The ninth month, p.13
The Ninth Month, page 13
“I’m not sure. What do you think, Bets?”
There’s no answer, and I know Betsey well enough that she’s not going to tell me what to do.
Finally, she speaks. “I just want you to do the right thing, Emily. That’s all I want. That’s all anyone wants for you.”
“Let’s face it. I’d be a terrible mother… Shit! I already am a terrible mother, and I haven’t even given birth yet.”
For some reason this last comment of mine elicits a bit of a chuckle out of Betsey.
“Oh, Emily,” she says. “You are something else. You’re not a terrible mother. You may be on your way to becoming a terrible mother. But you’re a good person. You have kindness and humor and brains. Those are the things you need for being a mother.”
I respond: “But what I don’t have is self-control and common sense. Hell, I don’t even have a husband.”
Another pause. A longer pause. Damn it. It’s Betsey’s turn to talk.
“Emily,” she says, but she says it with a touch of accusation in her voice. The word comes out like “Em-a-leeee.”
“What?”
Again, “Em-a-leeee.”
Then she says, “I know all about Las Vegas and what happened there. Ted told me on Friday.”
“Ted is lying. He’s just lying. He knows that I went to Vegas… because I told him. But I didn’t tell him who I went with. It sure wasn’t him. He’s lying to you, saying it was him.”
“Why would he lie?” Betsey asks.
“Because… I don’t know. I’m not sure. I think that it’s his fantasy that we would get married. But the guy I did marry in Vegas… actually… he and I knew it was a stupid little joke. And we promised not to let on to anyone. The only person I ever told was Ted.”
“You wouldn’t tell anyone that you got married.”
“Listen,” I say, “It was a stupid thing. It was a couple months ago. We were in Vegas, and we both had drunk about a million Moscow mules. It was just a goof, a lark. We were wasted. And there are wedding chapels all over that crazy town. And we joked about it. And he dared me. And so… There was even a gift shop at the stupid little chapel where I bought a stupid little disposable veil. And that was that. We got married. I disposed of the veil. Then we disposed of the marriage.”
“How, exactly?” asks Betsey.
“The next day, we were on our way back to the airport, and we stopped at the courthouse to get an annulment. It was so quick, we double-parked. We both signed a couple forms. I stayed in the car, my hubby ran in, dropped them off with the clerk, and that was it. Done. I was single again.”
Betsey waits for me to say more, but I’ve told her everything I care to tell her. Or so I think. Then Betsey starts talking.
“I know you’re not the first person to get married on a whim in Vegas, Emily. You’re probably not the first to get it annulled the next day, either. But there is something I want to ask…”
“The answer is no. If the question is ‘Is my ex-husband the father of my little bump?’ the answer is no. No. No. No. No. No.”
“How can you be…?” she asks.
“We were so drunk I don’t think we even did the deed, I mean, to consummate the marriage. I know you’re asking all this because you love me, Bets, because you care about me, but you’ve got to understand, it meant nothing. It’s like I said, a goof, a lark, a dare.”
“How about you and I meet before I get over to the hospital. We can have a cup of decaf. We can talk some more. We can…”
I begin to cry. It dawns on me that I’ve had nothing to eat all day.
“No, please, Bets. I love you, but I’m tired of talking. I’ve been talking all day, and I need to get a sandwich or something.”
“Do yourself and the baby a favor, Emily. Have some seltzer water with your sandwich.”
“Will do,” I say. “Thanks, Bets. Thanks for being the friend I don’t deserve. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
Suddenly Betsey speaks with urgency.
“Wait, there’s one more thing before you hang up.”
“What?”
“You never told me. Whose funeral did you go to today?”
“Nobody important. My mother and my father. A doubleheader. Gotta go. Talk soon.”
I hang up. I turn off my phone.
CHAPTER
38
The Present
TIERNEY’S PHONE BEEPS. He glances at it and says to Kalisha, “It’s Betsey.”
“What’s up?” he asks.
