21
It had been a restful
night, for a change.
The clock read 7:17. Betty got out of bed. She would have breakfast with
maman, as she had resolved the night
before. But she no longer felt the need to discuss Cary Seligman’s sexuality
with her.
She had dreamt about Cary. There had been erotic dreams. But in the
dreams with Cary there had been only talk. The male figure in the erotic ones,
though nameless, had been someone much more like Tom Radnovich.
Cary would be her friend, she now knew, but not her lover.
At least, if he wanted to be her friend and not her lover.
She needed to find someone more like Tom – pleasant personality
and good in bed – in Montreal. Well,
maybe need was a bit strong. But she
would be on the lookout.
She switched her cell phone on, and the text-message indicator gave her
an impatient beep. The message was from Marni:
pls call @ gzt asap.
Marni answered on the first ring. “Hi, Betty, I’m glad you called so
quickly. After talking to you it occurred to me that
you should be the one to write the story about Daniel’s case.”
“Me? But...”
“But it wouldn’t be objective? I wasn’t thinking about a news story but
an op-ed piece. The way you told it to me last night, but maybe fleshed out
with some background and some other details. You’ve been in touch with the
detective who cracked the case...”
And I’ve just dreamt about fucking him, Betty said to herself. “Detectives,” she corrected Marni.
“See?” Marni laughed. “I know you care about details. What do you say? It
would be your start in journalism.”
Betty was already imagining herself at her computer, composing the
article. Last October 15, my brother,
Daniel Wilner, was shot dead in a bar in the Bronx, New York. Should she
mention that that it happened shortly after he had been in Montreal for his
sister’s wedding? And that after nine months the marriage had fallen apart?
Or that it happened almost exactly twenty-five years after their father
had been killed while covering the Yom Kippur War?
Or both? Details, details...
“I’d love to do it, Marni. I’ll do an outline today and e-mail it to you.
The same format as Daniel’s Albanian article?”
“Sure. That’s great, Betty. No need to rush, though. And if we do get a
news story, we’ll link to it. By the way, I might add a little note from the
editor about what a great dancer Daniel was.” Marni
laughed again. “I’m kidding. I danced with him at your wedding, remember?”
Betty remembered. But what occupied her mind was the idea of her start in
journalism. Of course she needed some journalistic experience if she were to
publish a magazine.
She would be, it suddenly occurred to her, the
third Wilner journalist. And the other two had met untimely ends.
Des fins prématurées.
But they were reporters. She would not be a reporter.
Betty Wilner, intrepid girl reporter.
Like a female Tintin.
Tintine. She smiled inwardly.
Pas moi, chéri.
It ain’t me, babe.
Claudia
Quintero wasn’t sure what had woken her up, the alarm or the headache. Her
first thought was, I’m hung over. But
then she remembered that she had imbibed only half of her drink, and that she
had felt no influence of alcohol while driving home. Maybe it had just been bad
gin. Could it have been Albanian gin?
She would take a Tylenol and she would be okay. But she didn’t feel like
getting up.
She had worked for eight consecutive days. And a very intense eight days
they had been. She had been going to take the following two days off, Wednesday
and Thursday. But it might be a good idea to change it, and stay home on this Tuesday.
She reached over for her cell phone, which, as usual, had been plugged in
to the charger but not switched off, and called the precinct to tell the desk
sergeant (who happened to be the recently promoted Barry O’Keefe, her academy
classmate) that she wasn’t feeling well. If Lieutenant DePalma needed to talk
to her, he could call her back.
In any case, she could use another day away from Tom Radnovich. Not that
there was anything wrong with Tom Radnovich. But at this moment, with the
two-count case of The People of New York against Omar Murova closed, it was
time to put it to rest, while Tom gave her the impression of not being quite
finished with it.
In general, though, as male partners went, he was a good as it could get:
smart and respectful, a good listener who treated her as an equal though he
outranked her: he was Detective Second Grade, she was still Third Grade.
