by Leslie Glass
He was sputtering in some foreign language as Mike. pulled him to his feet.
"Ow, beetch, crazy beetch."
"Hey, watch that, buddy," Mike said. "You just assaulted a police officer." He rubbed his wet gloves together, then smacked one against the other. "You could go to jail for that."
"No way. I didn't do nothing." The man held his hands palms up. "She—"
"You assaulted a police officer. I saw you."
"Oh, for Christ's sake." Daphne Petersen turned to Mike. "The woman practically jumped on me. We thought she was one of those antifur people."
"What-?" April demanded.
"Can't you hear? We thought you were going to throw red paint at me."
"Crazy beetch." The handsome man didn't have much of a vocabulary. He was combing his fingers through his hair, managing to appear both peeved and injured.
Daphne shot him a scathing look. "Oh, shut up, Giorgio."
"Who's he?" Mike jerked a thumb at the bronze hair.
Daphne sniffed. "Just my trainer."
Mike stroked his mustache speculatively. "Nice job."
"You need any help?" the doorman tried again.
"Police," April said. "We're fine." She nodded him away.
"You're blocking the street," the doorman pointed out.
"That's what we're paid for," she told him.
"All right, you ruined my boots, you practically killed my friend. What are you doing here?"
"We're investigating a homicide."
"I had nothing to do with it. I hardly knew the woman. Let's go, Giorgio." Daphne turned away.
"Mrs. Petersen, would you mind getting in the car?" Mike said.
The widow swung back, stunned by the request. "What for?"
"We want to talk to you."
"You talked to me before." She eyed April now.
"You didn't tell me anything I wanted to know," April said evenly. "Now we're really going to talk."
"But I don't know anything," she protested:
"Funny, that's not what you said on TV."
The woman's face reddened. She glanced at her friend. "You'd better go now, Giorgio."
He peered at her as if he'd never heard such a command in his life. "Where?" he asked dumbly.
"Wherever you want, honey. You're a big boy."
He gave her a pathetic look, a hunk deprived of purpose, then scowled at the two cops. "Huh?"
"Go," Daphne commanded impatiently.
Giorgio looked at her again, saw that she was determined, then sloped off downtown, his shoes squishing on the sidewalk.
She turned to them angrily. "I don't know where he kept the stuff or who he got it from. I know that's why you're here." She leaned toward them on the
sidewalk, speaking passionately. "It's not my problem. I told you he was a cocaine user. I warned him it would kill him one day if he kept drinking the way he did." Her cheek glistened in the light. She raised a white-gloved hand to wipe away the single tear that teetered on the curve.
April couldn't help herself. She glanced at Mike.
"Where were you the night your husband died?" he asked.
She gestured to April with the gloved hand. "I already told her. I was at home watching a movie. I talked on the phone. I have a list of people who dialed my number."
This was the first April heard of that.
"Tor died of an overdose," Daphne went on. "I hadn't seen him since—oh, I don't know, a couple of days." She started shivering inside the heavy coat.
"Who told you that?" Mike asked.
Daphne looked at him as if he were retarded. "Don't you people talk to each other? That's what they told me."
"Who told you?"
"Some woman from the police called and told me the toxi . . ."
"Toxicology," April prompted.
"Yeah, those reports came in, and Tor was just"— Daphne shook her head—"chock-full of cocaine and alcohol." She swiped at her face again. "That's what killed hini. I asked her to keep it on the QT, you know. It doesn't help to spread that around, does it?" She looked yearningly at her building. "Can I go home now?"
"We'll come with you, make sure you're all right." Mike's face was impassive at the news of more official blundering.
Daphne made a face and hurried inside.
They left the car where it was on the street and took the elevator up to Petersen's apartment where the TV cables were gone, but plants and bouquets of flowers covered all available surfaces. The flowers were mostly lilies, April noticed. Many of them looked dried or hung over, as if the advice on the accompanying card, "Water me," had not been heeded.