A few seconds of silence from Tierney, followed by a profound “Oh, shit.” Then he adds, “Kalisha or I will talk to you later.”
He hangs up and updates Kalisha. “Betsey went to see that guy, Emily’s old friend from college, Quinn Temple.”
“Not Temple, Detective Tierney. His name is Church. Quinn Church.” She struggles not to laugh. Tierney is feeling some pressure, all right.
“Whatever,” says Tierney. “Betsey said she got a lot of background, but she doesn’t think there’s anything for us to grab on to.”
“So, look. No disrespect, but since you’ve got your lady friend, Miss Nurse, on the case, maybe we can move on.” She quickly adds, “Don’t bite my head off.”
“I’m too tired to bite a head off, yours or anybody else’s.” Then he says, “We’ve got to keep digging into this connection between Emily and Caitlin Murphy. Maybe…”
Tierney’s cell beeps again. So does Scofield’s phone.
“What’s all this?” says Tierney as they both look at their screens.
“I asked Missing Persons to send us their file on Nina Powell,” says Kalisha. “You remember that case, right?”
“Of course,” says Tierney. “It was a pretty big story for a while.”
“The victim reminded me a little of Emily. And Caitlin Murphy, too. It’s a long shot, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to take a look. Maybe the three are related.”
So Tierney and Kalisha review the case of Nina Powell, age thirty, who was reported missing about four months ago. Like Caitlin Murphy, Powell’s apartment was also just a few blocks away from Emily’s.
“Plus Murphy worked at an internet ad agency. And Powell’s an SEO expert,” says Kalisha.
“What the hell is an SEO expert?” asks Tierney.
“Search Engine Optimization expert. She makes sure that if someone googles ‘High-powered NYPD detective,’ your name shows up first.”
Tierney chuckles, then thinks for a moment, his wheels turning.
“Is there any physical evidence yet linking the three victims? And similarities in the perp’s MO?”
“Other than Emily being a contact in Caitlin’s phone, nothing. Maybe that’s just a coincidence. Maybe the cases aren’t linked after all. Maybe they’re—”
Tierney interrupts Kalisha by banging his desk as if his hand were a gavel.
“Bullshit. We’ve got three young women. Two missing. One dead. All early thirties. All lived on the Lower East Side. All worked in the same industry. Goddamn this city.” He slams his hand again for emphasis. “You know what this means, Scofield?”
“What does it mean, sir?”
“It means we’ve got a pattern. And we’re looking for one very sick guy.”
CHAPTER
39
KALISHA DOES A DEEP DIVE into the life and times of Nina Powell.
Her Facebook page, her Instagram account, her mention in the New York Times Style section—they all show a beautiful woman with a totally natural smile. Nina Powell has a thousand freckles on her face, but on her they look simultaneously adorable and glamorous. She seems to favor white slacks and beige Dior shirts. A pair of sunglasses are almost always propped on top of her orangey-red hair.
But Nina Powell’s great luck in life seems to go far beyond her good looks.
The two detectives find out easily and early that she grew up in a ritzy Chicago suburb (Lake Forest), went to a ritzy prep school (Lake Forest Academy), attended an academically demanding college (Swarthmore), and was engaged to a guy who could only be described as “a great catch” (Duncan Martin).
It was all going so great for Nina Powell. Until she disappeared.
Scofield and Tierney immediately reach out to Duncan for an interview. The fiancé is as handsome as his bride-to-be is beautiful. They were to be married three days before Christmas, he tells them—St. Thomas’s Church on Fifth Avenue—and then a walk across the street to the University Club for the reception. He loves her “more than anyone on earth could love someone.” That’s how Duncan puts it.
As soon as the detectives leave his apartment, Scofield asks Tierney the usual and inevitable question.
“Do you think he’s telling the truth?”
“The only time an investment banker might weep that long and that loud is when bond rates go down more than five percent.” Tierney pauses for a moment, then says, “We’re only about a five-minute walk from one of the neighborhood’s hottest watering holes…”
Kalisha knows what he’s talking about. “Ted’s Bar and Grill?”
