“Rick, will you help me? You may actually know something here.”
“Why, thank you.”
“You know what I mean.”
She ties the scarf around my neck. “Okay, so you’re asking me? Professionally?”
“Yes.”
She pats the knot and steps back, squinting at my costume like a movie director. “I think your friend the judge was a very interesting personality, and I think his behavior was totally consistent with suicide. Even the note.”
“But how?”
“Let me ask you this. How well did you know this man?”
“Armen? I knew him well.”
“You worked for him for three months. Part-time.”
“We worked closely together. I knew him well.”
“Think about it,” she says. “You didn’t know he loved you. You didn’t know he was sitting on a pile of money. You didn’t know he had an apartment.”
“But I knew what mattered, what kind of man he was. Everybody knew that. And what’s this have to do with psychology anyway?”
“Everything. He was a very important judge, a powerful judge, and the husband of a United States senator. On top of that, he’s a macher in the Armenian community. A hero, right?”
“Yes.” I feel vaguely like I’m being led where I don’t want to go.
“So people like that, they’re managing constantly under the pressure to live up to very high standards. The standards of others, of the community. It’s tough to keep that veneer perfect, to keep up appearances. They begin to keep secrets, like he did, and pretty soon what they know about themselves grows further and further away from what the world thinks of them. In the right circumstances, a person like that falls apart. The veneer cracks, and so do they.”
“But it wasn’t a veneer. He really was—”
“Perfect?”
I feel it inside. “Yes. In a way. He believed in things. He cared, really cared, and he fought hard.”
“Don’t you think you’re idealizing him, Grace?”
“No, I’m not idealizing him.” My throat tightens, but it could be the scarf. “Take this frigging thing off. I feel like a boy scout in drag.”
She avoids my eye and unties the scarf. “You worked for him for a short time. You had a business relationship with him until one night. Now you’re charging around, going to the police, ransacking his office for clues.”
“I wasn’t ransacking.”
“You’re acting like it was a fifteen-year relationship, like he was your husband. But he wasn’t. In fact, he was somebody else’s.”
Ouch. “That’s beside the point. The man was murdered, Ricki.”
“You don’t know that. It’s not your job to investigate it, even if it is true. If you were my client, I’d ask you why you’re doing all this. What would happen if you didn’t?”
“His killer would go free.”
“And what’s the matter with that?”
I look wildly around the frilly dressing room. “What’s the matter with murder? It’s very bad manners, for starters.”
“Don’t be snide, I mean it.”
“But what kind of question is that, What’s the matter with murder?” I hear my voice growing louder.
“No, the question is, Why does it matter if his killer goes free?”
I hold back my snidehood. “It’s terrible. It’s unfair.”
“Then it’s the unfairness that strikes you.”
“Yes, of course.”
She purses her lips. “You’re a person who’s been treated unfairly. By your father, then by Sam. You had a baby, he wanted out. He broke the contract.”
I feel a churning inside. “Yeah, so?”
“So maybe it’s not this unfairness you’re fighting about, maybe it’s unfairnesses in your past. Ones you can’t do anything about.”
“Oh please, Ricki.”
“Think about it. Keep an open mind.”
“The man is dead, Rick. Am I just supposed to ignore that?”
She folds her arms calmly, like she always does when I get upset. Therapists never have emotions; that’s why they want to hear ours. “How long have we known each other?” she asks.
I boil over. “Too damn long.”
“Well, that’s a very nice thing to say.”
“If you wouldn’t analyze me at every turn—”
“You asked me to.”
“I asked you to analyze him, not me.”
“Why do you need me to analyze him if you know him so goddamn well? Hmm?”
I have no immediate answer. The word uncle comes immediately to mind, but I push it away.
“Well?” A triumphant smile steals across her face. “I should’ve been a lawyer, right?”
Right. Or a personal shopper.
The red-lighted numbers on the clock radio say 4:13 A.M.; they’re oddly disjointed, constructed like toothpicks laid end to end. It flips to 4:14.