In the living room, which overlooked the park, Daphne opened her fur coat and threw it on a chair. Underneath she was wearing exercise clothes—white tights and a pink body suit with a thong. She threw herself into a deep sofa, careful to keep the boots off the silk.
"You know Tor's death was his own fault. So why are you bothering me?"
"Because you haven't told anybody the truth about anything. That makes a problem for us." April tried not to stare at her body. "Let's start with your original statement. You told us you'd seen your husband the morning he died."
"Well, I didn't." The widow looked at them defiantly, tossing her hair. "I didn't know what the story was. I felt silly, you know. He'd spent the night somewhere, and I felt—awkward."
"Awkward?" April cocked her head. The woman's husband had been murdered and she felt awkward.
Daphne checked her nail polish. "One doesn't exactly enjoy being a jilted wife, you know. I was pretty certain I didn't have much time with him left, and I just—you know, I didn't say anything. I hoped it would blow over. Sometimes they do, you know. It's my own fault, of course," she added.
Mike was sucking his mustache. April could almost hear him think.
"What's your fault?" she asked.
"Marrying him, thinking it would last. Silly me."
April glanced around the lavish living room, full of silk chairs and shiny tables, objects of art from countries and centuries she could not have identified if her life depended on it. Silly Daphne didn't turn out to be so silly. Her straying husband with the dangerous habits was conveniently dead, and she was his final wife, after all. April unbuttoned her own coat and considered the chair possibilities.
"Do you mind if I take my coat off?"
Daphne flicked her a glance that didn't take anything in. "No, of course not."
April took her coat off and sat in a wing chair covered with red leather that sat at an angle to the sofa where Daphne was displaying the sweat stains in her crotch to Mike, who sat in a similar chair opposite her. Lovely girl.
"So, your husband was a cocaine user. What about you?" Mike asked.
"I'm a strict vegetarian," Daphne said, sullen now. "I must respect the divinity in myself."
Uh-huh. "Earlier, you told us you warned him that his substance abuse was serious enough to kill him." Now April.
Daphne didn't answer. She chewed on the inside of her cheek.
"All the drinking and cocaine use must have made him pretty difficult to deal with," April went on.
"It was sad to watch," Daphne said flatly. "Are we almost done?"
April ignored the question. "You told a TV reporter your husband was having an affair with Merrill Liberty, and that Liberty killed them both in a jealous rage."
"So what?"
"Well, you also said you knew your husband would kill himself with drugs."
"What does it matter what I say? I'm crazed with grief." She appealed to Mike for understanding.
"Well, you accused a man of murder on national TV. That might matter to some people," Mike said. "He might sue you. We might think you did it for us, so we'd go after him and not you."
"I watched a movie and went to bed. Even if I had killed him, how could you prove it?" Daphne circled her head around her shoulders, loosening up those tight muscles.
"Why did you say you thought Liberty killed them?"
She scratched her cheek. "Maybe I thought so at the time. The interviewer thought so, too," she said defensively.
"And now?"
Daphne made a face. "Well, Liberty had no interest in women. I don't know if he and Merrill even made it together. He might be a fairy, you know. But he might have been upset if Tor wanted his wife. That's poaching, isn't it?"
Oh, so now Liberty was gay. "This is the first I've heard of that," April murmured. "So, do you think Merrill Liberty was having an affair with your husband?"
Daphne's face hardened. "I don't know. She was boring. He liked more—exciting women. And he didn't like blondes."
"Then why did you say it?"
"They were old friends. They were together a lot lately. You know how old friends stick together." Daphne glared.
"So you were a little jealous of the friendship." April changed tack. "You've made a lot of speculations." April pretended to search through her notes. "But you left one out."
"Are we done?' '
"You left out the jealous wife."
"Oh, here we go."
"You had more motivation for murder than anybody."
"It was probably his girlfriend,"' Daphne said abruptly.
"Who?"
"The woman Tor was seeing."
