I laughed a little. “Nick Carraway? You trust that man’s eye to notice how I wore my hair?”
“And then I thought a lot about our conversation in South Jersey. You remember that, Miss Baker?”
“Sure.” I nodded curtly. “You seem to have a penchant for harassing me in the middle of a tournament, Detective.”
“I asked you about this hairpin then, and you suggested Daisy might’ve dropped it at Gatsby’s.” I shrugged, not quite remembering what I’d said to him that afternoon, only that my mind had been back in the game, at long last, and I’d wanted so badly for him to leave me alone so I could focus on golf. “But the thing is,” he said now, “I never told you where I’d found the hairpin.”
His words felt like a sudden punch in my gut, and for a moment everything in the diner seemed to stop moving. The entire world got silent and still and blood rushed through my ears until all I could hear was my own pulsing heartbeat. “Well, wasn’t it obvious?” I finally said. He raised his eyebrows. “Why else would you have asked me about the hairpin?”
“So here’s what I think happened,” Detective Charles continued. “I think Mr. Gatsby found out you were lying about the golf tour and threatened to tell your friend Daisy. Maybe he even blackmailed you. He wasn’t the nicest guy.” I frowned, remembering that last gin-soaked afternoon at the Plaza, the way Tom and Jay were going at each other, the way the Saturday before he’d threatened to destroy me. “I think Mr. Gatsby threatened to tell Daisy your secret, and you shot him.”
I closed my eyes. Inhaled. Exhaled. It was uncanny how close he was, and how far away, too. How much he didn’t understand. And how I knew that I could never make him understand. Never tell him the truth. I promised. We all did. If my lie unraveled, Catherine’s and Daisy’s would come with it. I would never let that happen, no matter how many times the detective came to talk to me.
I opened my eyes and stared at him, unflinching. “You have quite the imagination, Detective. That sounds like some kind of a crazy made-up story to me.” I pushed my pie away. “And even if it were true, you’d never prove it.”
There it was, the only truth I’d ever tell the man, clear as day. He could think what he wanted, but he’d never prove anything unless I confessed. And that would never happen. Even with the hairpin. Daisy or a hundred other women really could’ve dropped it at a party last summer.
I flashed him my best Jordan Baker tournament smile, the one I put on up on the podium when I was proud and hot and tired and longing for a past I knew I’d never have again. And then I stood, and I walked out of the diner, just like that.
On the sidewalk, it was still hot, but it was almost dusk. The orange-pink sun fell and skimmed below the sparkling Pacific Ocean in the distance. I inhaled the delicious smell of the sea air, and I walked on, toward my hotel.
Detective Frank Charles June 1923
EAST EGG
YOU’LL NEVER PROVE IT.
Certain things had come to haunt Frank over the long and winding course of his career, and he knew that last thing Jordan Baker would ever say to him would be among them.
He’d watched her walk out of the Santa Barbara diner, walk away into the warm January sunset, and dammit, he’d suddenly understood that she was right. Three women, three suspects. All of them lying to him, all of them tangled up tightly in those mangled threads of deceit. He’d never truly unravel them without a confession.
He knew it, deep in his gut, that his theory was right. He’d pictured the scene again and again in his mind: Jordan Baker standing there in the bushes by Gatsby’s pool, holding the gun the way a certain kind of careless man held his glass of whiskey. It was illegal, illicit, but consequences be damned. He could see it all so clearly; Jordan had pulled the trigger, killed Jay Gatsby. Daisy and Catherine were covering for her. And yet, if none of them were going to talk, he never would prove it.
But what Jordan didn’t know was, he didn’t necessarily need to prove it. As far as the Long Island precinct was concerned, the case was closed and had been for months. Two not-so up-and-up men dead by each other’s hands. No detectives were losing any sleep over it, except for him. He’d never arrest Jordan, charge her, bring her to trial—those were the things you needed proof for. No, all he needed to do was take what he’d found, what he knew in his gut, to Meyer Wolfsheim and collect his fifteen grand.
He had, in fact, intended to do that very thing in February, a few weeks after getting back from Santa Barbara. He’d scheduled a lunch with Wolfsheim, and they met at an underground place of Wolfsheim’s, down by the docks. The booze was freely flowing and Wolfsheim didn’t even bother to tell him to look the other way. Wolfsheim notoriously operated by his own rules, always had. “Whiskey?” he’d simply offered Frank instead.