By Blood Written Read online

  He pulled out his notebook and a ballpoint pen from his coat pocket. “Mrs. Schiftmann, this is nothing more than a routine background check, and it’s standard procedure to go back to a subject’s home neighborhood and just ask some questions. It’s nothing to be alarmed about.”

  Kelly looked at the woman and waited for some kind of response from her. As she eased onto the sofa, he realized that she was even heavier than he first thought. The skin of her face was stretched tight, and as the housecoat draped open from her knees down, he saw that the skin on her lower legs was stretched until shiny and broken in several places by networks of spidery red veins.

  Then he saw, on the end table next to her, a blood sugar tester and one of those cheap, battery-operated sphygmo-manometers that were available in any drugstore or grocery nowadays. A row of amber plastic pill bottles was lined up next to the machines, stretching from one end of the table to the other.

  Type 2 diabetes, Kelly thought, high blood pressure. All the earmarks of American poverty …

  “Yes, well,” Kelly said after a moment, clearing his throat.

  He opened his notebook and pulled out the more-or-less standard form used in these kinds of checks. “The person we’re doing the background check on, Mrs. Schiftmann, is actually your son, Michael.”

  From across the room, Kelly felt the old woman stiffen.

  Her eyes narrowed, and she seemed to straighten her back on the couch. He watched as her right hand gripped the armrest and her knuckles grew white.

  “What’s he done?” she asked.

  Wow, Kelly thought, that’s not what I expected.

  “Uh, actually, Mrs. Schiftmann, I don’t think he’s done anything. This is a standard background check.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why is he getting a background check?”

  “I’m not actually at liberty to discuss that,” Kelly answered, thinking that even if he were, he didn’t know the answer. “But I assure you, it’s just standard procedure, all perfectly above board. These things are very routine these days.”

  She eyed him nervously and relaxed her grip on the armrest. Then she looked down at the floor, her eyes darting back and forth.

  “I don’t really like to talk about him,” she said softly.

  “It’s just a few questions,” Kelly said. “Like, for instance, we know your son was born in 1969. Did you live here then?”

  Mrs. Schiftmann shook her head. “No, my husband and I had an apartment in Portage. I moved in here with Michael after he left.”

  “Which was?”

  “I don’t know,” she said wearily. “It was kind of a blur.

  I was working in the extrusions factory, worked the night shift. Slept during the day; it was hard.”

  “Who kept the baby?”

  “There was a teenage girl who lived down the way. She was thirteen.”

  “So a thirteen-year-old was keeping your baby?” Kelly asked.

  “I had to work.”

  “And where did Michael go to elementary school?”

  The old woman was silent for a few moments. “O. C. Barber Memorial,” she answered. “It was down the street just a mile or so. He could walk.”

  “And how did he do in school? Was he a good student, did he enjoy school?”

  Her head seemed to be shaking nervously, side to side, in a jerky, continuous motion now. “Michael is very smart. He always made good grades, especially in English and spelling. But he didn’t like school. The other children were mean to him.”

  “Mean to him?”

  “Because he didn’t have a father, because we were poor, because I worked in a factory … Who knows why? Kids are just mean.”

  “Did he have any friends there, anyone he was close to?”

  “Not really. That was a long time ago. I don’t really know.”

  Kelly stared at the old lady for a moment. He wondered if she didn’t have Parkinson’s disease or something on top of everything else. He cleared his throat again.

  “How about junior high and high school?”

  “He got a scholarship in the ninth grade,” she said, with a hint of pride in her voice. The first he’d heard, Kelly noted.

  “Went away to that expensive, private school.”

  “What was the name of the school?”

  “Benton School, Benton Academy … something like that.

  I have trouble remembering.”

  “And how did he do there?”

  “It was harder than public school,” she answered, her voice lowering. “It was hard on him, being away from home, away from me. But he made it, he graduated. Barely.”

  “Did he have any girlfriends, any close friends at all?”