The house sleeps silently. The dishwasher stopped cranking at 1:10, leaving only the clothes dryer in the basement. A wet bathroom rug thudded against the sides of the drum, keeping me awake until 2:23. Since then I have no excuse except for my own feelings, tumbling as crazily as the rug in the dryer. The fury, grief, and confusion cycle: it comes right after spin-dry.
Maddie’s in the next room, her door closed against Bernice, who sleeps in my bed like a mountain range bordering my right side and curling under my feet. This must be why they call them mountain dogs. I shove her over, but she doesn’t budge. My thoughts circle back to Armen.
He said he loved me, but there’s obviously much he didn’t say. A secret bank account. An alias. I sit up and shake two powdery generic aspirins from the bottle, then swallow them with some flat seltzer from a bottle on my night table. I flop back in bed and stare up at the white ceiling with its cracked paint, trying to put away my emotions.
But I’m having less success than usual. Anxiety makes my chest feel tight. I wonder vaguely if they have a drug for that, and then I remember that they do.
Alcohol.
The thought warms me like brandy. I throw off the covers, slip on a terry bathrobe, and tiptoe down the creaky stair. Bernice looks up but doesn’t follow; she won’t go in the kitchen now unless she’s dragged into it.
I flick on the kitchen light and dim it down, then open up the tall kitchen cabinet that was built into the wall sixty years ago. My landlord let me strip the old paint away, and underneath was a fine bare pine, which I scrubbed and pickled white. I love this cabinet, a true old-fashioned larder, which finds room for every grocery I buy on its five shelves. The liquor is at the top, like a penthouse above the stories of oversized cereal boxes, cans of soup, and baked beans.
I grab a stool, climb up on it, and pull down a thick shot glass, one of the multitude my mother gave me a long time ago. Half I threw out and half I stowed in the basement until Maddie found them. I eventually had to sneak them away from her, finding something unseemly about a child’s tea party with shot glasses and a steel jigger. I hid them up here, where they line up like pawns guarding the liquor bottles.
I peer at the dusty bottles and try to make a decision. What shall I treat myself to? It’s all left over from my wedding, the last time I had more than two drinks. Alcohol goes right to my head, but that’s suddenly what I want.
A bottle of Crown Royal stands like a king behind the pawns. The lattice blown into its glass catches even the dim light. I pick the bottle up by its gold plastic crown and climb down from the shelf.
I am going to get drunk. This strikes me as a daring and powerful act, something a man would do. I am going to have myself a drink, yessir, I am going to tie one on. I put the bottle on the counter and crack open the cap, which sticks slightly. The bottle’s almost full. I take a whiff.
Fragrant. Sweet. Tangy. Strong.
I remember this smell, and it brings a memory down on my head. My parents fighting again, shouting. My father, lurching out the door. My mother, crying alone. A bottle of Crown Royal sittin
g in the center of a kitchen table, eye level with me: It’s so majestic, glinting like gold. A regal beacon in a world where Daddy is gone and the future is a mystery.
I pour myself a shot.
13
My head buzzes with liquor from the night before; my stomach gurgles like a polluted stream. Getting drunk isn’t as manly as I thought it would be. At least not the next morning.
You don’t have to be hung over to be seeing double. Even triple. There are judges everywhere in the grand ceremonial courtroom: circuit judges, district judges, bankruptcy judges, magistrate judges. They gather like ravens in ebony robes on either side of the dais and in the reserved section in front of it. Twenty representative judges from the circuit and district courts fill the dais in two tiers. Crows on the power lines.
The audience, relegated to the back rows, is standing room only. Lawyers, academics, and reporters clog the courtroom. Standing in the back are older men in shabby overcoats, the courtroom junkies dressed up. Shake and Bake isn’t here, but one of them, in a dark overcoat, looks familiar. Thick and bulky, like a thug. I try to think where I’ve seen him before.