Not that a detective’s grade level, in the NYPD, really signified rank,
the way rank was observed in Britain, or at least in the novels – which Claudia
so much enjoyed reading – by P. D. James, Ruth Rendell, Colin Dexter and
Elizabeth George, where a Detective Inspector or a Detective Chief Inspector
would have as his (and it was bloody always his,
until Helen Mirren as DCI Jane Tennison came along on television) very junior
partner a Detective Constable or Detective Sergeant who would call him “Sir”
(or her “Ma’am”).
No, in New York it was only a matter of seniority, expressed in such ways
as who would bear the primary responsibility for submitting reports, or whose
decision would prevail in case of a disagreement over procedure. But Tom
Radnovich had never pulled rank on her in that way. If he wanted his opinion to
prevail, it would be by arguing it as forcefully as he could. Claudia was sure
that he had done the same with Orsini, who was already Detective First Grade.
Rick DePalma had strongly implied to both her and Tom that solving the
two cases would entail promotions for both of them. Going up to Second Grade
would mean, for her, a salary like that of a sergeant.
With the raise she might consider getting a new car. She loved her Paseo
and, with the regular maintenance that she gave it, it was holding up quite
well for its 95,000 driven miles. She thought that the Paseo defined her in the
way that the fictional British DCIs were defined by their Lancias, Jaguars or
Bentleys. In Colombian Spanish dar
un paseo didn’t mean just ‘take a walk’ but also ‘take a
ride,’ and she liked to say that she was going to
dar un paseo en mi Paseo.
She would have liked to get a new Paseo. To her chagrin, Toyota had
stopped selling the model two years earlier. But she had recently heard that it
was still available in Canada, though it wouldn’t be after this year. Maybe she
could visit Betty Wilner in Montreal, buy herself a car, and drive it back to
New York.
Wasn’t she selling the bear’s skin before hunting it down? Or, she
corrected herself, counting her chickens before they were hatched? Not really:
she had more than enough in her money-market account to buy a car. Better yet:
she had more than enough credit on her Visa card, and she would get all those
frequent-flier miles! And if she waited too long, she might never get another
new Paseo, and whatever new sporty coupé Toyota or anybody else might come up
with, it would never replace it.
Suddenly she realized that she was feeling great. The headache was gone,
with no medication necessary. Should she go to work after all? She had already
called in sick. She could rescind that call. Or maybe not.
She realized that what was driving her was the idea of flying to Montreal
in order to buy a car. Was that something that could be done in one day? She
had never done anything so impulsive in her life. At least, not anything that
mattered. Going to bed with a guy she had just met was a bagatelle in
comparison.
She bounded out of bed, started her coffeemaker, and began making a list
of phone calls that she would make after nine o’clock.
”So,” Detective
Tom Radnovich said with a laugh when he saw Lieutenant Rick DePalma entering
his office, “that promotion you talked about?”
“The paperwork is on the captain’s desk,” the lieutenant said, smiling as
he stopped in his doorway. “First grade for you and second
grade for Quintero. I hear the brass is impressed.”
“That’s nice. Where is my
partner, by the way?”
“She called in sick. She was going to take tomorrow and the day after
off, so we agreed that it would be today and tomorrow instead. She didn’t
specify what she had, but O’Keefe said she sounded sleepy.”
“Okay, I’ve got some relatively old cases to write up.”
“Sure. And there’s this new kid Joe Fuentes.” Fuentes wasn’t exactly a
kid – he was at least thirty – but he was new to detective ranks. “I’m
partnering him with Musgrave, but he’s off today, so we’ll let Joe tag along
with you if you get called on a case.”
“If it isn’t one Hispanic it’s another, is that it?”
“This is the South Bronx.”
DePalma began to pull his office door shut, and Tom went to his desk, taking a
slight detour so that he could walk past Joe Fuentes’ desk and say hello to
the new kid.
The Wilner case is finally closed, he said to himself as he sat down. And
so is the Begović case.