Tierney nods. As they walk the few blocks to the bar, Kalisha says, “You may not get this feeling anymore, Detective, but you know what? When someone goes missing, whether it’s Emily or Nina, or when we were heading over to find Caitlin… I always get a sort of photo in my mind of them. I see them tied up and their mouths taped and their beautiful hair all greasy and messy. And I think of how scared they must be. And then I think that they might be dead already, lying in a kinda lake of blood. And I think how really frightened they must have been as they saw a knife coming at their neck or some scum touching them and laughing at them and then waving a gun and…”
“Stop it, Kalisha,” Tierney says. He speaks loudly but not harshly. He wants to make an impact. “You can’t concentrate on that shit. You’ve got to think about your job, your involvement. I had a boss who used to say, ‘You gotta dance with the clues.’”
“I hear you, Detective. Your old boss is right. I know that. But how can you dance with the clues if those clues haven’t shown up at the dance hall?”
By this time, they’re standing outside Ted’s Bar and Grill.
“You know, Detective Scofield, unless you’re really thirsty, I don’t think I want a drink anymore.”
“Up to you, Chief. Up to you.”
“Good,” says Tierney. “Let’s go find some more clues to dance with.”
The two of them walk on.
CHAPTER
40
SHE DROPPED ME. SHE just cut me out of her life,” says David Zingerman, Emily Atkinson’s former assistant at Dazzle, the marketing firm where she worked.
Tierney and Scofield are interviewing a few of Emily’s former colleagues. Tierney’s plan is to start with lower-level employees—like Emily’s assistant—and work his way up to Keith Hennessey, the chairman and creative director who ultimately axed Emily.
“You never know who might know something,” Tierney had said to Scofield.
Zingerman—handsome, charming, and wearing a Jaeger-LeCoultre wristwatch that costs more than any car Tierney’s ever owned—seems genuinely shaken and sad by Emily’s disappearance.
“She always called me the most important person in her life. She’d refer to me as the mother and father she never had. But once Hennessey kicked her out of the office, Emily kicked me out of her life.”
“You never spoke to her after she was fired?” Kalisha asks.
“Almost never. She called me the day after she left… I think she was pretty hungover. She wasn’t slurring her words or anything, but she was pretty tired-sounding. She wanted a file—a paper file—from her desk. I’d never seen it before. It was called Names and More Names.”
“I assume you looked at that file before you sent it to her,” Tierney says.
“What good assistant wouldn’t? But it was nothing, really. At least I couldn’t connect it to anything. It was these random scraps of papers with random words on them.”
“What kind of words?”
“Like summer, winter, autumn, and another one was like old-time actors like Rudolph Valentino and Cary Grant and… like… I don’t know. There was something like Scotch and Soda on one torn piece. I remember that. And another booze one. Gin Rickey. Then one was David and Goliath. Naturally I remember that one, because it had the name David on it.”
Zingerman says he dropped the file off at Emily’s apartment and that was the last time they spoke. Over the next few weeks, he tried calling her cell, but he always got her voicemail. Then her voicemail box became full, and Zingerman couldn’t even leave a message. Emily never returned a single one of his calls.
“Maybe she was bitter,” he suggests. “She had a lot to be bitter about.”
Tierney is quick with the follow-up. “Bitter about what?”
“They kept giving her mixed signals, at least Keith did. Emily would do something great, innovative, nuts, and he’d shoot her a bonus… although she occasionally forgot to deposit the check… and a week later he’d be reaming her out for disappearing for two days.”
“Did she disappear regularly?” asks Kalisha.
“Well, depends on what you call regularly. I almost always knew where she was. Sometimes she’d be someplace like the Spa at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel to dry out a little. Other times she’d be at this place on Tenth Avenue, YAI—the Young Adult Institute—where she worked with these mentally challenged folks who needed a boost in moving on with life. Emily said it was all about self-advocacy. She was really into that YAI thing.”