Outside the police station? Maybe the man in the black car with Virginia plates.
I crane my neck to see him better, but he disappears behind a group of Armen’s closest friends, the Armenian men in his dinner club; they cleave together, olive-skinned and outnumbered. Susan has been doing what she can to cut them and everybody else out, flying Armen’s body to Washington for a funeral tomorrow. Meanwhile she sits dry-eyed in the front row, sucking up all the attention by saying nothing, like a vacuum.
Does she know about Greg Armen?
It makes me sick to my stomach. Everything does.
Ben has joined Galanter’s clerks, up front. Artie sits with Eletha, comforting her before the service begins, but he looks like he needs comforting himself. He’s more unkempt than usual, his hair uncombed and his rep tie wrinkled. Sarah is next to me in the row behind them; she and Artie don’t exchange a word during the ceremony. Is there trouble in Paradise? I haven’t been paying attention.
Chief Judge Galanter begins the memorial service from the coveted center seat. His statement is ruthlessly generic, and over as soon as it starts. A few of the other judges make short speeches, their words shaky, their sentences halting. They mourn, but it’s a peculiar sort of mourning, characterized by bewilderment. One of their own, a suicide. Only Judge Robbins says the word, his eyes red-rimmed behind rimless spectacles. I close my mind until the service is over, hoping my head will stop thundering.
When it’s over the judges adjourn to the robing room, and some of Armen’s Armenian friends linger near the dais, waiting for a chance to talk to Susan. At the periphery of the crowd are reporters, interested in the same thing. Susan doesn’t seem to mind talking to anyone and doesn’t shed a tear. Her own husband’s memorial service. What had the detective said? Cried a river?
A wild-haired reporter with a day’s stubble gets close to her and says, “Senator, just clear up one thing for me. Senator, over here.”
She looks up, but her smile vanishes when she seems to recognize him. “One question, Sandy. That’s it.”
“Is it true that you and the judge were having marital problems?”
Shocked, the well-wishers turn and look at him.
Susan’s mouth sets into a thin line. “I’m fine. Thanks for asking.” Instantly, a tall, preppy aide in expensive eyeglasses takes her elbow and hustles her through the crowd to the robing room door.
“Have some decency!” an older lawyer says to the reporter, who takes off through the crowd after Susan. Two marshals, Mutt and Jeff, head after him; the big one, McLean, takes the lead.
“What an asshole,” Sarah says, but I watch the reporter until I lose him in the crowd. “Let’s go.”
Sarah and I bobble together in the mass of people leaving the ceremony. I whisper to her, “How do you think he knew?”
“Lucky guess. He’s been hustling since the campaign, trying to get a real job.”
I consider this, but it hurts my head to think. I keep seeing the checkbook, hidden now in my underwear drawer.
We pour out of the courtroom doors into the marble walkway that connects the north half of the federal building to the courthouse. I let the crowd carry me past the plant-filled atrium on the right, which the court employees use to smoke in. A hunchbacked man sweeps up the discarded cigarette butts with a broom.
“You’d think we could find him something better to do,” says a man’s voice beside Sarah. The wild-haired reporter. Up close, he looks sweaty and his curls are permed. “Remember me, Miss Whittemore?”
“What happened to the marshals?” Sarah says, and picks up the pace next to me.
“I’m Sandy Faber. I write for a lot of newspapers in the city.”
“Where do you get off asking a question like that?” Sarah says, barreling ahead.
The reporter falls into her brisk stride. “Did I upset your client, Miss Whittemore?”
“I don’t have any clients, and you don’t fool me for one minute. You’re the one who wrote that victim’s rights story. You called Armen a killer.”
“I didn’t call him a killer, I merely quoted—”
“I don’t want to hear it.”
The reporter scrambles over to me and grabs my arm. “Ms. Rossi, it’ll just take a minute. I know you cared about the judge.”
“We all did,” I say, wresting my arm back.
“Somebody didn’t. The person who killed him.”
