Blood Count

by Reggie Nadelson

  For a split second I felt myself dangle in the cold space, the wind pushing at me; for a second I wondered if someone had pushed me from behind, or if it was an accident.

  A voice from behind startled me, and I crashed back onto the roof, my foot twisted under me. Pain rattled my brain.

  “Jesus, man, you OK?” A hand reached down to help me. It was Carver Lennox.

  I stumbled to my feet. He asked if I wanted a doctor. I said I was OK and hobbled a couple of feet back from the edge of the roof.

  “You almost killed yourself—you sure you’re OK? I could call somebody.”

  I said I was fine. I asked if he’d talked to Mrs. Hutchison, and he said he’d called her over at her sister’s, but the sister said she wasn’t there, and was trying to find her. The sister thought she might be at church but wasn’t sure if she was attending her usual Catholic mass or was over at the Abyssinian Baptist, where she sometimes went with a friend.

  “I want to tell her about Lionel myself,” he said. “I want to be with her. She’s going to take this hard, you know; I mean, fifty, sixty years or something like that, they were married. You have anything at all on this? I talked to Captain Wagner, but he didn’t have any idea. He said you and Radcliff are working it.” Lennox looked at me. “How the fuck did Lionel fall? Celestina used to tell me she locked him in because he walked in his sleep.”

  “She has quite a few stories.”

  “Yes, and I never got the impression Lionel Hutchison listened to anything she said; he just humored her.”

  I headed for the door and he followed, not touching me, but holding an arm out as if to catch me in case I fell. My ankle was throbbing like somebody had stuck it with nails. Lennox opened the door to the stairs and held it for me.

  “You were close to them, weren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you wanted them to stay here.”

  “Of course,” he said. “Even though Celestina never stopped telling me she wanted to sell—even last night at the party. She wanted to go somewhere warm.”

  “I thought you were anxious to get hold of the apartments.”

  “You think I’d just buy them out and not help them? I’ve offered to re-house all of them, anywhere they like—brand-new apartments in midtown so they can go hear music or go to the theater, or in lovely assisted-living facilities up in Westchester, or Queens, just a stone’s throw from here, lovely gardens. Many have already told me they’d like to move somewhere warm—Hawaii, the islands. I can enable that. Did you think I would just kick them out into the street?” he said. “Well, how would that look to prospective buyers? As for the Hutchisons, I told Celestina I’d be real sad if they were to go. They’re part of the history. I see this building as a fusion of past and future.”

  “I see,” I said, walking painfully down the stairs from the roof.

  “You don’t believe me, do you?”

  “What about Simonova? Was she was part of your glorious plan?”

  Lennox didn’t answer, not until we got to the fourteenth floor. In the light of the hallway I saw his face, saw a change in his expression.

  “You were saying. About Simonova?” I looked at him.

  “I wasn’t saying anything.” He removed his thick tweed coat and looked at it. “Where did I get this old thing? I can’t remember.”

  “You didn’t like Simonova, did you?”

  “I didn’t have a view about Marianna Simonova,” he said, and I knew he was lying. “She was a little crazy, but she was part of the Armstrong family, so attention was paid. I’ll go to Celestina now.”

  “What the hell were you doing on the roof, by the way?” I said.

  “Saving your ass, it looks like,” said Lennox, and hurried into his apartment.

  Carver Lennox was fucked up over Hutchison’s death, but it felt like grief he might have borrowed from some TV talk show, public grief, standard clichés. What really worried him, was that the death would give the building a bad rep.

  Or maybe I was wrong. There were things about Lennox I didn’t get. I had met guys like him, bankers, lawyers, hedge-fund guys on the make, had met them in restaurants, at parties. But Lennox was black. There weren’t a lot of black guys like him on Wall Street, and I wasn’t sure I’d read him right.

