The show was over, Andie and the Elliotts gone from view. Sharon’s producer kicked the TV off with the point of her heel. Everyone in the room was watching me, waiting for an explanation, the party guest who just shat on the floor. Sharon gave me a too-bright smile, an angry smile that strained her Botox. Her face folded in the wrong spots.
‘Well?’ she said in her calm, plummy voice. ‘What the fuck was that?’
Tanner stepped in. ‘That was the bombshell. Nick was and is fully prepared to disclose and discuss his actions. I’m sorry about the timing, but in a way, it’s better for you, Sharon. You’ll get the first react from Nick.’
‘You’d better have some goddamn interesting things to say, Nick.’ She breezed away, calling, ‘Mike him, we do this now’ to no one in particular.
Sharon Schieber, it turned out, fucking adored me. In New York I’d always heard rumors that she’d been a cheat herself and returned to her husband, a very hush-hush inside-journalism story. That was almost ten years ago, but I figured the urge to absolve might still be there. It was. She beamed, she coddled, she cajoled and teased. She pursed those full, glossy lips at me in deep sincerity – a knuckled hand under her chin – and asked me her hard questions, and for once I answered them well. I am not a liar of Amy’s dazzling caliber, but I’m not bad when I have to be. I looked like a man who loved his wife, who was shamed by his infidelities and ready to do right. The night before, sleepless and nervy, I’d gone online and watched Hugh Grant on Leno, 1995, apologizing to the nation for getting lewd with a hooker. Stuttering, stammering, squirming as if his skin were two sizes too small. But no excuses: ‘I think you know in life what’s a good thing to do and what’s a bad thing, and I did a bad thing … and there you have it.’ Damn, the guy was good – he looked sheepish, nervous, so shaky you wanted to take his hand and say, Buddy, it’s not that big a deal, don’t beat yourself up. Which was the effect I was going for. I watched that clip so many times, I was in danger of borrowing a British accent.
I was the ultimate hollow man: the husband that Amy always claimed couldn’t apologize finally did, using words and emotions borrowed from an actor.
But it worked. Sharon, I did a bad thing, an unforgivable thing. I can’t make any excuses for it. I let myself down – I’ve never thought of myself as a cheater. It’s inexcusable, it’s unforgivable, and I just want Amy to come home so I can spend the rest of my life making it up to her, treating her how she deserves.
Oh, I’d definitely like to treat her how she deserves.
But here’s the thing, Sharon: I did not kill Amy. I would never hurt her. I think what’s happening here is what I’ve been calling [a chuckle] in my mind the Ellen Abbott effect. This embarrassing, irresponsible brand of journalism. We are so used to seeing these murders of women packaged as entertainment, which is disgusting, and in these shows, who is guilty? It’s always the husband. So I think the public and, to an extent, even the police have been hammered into believing that’s always the case. From the beginning, it was practically assumed I had killed my wife – because that’s the story we are told time after time – and that’s wrong, that’s morally wrong. I did not kill my wife. I want her to come home.
I knew Sharon would like an opportunity to paint Ellen Abbott as a sensationalistic ratings whore. I knew regal Sharon with her twenty years in journalism, her interviews with Arafat and Sarkozy and Obama, would be offended by the very idea of Ellen Abbott. I am (was) a journalist, I know the drill, and so when I said those words – the Ellen Abbott effect – I recognized Sharon’s mouth twitch, the delicately raised eyebrows, the lightening of her whole visage. It was the look when you realize: I got my angle.
At the end of the interview, Sharon took both my hands in hers – cool, a bit callused, I’d read she was an avid golfer – and wished me well. ‘I will be keeping a close eye on you, my friend,’ she said, and then she was kissing Go on the cheek and swishing away from us, the back of her dress a battlefield of stickpins to keep the material in front from slouching.
‘You fucking did that perfectly,’ Go pronounced as she headed to the door. ‘You seem totally different than before. In charge but not cocky. Even your jaw is less … dickish.’
