“Oh, all right,” she snapped. “You’re some kind of saint, I know, who never said a bad word to anyone. You can tell Corinne I’ll cut a deal with her. But if it goes wrong you can be the one to stay up at night worrying about her.”
I rubbed my head. “Send her back to Mobile, Brigitte. There must be a grandmother or aunt or nanny or someone who really cares about her. With your attitude, life with Corinne is just going to be a bomb waiting for the fuse to blow.”
“You can say that again, detective.” It was Jade, his bulk filling the double doors to the living room.
Behind him we could hear the housekeeper without being able to see her. “I tried to keep him out, Brigitte, but Corinne let him in. You want me to call the cops, get them to exercise that peace bond?”
“I have a right to ask whoever I want into my own house,” came Corinne’s muffled shriek.
Squawking and yowling, Casper broke from Joel Sirop’s hold. He hurtled himself at the doorway and stuffed his body through the gap between Jade’s feet. On the other side of the barricade we could hear Lady Iva’s answering yodel and a scream from Corinne-presumably she’d been clawed.
“Why don’t you move, Jade, so we can see the action?” I suggested.
He lumbered into the living room and perched his bulk on the edge of a pale gray sofa. Corinne stumbled in behind him and sat next to him. Her muddy skin and lank hair looked worse against the sleek modern lines of Brigitte’s furniture than they had in Mrs. Hellman’s crowded sitting room.
Brigitte watched the blood drip from Corinne’s right hand to the rug and jerked her head at the housekeeper hovering in the doorway. “Can you clean that up for me, Grace?”
When the housekeeper left, she turned to her sister. “Next time you’re that angry at me take it out on me, not the cat. Did you really have to let her breed in a back alley?”
“It’s all one to Iva,” Corinne muttered sulkily. “Just as long as she’s getting some she don’t care who’s giving it to her. Just like you.”
Brigitte marched to the couch. Jade caught her hand as she Was preparing to smack Corinne.
“Now look here, Brigitte,” he said. “You two girls don’t belong together. You know that as well as I do. Maybe you think you owe it to your public image to be a mamma to Corinne, but you’re not the mamma type. Never have been. Why should you try now?”
Brigitte glared at him. “And you’re Mister Wonderful who can sit in judgment on everyone else?”
He shook his massive jade dome. “Nope. I won’t claim that. But maybe Corinne here would like to come live with me.” He held up a massive palm as Brigitte started to protest. “Not in Uptown. I can get me a place close to here. Corinne can have her horse and see you when you feel calm enough. And when your pure little old cat has her half-breed kittens they can come live with us.”
“On Corinne’s money,” Brigitte spat.
Jade nodded. “She’d have to put up the stake. But I know some guys who’d back me to get started in somethin’. Commodities, somethin’ like that.”
“You’d be drunk or doped up all the time. And then you’d rape her-” She broke off as he did his ugly-black-slit number with his eyes.
“You’d better not say anything else, Brigitte Le-Blanc. Damned well better not say anything. You want me to get up in the congregation and yell that I never touched a piece of ass that shoved itself in my nose, I ain’t going to. But you know better’n anyone that I never in my life laid hands on a girl to hurt her. As for the rest…” His eyes returned to normal and he put a redwood branch around Corinne’s shoulders. “First time I’m drunk or shooting somethin’ Corinne comes right back here. We can try it for six months, Brigitte. Just a trial. Rookie camp, you know how it goes.”
The football analogy brought her own mean look to Brigitte’s face. Before she could say anything Joel bleated in the background, “It sounds like a good idea to me, Brigitte. Really. You ought to give it a try. Lady Iva’s nerves will never be stable with the fighting that goes on around her when Corinne is here.”
“No one asked you,” Brigitte snapped.
“And no one asked me, either,” Corinne said. “If you don’t agree, I-I’m going to take Lady Iva and run away to New York. And send you pictures of her with litter after litter of alley cats.”