  There was plenty I didn’t understand about the building, too, about what I’d seen and heard: the decent old doctor, as limber and healthy as somebody twenty years younger, who believed in euthanasia, was sharp as hell, talked about status and light skin and dark, laughed about New Harlem, had loved Marianna Simonova; the African woman who thought the place was haunted by evil spirits in the shape of black dogs; Celestina Hutchison’s bitterness; the stiff-necked Dr. Bernard; Virgil Radcliff, the young detective who didn’t play by the book, whose father looked like a white man.

  It was more than that. I was a white cop in a black neighborhood—I had felt the tensions between Jimmy Wagner and his black detectives. I was an outsider. For all my love of black music, I didn’t belong. I should have been used to it. I’d been an outsider as a kid at school in Moscow, a nonbeliever, with a mother who became a refusenik and a father who was kicked out of the KGB; I’d been an outsider in Israel, where I spent most of my time hanging with peaceniks or Arab kids or lolling on the beach with sexy Sabra drop-outs, girls who liked smoking dope better than fighting wars.

  New York, too, those first years, when I still had an accent, and got lost in the subway, and later at the academy, where I tried to be a tough cop.

  Finally, I had found a place I could belong. When I lost my accent, ditched my past, became a real New Yorker, it seemed right. For a long time now, I’d been at home here, along with all the millions of foreigners and outsiders.

  But now, I felt it again, that disconnect, the sense of being on the outside that made me wonder if I understood anything.

  Am I getting anything right? I kept thinking. Is it just I’m so focused on Lily, or did the beating I got in the storage room fuck me up in some way I couldn’t determine? Was I tone deaf in a different country? A code I couldn’t quite catch, or hear, or translate? I thought of the bebop guys back when they invented music so fast, so complex, almost nobody got it at first, and how, in a sense, they did it to outfox whitey.

  In the Soviet Union, we had done the same thing, though without the genius. Ways of dealing with the system. You left home, you stepped out the door, you took on a different role—at school, at work, any place where you pretended to listen, pretended to follow the party line, at least until you got home where you could take off your mask, sit at the kitchen table, curse the bosses.

  Maybe it had always been that way in Harlem, for black people. Maybe it still was. Maybe no matter if you were a doctor or a teacher, you had to toe the line when you were outside, when you went to work or school in white America, or were confronted with white people, cops especially. Were you always somebody else? Even in 2008? Even after Obama’s election, after that one dazzling night in November?

  Did Carver Lennox feel that I threatened his empire? When he’d suddenly come up behind me on the roof, had he been planning to help me, or push me over?

  CHAPTER 36

  Virgil was looking through a pile of mail in the Hutchison apartment when I told him about Lennox, and the roof, and he just nodded then examined his iPhone as if it would give up the answers to everything. I figured it was the way he did his thinking.

  “Sorry.” He put his phone away. “You find anything up there?”

  “Hutchison didn’t just fall off the roof. He wasn’t a fool. You have to make a big effort even to lean over the edge of that fucking roof,” I said. “He’d have to get up over a wall, and why the hell would he do that?”

  “What are you saying, Artie? He was pushed?”

  “I’m not sure about anything. There’s stuff on the roof, that’s for sure, prints in the snow, indicates it’s not impossible. There’s only one set, far as I could see. Lionel could have gone off the roof, bu
t not by himself. Where the fuck is that dog?”

  “I don’t know. Did you talk to Lennox much at the party last night?”

  “Talked my fucking ear off, most of it about the building, said he wanted what was best for everybody. He was like a politician. In between the lines I got the feeling he had money troubles.”

  “What about Celestina?” said Virgil.

  “She was there. Holding court.”

  “She left before Lionel?”

  “Before he got there. I don’t think she pushed him though, do you? She weighs about ninety pounds, I’m guessing.”

  “Maybe she convinced Lionel to off himself,” said Virgil. “Maybe he was sick and only she knew, and she went on at him about his believing in euthanasia. Maybe she played on him, made him feel guilty.”

  “Doesn’t sound right,” I said. “Lionel didn’t seem like a guy to feel guilt about his beliefs, and if he was sick, he’d have used pills or something.”

  “I’ll get some more input from the ME, then.” Virgil looked around the living room. “Sad room,” he said.

