Color Blind (6 page)

H
ow many days has it been?

Kate wasn’t sure. Her body felt heavy, leaden, way too much effort to pull herself upright in her bed, where she had been spending most of her time, crying, sobbing, all she seemed capable of doing. Sleep was out of the question; every time she closed her eyes, horror movie scenes of Richard’s body in that alleyway started to play.

And then the morgue.

How had she done it, stood there in that frigid room of death with her husband’s body on a cold porcelain table, a sheet pulled up to his chin to hide his ruined body, his beautiful body.

Floyd Brown had been beside her the whole time, hand on her arm, just enough human contact to make it possible for her not to turn and run screaming from this living nightmare.

But how had she felt?

Stunned? Yes. Numb? Certainly.

She had tried to look anywhere but at the body: at the walls, the sinks, the black hoses dangling from faucets, the hanging scales—the kind one sees in grocery stores, only these were used to weigh human organs, not tomatoes—the surgical tools, knives, scalpels, scissors, forceps, a Stryker saw to cut through bone, pruning shears.

Kate knew these places, had sat and stood through more autopsies and ID’d more bodies than she had ever wanted to. But that was over; that was history. She was finished with that. She’d paid her dues, hadn’t she?

A glimpse of Richard’s face, pale, lifeless, and Kate’s legs felt like those dangling hoses. Brown must have felt it, or intuited it, seasoned cop that he was. He tightened his grip on her arm, asked, “You okay?”

Okay? No! I’m dying!
But Kate had only nodded, taking deep breaths behind the surgical mask, quickly shifting her glance away, eyes focusing on the Dictaphone beside the table, which she knew from experience the medical examiners spoke into, recording details as they worked.

What would this ME say?

White male. Age forty-five. Good physical condition. Six feet, two inches tall.

Kate’s eyes crawled along the sheet, the relief map of a beloved and familiar body.

But, my God, he looked so much smaller, so diminished in death, this man, this body that was supposed to be her husband, but couldn’t possibly be. No, it just wasn’t possible. She refused to believe it.

She squeezed her eyes shut and pictured the beachfront below the dunes of their Hamptons home, the blue blue ocean that stretched out forever, and Richard, backlit by a blazing midday sun, tall and fit, collapsing playfully at her feet, tickling her until she begged him to stop, the sand scratching at her elbows as she pushed him away, the two of them laughing and laughing and laughing as if they were kids—and though she did not feel them, there were tears streaking mascara down her cheeks.

Had she kissed him good-bye before he’d left for Boston?

No, she was asleep.

And he’d never made it to Boston, never made it to the airport.

Had he been killed in his office? The alley was only a block away. He had to have been attacked on his way to or from the office or at the office, and if that was the case, then someone had dragged his body for a block and set it up in that alleyway.

Jesus, what was happening to her—thinking like a cop, now, at a time like this.

Kate stared at Richard’s hand, his gold wedding band catching the cool fluorescent light, shocking next to alabaster fingers. A chill rippled through her own fingers, up her arms, snaked its way into her heart, and for a moment the porcelain-and-steel room began to spin until Kate forced herself to study the hand coolly, detached, as though it were nothing more than a perfect anatomical replica of Richard’s hand, a piece of art worthy of Michelangelo.

The medical examiner, a youngish man with a sallow complexion and thick glasses, followed her line of vision. “The ring, uh, you can get it later, unless, like, uh, some people prefer them to be buried with it.”

Buried with it…buried with it…buried with it…

The words echoed in Kate’s brain and somehow kicked off one of those idiotic teen tragedy songs from her youth, a car stuck on the railroad tracks, a girl going back in to find her boyfriend’s ring, and dying, “Teen Angel”—which she could not stop, the refrain,
teen angel, teen angel,
playing over and over, absurdly, in her head.

“Can’t I have it now?” Kate managed to say, and watched as the ME tugged the ring from her dead husband’s finger and placed it in her hand, the precious metal cold, yet burning in her palm.

She looked up at the medical examiner’s name tag clipped slightly askew to the lapel of his white lab coat, anything to distract herself: Daniel Markowitz.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Markowitz said. “But, uh, you haven’t actually said, I mean, he is, uh, was, uh, your husband, correct?”

