The Occupied Read online

Elijah’s words, and the prophetic ring to them, dangled over my head like a smashed-up car on a magnetic crane in an automobile graveyard.

  At the time, though, I had no idea what was coming for me. All I knew then, as I clicked off my iPhone and tossed it on the bed stand, was that Elijah’s message had rattled me to a surprising extent, and I needed to find a way to fall asleep.

  10

  I tossed and turned in my bed that night, finally slipping into fitful dreaming around three in the morning. My alarm was set for six, but by that time I found the coffeemaker in the kitchen on, a half-eaten box of donuts left opened on the counter, and a dirty dish and a coffee cup in the sink. Courtney had already left the condo. That was strange. She liked her beauty sleep, and I was always the first one up. Things were already percolating in my brain.

  I pushed back mentally against a vague sense of doom, assuming instead that it was life as normal. After downing a cup of coffee, I checked the time, laid out my suit and tie, and jumped into the shower and soaped up. But I kept thinking back to our argument the night before. And the little things there were about Courtney that I hadn’t focused on previously, even though I knew all the symptoms.

  There were the sugar rushes and the repeated bouts of what my wife called the flu. Symptoms easily dismissed. Like the nausea and vomiting. Then it would disappear. Then reappear. I knew she couldn’t be pregnant. We had both been checked out years before, and it turned out she couldn’t have babies.

  As I wiped the fog off the bathroom mirror and started shaving, I visualized her occasionally bloodshot eyes and, when I could get close enough to check, her dilated pupils. When you live with someone, it can be hard to track their slow disintegration. But at some point you have to admit it.

  All the signs kept popping up in my head as I checked myself in the full-length mirror, knotting my tie. Maybe it had something to do with Bradley Yelsin.

  It so happened that I was to have a client conference that day with Bradley, who was a floor trader on Wall Street and an arm’s-length friend of mine. We ran in some of the same circles. Bradley had a penchant for throwing exotic, edgy parties, sometimes with multiple sexual encounters in his bedrooms and lines of high-grade coke on the mirrored coffee tables. I took Courtney to a few of his bashes, against my better judgment. After a while I began to notice the look in Courtney’s eyes, and I knew immediately that something deep inside of her had been captivated by the whole scene.

  I warned her that cocaine was a fierce monkey with a powerful grip and sharp teeth, and she needed to avoid it. She smiled and nodded, but in retrospect, it’s painfully clear that she wasn’t convinced.

  Bradley tried to lasso me into seeing him at 7:30 that morning about his case so he could still make it over to the New York Stock Exchange in time to check the wire services and the news on the Bloomberg terminal before the opening bell for trading. But I said no, 8:30 instead. He didn’t like that, but he didn’t have a choice. He showed up at the scheduled time wearing his blaze-orange trading jacket and a really ticked-off expression.

  It was time to get him ready for a settlement of the SEC fraud charges against him. The deal that I had worked out with the federal authorities was a sweet one. Bradley would agree to a federal monitoring of his trades for a year in exchange for a deferred prosecution. If he kept his nose clean for twelve months the whole thing would be forgiven and forgotten. Poof. Disappeared. No criminal record. Nothing.

  After walking him through the drill and explaining what to expect in the next week’s meeting with the assistant US attorney, I decided to take a chance. So I got personal.

  “So, how have you been, Bradley?”

  “Fine.” There was a forced grin on his face. Then he shot a glance at his Rolex. I got the point. The opening bell for floor trading would sound in about forty-five minutes.

  “What I’d like to know,” I continued, “is whether you’ve seen Courtney recently. You know, over at your parties.”

  He laughed. “You want me to tell you what your wife’s been up to? Geez, Trevor. Really?”

  “Yeah, really. I’ve told you before. I don’t want her doing substances. Period.”

  “She’s a big girl.”

  “Do you know where she is today?”

  He tilted his head to the side, sizing me up. Bradley was still a client, and I knew I was wading neck deep into an alligator swamp by mixing the personal with the professional. He shrugged and replied, “Who knows?”

