Ten Spot by Denis Hamill

Author:Denis Hamill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books

SEVENTEEN

* * *

At five p.m. they gathered to watch Cookie Calhoun die on tape.

Maggie finished digitizing the video footage on her Avid Express video-editing system. Bobby stood with Izzy behind and to the left of Maggie. Janis and Jimi Jim stood directly behind Maggie. Brian Calhoun stood just to Maggie’s right.

Maggie sat in front of three monitors at her fifteen-foot-wide computer station in her “homework room” in her mother’s ninetieth-floor condo in the Trump International. The room had six workstations, each with a different computer setup—laptops, desktops, color printers, copying machines, faxes.

Bookcases overflowed with reference books, computer guides, dummies’ books, CD-ROMs, boxes of diskettes, printing paper, photo-copy paper, and boxes of water, pretzels, and Raisinets in case of an emergency. A small generator was stored in a wall closet, in case of a blackout or power failure, with a built-in exhaust system, so that Maggie’s computers would never go down. She used a cable modem, but in case that also failed, she had hookups to a portable satellite-phone system.

The rain had stopped and the sun was shining and traffic helicopters buzzed in the baby blue sky past the big windows flying south along the West Side Highway and the eternal Hudson. U.S. Air Force jets roared by as the city went on Orange Alert after some vague new terrorist threat. Bobby knew he was standing at about exactly the same height as those poor morning workers when the first plane had hit the South Tower on 9/11 when New York had become the Pearl Harbor of the twenty-first century.

Trevor was still in Europe, and Bobby’s ex-wife, Connie, was at a Friends of Central Park luncheon in the Boat House Café in the park that glistened to the left like an enormous emerald after the earlier rain.

She was expected home anytime now.

“Herbie’s late,” Bobby said. “Not a good sign.”

“I told him five; it’s three minutes after,” Izzy said.

“A lot can happen in less time than that,” Brian said.

No one had a reply to that. Janis and Jimi Jim had spent most of the early afternoon arguing with Brian that maybe it wouldn’t be good for him to view the hit-and-run tapes.

“I’m sixteen years old, and if you don’t let me see the tape, I promise you, you’ll never see me again,” Brian had told Janis and Jimi Jim, in a flat, earnest tone. It was more a mature statement than an adolescent threat, a declaration from a kid who had made a decision in life. It spooked Janis and Jimi Jim.

Janis called Brian’s shrink, asking his advice. The shrink told her to view the tape first. To be sure Brian could handle it. And said that if wasn’t too gory, it might actually be a good thing for him to watch, a kind of cathartic shock therapy so that he could actually see that the death of his mother was not his fault. Reality was always better than a guilt-distorted memory.

Janis watched the blurry, grainy high-angle video footage first. Alone. And

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