"I suggest you back up quietly and let us into your apartment," Miriam said. "Keep your hands where I can see them. If you make any sudden moves, I can put a bullet through your friend's brain in no time at all."
With Barbara shielding her, I could see it was not the moment for heroics. I did as she said.
"Now close the door behind you," Miriam said. "Lock it. Keep your hands in sight. Where's your cell phone?"
I was wearing tight jeans, the better to entice Cindy with my manly buns. The phone was in my pocket, its outline clearly visible.
Miriam nudged Barbara with the gun.
"Put one hand behind your back," she said. "Now reach into his pocket and get his phone. No funny business, either of you."
Barbara's eyes and mine exchanged a warning glance. As long as we were bunched up so close together, we couldn't make a move without one or both of us getting shot. Our moment might not come for a while, but when it did, we had to be ready. As she tugged at the cell phone, her warm breath close to my ear, she whispered, "I'm sorry."
"Give me the phone," Miriam said. She was attired à la geek, in a T shirt and cargo pants with plenty of pockets. She tucked the phone away. The barrel of the gun at Barbara's neck didn't waver as she zipped the pocket closed.
"We outnumber you," I said.
"I can easily remedy that," she said. She repositioned her finger on the trigger to make her meaning clear.
"She's got Jimmy!" Barbara burst out.
"How did you manage that?" I asked Miriam.
If we could keep her talking, her attention might waver sooner or later.
"Your friend is smart," she said, "but not as smart as I am. If he'd run or knocked me out the moment I came up behind him and asked what he was doing at Fran's computer, I would have been in trouble. But Jimmy is too nice for his own good. He didn't want to hurt me, so he tried to bluff it out."
"He liked you!" Barbara snapped. "He was probably trying to give you the benefit of the doubt, hoping against hope that what he'd found could be explained some other way."
I shook my head infinitesimally. Who knew how this nutcase would react to indignation?
Miriam shrugged. The barrel of the gun remained steady on Barbara's neck.
"If he was, he's stupider than I thought."
"You're clever, all right," I said, praying her narcissism was strong enough to outweigh her common sense. "You had to be, to figure everything out."
"Did you know all along that your husband was seeing Sophia?" Barbara asked.
"The stupid bitch told me herself," Miriam said. "I knew he was seeing someone. I thought it was someone in the congregation. I was afraid he'd make a fool of himself and destroy his career."
"Why did you care?" I asked. "You have a good job yourself."
"I like being the rebbetzin," she said. "I get a lot of respect. Seymour's a child. He'd be lost without me. Who do you think tells him how to handle all the infighting and politics in that shul?"
"Why did Sophia tell you? Was she afraid you'd find out on your own?"
"She should have been," she said. "But it wasn't that at all. First she told me that it was over, as if I’d believe that. And as if it would make me not mind! That shiksa bitch seduced my husband. Why would she ever let him go? She babbled about making amends. She even said her sponsor told her not to tell me, but she had to wipe the slate clean and ask for my forgiveness."
"What did you make of that?"
"She was in one of those twelve-step programs," she said. "I've heard that poppycock before. People don't really change. They just learn to dissemble better when it suits them."
"Is that how you found out about Judith Orson?" Barbara asked. "She was Sophia's sponsor."
"I couldn't do anything when Sophia told me," Miriam said. "She had left a voice mail telling this Judith where she was meeting me, and she had promised to call her afterward to tell her how the conversation went. I supposed it was even possible she did mean to break it off, no matter how smitten Seymour was. I was sure he would never leave me. In the meantime, I made my plans, just in case."
"You got yourself some cyanide," I said. "And Jimmy found proof. What did you do with him? If you killed him, you won't get away with it. I swear you'll never be safe."
"Don't worry." Miriam emitted a dry chuckle. "I like Jimmy. He's in the trunk of my car. If he doesn't run out of air, he'll be perfectly all right. And he won't remember a thing."