Tierney asks David Zingerman who else at Dazzle might have some insight into Emily Atkinson.
“When she felt like it, Emily was part this group called Team Crisis. They’re the agency hotshots—two guys, two women… or one woman on the days Emily didn’t make it into the office. I’ll show you where they sit.”
David leads them to a conference room with an engraved plaque on the door:
PRIVATE THINK TANK. DO NOT DISTURB.
Right beneath the plaque is a roughly hand-lettered piece of paper on which is scrawled:
SHIT HOLE. VISITORS WELCOME
David leads the detectives inside and makes some introductions. Two members of Team Crisis—Susan Marlow and Adam DeGiacomo—are seated at a marble conference table. Ricky Ranftle, another team member, David explains, is at NewYork-Presbyterian getting ready for heart bypass surgery tomorrow.
“It goes with the territory,” Susan Marlow says. Then she quickly adds, “Joke. Just a joke. It’s a wonderful job.” But she does not smile.
Tierney says they’re looking for some information on Emily Atkinson.
Susan Marlow asks, “What’s up with Emily? She hasn’t even worked here for a while.”
Tierney replies, “She hasn’t been seen anywhere for a while, either. We’re gathering some background info from people who knew her, who might know something helpful.”
Then, after giving that troubling news a few moments to sink in, he says, “What can you tell us about Emily Atkinson? Anything. Top of your head.”
“Top of my head, I’d say Emily is one of the best in the business,” says Adam.
Tierney is pretty sure that he’s just seen Susan Marlow roll her eyes. He can’t be certain. But he will be certain in a few moments, because Adam DeGiacomo wastes no time in piling up the praise for Emily’s achievements in the cutthroat world of marketing.
“She just had a way to spin an idea. Like, after a World Series, everybody would try to get the pitcher from the winning team to push a brand or a cause or something. Not Emily. She’d suggest the pitcher from the losing team. And, sunuvabitch, if she wasn’t right. It was always more interesting.”
Adam is only just beginning.
“But you can only do that sort of thing once or twice. Then everybody’s doing it. The thing about marketing is that the old tried-and-true shit always works. But Emily always ran after something different. Em would never do Martha Stewart hawking stuff at Bloomingdale’s. She’d never put a ‘kills bathroom germs’ aerosol on the side of garbage trucks. That sort of thing wasn’t for Emily.”
“No, she left that shit for us to do,” says Susan Marlow. And anyone could tell she was not happy about it.
Adam has another Genius Emily story. He tells the detectives that one year—to encourage people to get flu shots—Emily persuaded the US Department of Health to offer free computer antivirus software to every New Yorker who got one. The theme was: “Protect your computer. Protect yourself.”
“The folks were lining up around the block,” Adam says.
“Adam has a gift for exaggeration,” Susan says.
Adam just won’t end his Emily stories. He actually stands up as he tells us how Emily spearheaded her most famous event. She had seen a wheelchair-bound woman stranded inside the 72nd Street Q train station because the station’s elevator was out of order.
Here’s the idea Emily hatched. On December 3, International People with Disabilities Day, a worldwide army of volunteers strung DO NOT ENTER tape across the exit stairs of every subway station throughout the world—from the T in Boston to BART in San Francisco.
“That meant that no one could leave the subway station. So everyone experienced what disabled people experience regularly, when the elevators and escalators aren’t working. This stunt virtually stopped all underground transportation in the United States.”
“I remember it,” says Kalisha. “My mama called me in a panic, yelling. She was stuck for close to a half hour in a crowd underground at Rego Park.”
Adam nods, then says, “The media coverage was extraordinary: TV news, internet news, Facebook, Twitter. Everywhere.”
Susan merely taps away on her laptop. She pays no attention as Adam continues.
“Emily wanted everyone to know what it felt like to be a disabled passenger on the crappy underground transportation systems. No escalators. No elevators. I’ll tell you, the next day a lot of transit boards were having meetings and figuring out how to fix their game.”
