: two types of sleeping pills, Xanax, Prozac, and the Vicodin for his tooth pain. If he took all the pills and drank a bottle of vodka, he might be able to end it. But staring at the pills, he realized he didn’t even have the courage to kill himself.
He could at least knock himself out. He took two Vicodins, two Xanaxes, and one of each kind of sleeping pill. Within minutes, he was asleep in a vibrant, multicolored dream that seemed to go on forever.
Enid Merle was one of the first people to hear about Sandy Brewer’s arrest. A reporter from the paper who was on the scene called her immediately. As yet, all the facts weren’t in, and the conclusion was that Sandy had somehow managed to buy the cross from Mrs. Houghton, who had stolen it from the Met. This allegation, Enid knew, was false. While it was true that Louise had possessed the cross, Enid guessed that she hadn’t taken it from the Met but from Flossie Davis. Flossie had always been the obvious culprit, but what had never made sense to Enid was why Louise hadn’t returned the cross to the Met in the first place. Instead, she’d kept both the cross and the secret, protecting Flossie from being punished for her criminal act. Louise was a devout Catholic; perhaps a moral imperative had prevented her from revealing Flossie’s crime.
Or perhaps, Enid thought, there was another reason. Maybe Flossie had something on Louise. Enid should have gotten to the bottom of this mystery long ago, but she’d never considered it important enough. At the moment, there wasn’t time. She had a column due, and since it concerned Louise Houghton, she would have to write it herself.
Enid looked through several printed pages of research on Sandy and Connie Brewer. The story wasn’t of much importance in the larger world — certainly nowhere near the impact of a presidential election, or the innocent murder of civilians caught in a war, or all and any of the insults and indignities suffered by the common man. It was only about New York “society.” And yet, she reminded herself, the desire for some kind of society was an innate human trait, for without it, there could be no hope of civilized man. Picking out a clip of an article from Vanity Fair written about Connie Brewer and her fabulous country house in the Hamptons, Enid wondered if it was possible to have a desire for too much society. The Brewers had everything in life — four children, a private plane, no worries.
But it wasn’t enough, and now the children’s daddy might be going to jail.
It was ironic that Sandy Brewer and Mrs. Enid Houghton should end up in the same sentence. If Mrs. Houghton had been alive, she never would have acknowledged an arriviste like Sandy. Enid sat back in her chair. There was a big chunk of the story missing, but her column was due in four hours.
Positioning her hands above the keyboard, she wrote, “Louise Houghton was a good friend of mine.”
Eight hours later, Billy Litchfield woke up in his claw-footed bathtub.
Checking his arms and legs, he was surprised to find himself still very much alive — and inexplicably exultant. It was the middle of the night; nevertheless, he felt an overwhelming desire to hear David Bowie. Sliding a CD into the machine, he thought, Why not? and decided to play the entire four hours of a two-CD set spanning Bowie’s career from 1967 to 1993.