The Late, Lamented Molly Marx (22 page)

Brie is bare-breasted, and the only woman I know who can pull off Brazilian-cut panties, which sit high on your hips to reveal a peek of cheek. Nothing droops, which she attributes to genetic roulette, but I know the elliptical machine gets part of the credit.

“Give me the rundown,” Isadora says, and slowly sinks into the froth of a deep, free-standing tub. She rarely hurries, and starts each morning with a ritual bath no less than fifteen minutes long. When she designed the apartment, Isadora insisted on a white marble bathroom as big as the bedroom. It looks like a laboratory and is, a buzzing workshop where beauty is nourished and transformation begins.

Brie has plotted Saturday by internal MapQuest. “We’ll start with brunch at Sarabeth’s on Central Park South because I know Annabel will love the pumpkin waffles, then the carousel and a stroll up Madison, where I saw the most adorable dress—a pale blue gingham pinafore—then frozen hot chocolate at Serendipity. Oh, and a bookstore—she’s
ready for
Madeline
,” she says. “In the late afternoon, a movie and pizza.” She turns the mirrors to assess the back of her hair. It’s as smooth as if it were painted. “I wish I could take her to the theater again, but I don’t want to miss the shopping.”

“That’s way too much for a five-year-old,” Isadora says as she lifts her left leg out of the bubbles, arches her foot, and gently pumices away nonexistent calluses. Her size fives are a point of pride. There is no dithering over polish shades. She gets a weekly pedicure, always Chanel Vamp. Isadora accepts no substitutes.

“Actually, Annabel’s almost four,” Brie says.

“Even worse. Are you mental?”

“Who made you queen mother?” Brie asks in a low voice. “Annabel’s going to love it.” She plans to will it so.

“But all this for a
niña?
We’ll have one whiny little princess on our hands.” Isadora laughs and thinks,
Just like her mother
. In the last three months I have learned that in Isadora’s estimation I wasn’t worth getting all lathered up about—its own insult. She didn’t despise me, but when her mind floats in my direction, condescension is right there, too. “You, my darling Brie, are wrong,” she says calmly.
Tía Sabrina es loca
.

“So, don’t join us,” Brie says, and shrugs. With that she puts on two coats of black mascara, stiffens her shoulders, and walks out of the room, Cleopatra commanding her barge.

When Brie and Isadora are pissed, it doesn’t end in plates sailing across the room. They’re alpha show dogs—an Irish wolfhound and a standard poodle. It’s been almost a year now and there has never been a bite that drew blood: they express their animus through posture, attitude, and the occasional preemptive bark.

Since my death, this will be Brie and Annabel’s third outing. It’s possible that my daughter has aroused a latent maternal instinct in my dearest friend, who until now has failed to nurture so much as a pot of chives. But perhaps the time passed together, lovely as it is for both, is mostly Brie’s way to stay close to me. Or—drilling down, because she’s one of the most instinctively competitive women I ever met, which I say with deep respect—it’s about one-upping Lucy and now Stephanie. Not that Stephanie’s been all that interested in Annabel.

I would read Brie’s mind, if only she herself knew it. But I have
learned that despite substantial evidence to the contrary, her head is a lot cloudier inside than anyone would guess. That Brie is one slightly mixed-up babe makes me love her more.

A driver is waiting downstairs to deliver her to the office. When Brie arrives, she logs onto her computer and pulls up a new file.
Annabel
. She scrolls through case after sordid case of disputes where fathers, a surprising number of whom wear mullets and orange prison jumpsuits, have been denied custody of their daughters. Some dads were years delinquent with child support. Others are in the process of, say, switching genders. Nice to know ya, Duane. Y’all meet Dixie!

Brie bites her lip. She isn’t finding the legal precedent of a widower who loses his child not to his wife’s family but to his wife’s friend. She isn’t even coming close, and since she doesn’t have time to continue the search, she switches to e-mail. A blitz of messages appears, mostly with headings in cryptic legalese. After she scans her inbox, the one she reads first is from
[email protected]
.
Anything new at your end? Today, the mother-in-law
.

I wish I had leads to feed you, Detective Hicks
, Brie’s thinking.
I wish I could figure this out on my own, but I’m coming up with nothing. I’m counting on you. Why hasn’t this case been solved already? What’s taking so damn long? Are we forgetting that a woman died, a young, beautiful woman? My best friend. But I’ve got to keep my head in the game. Stay cool
.

Hello Kitty—watch out—she hisses
, Brie writes back, and waits for a response from Hicks. There is none. This doesn’t make her unhappy. It makes her thinks he’s working hard. No nonsense. Good.