Almost like a singing duo, Kalisha and Tierney say “Wow” at the same time.
There’s no answer, and I know Betsey well enough that she’s not going to tell me what to do.
Finally, she speaks. “I just want you to do the right thing, Emily. That’s all I want. That’s all anyone wants for you.”
“Let’s face it. I’d be a terrible mother… Shit! I already am a terrible mother, and I haven’t even given birth yet.”
For some reason this last comment of mine elicits a bit of a chuckle out of Betsey.
“Oh, Emily,” she says. “You are something else. You’re not a terrible mother. You may be on your way to becoming a terrible mother. But you’re a good person. You have kindness and humor and brains. Those are the things you need for being a mother.”
I respond: “But what I don’t have is self-control and common sense. Hell, I don’t even have a husband.”
Another pause. A longer pause. Damn it. It’s Betsey’s turn to talk.
“Emily,” she says, but she says it with a touch of accusation in her voice. The word comes out like “Em-a-leeee.”
“What?”
Again, “Em-a-leeee.”
Then she says, “I know all about Las Vegas and what happened there. Ted told me on Friday.”
“Ted is lying. He’s just lying. He knows that I went to Vegas… because I told him. But I didn’t tell him who I went with. It sure wasn’t him. He’s lying to you, saying it was him.”
“Why would he lie?” Betsey asks.
“Because… I don’t know. I’m not sure. I think that it’s his fantasy that we would get married. But the guy I did marry in Vegas… actually… he and I knew it was a stupid little joke. And we promised not to let on to anyone. The only person I ever told was Ted.”
“You wouldn’t tell anyone that you got married.”
“Listen,” I say, “It was a stupid thing. It was a couple months ago. We were in Vegas, and we both had drunk about a million Moscow mules. It was just a goof, a lark. We were wasted. And there are wedding chapels all over that crazy town. And we joked about it. And he dared me. And so… There was even a gift shop at the stupid little chapel where I bought a stupid little disposable veil. And that was that. We got married. I disposed of the veil. Then we disposed of the marriage.”
“How, exactly?” asks Betsey.
“The next day, we were on our way back to the airport, and we stopped at the courthouse to get an annulment. It was so quick, we double-parked. We both signed a couple forms. I stayed in the car, my hubby ran in, dropped them off with the clerk, and that was it. Done. I was single again.”
Betsey waits for me to say more, but I’ve told her everything I care to tell her. Or so I think. Then Betsey starts talking.
“I know you’re not the first person to get married on a whim in Vegas, Emily. You’re probably not the first to get it annulled the next day, either. But there is something I want to ask…”
“The answer is no. If the question is ‘Is my ex-husband the father of my little bump?’ the answer is no. No. No. No. No. No.”
“How can you be…?” she asks.
“We were so drunk I don’t think we even did the deed, I mean, to consummate the marriage. I know you’re asking all this because you love me, Bets, because you care about me, but you’ve got to understand, it meant nothing. It’s like I said, a goof, a lark, a dare.”
“How about you and I meet before I get over to the hospital. We can have a cup of decaf. We can talk some more. We can…”
I begin to cry. It dawns on me that I’ve had nothing to eat all day.
“No, please, Bets. I love you, but I’m tired of talking. I’ve been talking all day, and I need to get a sandwich or something.”
“Do yourself and the baby a favor, Emily. Have some seltzer water with your sandwich.”
“Will do,” I say. “Thanks, Bets. Thanks for being the friend I don’t deserve. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
Suddenly Betsey speaks with urgency.
“Wait, there’s one more thing before you hang up.”
“What?”
“You never told me. Whose funeral did you go to today?”
“Nobody important. My mother and my father. A doubleheader. Gotta go. Talk soon.”
I hang up. I turn off my phone.
CHAPTER
38
The Present
TIERNEY’S PHONE BEEPS. He glances at it and says to Kalisha, “It’s Betsey.”
“What’s up?” he asks.
A few seconds of silence from Tierney, followed by a profound “Oh, shit.” Then he adds, “Kalisha or I will talk to you later.”