  “You see it like that?”

  “I do, Artie. There’s something about it, like it’s a shabby old museum piece. Suspended in time. People can’t stand change, some of them.” He tossed the mail on the table. “Nothing here except some real estate brochures from the islands. Maybe that was it,” Virgil said. “From what I heard, Celestina couldn’t stand Lionel, and she wanted to sell up here and move south,” he added. “She was jealous of him and the Russian.”

  “Enough to kill him? How jealous could a ninety-year-old woman be?”

  “Oh, Artie, man, you just have not met a lot of old folks,” said Virgil. “They are just like us, only more, a lot more. You think old people don’t have sex? Trust me.”

  “You’re an expert?”

  “I have a grandfather who’s ninety-five out in California; my great-granddad died at one hundred and five; my own father is going up to seventy.”

  “Fine. Meanwhile, we need to talk to Celestina Hutchison.”

  “You have a plan?” Virgil said.

  “I want to see her here, with Hutchison’s things. I want to see her reaction. Tell her if she wants any of her clothes, anything like that, they’re gonna seal the apartment up tight as a drum until the ME releases Hutchison’s body and the will goes to probate, at least that long. Lennox said he thought she might be at some church. Get her here. Can you do that?”

  He was already on his phone. “Right,” he said. “Fine.”

  “I need the keys to Simonova’s place,” I said.

  “I already borrowed them from Lily’s place.” He gave me the keys. “You have any idea when Lily’s coming back?”

  I looked at my watch. “It’s a long way to the cemetery. It’s out on Long Island some place. She said she had to go by herself, some kind of duty thing.”

  “Simonova exploited Lily,” Virgil said. “I told you I thought that. She made Lily listen to her stories, do her errands. Lily has some kind of liberal guilt, so she just did it.” Virgil got a set of keys out of his pocket and gave them to me. “You going into Simonova’s place, Artie?”

  “I want a look at her terrace.”

  He held up his phone. “I’ll keep on Celestina. I can do more on the phone than running around now. I got guys out there in cars spread out everywhere. Anyway, I want more time in this apartment OK? Try to keep Wagner’s other guys out, if you can. Buy me a little time, Artie.”

  “Check in with the ME, too,” I said. “What about that dog?”

  “I have a really fucking bad feeling, Artie. About that dog, I mean,” said Virgil.

  “Keep me posted.” I left the apartment, and went over to Simonova’s place. Something was nagging at me.

  CHAPTER 37

  For twenty-four hours now, more, I’d been in this strange capsule that was the Armstrong. Now it was Sunday. It was 8:45 and Jimmy Wagner was in a hurry. He wanted Hutchison’s case wrapped up fast. You have until Monday, he’d said. Get on it.

  I was hungover, my head hurt, so did my ankle. The Oxycontin, the lack of sleep, the night I’d spent in Lily’s bed, it was all making me nuts.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about Lily, the hours we’d been together. Where we were going—if we were going anywhere. Neither of us had said anything this morning; she had been on her way to Simonova’s funeral, and I didn’t want to ask. I got out my phone now. I hadn’t heard from her since she left.

  In Simonova’s apartment, prowling from one room to the other, I was desperate. Again and again I had come back to this place with its endless rooms and books and old smells. Maybe it was the Russian thing. I knew I’d missed something. But what?

  I tried to get my bearings. I knew Hutchison had been here often. Knew he had been the last to see her, that she had somehow grabbed at the button on his jacket and it had stayed in her hand where I’d found it; the dead hand curled around it.

  He had loved this woman, one way or another. He would not have let her suffer. Did he come in to give her something to release her from her pain? Did he come back to clean up after himself?

  Suffering is not noble, he had said; pain cripples our best selves and makes us at best hopeless, at worst evil, he had said.

  I thought about Hutchison his sense of history, of hardship, his humor, the intellectual rigor. Maybe he was also a zealot, a believer, obsessed with a mission.