“Of course,” Floyd Brown barked.

“Yes,” Kate whispered, and for the first time allowed herself to take in Richard’s face, which was miraculously unscathed, skin smooth, colorless lips slightly parted.

She had devoted the last minutes—or was it hours?—to willing away the truth. But now she looked at her husband’s eyes and waited for him to blink, and when he did not she forced herself to stare at the pearly gray-white skin of a face at once so familiar and yet totally alien, closer to a wax-museum dummy than the husband she loved, forced herself to believe that this body was him, was Richard, her husband, and that he was dead and that he would not be coming back to her, and at that moment something deep inside her cracked.

K
ate shifted her weight in the bed, brought her fingertips slowly to her eyes to make sure they were open, that in fact she was awake, that this was not a dream, the nightmare she had wished, prayed it was.

The digital radio confirmed the hour and the date; it was true, three full days had passed, and she was still at home, in bed, alive, though she was not sure she could stand the thought of living. She was alive and Richard was dead and nothing had changed and everything had changed.

She breathed in the pillow’s scent, Richard’s pillowcase, which she had not allowed Lucille—the soft-spoken Jamaican woman who had kept house for the Rothsteins for almost ten years—to change. Something, anything to keep his presence alive, the smell of him, his hair and flesh, and a lingering hint of the English cologne, Skye, which she had bought for him on their honeymoon in London, the bottle’s cap a tiny gold coronet. “Here you go, Your Majesty,” she’d said, presenting him with the bottle, the two of them laughing when he’d placed the teeny crown on his head.

A few bouquets of flowers dotted the bedroom with color. Even in shock Kate had asked that people make charitable donations in Richard’s name rather than send the usual flowers and fruit baskets, which she had no use for, but still they came.

Phone messages had piled up unanswered. Friends had been turned away.

Lucille had brought cups of tea and bowls of chicken soup surrounded by perfect triangles of buttered toast, but Kate barely touched them.

Nola had visited each day, planting herself by Kate’s bedside, gabbing about this and that—school, her constant heartburn, anything to distract Kate, God bless her. But it just made Kate feel bad and guilty, that she was the adult who should be consoling Nola, who had also lost Richard, a man who had been like a father to the girl these last few years—and Nola about to have a baby on top of everything else.

Kate hardly recognized herself, this sad, weak woman.

The funeral had been a blur, only days after the murder, the Jews ever-anxious to get bodies into the ground too soon, way too soon for Kate, and so totally unlike the drawn-out Irish-Catholic wakes of her childhood—relatives crowding the McKinnons’ Queens row house, cigarette smoke smudging the edges off sadness, alcohol dampening pain.

Kate’s memory of her mother’s wake was like so many other family parties: her housewife aunts in the kitchen, cooking and sharing recipes (“…a pinch of sugar in the stewed cabbage, that’s all you need, I swear…”); and her father’s brothers, Mike and Timothy, both cops like her father, in the living room, color television tuned in to any and all possible sports events; the tube’s electric hues reflected in the plastic slipcovers that finally came off the brown plaid sofa and matching armchairs—only after her mother was put into the earth—to collect the cigarette burns and beer stains that her mother had correctly feared.

Willie had called Kate close to a dozen times from Germany, where he was painting on a Fulbright Fellowship. God, how she missed that kid, so much more than a protégé, she and Richard having sponsored him all the way through Let There Be a Future starting in the sixth grade. Nowadays, he was not only surviving the art world, but thriving, supporting himself as well as his mother, grandmother, and sister, taking them out of that Bronx housing project where he’d grown up and putting them into an airy garden apartment in a middle-class Queens neighborhood, paid for entirely with the sales from his art. Amazing kid. No, not a kid; a young man.

“I’m coming home,” he’d declared.

“No, you’re not. You have work to finish for your show.”

“I’m finished. The show is less than two weeks away. The paintings have all been shipped.”

“Willie. Last week you told me you were still working on watercolors for the show, that you were going to bring them home with you on the plane. So don’t lie to me.”

