F Train Read online

  It took a while before Arlene Reilly opened the door.

  “Thanks for letting me come again.”

  The widow shrugged, said nothing, and led Flo toward the kitchen, where she stopped, looked over at the breakfast dishes still on the table, and turned back into the living room. The air smelled stuffy and stale, the living room was untidy, as though it hadn’t been cleaned in several days.

  Flo sat in an armchair while Arlene Reilly paced silently in front of the couch. In the short time since Flo last saw her, the widow had changed. Her hair needed brushing, her gaze was remote, dark circles under her eyes, her lips dry and cracked. She appeared uncomfortable with her own hands, taking them in and out of the pockets of her tan corduroy jeans. She wore a gray sweatshirt, on the front Fordham Athletics in maroon letters, and it, too, could have used a good wash.

  “So okay, Lieutenant, what is it this time?” Her voice was tired, low and monotone.

  Uncertain where to begin, Flo shifted in her chair. Reassuring Arlene Reilly was essential. Her best opening gambit was to surrender a solid piece of information to put the widow’s mind, if not at ease, then at least less guarded, less resentful.

  “Marie Priester was engaged to marry a lawyer at the firm where she worked. Her mother told me this. When she died, she was five weeks pregnant with his child.” Flo wasn’t completely sure of this final attribution of paternity, but she knew for certain the baby wasn’t John James Reilly’s.

  Arlene Reilly remained wretched. She stood stiffly as if scarcely relieved by this news, her eyes steadily inexpressive, revealing no thoughts.

  “Why don’t you sit down, Arlene, and let’s agree we’ll be open with each other.”

  The widow dropped onto the couch and sighed. “What have I got left to hide? John James was away a lot, okay, I didn’t know what he was up to. He could never tell me. After a while you start imagining all kinds of things, you know what I mean?”

  “Did he usually go out with his service weapon, even off-duty?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “He liked his guns.”

  “He had more than one?”

  “Two more that I know of, both here in the house. They make me nervous now. But I don’t know what to do with them.”

  She paused as if weighing the consequences of an act, and abruptly stood up from the couch and walked over to a bookcase, reaching up to the top shelf and taking down a leather-bound volume of For Whom the Bell Tolls. She opened the cover of the book and held it out for Flo to examine.

  The book wasn’t a book, just a box, no pages, and inside the box nestled in white plastic foam was a Glock 32 pistol.

  Flo recognized the weapon at once, the same model Frank Murphy carried, a .357 with a law enforcement magazine capacity of thirteen rounds, a weapon with no other purpose than to kill someone. The same model she carried only when a situation looked as if a gun might be needed. A Glock 32 wasn’t a sporting arm or a hunter’s tool, but a gun capable at close quarters of blowing an exit wound as big as a breakfast bowl in another person, a gun far more likely to kill than injure. A gun that wasn’t issued by the FBI.

  “Did he always keep this in the house?”

  “Only the last few months. He had another one just like it, locked in a drawer next to our bed. It’s still there. He kept them both loaded.”

  “Did he say why? Why he had loaded guns in the house?”

  Arlene Reilly looked at a loss for explanation. “I didn’t really ask, I didn’t push. I had to assume he knew what he was doing.”

  Flo lifted the weapon from its resting place in For Whom the Bell Tolls, and, keeping her finger away from the trigger guard, opened the action and removed the magazine. She emptied all thirteen cartridges into her briefcase.

  “Take the gun, too, Lieutenant. Keep it. I don’t want guns in the house anymore. Not with the kids and the kids’ friends around. I don’t need a gun.”

  Flo put the unloaded Glock 32 in her briefcase. “And the other one?”

  “Still in the bedroom. Locked up. I never touch it.”

  Together they went down the short hall to the bedroom. The bed was made up only on the one side where no one had been sleeping.

  “It’s in that night table over on my side. The key is in this one.” She took out the key from her husband’s night table drawer and handed it to Flo.

  “Why is the gun on your side?”

  “He wanted me to be able to get at it, if anything happened and I was here by myself. I was supposed to keep my drawer open at night.”