The threat, uttered with all the venom she could muster, made me choke with laughter. I swallowed some Sancerre to try to control myself, but I couldn’t stop laughing. Jade’s mountain rumbled and shook as he joined in. Joel gasped in horror. Only the two LeBlanc women remained unmoved, glaring at each other.
“What I ought to do, I ought to send you to reform school, Corinne Alton LeBlanc.”
“What you ought to do is cool out,” I advised, putting my glass down on a chrome table. “It’s a good offer. Take it. If you don’t, she’ll only run away.”
Brigitte tightened her mouth in a narrow line. “I didn’t hire you to have you turn on me, you know.”
“Yeah, well, you hired me. You didn’t buy me. My job is to help you resolve a difficult problem. And this looks like the best solution you’re going to be offered.”
“Oh, very well,” she snapped pettishly, pouring herself another drink. “For six months. And if her grades start slipping, or I hear she’s drinking or doping or anything like that, she comes back here.”
I got up to go. Corinne followed me to the door.
“I’m sorry I was rude to you over at Lily’s,” she muttered shyly. “When the kittens are born you can have the one you like best.”
I gulped and tried to smile. “That’s very generous of you, Corinne. But I don’t think my dog would take too well to a kitten.”
“Don’t you like cats?” The big brown eyes stared at me poignantly. “Really, cats and dogs get along very well unless their owners expect them not to.”
“Like LeBlancs and Pierces, huh?”
She bit her lip and turned her head, then said in a startled voice, “You’re teasing me, aren’t you?”
“Just teasing you, Corinne. You take it easy. Things are going to work out for you. And if they don’t, give me a call before you do anything too rash, okay?”
“And you will take a kitten?”
Just say no, Vic, just say no, I chanted to myself. “Let me think about it. I’ve got to run now.” I fled the house before she could break my resolve any further.
SETTLED SCORE
I
“IT’S SUCH A difficult concept to deal with. I just don’t like to use that word.” Paul Servino turned to me, his mobile mouth pursed consideringly. “I put it to you, Victoria: you’re a lawyer. Would you not agree?”
“I agree that the law defines responsibility differently than we do when we’re talking about social or moral relations,” I said carefully. “No state’s attorney is going to try to get Mrs. Hampton arrested, but does that-”
“You see,” Servino interrupted. “That’s just my point.”
“But it’s not mine,” Lotty said fiercely, her thick dark brows forming a forbidding line across her forehead. “And if you had seen Claudia with her guts torn out by lye, perhaps you would think a little differently.”
The table was silenced for a moment: we were surprised by the violent edge to Lotty’s anger. Penelope Herschel shook her head slightly at Servino.
He caught her eye and nodded. “Sorry, Lotty. I didn’t mean to upset you so much.”
Lotty forced herself to smile. “Paul, you think you develop a veneer after thirty years as a doctor. You think you see people in all their pain and that your professionalism protects you from too much feeling. But that girl was fifteen. She had her life in front of her. She didn’t want to have a baby. And her mother wanted her to. Not for religious reasons, even-she’s English with all their contempt for Catholicism. But because she hoped to continue to control her daughter’s life. Claudia felt overwhelmed by her mother’s pressure and swallowed a jar of oven cleaner. Now don’t tell me the mother is not responsib
le. I do not give one damn if no court would try her: to me, she caused her daughter’s death as surely as if she had poured the poison into her.”
Servino ignored another slight headshake from Lotty’s niece. “It is a tragedy. But a tragedy for the mother, too. You don’t think she meant her daughter to kill herself, do you, Lotty?”
Lotty gave a tense smile. “What goes on in the unconscious is surely your department, Paul. But perhaps that was Mrs. Hampton’s wish. Of course, if she didn’t intend for Claudia to die, the courts would find her responsibility diminished. Am I not right, Vic?”
I moved uneasily in my chair. I didn’t want to referee this argument: it had all the earmarks of the kind of domestic fight where both contestants attack the police. Besides, while the rest of the dinner party was interested in the case and sympathetic to Lotty’s feelings, none of them cared about the question of legal versus moral responsibility.
