“You think I care who you—” Brad’s rough voice stopped just short of the word, after a hasty glance at his daughter. “Just be careful in front of Dawn,” he warned, his fist slamming into his open palm. “I don’t want her exposed to your filth, Linda. Understand?” The sound reverberated through the hallway. It was, I knew, simply Brad’s equivalent to Dawn’s playing with her zipper.
Unfortunately, the court officer who’d been watching this exchange didn’t see it that way. Stepping quickly between Linda and Brad, he laid a hand on Brad’s clenched arm and said, “Calm down, buddy. I don’t want no trouble.”
It was the worst thing that could have happened. Brad, whose rage had been checked by Dawn’s presence, turned on the officer, eyes blazing. “Get your fucking hand off me,” he snarled, twisting out of the officer’s grip. It may not have been meant as an aggressive move, but Brad had a good eight inches on the court officer, who fell back against a wall. He shouted for help, ripped his handcuffs off his belt, and lunged at Brad.
Brad set his feet apart and spread out his arms, ready for a wrestling match. His breath was coming fast, and he seemed almost glad that things had moved to a physical level. He dared the officer to come at him. I looked around; six officers were about to weigh in on the side of law and order. “Listen, Brad,” I began, hoping to avert disaster. But Linda had other ideas. Turning to one of the officers, she murmured, “Just don’t let him hit me. He’s always trying to hit me.”
“Don’t worry, lady,” the officer answered grimly. “We know how to take care of guys like him. Tough guys who like beating up on women.” He jumped into the fray, whirled Brad around, and before he knew what had hit him, Brad was standing in the center of a circle of blue, chained like a baited bear.
“What the fuck—” Brad cried, as puzzled as he was hurt.
“Shut your foul mouth,” the officer who had cuffed him yelled, punching him on the arm for good measure.
“Not till I finish talking to my wife,” Brad shouted, his face bright red.
“She don’t want to talk to you,” the officer replied, prodding Brad in the ribs.
Brad pulled away and faced Linda, his breath coming in little gasps. “Your fault,” he panted. “You bitch! You’ll be sorry for this, Linda. I swear you will.” One of the officers told him to shut up, jerking him along like a puppet on a string. As they led him away, he shouted, “I’ll kill you for this, Linda.” Double doors banged, and the phalanx of officers led Brad, still shouting, behind them.
Linda watched, calm as a summer breeze, her dark eyes unblinking. Then she turned to her daughter. “Come on, Dawn,” she said briskly. “Show’s over.”
Dawn, whose eyes had been fixed with mute sympathy on her father, put her trembling hand to her bleeding mouth and did what her Aunt Marcy had told me she did before every one of her tennis matches. She threw up. Personally, I thought the kid had a point.
2
Thank you, God, I prayed silently, forgetting for the moment that I’d become an atheist at twenty. Relief flooded through me; sweat poured in rivulets inside my down coat. My breath still came in icy gasps that stabbed my lungs, and my legs were rubber. But it was all right. My house was safe. It wasn’t a fire.
Then the medics brought the body out. I must have gasped audibly. Someone in the crowd said, “It was that woman who lived on the top floor. The one with the daughter.”
Linda! My head reeled as I tried to assimilate the news. It had been a week since our victory in Family Court. A week full of cases and clients and a thousand other things that had almost driven the memory of Linda’s triumphant smirk and Brad’s hate-twisted face out of my mind. Almost—but not quite.
“My God,” I breathed. I stood a moment, trying to readjust my mind from relief to shock to sorrow. Then I trudged slowly up the steps, stopped at the top by a uniformed cop.
“Look, lady,” the cop said wearily. “You can’t go in there.”
“I live here,” I said, pointing to my name in gold on the parlor floor window. CASSANDRA JAMESON, COUNSELOR-AT-LAW. It winked at me through the strobelike flashes of the police lights. I didn’t wait to be asked for ID, just turned the key in the lock and went into my office.
I headed straight to the filing cabinet, opened the drawer marked CONFIDENTIAL, and took out the bottle of expensive Scotch Matt Riordan had given me when I opened my own office after leaving Legal Aid. I poured a little into my coffee mug and drank it neat. Its warmth felt good, but it didn’t stop the shaking. I sat down hard and took another sip. I was still shaking, but now there was an overlay of giddiness. Not a good state in which to talk to cops.
