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  Cards on the table. “Was Duffy Madison in the Classics Society with you?” I asked.

  “Huh?” That had caught Louise off guard. Good. “Duffy Madison?”

  “Yeah.” I could steal her tactic if I wanted to.

  “Wasn’t that the guy who was with you when you were here?” she asked.

  “Um, yes,” I said. “The yearbook lists him as a member of the Classics Society the same year you were in it. Did you know him?”

  “No.” Louise was back to the one-syllable answers. I’d struck a nerve.

  “There were only seven members,” I said. “How could you not know somebody who was in that club with you?”

  “Look, what has this got to do with Damien Mosley leaving town and not coming back?” Louise was operating under the principle that accusing the accuser—and I wasn’t even accusing her of anything—would help her to dodge the question.

  It was a decent tactic, considering that I couldn’t actually present a connection between the two things unless I were to get into the Twilight Zone logic that Duffy used to be Damien and that’s why everybody thought they looked alike. Louise had already said they were similar but not that similar, so it didn’t seem the right road to walk.

  “I’m just wondering how that’s possible. I mean, if there were six other people in the club, and you did whatever a Classics Society does at the meetings, how could you not remember if the guy was there or not?” I’d chosen to ignore her question entirely because this was my interrogation, after all. I got back to being the reporter on the story. Woodward/Redford never let it throw him when the White House guys tried to make The Washington Post part of the Watergate story.

  Really, you can develop a whole philosophy watching that movie.

  “Okay!” Louise shouted. “I give up. You got me, okay? I never went to the Classics Society meetings.”

  Well, of course she . . . what? But I resisted the urge to repeat her statement back to her in the form of a question. I’m just too professional for that. So it took me a moment to reply. “Why not?” I asked.

  The answer took a long time coming, like Louise was trying to bolster her confidence. I heard some liquid swish in the background, and there might have been ice cubes clinking.

  It was not yet eleven in the morning.

  “I needed a reason to tell my parents why I wasn’t coming home,” she said finally. There was no slurring of words. Her s’s were not sloppy. I was hoping this was the first drink of the day, or that it was ginger ale or orange juice. With ice.

  “So you joined the Classics Society?” Maybe that was the least of it, but it was the first thing that struck me.

  “Yeah.”

  I was going to have to do better than that. “Why did you need to put up a smoke screen for your parents?” And as soon as the words were out of my mouth, I realized that was a stupid question.

  “So I could be with my boyfriend,” Louise said, her tone indicating she too knew I was a bozo. “You know, be with him.”

  It all came flooding toward me at that point. She needed to be with her boyfriend, so she joined the Classics Society. There was no evidence that Duffy had ever gone to a meeting of the Classics Society, either, since none of the other members Paula had contacted remembered him. And then Louise, after taking the SATs, had promptly given up any pretense of applying to colleges. I put it all together in my head, and it spelled out only one solution.

  “Louise,” I said, my breath coming a little heavier than I intended, “did Duffy Madison get you pregnant?”

  “What is it with you and Duffy Madison?” she demanded. “Are you his girlfriend or something?”

  It was a much more complicated relationship than that, but I really didn’t have the time or the Tylenol to get through it right now. “No,” I said. “I’m not his girlfriend. So what happened?”

  “I got pregnant, all right, but I don’t know anything about your Duffy Madison,” Louise said. She was going to drive the point home. “I never met the guy before you came to my house a couple of days ago, okay?”

  Okay. Okay. I got it, although I still thought she was lying. Duffy had been going to Poughkeepsie to investigate Damien Mosley’s disappearance while he was staying at my father’s house a month before.

  “So who was the boyfriend?” I asked. I’m not even sure why I cared unless it was Damien Mosley.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Louise said. “I wasn’t really pregnant.”

  In my experience, you either are or you’re not. “What does that mean?”

  “I just thought I was. Turned out about a week later that I wasn’t.”

  A week later? “Then why didn’t you go to college?” I asked.