  “Look, Bradley, I’m more than your lawyer. I thought we were friends. Maybe I don’t dig the stuff you’re into. But I thought we could tell each other the truth. Until now. Frankly, I’m hurt.”

  He huffed cynically. “Oh, wow. So does this mean you and I aren’t going steady anymore?”

  That lit me up. “Okay. That’s it.” I leaned toward him, across my desk. “You tell me right now where Courtney is. I’ve never busted a client’s nose before. But there’s always a first.”

  Actually, I hadn’t landed a blow like that since I was sixteen years old, competing in the Wisconsin Golden Gloves competition at the Racine community center. The other guy was a tough Chinese kid with fast hands who was pummeling me something fierce, but he let his guard down for a second, and that’s when I nailed him. A lucky punch.

  When I delivered my warning to Bradley, his eyes opened wide. Silence for half a minute. “Hang on,” he finally said. “I remember now. Ginny and her and some of their girlfriends were going to have a girls’ day out. You know, with Courtney. All day.”

  Ginny was Bradley’s live-in girlfriend. I had no use for Ginny or most of her friends. As I considered the worst-case possibilities, I felt a sense of weightlessness and nausea in my gut.

  Then Bradley remembered something else. “Oh yeah. And here’s for your last bill. Paid in full.” Then he reached into the top pocket of his colored trading jacket and yanked out a check. But in the process he also inadvertently pulled up the cigarette pack that was in that pocket. Marlboros.

  At that point I wasn’t interested in breaking his nose. I wanted to toss my client out the window of the Woolworth Building.

  Before I could respond, Bradley jumped up and flipped the check onto my desk. As he turned and started to hike out of my office I yelled after him, “I’ll be talking to you about Courtney. Outside of this office.”

  I muddled through the rest of the morning on several other cases. Then I worked through lunch on the Dunning Kamera file and into the afternoon, not stopping to eat, finding it difficult to focus but still trying to push through. I called Courtney several times but she didn’t pick up.

  I dug into the pile of police reports on my desk. Assistant District Attorney Betty Verring had sent them to me in response to my discovery demand. Even in my fuzzy state of mind, I could see with crystal clarity that Detective Dutch Alreider, the investigating officer, had seized my client’s bloody handkerchief without a warrant, and without probable cause. He had gained access to Kamera’s apartment under the pretense that there might be a building code violation. That was the excuse he had given to the building manager in order to gain entry. Something about the electrical wiring in the apartment not being up to snuff. But it was an empty ruse, laughable actually.

  The cop ended up finding the handkerchief in the pocket of one of Kamera’s sport coats in his closet. Dunning Kamera considered himself a kind of fashion dandy, always wearing a smartly starched handkerchief in the top pocket of his sport coat. The blood on the handkerchief matched Heather’s blood type.

  My next step was obvious. I needed to file a motion to suppress from evidence the improperly seized handkerchief, a motion I expected that the judge would grant. After that, the prosecution would have no alternative but to grudgingly dismiss the case against Dunning Kamera.

  But before I could start drafting my motion to suppress, Catherine, my executive assistant, buzzed me. She sounded breathless. I knew something was wrong.

  “There’s a call for you, Trevor,” she said. “
It’s urgent.”

  “What’s it about?”

  Catherine made a little sound, like she was trying to swallow but had something caught in her throat. After a second she finished her message to me. “It’s about Courtney.”

  I told her to put the call through. The numbness was already setting in, even before hearing the police officer ask me if I was Trevor Black, and whether Courtney Black was my wife, and if I knew anything about her whereabouts that day.

  “No,” I said in a stumbling voice. “I don’t know exactly where she was going. Not exactly . . .”

  “One of our officers will be speaking to you personally,” the cop said. “Thank you for your cooperation.”

  Five minutes later, as I sat at my desk staring out into space and steadying myself, there was a knock on my office door. A uniformed officer entered with a look on his face that was different than I might have expected. I am sure he knew who I was and what I did for a living—mostly making cops look like the bad guys and the bad guys look like they were innocent.