But for some strange reason the normal feeling of satisfaction that came
with the closing of a case, especially a difficult one like these two (which to
him had become one case), wasn’t quite there.
No question about it: he had become emotionally drawn into the case. Of
course there were the four women that he had met through it. But this had
happened before, meeting a woman through working a case. There was Voula. There
were... No, no point in reminiscing over old cases. There were Megan, Betty,
Yasmina and Alida. Each had affected him in a different way. Strangely enough,
the one that he had first gotten the hots for, the one who had brought him out
of a state of sexual torpor, was the one that he had
not had sex with.
But sex was not what the double case was about. Well, yes, it was, for
Omar. But only incidentally so for Tom Radnovich.
For him, as usual, the case had been a puzzle to be solved. And the
solution, in the end, had proved too simple to be satisfying.
It would have been different if it had been a movie script. Movies thrive
on false leads (the coded names in Daniel’s computer files), mistaken
identities (Shkodra and Shkodran!), and accidental discoveries like Betty’s
finding of the gun hidden in a tissue box.
Except that in a movie, or in a novel, what would have seemed at first to
be simple personal murder would turn out to involve high-level politics or
organized crime (or both). This case had gone the other way.
In his spare time, Tom Radnovich decided, he would compose an outline of
the case as if it were a – what do they call it? – treatment?
No, that’s the long one. A synopsis, that’s it.
It was time to look back at other cases. And, a little
later, to call Claudia.
The Claudia who
had called Betty had sounded nothing at all like Detective Claudia Quintero.
Not the informative Claudia Quintero who had briefed her on the developments of
Daniel’s case in the lobby of the hotel, and on the phone before that. Not the
discreetly quiet Claudia of the walk in Lower Manhattan. Not the briskly
efficient policewoman who had come to Old Nick’s within a minute of Betty’s
call.
Claudia, Betty thought, was eight or ten year older than she. But this
morning, on the phone, she had sounded like an excited undergraduate. Or at
least like Betty herself when she got into a giddy mood. Except that she didn’t
giggle.
She had two days off, Claudia had gushingly told Betty, and she had
decided to fly to Montreal in order to buy herself a car, which she would drive
back to New York the next day. It was only as an afterthought that she
explained that the car she liked, a Toyota Paseo, was no longer sold in the
States but still available in Canada, but it was being discontinued there too
and very few models were left. Her Toyota dealership in Queens had told her
that they would arrange with one located near the airport in Montreal not only
to have a car ready for her but to pick her up at the airport and put her up in
a nearby guesthouse. They had already done this for other customers. She would
drive back the next day, but would Betty like to have dinner with her that
evening? She could pick her up with her new car if Betty gave her directions to
her house.
But once Betty told Claudia what an amazing coincidence her call had
been, since she was about to write an article about Daniel’s case and needed to
go over the facts, Claudia immediately became her serious self. She would not
have the file with her, she explained. She had been on the reopened case only
for a week, and what she knew of the very complex Lejla Begović case,
which was inextricably connected to that of Daniel, was only from the fill-in
that Tom had given her, since it had never been her case until she got Omar’s
confession. If Betty wanted that as part of her story, she would need to talk
to Tom Radnovich.
They had agreed that Claudia would pick Betty up at 6:30 and go out to a
restaurant of Betty’s choosing. And then, after clicking off, Betty began to
think.
She had accepted the theory of Daniel’s accidental death in a shootout,
and also that of his being the target of a deliberate shooting by one or both
of the gangs. But something had struck her as fishy about the final version of
the case: that Omar had somehow managed to place Daniel at the precise location
where he would be hit in the course of the shootout that Omar would provoke by
firing the gun in the bathroom.
At least one of the bullets that hit Daniel, she now believed, must have
been aimed at him. Megan had once told her of the low mathematical probability
that two bullets fired at random
would hit the same target. What this now meant was that someone else, present
at the shooting, had to be involved.