A voice came out of the silence. A voice I recognized from the past, from another murder, another body. It felt like the instant replay of a nightmare. I jumped, spilling whiskey on the desk.
When I looked up, I sighed with relief. It wasn’t a nightmare after all. The man in the doorway really was Detective Button, the cop who’d shown up when I’d discovered my dead lover’s body nearly a year ago.
“Christ, Button,” I said with feeling. “You scared the hell out of me. What are you, the only detective in Brooklyn?”
“Seems like it sometimes,” he agreed. “’Course, this is different,” he went on, moving toward one of the clients’ chairs. “You didn’t actually find this one, did you, Counselor?”
“No, thank God,” I replied, taking another drink. If we were going to talk about Nathan’s death, I was going to need one.
Between the shock and the booze, I was feeling reckless. Gesturing toward the bottle, I offered Button a drink, fully expecting him to decline. He didn’t. He poured a generous amount into the coffee mug I kept for clients, took a sip, and said, “You private lawyers sure can afford good booze.”
“It was a gift,” I answered glumly, watching my office-warming present on its way to warming Button’s insides.
“Nice office, too,” he commented, looking around appreciatively. “I like the pictures.” Button’s gaze rested approvingly on my Depression-era photographs of farm families.
“Must cost quite a bit, a place like this,” he went on.
“I owe the world,” I answered lightly. If Button really wanted a report on my financial situation, he could get it in ten minutes. “The bank, my parents, my brother Ron.”
“Must be nice to have rich relatives.”
I thought of Ron, who for years had lived in the VA hospital in Brecksville, Ohio, near our hometown. Out of boredom, he’d started investing his spare cash in the stock market, until he’d amassed a tidy sum. Now that he had discovered personal computers and ham radios, he had his own expenses, but he’d been more than generous about sharing his money with me.
“Yeah,” I replied. “Silver spoons and all that.” I looked at the detective across an expanse of oak desk, feeling a little like Nero Wolfe. Button had changed not a hair since I’d seen him last. His close-cropped Afro had exactly the same amount of gray, his cheeks were still chipmunk-round, and he still looked like the first black loan officer hired by a midtown bank.
“How was she killed?” I asked, hoping the question sounded more professional than I felt.
“Stabbed,” he replied. “Stabbed repeatedly about the face and body with a butcher knife.” His slight smile told me he knew very well he was speaking in cop-witness jargon. “Knife’s still up there,” he went on. “Have to get the scene-of-the-crime boys on it when they get here. Fingerprints, photos, blood samples—you know.” I nodded; my work as a criminal lawyer had made me familiar with police procedure.
“How many times …” I began, then faltered, not sure I really wanted to know.
“Let’s put it this way, Counselor,” Button answered, his voice suddenly grim. “You’re going to have to put six coats of paint on the walls before you can rent the apartment.”
“I wish you hadn’t said that,” I murmured, picturing the upstairs apartment spattered with Linda’s blood. Somehow I’d conjured up a vision of a peace
ful, Sleeping Beauty kind of death. My mind flashed back to Family Court, to Brad, handcuffed and shouting threats. “You’ll be sorry,” he’d told Linda. I recalled his pained cry: “I’ll kill you for this.” Had it been the bluster of a man driven beyond endurance, or had it been a promise?
I’m a born defense lawyer. It’s a reflex, not a choice. Start bad-mouthing Attila the Hun, and I’ll probably come up with a defense. So if Detective Button had been trying to sell me Brad Ritchie as the killer, I’d have bent all my energies on thinking of reasons why he hadn’t done it. But Button said nothing of the kind. Suspicion of Brad came from somewhere deep inside, unhampered by my habitual defense orientation.
I told Button everything. How Linda had overcome her usual prejudice against women and hired me after her first lawyer had retired. How I’d gone to court at least eleven times in three months to fight the petty motions brought by Brad and his succession of lawyers. How Brad had reacted when Linda boasted of her affair with Art Lucenti. How Linda had gotten Brad arrested and how he’d threatened her. How Dawn had stood, shaken and sick, in the aftermath of her parents’ hatred.