"I caught her putting him there in the underground garage when I came to pick up Jimmy, " Barbara told me. "I couldn't understand why he was climbing in there of his own accord. By the time I figured out that she'd dosed him with Rohypnol, she'd slammed the lid of the trunk and had the gun trained on me. She asked me if anyone else knew. I'm sorry I dragged you into it, Bruce, but she'd have shot me right there if she'd thought Jimmy and I were the only loose ends. She made me drive her car over here."
"What happened to the great security Costello is supposed to have?" I asked.
"It's electronic security," Miriam said. "Costello's is well guarded against hackers. But if she'd yelled for help, or even if I'd pulled the trigger, no one would have come running. And I work in the building, remember? I can unlock the door to the elevator with my key card and go directly to my office."
"What about the gun?" I asked. "Don't they have metal detectors?"
Miriam repeated her ghastly chuckle.
"It's a 3D gun," she said. "It's made of ABS plastic. Acrylonitrile butadiene styrene, if you really want to know. It would fool a metal detector, but I didn't need to. I made it in the office. Costello always has to have the latest toy. His high-end 3D printer is quite a piece of machinery. I even found the latest specs for bullets that work in it. Not too many people have those yet. Your friend Jimmy might have found my search for those too. I really couldn't afford to let him remember."
"Wait a minute," Barbara said. "You said you were sure your husband would never leave you. She told you it was over. So why did you kill her?"
"The shiksa bitch got pregnant," Miriam said. "That changed everything."
"You don't have children, do you?" Barbara used her counseling voice, soothing and empathic.
Miriam made a sound that could have been a snarl or a moan. The gun didn't waver. I wondered if the woman pumped iron in her spare time.
"I had four miscarriages when Seymour and I first got married," she said. "Then we decided to stop trying. Seymour wanted kids, but he loved me enough in those days to put me first. She took that away from me. I'm not one bit sorry I killed her."
"Bruce?" Cindy's voice drifted on the air. "Who's there? Do we have company?"
Damn! Her timing sucked. I couldn't even shout a warning, with Miriam's gun still pressed to the back of Barbara's neck.
Cindy padded out of the bathroom, damp and barefoot, drying the ends of her hair with one end of the big towel she had wrapped around her. She took in the scene in front of her in one sharp glance. Then her face went slack. She let her eyes go round and her jaw drop.
"Who are you? What do you want?" She spoke in a baby-girl voice I'd never heard her use before. She was deliberately presenting herself as a negligible threat.
"Never mind that," Miriam said crisply. "Do as you're told, and you won't get hurt."
That was a big lie. She had told Barbara and me too much to leave us alive, and now Cindy was a witness.
"Go and stand next to him," she said. "Go on. Closer. And keep your mouth shut."
Cindy nestled in under my arm. I could feel her shivering. She must be faking it. The apartment was plenty warm, and my Cindy didn't scare that easily.
Barbara's indignant voice broke the silence.
"Can't you see the poor girl is freezing? For heaven's sake, let her at least put on her jacket. It's on the chair over there. Let me give it to her."
In that second, we all moved. Barbara scooped up Cindy's jacket and tossed it to her. I knew and Barbara no doubt guessed that Cindy had wrapped up her gun, sho
ulder holster and all, in its folds. Cindy let the towel drop—what the hell, they were all girls together, and I never got tired of seeing her naked—and aimed a kick at Miriam's gun hand. The gun went off, the bullet lodging in the ceiling. I leaped on Miriam in a flying tackle and clutched her around the shins, knocking her off balance. She lost her grip on the gun. It spun away across the floor. I knelt on her chest as Barbara picked up the gun with the dish towel I'd forgotten I was holding when the buzzer rang. Meanwhile, Cindy tucked her towel in with one smooth motion and straddled Miriam's legs.
"Roll her over so I can cuff her," Cindy said, wrenching Miriam's arm back and suiting the action to the word. Her handcuffs had been in the jacket pocket. The swift maneuver looked just as cool as it did on TV cop shows. I was almost sorry when she put the jacket on, fished out her cell from an inner pocket, and called for backup.