  “What’s college got to do with it?”

  I was beginning to get the idea that maybe I shouldn’t make assumptions about people’s lives based on my own investigation. Or Paula’s. “I thought you didn’t go to college because you were pregnant,” I said.

  “I didn’t go to college because I had to go to work,” Louise answered. “My dad was almost out of a job, we thought he was going to get laid off, and my mom was only working part-time, and I still don’t see what any of this had to do with Damien Mosley.”

  She had a point, I had to admit. “Were you really involved with Damien right before he vanished?” I asked. What the hell; maybe I could find out something with this phone call.

  “I don’t know if you’d call it involved,” she said. “He had a wife, but he wasn’t living with her. We did what we did, and that was it.”

  The tone in my ear indicated someone else was trying to call me. I thanked Louise for her trouble—which seemed weird—and clicked through to the other call.

  “Is this Ms. Rachel Goldman?” a man asked.

  No good phone call ever started that way.

  I admitted to being myself. It was one of the few things I was still sure about these days.

  “I’m calling about a man named Duffy Madison,” the man said. “I’m Sgt. Michael O’Rourke with the North Bergen Police Department.”

  Alarm bells went off in my head. “What about Duffy Madison?”

  A call from the North Bergen police about Duffy? Were they trying to alert me to some new weird breach of protocol my Frankenstein creation had committed? Did they want to know if there was such a person as Duffy Madison? If so, how could I answer? But then my mind wandered into darker areas, and all in a flash, I had to wonder if I was Duffy’s emergency contact. Had they found his body in the same ditch they’d found Damien Mosley’s?

  That was the kind of twist I might be looking for at the midpoint of a manuscript. If Duffy was dead, was I responsible?

  “Mr. Madison asked us to call you,” Sgt. O’Rourke said. I heard myself let out a sigh of relief. Duffy wasn’t dead. Or wait—had he asked just before he let out his last agonized gasp? “He said he did not have a lawyer, so we should call you.”

  A lawyer? “Why does Duffy need a lawyer?” I asked.

  “We have him under arrest,” O’Rourke answered. “He’s being charged with regard to a murder.”

  Chapter 18

  “A murder.” Ben Preston sat in the passenger seat of my tiny Prius c, and even though I was mostly watching the road, I stole a glance at him. He looked absolutely bewildered. “A murder,” he repeated.

  “That’s really all I know,” I said. “They arrested Duffy, and he said he didn’t have a lawyer to represent him, but when they suggested getting someone from the public defender’s office, he said they should call me.”

  Ben shook his head. “Why would they think he killed Damien Mosley?” he said, no doubt thinking out loud. “There’s no evidence at all that Duffy ever met Damien Mosley.”

  “They were high school classmates,” I reminded him. “Whether Duffy admits to it or not, they might very well have known each other back in the day.”

  We were taking my car because Ben has one the prosecutor’s office lets him use, and since he’d taken half a day off
from work to come with me on our Duffy quest, he didn’t feel comfortable using his work car. The drive wasn’t going to take long, but it felt like hours had passed since O’Rourke had called me.

  My first impulse was to call Ben. He’s much better steeped in the criminal justice system than I am. I deal strictly in my fictional version, which strives to be accurate but doesn’t mind bending the occasional rule in service of a good story. Ben has to work in the real world, which has its drawbacks. It does mean, however, that he knows how this stuff works.

  Besides, the last thing I’d wanted to do was go confront Duffy in jail on my own.

  “If they’re charging him, not just questioning him, that is serious,” Ben said. I still wasn’t sure whether he was talking to me or to himself. “That means they have sufficient evidence to merit an indictment, or at least they think they do. It’s not just speculation.”

  “What do we do when we get there?” I asked, both to get an answer to the question and to remind Ben that I was in the car with him. He was staring out the side window now, and I was navigating our way to North Bergen. They hadn’t had time to transfer Duffy to county lockup yet, in preparation for his arraignment.