Thinking of Dawn undid me. My recitation stopped as I choked back a sob. Linda’s death I could handle; Dawn motherless I couldn’t. I pulled three Kleenexes out of the box on my desk and buried my face in them.
Button waited. He was good at that. I threw the wet Kleenexes away, noting dispassionately that most of my makeup had gone with them. Then I took another drink; this time I felt it.
“Where is the daughter?” Button asked.
“Marcy’s, I suppose,” I replied. I was feeling exhausted from shock and emotion. “Linda’s sister. She lives in Manhattan,” I explained. “She always takes Dawn when Linda has a date.”
“Oh, why was that?” Button asked, all innocence.
“Because of Brad,” I answered with weary patience. “Linda had to be careful about the men in her life. If Brad ever caught her—” I broke off at the sight of Button’s smug smile.
“I didn’t say he’d kill her,” I retorted. My defender’s instinct was returning. “But he’d have used anything to get custody of Dawn away from Linda.”
“How would he know?” Button asked.
“The man’s a fanatic,” I had to admit. “She told me once how he followed her, tapped her phone, went through her garbage. Believe me,” I told Button, “he’d know in a minute if she ever did anything he could use in court. He’s a professional ex-husband.” I kept on talking, too engrossed to notice the way Button took it all in, feeding me straight lines, until I’d said more than I intended to. With all my years in the system, I couldn’t figure out that I was rapidly becoming the prosecution’s star witness.
“Of course,” I went on, “he’s not even supposed to know where she lives. If he has to talk to her, he calls Marcy and she calls Linda. Then Linda gets back to him. Visits are the same way. Linda takes Dawn to Marcy’s, then leaves. An hour later, Brad comes, takes Dawn, brings her back, and Linda picks her up an hour after that. It’s a total pain, Linda says, but it’s the only way to avoid contact with Brad.” I was not only unconscious that I was making a formal statement, I was oblivious to the fact that I was still using the present tense.
“I’d say a little contact took place tonight,” Button said grimly. “Before I talked to you, I’d have said she walked in on a burglar, but this fits better. Nothing was taken, even though there’s a lot of disarray.” He shook his head. “Besides, that number of stab wounds—hell, no ordinary burglar would do that unless he was on angel dust. But an ex-husband, especially one with a history of wife-beating, he’s capable of anything.” I looked at Button curiously. The slightly bitter edge to his tone gave me the feeling he was speaking from experience. But I knew better than to ask.
Button picked up my phone. Automatically, I nodded the permission he hadn’t bothered to request. “Where does the sister live?” he asked. “I’ll have to get a policewoman to stay with the kid while she identifies the body.”
“You don’t need a policewoman,” I said hurriedly. “I’ll go with you.”
“Well,” Button looked at me, calculation in his eyes. “You are a lawyer, and a friend of the family.” He put down the phone.
If I’d been operating on all eight cylinders, I’d have realized then instead of later that I’d been set up.
I watched Button’s face as he rang the doorbell of Marcy Sheldon’s East Side apartment. Impassive, schooled, with an underlying tautness that spoke the anxiety his features refused to reveal. How many times, I wondered, had this man stood in a doorway, waiting to bring death inside?
Marcy opened the door and let us in without a word. A tiny woman like her sister, she was different from Linda in every way that mattered. Where Linda had played up her little-girl look, Marcy was strictly dress-for-success. Where Linda had been a self-described man’s woman, Marcy ran her own public-relations business and was independent to the point of fanaticism. She was about ten years older than Linda and held herself with the assurance of a much taller woman.
As Marcy motioned us inside, I looked around for Dawn. I didn’t see her. What I saw was a standard-issue single professional woman’s apartment. Stark white walls, chrome-and-glass tables, track lighting, wall units with smoked glass doors. A blue and green Rya rug. Framed posters of modern art shows from the Whitney and the Guggenheim. The living room struck me as looking about as personal as a corporate conference room.
The funny thing was that Marcy’s office was the exact opposite. There she’d gone in for sumptuous upholstery in shades of mauve, black and silver lamps, wonderful Art Deco antiques and highly polished redwood. Vases of peacock feathers and framed 1920s Vogue covers had completed the look. It was stunning—and sensuous enough for a boudoir.
