Death Will Help You Leave Him (24 page)

At that moment, she heard the jiggling rhythms of a rap song coming from behind her. She risked a swift look back. A group of kids rounded the corner, boys and girls not more than thirteen or fourteen. One carried the boom box on his shoulder. The others were horsing around, mock fighting, flirting— she could see the body language from here— showing off with little break dance moves.

“Change the station, man.” A lightly accented voice came floating down the block. “Let’s have a little salsa. Let’s do some real dancing to real music.” A mixed group, then, blacks and Hispanics together. That made it not a gang, just a group of kids who probably went to school together. Maybe change was possible in this world. Maybe God would get her to the corner.

“Did you know,” Jimmy asked, “that Diocletian was the only Roman emperor who died in his bed?”

“How did the others die?” I asked. I didn’t really care about a bunch of guys who’d been gone two thousand years. But Jimmy has a way of sucking you in.

“Most of them were murdered by the army or their own bodyguards.”

“So how did he manage not to be?”

“Smart enough to retire at the right moment.”

“Well, don’t look at me,” I said. “I can’t retire. I haven’t started yet.”

“Started what?” Barbara came into the living room balancing two mugs of coffee and a plate of oatmeal cookies. She felt guilty about not letting me smoke in the apartment, so she fed me. “Did you want milk in your insomnia?”

“The career I haven’t picked out yet. No, ma’am, gimme a straight shot. You know me.”

She handed me a mug. I snabbled a couple of cookies and dunked them in the coffee.

“I do know you, and I’ve been thinking about that. It’s about time you traded up from your recovery job.”

“Aren’t we here to talk about the murders?” Jimmy acted as if he’d never mentioned ancient Rome. He got away with it because Barbara is the designated digresser in our triumvirate. “And what’s happening with Luz?”

I got serious immediately.

“Someone’s stalking her, and I don’t like it,” I said. I hadn’t meant that to come out sounding so proprietary. I frowned at Barbara, daring her to comment.

“Who could it be?” Jimmy asked. “Who might still be mad enough at Luz to want to hurt her even now?”

“Netta,” Barbara said. “But Netta doesn’t know who Frankie’s girlfriend is. Was. Is.”

“The same goes for Netta’s brothers,” Jimmy said. “Unless somebody told them.”

“Cousin Vinnie could have told,” Barbara said. “But why would he make trouble? He wanted her to get out of their lives. He didn’t give her away when they all showed up at her shop.”

“That was in his own best interest,” Jimmy said. “I wouldn’t have wanted to make a scene among the lingerie myself.”

“I can never get you within a block of a lingerie shop,” Barbara said, “so it’s moot. What do you think about Luz maybe calling Vinnie? We need more of a handle on Netta’s brothers.”

“I don’t like it,” I snapped.

“It was just an idea,” she said.

“All your ideas put Luz out front in uncomfortable situations.”

“Come up with another idea, then.”

“I have one,” Jimmy said, “but neither of you will like it. Are we a hundred percent sure that Luz didn’t kill Frankie herself?”

“Jimmy!” Barbara said. “I thought you liked her.”

My throat constricted and I could feel my face turn red. I couldn’t say a word.

“I do like her,” Jimmy said. “But she had plenty of motive. She couldn’t get herself to leave him. If she had, he’d have reeled her back in with no trouble. His getting sober didn’t stop the battering. You know how that goes.”

Barbara’s grim nod went for me too. Some of the women’s stories in AA made me want to crawl for being a guy.

“She could be making up the stuff about being stalked,” Jimmy said.

“Bruce saw a car nearly run her down,” Barbara protested.

“He saw a car speed past while she was crossing the road.”

I felt depressed. I hid my face behind the coffee mug.

“She said she didn’t know about Carola and the kid,” Jimmy said. “What if she lied? That would give her even more of a motive.”

“She lied to me about knowing he had kids with Netta,” Barbara admitted.

I banged the mug down onto the coffee table. Quick on the draw, Barbara slid a napkin underneath it before it touched down. Saving the furniture from rings and solving a murder at the same time. Jimmy’s not the only multi-tasker.

“Maybe it was Carola,” I said. I didn’t care about Carola. “He was a hitter. If she thought he might hurt the little boy—”

“Edmund.”

“Right. If he knocked that kid around, she’d have killed him, no problem.”

