Never Tell

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 (#ulink_18e06d12-e071-54bf-b74b-be2f894acbb0)

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?”