The dinner was in honor of Lotty Herschel’s niece Penelope, making one of her periodic scouting forays into Chicago ’s fashion scene. Her father-Lotty’s only brother-owned a chain of high-priced women’s dress shops in Montreal, Quebec, and Toronto. He was thinking of making Chicago his U.S. beachhead, and Penelope was out looking at locations as well as previewing the Chicago designers’ spring ideas.
Lotty usually gave a dinner for Penelope when she was in town. Servino was always invited. An analyst friend of Lotty’s, he and Penelope had met on one of her first buying trips to Chicago. Since then, they’d seen as much of each other as two busy professionals half a continent apart could manage. Although their affair now had five years of history to it, Penelope continued to stay with Lotty when she was in town.
The rest of the small party included Max Loewenthal, the executive director of Beth Israel, where Lotty treated perinatal patients, and Chaim Lemke, a clarinetist with the Aeolus Woodwind Quintet. A slight, melancholy man, he had met Lotty and Max in London, where they’d all been refugees. Chaim’s wife, Greta, who played harpsichord and piano for an early music group, didn’t come along. Lotty said not to invite her because she was seeing Paul professionally, but anyway, since she was currently living with Aeolus oboist Rudolph Strayarn, she probably wouldn’t have accepted.
We were eating at my apartment. Lotty had called earlier in the day, rattled by the young girl’s death and needing help putting the evening together. She was so clearly beside herself that I’d felt compelled to offer my own place. With cheese and fruit after dinner Lotty had begun discussing the case with the whole group, chiefly expressing her outrage with a legal system that let Mrs. Hampton off without so much as a warning.
For some reason Servino continued to argue the point despite Penelope’s warning frowns. Perhaps the fact that we were on our third bottle of Barolo explained the lapse from Paul’s usual sensitive courtesy.
“Mrs. Hampton did not point a gun at the girl’s head and force her to become pregnant,” he said. “The daughter was responsible, too, if you want to use that word And the boy-the father, whoever that was.”
Lotty, normally abstemious, had drunk her share of the wine. Her black eyes glittered and her Viennese accent became pronounced.
“I know the argument, believe you me, Paul: it’s the old ‘who pulled the trigger?’-the person who fired the gun, the person who manufactured it, the person who created the situation, the parents who created the shooter. To me, that is Scholastic hairsplitting-you know, all that crap they used to teach us a thousand years ago in Europe. Who is the ultimate cause, the immediate cause, the sufficient cause, and on and on.
“It’s dry theory, not life. It takes people off the hook for their own actions. You can quote Heinz Kohut and the rest of the self-psychologists to me all night, but you will never convince me that people are unable to make conscious choices for their actions or that parents are not responsible for how they treat their children. It’s the same thing as saying the Nazis were not responsible for how they treated Europe.”
Penelope gave a strained smile. She loved both Lotty and Servino and didn’t want either of them to make fools of themselves. Max, on the other hand, watched Lotty affectionately-he liked to see her passionate. Chaim was staring into space, his lips moving. I assumed he was reading a score in his head.
“I would say that,” Servino snapped, his own Italian accent strong. “And don’t look at me as though I were Joseph Goebbels. Chaim and I are ten years younger than you and Max, but we share your story in great extent. I do not condone or excuse the horrors our families suffered, or our own dispossession. But I can look at Himmler, or Mussolini, or even Hitler and say, they behaved in such and such a way because of weaknesses accentuated in them by history, by their parents, by their culture. You could as easily say the French were responsible, the French because their need for-for-rappresaglia-what am I trying to say, Victoria?”
“Reprisal,” I supplied.
“Now you see, Lotty, now I, too, am angry: I forget my English… But if they and the English had not stretched Germany with reparations, the situation might have been different. So how can you claim responsibility-for one person, or one nation? You just have to do the best you can with what is going on around you.”
Lotty’s face was set. “Yes, Paul. I know what you are saying. Yes, the French created a situation. And the English wished to accommodate Hitler. And the Americans would not take in the Jews. All these things are true. But the Germans chose, nonetheless. They could have acted differently. I will not take them off the hook just because other people should have acted differently.”