Who? One of the Gremnik Boys or one of Steve Lusha’s
men?
From the way that, according to Claudia, Omar’s brother had reacted when
he found out what had happened, it would seem that the brother had nothing to
do with it, and it seemed unlikely that young Omar would have his own alliances
in the gang without
his brother being involved.
What about Steve Lusha, then? I am
so sorry about your brother, beautiful Miss Wilner. Some nice
Albanian wine? Something
about Steve’s oily effusiveness had struck her, if only subliminally, as phony.
But what could he have had against Daniel?
Well, Daniel had written about Albanians. There was that
Heq qafe article that she had recently
e-mailed to Marni, after suitably emending it. But the emendations had included
the line As
I already wrote in these pages, so he
had written other articles on the subject, maybe in ways that Steve hadn’t
liked.
But what were these pages?
There was only one thing to do: open the
Published subfolders of DW/Articles,
starting with Published_98, and scan
them for content, or at least look at the titles.
She would do it later in the afternoon. At that moment she felt the need
to get out of the house. She had to go back to the rental agency with a check,
and as long as she was in the area she would have lunch, and then drop into
some boutiques. It was time to look for some
décolleté.
No. Her curiosity was too strong. She went to her computer and started
prospecting. And very quickly she struck gold. The file newly named
1998-05-23 contained an article titled
simply Albanian Gangs, beginning like
this:
In New York City, Albanyites are
sometimes jokingly called Albanians. I want the readers of the
Times Union to know that when I write
about Albanians I mean those who are ethnically Albanian, whether from Albania,
Kosovo or other places. If some of them also happen to be Albanyites, it is
entirely coincidental.
This was it!
Albanyites!
The
Times Union was obviously a paper in
Albany, New York, and Daniel had probably submitted his article there so he
could make the Albany-Albania joke. Very Daniel.
She printed the
article and placed the output on her desk to read when she returned from her
outing.
Everything had worked out
for Claudia Quintero with incredible smoothness. Her travel agent, Connie
Martínez, working with a consolidator operating in Bogotá, found her a flight
to Montreal, for that same afternoon, at less than half the fare that the
airline would have charged her. And, at the Toyota dealership where she had
bought her car and continued to have it serviced, a salesman told her that she
was not the only New Yorker who was going to Canada to buy up the final stock
of Paseos, and they had an arrangement with a dealer in Montreal, near the
airport.
She called Betty
again to confirm the plan.
“Could your
miraculous travel agent also find a ticket like that for me, for Thursday?”
Betty asked.
“You mean, from
Montreal to New York? I doubt it.”
“No, I mean from
New York to Montreal, just like you. I’d like to hitch a ride to New York with
you in your new car, so I can talk to Tom in person.”
“That’s great!
But shouldn’t you inform him?”
“Of course.
Let me know if you can get that flight for me. Anytime on
Thursday is okay. I’ve got to be home on Friday to pack up all my stuff,
because I’m moving on Saturday. Into my own place!”
“Congratulations!”
There was a
ticket available only for the same early-afternoon flight on Thursday, on
American Airlines (actually American Eagle) out of
LaGuardia, that Claudia was to take shortly. She called Betty back immediately.
She got voicemail, and left her the message with Connie’s telephone number and an
admonition to call as soon as possible.
She packed her
things, including a dress to wear for eating out in a restaurant, had a quick
lunch and walked to 83rd Avenue to catch the Q33 bus to LaGuardia.
While seated on
the bus she called Tom Radnovich. She guessed that he would be on lunch break,
and she was right.
“Hi, Claudia!
I meant to call you, but I got hung up! How’re you feeling?”
“Fantastic! I
got over whatever was bothering me after I called in sick, and then I just
decided to take the day off, as well as tomorrow, which I was already taking
off, but I’ll be back Thursday. Right now I’m on the way to LaGuardia and then
I’m going to Montreal!”
“What?
Just like that?”
“For a reason.
