"When did this party take place?" Natali asked. "Last call for tuna."
Cindy shook her head and grinned.
"The Saturday night before she died."
"Get the guest list and the caterer's contact info," Natali said, still chewing. "It's possible some of them didn't know the darkroom was there. They could have been looking for the bathroom."
"Or said they were, if anybody saw them," Cindy said.
"Check out the cleaning service too," he said. "My guess is they cleaned before the party and came back to clean up after it."
"They might have skipped the darkroom the second time," she said, "since it was supposed to be off limits to the guests. I'll ask."
She saw Natali beginning to wipe his oily fingers on the paper bag and handed him a stack of the Starbucks napkins that tended to accumulate in her handbag.
"I don't suppose we can do anything with DNA?" she asked.
Natali finished giving his fingers an efficient scrub and tossed the wad of napkins into the nearest wastebasket.
"You know how long that takes and how much it costs," he said. "Or if not, you should. We check the evidence for DNA transfer once we have a suspect in custody and not before. Not even then unless it's needed."
"Like not if we have a plausible signed confession?" she said. "That's what I thought. You know, the darkroom at her office is a likelier place for her to have worked on event photos, stuff she shot specifically for clients."
Natali rocked his chair back again.
"Go ahead."
"CSU picked up lots of Sophia's fingerprints there too and almost as many from Miranda Spence."
"Any other prints?"
"One unidentified set on the doorjamb," Cindy said, "as if someone had been leaning against it schmoozing with Sophia at a time when the door was open."
"Uh-huh. Or someone could have stopped to take a look around before going in at a time when she wasn't there. What's the next step?"
"Find out when Sophia's office last got cleaned," she said. "She might have used whatever cleaning service the law firm did. I can start there."
"Go on."
"Try to identify the schmoozer," she said. "Someone hanging out in her office, maybe a client or a friend. She didn't have colleagues of her own, so the most likely person would be someone from Kane's law firm down the hall. It wasn't Kane, because we have his prints. We still don't have probable cause, do we? I mean, we can't go making all those lawyers give their prints."
"Nope. What can we do?"
"Run the prints we have? That only helps if they're already in the system, right?" Cindy shook her head. "Corporate lawyers? How likely is that?"
"You'd be surprised," Natali said. "Lawyers don't spring full grown from the forehead of Clarence Darrow. Whoever the guy is now, he could have been arrested for a protest march or turnstile jumping in his youth. He could have worked at a childcare facility before he lost his ideals and went to law school. What can we do that's quicker, cheaper, and more likely to yield results? Come on, Cinders, this is an easy one."
"Oh!" She grinned at him, pleased by his use of her nickname. "We ask Miranda Spence."
Chapter Twenty-One: Bruce
The #1 train was stuffed to bursting with rush hour traffic. Jimmy and I were on our way to the Village, where we had consumed vast quantities of beer and had lousy luck at picking up girls in our misspent youth. We hoped we might run into Judith at the meeting Eleanor had mentioned she attended. If we didn't, Jimmy pointed out, we'd still have the benefit of the meeting, a good thing by definition. He harangued me from 86th Street to Times Square about getting a DA sponsor and a pressure relief group, writing down what I spent, and thinking harder about what I wanted to do with my life. Going to meetings and drifting from temp job to temp job was not a vision, he said. I begged him to change the subject.
"You haven't talked to Cindy, have you?" Jimmy asked.
"You really know how to pick a topic," I said. "Rub it in, why don't you."
"I'm not trying to hurt you," Jimmy protested. "I want you to be happy, man. I thought maybe she told you she dropped in on us last night."
"Dropped in? Was it a social call? What did she say about me?"
"Sorry, bro, but you weren't mentioned. Her boss sent her to ask more questions."
"That sounds awkward."
" I don't think she wanted to be there. I don't know which of us was the most uncomfortable."
"So what happened?" I asked.