I took her hand and squeezed it. “At the risk of being the Neville Chamberlain in the case, could I suggest some appeasement? Chaim brought his clarinet and Max his violin. Paul, if you’ll play the piano, Penelope and I will sing.”
Chaim smiled, relaxing the sadness in his thin face. He loved making music, whether with friends or professionals. “Gladly, Vic. But only a few songs. It’s late and we go to California for a two-week tour tomorrow.”
The atmosphere lightened. We went into the living room, where Chaim flipped through my music, pulling out Wolf’s Spanisches Liederbuch. In the end, he and Max stayed with Lotty, playing and talking until three in the morning, long after Servino and Penelope’s departure.
II
The detective business is not as much fun in January as at other times of the year. I spent the next two days forcing my little Chevy through unplowed side streets trying to find a missing witness who was the key to an eighteen-million-dollar fraud case. I finally succeeded Tuesday evening a little before five. By the time I’d convinced the terrified woman, who was hiding with a niece at Sixty-seventh and Honore, that no one would shoot her if she testified, gotten her to the state’s attorney, and seen her safely home again, it was close to ten o’clock.
I fumbled with the outer locks on the apartment building with my mind fixed on a hot bath, lots of whiskey, and a toasted cheese sandwich. When the ground-floor door opened and Mr. Contreras popped out to meet me, I ground my teeth. He’s a retired machinist with more energy than Navratilova. I didn’t have the stamina to deal with him tonight.
I mumbled a greeting and headed for the stairs.
“There you are, doll.” The relief in his voice was marked. I stopped wearily. Some crisis with the dog. Something involving lugging a sixty-pound retriever to the vet through snow-packed streets.
“I thought I ought to let her in, you know. I told her there was no saying when you’d be home, sometimes you’re gone all night on a case”-a delicate reference to my love life-“but she was all set she had to wait and she’d’a been sitting on the stairs all this time. She won’t say what the problem is, but you’d probably better talk to her. You wanna come in here or should I send her up in a few minutes?”
Not the dog, then. “Uh, who is it?”
“Aren’t I trying to tell you? That beautiful girl. You know, the doc’s niece.”
“Penelope?” I echoed foolishly.
She came ou
t into the hall just then, ducking under the old man’s gesticulating arms. “Vic! Thank God you’re back. I’ve got to talk to you. Before the police do anything stupid.”
She was huddled in an ankle-length silver fur. Ordinarily elegant, with exquisite makeup and jewelry and the most modern of hairstyles, she didn’t much resemble her aunt. But shock had stripped the sophistication from her, making her dark eyes the focus of her face; she looked so much like Lotty that I went to her instinctively.
“Come on up with me and tell me what’s wrong.” I put an arm around her.
Mr. Contreras closed his door in disappointment as we disappeared up the stairs. Penelope waited until we were inside my place before saying anything else. I slung my jacket and down vest on the hooks in the hallway and went into the living room to undo my heavy walking shoes.
Penelope kept her fur wrapped around her. Her high-heeled kid boots were not meant for street wear: they were rimmed with salt stains. She shivered slightly despite the coat.
“Have-have you heard anything?”
I shook my head, rubbing my right foot, stiff from driving all day.
“It’s Paul. He’s dead.”
“But-he’s not that old. And I thought he was very healthy.” Because of his sedentary job, Servino always ran the two miles from his Loop office to his apartment in the evening.
Penelope gave a little gulp of hysterical laughter. “Oh, he was very fit. But not healthy enough to overcome a blew to the head.”
“Could you tell the story from the beginning instead of letting it out in little dramatic bursts?”
As I’d hoped, my rudeness got her angry enough to overcome her incipient hysteria. After flashing me a Lotty-like look of royal disdain, she told me what she knew.
Paul’s office was in a building where a number of analysts had their practices. A sign posted on his door this morning baldly announced that he had canceled all his day’s appointments because of a personal emergency. When a janitor went in at three to change a lightbulb, he’d found the doctor dead on the floor of his consulting room.
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