Brie answers a few more e-mails and is interrupted by a buzz from her assistant. Her first deposition waits.

I leave Brie to fight on behalf of liberty and justice for all and circle back to Kitty’s building. Hicks enters. I half expect him to be carrying a bouquet: my mother-in-law attracts gifts the way other women do mosquitoes. She has one whole closet filled with tributes: tall reeds that slip into essential oils, Egyptian cotton dish towels in rainbow hues, pithy advice books she’ll never read, Florentine notepaper, enemies’ scalps.

“Detective,” she says. “At last.” Kitty Katz ushers Hicks into the living room.

I see an overdecorated Manhattan coop, everything inert, just so.
But Hicks sees something else as his eyes sweep the room with the swift look-see he’s perfected during his eight years on the force. Hicks sees money. His new condo, which is a big step up from his mother’s place in a less cultivated section of uptown Manhattan, would fit into the foyer and living room. He never knew that beige came in so many varietals. Yet the room is far from dull, thanks to a mix of muted tapestry, mohair, silk, tweed, and velvet, especially the velvet, whose silken smoothness on a pillow he can’t resist stroking when Kitty turns her back. Afternoon light boomerangs off a few well-chosen pieces of antique Murano in tutti-frutti colors. In another life, this taut, handsomely dressed woman was apparently the contessa of the Venice lagoon.

Hicks also can’t help noticing that while he sees pictures of Annabel and many of Barry at different ages, there is only one of Barry, Annabel, and me, on a side table overshadowed by a pungent arrangement of tall peach roses and birds of paradise.

“Coffee? Tea?” Kitty says. Pinky is standing ready, unseen, in the kitchen.

“No, thank you,” he says. “I’m aware that you’re on a tight schedule, so if you agree, Mrs. Katz, let’s dive in.” Out comes the small black leather notebook, which isn’t as pristine as the first time I saw it. He smiles. “Okay, let’s take it from the top. Did your son and daughter-in-law have a happy marriage?”

Has he had orthodontia?
is Kitty’s first thought. Next she considers what the correct answer to the question might be. “Divinely happy.” She laughs. “No pun intended.” Although it was. “Devoted. Molly adored my son.”
Who wouldn’t
, her face says.

“No cracks in the surface, Mrs. Katz? Tensions, worries?”

“Of course. What young marriage doesn’t have all that?”

“Just answers, Mrs. Katz. Just answers. And your own relationship with the deceased? With Molly?”

Kitty leans forward and extends her hand—age spots lasered away, sporting one hefty, square-cut diamond solitaire in a platinum setting. “You know, Detective,” she says, “my own mother-in-law—that would be Barry’s father’s mother, may she rest in peace—interfered with my life no end.” She has to stop herself from rolling her eyes at the memory of that particular hairy-chinned bat. “I made a point of never doing
that.” She pronounces “never” as if italicized. “I gave my son and Molly their space.”

The truth: Kitty did give me a wide berth, but rarely a day passes when she and Barry don’t speak. If she told Hicks this, he would understand, because in his family, interference equals love. The more meddling, the more love—two-thirds of a triangle completed by food.

The Katz woman had no use for Molly
, Hicks jots in his notebook, using cop code only he would understand. “Was Molly the wife you pictured for your son?” he asks.

Ah, the answer? Please! Might Kitty have preferred a member of the right charity committees with, say, a golf handicap in the single digits? Too threatening, perhaps. A mini-Kitty? Yes, if the woman worshipped her as much as both of them worshipped Barry and was on board with advancing his practice, a woman who buried her own identify before the Barry throne.

“I never pictured a wife for my son,” she says, in what might be her first honest answer of the day. Indeed, my bullshit meter has fallen silent.

A grin crosses Hicks’ face. “Then you’re a good sight different from my ma. She’s had the girl picked out for me since I was twenty-three.” Evian, who cornrows his mother’s hair. Sweet kid, Evian. A shapely lady, all heart, just like Ma, who invites her to Sunday dinner at least once every two months. One of these days Ma will catch on to the fact that he is not Evian’s type, a hot-shit detective who can’t dance to save his life. But he and Ev play along and flirt away those Sunday afternoons. Every Christmas, he sends her the biggest box of chocolates Godiva sells. She gives him the thickest history book on the best-seller list. Once a summer, they take in a Yankee game and afterward, over beers and dogs, bemoan the unfortunate state of romance in America, their own lack thereof, in particular.