"Do you know her name?"
Daphne shook her head. "But I know her smell. Want to smell her?" She jumped up without waiting for an answer. April realized that she was tall, five eleven with her boots on.
Mike watched Daphne's bottom and legs progress across the room. April frowned at him. He didn't seem
to mind. Daphne returned in less than a minute carrying a purple bag with a dry cleaner's name on it, reached inside, and handed a man's large burgundy cashmere sweater to April. "Smell."
April sniffed and wrinkled her nose. She handed the sweater to Mike.
He put the soft knit to his face. "Vanilla musk." His crookcd eyebrow went up as he examined the sweater. Inside, like a lining, was a white T-shirt. It smelled of deodorant and the same woman's perfume.
Daphne reached out and pulled something off the hem of the T-shirt. "See," she said, holding up a four-inch length of black hair that was inky like Carmella's but straight. Both detectives examined it. Then Daphne took it back, put the sweater and the T-shirt and the hair carefully back in the plastic sweater bag as if they were still bits of evidence she might need in a divorce case.
"Maybe she killed him with bad stuff," Daphne offered.
"Why would she do that?" April asked.
"Maybe he was breaking up with her."
Mike shook his head. "From what you've told us earlier, Mrs. Petersen, it sounds more like your husband was breaking up with you."
Daphne started to shiver again. "I've never touched cocaine in my life. Tor didn't get the stuff from me. He could have gotten it from that woman, or Patrice— I heard someone was selling at the restaurant. Or it could have been from his driver, Wally. He and Wally were very close. He certainly didn't get it from me." She'd raised her voice and was shouting now. "j didn't kill him!" She stopped the tirade abruptly, her face red.
"You made me say that," she said, for the first time frightened by something that had come out of her mouth. "Tor wasn't even murdered, and you made me say that." She shook her head. "You'd better go now."
"Maybe the information you got on the phone this morning was premature," Mike said. "We'll need you to come down to the station to make a formal statement. "
"What?" Alarmed, Daphne reached for her coat.
"Not right this minute, Mrs. Petersen. We'll call and make an appointment." In the meantime, they would check out every comer of her life.
"Oh, do you mind if I take this?" April reached for the sweater bag Daphne had dropped on the table.
"What for?"
April wrote out a receipt. "Oh, who knows, it might prove useful." She handed over the slip of paper and reached for her plain navy wool coat. Daphne seemed too tired to object. Maybe it was all that exercise.
"Thanks, you've been a big help." April smiled. Next time she'd ask Daphne about her calls to the medical examiner's office and how she'd gotten her husband's body cremated in record time.
The two detectives started for the door. Before they got there, Mike turned back to the widow, who had wrapped the coat around her shoulders and was now shivering uncontrollably in her mink. "By the way, Mrs. Petersen, did your husband always wear a T-shirt under his sweaters?"
Deep in her own thoughts, Daphne responded without hesitation. "Always. He thought it was unhealthy not to have cotton next to his skin."
"He wasn't wearing a T-shirt when he died. Where do you think it went?" April chimed in.
Daphne stared at them too stunned to answer.
26
The wail of sirens was almost continuous during the morning hours. Many times Liberty crossed the room to peek behind the parade of orange-and-black giraffes on the African print fabric secured over the window facing the side street. All he saw each time was a group of ragtag males more old than young. They hung out on the front steps of a brownstone identical to the ones on either side. Each time the sirens wailed, two or three of them would drift off in different directions, leaving the same lone man sitting there with a pail and a mop by his side.
The pail and the mop and the man with a flat backpack and bulging side pockets never left the brown-stone stoop. He sat there in the cold as Liberty read his E-mail. Sat there in the middle of the block, without coffee or gloves to warm him. Sat there, lost in some space of his own, impervious to cold as his buddies drifted in around him and then dispersed like a school of aimless fish. Sat there loose-limbed and semi-awake, tuned in somewhere else, waiting.