“Yes but,” Barbara said. “She was always there when he saw Edmund. It’s not like she went out and left him to babysit.”

“As far as we know.”

“It was their time together as a family,” Barbara said. “If he’d threatened or hurt Edmund, she’d have clobbered him then and there. It’s like what we said about Netta. Would Carola hire a sitter so she could follow him all the way from Park Slope to East Harlem? Why bother?”

“To set Luz up.” I leaned forward, excited. “No, listen, it makes sense. Luz didn’t know about Carola, but Carola admitted she knew about Luz. We have only her word for it that she didn’t mind.” Who else? Anyone was likelier than Luz. “And let’s not forget Netta’s brothers.”

“Who we still have to figure out how to follow up on,” Barbara said.

“I can’t stop thinking about Kevin,” Jimmy said. “We could try to find out what he knew.”

“How do you we do that?” I asked.

“Ask Mars, maybe,” Jimmy said.

“You could go to downtown to the gay meeting, again, Bruce,” Barbara said.

“Why can’t Jimmy go?”

“No whining.” Barbara said. “I would go myself, but it’s a closed meeting.”

“That didn’t stop you when I first got sober,” Jimmy said.

“I’ve grown a lot since then. I
have
— I’ve got a lot more respect for the traditions now. I wouldn’t go in there and pretend I’m an alcoholic. Besides, I might run into someone I know from work or from the other program who’d know I’m not, and I’d feel—”

“Embarrassed!” we chorused. We know her very well.

“We don’t need a meeting to contact Mars,” Jimmy said. “I have his number.”

“And that woman Marla,” Barbara said. “She said she identified with Frankie. Maybe she was close to Kevin too. Rehab is intense, right? People get close.”

“So how do we find Marla?”

“I’ll call Mars,” Jimmy said, “and ask him for her number.”

But he didn’t have to do that. The next day, I ran into Marla at a lunchtime meeting near my current temp job in the East Fifties. More churches than you’d think are tucked away among the glass and steel office buildings. Office work makes a good recovery job for folks whose sobriety is still shaky and want to get to a lot of meetings. In fact, it surprised me that I’d never run into her before. I found out why when she raised her hand and shared.

“I’m five days back,” she said. She’d relapsed.

Everybody clapped. In AA you get a lot of points for even one day without a drink.

Marla held up her hand in a Stop gesture.

“Thanks for the support. It’s hard for me to believe I deserve it. A few weeks ago I went through rehab. Bared my soul for twenty-eight days, borrowed money from my folks, which I hate.” That drew sage nods and murmurs from around the room. “And I went back out.” Her voice got husky. “I will not cry!”

A couple of the women’s purses clicked open as they searched for tissues.

“Do I still have time?”

The guy who’d volunteered to be “spiritual timekeeper” for that meeting nodded and held up one finger. She had a minute left to speak.

“A friend of mine got killed,” she said. “A friend from rehab, clean and sober the same amount of time as me. I’m not saying it as an excuse. We can always find an excuse to drink. I mean,
I
found one— or didn’t need one, same thing, I know. If he hadn’t died, maybe I would have stayed clean. Or maybe he’d have his ninety days and I’d still be telling you I’m five days back.”

She left before the meeting ended. At lunchtime meetings, people do. I hurried after her. I caught up with her as she stopped in the street to light a cigarette. Her match kept going out.

“It’s Marla, right?” I flicked my lighter on and held it out to her. “Hi, I’m Bruce,” I said, giving the password.

“I know you. Wait a minute, I’ll get it. I’m still so mokus. Bad case of CRS— can’t remember shit. I can’t believe how clear my head felt when I left rehab. I guess you heard me in there, huh?”

I nodded.

“Frankie’s funeral,” I said.

“Oh, yeah, right, of course. You and the other guy knew Mars. You know, I need to make amends to everybody from that funeral. I was so freaked out I made all of us pretty conspicuous.”

“No, I don’t remember you doing anything bad.”

“Nice to run into somebody I don’t owe amends to, then,” she said. “I made a bit of a scene over the coffin. Must have been after you left.”

I drew a long pull on my cigarette and blew it slowly out.

“Well, as long as they make people look at their friends all dolled up with blue satin and embalming fluid, people are gonna react. It doesn’t sound so terrible to me.”

“Thanks for saying so. I have a tendency to guilt-trip myself— me and every other addict, huh? I wish I hadn’t picked up. And then— you remember Kevin? Little Irish guy who came to the funeral with us? He’s dead too.”

