Ghosts

Q: What were you about to say?

A: Only that someone else knew.

Q: Who was that?

A: Stephanie Craig. His ex.

Q: Mr. Craig’s former wife?

A: Yes.

Q: Knew what?

A: About the tapes. She heard the tapes one day. We were sitting there in his living room, playing them back, when she came to see him. The machine was going, she heard them.

Q: Why had she come to see him?

A: She was always stopping by. She was still carrying the torch for him.

Q: And she heard the tapes?

A: Yes. But I didn’t have to worry about her, you see. She drowned that very same summer.

All the way uptown from Buena Vista Hospital to Mercy General, where Meyer Meyer was recuperating, Carella thought about Jack Rawles’s statement. The motives for murder would never cease to amaze him, but discounting the murder of Marian Esposito—which, as he’d suspected from the start, was a murder of expedience—the motives for the killings of Gregory Craig and Daniel Corbett were complex and contradictory. Rawles had gone to see Craig because he wanted recognition, by way of payment, for his contribution to a phenomenal best seller. He had slain Craig because recognition had been denied him. And then he had killed Corbett and tried to kill Hillary because he had been afraid of the very thing he’d so desperately wanted earlier: recognition.

There were holes in the statement, there were always holes. Not anything that would prevent a conviction, no. Saperstein had done a good job nailing down all the facts, and Carella suspected the DA’s Office would have no trouble convincing a jury that Jack Rawles had indeed killed three people during the holiday season and tried to kill a fourth. But as he parked the car in the lot outside Mercy General, and as he took the elevator up to Meyer’s room on the sixth floor, he wondered about that odd collaboration three summers ago and wondered how Craig had finally convinced Rawles to surrender the one true recognition he should have insisted on: his name on the book. In many respects, Rawles was exactly what Hillary had labeled him, a ghost—in literary terms, at least. He had, in effect, already written the book for Craig the day he taped his experiences. And he had been denied the one thing that might have given him something more than ectoplasmic substance—a shared byline.

Carella wondered, too—and this bothered the hell out of him—about the drowning of Stephanie Craig. She had heard Rawles’s voice on those tapes, she undoubtedly knew that Craig was writing a book, and if psychics were to be believed, she had threatened to reveal that the material was stolen, that Craig’s book was not really his own but instead another man’s. But had she truly threatened Craig with exposure, or was that only a figment of Hillary Scott’s vivid psychic imagination? Because if she had threatened him and if Craig was indeed responsible for her drowning, then he had begun planning the theft way back then when the book was still in progress, with no intention of ever honoring his contract with Rawles.

Sighing, Carella went down the corridor to Meyer’s room.

Meyer was sitting up in bed, reading. He put the book aside the moment Carella came into the room, and extended his hand, and listened while Carella told him first about how the case had been wrapped by a patrolman named Tack Fujiwara and then about Rawles’s statement and the questions it had left unresolved.

“It bothers me that I don’t have all the answers,” Carella said.

“Listen,” Meyer said, “if you had all the answers, you’d be God.”

Carella smiled. Meyer returned the smile. The two men shook hands again and wished each other a happy new year, and then Carella went home to Riverhead. Fanny had already left for her sister’s house in Calm’s Point. They allowed the twins to stay up till midnight and even permitted them to have a sip of champagne when they toasted the new year. Later, after they had put the children to sleep, they made love, a tradition they had honored since the first year of their marriage because—as Teddy put it—she believed in starting each new year with a bang.

In the middle of the night Carella woke up and sat staring into the room, still troubled by the realization that he would never know for sure whether Gregory Craig had killed his former wife. And then he went back to sleep because he wasn’t God after all, and maybe in the greater scheme of things there were answers he never dreamed of.