Good morning!
I sat in bed with my laptop by my side, enjoying the online reviews of my impromptu interview. My left eyeball was throbbing a bit, a light hangover from the cheap Scotch, but the rest of me was feeling pretty satisfied. Last night I cast the first line to lure my wife back in. I’m sorry, I will make it up to you, I will do whatever you want from now on, I will let the world know how special you are.
Because I was fucked unless Amy decided to show herself. Tanner’s detective (a wiry, clean-cut guy, not the boozy noir gumshoe I’d hoped for) had come up with nothing so far – my wife had disappeared herself perfectly. I had to convince Amy to come back to me, flush her out with compliments and capitulation.
If the reviews were any indication, I made the right call, because the reviews were good. They were very good:
The Iceman Melteth!
I KNEW he was a good guy.
In vino veritas!
Maybe he didn’t kill her after all.
Maybe he didn’t kill her after all.
Maybe he didn’t kill her after all.
And they’d stopped calling me Lance.
Outside my house, the cameramen and journalists were restless, they wanted a statement from the guy who Maybe Didn’t Kill Her After All. They were yelling at my drawn blinds: Hey, Nick, come on out, tell us about Amy. Hey, Nick, tell us about your treasure hunt. For them it was just a new wrinkle in a ratings bonanza, but it was much better than Nick, did you kill your wife?
And then, suddenly, they were yelling Go’s name – they loved Go, she had no poker face, you knew if Go was sad, angry, worried; stick a caption underneath, and you had a whole story. Margo, is your brother innocent? Margo, tell us about … Tanner, is your client innocent? Tanner—
The doorbell rang, and I opened the door while hiding behind it because I was still disheveled; my spiky hair and wilted boxers would tell their own story. Last night, on camera, I was adorably smitten, a tad tipsy, in vino veritastic. Now I just looked like a drunk. I closed the door and waited for two more glowing reviews of my performance.
‘You don’t ever – ever – do something like that again,’ Tanner started. ‘What the hell is wrong with you, Nick? I feel like I need to put one of those toddler leashes on you. How stupid can you be?’
‘Have you seen all the comments online? People love it. I’m turning around public opinion, like you told me to.’
‘You don’t do that kind of thing in an uncontrolled environment,’ he said. ‘What if she worked for Ellen Abbott? What if she started asking you questions that were harder than What do you want to say to your wife, cutie-pumpkin-pie?’ He said this is a girlish singsong. His face under the orange spray tan was red, giving him a radioactive palette.
‘I trusted my instincts. I’m a journalist, Tanner, you have to give me some credit that I can smell bullshit. She was genuinely sweet.’
He sat down on the sofa, put his feet on the ottoman that would never have flipped over on its own. ‘Yeah, well, so was your wife once,’ he said. ‘So was Andie once. How’s your cheek?’
It still hurt; the bite seemed to throb as he reminded me of it. I turned to Go for support.
‘It wasn’t smart, Nick,’ she said, sitting down across from Tanner. ‘You were really, really lucky – it turned out really well, but it might not have.’
‘You guys are really overreacting. Can we enjoy a small moment of good news? Just thirty seconds of good news in the past nine days? Please?’
Tanner pointedly looked at his watch. ‘Okay, go.’
When I started to talk, he popped his index finger, made the uhp-uhp noise that grown-ups make when children try to interrupt. Slowly, his index finger lowered, then landed on the watch face.
‘Okay, thirty seconds. Did you enjoy it?’ He paused to see if I’d say anything – the pointed silence a teacher allows after asking the disruptive student: Are you done talking? ‘Now we need to talk. We are in a place where excellent timing is absolutely key.’
‘I agree.’
‘Gee, thanks.’ He arched an eyebrow at me. ‘I want to go to the police very, very soon with the contents of the woodshed. While the hoi polloi is—’
Just hoi polloi, I thought, not the hoi polloi. It was something Amy had taught me.
‘—all loving on you again. Or, excuse me, not again. Finally. The reporters have found Go’s house, and I don’t feel secure leaving that woodshed, its contents, undisclosed much longer. The Elliotts are …?’
‘We can’t count on the Elliotts’ support anymore,’ I said. ‘Not at all.’ Another pause. Tanner decided not to lecture me, or even ask what happened.
‘So we need offense,’ I said, feeling untouchable, angry, ready.
‘Nick, don’t let one good turn make you feel indestructible,’ Go said. She pressed some extra-strengths from her purse into my hand. ‘Get rid of your hangover. You need to be on today.’ ‘It’s going to be okay,’ I told her. I popped the pills, turned to Tanner. ‘What do we do? Let’s make a plan.’