He hangs up and updates Kalisha. “Betsey went to see that guy, Emily’s old friend from college, Quinn Temple.”
“Not Temple, Detective Tierney. His name is Church. Quinn Church.” She struggles not to laugh. Tierney is feeling some pressure, all right.
“Whatever,” says Tierney. “Betsey said she got a lot of background, but she doesn’t think there’s anything for us to grab on to.”
“So, look. No disrespect, but since you’ve got your lady friend, Miss Nurse, on the case, maybe we can move on.” She quickly adds, “Don’t bite my head off.”
“I’m too tired to bite a head off, yours or anybody else’s.” Then he says, “We’ve got to keep digging into this connection between Emily and Caitlin Murphy. Maybe…”
Tierney’s cell beeps again. So does Scofield’s phone.
“What’s all this?” says Tierney as they both look at their screens.
“I asked Missing Persons to send us their file on Nina Powell,” says Kalisha. “You remember that case, right?”
“Of course,” says Tierney. “It was a pretty big story for a while.”
“The victim reminded me a little of Emily. And Caitlin Murphy, too. It’s a long shot, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to take a look. Maybe the three are related.”
So Tierney and Kalisha review the case of Nina Powell, age thirty, who was reported missing about four months ago. Like Caitlin Murphy, Powell’s apartment was also just a few blocks away from Emily’s.
“Plus Murphy worked at an internet ad agency. And Powell’s an SEO expert,” says Kalisha.
“What the hell is an SEO expert?” asks Tierney.
“Search Engine Optimization expert. She makes sure that if someone googles ‘High-powered NYPD detective,’ your name shows up first.”
Tierney chuckles, then thinks for a moment, his wheels turning.
“Is there any physical evidence yet linking the three victims? And similarities in the perp’s MO?”
“Other than Emily being a contact in Caitlin’s phone, nothing. Maybe that’s just a coincidence. Maybe the cases aren’t linked after all. Maybe they’re—”
Tierney interrupts Kalisha by banging his desk as if his hand were a gavel.
“Bullshit. We’ve got three young women. Two missing. One dead. All early thirties. All lived on the Lower East Side. All worked in the same industry. Goddamn this city.” He slams his hand again for emphasis. “You know what this means, Scofield?”
“What does it mean, sir?”
“It means we’ve got a pattern. And we’re looking for one very sick guy.”
CHAPTER
39
KALISHA DOES A DEEP DIVE into the life and times of Nina Powell.
Her Facebook page, her Instagram account, her mention in the New York Times Style section—they all show a beautiful woman with a totally natural smile. Nina Powell has a thousand freckles on her face, but on her they look simultaneously adorable and glamorous. She seems to favor white slacks and beige Dior shirts. A pair of sunglasses are almost always propped on top of her orangey-red hair.
But Nina Powell’s great luck in life seems to go far beyond her good looks.
The two detectives find out easily and early that she grew up in a ritzy Chicago suburb (Lake Forest), went to a ritzy prep school (Lake Forest Academy), attended an academically demanding college (Swarthmore), and was engaged to a guy who could only be described as “a great catch” (Duncan Martin).
It was all going so great for Nina Powell. Until she disappeared.
Scofield and Tierney immediately reach out to Duncan for an interview. The fiancé is as handsome as his bride-to-be is beautiful. They were to be married three days before Christmas, he tells them—St. Thomas’s Church on Fifth Avenue—and then a walk across the street to the University Club for the reception. He loves her “more than anyone on earth could love someone.” That’s how Duncan puts it.
As soon as the detectives leave his apartment, Scofield asks Tierney the usual and inevitable question.
“Do you think he’s telling the truth?”
“The only time an investment banker might weep that long and that loud is when bond rates go down more than five percent.” Tierney pauses for a moment, then says, “We’re only about a five-minute walk from one of the neighborhood’s hottest watering holes…”
Kalisha knows what he’s talking about. “Ted’s Bar and Grill?”
