A Good Marriage(2)
I held my breath.
“Zach Grayson,” an actual human voice said, before the message reverted to the automation. “Press one if you agree to accept the charges.”
I exhaled, relieved. But Zach … I drew a total blank. Wait—Zach Grayson, from Penn Law? I hadn’t thought about Zach for at least a couple years, not since I’d read that New York Times profile about ZAG, Inc., the wildly successful logistics start-up in Palo Alto he was running. ZAG was creating the equivalent of Prime membership for the endless small companies trying to compete with Amazon. Shipping didn’t sound very glamorous, but it was apparently extremely profitable. Zach and I hadn’t actually spoken since graduation. The recorded voice repeated the instruction, warned that I was running out of time. I punched 1 to accept the call.
“This is Lizzie.”
“Oh, thank God.” Zach exhaled shakily.
“Zach, what’s going—” The question was an unprofessional slip. “Wait, don’t answer that. These calls are all recorded. You know that, right? Even if you’re calling me as an attorney, you shouldn’t assume this conversation is confidential.”
Even well-versed attorneys were sometimes comically stupid when acting in legal matters on their own behalf. With criminal matters, they were completely useless.
“I don’t have anything to hide,” Zach said, sounding like every lawyer who’d found himself on the wrong side of the law.
“Are you okay?” I asked. “Let’s start there.”
“Well, I am at Rikers, so …,” Zach said quietly. “I’ve been better.”
I could not remotely imagine Zach at Rikers, a jail so sprawling it occupied its own island. It was a ruthless place where Latin Kings, sadistic murderers, and career rapists were held perilously alongside the guy awaiting trial for selling a dime bag of weed. Zach was not a big guy. He’d also always been kind of, well, meek. He’d get ripped apart in Rikers.
“What have you been charged with? And I mean only the facts of the charge, not what happened.”
It was that important not to disclose anything incriminating, and that easy to forget. Once, my office had built an entire prosecution around a single recorded jailhouse conversation.
“Uh, assaulting a police officer.” Zach sounded embarrassed. “It was an accident. I was upset. Someone grabbed my arm and I jerked back. My elbow hit an officer in the face and I gave him a bloody nose. I feel bad, but obviously I didn’t do it on purpose. I had no idea he was even behind me.”
“Was this at, like, a bar or something?” I asked.
“A bar?” Zach sounded confused, and I felt my cheeks flush. It was a weird leap. A bar wasn’t where most people’s problems started. “Um, no, not a bar. It was at our house in Park Slope.”
“Park Slope?” That was my neighborhood, or close to my neighborhood. Technically, we lived in Sunset Park.
“We moved to Brooklyn from Palo Alto four months ago,” he said. “I sold my company, stepped away completely. I’m launching a venture here. Entirely new territory.” His tone had turned wooden.
Zach had always been that way, though, a bit awkward. A weirdo, my law school roommate Victoria used to call him, and worse, in her less charitable moments. But I’d liked Zach. Sure, he was a little nerdy, but he was dependable, smart, a good listener, and refreshingly direct. He was also as relentlessly driven as me, which I’d found comforting. Zach and I had other things in common, too. When I arrived at Penn Law I was still emerging from my grief-hardened shell, the one I’d been tucked inside since I’d lost both my parents at the end of high school. Zach had lost his father, too, and he knew what it meant to pull yourself up by your working-class bootstraps. At the University of Pennsylvania Law School, not everyone did.
“I live in Park Slope, too,” I offered. “On Fourth Avenue and Nineteenth Street. What about you?”
“Montgomery Place, between Eighth Avenue and Prospect Park West.”
Of course. The only time I ever went to that wildly expensive part of Center Slope was to browse (and browse only) at the equally overpriced farmer’s market at Grand Army Plaza.
“Why were the police at your house?” I asked.
“My wife—” Zach’s voice caught. He was silent for a long moment. “Amanda was, um, at the bottom of the stairs when I got home. It was really late. We’d been at this neighborhood party together earlier in the night, but we’d left separately. Amanda got back before me and when I walked in—Jesus. There was blood everywhere, Lizzie. More blood than—I almost threw up, honestly. I could barely check for a pulse. And I’m not proud of that. What kind of man is so scared of the sight of blood that he can’t help his own wife?”
His wife was dead? Shit.
“I’m so sorry, Zach,” I managed.
“I got myself to call nine-one-one, luckily,” he pressed on. “And then I did try CPR. But she was already—she’s gone, Lizzie, and I have no idea what happened to her. I told the police that, but they wouldn’t listen, even though I was the one who called them, for Christ’s sake. I think it was because of this one guy in a suit. He kept eyeballing me from the corner. But it was this other detective who tried to pull me away from Amanda. She was right there on the floor, though, and I couldn’t just leave. I mean, we have a son. How the hell am I going to—” His voice cut out again. “I’m sorry, but you’re the first friendly voice I’ve heard. Honestly, I’m having a hard time holding it together.”