It stuns me in my tracks, but Sarah reacts instantly. “How dare you!” she says. “You want me to call the marshals?”
“Take a look at your co-counsel here, Miss Whittemore. She’s not so sure it’s a suicide either.”
I feel my gorge rising, only partly from the alcohol. I look past the crowd for the ladies’ room and spot it at the end of the gleaming hall. “I have to go.”
“Grace, are you all right?” Sarah asks.
I wave her off. “See you upstairs.”
“Ms. Rossi?” calls the reporter, who takes off after me, opening his skinny steno pad as we walk. “You were close to Judge Gregorian, weren’t you?”
Does he suspect anything about me and Armen? I hurry past the crowd. The rapid motion makes me seasick. I’ll never drink again; I don’t know how my father stood it.
“Did you know that the judge and his wife were having marital problems?”
I try to ignore him and make my way through the crowd to the ladies’ room. I zigzag left and right, like a sunfish trying to tack in a hurricane.
“Can you shed some light on that, Ms. Rossi? Ms. Rossi?”
I reach the door and pull its stainless steel handle with all my might, but the reporter stops it with his hand. He’s breathing heavily; he smells like cigarettes.
“Grace, are you gonna let somebody get away with murder?”
I look into his face with its sheen of sweat. I feel a stab of confusion and nausea. I yank on the door. “I have to go.”
“Is that the way it’s gonna be? Is it?” he calls after me, as the heavy door closes between us.
I lurch into an empty stall, lock it, and drop on to the seat until the wave of nausea passes. I hang my head, examining the speckles in the floor tile; gray, black, and white fragments tumble together like a kaleidoscope. Between each tile is a steel line where the grout would be, but it wiggles from time to time. I right myself and wrestle with the oversized dispenser for a square of toilet paper.
Are you gonna let somebody get away with murder?
I wipe my face with the thin square and decide to stay there until the earthquake stops. I listen to other women flush the toilets, wash their hands, and leave. I wait until all the hands are washed and all the women have gone. In time, the voices outside the bathroom diminish, then disappear altogether.
I think of the checkbook. I think of Armen. I’m not sure if I can’t move or won’t. I stay a long, long time at the bo
ttom of the tall, glistening courthouse, sitting on the john in silence, thinking about my murdered lover. The judge with the alias.
What does that reporter know?
I hear the bathroom door open.
Shit. Who’s coming into my bathroom? I feel intruded upon. I hate to share a public bathroom with the public, especially when my stomach is barely parallel to the floor.
Whoever it is walks farther into the bathroom. There’s no sound of pumps on the floor; she must be wearing flats. I lean over and squint through the slit where the door meets the jamb, but I can’t see anybody.
I know someone is there, but she’s not going into a stall. She doesn’t turn on the water, either, or strike a match for an illicit smoke. Maybe she came in to fix her makeup or brush her hair. I listen for the sounds, but nobody’s fumbling in a handbag.
Still, someone is there. I heard the door. I feel a presence. I squint through the slits but see nothing.
Then I hear the faintest sound, of human breathing.
Someone is standing right in front of my door.
Panic floods my throat. I rise involuntarily.
There’s a shuffling outside the stall as the presence moves closer in response. I lean next to the door, every nerve taut, straining to listen.
I hear the breathing, louder now.
I look underneath the door to my stall.
Planted there is a pair of large black shoes.
A man’s.
14
“Who’s there?” I shout, terrified.
“Are you all right?” says the man. Concerned, professional. “You’ve been in there awhile.”
“Is that you, Faber?”
“No, I’m a special agent with the FBI.”
“In a ladies’ room?” My voice clatters off the tile walls. “Go away or I’ll scream, I mean it! Right now!”
“Wait, relax. I swear to you, I am an FBI agent. Our office is here in the building. Seventh floor.”
“Anybody would know that. It’s on the directory.”
“I’m with the agency for ten years now. I trained at Quantico. Eighteen months, not counting in-service training.”
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