Act of God (17 page)

“So,” he said, “what else you need to know?”

“We were talking about the night—”

“Oh, right. Right. Sorry, where was I?”

“In the men’s room.”

“Right, and I was telling you—look, that was another of Abe’s ideas.”

“What was?”

“Us sharing the men’s room with the customers. Or Beverly and the female salespeople with the women. The idea was, you’d overhear things that might help you with the business.”

“Like what?”

“Like, ‘I really like a print on a sofa better than plain, don’t you?’ Or, ‘Man, blue leather is just so
in,
I gotta have it.’ Like that.”

“So, you’re in the men’s room that night.”

“Right.”

“For how long?”

“How long? I don’t know. Was it ten minutes? Could have been. Fifteen? Maybe. These pills, they make it … unpredictable, you know?”

“Did you hear anything?”

“Not till the alarms went off.”

“Alarms?”

“Yeah, the—well, I guess there’s just the one alarm, but we got sirens everywhere, and it just about deafened me in there with all that tile.”

“What did you do?”

“Started cursing. We’d had this trouble before, like I said.”

“Then what?”

“Well I—I finished up as quick as I could, then went out to the head of the stairs and yelled for Finian.”

“The head of which stairs?”

“The store stairs.”

“Through the swinging doors.”

“Right. But I don’t know if he could hear me. I sure as hell couldn’t hear him. So I walked back through the doors into the corridor here.”

“The office corridor.”

“Right. And I see Beverly down at the other end, and I yell to her, but she doesn’t hear me.”

“What’s she doing?”

“She’s got the door open—the door to the back stairs, now—and she’s yelling for Finian, too.”

“You could hear her?”

“Yeah—No, no, as a matter of fact, I couldn’t. Couldn’t hear what she was saying, I mean, just her voice over the alarm. I guess she must have told me later what she was saying. Anyway, I see her at the door, and when she doesn’t turn around after I yell at her, I go down to see what’s what.”

“You didn’t see your partner.”

“No. I was watching her. I glanced in the office here probably, but I don’t really remember doing it now.”

“You glanced in here but didn’t see anything?”

“Like I said, I maybe didn’t even glance in. That alarm, it makes everything kind of fuzzy, you know?”

“Go ahead.”

“So I get to Beverly, and it’s like she’s seen a ghost or something. She’s yelling and crying, but I can’t make sense of it, except for the one word.”

“Which word?”

“ ‘Abe.’ ”

This time I was ready for the blubbering sound, but Bernstein didn’t make it. “Then what happened?”

“Beverly turned around and started running back up the hall, so I followed her to our office here. She stopped at the door, and I—I don’t know exactly what I did. All I know is that I saw the poker thing we never should have had in the first place because the goddamned fireplace doesn’t draw—Despradelle, he was great on the facades there, but not so hot on the heating system. And Beverly and I moved Abe around and we tried to … but he was gone. You could see it.”

The blubbering sound, more than once, then a steady chorus of it, but still no tears.

When Bernstein finished, I said, “Then what?”

“Beverly called the police, and Finian got here—the office here, I mean, and he said he went out the back door after he heard the alarm but didn’t see anybody.”

“Does the alarm sound when any of these doors is opened?”

“You mean the doors to the back stairs?”

“Yes.”

“Yeah. Some kind of fire regulation, account of we don’t have fire escapes. Every door to the stairs has to be wired into the alarm.”

“So you wouldn’t know which door the guy went through?”

“I don’t know if they can tell that. The cops went through all the floors when they got here. At least, that’s what I was told afterward.”

“Other than a panicked robber, you think of anybody who’d want to hurt your partner?”

“Abe? Hurt him? You never knew the man. Listen to people who did, me almost thirty years. He grew up in the camp, in Buchenwald. He grew up knowing violence, knowing what provoked it. Knowing the kind of person who got off on it. He also knew how to avoid it. He was the kind never to give offense. Never a harsh word. And he never lied, either. Never, not once in all the years I knew him. Abe … Abe …”

The blubbering again. It hurt you to hear it.

This time I said, “About the business.”

A shrug. “I’m gonna carry it on, long as the economy’ll let me. It’s what I’ve got. No family, just this.”