‘Almost, yeah. See you back home.’ She actually gave me a go-champ punch to the shoulder.
I followed the Sharon Schieber interview with two quickies – one cable and one network. Tomorrow the Schieber interview would air, and then the others would roll out, a domino of apologetics and remorse. I was taking control. I was no longer going to settle for being the possibly guilty husband or the emotionally removed husband or the heartlessly cheating husband. I was the guy everyone knew – the guy many men (and women) have been: I cheated, I feel like shit, I will do what needs to be done to fix the situation because I am a real man.
‘We are in decent shape,’ Tanner pronounced as we wrapped up. ‘The thing with Andie, it won’t be as awful as it might have been, thanks to the interview with Sharon. We just need to stay ahead of everything else from now on.’
Go phoned, and I picked up. Her voice was thin and high.
‘The cops are here with a warrant for the woodshed … they’re at Dad’s house too. They’re … I’m scared.’
Go was in the kitchen smoking a cigarette when we arrived, and judging from the overflow in the kitschy ’70s ashtray, she was on her second pack. An awkward, shoulderless kid with a crew cut and a police officer’s uniform sat next to her on one of the bar stools.
‘This is Tyler,’ she said. ‘He grew up in Tennessee, he has a horse named Custard—’
‘Custer,’ Tyler said.
‘Custer, and he’s allergic to peanuts. Not the horse but Tyler. Oh, and he has a torn labrum, which is the same injury baseball pitchers get, but he’s not sure how he got it.’ She took a drag on the cigarette. Her eyes watered. ‘He’s been here a long time.’
Tyler tried to give me a tough look, ended up watching his well-shined shoes.
Boney appeared through the sliding glass doors at the back of the house. ‘Big day, boys,’ she said. ‘Wish you’d bothered letting us know, Nick, that you have a girlfriend. Would have saved us all a lot of time.’
‘We’re happy to discuss that, as well as the contents of the shed, both of which we were on our way to tell you about,’ Tanner said. ‘Frankly, if you had given us the courtesy of telling us about Andie, a lot of pain could have been forestalled. But you needed the press conference, you had to have the publicity. How disgusting, to put that girl up there like that.’
‘Right,’ Boney said. ‘So, the woodshed. You all want to come with me?’ She turned her back on us, leading the way over the patchy end-of-summer grass to the woodshed. A cobweb trailed from her hair like a wedding veil. She motioned impatiently when she saw me not following. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Not gonna bite you.’
The woodshed was lit up by several portable lights, making it look even more ominous.
‘When’s the last time you been in here, Nick?’
‘I came in here very recently, when my wife’s treasure hunt led me here. But it’s not my stuff, and I did not touch anything—’
Tanner cut me off: ‘My client and I have an explosive new theory—’ Tanner began, then caught himself. The phony TV-speak was so incredibly awful and inappropriate, we all cringed.
‘Oh, explosive, how exciting,’ Boney said.
‘We were about to inform you—’
‘Really? What convenient timing,’ she said. ‘Stay there, please.’ The door hung loose on its hinges, a broken lock dangling to the side. Gilpin was inside, cataloging the goods.
‘These the golf clubs you don’t play with?’ Gilpin said, jostling the glinting irons.
‘None of this is mine – none of this was put there by me.’
‘That’s funny, because everything in here corresponds with purchases made on the credit cards that aren’t yours either,’ Boney snapped. ‘This is, like, what do they call it, a man cave? A man cave in the making, just waiting for the wife to go away for good. Got yourself some nice pastimes, Nick.’ She pulled out three large cardboard boxes and set them at my feet.
‘What’s this?’
Boney opened them with fingertip disgust despite her gloved hands. Inside were dozens of porn DVDs, flesh of all colors and sizes on display on the covers.
Gilpin chuckled. ‘I gotta hand it to you, Nick, I mean, a man has his needs—’
‘Men are highly visual, that’s what my ex always said when I caught him,’ Boney said.