  But even so, at that moment the expression on his face said something else: regret for what he was about to tell me, as if he knew how hard it was going to shake me when he said the words. “I’m sorry, Mr. Black. But there’s been an incident with your wife, Courtney.”

  More numbness upon numbness. Then shock.

  “I’m sorry to inform you that your wife has passed away. You’ll need to come with me to the coroner’s office.”

  11

  Some images you don’t forget. That day I found myself standing inside the morgue, staring at the cement floor that was painted in a thick, shiny gray, like the kind of paint you might expect on a battleship. My focus was on the floor, because five feet away there was a metal gurney with a body lying on it, covered by a sheet. I was clinging stupidly to the hope that there had been a grotesque mistake, and my legs were momentarily struggling to bear my weight, feeling like the marrow had been sucked out, or like my entire skeleton had vanished and I was just some ocean invertebrate, like a jellyfish.

  A staffer had gone to fetch the coroner and had left me alone with what I had been told was the body of my wife. The sheet was still veiling the body, but the coroner’s assistant assured me that it was Courtney. A patrol officer had found her dead behind the wheel of her Mercedes about a block away from Bradley Yelsin’s penthouse.

  A few minutes later the coroner strode in, said he was sorry about my loss, and pulled the sheet back from over her face. Courtney had always been so proud of her reddish-auburn hair, and she paid exorbitantly to have it styled. Movie-star hair, I used to tell her. But now her hair was a straggly, tangled mess, and it framed her face, which had a whitish-gray pallor.

  It struck me how Courtney was absolutely unmoving, as if her very atoms and molecules had stopped, frozen in time. And there was nothing I could do to restart it all again. Or to go back. Or to change any of it. Ever.

  “Yes,” I told the coroner, “this is my wife.” I wished somebody had offered me a chair, but I was too shaken to ask for one. I just stood there, my knees trembling, looking at the woman I’d promised to love and cherish till death parted us. I looked away from the body, bracing myself for an answer I already anticipated. “How did she die?”

  “There will be an autopsy,” the coroner replied, “but my preliminary impression is that it could have been a drug overdose. Her posture in the car suggested congestive heart failure, indicative of a possible cocaine overdose. Traces of the drug were found in the car and on her person.” The coroner looked up at my stricken face, maybe realizing he was talking like a pathology report rather than a person. He licked his lips and looked away. “Unless . . . Did your wife have a history of heart problems?”

  My mind was blank. I just shrugged. Courtney’s heart was a mystery in several ways.

  In the blur of the days that followed, I drifted between grief, rage, and regret, not able to really separate them. But one thing was clear. If I saw Bradley Yelsin, I would beat him to within an inch of his life.

  I avoided the office altogether. Catherine and my paralegals kept things going for me. On the day of the funeral I was a mess. My friends came, along with the entire law firm staff. Neither Bradley Yelsin, nor his live-in paramour, nor any of his sordid party hangers-on attended.

  At the graveside when the service was done, and as I turned to walk away from that open hole in the ground and from the casket that contained the mortal remains of my wife, I noticed that Elijah White was in the crowd. People were beginning to disperse. A few hugs and handshakes and many murmurs of So very sorry from friends and from my law partners and from my secretary, Catherine.

  But I had to chase down Elijah. I followed him and called after him as he was passing quickly between two leafy trees in the cemetery. He heard me and turned. A stocky guy with a shiny bald head, Elijah had taken to wearing reading glasses, which hung around his neck on a chain, like he was a librarian or a schoolmarm. He had a smile on his face. No one would peg him as a former felon whose time in prison was spent fighting off Aryan Nation inmates and even members of a black power gang that he had refused to join. On one occasion he had pulled up his shirt in my office to show me the jagged scars from knife wounds that marked his torso.

  Elijah trotted up to me and wrapped his arms around me and squeezed until my ribs could feel it. When he let go he said, “Man, I am cut to the bone over this. So sorry, Trevor. My heart is just breaking for you.”