‘Great, here’s the deal,’ Tanner said. ‘This is incredibly unorthodox, but that’s me. Tomorrow we are doing an interview with Sharon Schieber.’
‘Wow, that’s … for sure?’ Sharon Schieber was as good as I could ask for: the top-rated (ages 30–55) network (broader reach than cable) newswoman (to prove I could have respectful relations with people who have vaginas) working today. She was known for dabbling very occasionally in the impure waters of true-crime journalism, but when she did, she got freakin’ righteous. Two years ago, she took under her silken wing a young mother who had been imprisoned for shaking her infant to death. Sharon Schieber presented a whole legal – and very emotional – defense case over a series of nights. The woman is now back home in Nebraska, remarried and expecting a child.
‘That’s for sure. She got in touch after the video went viral.’
‘So the video did help.’ I couldn’t resist.
‘It gave you an interesting wrinkle: Before the video, it was clear you did it. Now there’s a slight chance you didn’t. I don’t know how it is you finally seemed genuine—’
‘Because last night it served an actual purpose: Get Amy back,’ Go said. ‘It was an offensive maneuver. Where before it would just be indulgent, undeserved, disingenuous emotion.’
I gave her a thank-you smile.
‘Well, keep remembering that it is serving a purpose,’ Tanner said. ‘Nick, I’m not fucking around here: This is beyond unorthodox. Most lawyers would be shutting you up. But it’s something I’ve been wanting to try. The media has saturated the legal environment. With the Internet, Facebook, YouTube, there’s no such thing as an unbiased jury anymore. No clean slate. Eighty, ninety percent of a case is decided before you get in the courtroom. So why not use it – control the story. But it’s a risk. I want every word, every gesture, every bit of information planned out ahead of time. But you have to be natural, likable, or this will all backfire.’
‘Oh, that sounds simple,’ I said. ‘One hundred percent canned yet totally genuine.’
‘You have to be extremely careful with your wording, and we will tell Sharon that you won’t answer certain questions. She’ll ask you anyway, but we’ll teach you how to say, Because of certain prejudicial actions by the police involved in this case, I really, unfortunately, can’t answer that right now, as much as I’d like to – and say it convincingly.’
‘Like a talking dog.’
‘Sure, like a talking dog who doesn’t want to go to prison. We get Sharon Schieber to take you on as a cause, Nick, and we are golden. This is all incredibly unorthodox, but that’s me,’ Tanner said again. He liked the line; it was his theme music. He paused and furrowed his brow, doing his pretend-thinking gesture. He was going to add something I wouldn’t like.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘You need to tell Sharon Schieber about Andie – because it’s going to come out, the affair, it just will.’
‘Right when people are finally starting to like me. You want me to undo that?’
‘I swear to you, Nick – how many cases have I handled? It always – somehow, some way, always comes out. This way we have control. You tell her about Andie and you apologize. Apologize literally as if your life depends on it. You had an affair, you are a man, a weak, stupid man. But you love your wife, and you will make it up to her. You do the interview, it’ll air the next night. All content is embargoed – so they can’t tease the Andie affair in their ads. They can just use the word bombshell.’
‘So you already told them about Andie?’
‘Good God, no,’ he said. ‘I told them: We have a nice bombshell for you. So you do the interview, and we have about twenty-four hours. Just before it hits TV, we tell Boney and Gilpin about Andie and about our discovery in the woodshed. Oh my gosh, we’ve put it all together for you: Amy is alive and she’s framing Nick! She’s crazy, jealous, and she is framing Nick! Oh, the humanity!’
‘Why not tell Sharon Schieber, then? About Amy framing me?’
‘Reason one. You come clean about Andie, you beg forgiveness, the nation is primed to forgive you, they’ll feel sorry for you – Americans love to see sinners apologize. But you can reveal nothing to make your wife look bad; no one wants to see the cheating husband blame the wife for anything. Let someone else do it sometime the next day: Sources close to the police reveal that Nick’s wife – the one he swore he loved with all his heart – is framing him! It’s great TV.’
‘What’s reason two?’
‘It’s too complicated to explain exactly how Amy is framing you. You can’t do it in a sound bite. It’s bad TV.’
‘I feel sick,’ I said.
‘Nick, it’s—’ Go started.
‘I know, I know, it has to be done. But can you imagine, your biggest secret and you have to tell the world about it? I know I have to do it. And it works for us, ultimately, I think. It’s the only way Amy might come back,’ I said. ‘She wants me to be publicly humiliated—’
‘Chastened,’ Tanner interrupted. ‘Humiliated makes it sound like you feel sorry for yourself.’
‘—and to publicly apologize,’ I continued. ‘But it’s going to be fucking awful.’