Chapter Thirty-Seven: Bruce
In the end, Barbara and Jimmy got married in the Park, under the gazebo near the lake. An interfaith minister Jimmy knew from AA officiated. Barbara wore a big floppy hat and pale green harem pants with a voluminous tunic floating over it and Junior underneath, growing almost visibly bigger hour by hour. Jimmy wore a gray suit, a pale green shirt, and a green tie with Celtic knots on it. I wore a navy blazer and pearl gray pants, in which the most WASP-y friend I ever had, now deceased, had once told me I could go anywhere. Nobody had to give Barbara away. As her father pointed out with a big grin, she had been self-propelled since the day she learned to crawl. Nice guy. Her mom was the matron of honor. The other guests stood in a big, loose semi-circle around them and wore what they damn pleased.
Barbara said she wouldn't feel married unless they stood under a chuppah, so we had rigged up a white silk canopy on four long poles. In case that wasn't enough, the underside of the gazebo was festooned with gauzy material that might have been cheesecloth or mosquito netting, dyed pale green. Jimmy wanted to honor his Celtic roots, so a bagpiper, another of Jimmy's many AA buddies, played them into position. There was no aisle for us to march down, just a sloping length of path, still slippery from last night's rain. The sun wouldn't have dared not shine on Barbara's wedding day.
She kept asking Jimmy and me if we didn't think she looked like an elephant. We kept assuring her she didn't until I finally told her that she looked like a radiant elephant and that would have to be good enough. Then she switched to asking me every two minutes if I still had the ring. I had to threaten to throw the ring in the lake to make her stop. The second ring, the one she would put on Jimmy's finger, was in her own pocket. She offered to take charge of my ring too, but I told her she had to trust somebody sometime, and this was a good time to start.
Considering it was a clean and sober wedding, things got very lively. Jimmy got a big laugh when he broke the glass, the other Jewish tradition Barbara insisted on. He said he hadn't smashed a glass in twenty years, but he'd had the hang of it then, and he bet it was like riding a bicycle. Someone called out, "Yeah, but you've never broken one glass before!" Everybody laughed again, and Jimmy stomped, and everybody yelled, "Mazel tov!" except for some of the program folks, who yelled, "It works! Keep coming back!" A clean and sober klezmer band played "Hava Nagila," and everybody danced with everybody. I even danced with Barbara's mom. The dancing was kind of a free-for-all, hiphop and waltzing and everything in between. Between them, the piper and the klezmer band had quite a repertoire. I danced all the slow ones with Cindy.
When the party started to wind down, Cindy and I wandered away from the commotion to sit on a big rock and enjoy it from a distance as twilight fell.
"So is your case wrapped up?" I asked.
"As far as we're concerned, yes," she said. " It's with the DA's office now. We're through until it comes to trial. You and Barbara will have to testify, you know."
"That's okay," I said. "They'll believe us because you'll be able to back us up."
"I didn't hear the whole thing," she said, "the way you and Barbara did. But I heard some of it. I waited a couple of minutes before I came into the room. If she'd stopped talking, I'd have been there in a split second."
"You mean you could have put something on besides that towel? Why didn't you?"
Cindy grinned.
"I knew I needed to disarm her, literally and figuratively."
"I admit it was quite a distraction," I said.
"I can testify that she was threatening to shoot you," Cindy said. "And finding Jimmy in the trunk of her car with Rohypnol in his system was pretty convincing too."
"I still don't understand everything that happened," I said. "Have you gotten any more answers out of her?"
"There are always some unanswered questions," she said. "But we've interviewed her several times, and we've been able to piece together more of the puzzle."
"Do you think she's nuts?"
"I don't know," she said. "She is a piece of work, though. Narcissistic, yes. What do you want to know?"
"For one thing, how did she know about Judith? She wasn't in the program. Sophia would never have told Miriam who her sponsor was."
"That was Brent Martin talking out of turn," Cindy said. "He and Sophia were first cousins. Miriam and Brent were cousins-in-law via two marriages: not blood relatives, but family. He says the subject of the museum came up, and he couldn't resist telling Miriam his degrees-of-separation story. We retrieved a voice mail message from Sophia on Judith's phone. She was determined to tell Miriam about the baby. I think she was trying to bookend the meeting with calls to Judith. You know how you're supposed to call your sponsor for support before and after a scary conversation?"