“I heard. It sucks. I guess some of us make it and some of us don’t.”

Could Jimmy be right about Kevin? Had he accused someone who hated Frankie of killing him?

“Were you in touch with Kevin?” I asked.

“Yeah, I feel guilty about that too. I guess I’m the queen of guilt. He left a message on my machine saying he wanted to run something by me. I never returned his call.” Her face twisted in self-mockery. “Of course not. I was high as a kite. The last thing I wanted to do was talk to program people.”

I understood that all right. Story of my life until a few months ago.

“If only. My sponsor says ‘if only’ is as useless as ‘should.’ Too bad we don’t come with an off button.”

“Amen to that,” Marla said. “My way of turning off ‘if only’ was to score a bunch of pills and wash them down with vodka. I was already ripped up about Frankie getting killed. When someone’s got the same number of days you do, they’re special. Frankie and I connected. I didn’t know about his bad side. I never saw that side of him.”

“I can relate to that.” I thought of a detox buddy, dead now too.

“Hey, can I get your number?” Marla asked. “I need to make a lot of calls if I’m going to make it this time. My mom was a drunk. I’m older now than she was when she died. I don’t want to end up like her.”

There was no way to refuse. She pinched the half-smoked cigarette between her lips as she fished around in her bag and whipped out a pad and pen. She scribbled her number, tore off the sheet for me, then handed me the pad and pen to write mine. I had gotten used to calling Jimmy and my sponsor when the inside of my head started getting too dark. I had trouble imagining unloading my shit on strangers. Maybe I’d better not ever relapse, if that’s what I’d have to do to get back.

“I don’t know if I have another recovery in me,” Marla said, “you know?” She let the cigarette fall from her lips and ground it into the pavement with the toe of her shoe. “I’ve gotta give these things up.”

Me too. Only somehow it’s never today. Booze was hard enough.

“I’m trying to smoke only half,” she said. “But who am I kidding? You know how AA fucks up all your addictions. This relapse was no damn fun.”

A silence fell as we both thought about that. I stubbed out my own cigarette.

“I used to see him at meetings,” Marla said. “New York can be such a small town, you know?”

“Big city’s got the skyscrapers,” I said, “small town’s got the church basements. It is kinda mind-blowing.”

“I saw Frankie at a meeting the night he died,” Marla said.

“Are you sure?” When you go to a lot of meetings, they can kind of blur together. And the clear head comes slowly.

“I remember that night,” she said. “I’ll never forget it, because Frankie was so nice to me. It was pouring cats and dogs, and he helped me get a taxi after the meeting.”

I remembered that downpour.

“Yeah, it can be hard to get a cab in Brooklyn late at night.”

“Brooklyn? No, this wasn’t in Brooklyn. Oh, you mean because of the funeral. Yeah, that’s where he lived. His whole family lived there, like, they owned the neighborhood. Not owned owned, but you know. This was uptown. You know how you’re willing to go to meetings all over town when you first get clean.”

I nodded. I knew how Jimmy and my sponsor told me I should be willing to go to meetings all over town. Okay, they didn’t say “should.” They suggested I pray for willingness.

“This was uptown,” Marla repeated. “There were plenty of cabs out, but the drivers don’t want to stop at night in Spanish Harlem.”

“Finally!” Barbara said. “Do you realize how important this is? We actually know something the police couldn’t possibly have found out— what meeting Frankie went to the night he died.”

We had just come out of another of those His and Hers AA and Al-Anon meetings and were walking toward the crosstown bus. Jimmy had stayed home to chair a real-time meeting in cyberspace.

I stopped to light a cigarette.

“Yeah, now we just need to figure out what to do with it.”

Barbara wrinkled her nose and brushed away smoke with her hands.

“Hey, stop taking my inventory,” I said. “Nonverbal counts. I’ll quit when I’m ready.”

“Isn’t the last person who saw the victim,” Barbara said, taking a final swipe at my exhalations, “usually a suspect? That’s either Marla or whoever Frankie left with. Did you ask her if he had anyone with him?”

“Damn. I didn’t think of it.” My shoulders slumped. The cigarette drooped in my fingers and dropped ash on the pavement. Barbara whisked her toes away. Ostentatiously. “Wait a minute. Wouldn’t she have mentioned someone else from rehab?”