He was drinking Glenfiddich on the rocks in a squat, manly glass.
“I hope you will,” I said.
“So, how’s that segue to detective work?” he said.
“I needed to earn a living until my paintings began to sell,” I said. “And my father was a cop. I like the work. It’s interesting. Sometimes I’m helpful to people. And I get to set my own hours.”
“You live alone?” he said.
“I live with Rosie, the world’s most beautiful bull terrier.”
“Being the world’s most beautiful bull terrier,” Peter said, “is not necessarily a challenge.”
I stared at him without speaking. He looked at me and smiled.
“She must be very beautiful,” he said. “I gather you’re not married.”
“Divorced,” I said.
He nodded as if to say, “Aren’t we all.”
“Anyone in your life right now?” he said.
“Right now?” I said. “You.”
“Well, aren’t you literal,” he said.
I smiled. “So why did you decide to see me?” I said.
“I had a premonition,” he said.
“The names I mentioned didn’t count?”
“Well, hell,” he said, and sipped his scotch. “I knew Ike Rosen, at least.”
“The receptionist didn’t expect you to see me.”
“Just that feeling,” he said.
He gave me a little toast with his glass.
“You know . . . this could be the start of something big.”
“And you never heard of Lewis Karp.”
“Must you keep carping on him?”
I smiled.
“That’s awful,” I said.
He nodded.
“Awful,” he said.
“You represent Lolly Drake?”
“I do,” he said. “And Andy Wescott—you know, the star of that cop show. And Chuck Wells, the news anchor.” He smiled. “Lawyer to the stars,” he said.
“What’s she like?” I said.
“Lolly?”
I nodded.
“Just what you see and hear,” he said. “Smart, tough woman. Sees clearly, thinks clearly. And a knockout to boot.”
“Do you know where she started?” I said.
“Oh, hell, East Overshoe, someplace. I don’t know. The Midwest. Some rinky-dink eight-watt radio station. She was their”—he made quote marks in the air and lowered his voice—“law correspondent.”
“And it built from there?”
“Yeah. It became a ‘call-in, ask Lolly’ kind of program, and then the subject matter broadened”—he waved his hand—“the rest is history.
“The firm has represented her since she went national,” he said. “I took her on personally, I’d say, about ten years ago.”
“She fun to work with?”
“You bet,” he said. “You always know where you stand with Lolly.”
“But is she fun?” I said.
“Probably not as much fun as you. Why the interest?”
“Hell,” I said. “What woman wouldn’t be interested. She’s a hero to us all.”
“I can see why she would be,” Peter said.
“Do you do all her legal work?”
“We do everything,” Peter said. “Legal, representation, the whole deal.”
“I’d love to meet her,” I said.
Peter tilted his head.
“Might be possible,” he said. “Would you like dinner here, or would you like to come back to my place?”
“Do you cook?” I said.
“Elegantly,” he said.
“And would there be something really good for dessert?” I said.
He smiled at me and let the question hang for a moment.
Then he said, “I guess that would be pretty much up to you.”
It was possible that Peter would turn out to be the enemy. I was alone in New York. My ex-husband had remarried.
“Let’s find out,” I said.
33
The red digital display on the cable box in Peter’s bedroom said that it was 2:30 in the morning. I was lying on my back beside Peter, listening to him snore softly. I had no clothes on. I wished very much to be dressed and in a cab back to my hotel. I wished I were back in my hotel, dressed in an oversized two-tone-orange T-shirt, and in my bed. Like so many liberated, up-to-the-minute contemporary men I had met, Peter felt it was important to spend the night together. No slam, bam, thank you, ma’am. Which meant a sort of awkward maneuvering around the bathroom in the morning. It meant wriggling into my pantyhose while he watched. Or it meant picking up my clothes and getting dressed in the closet. Ick!
There was no real basis for speculating about Lolly Drake. Except the coincidence that she knew Sarah’s father. And she was represented by a man who may have hired someone to beat up Sarah. But if I decided that it was a meaningless coincidence, and that Ike Rosen had probably lied to me, in the grip of his passion, then I had nowhere to go, and the discovery of that coincidence did nothing for me. And if it wasn’t a coincidence, I might be sleeping with the enemy. I decided to assume that it wasn’t a coincidence. So what if I had slept with the enemy.
The red-letter clock told me it was ten of three. I slipped out of bed and tiptoed to the chair where my clothes were folded and got dressed in careful silence. The pantyhose seemed too challenging at three in the morning, so I put them in my handbag and, carrying my shoes, I tiptoed out of the bedroom and through the living room, where the ambient light of the city showed the empty champagne bottle and two fluted glasses standing in mute memory of our evening. I stepped into my shoes while the elevator dropped silently to the lobby.
There was a sleepy doorman at the desk. I smiled at him demurely, trying not to look like a floozy, as I went by him and out onto Fifth Avenue. There is very little emptier than anywhere at three in the morning. I didn’t see a cab. The night was pleasant enough, so I headed downtown and walked twenty-one blocks down Fifth to my hotel. Most of the way, Central Park was on my right: lovely, dark, and deep. And beyond it, the eternal lights of the West Side marked its westward definition.
