Come Out Tonight (15 page)

Julian had always been more of a cook than I was.
 
Truth be told, I was never a cook at all.
 
I had other talents to be sure, but cooking wasn’t one of them. Or fashion, for that matter.
 
I had a few outfits that worked, and that was good enough for me.
 
Now, my mother never went out of the house unless she was totally coordinated: e.g., pink jacket, pink skirt, pink pillbox hat.
 
Hair perfectly cut and coifed; hand bag matching her shoes; perfectly feminine and turned out.
 
I still shiver at the memory.
 
Naturally, I did the opposite and decided to be a cop.
 

I dropped my beat-up canvas tote off by the front door and entered, sniffing deeply.
 
Ahhhh.
 
I hadn’t even realized I was craving chicken chili until the whiff of it hijacked my senses.

That spicy aroma, the picnic ambience and Julian with the dish towel over his arm, and, now that I noticed, a swell of Gypsy violins in the background: it all washed over me, leaving the requisite warm glow.
 
It was just like him to set the stage with style.
  

Hey, Julian made no apologies about wanting to live well.
 
He appreciated good food and wine and music and never saw anything wrong with spending most of his income on them.
 
And mine.
 
It’s one of the things we never could come to terms on.
 
Me, I liked to have money in the bank. A ritzy place in lower
Manhattan
would have been nice, but a rent-stabilized apartment on the East Side of New York – well, it doesn’t get much better than that.
 
I tended not to spend much on extras.
 
Sure they’re nice, but once you’ve eaten, drunk, watched or worn them, they’re gone.
  
On the other hand, the fruits of hard work and persistence, like putting away a murderer for the rest of his natural life - that’s forever.
 

Well, I wasn’t going to complain.
 
I kicked off my shoes, sloughed off my jacket and sat down at the table.
 
“We finally caught the Bouquet Bandit,” I called out.
 

“Congratulations,” Julian said, as he came in from the kitchen carrying my Calphalon casserole, aromatic steam seeping from the lid.
  

“Thanks for this,” I said.

“Least I can do,” he replied, sitting down.

We gorged ourselves on chicken chili over talk of the Bouquet Bandit and the juvenile vs. the Korean deli owner: two cases closed.
 
Four to go, but I didn’t want to talk about the open ones.
 
We finished the bottle of wine and opened another one. We talked about old times, new jobs, the state of the economy.
 
I’d missed having someone to talk to, I guess.
  
We drank some more; I lost my inhibitions.
 
We laughed ourselves silly about nothing at all.
 
Julian scooted his chair around to my side and started to kiss my neck.
 
I went with the moment, until, all of a sudden, I didn’t.

“No,” I said.
 
“I don’t think we should be doing this.”

“Why not?” Julian asked from behind my right ear.
 

I turned my head so he would have to stop.

“What’s the matter?” Julian asked, his expression somewhere between humor and surprise.

You come on strong with looks, style, charm, I thought, but you lied, not once but over and over, and I can never trust you again.
 
I looked up into his dark eyes, still crinkled from laughing.
 
For the first time I noticed a spray of laugh lines at the outside corners.
 
He’s older, I told myself.
 
Maybe he’s changed.
 
Maybe not.

“You’re not good for me,” I said.

“I just cooked you dinner,” he said, going back to my neck.

I let him nibble for a moment or two.
 
“You’re a temptation,” I said, moving my neck out of reach.

“You want it as much as I do,” he said, going to unbutton my blouse.

I did.
 
Oh, I did, I did, I did.
 
I let him unbutton the top two buttons and stick his face inside.
  
I heard him sigh from the depths of my cleavage.

“No…,” I said as I abandoned all resistance.

*
   
*
   
*

A few days later Ricardo finally got back to me about the small plane registries.
 
There was no mention of the Pollacks chartering a plane on the night of May 2
^nd
, but he had taken the liberty of checking out flights several days back – both for small planes and commercial flights.
 
Dr. and Mrs. Phillip Pollack were listed on the manifest of Delta Airlines Flight # 2560, departing
Los Angeles
at 8:30 a.m. and arriving JFK at 4:57 p.m. - on April 30.

So, they had lied to me. No surprise there. They were both in
New York City
on the night of April 30, just as Henry Jackman had told me they were. Why, I wondered? What were they covering up by saying they had just come in May 3?

I got out my phone, checked the email message Ricardo had sent me with the four phone numbers, and dialed Rhonda Pollack’s cell phone.
 
Calling Rhonda first, I figured, was my best chance of obtaining the unadulterated truth.

She answered after the first ring.
 
I gave her my name and reminded her who I was.
 
The silence on the line was so long I began to think she had hung up.
 
But then she spoke.
 
“Is there something wrong, Detective?”

Funny she would begin that way.
 
She might have asked how her daughter was.

“Only that I have evidence that you and your husband did not come in on the morning of May third as you claimed, but came into New York three days earlier to take your daughter out to a birthday dinner.”

A protracted pause.
 
“Yes, that’s true, Detective.
 
We did come in earlier.”
 

Nothing followed, so I guessed I’d have to pull it out of her.
 
“Why did you lie, then?” I asked.

A deep sigh.
 
“I don’t know why myself.
 