I decided that I need a new car, and you know I like my
Paseo, but now I can get one only in Canada. So I’m flying out today and
driving back tomorrow.”
“Wow!”
“And, not quite
coincidentally, our friend Betty Wilner will be coming with me. She needs to
talk to you. Tomorrow evening. She’ll call you about it.”
“She just can’t
stay away from New York!”
“Maybe from you!
You’d better watch out!”
Tom chuckled. “Tomorrow evening, you say?”
“Yes. Are you free?”
“I guess so, if
I skip my workout. Do you know how long she plans to stay? And
where? With her new friend the lawyer, maybe?”
“She’ll tell you
all about it.”
“Well, thanks
for the warning. I’d better get back to the precinct. My phone’s flashing.”
“Bye, Tom! See
you Thursday!”
As soon as
Claudia clicked off, her voicemail indicator beeped. The message was from
Betty: she had made her flight reservation, and was excited about seeing
Claudia in the evening and riding down to New York with her tomorrow.
It had been a strange case.
Tom wished that Claudia had been with him, since the people involved were
Hispanic, though the woman who was the suspect in the case was a Nuyorican in
her thirties speaking fluent South Bronx English. Just like Joe Fuentes, who
had gone with him on the call. But Joe had a few
things to learn about keeping his distance from the people that a detective
investigates. This was not the same as community policing. He would learn. They
all did.
The woman had
killed her husband.
He had been in
his fifties, and had been diagnosed with terminal cancer a year before.
Incurable. Inoperable.
Unbearable, according to her. But, with his Catholic
upbringing, he had been unable to bring himself to suicide, and so had begged
his wife, in a written note, to kill him while he was in deep, sedated sleep.
Or so the woman claimed, having produced the typewritten note with
her husband’s signature. She had done it by injecting him with potassium
chloride.
Mercy killing?
Assisted suicide? Illegal in New York, of course, but a
sympathetic jury might go lenient.
Yet something
seemed fishy. The man had been an upper-class Dominican, owning a fair amount
or property in the Republic. But according to Joe Fuentes, the language of the
note was the kind of Spanish that he
would write, not an educated man from Santo Domingo. For one thing, there were
too many borrowings and word-for-word translations from English. And while the
signature looked authentic, it was of the florid kind that would not be too
hard to forge. It might even have been traced. It would have to be examined by
a handwriting expert.
And then there
was the matter of the will. A new one had been written some six months earlier,
reducing the share of the man’s estate that would go to his children (from his
first marriage) from two-thirds to one-third and correspondingly increasing
that of the young wife, “in appreciation
of the loving care that she has given me in my illness.”
It would also be
necessary to find out from doctors just how grave the man’s illness had been.
The woman
already had a lawyer in place – it was the one who had drafted the will, in
itself a suspect coincidence – and clammed up after the initial admission.
Arraignment was going to be later that afternoon.
While he was
writing up the preliminary report, Tom checked his voicemail. Sure enough,
there was a message from Betty Wilner. “Hi, Tom, it’s Betty. I guess Claudia already
told you that I’ll be going to New York with her tomorrow. I’d like to see you
tomorrow evening. There are a couple of things I’d like to talk to you about.
And I’d like to stay over at your place. I hope that’s okay with you. Bye!”
Stay over?
As a guest, or as a bedmate?
His guest
facilities were limited. The arrangement with the kids was that they slept in
their sleeping bags (or on them, on
warm summer nights), Brian in the bedroom – sometimes on the floor and
sometimes on Tom’s queen-size bed – and Lindsey on the living-room sofa. He
didn’t think that that was what Betty had in mind.
The prospect of
sleeping with the beautiful Betty again excited him. After the miscommunication
with Yasmina he had thought that he was ready to retreat back into a figurative
monastic cell for a while, but now he felt far from ready.