"Barbara asked her outright if she couldn't explain to the cops about program relationships or at least vouch for our character based on past acquaintance. Cindy said it didn't work like that."
"So how does it work?"
"Barbara asked the same question. You didn't have to be Hercule Poirot to figure out Cindy hasn't told them that she knows us. You know, maybe she's right about cops and civilians not mixing. Maybe it's like recovering people and civilians, and you need to let her go."
"I don't seem to have any say in the matter," I said. " Cindy is calling the shots. If I'm supposed to stop caring about her, isn't my Higher Power supposed to remove the feelings?"
The subway doors opened after a long delay. A multitude squeezed out onto the platform and started streaming toward connecting trains and the exits onto Times Square. Another multitude squeezed in the doors, most of them bound for Penn Station and commuter trains. It was only one stop away, so they stayed clumped around the doors. Jimmy and I, clutching a pole as far from the doors as we could get, had barely enough oxygen to get us to our stop at Christopher Street. The train jerked into motion.
"Are you really suspects?" I asked. "What did she say about that?"
"She said she wants to get us off the hook," Jimmy said, "and whether or not Barbara was really jealous or had anything to be jealous about, motive doesn't make a case. Evidence does. She begged us to tell or show her anything that might prove that we didn't have opportunity or means. In the end, we showed her our financial records. I have them all organized, since I've been going over them with Dan and Eleanor to get a handle on the spending that got me into this mess. Then I took her through our search history on all our computers. I even gave her a copy of the resumé I've been using with job applications. Barbara was afraid it would make them see how easily I could have bought cyanide online and covered my tracks. But Cindy said she could make a case for my having been thorough and transparent because we had nothing to hide. I said their computer guys were welcome to see for themselves, they wouldn't need a warrant."
"Let me guess," I said. "Then Barbara got all excited that the police force hires computer guys and said what a great career that would be for you. Did she tell Cindy to pass on your resumé?"
"No," Jimmy said, "she managed not to say it till Cindy had left. But there was more. She said they were investigating other leads, so not to panic yet. For starters, I wasn't Sophia's only sponsee. If you think partners who go to Al-Anon are resentful of recovering addicts, you should see partners who don't."
"Or partners of recovering debtors," I said. "I can see a guy feeling threatened if his wife started baring her soul about their financial affairs to some woman he didn't even know. Especially if he happened to be a crook."
"What kind of crook?"
"Take your pick," I said. "A thief, a con artist, an embezzler, an insider trader."
"I see what you mean," he said. "Or a compulsive gambler whose wife suddenly started taking an interest in where the money came from and where it was going."
"Or a racketeer or drug dealer," I said. "The more you think about it, the more possibilities there are. On the other hand, recovery might have nothing to do with her death. Sophia could have had a boyfriend."
We reached our stop and came out into the twilight bustle of Sheridan Square.
"We could have gotten out at 14th Street," Jimmy said as we started walking north on Seventh Avenue.
"You don't want your legs to atrophy," I said. "We could both use the walk, and I
still like the Village. Do you ever wonder how many tattoos we might have ended up with if we were going through our drinking days now?"
Jimmy shuddered.
"I don't even want to think about it. I still can't believe Sophia had a boyfriend, no matter what her college roommate said. The Sophia I knew really walked the walk."
"Even if you're right, the cops might think she did."
"What was the name of that politician at Sophia's funeral?" he asked.
"The one you ran away from so I had to listen to his pitch all by myself? Kerensky. He was working with Sophia on his campaign. I met his wife too. She seemed fine with it, but if she wasn't, she wouldn't tell a total stranger how she felt."
"We need to know more about the Kerenskys before we start speculating about them."
"You can look them up."
I meant when we got home. But Jimmy whipped his latest model smartphone from his pocket and dove right into cyberspace, thumbs flying over the touch keyboard. We used to compare Jimmy to a virtuoso pianist. I wondered when the geeks would redesign musical instruments to allow musicians to play them with their thumbs.