  “I don’t know. He was away. He always liked girls, but he was shy when he was younger. We didn’t go out much.”

  “Mrs. Schiftmann, did your son ever get in any kind of trouble at school or anything? Were there ever any kinds of disciplinary problems, difficulties like that?”

  The old woman coughed, hard, her whole body shaking as the rumble echoed through her chest. She cleared her lungs after a few hard coughs, then settled back on the sofa and panted a few times.

  “No,” she said. “Never. My Michael was never in any trouble at all. He was a good boy.”

  Kelly leaned back in the chair and studied her for a moment. “Mrs. Schiftmann, if you don’t mind my saying so, it seems like you and Michael had a lot of obstacles to overcome. A tough time … But my question, I guess, is how did Michael go from being apparently a lonely but bright kid to being a famous, wealthy writer? I mean, this guy’s on magazine covers now. How did that happen?”

  When Michael Schiftmann’s mother finally looked back up at Kelly, he could see a shiny film of tears in her eyes.

  Her hands shook as she raised a finger and pointed at him.

  “Because Michael was willing to do what it takes to get what he wants. Once he wanted something, nobody in heaven or hell could stop him.”

  Kelly made a couple of notes on his legal pad and looked at the form. There were a few other questions he could ask, but they probably didn’t apply here. He could tell Mrs.

  Schiftmann was starting to get upset. So, on impulse, he closed his notebook and stuck his pen in his pocket.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Schiftmann. I think I’ve got just about everything I need. If there’s anything else, I’ll give you a call. And while there’s certainly no legal requirement for you to do so, we always ask that you keep this just between us. If you don’t mind, there’s no need to say anything to Michael about this.”

  Kelly stood and reached for his coat. The old lady looked up at him, her eyes filling even more. “Don’t worry,” she said. “We haven’t spoken in years.”

  Kelly looked around at the tattered living room, the peel-ing wallpaper, the general sense of decay, deterioration.

  He almost said something about that explaining why, even though her son was rich and famous, she still lived this way, but then he held his tongue. He stood, threw his overcoat over his arm, and closed his notebook.

  Mrs. Schiftmann struggled to pull herself up off the couch.

  “Please, don’t bother,” Kelly said. “I can find my way out.”

  He took two steps toward the door, then stopped. He turned, faced the old woman as she sat there staring at him.

  “Mrs. Schiftmann, this really isn’t part of the check, but I’m curious. If you don’t mind my asking, how did you and your son become estranged?”

  She stared at him through rheumy, bloodshot eyes for a few moments without answering. The silence continued, and Kelly realized he wasn’t going to get an answer. He turned and walked toward the door.

  Outside, the sky had abruptly clouded over in the short few minutes he’d been in the Schiftmann home. He walked to the sidewalk, pulling his coat around him as the wind picked up. The air felt heavy, as if snow were imminent. After a few years around the Great Lakes, one learned to feel t
he weather as much as observe it.

  He stopped on the sidewalk, thinking. The interview with Michael Schiftmann’s mother had been frustrating. He didn’t know if she was withholding or if she was just unable to focus. He wondered if he should knock on a few doors, but his supervisor in the Cleveland Field Office had told him not to take any more time than he had to. There were other things on his plate.

  Kelly stood there for a few moments, appearing to be almost in a kind of trance. Behind him, at the end of the block, a car drove past with a bad muffler. A siren wailed in the distance. He was about to turn and head back to his car when the front door of the house next door to Mrs. Schiftmann’s opened.

  An elderly, thin man, gaunt and balding, wearing a pair of dirty khakis and a large sweatshirt, stepped out onto his porch. Kelly looked up and noticed the man’s right sleeve was empty, folded in the middle and pinned at the shoulder.

  His left hand held a cane that looked carved from a thick tree limb.

  “Can I help you?” the man said suspiciously. Well-dressed strangers standing on the sidewalk were not common in this part of town.

  Kelly looked at the man, then decided to take a chance.