  “What could happen?”

  “I don’t know. Like something dangerous. He didn’t really specify. And I didn’t want to probe. I’ve never fired a gun in my life and he knew it.”

  “Did he keep a gun for himself in the bedroom?”

  “These past few months, yes. He kept his service gun under his pillow whenever he was in bed.”

  Flo concluded—how could she not?—that Reilly must have felt himself under extreme threat the past few months. Either that or he was suffering from clinical paranoia. She simply couldn’t believe he was so obtuse he couldn’t detect his wife’s distress over guns in the house.

  Flo removed the second Glock 32 from the night table drawer, unloaded it, and put the pistol and its magazine contents of thirteen cartridges in her briefcase. She felt like a walking armory.

  “I suppose I can understand your husband having all these guns around. I mean, if someone is so totally fascinated with weapons.” What she really meant was someone so obsessed with fear, but she cautiously opted for the inanimate. The widow looked as though she was already sinking into more than enough grief and Flo didn’t want to drive her into drowning.

  “Arlene, is there a café nearby?”

  “There’s a couple on Third Avenue.”

  “Let’s go get some coffee.” She saw little hope of the widow’s opening up in the house, surrounded by so many reminders of “these past few months.”

  11:30 A.M.

  On their walk down to Third Avenue, Arlene Reilly stayed quiet and Flo bided her time, keeping her own counsel.

  After a half-block, the widow stopped to wipe tears from her cheeks. “It’s the cold. I haven’t been out much, not since the funeral.”

  In the café, after they got their coffee, Arlene Reilly looked Flo directly in the eye and held her gaze for the first time that day. “Well, now what?” she said.

  “For starters, Arlene, how do you feel?”

  “Not much better. Just different. You can ask me whatever you want now. And I’ll try my best. You’ve got a job, the right job. Only tell me one thing first.”

  “I’ll also try my best.”

  “Have you totally leveled with me, do I know everything I should know?”

  “Not everything. Not yet. There’s an official explanation put out by City Hall. The lone mad killer theory. But the truth is, my colleagues and I don’t put much faith in it. I want to be candid here. Regardless of whether your husband was or wasn’t having an affair with Marie Priester—or whatever you want to call their relationship—he was in that subway car with her for a reason. Moreover, he was clearly a man afraid something awful might happen.”

  “What do you suspect, what was he afraid of?”

  “I think you put your finger on it when you described his behavior these past few months. By your own account, and by the evidence of the guns in your house, he had to be convinced someone extremely dangerous was after him. And maybe after her, too, after Marie Priester. We just don’t know yet.”

  “But you confirmed he was off-duty, that he was on leave time.”

  “Officially, yes. That’s right, as far as we’ve been told. But from everything you’ve said, I think he may have been telling you the real truth, a bigger truth, if maybe not in so many words. He was still on the job, as far as he was concerned, and for some reason that he thought very good, he didn’t want to let on at the office he was st
ill working that week.”

  “So what does the Bureau say?”

  “Just about nothing. All we’ve learned is your husband was assigned to a UN member nation’s delegation and for reasons of national security they can’t even tell us which one. This may or may not be directly pertinent.”

  “China,” Arlene Reilly said abruptly.

  “China?”

  “He was assigned to cover the Chinese.”

  China…A vision of a billion and more people flashed through Flo’s brain, people hard at work, people marching, red flags, people conversing in dozens of Chinese dialects no one but they could understand.

  “He told you?” Flo said. “What did he tell you?”

  “That’s about it. That and how he was getting sick and tired of Chinese food. He joked about this, of course, he always had a sense of humor even when things got bad. He said it was only out of duty to his country he was eating Chinese almost every day. John was a steaks and chops man. He preferred eating at home. But he wasn’t eating at home much, not for the past few months anyway. Look, I think maybe it’s enough now, enough talk, too many things in all this just don’t add up for me.”

  “It looks pretty clear he was working on something neither you nor I know anything about. And if the Bureau knows, they’re not saying. My feeling—at least fifty-fifty—is that even at the Bureau they’re still not sure. But before that night…over the past few months…how was your husband changing?”