‘Men are highly visual, but Nick, this shit made me blush,’ Gilpin said. ‘It made me a little sick, too, some of it, and I don’t get sick too easy.’ He spread out a few of the DVDs like an ugly deck of cards. Most of the titles implied violence: Brutal Anal, Brutal Blowjobs, Humiliated Whores, Sadistic Slut Fucking, Gang-raped Sluts, and a series called Hurt the Bitch, volumes 1–18, each featuring photos of women writhing in pain while leering, laughing men inserted objects into them.
I turned away.
‘Oh, now he’s embarrassed.’ Gilpin grinned.
But I didn’t respond because I saw Go being helped into the back of a police car.
We met an hour later at the police station. Tanner advised against it – I insisted. I appealed to his iconoclast, millionaire rodeo-cowboy ego. We were going to tell the cops the truth. It was time.
I could handle them fucking with me – but not my sister.
‘I’m agreeing to this because I think your arrest is inevitable, Nick, no matter what we do,’ he said. ‘If we let them know we’re up for talking, we may get some more information on the case they’ve got against you. Without a body, they’ll really want a confession. So they’ll try to overwhelm you with the evidence. And they may give us enough to really jumpstart our defense.’
‘And we give them everything, right?’ I said. ‘We give them the clues and the marionettes and Amy.’ I was panicked, aching to go – I could picture the cops right now sweating my sister under a bare lightbulb.
‘As long as you let me talk,’ Tanner said. ‘If it’s me talking about the frame-up, they can’t use it against us at trial … if we go with a different defense.’
It concerned me that my lawyer found the truth to be so completely unbelievable.
Gilpin met us at the steps of the station, a Coke in his hand, late dinner. When he turned around to lead us in, I saw a sweat-soaked back. The sun had long set, but the humidity remained. He flapped his arms once, and the shirt fluttered and stuck right back to his skin.
‘Still hot,’ he said. ‘Supposed to get hotter overnight.’
Boney was waiting for us in the conference room, the one from the first night. The Night Of. She’d French-braided her limp hair and clipped it to the back of her head in a rather poignant updo, and she wore lipstick. I wondered if she had a date. A meet you after midnight situation.
‘You have kids?’ I asked her, pulling out a chair.
She looked startled and held up a finger. ‘One.’ She didn’t say a name or an age or anything else. Boney was in business mode. She tried to wait us out.
‘You first,’ Tanner said. ‘Tell us what you got.’
‘Sure,’ Boney said. ‘Okay.’ She turned on the tape recorder, dispensed with the preliminaries. ‘It is your contention, Nick, that you never bought or touched the items in the woodshed on your sister’s property.’
‘That is correct,’ Tanner replied for me.
‘Nick, your fingerprints are all over almost every item in the shed.’
‘That’s a lie! I touched nothing, not a thing in there! Except for my anniversary present, which Amy left inside.’
Tanner touched my arm: shut the fuck up.
‘Which we have brought here today,’ Tanner said.
‘Nick, your fingerprints are on the porn, on the golf clubs, on the watch cases, and even on the TV.’
And then I saw it, how much Amy would have enjoyed this: my deep, self-satisfied sleep (which I lorded over her, my belief that if she were only more laid-back, more like me, her insomnia would vanish) turned against me. I could see it: Amy down on her knees, my snores heating her cheeks, as she pressed a fingertip here and there over the course of months. She could have slipped me a mickey for all I knew. I remember her peering at me one morning as I woke up, sleep-wax gumming my lips, and she said, ‘You sleep the sleep of the damned, you know. Or the drugged.’ I was both and didn’t know it.
‘Do you want to explain about the fingerprints?’ Gilpin said.
‘Tell us the rest,’ Tanner said.
Boney set a biblically thick leather-covered binder on the table between us, charred all along the edges. ‘Recognize this?’
I shrugged, shook my head.
‘It’s your wife’s diary.’
‘Um, no. Amy didn’t do diaries.’
‘Actually, Nick, she did. She did about seven years’ worth of diaries,’ Boney said.
‘Okay.’
Something bad was about to happen. My wife was being clever again.