Dead Certain: A Novel Read online

  PRAISE FOR ADAM MITZNER

  A Conflict of Interest

  “A Best Book of the Year”

  —Suspense Magazine

  “A heady combination of Patricia Highsmith and Scott Turow, here’s psychological and legal suspense at its finest. Adam Mitzner’s masterful plotting begins on tiptoe and morphs into a sweaty gallop, with ambiguity of character that shakes your best guesses, and twists that punch you in the gut. This novel packs it. A terrific read!”

  —Perri O’Shaughnessy, New York Times bestselling author

  “Mitzner combines the real-world insights of an experienced litigator with the imaginative flair of a fine novelist to produce a page-turner with deeply flawed heroes, sympathetic villains and totally unexpected twists. I loved it.”

  —Alan Dershowitz, author of Trials of Zion

  A Case of Redemption

  “Head-and-shoulders above most . . .”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A Case of Redemption is engaging and compelling—a story that literally challenges the reader to move on to the next chapter rather than setting the book down. With plenty of plot twists and turns as well as a hugely unexpected turn of events at the end, Adam Mitzner’s legal thriller is fresh and satisfying.”

  —New York Journal of Books

  “This noirish tale . . . is sure to keep you riveted from start to finish.”

  —New York Observer

  Losing Faith

  “Mitzner provides a surprise ending that will leave fans gasping in shock . . .”

  —New York Journal of Books

  “A worthy courtroom yarn that fans of John Grisham and Scott Turow will enjoy.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “If looking for a good, solid legal thriller, this is the one to read.”

  —Suspense Magazine

  The Girl from Home

  “An engrossing little gem.”

  ―Kirkus Reviews

  “This inside look at underhanded Wall Street dealings dramatically explores the things that matter most.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Readers will thoroughly enjoy this story of the Wall Street wealthy and just what happens when everything falls apart. A definite ‘5-star’ read!”

  —Suspense Magazine

  “Mitzner’s finest work to date, and I won’t be surprised to see it up for award consideration this year.”

  —newmysteryreader.com

  OTHER TITLES BY ADAM MITZNER

  A Conflict of Interest

  A Case of Redemption

  Losing Faith

  The Girl from Home

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2017 by Adam Mitzner

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781477822593

  ISBN-10: 1477822593

  Cover design by Faceout Studio

  To my daughters, Rebecca and Emily, because . . . because

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE

  DAY ONE TUESDAY

  1.

  2.

  3.

  DAY TWO WEDNESDAY

  4.

  5.

  6.

  DAY THREE THURSDAY

  7.

  8.

  9.

  DEAD CERTAIN A NOVEL BY CHARLOTTE BRODEN

  DAY FOUR FRIDAY

  10.

  11.

  12.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  13.

  14.

  15.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  DAY FIVE SATURDAY

  16.

  17.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  18.

  DAY SIX SUNDAY

  19.

  20.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  21.

  DAY SEVEN MONDAY

  22.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  23.

  24.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  DAY ONE TUESDAY

  25.

  26.

  DAY TWO WEDNESDAY

  27.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  DAY SEVEN MONDAY

  28.

  DAY THREE THURSDAY

  29.

  DAY FOUR FRIDAY

  30.

  DAY FIVE SATURDAY

  31.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  PART TWO

  DAY FIVE SATURDAY

  32.

  DAY SIX SUNDAY

  33.

  DAY SEVEN MONDAY

  34.

  35.

  DAY EIGHT TUESDAY

  36.

  37.

  38.

  DAY TEN WEDNESDAY

  39.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PART ONE

  DAY ONE

  TUESDAY

  Ella Broden

  1.

  I have news!!!

  For someone who fancies herself a writer, Charlotte’s texts are extremely heavy on exclamation points.

  I text back, wat—no question mark. My sister and I have used this shorthand since texting began, even though it’s actually more difficult because my phone autocorrects to what, and then I have to manually change it back.

  No! In person! Tom’s!

  That it’s the middle of a workday didn’t seem to enter Charlotte’s consciousness. Nor did the fact that she’s asking me to go to 112th and Broadway, a few blocks from her apartment. She undoubtedly knows that I’m in my office in Midtown, at Fifty-Seventh and Madison. In other words, a two-minute walk for her and a forty-minute commute for me. But my sister and I long ago established that when she asks me to come to her, I come, no questions asked. One of the privileges of being the baby, I suppose.

  KK. We always text that too, even though that autocorrects to OK, and then I change it back.

  Leaving in 10.

  C u there at 2!!

  On my subway ride to the Upper West Side, I consider the possibilities regarding my sister’s news. Given that we are both of that age, marriage is always what I suspect by default when a single friend says she has news, or a baby if she’s already wed. Charlotte is unmarried and enough of a traditionalist that I reject pregnancy in favor of nuptials. I know I should be happy for her if that is her big reveal, but I hope to God it’s something else. Not because Charlotte is six years younger than I am and I don’t even have a boyfriend—it’s because I’m not a fan of her current beau, Zach.