  Arlene Reilly stared into her empty coffee cup as if an explanation might lie somewhere at the bottom among the milky remains of the morning. “Hard for me to pinpoint. And quite frankly I’m not sure I’ve got the level of trust in you yet that I need…you know, to keep going on and on now about details.”

  Flo’s palms grew moist and she wiped them with a paper napkin. She felt nervous with their roles reversing, Arlene Reilly shifting into resistance.

  “Listen, Lieutenant, bottom line, I loved him, okay? The kids loved him. But yes, we had different temperaments, our outlooks weren’t the same. We didn’t make equal demands on life, we never had the same expectations.” She gave Flo a guarded, searching glance. “But no matter, you can still be happy together, right? You just learn to accommodate, adapt. You must know how it is, I’m sure you understand.”

  “Yes, I do. I can understand.”

  “But I’m not so sure your male colleagues would understand. They wouldn’t get it, they’d probably blame me for the way he was changing. I drove him out of the house. Another woman and so on, how he was out all hours. Lying about where he was and what he was doing.”

  Lying…“How did you know he was lying, what made you so sure?”

  “John James was very ambitious. And something happened last year, I don’t know what, but something made him want to work even harder…something he really wanted a lot of credit for. Maybe all the credit.”

  “He told you this?”

  “He implied it. And for a while I went along, I kept quiet. I felt he knew what he was after. And at first I really had no reason to think otherwise. John James was a hard worker and he wanted to go far. But then there were those pictures with that woman in different places. And I had to ask myself, is this ambition? Or just a bimbo? The opposite of ambition, running a gambler’s biggest risk. But the thing is I never knew him as reckless, he was never a gambler.”

  “Any other people in those pictures?”

  “Sometimes. It looked like they went to a lot of Chinese restaurants together. Bars, too. But my husband wasn’t a bar kind of guy, not as long as I knew him. More than once I got woken up two, three o’clock in the morning, when he’d come home and slip into bed, and I could smell where he’d been.”

  “The pictures, the ones you burned—”

  “No. Look, I lied, okay? I kept them. What’s more my husband wasn’t in the habit of hiding things. I always knew exactly where the guns were, and of course he made sure of that. And then I discovered the pictures, and after it happened…I went digging for more. And I found some notes. A notebook buried under a pile of junk in his closet. My husband wasn’t very neat. So if you want the book, you can have it. I can’t figure out anything in it. Names, places, dates, short indecipherable remarks, and that’s about it, almost like hieroglyphics, all of it impossible to read. I don’t know what any of it means, if it means anything at all. Still, he must have hidden it there for a reason.”

  “Please, Arlene, whatever you can give me, anything could help. There may be a link there. I’d really like to see his notebook. We got to nail the monsters who killed your husband and six other people. We got to stop them from ever doing anything like this again.”

  Sitting across from the widow, Flo saw an emotionally and mentally complex woman, wary eyes and roller-coaster moods, someone Frank Murphy and Marty Keane might well find exasperating, someone exposed and bruised and exhausted, who at the slightest perceived threat might withdraw into herself as purposefully as a frightened snail.

  Was Arlene Reilly always this touchy? How aware was John James Reilly of his wife’s frailties, and was he sensitive enough to treat her with delicate consideration? This could explain his discretion about work, his deceptions, his disappearances. Or was he more like Frank and Marty, and simply found his wife a handful and he’d given up explaining anything to her? Did he seek out another woman who was more understanding, less volatile, a more dependable listener?

  And if so, what did he tell Marie Priester that he wouldn’t dare tell his wife?

  Flo and Arlene Reilly left the café, and as they neared the house, the widow was crying again.

  And snow was blowing in from off the ocean.

  2:50 P.M.

  When he stepped from the car onto Atlantic Avenue, a stinging wind hit Frank Murphy full in the face, constricting his breath as cruelly as a strangler’s hands on a victim’s throat.

  Head down, he struggled forward into the gale and walked past the Heights Antiques shop. He reached an abandoned church on the corner and glanced up at the FOR SALE sign on a broken, blackened steel door, the church steps covered in pigeon droppings. And in Day-Glo orange, spray-painted across the faux Gothic façade…Jesus left me.