Tierney nods. As they walk the few blocks to the bar, Kalisha says, “You may not get this feeling anymore, Detective, but you know what? When someone goes missing, whether it’s Emily or Nina, or when we were heading over to find Caitlin… I always get a sort of photo in my mind of them. I see them tied up and their mouths taped and their beautiful hair all greasy and messy. And I think of how scared they must be. And then I think that they might be dead already, lying in a kinda lake of blood. And I think how really frightened they must have been as they saw a knife coming at their neck or some scum touching them and laughing at them and then waving a gun and…”
“Stop it, Kalisha,” Tierney says. He speaks loudly but not harshly. He wants to make an impact. “You can’t concentrate on that shit. You’ve got to think about your job, your involvement. I had a boss who used to say, ‘You gotta dance with the clues.’”
“I hear you, Detective. Your old boss is right. I know that. But how can you dance with the clues if those clues haven’t shown up at the dance hall?”
By this time, they’re standing outside Ted’s Bar and Grill.
“You know, Detective Scofield, unless you’re really thirsty, I don’t think I want a drink anymore.”
“Up to you, Chief. Up to you.”
“Good,” says Tierney. “Let’s go find some more clues to dance with.”
The two of them walk on.
CHAPTER
40
SHE DROPPED ME. SHE just cut me out of her life,” says David Zingerman, Emily Atkinson’s former assistant at Dazzle, the marketing firm where she worked.
Tierney and Scofield are interviewing a few of Emily’s former colleagues. Tierney’s plan is to start with lower-level employees—like Emily’s assistant—and work his way up to Keith Hennessey, the chairman and creative director who ultimately axed Emily.
“You never know who might know something,” Tierney had said to Scofield.
Zingerman—handsome, charming, and wearing a Jaeger-LeCoultre wristwatch that costs more than any car Tierney’s ever owned—seems genuinely shaken and sad by Emily’s disappearance.
“She always called me the most important person in her life. She’d refer to me as the mother and father she never had. But once Hennessey kicked her out of the office, Emily kicked me out of her life.”
“You never spoke to her after she was fired?” Kalisha asks.
“Almost never. She called me the day after she left… I think she was pretty hungover. She wasn’t slurring her words or anything, but she was pretty tired-sounding. She wanted a file—a paper file—from her desk. I’d never seen it before. It was called Names and More Names.”
“I assume you looked at that file before you sent it to her,” Tierney says.
“What good assistant wouldn’t? But it was nothing, really. At least I couldn’t connect it to anything. It was these random scraps of papers with random words on them.”
“What kind of words?”
“Like summer, winter, autumn, and another one was like old-time actors like Rudolph Valentino and Cary Grant and… like… I don’t know. There was something like Scotch and Soda on one torn piece. I remember that. And another booze one. Gin Rickey. Then one was David and Goliath. Naturally I remember that one, because it had the name David on it.”
Zingerman says he dropped the file off at Emily’s apartment and that was the last time they spoke. Over the next few weeks, he tried calling her cell, but he always got her voicemail. Then her voicemail box became full, and Zingerman couldn’t even leave a message. Emily never returned a single one of his calls.
“Maybe she was bitter,” he suggests. “She had a lot to be bitter about.”
Tierney is quick with the follow-up. “Bitter about what?”
“They kept giving her mixed signals, at least Keith did. Emily would do something great, innovative, nuts, and he’d shoot her a bonus… although she occasionally forgot to deposit the check… and a week later he’d be reaming her out for disappearing for two days.”
“Did she disappear regularly?” asks Kalisha.
“Well, depends on what you call regularly. I almost always knew where she was. Sometimes she’d be someplace like the Spa at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel to dry out a little. Other times she’d be at this place on Tenth Avenue, YAI—the Young Adult Institute—where she worked with these mentally challenged folks who needed a boost in moving on with life. Emily said it was all about self-advocacy. She was really into that YAI thing.”
Tierney asks David Zingerman who else at Dazzle might have some insight into Emily Atkinson.