There he sat, like a benchmark signifying Liberty's own downfall, the man his mother and grandmother feared even before he could toddle or talk that Liberty himself would somehow become. The man with the mop and the pail he didn't intend to use was the bogeyman of Liberty's childhood. He was the black bum, the fatherless, motherless, black everyman. He was all the soulless nobodies, unwashed and unwanted at the table at Christmas or Easter or the Fourth of July. He was the signature of failure in every respect, the one for whom no one was left to mourn each day of his empty, worthless, no-good, self-destructive life. The drinker, the drifter, the wastrel, the thief. Loose-limbed, loose-lipped. Greatest pride and best handiwork of the devil himself. Conspiracy of the Confederate legacy, the federal government, and all the forces against God and decency combined. The anxiety had been there in Liberty's childhood every day of his life, an unarticulated prayer in his mother's heart—Oh, Lord, don't let my boy end up like that. Amen, Jesus.
And there he was, rooted to the spot outside Liberty's window, mocking everything he'd become. Behind another curtained window in another dimension of cyberspace was Liberty's E-mail. It sat there in its own place waiting to ambush him with more opinions he didn't want to have. He was receiving a single message over and over: A lot of people thought he murdered his wife simply because they'd always felt there was no other way the story of a pretty white woman and a nigger bastard could end.
Liberty replied to a few and initiated a dozen or so of his own, assuring his partners and friends that he was safe and seeking legal advice in a timely and orderly way in just the manner they had advised him. He called Wally Jefferson half a dozen times, but Wal-ly's wife, said he wasn't home. He called Marvin, but Marvin was out of the office. He stared at a cockroach climbing the wall in front of him and flashed to the two cops "interviewing" him in his apartment yesterday.
"If you have something to tell us about the night your wife died, now would be a good time." The one called Sanchez had looked at him in a friendly manner, as if he had nothing against people killing their wives and would be totally sympathetic to a confession.
"I told you everything I know." Liberty remembered the heat jolting through his body like lightning as he talked.
"I know you said that, Mr. Liberty. But there are a lot of ways w
e can go with this."
Liberty moved back in time to that first terrible point of reference, the "harmless hazing," as the administration at his boarding school had called it when five of the boys on his floor told him he had to be their slave, to kneel, touch his head to the ground, and say "Yes, massa," no matter what they told him to do or when they told him to do it.
The boys didn't understand that five of them were not enough to force him to kneel. Nor ten of them, or indeed the whole school. When he refused and they piled on him in an attempt to lower him to his proper place so they could urinate on him, one got a broken nose that bled all over the room, another got a broken arm, and a third a fractured jaw. The other two escaped with bad cuts and bruises. And the whole community rose to expel him from their midst. No one had told the fourteen-year-old Liberty the rule. The rule was white boys could hurt him but he could not defend himself. The parents of the boys in question, the student council, and the town paper called for his dismissal despite an investigation that absolved him of any wrongdoing. And when he begged to go home to end the confrontation, the administration, for reasons of its own, and his mother, who didn't want him to turn out a bum, had refused to let him.
Liberty was a rich man now. He traveled first class, had the best of everything. People asked for his opinion, wanted him to go on television, took his picture wherever he went. But it seemed that nothing really had changed.
"You asked me every question a dozen different ways. I flew to Chicago and missed the play. If I had been there as I was supposed to be, my wife and friend would still be alive." Liberty said it with no emotion, trying not to let go of his soul.
"But you were in the city. Your doorman and the driver of your car service said you got home around midnight. You knew where your wife was." "Yes, but I didn't leave the apartment. I'll have to live with that for the rest of my life. If I'd gone to get her, no one would have attacked her." Liberty lowered his head, taking the blame for the situation.
"How do you know?" the Chinese cop asked.
Liberty turned his head to look at her. "Would you take me on?" he asked bluntly.
"Is that why your friend had a heart attack?" Sanchez was the one to reply. .