He had the
impression of having given Betty some physical discomfort the first time. It
sometimes happened that, after extensive foreplay, his organ swelled to more
than its normal size, and that first time with Betty had been one of those
times. It had also happened with Yasmina on their first date, but Yasmina
seemed to like size, and he thought that he had detected a tinge of
disappointment when it wasn’t there the second evening. It had not happened
with Voula or Julia or Alida.
And, as a matter of fact, the occasions of what a doctor had once jokingly
called “sporadic hyperphallia, to give it a medical name” had occurred, with
any one woman, only the first time. When Tom had told him that, the doctor had
renamed it “sporadic primocoital hyperphallia.” Tom thought that it might
happen in order to make up for the times when in similar situations he couldn’t
get it up (“primocoital impotence”).
But, he now
thought, it was too soon to presume, until he actually talked to Betty.
He stepped
outside the station and called her back. She answered on the first ring, but he
felt oddly shy and couldn’t bring himself to say any more than that it was fine
for her to stay over. “Thanks, Tom!” she said. “See you tomorrow!” He would
find out her intentions once she was there.
Amelia Klein had been right,
as usual. Twenty-four hours after the tramadol injection the pain was down to a
tolerable level, and the bleeding was down to less
than half of the previous volume. Not only that, but the anxiety she had been
feeling while awaiting the test results felt like no more than curiosity.
But the most
remarkable effect of the drug was on Sam. Could it have been the sedative
equivalent of a contact high? At lunch he was back to his chatty, sweet self,
and promptly at two o’clock – did he know how to tell time already? –
he began to yawn. After she put him down in his crib he
looked at her through the slats and said, “Hi, mommy” before shutting his eyes.
It was now obvious.
For the last several days, while Megan had been experiencing her anxiety, Sam
had been reacting to it. In his infantile way, perhaps, he had felt responsible
for it, and believed that he could change it by changing his behavior. Never
underestimate the mind of a child, Doctor Cantalupo was fond of saying. And now
that mommy was back, at least relatively, to her placid self, Sam could be
himself again.
For the first
time in – how long had it been? five days? – Megan
Kenner felt capable of attentive thinking about matters other than her physical
condition. And she thought about the surprising resolution of the mystery of
Daniel’s killing, as told by his sister.
Surprising because, on the one hand, he had been hit (improbable as it
might be) by two bullets fired at random in the course of a shootout between
gangs.
As first supposed. But, on the other hand, the shootout had
been deliberately provoked with the intention of having him killed, or at least
injured. The perpetrator had admitted as much. It was from jealousy over a girl.
And later the same guy had strangled the same girl.
It seemed too
neat. And too simple. All the intrepid reporting that
Daniel had done in Kosovo, the confidential phone calls in which he had given
her the real names of the war criminals to whom, in print, he had given
pseudonyms... They must have known that
he had been writing about them. And even if his articles had not yet appeared
in any major publications – he was in no rush, he had told her, to get into the
big leagues – the Albanian gangs, with their ties to the KLA, had their
tentacles spread out. The last time that he had visited her he had shown her
some threatening mail he had received in response to an article on Albanian
gangs that he had published in a paper in, of all places, Albany, New York.
Betty was still
thinking about Daniel’s article. She had finished reading it half an hour
earlier, and immediately e-mailed Marni the message that she
needed to do some more research before she could work on her essay. She was
still in her jeans and her old J’♥ ST-LAURENT tee-shirt when Claudia
drove up behind the wheel of her shiny new metallic-blue car. When she went out
to greet Claudia as she stepped out of the car, Betty saw that Claudia was
wearing heels and a dress that was similar to, if not as low-cut as, one that
she had just bought. It had not occurred to her, unaccustomed as she was to the
practice, to regard a restaurant outing with a woman companion as a dress-up
occasion.
“You look
fabulous,” Betty said.
“Thanks. I’m not
only off duty but out of New York. When I’m in town I never know when I might
be called in on a case, so I have to dress a little more professionally.”
“I just bought a couple of dresses like this, but I haven’t worn them
yet, except to try them on.”
“Put one of them on!”