"I've never had a conversation that scared me that much," I said. "But yeah, I know the concept."
"We've retrieved the 'before' call," Cindy said. "There was no 'after' call. But Judith didn't know that. She'd been letting her messages pile up."
"Not surprising," I said, "when you remember she was drinking at the time."
"Sophia made a terrible mistake," I said. "Still, I can understand how she might have felt she had to tell Miriam she was pregnant. But why on earth did Judith agree to meet Miriam?"
"She still wasn't sure that Miriam was the killer," Cindy said. "Miriam spun her a story. Judith was sober by then, but barely, and probably feeling globally guilty."
"Been there, done that," I said.
"Me too. Anyhow, I think she had a misplaced sense of justice. You guys had persuaded her to tell the police that Seymour was Sophia's lover. That was going to hurt Miriam, and she wanted to warn her first as a kind of anticipatory amends. At least, that's my theory."
"She must have thought she'd be safe meeting for coffee in a public place," I said. "Wrong."
"Any more questions?" Cindy asked.
"Barbara answered them. I couldn't think why Barbara would take the car into midtown, which was the only reason she was in the parking garage at the right moment to catch Miriam in the act of putting Jimmy in the trunk. They were supposed to go straight from there to talk about the wedding with the minister. He lives in Hoboken."
"Jimmy knows somebody who lives in Hoboken?"
"Amazing, huh? For a Manhattan freak, he's getting positively global. The guy used to live in the city and still goes to meetings here. I also wondered how Miriam managed to park—I mean, make Barbara park, at gunpoint—in my neighborhood. It's hard to find a legal spot, and she couldn't afford to get towed. If she had, I hate to think how things might have turned out for Jimmy. According to Barbara, as they were driving from Costello's to my place, Miriam boasted about her parking karma."
"A killer but a true New Yorker," Cindy said.
"How's the rabbi doing?" I asked. "He's left with the scandal and the guilt."
"He's holding up," she said.
"Will he get a divorce?" I asked.
"I don't know," she said. "He's standing by her for now, and he'll pay for her defense. I went to see him after the arrest. At least his job is safe. He says his board isn't holding it aga
inst him. I felt kind of sorry for the guy. In a way, he's a victim too."
"It was his fault, though. If he hadn't cheated on his wife in the first place, none of it would have happened."
"Don't worry," she said, "he knows that. He's not getting off scot-free. His conscience won't let him. But what I wanted to tell you is that the phone rang four times while I was talking with him, all women inviting him to dinner. He says his congregation loves him. He let the calls go to voicemail, but that didn't stop them from making their intentions clear."
"As Barbara would say, it's a sexist world."
Cindy extracted herself from the circle of my arms and stood up, checking the back of her skirt for damp. She held out a hand and pulled me up too.
"I wonder what will happen to Miriam's big project," I said.
"You'll have to ask Jimmy about that," Cindy said.
"Not today," I said. "Not till after their honeymoon."
"They're going away? How did she talk him into it?"
"She had help. His new boss offered him a week at a Great Camp in the Adirondacks as a wedding present."
"I don't see either Jimmy or Barbara going camping on their honeymoon, not to mention that she's almost ready to pop."
"You never heard of the Adirondack Great Camps? They were rich folks' summer houses built in the nineteenth century. This one is a luxury resort. I think it used to belong to a Rockefeller."
"That's incredibly generous of Costello," she said. "He obviously values Jimmy."
"And he has money to burn," I said. "I'm glad they're getting some time away. They've both been so stressed out."
"You really love them, don't you?" Cindy flashed her raffish grin at me.
"Yeah, I do," I said. "You can't imagine how they've stood by me."
"When you were drinking?"
"No, they steered clear while I was self-destructing," I said. "I don't blame them. But when I was getting sober, they were amazing. I deserved to lose them, but they stuck."
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