  He strode over to the sidewalk and smiled at the man. “Yes sir, maybe you can. Have you lived here a long time?”

  The man looked at him for a moment before answering.

  “About thirty years,” he said.

  “So you’ve known the Schiftmanns for a while.”

  The man scowled. “Who are you?”

  Kelly smiled. “I’m sorry. Forgot my manners.” He pulled out his badge case and ID and held it out to the man. “I’m Special Agent Kelly, FBI. I’m doing a routine background check and I’m trying to get some information on a Michael Schiftmann. Could I ask you a few questions?”

  The old man nodded toward the Schiftmann house. “She help you?”

  Kelly smiled. “Little. Not much.”

  The man snorted. “I’m not surprised. She’s as crazy as he is.”

  “Crazy?” Kelly asked.

  “Kid was the craziest little psycho bastard I ever seen.

  Good thing he moved away. I’d have probably had to shoot him, one way or another.”

  Kelly smiled even more broadly. “Would it be okay if I came in and we talked a bit?”

  The old man shrugged, then pivoted on one foot and turned for the door, leaning heavily on the cane with his one good arm.

  “Sure,” he said. “C’mon in.”

  CHAPTER 19

  Saturday afternoon, Manhattan

  The flight from Bonaire to JFK was so uneventful as to be tedious. The sky was gray, overcast, threatening a late winter snow as Taylor and Michael emerged from the plane and walked down the Jetway in a kind of shock. Six hours earlier they’d been in paradise; now they were back in the city.

  That said it all.

  The two were quiet during the long taxi ride to Taylor’s loft on Grande Street. They dragged their suitcases and mesh bags full of scuba equipment upstairs, began unpacking, and then found themselves once more in bed. They made love yet again, perhaps a bit more subdued now that they were out of paradise and a bit more tired, then fell into a deep, silent sleep that went on for hours.

  Taylor felt herself coming to and rolled over. The glowing orange numerals of the alarm clock read 8:47. She moaned, unable to believe that they’d been asleep nearly four hours.

  She shook herself awake and sat up on the side of the bed.

  Next to her, Michael was breathing deeply and rhythmically, still sound asleep.

  She picked up her underwear off the floor and slipped into it, then quietly lifted her sweatshirt from the chair next to her bed. She crept out of the bedroom into the hallway and down the stairs to the main floor of her loft. The cavernous room, as high as two stories, was cold and drafty this time of year. Taylor shivered as she pulled the sweatshirt on, the rough material scraping her nipples. She crossed her arms across her chest, rubbing herself, as she walked into the kitchen.

  She hadn’t bothered to look at the stack of mail she’d brought up after digging it out of her jammed mailbox. And she noticed the message light on her answering machine was blinking madly. Not completely awake yet, she pushed the mail stack aside and opened the refrigerator. She pulled out a container of orange juice and poured a glass, then casually hit the button on the answering machine.

  The computerized voice came on and announced that she had sixteen messages. Taylor shook her head wearily and reached for a pad of paper and one of the pencils from a jammed coffee mug full of pens, pencils, markers, and anything else she could cram in.

  The first message was from Brett Silverman, delivered in her usual upbeat, high-energy, in-your-face fashion: “Hey girl! So you’re off to the Caribe, eh? You gotta drink some of those frou-frou drinks with the paper umbrellas for me, and for Chrissakes, have lots of sex!”

  “God,” Taylor whispered, “if you only knew.”

  The second message was a frantic one from Joan Delaney, something about a lost contract. The third, fourth, and fifth messages were from Joan as well, the last one announcing that the contracts had been located and she could ignore the other messages. There was the usual depressing message from her mother, followed by one from her floor leader on the co-op board about the next monthly meeting, and a few other dreary, routine business messages. Taylor made notes of any message that actually required something of her, and either mentally filed away or dumped the others.

  Then the next-to-last message, time-stamped Friday morning at nine-thirty, was Brett Silverman again. “I hear you’re going to be in Saturday afternoon. You get your ass out of that apartment and buy the Sunday Times the second it hits the newsstand!”