  I thanked him. The two of us were alone then, on the spongy, perfectly manicured grass, standing near headstones and grave markers.

  But I knew I had to bring it up. “I need to know something.”

  “Anything,” he said.

  “About Courtney. How did you know?”

  “Know what?”

  “When you said that about how the prince of darkness was coming after me. How did you know that something bad would happen to Courtney?”

  Elijah gave me a look like I had been speaking Mandarin. “Hey, bro, not sure what you mean . . .”

  “You must have had a premonition about Courtney dying. That must have been what you meant about my facing some kind of demonic attack.”

  He paused. Then, “Oh hey, Trevor, my man. This is a bad day for you. Not sure we ought to be talking about any of that right now.”

  I insisted. “You’ve got to tell me. You have to. How could you have known that I would lose Courtney like this?”

  “But I didn’t know,” Elijah said.

  “But all that stuff you said about the demons coming after me, or the devil, or whatever . . .”

  “Trevor,” he said. “My dreams. What the Spirit of God was speaking to me. The things I said about the evil one. There’s something I got to tell you about that.” Then he clapped me on the shoulder and looked at me real close. Uncomfortably close. Right in the eye. “Those warnings—they weren’t about Courtney. They were about you.”

  12

  Law work would keep me from going crazy. That was what I thought. When I finally dragged myself back to the office a few days later, there was a letter from the district attorney’s office, from the DA himself, and an e-mail from ADA Betty Verring. There was also a pink slip with a phone message from Dunning Kamera.

  The letter from the district attorney for New York City expressed condolences about the loss of my wife and that the entire staff was saddened at the news.

  The e-mail from Betty shared her personal regrets about Courtney as well, but added something else. “I am sorry to hit you with this. However, Mr. Kamera was caught in northern Maine trying to leave the United States at the Canadian border, in violation of his bail terms. A passport was found in his possession. A detention hearing is scheduled for tomorrow because he violated his bail. Considering everything you have been through, I would be glad to agree to an adjournment for a week or so, but of course, you will need to clear that with your client.”

  I shot her a quick reply e-mail saying that I would forge ahead with t
he hearing as scheduled. My client deserved a quick decision about his being held in custody.

  Not surprisingly, the message from Kamera was his single call from jail, telling me that he had been picked up, but that it was all a misunderstanding and he needed me to spring him from lockup.

  I made arrangements to attend the court hearing the next day, and looked over the file. But by then, emotionally speaking, I had started to tank dramatically and I was ready to call it a day. I didn’t even go through the rest of my mail, but grabbed my car keys, fled the office, and went home.

  I walked in the door, and it hit me again. I almost expected to see her sitting at the table with clams and oysters from that upscale market or carryout chicken tikka from the Indian restaurant. Or maybe stepping out of the bedroom in one of her designer kimonos. There were traces of her everywhere. A bottle of kefir in the fridge. Cosmetics littering the master bath. Her specialty soap from Harrods still perfumed the shower stall.

  After eating only a few bites of yesterday’s carryout Chinese, I dropped into bed but couldn’t sleep. Maybe I dozed off here and there, but my eyes had already been open for a long time when I saw the sun coming up around the curtains of the guest room. For some reason, I couldn’t bring myself to sleep where Courtney had slept. I just left the bed in the master bedroom unmade. Exactly the way it was—when she left that morning ahead of me.

  Later, in the courthouse, when I was on my way up to my detention hearing for Dunning Kamera, two women trotted into the elevator with me. One had a briefcase. The other had the nervous look of a client. They both got out at the next floor. I stayed in. While I was ducking my head down to leaf through my briefcase and make sure I had the Kamera file, someone else walked in. Then the elevator door closed. I looked up.

  It was Bradley Yelsin. We didn’t talk, but as the elevator stopped at another floor, he tried to scoot out when the door slid open, but I got there first and blocked his exit. The door kept closing on me and then banging back open as I stood there, staring at Bradley.