“Tell me about Molly, things only you know.”

“Well,” she says, savoring this tasty question as she lights up. “I don’t think she had much confidence—”

This may be true, but I was working on it, and dammit, she didn’t help.

“—or that many friends.”

Heresy! A blatant lie! Kitty just didn’t know many of my friends—dozens
of colleagues, current and former; five or six mommies; my book club; bicycle people; college buddies; even a few doctors’ wives. Lucy, sort of. Brie!

“Let me amend that,” she says, almost as if she heard me. “She has that lawyer from college who spoke at the funeral and, of course, male friends.”

“And might you know their names?”

“Unfortunately, I don’t, but I’m sure, with your sources …” She looks Hicks straight in the eye as she flicks her ash on a Baccarat plate. “And also, I must tell you she was envious of all the attention my son received. As you know, Dr. Marx has a thriving practice.”

Envious of Barry? What a crock. I am outraged, but then I concede that Dr. Kitty might be on to something. Perhaps I was envious of how Barry always triple-lutzed through life, self-doubt as foreign to him as flying a helicopter, not that he wouldn’t try to do that, given the chance.

“And her twin sister?” she continues.
Maniac
, Kitty thinks as she grinds her cigarette into extinction. “But I gather you’re on to Lucy. My revelations will not be enlightening.”

“She’s a complicated one,” he says. Hicks knows the woman wants to be brought up to speed.
Are we ready to throw her in the slammer?

“
Complicated?
” Kitty lets loose with her signature cackle, half whinny, half caw.

“And interesting,” he says. “Not to worry, we’re on her. It’s you I’d like to talk more about today, thanks.” He looks again at his notebook and, while he’s thinking, admires the portrait of a young dark-haired boy with a fox terrier. Barry,
le petit prince
. “Mrs. Katz, on the day of your daughter-in-law’s death, where were you?”

“Now, finally, an easy question,” Kitty says gaily as she lights a second cigarette. Or maybe it’s her third. “In the afternoon I was shopping on Madison Avenue and afterwards played mah-jongg, like I always do on winter Fridays, with three of my oldest friends, Suzette, Linda, and Nancy.”
Bam! Dot! Crack!
As if a confirmation from the mahj girls and boutique receipts corroborate innocence.

“So, getting down to business here,” Hicks asks, leaning forward, using his most beseeching timbre—intimate, conspiratorial—“was Molly Marx the victim of some random crazy or was she intentionally murdered?” Slowly he pulls out a colored photo from the crime scene.

She gives a little gasp as she sees my face as filet mignon à la Sweeney Todd. “The latter, possibly,” she says, rolling the word in her mouth like a sucking candy. “Yes, I think it’s entirely possible that someone took her life on purpose.”

“Why, Mrs. Katz?” His voice is rougher than before.

“That’s what I can’t fathom.”

“Mrs. Katz, hazard a guess.” It is an order.

“Someone would have had to hate Molly. Who, I can’t say.” Because she can’t imagine me engendering that intense a response in another person.

“Could that person be your son?”

“No!” While Kitty is saying the word, her mind is racing.
Is this possible? Could Molly have done something so heinous the poor boy snapped like a bungee cord?

“Another woman?” Hicks suggests. He lets the grisly photo of me stay face-up on the table.

“My son was a faithful husband.” My bullshit meter reactivates with a loud bleep.
And if he wasn’t
, she’s thinking,
so what? Barry’s father was no different, though he learned that diamonds cure suspicion and we both got on with our lives
. “And if he wasn’t,” Kitty adds, “how would I know? But I can safely say any woman—any other woman—my son would ally himself with would never be so vile as to commit murder. Frankly, Detective, I am deeply offended that you would even suggest this.”

It’s my fucking job
, Hicks thinks, but tries to smile with deep sympathy.

“Which is why I’m thinking she …” Kitty pauses and takes a deep drag, which she would like to blow in Hicks’ handsome face. “She most likely took her own life.”

“Really? Suicide?”
That’s a joke
, Hicks thinks.
Where’s the motive? According to her internist and gynecologist, both of whom Molly saw at the first of the year, good girl that she was, she was healthy—no secret, gruesome disease, no pregnancy by some inconvenient man. The husband, well, he may be a player and a jerk, but folks say he spent plenty of time at home, and it’s a pretty exceptional home at that
. “Your daughter-in-law rode her bike off the road, possibly right into the Hudson River? Did she intend
to drown herself but didn’t make it far enough? I don’t quite get that. But let’s not talk about how, tell me
why
.”