“What kind of shape is it in?”

A darkening. “You need that for what you’re doing for Pearl?”

“It might help to know.”

“What’s to know? We’re floundering. A lot of the big furniture places, they’ve already closed their Boston stores, like Paine’s there on Arlington Street? Never thought I’d see that. Others can’t make it in the suburbs even, they closed down altogether. Beauty of this place, it’s ours. The building, I mean. We own it, still free and clear, so I can last as long as I can cover the rest of the overhead, like payroll, utilities, and all.”

“And if you had to close?”

“At least it wouldn’t be bankruptcy court, like a lot of others. We’d hand out the pink slips, lock the doors, and sell the building for what it’d bring.”

“Did you and Mr. Rivkind ever talk about that?”

“Abe? Are you kidding or what? This place
was
Abe Rivkind. He’d never even consider …” Bernstein paused. “Wait a minute. What are you saying?”

“I’m not saying anything.”

“No, but you’re implying something, aren’t you? You’re implying that Abe would have kept the store running, even if it meant a lot of debt and bankruptcy if it did have to close. Well, let me tell you something, Mr. Investigator. Abe wanted to do that, he was the boss, as far as I was concerned. I would have let him have his way, because of how he went through the camp and because of how he treated me. You’ve been thinking, how come Joel’s not crying over his partner of twenty years, am I right?”

“Yes.”

My not trying to dodge that question seemed to throw Bernstein off a little. “You’re a direct son of a bitch, I’ll give you that. Well, I’m not crying for Abe because I don’t cry, Mr. Cuddy. I learned not to cry when the other kids in school threw food at me and tripped me and just-for-the-hell-of-it beat the shit out of me. And I didn’t cry for Abe, I don’t see me ever crying again over anything. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t love him, and it doesn’t mean I had reason to kill him. Now get out of here.”

“Mr. Bern—”

“Get out! You want to go through the store, do what you gotta do for Pearl, fine. But you get the hell out of my office right now or I’ll put you through one of Despradelle’s windows there.”

I stood up. Either I’d really struck a nerve with him, or he was very good at sensing a question about any relationship between his partner and Darbra before I could ask it.

I
LEFT THE OFFICE
complex through the fire door to the rest room corridor. A man came from the swinging doors and bent over to take a drink at the water fountain. His footsteps weren’t much more than clicks as he’d come toward me, and I went into the men’s room as he walked back toward the swinging doors. From inside, I couldn’t hear him at all, and I wasn’t even in a stall, like Joel Bernstein had been, where the walls would be another barrier to sounds.

I left the rest room and moved back into the store. I dawdled a little on the fourth floor, fending off two eager salespeople, then risked my knee to climb down to the third and did the same. I confirmed what I’d thought on the way up with Karen: plenty of places for somebody to hide until after Value Furniture closed for the night.

I was moving gingerly down the staircase, the knee seeming pretty stable inside the brace but me not wanting to press my luck. On the last flight to the first floor I saw Karen at the main entrance, pointing up toward me as she spoke to a kid in his early twenties with clean-cut good looks over a golf shirt and blue jeans. He came up the steps two at a time, bouncing on the balls of his feet like a dancer and smiling at me. I smiled back, and the kid hit me in the stomach with his right fist.

As I doubled over, Karen screamed and ran out of my sight to the left. The kid swung his knee up toward my face, and I parried it with my right palm, pushing forward so that he went backward down the stairs. He stumbled at first, regaining his balance as I straightened back up, my left knee not even wobbling. He charged and decided to try another punch, this one a swooping left cross. I blocked it with my right forearm and slipped my hand up and under his arm at the triceps, pinning his wrist and hand at my underarm and lifting up just enough to let him know I could dislocate his elbow if things didn’t calm down.

“Hey, hey that hurts!”

The voice was familiar. I said, “It’s supposed to.”

“Let go. Let go of me!”

“Not just yet. Who are you?”

“Fuck you.”

I lifted a little more.

“Ow. Ow! I’m Larry Rivkind, all right?”

The son from the telephone. “Why did you attack me?”

“Let me go.”