“When she felt like it, Emily was part this group called Team Crisis. They’re the agency hotshots—two guys, two women… or one woman on the days Emily didn’t make it into the office. I’ll show you where they sit.”
David leads them to a conference room with an engraved plaque on the door:
PRIVATE THINK TANK. DO NOT DISTURB.
Right beneath the plaque is a roughly hand-lettered piece of paper on which is scrawled:
SHIT HOLE. VISITORS WELCOME
David leads the detectives inside and makes some introductions. Two members of Team Crisis—Susan Marlow and Adam DeGiacomo—are seated at a marble conference table. Ricky Ranftle, another team member, David explains, is at NewYork-Presbyterian getting ready for heart bypass surgery tomorrow.
“It goes with the territory,” Susan Marlow says. Then she quickly adds, “Joke. Just a joke. It’s a wonderful job.” But she does not smile.
Tierney says they’re looking for some information on Emily Atkinson.
Susan Marlow asks, “What’s up with Emily? She hasn’t even worked here for a while.”
Tierney replies, “She hasn’t been seen anywhere for a while, either. We’re gathering some background info from people who knew her, who might know something helpful.”
Then, after giving that troubling news a few moments to sink in, he says, “What can you tell us about Emily Atkinson? Anything. Top of your head.”
“Top of my head, I’d say Emily is one of the best in the business,” says Adam.
Tierney is pretty sure that he’s just seen Susan Marlow roll her eyes. He can’t be certain. But he will be certain in a few moments, because Adam DeGiacomo wastes no time in piling up the praise for Emily’s achievements in the cutthroat world of marketing.
“She just had a way to spin an idea. Like, after a World Series, everybody would try to get the pitcher from the winning team to push a brand or a cause or something. Not Emily. She’d suggest the pitcher from the losing team. And, sunuvabitch, if she wasn’t right. It was always more interesting.”
Adam is only just beginning.
“But you can only do that sort of thing once or twice. Then everybody’s doing it. The thing about marketing is that the old tried-and-true shit always works. But Emily always ran after something different. Em would never do Martha Stewart hawking stuff at Bloomingdale’s. She’d never put a ‘kills bathroom germs’ aerosol on the side of garbage trucks. That sort of thing wasn’t for Emily.”
“No, she left that shit for us to do,” says Susan Marlow. And anyone could tell she was not happy about it.
Adam has another Genius Emily story. He tells the detectives that one year—to encourage people to get flu shots—Emily persuaded the US Department of Health to offer free computer antivirus software to every New Yorker who got one. The theme was: “Protect your computer. Protect yourself.”
“The folks were lining up around the block,” Adam says.
“Adam has a gift for exaggeration,” Susan says.
Adam just won’t end his Emily stories. He actually stands up as he tells us how Emily spearheaded her most famous event. She had seen a wheelchair-bound woman stranded inside the 72nd Street Q train station because the station’s elevator was out of order.
Here’s the idea Emily hatched. On December 3, International People with Disabilities Day, a worldwide army of volunteers strung DO NOT ENTER tape across the exit stairs of every subway station throughout the world—from the T in Boston to BART in San Francisco.
“That meant that no one could leave the subway station. So everyone experienced what disabled people experience regularly, when the elevators and escalators aren’t working. This stunt virtually stopped all underground transportation in the United States.”
“I remember it,” says Kalisha. “My mama called me in a panic, yelling. She was stuck for close to a half hour in a crowd underground at Rego Park.”
Adam nods, then says, “The media coverage was extraordinary: TV news, internet news, Facebook, Twitter. Everywhere.”
Susan merely taps away on her laptop. She pays no attention as Adam continues.
“Emily wanted everyone to know what it felt like to be a disabled passenger on the crappy underground transportation systems. No escalators. No elevators. I’ll tell you, the next day a lot of transit boards were having meetings and figuring out how to fix their game.”
Almost like a singing duo, Kalisha and Tierney say “Wow” at the same time.