  It was hard to think of Duffy in those terms.

  “First, we need to find him a lawyer,” Ben said, snapping out of his reverie and realizing action was required. “Do you know anybody?”

  I thought about it. I’d dated a lawyer once, but he was not someone I’d care to call again, even for professional reasons. I had a lawyer who looked over my contracts with my agent Adam Resnick, and Adam advised me on all the contracts I signed with my publisher. Neither of them was a criminal attorney.

  “Not really,” I told Ben. “You must know some.”

  He nodded. “Most of them are prosecutors, but I do know a few good defense attorneys. They’re not all crazy about me.”

  “Hard to believe,” I said.

  Ben ignored that. “Does Duffy have enough money for this?”

  I had no way of knowing anything about Duffy’s financial status and told him so. “He seems to have enough to get by even when you guys aren’t giving him work,” I said. Another wave of insight hit me. “That whole consultant thing is probably out the window for him now anyway, isn’t it?”

  “It’s not good,” Ben admitted. “He’ll be placed on the inactive list once the paperwork on his arrest hits the database. Petrosky’s going to have a lot of questions, and he’s not going to be happy with the answers he gets. Even if Duffy is acquitted, it’s going to be tough to get a law enforcement agency to put him on their payroll just as a freelancer.”

  It felt like a page had been turned and there was no going back. We rode (well, Ben rode and I drove) in silence for a couple of minutes. “Poor Duffy,” I said, for lack of anything else to say.

  Ben ignored that and turned his attention toward me; I could see the shift in his position in my peripheral vision. “Don’t tell anybody there I’m with the prosecutor, okay?” he said out of nowhere.

  I didn’t understand why that was a good idea, but I said I’d do as he asked.

  “Good. If I just seem like an interested friend of Duffy’s, I might be able to find out more about what made them charge him so quickly. Is there anything you know that would indicate Duffy had a problem with this Mosley guy?”

  “Nothing I’ve heard,” I said. “I’ve told you everything I know.”

  “Have you?” There was a challenging tone in his voice.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Was I mad at Ben or taking out my growing frustration at the Dodge Ram truck in front of me that was slowing to thirty-five miles per hour in a fifty-five zone? Pennsylvania plates. It figured.

  “It means you never told me Duffy believes he’s a product of your imagination,” Ben said. That tone wasn’t challenging, I realized. It was hurt. How could I hold back that information from him?

  “I figured that would hurt his employment, and it wasn’t my place to tell you,” I answered. “I didn’t want to cause him trouble.”

  Ben made a noise in his throat like he was having trouble swallowing something. It was probably my explanation. The Ram slowed to thirty. This wasn’t my day.

  “Look,” I said before he could protest further, “the guy saved my life. He’s quirky, but until I got a phone call from the cops a little while ago, I never thought he was dangerous. So there was no reason to tell a guy I’d barely met that Duffy shouldn’t be working for you anymore because he was certifiably insane.”

  Ben grunted. “You realize how that comes across?” he asked. But there was a little more understanding in his tone.

  “It sounded better in my head. The question now is, what do we do for Duffy? Is there anything we can do?”

  “We can find out what his status is and then find him a lawyer. If he’s about to be arraigned, we can find out about bail. And maybe we can get a story from your imaginary friend about what actually happened. Usually he’s pretty rational about this kind of stuff.”

  “When it’s not about him,” I said. I couldn’t stand it anymore and passed the Dodge Ram on the right, which you’re not supposed to do but is necessary when driving behind a Pennsylvanian. We Jersey girls are not to be messed with when we’re on wheels. Or any other time.

  “Easy there, Ms. Andretti,” Ben said, watching the woman in the Dodge Ram make a rude gesture at us as she faded into memory. “You’re not going to help Duffy by smacking us into a highway divider.”

  “I’m a good driver,” I protested, and Ben shut up. For a moment.