  Zach is the kind of guy you date in your twenties because he’s beautiful and damaged and you think you can change him. The problem is that when you reach your thirties, you realize he’s not always going to be beautiful, you’re never going to change him, and being with him has already damaged you so profoundly that you can’t even imagine the wreck you’ll be if you remain together even one more day, much less ’til death do you part.

  When Charlotte and I last discussed Zach—which was only a few weeks ago—she seemed ready to end it, so I doubt that she’s suddenly decided to marry him. Then again, stranger things have happened after a man proposes. And Charlotte is nothing if not a romantic in that way.
<
br />   The next possibility my mind runs to is that Charlotte’s news might be employment related. But here there really couldn’t be much for her to say. She just finished her first year of a two-year MFA program in creative writing at NYU—all on our dad’s nickel. I couldn’t imagine her giving up that cushy life for an entry-level job anytime soon.

  It isn’t until I’m coming up from the subway at 110th and Broadway that I consider the possibility that her news might not be good. Could she want to tell me that she’s got some health issue? That she’s pregnant and doesn’t know what to do?

  I shake off the idea that it could be negative. Bad news doesn’t come with three exclamation points.

  Even though clients pay $750 an hour for my time and all Charlotte has is time, she isn’t at Tom’s when I arrive. So I take a booth in the corner and wait.

  A note about Tom’s. It’s the most famous diner in the world because its exterior was used for the coffee shop on Seinfeld. The sign shown on television was on the 112th Street side, where it only says the word Restaurant, but from Broadway it reads TOM’S RESTAURANT. Before Seinfeld, though, Tom’s was immortalized in Suzanne Vega’s eponymous song, and even before it made A-list connections, Tom’s had been a haunt of the Columbia University crowd for years.

  At a quarter after, Charlotte bounds into the restaurant. She’s absolutely beaming. If anyone else made me travel for close to an hour and then showed up fifteen minutes late from a location two minutes away, I would have been furious. But I’ve never been able to be mad at Charlotte. Not when I was nine and she was three and she cut my hair when I was asleep; not when I was thirteen and she was seven and she poured chocolate milk in my favorite boots; not when I was sixteen and she was ten and she told Bradley, who was my boyfriend, that I wished Ryan would ask me to the junior prom.

  Charlotte slides into the booth and sits up straight. When we were younger, my sister’s main ambition in life was to be taller than me. It wasn’t a very lofty goal considering I’m all of five three, but our parents’ short genes caught up with her too, and she topped out at five two.

  “Sooooo . . . ,” I tease out. “What’s the big, exciting, three-exclamation-point news?”

  A delicious smile comes across her lips. As if she wants to savor her news before letting it out into the world.

  “Well,” she finally says, “your . . . sister . . . has . . . just . . . ,” and then she quickly runs through the rest of it, “sold her first novel!”

  “What?” I say, although I understand completely. I just can’t get my head around it.

  “Our major assignment is to write a novel. You submit the first half of the manuscript as your final first-year project, and you’re supposed to finish it your second year. My advisor loved mine so, even though it was unfinished, he sent the chapters I’d written to a friend he knows over at Simon and Schuster . . . long story short, they’re going to publish it!”

  It takes me a moment to scan through my emotions. It feels a bit like watching the wheel spin on Wheel of Fortune—jealousy, envy, and anger click by, but I don’t come to rest on any of those things. I finally stop on shame.

  I’m ashamed of myself. Charlotte has followed her dream, and now it’s coming true. And I, who could have done likewise, chose a safer course. I’m left wishing with all my might that I could go back and redo everything in my life.

  My dark emotion quickly lifts, however. Sitting across from Charlotte, with her glistening eyes and a smile whose wattage could illuminate the city, I am quickly consumed with pride. My baby sister is going to be a published author.

  “That’s amazing! I don’t even know what I’m supposed to ask. What’s the book about?”

  “The pitch was Gone Girl meets Fifty Shades. But at its core, it’s a story about these two sisters—”

  This sounds an alarm bell. Over the years, Charlotte has written many a roman à clef, including family and friends among her thinly veiled characters. When pressed about the similarities to real people and events, she’s always leaned on the standard disclaimer: “Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.” Despite that, the circumstances leading up to the loss of my virginity were memorialized for all time in a story about a girl named Ellice that Charlotte published her senior year in the high school literary magazine. Another time, the older sister was named Gabriella; and once Charlotte thought that by adding a B—Bella—she’d throw people off the scent that her protagonist’s older sister was me. As for her own doppelgängers, Charlotte was only slightly more creative. She went through a phase of cycling among the Sex and the City characters; instead of Charlotte, her stand-in was named Carrie or Samantha or Miranda. Once she even called her fictional counterpart Wilbur, a Charlotte’s Web allusion.