  Turning his back to the wind, Frank retraced his steps a few yards to the far side of the church ruin and up to the shop door of Heights Antiques.

  A bell tinkled as he entered but no one appeared.

  He called out, “You open for business?”

  The shop stayed as silent as dust. Heights Antiques seemed less like a shop and more like a series of gloomy storerooms, each resembling a cavern stuffed to the roof with perilous clutter.

  Incredulous, Frank picked his way gingerly around mound after musty mound of Japanese trunks and samurai swords, cracked porcelain chamber pots, pillars of Delft blue china, stuffed bears, an entire aviary of deceased parrots under a great glass bell, mounted swordfish, stags’ heads, British brass, French crystal, German and Danish and English silver, Venetian carnival masks, stamps, coins, old paper money collections, trays of medals from forgotten wars, framed stock certificates of long-defunct companies…

  …until finally he reached what he thought was the last Ali Baba hideaway, the largest cave housing a great jumble of dark polished furniture. Around the walls, ostentatiously padlocked showcases sparkled and dazzled, stuffed with constellations of glittery old jewelry. Who the hell buys this stuff …? Frank lingered to examine an exhibit of gold and silver pocket watches, and a voice, female but of hog-calling quality, pierced the dusty silence. “See those cigarette cases?”

  Frank glanced around for the source, saw no one, but felt compelled to peer over at the next display, the cigarette cases.

  The voice was authoritative. An out-of-town accent. “Paul Flato you’re looking at there,” she said. “The best. Only ever did museum-quality cigarette cases. And in the next case you got your original Verdura cuff links. Cary Grant, Fred Astaire, Kate Hepburn, all the great old movie stars, the crème de la crème of y
our strata, they once pre-owned every bit of that top-class merchandise. You got your turquoise there, you got lapis lazuli, you got rubies and sapphires and emeralds, you name it, it’s there. And at half what you’ll pay over across the bridge. Max.”

  The individual behind the voice so redolent, to Frank’s ears and nose, of black-eyed peas, fried squirrel, and continuous gin fizzes swept into view around a gargantuan wardrobe, a car-sized mahogany commodity on top of which a pair of carved eagles perched perpetually poised for takeoff.

  And here the person paused, a busty hip-heaving vision.

  To Frank’s eyes, she was the in-the-flesh dream of every convict’s more ambitious ambitions. Ella Mae Bontemps—he knew her name, that much he’d discovered in advance. Her appearance was another story, this he wasn’t prepared for. An implausible dream in white cashmere sweater and trousers miraculously untouched by dust, a high-heeled ivory tower of swan-simple curves rising to a cranberry-colored crown, a single fresh white rose tucked behind her ear, a glossy mouth twitching into rapid slippery shapes, sometimes a smile, sometimes not, her Ritalin-bright eyes assessing him as assiduously as she might appraise a questionable Biedermeier breakfront.

  Although she wasn’t young, Frank had to wonder how Ella Mae Bontemps possessed her weird youthfulness, as though youth were a chemical solution in which she was permanently immersed. This impression enveloped her in a sinister aspect.

  Frank, watching her at least as attentively as she watched him, couldn’t suppress—even worse, couldn’t conceal—an unmistakable sensual interest. He felt a tingling. True, Ella Mae’s face was flawed, somewhere between cute and coarse, but cosmetics helped, and her figure in close-fitting cashmere was vastly more than adequate. She behaved as though her body was utterly sensational, the most unfair competition for the sexiest Hollywood celebrity. The movements of her buttocks, the sway of honeydew- melony breasts, her dancelike hand gestures: all were hyperseductive for Frank, distracting him from the job at hand.

  But the vision’s real power, Frank observed, lay in her attitude: she behaved, she moved, she regarded him as though she believed as a matter of faith that she was utterly irresistible, and no matter what opportunities were yet to come to her along life’s rocky path, her style implied an erotic history already replete with extensive footnotes. And all he had to do was check it out.