  Taylor perked up. There was nothing else to the message but a moment of silence followed by a beep, then another time stamp for Friday morning, nine thirty-four, and Joan’s voice again:

  “We did it!” she screamed. “He’s number one! And the other four are all on the paperback list at the same time!”

  Taylor’s heart leaped into her throat. Could it be? She dropped the pencil on the counter, grinning broadly, then ran out of the kitchen, her bare feet pounding on the hardwood floors, then breathlessly up the stairs. She flung open the bedroom door and swiped the wall to hit the light switch.

  “Wake up!” she yelled.

  Michael shot up out of bed like a tiger who’d just taken the first bullet. He was halfway on his feet, furious, something dark, almost murderous in his face. He raised a fist, a wild look in his eye, and took a step toward her.

  “Wait!” Taylor barked, startled. “It’s me! It’s me, baby, just me.”

  He stood there a moment, stunned, staring at her as if she were a stranger. Taylor looked into his face and saw something she’d never seen before, something that frightened her terribly. She took a step backward, into the doorframe.

  “I didn’t mean to startle you,” she said softly.

  Michael stood there at the edge of the bed for a moment, his nude body tight and tense as if poised to leap. Then he seemed to relax, the breath rushing out of his chest, and dropped onto the mattress still sitting up, stunned.

  “I’m sorry,” he gasped. “I was sound asleep.”

  Taylor rushed over to the edge of the bed and dropped to her knees in front of him. She put her arms around his waist.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to do that. I was just excited.”

  He ran his hands through her hair and pulled her to him, his torso bending down over her head. He was still breathing hard. Against his chest, Taylor felt his heart beating like a hammer. Michael hugged her to him.

  “I’m sorry, too. I didn’t mean to look like a crazy person.”

  She pulled away from him and looked up into his eyes, smiling once again. “My father always told me to never wake a sleeping dog.”

  Michael laughed, reached down, and pulled her up off her knees, then fell back on the bed, pulling her o
n top of him.

  She leaned down and kissed him softly, as he held her there.

  She felt him getting hard once again and found herself rubbing against him, feeling him through the silk of her underwear. She moaned softly.

  “Oh, wait,” she said suddenly. “I almost forgot.”

  “What?”

  “Brett Silverman and Joan both left frantic messages yesterday morning. We’ve got to go pick up the Sunday Times.”

  His eyes widened. “You mean?”

  She nodded. “Yep. You made it.”

  Michael jerked upright, carrying her with him. She almost bounced off him and landed on the balls of her feet.

  “When’s it come out?” he yelped.

  “There’s a newsstand over on Houston that gets them in around nine.”

  Michael stood, a look of incredulity on his face. “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it.”

  “Believe it,” Taylor said. “It’s real. It’s happened.”

  “Number one on the New York Times best-seller list,” he said in wonder, as if it were a dream, an illusion.

  The look on his face almost made her want to cry. “I’m so happy for you,” she said.

  Michael bit his lower lip. “I wish my mother were alive to see this,” he said. “She would have been proud.”

  Taylor nodded. “I know she would have. I’m proud of you.”

  Michael stepped toward her and threw his arms around her waist, then lifted her up in the air and twirled her. They shouted and giggled and yelled.

  Then they got dressed as fast as they could and headed out into the bitterly cold Manhattan night.

  Sunday morning they slept in late, partially out of fatigue, partially to recover from the hangovers they were shouldering after the previous night’s celebration. Michael had bought twenty copies of the Sunday New York Times, which turned out to be a load of newspaper to carry in the wet weather. They’d found a cab and gone to N’s, the trendy Manhattan bar where they’d had their first date. The place was packed and they had to wedge into a corner table, made all the more difficult by the nearly four-foot-high stack of newspapers. Michael ordered a bottle of champagne, and while waiting for it, opened the book review and simply stared at the page for a long time. Then he turned the page to the paperback best sellers and held it there in front of him.