‘Before we go forward, I want to be honest here,’ Tanner said. ‘Telling the police the whole story – Amy’s framing Nick – it is a risk. Most cops, they decide on a suspect and they don’t want to veer at all. They’re not open to any other options. So there’s the risk that we tell them and they laugh us out of the station and they arrest you – and then theoretically we’ve just given them a preview of our defense. So they can plan exactly how to destroy it at trial.’
‘Okay, wait, that sounds really, really bad, Tanner,’ Go said. ‘Like, bad, inadvisable bad.’
‘Let me finish,’ Tanner said. ‘One, I think you’re right, Nick. I think Boney isn’t convinced you’re a killer. I think she would be open to an alternate theory. She has a good reputation as a cop who’s actually fair. As a cop who has good instincts. I talked with her. I got a good vibe. I think the evidence is leading her in your direction, but I think her gut is telling her something’s off. More important, if we do go to trial, I wouldn’t use the Amy frame-up as your defense, anyway.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Like I said, it’s too complicated, a jury wouldn’t be able to follow. If it’s not good TV, believe me, it’s not for a jury. We’d go with more of an O.J. thing. A simple story line: The cops are incompetent and out to get you, it’s all circumstantial, if the glove doesn’t fit, blah blah, blah.’
‘Blah blah blah, that gives me a lot of confidence,’ I said.
Tanner flashed a smile. ‘Juries love me, Nick. I’m one of them.’
‘You’re the opposite of one of them, Tanner.’
‘Reverse that: They’d like to think they’re one of me.’
Everything we did now, we did in front of small brambles of flashing paparazzi, so Go, Tanner, and I left the house under pops of light and pings of noise (‘Don’t look down,’ Tanner advised, ‘don’t smile, but don’t look ashamed. Don’t rush either, just walk, let them take their shots, and shut the door before you call them names. Then you can call them whatever you want.’) We were headed down to St. Louis, where the interview would take place, so I could prep with Tanner’s wife, Betsy, a former TV news anchor turned lawyer. She was the other Bolt in Bolt & Bolt.
It was a creepy tailgate party: Tanner and I, followed by Go, followed by a half-dozen news vans, but by the time the Arch crept over the skyline, I was no longer thinking of the paparazzi.
By the time we reached Tanner’s penthouse hotel suite, I was ready to do the work I needed to nail the interview. Again I longed for my own theme music: the montage of me getting ready for the big fight.
What’s the mental equivalent of a speed bag?
A gorgeous six-foot-tall black woman answered the door.
‘Hi, Nick, I’m Betsy Bolt.’
In my mind Betsy Bolt was a diminutive blond Southern-belle white girl.
‘Don’t worry, everyone is surprised when they meet me.’ Betsy laughed, catching my look, shaking my hand. ‘Tanner and Betsy, we sound like we should be on the cover of The Official Preppy Guide, right?’
‘Preppy Handbook,’ Tanner corrected as he kissed her on the cheek.
‘See? He actually knows,’ she said.
She ushered us into an impressive penthouse suite – a living room sunlit by wall-to-wall windows, with bedrooms shooting off each side. Tanner had sworn he couldn’t stay in Carthage, at the Days Inn, out of respect for Amy’s parents, but Go and I both suspected he couldn’t stay in Carthage because the closest five-star hotel was in St. Louis.
We engaged in the preliminaries: small talk about Betsy’s family, college, career (all stellar, A-list, awesome), and drinks dispersed for everyone (soda pops and Clamato, which Go and I had come to believe was an affectation of Tanner’s, a quirk he thought would give him character, like my wearing fake glasses in college). Then Go and I sank down into the leather sofa, Betsy sitting across from us, her legs pressed together to one side, like a slash mark. Pretty/professional. Tanner paced behind us, listening.
‘Okay. So, Nick,’ Betsy said. ‘I’ll be frank, yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘You and TV. Aside from your bar-blog thingie, the Whodunnit. com thingie last night, you’re awful.’
‘There was a reason I went to print journalism,’ I said. ‘I see a camera, and my face freezes.’
‘Exactly,’ Betsy said. ‘You look like a mortician, so stiff. I got a trick to fix that, though.’
‘Booze?’ I asked. ‘That worked for me on the blog thingie.’
‘That won’t work here,’ Betsy said. She began setting up a video camera. ‘Thought we’d do a dry run first. I’ll be Sharon. I’ll ask the questions she’ll probably ask, and you answer the way you normally would. That way we can know how far off the mark you are.’ She laughed again. ‘Hold on.’ She was wearing a blue sheath dress, and from an oversize leather purse, she pulled a string of pearls. The Sharon Schieber uniform. ‘Tanner?’