  “Wait a sec. This isn’t your blog that no one ever looks at. This is a real book. People are going to read this.”

  She laughs. “That’s kind of the point. For people to read it. But, to put you at ease, no . . . it’s not about us. It’s fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.”

  “Of course it is,” I say with an eye roll. “Are the two sisters named . . . Charlemagne and Eleanor?”

  “No. Emily and Clare.”

  “Great. So you used our middle names. Very creative.”

  “I’ll change them if you want. But you should be honored that I think you have the makings of a great literary character. Besides, it’s the younger sister who’s really messed up. The older sister is the moral compass of the book.”

  This much I believe. Charlotte always paints her alter egos with harsh colors, and the characters based on me always seem too good to be true.

  “You must be ecstatic,” I say.

  “I don’t know about ecstatic, but I am very excited . . . and also more than a little scared about the prospect of having to finish it. But it comes at a time when I really needed some good news in my life.”

  This revelation stops me short. I hadn’t realized anything was troubling Charlotte, aside from the usual ups and downs with Zach.

  “Is something wrong?” I ask.

  “No . . . no. It’s just . . . I don’t know. Sometimes I feel like I’m the family screwup, and now I have some small measure of validation that I’ve done something right. You know what I mean?”

  I do. All too well, in fact. It’s part of the roles that Charlotte and I have been assigned in our family drama. I’m the steady one, the sensible one. She’s the free spirit, the dream chaser. I have long wished we could switch parts. Oddly, it never occurred to me that Charlotte might feel that way too.

  “Char, you’re twenty-five years old and about to be a published author. You’re way ahead of the curve. When I was twenty-five . . . I was doing arraignments in traffic court.”

  She smiles, but I know I haven’t alleviated whatever is bothering her.

  “Thanks,” she says as my consolation prize.

  “No, I’m serious. I’m so proud of you, Char. Such an amazing accomplishment. And Mom would be over the moon.”

  Our mother died when I was nineteen and Charlotte was a month away from becoming a teenager. She had been diagnosed with cancer a year before and underwent the most brutal form of chemotherapy in hopes of surviving long enough to attend Charlotte’s high school graduation. I suspected she knew this was asking too much, and that surviving long enough to see me graduate from college was her true goal. She didn’t come close to either.

  Had my mother lived, I imagine that both my sister and I would have taken vastly different paths in life. For starters, I’m quite certain I wouldn’t have gone to law school. My mother’s almost-constant mantra was that I possessed a special musical talent.

  “You don’t realize it now, Ella,” she’d said, “but a voice like yours is a gift from God. There’s nothing sadder than turning your back on the thing that makes you great.”

  She had high hopes that, after college, I’d take a year or more and live the life
of a singer. A struggling one, at least. Waitressing, auditions, the whole nine yards.

  When she died, so did that dream. Instead, I gravitated toward pleasing my father, which meant following in his footsteps. And so, after college, rather than auditioning for Broadway, I went to law school.

  But my detour was minor compared to Charlotte’s. Before our mother died, the long-running joke in our family was that Charlotte was the only creature on earth happier than our dog. Nixie would run around the house with her tail wagging for no reason at all, and Charlotte always seemed even more joyous than that. By the time I graduated from college, however, my sister had been fundamentally transformed. The happy-go-lucky tween who sang out loud without realizing it suddenly became closed off and moody. She wore nothing but black and applied her makeup so heavily it was almost like a mask. For as long as I could remember, Charlotte had talked about plans for becoming a doctor—and not just any kind of doctor. By twelve she knew she wanted to go into pediatric cardiology. But after witnessing our mother’s demise, it was apparent that being around death was the last thing she wanted, so she declared herself a writer.

  My reference to our mother is enough to bring both of us to tears. We wipe them away with the same motion—mirror images.

  “So, when can I read this masterpiece?” I ask.

  “I’ve got it right here.”

  Charlotte reaches down into her backpack, a green canvas one that she bought at a thrift store—that’s where she buys all her clothing, usually paying a price by the pound. Out of it she pulls a white, loose-leaf binder of the two-inch variety and hands it to me.

  “Normally I’d just e-mail it, but I know you prefer reading actual paper books,” she says. “So I went to OfficeMax and had them print it out.”

  I open the binder to the title page, which reads in large, bold font:

  Dead Certain, by Charlotte Broden

  I turn the page: To my sister, Ella, because . . . because.

  “Aw,” I say. “You dedicated it to me?”

  “Who else? Like I said, I’ve only written the first half. So what you have are the events leading up to the crime, but the identity of the murderer is still unclear. After you’re done, if you want, I’ll tell you who did it.”