🌁 chapter seven: the right hand [let me be your ghost]
“Every murderer is probably somebody’s old friend.” -Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles
“Every murderer is probably somebody’s old friend.” -Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles
previous: about | chapter one | chapter two | chapter three | chapter four | chapter five | chapter six
Kira canceled on me before I ever met her.
“Postponed, not canceled—there’s a difference, and apparently the difference is my job,” Hayden said over the phone, in the crisp tone of a woman who ran her mornings on cold brew, reformer Pilates, and an org chart. “Her office says she’s in London handling a client thing. Some actor said something on a podcast, you know how it goes. So we’re flipping the order. Conrad’s thrilled to be your first official interview for the book. His word. Thrilled.”
“I bet he is,” I said.
I hung up and stared at the fog pressing against the lighthouse glass, dreading it already. I had spent nine years being talked at by men like Conrad Doherty—the back-slappers, the too-tight handshakes, the ones who called you sweetheart in the first five minutes to put you in your place and remind you of his. I could handle him. That wasn’t the question. The question I kept turning over was what a man like Eze, who noticed everything, saw in a man like that. Loyalty, maybe. Or a habit. Twenty-six years is a long time to keep a friend.
Either way, Conrad had known Magnus Crane better than almost anyone alive, and the book needed him. Both books. The real one and the one under it.
Which is how I found myself that same afternoon—the storm blown out, the power back on, my knuckles still humming from the heavy bag—in a glass conference room on the forty-something floor of Crane Industries, watching Conrad Doherty choose his seat the way generals choose high ground.
He’d picked the room, Hayden told me on the walk over. Of course he had. The conference room hung off the side of the silo like a display case, glass on five of six surfaces, visible to three floors of employees who could watch us the whole hour without hearing a word. An interview conducted inside an aquarium. Whatever happened in here, there would be witnesses to the fact of it and none to the content—which told me Conrad understood surveillance the way the rest of this building did. As a thing you aimed at other people.
“Lola!” He came at me with both arms open like we were old war buddies, and I got my first real look at him in daylight. Conrad Doherty was built like the linebacker he must have been thirty pounds and twenty-six years ago—six-four at least, shoulders straining a salmon dress shirt, the heavy muscle of a college athlete now enjoying the spoils of a good living. Blond buzzcut going silver at the crown. A class ring he still wore. A face made for boat ads, gone a little pink around the collar. I braced for the hug and got a handshake instead, his grip recalibrated from our first meeting—gentler now, almost courtly. That worried me more than the crushing version. Men like Conrad didn’t soften. They simply adjusted their sights.
“Thanks for making time,” I said, setting my recorder on the table between us and pressing record where he could see me do it. The spool turned. He watched it turn.
“For the book? Anything.” He dropped into his chair and kicked back, boots nearly on the table, a man performing relaxation to an audience of Crane Industry employees looking in curiously from where they walked past the conference room. “Eze’s story deserves telling right. And nobody knows that story like me. Not the board, not the lawyers.” A pause, a grin. “Not even the pretty ghostwriter.”
“That’s why I’m here.” I opened my notebook, clicked my pen, and put on the expression that was my disguise. Of someone harmless. Wide-eyed. A woman who lived in other people’s sentences. “Let’s start at the beginning. You met him when you were, what, eight?”
“Seven. Summer camp in North Carolina, the kind rich fathers send their sons to so somebody else can teach them to be men.” He laced his fingers behind his buzzcut. “Eze was this skinny European kid who didn’t know poison ivy from poison oak, and I was the scholarship case with the wrong accent. Camp food chain had us both marked for the bottom. So we made an alliance.” He smiled at something far away. “Twenty-six years ago, and I’ve been watching his back ever since.”
“What was he like then?”
“Same as now. Watchful. He’d let you run your whole mouth, and then he’d ask the one question you’d been praying nobody would ask.” Conrad shook his head fondly. “Eleven years old, and he ran better interviews than the counselors.” “His daddy loved that about him. The old man used to say Eze was born knowing what everybody wanted. Just took him thirty years to admit that’s a weapon.”
I wrote it down because it was good, and because the book was real. That was the strange truth of my double life—the cover assignment and the actual assignment used the same pen, and lately I had stopped being able to tell which one I was working harder at.
“Tell me about Eze’s father,” I said. “Off the record if you want. I’m trying to understand him, not quote you.”
Conrad’s boots came off the table. A small thing, but I noted it.
“Magnus Crane was the smartest man I ever met and the coldest, and I loved him like my own father, which tells you what my own father was like.” He rolled his shoulders. “He built something nobody else could have built and he never once apologized for it. People want their geniuses cuddly now. Magnus wasn’t cuddly. He was right. There’s a difference, and this country used to know it.”
“You were close with him. Toward the end?”
“Close as anybody got.” Conrad’s eyes settled on me, friendly and flat at the same time, like a lake you’re warned not to swim in. “I know what you’re circling, by the way. You want to ask about Geneva.”
I kept my pen moving, casual. “I want to ask about a lot of things.”
“The week he died, I was in Huntsville. My mama’s knee replacement. Flew commercial, if you can believe it—Delta through Atlanta, five days, whole thing’s on my card statements.” He spread his hands. “In case the book needs it.”
The pen kept moving, but everything else in me went still.
I hadn’t asked. I hadn’t asked anything within a mile of it. I’d asked if he was close with a dead man he loved, and Conrad Doherty had handed me an alibi with flight routes attached, unprompted, wrapped in a joke, in a glass box he chose so the whole company could watch him give it.
Who volunteers an alibi nobody asked for? Eze had written that warning in fountain ink, on the list I still carried, and here was Conrad handing me an alibi I had not asked for, and it was gift-wrapped.