Her husband fastened the pearls for her, and when they were in place, Betsy grinned. ‘I aim for absolute authenticity. Aside from my Georgia accent. And being black.’
‘I see only Sharon Schieber before me,’ I said.
She turned the camera on, sat down across from me, let out a breath, looked down, and then looked up. ‘Nick, there have been many discrepancies in this case,’ Betsy said in Sharon’s plummy broadcast voice. ‘To begin with, can you walk our audience through the day your wife went missing?’
‘Here, Nick, you only discuss the anniversary breakfast you two had,’ Tanner interrupted. ‘Since that is already out there. But you don’t give time lines, you don’t discuss before and after breakfast. You are emphasizing only this wonderful last breakfast you had. Okay, go.’
‘Yes.’ I cleared my throat. The camera was blinking red; Betsy had her quizzical-journalist expression on. ‘Uh, as you know, it was our five-year anniversary, and Amy got up early and was making crepes—’
Betsy’s arm shot out, and my cheek suddenly stung.
‘What the hell?’ I said, trying to figure out what had happened. A cherry-red jellybean was in my lap. I held it up.
‘Every time you tense up, every time you turn that handsome face into an undertaker’s mask, I am going to hit you with a jellybean,’ Betsy explained, as if the whole thing were quite reasonable.
‘And that’s supposed to make me less tense?’
‘It works,’ Tanner said. ‘It’s how she taught me. I think she used rocks with me, though.’ They exchanged oh, you! married smiles. I could tell already: They were one of those couples who always seemed to be starring in their own morning talk show.
‘Now start again, but linger over the crepes,’ Betsy said. ‘Were they your favorites? Or hers? And what were you doing that morning for your wife while she was making crepes for you?’
‘I was sleeping.’
‘What had you bought her for a gift?’
‘I hadn’t yet.’
‘Oh, boy.’ She rolled her eyes over to her husband. ‘Then be really, really, really complimentary about those crepes, okay? And about what you were going to get her that day for a present. Because I know you were not coming back to that house without a present.’
We started again, and I described our crepe tradition that wasn’t really, and I described how careful and wonderful Amy was with picking out gifts (here another jellybean smacked just right of my nose, and I immediately loosened my jaw) and how I, dumb guy (‘Definitely play up the doofus-husband stuff,’ Betsy advised) was still trying to come up with something dazzling.
‘It wasn’t like she even liked expensive or fancy presents,’ I began, and was hit with a paper ball from Tanner.
‘What?’
‘Past tense. Stop using fucking past tense about your wife.’
‘I understand you and your wife had some bumps,’ Betsy continued.
‘It had been a rough few years. We’d both lost our jobs.’
‘Good, yes!’ Tanner called. ‘You both had.’
‘We’d moved back here to help care for my dad, who has Alzheimer’s, and my late mother, who had cancer, and on top of that I was working very hard at my new job.’
‘Good, Nick, good,’ Tanner said.
‘Be sure to mention how close you were with your mom,’ Betsy said, even though I’d never mentioned my mom to her. ‘No one will pop up to deny that, right? No Mommy Dearest or Sonny Dearest stories out there?’
‘No, my mom and I were very close.’
‘Good,’ said Betsy. ‘Mention her a lot, then. And that you own the bar with your sister – always mention your sister when you mention the bar. If you own a bar on your own, you’re a player; if you own it with your beloved twin sister, you’re—’
‘Irish.’
‘Go on.’
‘And so it all built up—’ I started.
‘No,’ Tanner said. ‘Implies building up to an explosion.’
‘So we had gotten off track a little, but I was considering our five-year anniversary as a time to revive our relationship—’
‘Recommit to our relationship,’ Tanner called. ‘Revive means something was dead.’
‘Recommit to our relationship—’
‘And so how does fucking a twenty-three-year-old figure in to this rejuvenative picture?’ Betsy asked.
Tanner lobbed a jellybean her way. ‘A little out of character, Bets.’
‘I’m sorry, guys, but I’m a woman, and that smells like bullshit, like mile-away bullshit. Recommit to the relationship, please. That girl was still in the picture when Amy went missing. Women are going to hate you, Nick, unless you suck it up. Be up-front, don’t stall. You can add it on: We lost our jobs, we moved, my parents were dying. Then I fucked up. I fucked up huge. I lost track of who I was, and unfortunately, it took losing Amy to realize it. You have to admit you’re a jerk and that everything was all your fault.’
‘So, like, what men are supposed to do in general,’ I said.
Betsy flung an annoyed look at the ceiling. ‘And that’s an attitude, Nick, you should be real careful on.’