Marcy motioned me to the couch. I sat gingerly, not wanting to make myself too much at ease, as though death required some sort of discomfort. I decided Marcy must have furnished her apartment fifteen years earlier and hadn’t given the place a second thought since.
She handed me coffee in a thick Danish mug edged with heavy blue stripes. I sipped it gratefully, needing it after the Scotch I’d put away. Marcy drank hers slowly and watched Button with expectant eyes. She’d been told on the phone that Linda was dead, but I didn’t know how many details she’d been given.
I wondered how Button would play it. He could be sympathetic or brutal, and his choice would have nothing whatever to do with Marcy Sheldon’s needs. Button would say whatever it took to open her up.
He chose the crisply impersonal yet regretful tone of a newscaster describing a four-car collision on the Major Deegan. It wasn’t the way I’d have spoken to a woman whose only sister had been stabbed to death in her own apartment, but Marcy visibly relaxed and answered in kind.
Even when they got to the hard stuff, both Button and Marcy never wavered from the six o’clock news version.
“Did your sister have many men friends?” Button inquired, his face the same bland mask he’d worn since entering the apartment.
“I knew she was dating,” Marcy replied, “but I didn’t know the details. She was very taken up with her new job, of course,” she added, then shook her head regretfully. “Such a good opportunity,” she commented, as though Linda’s murder had been an unfortunate career setback.
“What was her relationship with Congressman Lucenti?”
Marcy flashed me a glance from under mascaraed eyelashes and hesitated only a fraction of a second before replying smoothly, “He was her boss, Detective, nothing more.”
I got the unspoken message. It was time for me to see Dawn. “In the bedroom,” Marcy murmured, pointing to a door. I wondered what she would tell Button once she had me out of the way.
I walked toward the bedroom, my heart pounding. I cracked open the door, suddenly wishing to God I’d kept my stupid mouth shut and stayed in Brooklyn where I belonged. What right had I, I accused myself, to come blundering into this child’s grief?
Then I caught hold of myself. I hadn’t come as a sightseer; if I weren’t here, some faceless lady cop would be pushing open this door. Dawn might as well be harassed by someone she already knew.
I opened the door and stepped into the room. Dawn sat on her bed still as a statue. A trance of grief, I told myself—until I saw the earphones. I tapped lightly on her shoulder, and she turned off the tape-player.
“Do you like the Police?” she asked.
“Well,” I began, startled by the question. “Detective Button’s okay.”
“No,” she giggled, her laughter slightly edged with hysteria. “not the police. The Police.” She pointed to a cassette.
“Oh, the group,” I said lamely as Dawn continued to stifle nervous laughter. I felt about a hundred and three, remembering my attempt to explain the Rolling Stones to my Grandma Winchell.
“I came to stay with you while your Aunt Marcy …” I broke off, not knowing how to finish. Or maybe the word morgue stuck in my throat.
Dawn nodded. While she didn’t replace the earphones, she didn’t talk either. We sat in silence for a moment, me perched awkwardly on the edge of the bed, my eyes darting around the room in search of something to talk about. A Culture Club poster, two Michael Jacksons, a teddy bear holding a miniature tennis racket, three tennis trophies—Marcy’s guest room had been decorated with one guest in mind. A white bedroom suite, with green and yellow accents to match the patchwork comforter on the bed. Remembering the jumble of secondhand furniture in Dawn’s own bedroom, I found myself warming to Marcy. She may act like a cold fish, I told myself, but if material things can show love, then she loves her niece. It was the one good thought I’d had since Linda’s death. It comforted me as I watched Dawn look longingly at her earphones.
The silence was becoming oppressive. I wanted to say something, but I knew instinctively that what I said had to be exactly right or I’d lose Dawn forever. Twelve is like that.
I relaxed slightly as I recognized the feeling. It was the same one I’d had when I’d started at Legal Aid, sitting in dark pens with accused criminals. For the first time in my comfortable, middle-class life I’d had to communicate with people so different from me as to seem wholly alien. Hell, I snorted silently to myself, I hadn’t even known their names. Oh, sure, I knew to call them Julio or Anthony, Mr. Ramirez or Ms. Jackson, but those were the names they gave the Man. On the street they were Chico or Freeze or Mr. Cool. Once I’d learned that, I’d begun to loosen up with my clients, to learn their language.
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