"Damian Kerensky," Jimmy said. "His wife is Marcia Baldwin-Kerensky. She's got money, and she's been using a lot of it to fund his campaign. She might even have been paying Sophia's fees. But think about this: the Baldwin money comes from real estate, and it's the kind of money that can afford to build a new hospital wing or sponsor the New York Marathon as a tax loss. You don't get that rich giving your tenants a break. That might have been fine with Damian when they got married. He works in a corporate law firm, the same one as Larry Kane. The Baldwins and some other big landlords are clients of theirs. But he's been courting the liberal vote. That could be partly down to Sophia. She'd have been working on his image."
"Damian told me himself," I said, "that he was working on tenant rights cases now. Marcia might not have liked that at all."
We arrived at the meeting a few minutes late. Jimmy spotted an empty seat in the front row and made a beeline for it. I slouched over to the giant coffeepot and poured myself a cup. The room was full, but a woman in one of the middle rows turned around and caught my eye. Lifting a backpack, a sweater, and an empty coffee cup off the seat next to her, she nodded toward it, and I went and squeezed in next to her. They had already said the Serenity Prayer and passed around the Twelve Steps and the Twelve Traditions. The speaker was talking about "what it was like," the usual "before" story that we all had in common: starting the evening in a noisy bar, fast forward to the nausea and falling down, cut to waking up in a stranger's bed with needles of sunlight stabbing you in the eyes.
"It's still hard for me to believe that I picked up that first drink," the speaker said. "I was sober for a long time, and I thought it could never happen to me. Believe me, this relapse started long before that first boilermaker."
A lot of heads nodded. I looked around to survey them and spotted Judith near the back. I saw Jimmy twist around in his seat, looking for me in the back near the coffee and cookies first. When he spotted me installed in the midst of the crowd, I made a face at him, and he grinned. I raised my chin in Judith's direction, making sure he'd seen her before we both turned back to the speaker.
"I had a good job," she said. "I was eating right and running every day. I had my meetings and my sponsees. I thought I had my act together, and I got complacent. I thought I deserved a vacation. I booked a cruise. I wasn't going to drink, so I figured that would save me a lot of money. Instead, I floated through the Caribbean on a sea of booze. I'm blessed, because my sponsor didn't give up on me. When I wouldn't take her calls, she came over and made me let her in. She threw me into the shower, threw all the bottles out, and dragged me to a meeting. I have ninety days now, and I'm grateful."
I sneaked another quick glance at Judith. She was hunched over, her face hidden in her hands. I remembered her saying she had to live with the shame of not being there when Sophia needed her.
After the meeting, we made our way over to Judith and introduced ourselves.
"You knew Sophia, didn't you?" Jimmy said. "I think I heard you share about her at a meeting uptown. She was my sponsor. I still can't believe she's gone."
Judith took his hand, tears in her eyes.
"I let her down," she said. "I was a bad sponsor and a bad friend."
"Look, do you want to go for coffee?" Jimmy asked.
There was a coffee shop around the corner. There always is. We settled into a booth and ordered coffee.
"I feel awful about Sophia," Judith said. She clutched a thick white china mug of steaming coffee against her chest, as if it could warm her heart.
"Then help us find out who killed her," I said. "The cops think it's Jimmy's fiancée, because he gave his fourth step to Sophia, and things he wrote made them believe she had a motive."
"It's ludicrous," Jimmy said. "Barbara knows I'm a one-woman man. Anyhow, Sophia was my sponsor. She would never have tried to come on to me. She wasn't that kind of woman."
"Well—" Judith said under her breath, but I heard her.
"Well, what?" I asked. "Do you know something? If it might have gotten her killed, you've got to tell us."
"Please tell us," Jimmy said.
"Sophia was having an affair," Judith said. "She wanted children, and her husband had had a vasectomy. I told her she couldn't walk a tightrope in one area, like destructive relationships, without putting her whole recovery at risk. Then I threw away my own recovery, so who was I to talk? I couldn't be her sponsor any more, so it's not like we were talking every day."