“Same question.”

Exasperation, then resignation. “My mother shouldn’t have hired you, and I don’t want you going around, trying to throw mud at my father.”

“I’m not. I—”

“You are, if you’re here asking questions. He never had any affair. He told her he didn’t, and my father never lied.”

“So people keep telling me.”

“Now let me go.”

“If I do, you going to behave?”

“Yeah. Yeah, come on.”

I let him go as I backed away on the step. He rubbed his arm a little, then said, “I’m telling you, butt out of this. Butt out now.”

I expected that Karen had gone for help, and she returned with a husky guy about thirty in a powder blue, short-sleeved shirt and dark blue pants. There were no patches or badges on the shirt, but the forearms were corded with muscle, and the nose looked like the next break might take it into double figures. His hair was red and cut in an old-fashioned butch. The brows were so fair as to be almost invisible, the eyes under them more playful than wary.

He said, “What’s this, now?”

“Nothing,” said Rivkind, moving down the stairs but not rubbing his arm anymore with company having arrived. Taking the last few steps two at a time, he went out the door.

I said to the guard, “Why didn’t you stop him?”

“They don’t try leaving with a lamp under their arm, they’re welcome to go.” The brogue was thick, the voice syrupy with that harsh edge that makes you pay attention to it. “Besides, he’s family of the owners. And who might you be?”

“John Cuddy.”

“Ah, the one we had the call about.”

“Probably.”

“Finian Quill. I suppose you’ll be wanting to hear my side of it, won’t you?”

“I would.”

Quill looked over to where he’d come from. “There’s a place in back might suit us.”

“Kerry. And your family, now?”

I said, “Cork, both sides.”

Finian Quill nodded. He was sitting on a recliner chair in an employees’ lounge furnished comfortably with pieces that looked too expensive for the purpose until you noticed a tear here or a ding there. His hands were folded casually over his belt, his head resting back at the half-mast position in the chair. I shifted my rump on a leather love seat. “How long have you been in the states?”

“Oh, you lose track of that sort of thing pretty fast, you do. This beautiful country, it intoxicates, makes you forget most everything that came before her.”

Despite the nose, the smile looked to have all its teeth. “Mind if I see your registration card?”

“What, my green card?”

“Right.”

His teeth flashed at me again. “I’m thinking neither of us has a badge here.”

I was thinking how a man like “Honest” Abe might react to finding out he’d broken the law in hiring his new guard. “How illegal are you, Quill?”

“How might ‘Finian’ and ‘John’ strike you for conversational purposes?”

“Fine. How illegal?”

“Well now, I’m not sure there’s levels of that where the Irish are concerned, John, but I’ve heard tell of streets in Dorchester where a man could buy himself a lovely package of Social Security card, voter registration, and the like for about a hundred dollars.”

“Which makes you look like a citizen.”

“So long as the one doing the looking isn’t too demanding. Now, with what I’m told is my strongish accent, I’m not so sure I could pull that off.”

“So you have a green card.”

“Not quite kelly green, but it will do.”

“Let me guess. You came over on a tourist visa good for what, three months?”

“More like six.”

“And you decided to overstay your welcome.”

“As I said, an intoxicating country.”

“So long as somebody else is buying the drinks.”

A flash of more anger than teeth. “Easy words to your lips, born to the advantages here because of the sacrifice of your forebearers. Let me tip you to a few things, eh? First, I’d been wanting to come over for ten years now, but your grand immigration policy, it said I needed an immediate family member already here. That may help the Mexicans and the Chinese, but not so much the Irish, the last wave of us being forty years and more ago. Second, when the policy seemed to loosen some a few years back, I queued up like a good lad and waited my turn, but wouldn’t you know it, by the time my turn came, there were no more of the right kind of visa. Can you imagine that, John? Some forty million—
million
—of your countrymen trace themselves back to the Auld Sod, but now there’s not enough room at the inn? So I’m looking hard at my own thirtieth birthday and wondering how many years I’ve left on this planet, and I decided it was time. I got myself a green card, never you mind just how, now, and that means I can have a job doesn’t require me to work for less than the minimum wage under the table.”

“What happened to the nose?”