Chapter 60: The People Who Hand Out Knives
He saw her from half a block away, standing at the gym entrance with her hands in her coat pockets, looking down the street in the wrong direction. When she spotted him she smiled the way she smiled when she hadn't been expecting to be happy and was anyway, and jogged the last few steps through the snow.
He caught her and lifted her off the ground, which she protested immediately and without conviction.
"Put me down, I'm a professional."
"Professional what?"
"Professional person."
He put her down. She fixed her scarf with the dignity of someone reclaiming her composure, then immediately tucked her arm through his and leaned into his shoulder.
"How was the last class?" he asked.
"It was Christmas Eve. There were three people."
"Three dedicated people."
"Three people who had nothing else going on." But she was smiling when she said it.
They walked. The snow had been coming down since mid-afternoon in the quiet committed way that meant accumulation — not the decorative flurry kind, the real kind that changed the sound of the city, muffled the traffic, put a layer of white on the cab roofs and the awnings and the bare branches along the block. The streetlights had that particular cold-air clarity.
Jade stopped walking and tipped her head back.
"Look at it," she said.
He looked at her looking at it, which was better.
She caught a snowflake on her fingertip and examined it with the absorption of someone encountering snow for the twentieth time and finding it just as good as the first. Texas winters were mild. She'd told him once that she'd moved to New York partly for this — the real seasons, the city in December, the thing that happened to people's faces when the first real snow came down.
She pulled her hood up, turned to face him, and with great deliberateness arranged a collected line of snow between her upper lip and her nose.
"Do I look like Santa?"
Her eyebrows had gone white. Her cheeks were red from the cold. The snow mustache was holding.
She did, slightly.
He kissed her instead of answering, which dislodged the snow directly into his collar.
The cold hit his neck like a verdict.
"Oh—"
She laughed — the real laugh, the one that started in her chest — and stepped back.
He made a grab for the back of her scarf with both cold hands as retribution, got them inside the collar before she could react, and she shrieked and pulled away and they were both running, her laughing and calling him unrepeatable things, him gaining ground on the slippery sidewalk until she caught a lamppost and used it to redirect, and they arrived at her building flushed and out of breath and a woman walking her dog gave them the look of someone who was fifty and remembered being twenty-three.
At the door he made a bow — formal, hand over chest, the whole thing.
"My lady. I'll come back for you."
She curtsied, which she pulled off with genuine grace despite the snow boots. "I'll be ready."
She went inside. He waited on the sidewalk, hands in his pockets, watching the lobby through the glass.
Thirty seconds. A minute.
He checked the panel the way he checked it when he was waiting for something to happen.
[Observation (Proficient): 62/100][Boxing (Proficient): 93/100][Martial Arts (Proficient): 87/100]
Two minutes.
The window didn't open.
He stood there and let the unease register without dismissing it. She'd done the window wave every time for months. Not because he'd asked her to — she'd started it, the third night, and it had become the thing they did, the small specific ritual that belonged only to them. She knew he waited. She always opened the window.
Three minutes.
Andrew went inside.
The lobby was empty. He took the stairs because the elevator was slow and he was already moving fast without quite deciding to. Fourth floor. Her hallway.
Her apartment door was open.
Not ajar. Open — the way a door was open when someone had come through it in a hurry and not looked back. Her scarf was on the hallway floor just inside the threshold.
"Jade." He said it at normal volume first.
No answer.
The hallway had six apartments. All the doors were closed except one — the unit nearest the stairwell, at the end, where a line of light showed under the door.
He didn't think about it. The thought had already happened, assembled from pieces he'd been carrying for weeks: Robert Durst rents rooms. Robert Durst has been watching. Robert knows where she lives because Robert knows where I live and I walk her home.
He tried the handle. Locked.
He stepped back and kicked it open.
The room was someone's sublet — sparse, impersonal, a folding table and two chairs and a lamp on the floor. The lamp was the only light.
Jade was on the floor near the far wall, unconscious, her coat still on. Breathing — he checked that first, the half-second that felt like longer. Breathing.
In one of the chairs, hands zip-tied to the armrests, was a woman he recognized from photographs. Somewhere in her forties, dark hair, the quality of someone who was frightened and managing it. She'd been crying recently and had stopped.
Susan Berman.
She looked at Andrew with the desperate focus of someone identifying a variable they couldn't yet classify.
Robert was standing by the window with the ease of a man who had expected this and found it confirmed. He was holding a revolver with the specific looseness of someone who'd held firearms long enough that the weight was ordinary. He was dressed the same way he'd been dressed at the restaurant — well, unremarkably, the clothes of a man who moved through rooms without being remembered.
His dark eyes did their thing. The warmth had been set aside. What remained was the assessment.
"You're fast," he said. "I didn't hear the elevator."
"I took the stairs."
"Of course you did." He tilted his head slightly. "How did you know it was this room?"
Andrew kept his eyes on the gun and his breathing even. The Martial Arts training had given him something that was only now becoming fully useful — the capacity to stand in front of a firearm without every instinct in his body overriding his thinking. It wasn't absence of fear. It was fear running parallel to function rather than replacing it.
[Martial Arts (Proficient): 88/100]
"You're right-handed," Andrew said. "The room nearest the stairwell gives you the fastest exit if something goes wrong. You'd want that."
Robert considered this with what appeared to be genuine interest. "You've been thinking about me."
"You came to my apartment."
"I did." He didn't apologize for it. "I've had people watching you for two weeks. Three shifts, around the clock. Thorough people. And I cannot find a single explanation for why you know what you know." His voice was conversational. Patient. The voice of a man accustomed to having the time to be curious. "You have no connection to Katherine. No connection to Susan — until recently. No connection to my brother or anyone in my family. You're a food truck operator who lives in a two-bedroom apartment and plays guitar at a coffee shop."
He paused.
"And yet you told Corleone my name. You've been waiting for me to do something. Like you already knew."
Susan made a sound — half word, half exhale.
Robert glanced at her briefly. Something moved across his face — not regret, more like the specific sadness of someone closing a door they'd hoped to leave open.
"Robert." Susan's voice was controlled with effort. "This isn't — you don't have to—"
"Susan." He said her name the way you said a name when you'd been saying it for twenty years and it had accumulated meaning in both directions. "I'm sorry it got here. I genuinely am."
"Then don't—"
"It got here a long time ago," he said. "We've both known that."
Andrew was calculating distance, angles, the lamp placement, the furniture between him and Robert, the position of Jade behind him and to the left. The gun was a .38 — he'd catalogued it in the first second. Robert was holding it at his side now, not raised, which was the only thing working in Andrew's favor.
Twelve feet. Maybe eleven.
Robert looked back at Andrew with the measuring expression.
"You should know," Robert said, almost conversationally, "that I'm not a person who makes these decisions lightly."
"I know," Andrew said.
"Then you understand that I can't—"
The door at the end of the hall — the stairwell door — banged open.
Both of them moved.
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