At my hotel, I had to ring to get in. I tried my I’m-not-a-floozy look on the security man who checked my room key. It’s a hard look to pull off when you are coming home alone at three in the morning with your pantyhose in your purse. I’m not sure he bought it.
Upstairs, I brushed my teeth and took a long shower and put on my orange T-shirt and went to bed and fell asleep almost as soon as I was prone. I dreamed Rosie and I were walking in a landscape I’d never seen, and Rosie was running around in ever-widening circles. When I called her, she came back, but then as we walked, she would continue to stray farther and farther until I called her back.
In the morning, I awoke with no new insights about myself or Peter Franklin, but I felt rested and lay in bed for a while being alone, reading the room-service menu, thinking about breakfast. Love and sex were great. Especially when they overlapped. But alone had its moments, too.
Two hours later, freshly showered, with a fine breakfast settling comfortably and my teeth newly brushed, I left the hotel and went to work.
It was 11:20, bright and cold with some wind coming up 57th Street off the Hudson, when I settled in opposite Peter Franklin’s office. I was in jeans and sneakers and a warm black trench coat with a lot of zippers. I had on a dark wool watch cap, pulled down over my ears, the kind of hat that I would have to wear for the rest of the day, or suffer the heartbreak of hat hair. In my coat pocket I had a little digital camera with a zoom on it. I looked at my watch. I was betting he’d come out for lunch in the next hour or two.
I had checked out of my hotel. My luggage was in my car, and my car was parked in a garage near Tenth Avenue. Get my pictures and beat it north alon
g the Hudson. While I had been lolling around my room, enjoying solitude and eating breakfast, the phone had rung three times. Each time, I didn’t answer. Each time my message light began to flash, and when I checked the voice mail it was Peter Franklin.
The first message was, “Hey, babe. Where’d you go? Was it something I did . . . or something I didn’t do? I want to see you again. Give me a call.”
The second and third messages were variations of the first. The second message also contained a graphic anatomical compliment.
Oh, shucks.
The size and quickness of New York always excited me. It always made me think of the way Lewis Mumford had defined a city. Something like “the most options in the least space.” It was all of that.
I was comfortable in New York. I had lived all my life only four hours up the road, and was pretty much at home in Manhattan, though, like most people who didn’t live in New York City, I had only limited experience of the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn, and was pretty sure I’d never even been to Staten Island.
I wasn’t much worried that Peter would see me. He wasn’t expecting to see me. I had on the hat and big sunglasses, and was dressed very differently from the last time he’d seen me, even not counting the time he’d seen me undressed. Even if he did see me, it wouldn’t matter much. I’d say I was on my way to say goodbye and stopped to take a sentimental-memory picture of his office building.
At one o’clock I bought a soft pretzel from a vendor and ate it. With yellow mustard. At 1:15, Peter appeared in the doorway of his building with two other men. All three wore dark overcoats and light scarves. Peter had on a soft hat with a wide brim like crime bosses wear in movies. The three of them stopped to talk for a moment on the sidewalk outside the building, and I took some pictures. Peter was animated. The two men nodded. Then one of them talked with a lot of hand gestures, and Peter kept shaking his head. Then, finally, he put his hand up and the man who had been gesturing gave him a high-five and the three of them laughed. The two men turned west and walked away. Peter stood, looking after them, ever solicitous, and I took some more pictures. Then he turned and walked east, toward Sixth Avenue. I put my camera away and headed for my car, walking straight into the wind with my head down a little to keep it from blowing grit in my face.
34
Dr. Silverman was wearing a black suit and a white silk top. She had pearls around her neck and quiet pearl earrings. As usual, she wore no rings. Many married women, of course, didn’t wear wedding rings. I hadn’t worn one much when I was married. Richie had. He wore his like an amulet or something. I wondered if that was meaningful.
“Here’s what happened on my trip to New York,” I said.
Dr. Silverman raised her eyebrows a little to let me know that she was fascinated.
“You know the case I’m working on, Sarah Markham’s real parents and such?”
Dr. Silverman nodded. Did she really remember or was she just encouraging me?
“Well, after Spike and I had the confrontation with the two guys in the woods . . .”
I looked at her to make sure she remembered. I knew she had many patients. I knew she didn’t take notes. I couldn’t believe she recorded the sessions without my knowledge. So I was dependent on her memory.
“Spike is a useful friend,” she said.
Apparently, she remembered. Though she was so nondirective, as she always was, that I couldn’t be sure. I gave it up.
“Anyway,” I said. “They gave me a name, a lawyer named Ike Rosen, and I went to New York and Ike gave me a name, a lawyer named Peter Franklin, and I talked with Franklin, and he turns out to represent Lolly Drake, the talk-show lady?”
Dr Silverman nodded.
“And Lolly Drake started her career at the same station, at the same time, that George Markham was there.”
“It could be a coincidence,” Dr. Silverman said.
“It could be,” I said. “But deciding that it is leads me nowhere . . . deciding that it isn’t presents an opportunity.”