  I knew about zealots, all kinds, religious, political—I’d met them all my life. Hutchison didn’t seem to fill the bill—he had been too lively, he told jokes, had seen the comic side.

  Marianna Simonova was something else. This was a woman who kept a hammer and sickle for a paperweight, and a picture of herself with Stalin. It was still on the mantelpiece: Marianna as a girl handing Stalin a bouquet.

  Something was missing.

  I saw it as soon as I looked at the row of photographs. One of the pictures I had seen earlier was gone. I looked everywhere. Where was it?

  I couldn’t find the picture of Marianna Simonova with a little boy, his face turned away to look at the Statue of Liberty, his suit too big. Why would anybody have taken it?

  I went through Simonova’s papers in her desk fast as I could. There was a small leather address book with phone numbers and notes in her tiny writing crammed onto the pages.

  From the notes, I saw she had Russian connections, some in New York, some in Moscow, even a few in Miami and Los Angeles.

  But who was she working for? She had been a devout Communist, and there were the names of sympathetic organizations. But the pages with their details were old and brittle and I knew most of the groups must be defunct.

  I put the book in my pocket. There was something going on, but I needed time.

  Nobody would notice the missing address book. As far as the world was concerned Simonova had died of disease, and the only people who would look at her things were her heirs.

  On the table by the sofa were her pills. I grabbed the three vials, read the labels, put them back, then pocketed one of them and ran out, locked the door, went into the Hutchison apartment. Virgil was combing through the dresser drawers in a bedroom.

  “Did you get anything?” he said. The day before he had been combative. I had been an ass. We were both on the same side. I could work with this guy. He was good.

  “I have to find Lionel Hutchison’s meds. You got anything?”

  “Artie, you notice anyone weird hanging around down there, at the scene?”

  “What kind of weird?’

  “I don’t know, somebody watching. I was pulling up in my car, and I just saw this guy kind of half hiding behind a truck.”

  “There’s always wacko sightseers who show up at a scene,” I said, but my stomach turned over. I had felt somebody watching, too. “What’d he look like?”

  “Hard to say. North Face jacket. Hood up. Saw me and beat it.”

  “Black?”

  Virgil looked up at me. “No.”

&n
bsp; “You felt he was connected to the case?”

  “I just thought, What the fuck’s he doing here so early in the morning? He didn’t look local, he wasn’t walking a dog, so I thought, yeah, in my gut, I felt it was connected. You mentioned Lionel’s meds? What’s that about?”

  Everything in the bathroom seemed to have belonged to Celestina—there was no razor, no shaving cream. I pushed aside the hand lotions, the shampoos, the soaps. She favored, as she’d said in the hallway the day before, Jergens lotion. You could smell it everywhere—vanilla, almonds, cherries. It made me want to gag.

  I yanked open a drawer in the vanity and found Lionel’s stuff—shaving brush, bottles of herbal remedies, most of them in capsule form. The only prescription medication I could find was in a single vial. On it was her name. The doctor who had prescribed the pills was Lionel Hutchison himself. But so what? She might have run out, he would have written her the prescription.

  I took the vial.

  “Artie?” Virgil came into the bathroom. “They’ve located Celestina Hutchison, Artie. You want me to go or you want to do it? I also heard from the chief and he’s sending up more people, forensics included.”

  “Give me the address where Celestina is.”

  “Yeah, sure. Say your prayers, Artie, my friend.”

  “Who called you?”

  “Carver Lennox.”

  I drove over to the drugstore on 145th Street. In my pocket were two bottles of pills. They looked the same, but I wasn’t sure. Simonova’s was labeled Altace. Hutchison’s was Ramipril.

  At the local Duane Reade, I pushed past a woman waiting at the counter and got hold of the pharmacist, an Indian guy, name on his tag read Ravi. I him asked what the hell Ramipril was.

  “Generic name for something that also goes under Altace,” he said.

  “What’s it for?” I asked, even though I knew. Tolya took the stuff but I had to be sure.

  “High blood pressure,” said the pharmacist. “People who’ve already had a heart attack, a lot of docs prescribe it for them.”