  Wisely, he chose to change the subject. “I can’t imagine what evidence they can have of Duffy being in that park five years ago. I dug all I could, and I didn’t find evidence of him being anywhere before then.”

  I told him Paula had found the evidence of someone named Duffy Madison in the Poughkeepsie High School yearbook, and he nodded. “I knew about that, but it’s almost like he was there and someone went back and erased him. Any trace there would have been, anything you’d logically assume would be there, is gone.”

  We arrived at the North Bergen police headquarters, and I parked the car. Ben was out of his door before I managed to kill the engine, and he headed right for the front door. He was more worried about his friend than he wanted to let on, and now he was doing an extremely poor job of hiding it.

  There was a cemetery next door to the police building. I didn’t take that for a good sign.

  I practically had to run to catch up with Ben as he took the steps two at a time. I couldn’t remember if I’d locked my car. Of course, it was in front of the police headquarters, but I’ve heard stories. New Jerseyans have a strong sense of irony.

  Despite never having been in the building before, Ben seemed to have a sixth sense about direction. He headed directly to a door marked “Detectives” and noted the desk in front of it. “Probably locked,” he said to himself—I no longer seemed to have a function here, having transported Ben to the building—and turned toward the desk.

  The dispatcher behind it was an African American woman of about forty who seemed incongruously relaxed in the middle of a police station in a somewhat hectic area. She had large eyes, and they were taking in Ben. “Can I help you?” she asked.

  It was a good question, especially the way she asked it, but Ben wasn’t in the mood to correct her grammar. “I’m here to find Duffy Madison,” he said. “We got a call from a Sgt. O’Rourke that he’d been brought here.” Then he seemed to remember that he wasn’t going to let anyone know he was a pseudocop, and his voice became more plaintive and uncertain. “Is this the right area?”

  She started punching keys on the computer in front of her, then seemed to find what she was looking for. “Duffy Madison?” the woman said slowly. “Is that the guy with the murder from New York?”

  “New York?” I said. Ben looked at me a moment as if remembering I was present. Shoot me; I was surprised.

  “Yeah, it was the New York State Police pu
t out the BOLO on that guy, I’m pretty sure. He’s not in the detective bureau. He’s downstairs in holding.” She looked at me, then at Ben. “Sorry.”

  We went downstairs, Ben no longer showing off how he knew everything about law enforcement, and found Sgt. Michael O’Rourke in uniform at a separate desk in the main intake area.

  He was a gray-haired man of maybe fifty, thin and naturally skeptical if you believed the look in his eyes. We—Ben—told him who we were, and O’Rourke nodded, not having to refer to a screen. Duffy had no doubt made an impression.

  “We got a bulletin from the New York State Police this morning,” he said, ushering us to a relatively quiet corner of the large room. “They were looking for someone in connection with a murder. We didn’t have to do too much. This Madison guy walks into our house a couple of hours ago asking about a crime scene from five years ago, and somebody has the bulletin from New York open on their computer. They recognize him.”

  The words were dancing around my head but not entirely penetrating my ears. “I don’t understand,” I said.

  Ben turned and looked at me as if I had broken the Law of Men. He’d asked me to let him do the talking, and there was my voice being completely audible. Again.

  I was glad I hadn’t let him spend the night. That’d teach him, and he wouldn’t even know it.

  “I don’t understand why you arrested Duffy for a murder that took place in New York State,” I said, not reacting to Ben’s look. “Damien Mosley died here in North Bergen.”

  “I don’t know about a Damien Mosley,” O’Rourke answered. He picked up a tablet computer from a desk that I guessed was his and punched the screen a few times. “This was a shooting in Poughkeepsie, New York. A woman named Michelle Testaverde. Was a cold case; they thought she was homeless, dressed in seventeen coats and whatever. But apparently they took ballistics at the time, and there was a match today. She died five years ago. They think your pal here shot her in the back of the head and then fled here to Jersey.”

  “Michelle,” I murmured to myself. “Damien Mosley’s wife.”