“The watercolors don’t matter, Kate. I need to be there with you. Right now.”

But Kate had held firm. “This is the most important show of your career, Willie. A new gallery for you, and one of the best in New York. You have to finish everything.” She took a deep breath, and lied: “I’m doing okay. I’ll see you at your show. And you are not to come home one day earlier. You hear me?”

Finally, Willie had agreed, but only because Kate insisted.

It had taken Kate a few hours after the phone call to realize why she had argued so vociferously. The truth was she did not want Willie to see her unglued; for some absurd reason she needed him to go on believing she was a super-woman—his fairy godmother who could cope with anything. Maybe, she thought, if she convinced someone else, it might actually be true.

Richard’s mother was doing the official thing, sitting shivah, in her Boca Raton condo, but Kate could not bring herself to go there, to sit with Edie on her airy Florida terrace, to chat and smile bravely. She adored Richard’s mother, but no, it just wasn’t possible. Not right now.

So what was it she needed to do? Kate played with the sash of her white terry robe, unconsciously plucking out individual strands of straying cotton. She had no idea.

She had never imagined herself like this, immobilized by grief, had always been able to cope, to deal with the most horrific things. Somehow she had survived.

How had she done that?

Kate gazed down at the view through her tall bedroom windows, a strip of faded green treetops, a sort of crew-cut view of Central Park against a gray sky that suited her mood.

A blur in her peripheral version; Kate flinched. “Jesus, you scared me.”

Liz Jacobs strode into the room, plopped herself into the overstuffed chair opposite Kate’s bed, and took stock of her oldest, dearest friend. “God, you look awful,” she said, shaking her head.

“Thanks a lot.” Kate narrowed her green eyes in mock anger, though there was no way she could be mad. “How did you get in? I specifically told the doormen
no solicitors
.”

“An FBI ID opens a lot of doors, sweetie. And after kissing my boss’s fat ass to get away from my Quantico desk for a full day, there is no way I was going to let some stuck-up Central Park West doorman tell me to get lost!” Liz offered a warm smile. “And I’m coming back in a few days, taking my two-week vacation here, in New York.”

“To watch over me?”

“No. I needed a break, and I was about to lose my vacation days if I didn’t take them. Going to stay with my sister in Brooklyn, do a little catch-up with her and the kids.”

“Liar.”

Liz squinted at Kate. “Are you eating? You’re a stick, which personally pisses me—and every other size-twelve woman—off!”

Kate knew what Liz was doing, trying to kid her out of her misery. It was the way the two women had helped each other through their various tribulations for years—and it was almost working. Kate actually smiled. “I’m really happy to see you.”

“And why wouldn’t you be?” Liz took another close look at her friend. “Now really, Kate, you’re destroying my image of you as the perfect woman—your hair’s a mess, no makeup, you’re a wreck. By next week you’re gonna look like
me
!”

Kate laughed, but seconds later the laughter gave way to tears. “Oh, Liz…”

Liz wrapped her arms around Kate and patted her back while she sobbed.

But after a minute Kate pulled away, whipped a couple of tissues from the bedside table, dabbed at her eyes, nose. “Tell me something, Liz. How did I do it? I mean, when Elena died, how did I survive that, because—”

“You worked her case. That’s how.”

The words hit Kate like ice water thrown in her face. “
What?
You’re suggesting I work Richard’s case?”

“Forgive me, Kate, but you and I go back a long time—partners on the Astoria force, my divorce, your miscarriages. I think I know you. You are not a passive woman. You’re a take-action, kick-ass dame. That’s what makes you tick, always has.”

Kate took a moment to imagine it, the idea of not only picking up police work again, but actually having the ability to detach enough to pursue her husband’s killer.

“You said Floyd Brown wanted you to consult on the case,” Liz continued. “Clearly, it was a case he thought you could, and should, be involved in, and Tapell agreed.”

“That was before—” Kate swallowed, hard. “Before Richard. It’s not just a case now.”

“I know that. And believe me, I’m not trying to talk you into anything.” Liz rested her hand gently on Kate’s arm. “You asked me a question—how did you survive Elena’s murder?—and I reminded you. That’s all.”