He stuffs the notebook back into his pocket and reaches across the table to shake my hand.
“We’re going to figure this out for you, Ms. Linden,” he says. “And we can start immediately.”
“Thank you.” His words have triggered a rush of relief, though there’s still fear pulsing lightly beneath it. “What can I do to assist in this?”
“For the moment, the most important thing is to be available so I can check in with you regularly and ask you questions as they come up.”
“You can count on it.”
Mulroney raises a finger for the check, and the waiter nods with a smile.
“You do a lot of meetings here?” I ask.
“A fair amount. I also like to stop by at the end of the day and think through my cases.”
I offer to pay for my own coffee, but Mulroney insists it’s on him.
“Oh, wait,” I exclaim as he lays down a few bills. “I almost forgot.”
I fish through my purse and extract the gallon-size Ziploc bag I’ve stuffed with the bloodied tissues. Mulroney’s right eyebrow, the one with the scar, shoots up.
“These were in my coat pocket, though I don’t have any memory of putting them there.”
He cups the bag in one hand and peers at the contents intently.
“Did you have any cuts or bruises last week?”
“No, but I’ve gotten nosebleeds in the past. Can we do a DNA test to find out whether the blood is mine or not?”
“DNA’s going to take a few weeks. Plus, you’ll need to buy one of those home paternity tests. Actually, I think we should start instead by checking the blood type on the tissues, which can be done quickly and might tell us all we need to know. What type are you?”
“O negative.”
“That’s rare. If the blood on these turns out to be O negative, it’s probably safe to assume it’s yours. If it’s not, we’ll decide from there how much more testing we want. Why don’t you give them to me, and I’ll drop them off at the lab we use.”
I feel a tiny swell of reluctance about handing over the whole bag but decide I’m going to have to put my trust in this guy. He was a cop. That’s no guarantee he’s ethical but at least he’s experienced. Mulroney accepts the bag and tucks it into the soft black leather briefcase resting next to him.
As we’re sliding out of the booth a few minutes later, another man approaches us.
“Jay, hey,” Mulroney says. “Ms. Linden, I asked my partner, Jay Williams, to stop by to say hello. Since he’ll be involved, too, I thought you should meet him.”
He appears to be slightly younger than Mulroney, maybe in his midforties, African American, and handsome. Unlike his partner, he bears an exact resemblance to his online photo.
“A pleasure,” Williams says, firmly shaking my hand. “Did you two have a good meeting?”
“We did,” Mulroney says, lowering his voice as we move toward the front of the diner. “I’m going to make Ms. Linden’s case a top priority.”
Out on the sidewalk, Mulroney briefly recaps the conversation for his partner. I realize the meeting has gone longer than I planned, so I say good-bye and step off the curb and hail a cab. Less than ten minutes later I’m sinking into the backseat of a cab hurtling toward the studio on Ninth Avenue and Forty-Fifth Street. This all seems so crazy—hiring a couple of gumshoes—and yet I feel bolstered by my decision.
Once I arrive at the studio, I take the elevator to the ninth floor and proceed to the small suite rented by the production company that does my program. The guy manning the desk in the reception area nods hello and announces, “They’re all inside, Ally.”
I pray he doesn’t mean Sasha, too. I’d been hoping to beat her here and have a few minutes to chat alone with Casey about the final segment of the show. But as I step into the outer part of the studio, I spot Sasha in the sound booth, shuffling a stack of papers. Casey and Rex, the engineer, are busy at their computers, but they both glance up when I enter. Sasha either doesn’t notice me or pretends not to.
“Morning,” Rex and Casey say nearly in unison.
“How’s everyone doing?” I ask, watching for their reaction. I’ve been wondering if I might have contacted either one of them—perhaps in some lunatic way—when I was MIA.
“All good,” Rex says and swivels his dark eyes back to the screen. In the year and a half I’ve been doing the podcast, I’ve probably heard the guy say a couple hundred words.
Casey, however, smiles and affords me her full attention, setting down a green juice concoction in a plastic cup the size of a rocket ship.
“Got anything for me?” she asks, eyeing my tote bag. I’ve worked with Casey for two years now and she’s not only fun and considerate, but a pro in every respect.
“No, I’m going to stick to the plan I sent you last night. Our guest is on her way?”
“Yeah, but she texted to say she’s running ten minutes late. So much for taking your own advice, right? In her books she warns people to never be late for a meeting.”
“Ha. For the powerful, rules are meant to be broken.”
Both she and Rex seem totally normal, making me think that neither has witnessed any bizarre behavior on my part. And yet everything in the room seems slightly out of frame to me. I feel like if I reached out to touch Casey or Rex, my hand would miss by an inch or two.
Is it simply because I’m still a little wobbly from last week? Or is this out-of-frame sensation an alert about my mental state, one I should be heeding? Were there warning signs before the first dissociative state that I didn’t know how to interpret? Please, I silently beg, don’t let this be happening again. Maybe Hugh was right when he urged me to postpone the recording a week.
I’m also a little jittery, I realize, about my meeting with Damien. It’s only a few hours away.
I inhale slowly, hold, then release. I can do this, I tell myself.
“Want me to grab you a coffee?” Casey asks, as if sensing my unease.
“Actually, I’ll get it,” I say, dumping my jacket and bag on the saggy couch. “But walk me to the elevator, will you, Casey?”
Outside in the hall, I thank her again for allowing Sasha to take over the last spot of the show.
“Not a problem,” she says. She rakes a hand across the crown of her long, strawberry-blond hair. “I know it’s all about keeping the sponsor happy.”
In the café on the ground floor of the building, I order chamomile tea at the counter and carry it to a small table, where I sip it slowly and take a few more deep breaths. I feel more present suddenly. Maybe the disconnected sensation was simply jitters from the extra cup of coffee I drank at the diner.
By the time I’m back upstairs, my guest, the former Wall Streeter/book author Jamie Parkin, is in the outer part of the studio, chatting with Casey and Sasha. I discover she’s fairly aloof in person, not what I was expecting based on the engaging shot on her book cover. Damn, I think. I’ll need to charm her, make her seem more accessible, but I’m hardly at the top of my game today.
This, however, isn’t Parkin’s first rodeo, and she turns out to be a polished interview subject, with plenty of hard-won wisdom to share. She offers a few excellent strategies for not only negotiating one’s salary but also for scoring promotions, perks, and opportunities at work.