"Do you know who her lover was?" I asked.
"I can't tell you that," Judith said.
"Can't or won't?" I asked.
"Did her husband know?" Jimmy asked.
Judith ignored my question and answered Jimmy's.
"She didn't think he did," Judith said. "She was good at keeping secrets."
"Her husband must have known she was in AA," Jimmy said.
"At least he must have known she'd stopped drinking," I said.
"He paid for her to go to rehab," Judith said, "way back. But he didn't think it had anything to do with him. As far as he was concerned, it was her problem, and once she solved it, that was that. She didn't even tell him she went to meetings."
"Not even when she started having the affair?" I asked. "Whenever she wanted to see him, she could have told the husband she was going to a meeting."
"Didn't it bother her," Jimmy said, "that she was committing adultery?"
"Yeah," I said, "it sounds like what the program calls a defect of character to me."
"Of course," Judith said. "It was her biggest struggle when we worked together. But she wasn't ready to let him go. You know you can't force somebody else to change. I figured she would get there at her own pace. I thought she had time."
Her eyes filled with tears again.
"Judith, if you know who she was seeing," Jimmy said, "you've got to tell someone. If not us, then go to the police. It could help them find whoever killed her. The guy himself could be the murderer."
"Or her husband," I said, "if he knew about the affair."
"I'm only eight days sober," Judith said, "and I'm still pretty mokus. I can't think straight."
"I know how that feels," I said.
"You can't wait until your head is clear," Jimmy said. "That could take a month."
"More," I said.
"Besides," Jimmy said, "if you have this on your conscience, you'll drink again."
"I know you're right," she said.
"At least give the cops his name," Jimmy said. "You do know it, don't you?"
"Honestly, I don't," she said.
"Can't you figure it out?" he asked. "Sophia must have dropped at least a hint or two."
Judith finished her coffee and started tearing paper napkins into strips, then twisting and bending them to form crude stick figures.
"She said a couple of things. It wouldn't have been right for me to
go snooping. I was her sponsor."
"And now you're not, because she's dead. This is the only thing you can do for her."
I'd never seen Jimmy this relentless. He might be reacting to the threat to Barbara if the police didn't get another strong suspect. Or maybe I'd just forgotten as my sobriety rolled on how good he was at giving tough love when he thought someone needed it.
"I ought to tell them," she said, "but I can't."
"You can," he said. "You got sober twice, two fucking miracles right there, and you can do this too."
I thought he'd pushed as hard as she could take right now.
"Promise you'll think about it," I said. "That's not too much to ask, is it?"
Judith nodded and flashed me half a smile. Her glance shifted back to Jimmy.
"I'll think about it," she said. "I promise."
Chapter Twenty-Two: Barbara
Barbara ran, legs kicking back, arms pumping, past the lakeside gazebo where tourists had gathered to listen to a duo of musicians, saxophone and electric guitar. The intermittent spring breeze cooled the damp curls on her forehead and the back of her neck. As she did every time she passed, she thought how exceptional the guitarist was and how nice it would be to come and sit and actually listen, maybe with Jimmy, some time when she wasn't on a training run. It would never happen. She could hardly ever get Jimmy into the park. She ran every day, and Bruce, even though he pooh-poohed formal exercise, had walked thousands, well, maybe hundreds of miles crisscrossing the stretch between his own apartment and theirs and getting to meetings. When Jimmy made an East Side meeting, he took the bus. He might think better of it now that he had to write down every $2.75 debit on his Metrocard. She could point out that the music in the gazebo was free.
She hated, hated, hated his DA recovery. It was spoiling everything. Everyone who knew her had heard her go on about how transformational recovery was. So now, on top of feeling deprived and unsupported in what she'd hoped would be a joyful phase of her life, she felt guilty and ashamed. Besides, thinking about it was killing her endorphins. She had to stop. Think positive thoughts. Say the Serenity Prayer.
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