My husband felt that if you knew we were in
New York
, we’d be detained for questioning; there would be publicity and suspicion and who knows what.
 
My husband is a very private man.”

“Did you take your daughter out to dinner the night she was attacked?”

A pause, punctuated with what might have been a sniffle.
 
“Yes.”

She was going to make me work for every bit of information.
 
“What happened at that dinner?”

Long, long pause, and then the dam broke.
 
“Phil was always so hard on Sherry.
 
Whatever she did was not enough or not what he would have done.
 
Sherry told us about that Somnolux drug she had helped to discover: about the people who were running amok, as she called it – doing crazy things in their sleep.
 
She was worried, that’s all.
 
She needed to confide in someone.

“But Phil, well Phil just lit into her – how Vandenberg hadn’t fully tested the drug, how she should have taken responsibility and done it right in the first place. Then Sherry said that that couldn’t be helped, that there were millions of patients and sometimes you can’t tell what will happen from a small-sized test.
 
The thing, she said, was that Vandenberg was doing their best to hush the whole thing up.
 

“Then Phil told her she was a screw up – that the very fact that she couldn’t see what it was she had to do testified to her lack of character.
 
Sherry told him she knew he never had thought much of her.
 
That she had tried and tried to make him proud of her, but it didn’t matter what she accomplished, something was always wrong.
 
She ran off into the dark, and that…that was the last we saw of her.
 
Phil went after her, but he came back half an hour later saying he had lost her in the dark…” Rhonda quavered.
 
She stopped to regain control before going on.
 

“If this is too much for you,” I began, but Rhonda interrupted me to say no, no, she wanted to tell me everything.

“We went back to our hotel,” she went on.
 
“I tried to get her the next day on her cell phone, but it wouldn’t go through.
 
I figured she had put some kind of block on our number.
 
Even Phil felt terrible.
 
We decided not to fly back home the next day as we had planned. We went to her apartment, but she wasn’t there. We were going to wait one more day, hoping that she’d come back home and find us there, camped in
 
front of her front door.
 
But it didn’t happen.
  
And then you called.”

“So you didn’t know she had been attacked,” I said.

“No,” she said, “We didn’t know,” the quaver in her voice overcoming the words.

Then she began to sob uncontrollably, and I waited on the line, making little noises of comfort every once in awhile, hoping that she would calm down enough to answer a question or two more.
 
Most of what she said didn’t surprise me, but all this about the Somnolux was new.
 
I hadn’t known about the side effects or the fact that Vandenberg ostensibly knew about them and was prepared to hush it up.

But Rhonda never did calm down this time.
 
She cried for so long that at last I gave up, saying I’d call back when she was feeling better.

HENRY

I walked west on 96th, punching in a few numbers on my cell phone.
 
“Detective Sirken, please.”

“Who’s calling?”

“Henry Jackman.

“One minute please.”

I rounded the corner onto Broadway, heading uptown.
 
It was half past seven in the evening, but the sidewalk traffic was brutal.
 
Three guys walked side by side, blocking my path. I just managed to dodge them when an old woman in a winter coat pushed a shopping cart right into my leg.
 
“Excuse ME,” I yelled, but she just muttered something, pushing the cart on past.
  

“Mr. Jackman?” the phone said.
 
“I can’t get a hold of her.
 
She must be gone for the day.”

“Sure she is.
 
Just tell her I’ve got new, pertinent information for both of the cases we were talking about.”

“Your number please?”

“She was just there an hour ago.”

“Well, she’s not there now.”

“Give me her cell, then.”

“Sir, we don’t give out that information.
 
If you give me your number, I’ll page her.”

“Oh, okay.
 
212-362-3974. Tell her it’s an emergency. Henry Jackman.
 
I gotta talk to her.”

“I’ll tell her.”

I hung up and kept walking.
 
At 111
^th
, I found a Starbucks and decided to chill a bit, waiting for Sirken’s call.
 
I walked in, ordered a
venti
iced latte, and plunked down on a stool at the front window.
 
I sat there, sucking latte through a straw and watching lone customers pecking on their laptops.
 
The place was quiet as a tomb, the only sounds the click-clack-click of keys against a background hiss of espresso machine.
 
Not a word of social chitchat, except, maybe, “Here’s your white chocolate mocha Frappuccino,” or
 
“skinny cinnamon dolce latte, Miss” or “Ya see I’m busy?
 
I’ll getcha when I’m ready.”

No flirting. “No, “Hi, how are you?” Not even, “Pass the sugar, please.”
 
Each customer cocooned in his own invisible world: so plugged in and clued out, they might as well be vegetative patients in Parkhill Nursing Home.
 
Looking for a little action, I spun my stool around to face the window.
 
There, at least was the usual
New York
hubbub: nannies pushing double strollers; dog walkers launched behind teams of mixed dogs; the odd person with a suit and briefcase.

That got old fast.
 
Soon the smell of espresso brewing brought me back to Sherry, as it always did.
 
Boy, did Sherry love Starbucks.
 
Frappuccinos, tall lattes, double espressos: anything you could buy in a paper cup.
 
For that matter, anything you could buy in a paper take-out container. Come to think of it, anything you could order from a restaurant.
 
Sherry couldn’t toast a piece of bread to save her life, but take in or eat out, she sure could order.