“Come into the house,” Betty said. “My mom is out with a friend.” It was,
Betty knew, with Tina Leblanc, not the new male friend whose name Betty didn’t
know yet, but about whom she would probably talk with Tina. “Help me choose
which dress to wear.”
“Is one of them more revealing than the other?”
“Yes,” Betty said after recalling her reflected images in the mirrors of
the two shops.
“Then wear that one! As they say in my culture,
¡si lo tienes, lúcelo! If you’ve got it, show it! It’s not quite as
strong as ‘flaunt it,’ but... anyway, we can then be
bosom buddies!” They laughed together.
“Where would you like to eat?” Betty asked.
“Your choice, my treat,” Claudia said.
“No way! You’re in my precinct, officer! The
specialty here in Saint-Laurent” – Betty pointed at the legend on her shirt –
“is Lebanese. Are you familiar with that food?”
“Where I live in Queens there’s everything.
Within two blocks there’s probably fifty different
cuisines. And yes, I love Middle Eastern. So go get dressed, and let those Arab
types drool over us!”
It turned out, at the same place where Betty had had her solitary lunch
the previous day, to be a dinner of girl talk.
Early on in the conversation, Betty sought an opening through which to
insinuate the suggestion that Omar might not be the sole killer.
It began promisingly enough. Claudia reminded Betty of the time when she
told her that she identified with her because both women had lost their fathers
when they were little. She later realized that she was mistaken – that Betty,
born after her father’s death, was more like Claudia’s sister
Martha, and Claudia was really more like Daniel. When Betty asked what had
happened to their father, Claudia said that he was murdered by some unknown
party or parties, and it was the fact that the murder had never been solved
that ultimately led her to become a detective. “Believe me, Betty,” she said,
“knowing is better than not knowing, and it’s good that we’ve found the
perpetrator.”
“But are you sure that it was only
Omar? Just because he confessed, you know...”
“We’re never sure of anything, Betty. But we have a plausible scenario,
we have a confession, and no evidence that Omar is covering for anyone.”
“It’s just that... never mind.” She was going to bring up the matter of
probabilities, but she didn’t see how that would change Claudia’s mind. After
all, improbable things happen, though rarely, and
very improbable things happen too, though
very rarely, and you can’t rule out one particular happening just
because it’s very improbable. Where had she heard that argument? It was back at
McGill, when a fellow student – Randi Ness, as a matter of fact – had once
tried to convince her of the reality of Biblical miracles. “You’re right,”
Betty went on, “it’s better to know than not to know, even if you’re not
absolutely sure. Was your father’s death ever investigated?”
Claudia laughed. “Yeah, they went through some formalities, but they were
afraid of the same fate. They were my father’s colleagues. You see, he was an
investigating judge, sort of like a prosecutor...”
“I know, they have them in France. They’re in
all the French crime movies.”
“When I came to this country – I mean, to the US – I thought that
I would become an investigating judge,
until I found out that there’s no such thing here, I mean there, and
it’s detectives who investigate crimes. So here I am.”
Claudia laughed again. She had a deep, womanly laugh, and Betty suddenly felt
self-conscious about her tendency to giggle. Another assignment to self:
develop a mature laugh.
And then, somehow, the talk turned to the men in their lives. Betty told
Claudia about Gérard and Paul, but since Claudia knew about her and Cary, Betty
refrained from mentioning that brief liaison unless Claudia asked about it.
Claudia, in her turn, talked about her three-year marriage to a poet who
had turned Wall Street financier, and her many relationships before and after.
She casually mentioned a six-month-long affair with Tom Radnovich, before they
had become partners, giving no indication that she knew about Betty’s one-night
stand with Tom a week or so earlier or that she suspected another one coming
up. And then she talked about her last, a guy named Tony who, amazingly enough,
had many years ago been Cici’s boyfriend before Daniel.
“Small world,” Betty said with a laugh that she hoped was more like
Claudia’s.
|