“That’s true,” Dr. Silverman said.
Her hands looked strong. Her nails were perfectly manicured with a clear polish that made them gleam quietly. It was hard to figure how old she was. Older than I.
“The thing is,” I said. “Sex reared its ugly head.”
“Ugly,” Dr. Silverman said.
“It’s just, you know, a phrase,” I said.
Dr. Silverman nodded.
“Tell me about it,” she said.
So I told her about letting Rosen think I’d sleep with him, and I told her about sleeping with Franklin.
“I took some pictures of him,” I said. “I’ll show them to Karp and see if Franklin is the man who hired him.”
“And if he is?”
“I’ve been sleeping with the enemy.”
“A possibility you knew about when you chose to,” Dr. Silverman said.
“Yes.”
Dr. Silverman was quiet.
“I feel kind of dirty,” I said.
“How so?”
“Well, pretending I’d, ah, come across for poor, fat Ike Rosen, just so I could get him to tell me what I needed to know.”
“You’re in a tough business,” Dr. Silverman said. “There’s no reason not to use whatever advantages you have.”
“I suppose.”
“Do you feel dirty about Franklin?” Dr. Silverman said.
“No. Isn’t that odd.”
“Odd?”
“Yes. I mean, he may be a very bad man, and I knew he might be, and I hopped right into bed with him.”
“His faults may be his charm,” Dr. Silverman said.
“What’s that mean?” I said.
“Perhaps you can enjoy him more,” she said, “because he’s almost certainly not going to become a long-term relationship.”
“Because he might be a bad guy.”
“You didn’t spend the night,” Dr. Silverman said.
“No,” I said. “I hate to spend the night.”
“Really?”
“You know . . . how you look when you wake up and how he does, and the bathroom business, and getting dressed while he watches you. . . . It’s all just, sort of, ah, uncomfortable, once the passion subsides. Besides, he might want to again, and I never want to first thing in the morning.”
Dr. Silverman smiled. I wondered if she ever worried about spending the night.
“Do you think leaving when the sex is over underscores that it’s only about sex?”
“I suppose,” I said.
We were quiet. Dr. Silverman watched me pleasantly. I drummed my fingers gently on my thighs for a moment. Dr. Silverman watched me do that. A student of body language, too? It was very interesting, what we’d talked about. Did I want to make it clear that it was in fact only slam, bam, thank you, ma’am? Or was it after all only the inconveniences of spending the night with anyone you didn’t know well . . . or did.
I said, “Let me tell you about a dream.”
She nodded.
“I’m out walking in a rural landscape with Rosie. There’s a little arched bridge over a stream at the top of a hill where we’re walking. It’s not a place I’ve been to in real life, that I can remember. It’s sort of a generic painterly kind of still-life landscape. Rosie keeps running in wider and wider circles. When I call her, she comes back, but not all the way. She’s having a grand time. But I’m a little uneasy about her running loose without any certainty that she’ll come back. Usually, she’s on a leash.”
Dr. Silverman waited. Still interested.
“And that’s all,” I said.
“How did you feel?”
“In the dream or when I woke up.”
Dr. Silverman smiled.
“Either one,” she said.
“In the dream, as I sai
d, I was uneasy, anxious about her.”
Dr. Silverman nodded.
“And after?” she said. “When you were awake?”
“That’s the funny thing,” I said. “Now, awake, I kind of like the dream. I like to think about her running free like that.”
“Unleashed,” Dr. Silverman said.
I looked at her for a moment. What was she up to?
“Yes,” I said. “Unleashed.”
She nodded and was quiet. I was quiet. I didn’t know where to go with it. After a while, Dr. Silverman looked at her watch. She always did it the same way. It was ritualized. A way to say, “It’s time.”
“I . . .”
“We’re out of time today,” she said.
“I don’t . . .”
She waited a minute.
Then she said, “There’s no hurry. I’ll see you Thursday.”
I stood and walked to the door. She stood as she always did and walked to the door with me.
“Unleashed,” I said.
She smiled and opened the door.
I went out.
35
Under the heading of no hard feelings, I had lunch with Lewis Karp, at a coffee shop on Washington Street in Brighton. Lewis looked around a bit nervously when he came in, and didn’t see Spike, and seemed to relax. He ordered a cheeseburger. I had tuna salad on whole wheat. We both had coffee.
“So, you talk to Ike Rosen?” Karp said.
The continuing absence of Spike seemed to make him positively expansive.
“I did.”
“He’s a great guy, isn’t he?”
“A very friendly person,” I said.
“So, did he help you out?”
“Yes. He sent me to a lawyer named Peter Franklin,” I said.
“And?”
I took an eight-by-ten blowup out of my big shoulder bag and handed it to Karp. He studied it, making a considerable show of frowning and turning the picture for a different angle.
“I think that might be him,” Karp said. “You got any other shots?”
I took several more out of my bag and placed them side by side on the table. Karp looked some more. Frowning, squinting, sitting back, cocking his head. He did everything with the pictures but taste them. I was quiet, enjoying the show.
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