"Aphrodite" - читать интересную книгу автора (Andrews Russell)

13

When Justin woke up, he wasn't sure exactly where he was. He thought he might have passed out in Duffy's and was coming to on the floor by the bar. It seemed a realistic enough possibility that one of his first hung-over reactions was to get angry at Donnie for not getting him home and letting him spend the night sleeping on a bed of hardwood in puddles of spilled beer and whiskey.

When his brain cleared a bit more, Justin realized that he was not sprawled on a barroom floor. He was in his own home. But not on his bed. He hadn't made it that far. He hadn't even made it to the couch. He'd managed to get into his living room, take a few steps, and collapse on the coffee table.

He took a deep, wheezy breath, kept his eyes open for several seconds, trying to clear the haze behind them, and forced himself to stand up. The move wasn't one of his major successes. He felt himself bob and weave and sway. But he stayed up. He took one step toward his bedroom, had to stop when he was overcome by the urge to puke his guts out. It was while he was standing there, trying to keep his balance and whatever was in his stomach in there, that he heard it. At first he couldn't place the noise. It sounded like birds squawking. Then he realized it was the buzz of a crowd. Human voices, talking. It seemed disconnected from his environment, but he began to understand that the noise was close by. He managed to take several steps over to his living room window, looked outside onto his small front lawn, and saw that the crowd was standing in front of his house. There were several vans, all with television-station logos on their sides. One had a satellite perched on top of it. A row of cars was parked on each side of the street. Twenty or thirty people stood peering in at him. Several of them had cameras. When Justin's face appeared in the window, the cameras started clicking and the crowd began to vibrate.

Justin jerked away from the window, making his head feel as if it were going to topple off of his neck. He took several more deep breaths, a foul odor emerging from his mouth, the taste of whiskey and bile forging up his throat. He tried to piece together what was going on. Something to do with the discovery of Maura Greer's body, that much was clear. But why the hell were the jackals pursing him? He looked at the clock that rested atop the living room mantel. One o'clock. Jesus. He'd slept half the day away.

Before anything, he knew he had to clear his head. So he went into the bathroom, popped four aspirin, brushed his teeth, turned the shower on as hot as he could stand it, and stepped in. As the water streamed down, he slowly turned the knob until it was ice cold. He was awake. Toweling off, Justin went into the kitchen, grabbed a large bottle of water out of the fridge, and drank half of it in one gulp. He went back to the living room, turned on the television, surfed the channels until he came to CNN. Maura Greer was the story. And it was a big one. The media had already sunk their sharklike teeth into it and they weren't going to let go until it had been torn into tiny little pieces. He pressed the Mute button on the remote control. Sat there trying to absorb what was happening. When he looked up, what he saw on the TV screen surprised him so deeply that he dropped the remote. It was Brian Meves, his fellow East End cop. Brian's mouth was still stitched and swollen, his face still puffed out from the beating Justin had given him. But he was being interviewed by some blond woman. She had a microphone shoved up to his battered lips. Justin found the remote, fumbled with the buttons, finally got the sound back on, heard the end of the interview, heard Brian saying, "We didn't know anything about his background. He's not much of a talker. It's all been a big shock, on top of, you know, what happened to Maura. Let's face it, the guy basically had a nervous breakdown, so that's not exactly who you want in charge of a murder investigation. His recent assault on me shows that he's not exactly stable. So yeah, I can verify the fact that he's off that case-"

What? Off what case? What the hell was the idiot talking about?

Justin clicked off the TV, ran to the front door, opened it a crack, just wide enough to pull in the newspapers off the front mat. The second the door opened, he heard questions being hurled at him from the curb. The words didn't make any sense to him, it was just one loud roar. He slammed the door shut, backed over to his couch as if he were facing down a pride of lions in the jungle.

He sat and read the front page of the New York Times. The entire right-hand side of the page was devoted to the discovery of Maura Greer's body. He read through to the break, didn't find any crucial details he hadn't learned the day before, other than the fact that the weekend Frank Manwaring, the secretary of Health and Human Services, had been in the Hamptons he had several hours that could not be accounted for. It led to even more suspicion that he was involved in the murder and disposal of the body. Justin turned to page eighteen to finish reading the story. But he didn't get to continue with it. On the center of that page was his photograph. And above it was a headline: tragic hero in the middle of two murders. He read what they had to say about him. The journalist had more than done his homework. He'd talked to cops up in Providence. He rehashed Justin's history up there. He told the story of the deaths of Justin's wife and daughter. Justin stopped reading halfway through. His eyes ran back up to the headline. Two murders?

He skipped ahead until he read it.

Jesus Fucking Christ.

The reporter had gotten to Brian. The idiot cop had spilled his guts. He told everything he knew about Justin. Talked about his personality. His violent temper that had erupted when he'd attacked his fellow cop. And Brian said that Justin Westwood had been working on another murder case, the murder of a local journalist named Susanna Morgan. Justin pictured him smiling as best he could through his injuries as he bragged that he was now in charge of the investigation and revealed that there had been a witness to that murder, a woman who had been interviewed by the East End Harbor police and who had seen everything that had happened. She was their best lead, Brian Meves said.

Justin dove for the telephone, grabbed the receiver, and dialed the police station. Gary answered the phone, sounding tense and nervous.

"Where's Brian?" Justin said. "Put him on the phone."

"Westwood? I mean…Justin…uh…"

"Get your fucking friend and put him on the phone!" Justin screamed.

"He…he hasn't come in yet."

"When did he do the TV interviews?"

"What? I…"

"Gary, for chrissake, I just saw him on TV-when did he tape that?"

"Last night. They talked to both of us. Around ten, I guess. I watched it last night around eleven."

"It aired last night?"

"Yeah. They must be showing it again."

"Did he talk about Susanna Morgan?"

"I…I don't know."

"Did he say she was murdered? Did the moron say that last night on TV?"

"Yes. Yeah, I guess he did."

"Where the hell is he?"