by Janice Weber
Emily’s heart twitched: laughing Dana a corpse? “I lived in Turkey and Korea,” she replied. “Bodies are part of the scenery there.”
Out on Tremont Street, a redhead in a brilliant green suit was peering into the front window. “She’s a little early for lunch,” Ward commented suspiciously, watching as the woman tested the doorknob. “Cripes, who left the door unlocked? Hello! Can I help you?”
The woman walked to the table. Her purse matched her shoes matched her lipstick matched her eye shadow. The effect was merely humanoid. “I’m looking for the person in charge here.”
Ward picked a fleck of oatmeal from her sweatshirt. “Speaking.”
“My name is Wyatt Pratt. I am here representing Ardith Forbes.” Seeing that neither name meant anything to Ward, she said, “The widow of Dana Forbes.”
“You’re a lawyer?”
Pratt’s lips curved imperceptibly upward, as if she had just been given an expensive chocolate. “Mrs. Forbes believes that the negligence of this restaurant is responsible for her husband’s death.”
“That’s pretty swift,” Emily said. “He was only eating here twelve hours ago.”
Pratt lay a thick envelope on the table. “This is fairly self-explanatory. I’m sure you’ll consult your attorney if you have any further questions.” Smiling with a saccharinity that tempted people to punch her in the teeth, she left.
Ward and Emily stared at Wyatt Pratt s envelope for a few moments, half expecting it to quiver to life, like a stunned rodent. “This is all my fault,” Emily said finally. “Maybe I should have kept flipping pancakes at Cafe Presto.”
Ward slit the envelope open with a fork. “I can’t afford any goddamn lawyers.”
“Forget it! I’ll have my husband speak with Ardith. Once she knows I’m chef here, she’ll drop the suit.”
Ward skimmed the neat typing. Suddenly her eyes bulged at a couple of difficult words. “Is your friendship with Ardith worth ten million bucks?”
Emily’s friendship with Ardith wasn’t worth two cents. Ardith was one of those overhauled, anorexic wives who knew that no matter how perfectly lovely she looked, her husband would still prefer to sleep with raunchier women. “Ten million bucks?” Emily cried. “That bitch has no case!”
“Let’s hope not.” Ward slowly eased herself from the chair, wincing as her ankles bore the brunt of her weight. “Why don’t you go talk to your husband right now. Just for my peace of mind.”
Emily called home, got the machine. She called Ross’s private office line and got Marjorie, whose toneless voice left no doubt that she had recently received some horrendous news. Yes, Ross was in, she told Emily. Of course, come on down.
Emily cabbed to State Street. Marjorie was not at her desk: That was like the Marines not guarding an embassy. Near the water cooler, an assistant with wet, red eyes honked into a Kleenex. When the phone rang, an apprentice answered, telling the caller that “he wasn’t in right now.” He politely took a number, hung up, and raked his fingers through a spiky haircut, as if to reassure himself that his head was still round. Not one word passed among a dozen employees, many of whom were staring out the windows. Others only nodded as Emily walked by.
She found Ross lying on the couch in his office. Marjorie sat at his side, holding a glass of water to his lips. It was a pose of tremendous intimacy. Emily stopped in her tracks, startled: Here was another Ross, one bound to another woman, maybe not in the same way he was bound to her, but with as deep a passion. Otherwise he would not have allowed his assistant to sit so close, to whisper to him so. Never having seen them alone, in their natural habitat, Emily had always thought of Marjorie as one of Ross’s office fixtures, a professional fact of life, like withholding tax. Now she realized that Marjorie was more on the order of Ross’s alternate wife, occupying a niche that Emily never could; in the near future, without Dana, that niche would probably widen to a canyon. Emily wondered if Ross slept with her. Why not, really. They had spent many years, and their most creative energies, pursuing the same rainbow. All Emily had done was cheer from the wayside at dinnertime.
“Ross?” She knocked and walked in slowly enough that, if his hands were in Marjorie’s lap, he could remove them by the time she got to the couch. Emily dropped into a nearby chair, noticing that Marjorie’s rear end hadn’t budged more than an inch from its original position. At least she was trying to look more like a nurse now. “Rough morning, eh?”
“The worst,” Ross replied. He half sat up. Emily’s mouth dropped: He hadn’t shaved. That was like coming to the office in his jock strap. “How was the restaurant?”
“Detective O’Keefe was in. He won’t be sure of anything until the autopsy.” Emily crossed her legs, wondering how they compared with Marjorie’s. “Ardith is suing Diavolina for ten million bucks.”
“What?” Marjorie cried, finally taking her eyes off her patient. “Why?”
“Who the hell knows? Ardith is Ardith. If you’re feeling up to it, Ross, try talking to her, would you? Tell her it wasn’t anything Dana ate in my restaurant.”
Marjorie got professional. “Who’s her lawyer? Maybe we should work on him instead.”
“Her. The name is Wyatt Pratt. She’s a cross between a buzzard and a gorgon.”
“So Ardith hooked up with Personal Liability Pratt,” Ross said. “Good luck. She cruises around town listening to the police band. Arrives at the accident with a lawsuit before the blood even dries.” He smiled coldly. “Dana had a one-nighter with her a few years ago. He said it was like screwing a starfish, all bristles and slime.”
Aghast, both women stared at him. Neither had heard him speak like this before. Then again, it was a man-to-man topic and Ross had no more man. “Dana said that to you?” Emily asked finally.
“Of course. He told me everything.” Wrong: nearly everything. As the phone rang, Ross put his face in his hands. “Word’s getting out. Wait until the obituary tomorrow.” Lurching off the couch, he went quickly to the washroom between his office and Dana’s. A lot of water began gushing behind the oak wall.
“I apologize for hanging up on you yesterday,” Marjorie said. “I mistook you for your sister.” Seeing that Emily had no idea what she was talking about, she continued. “I walked in on Dana and that woman by mistake. In his office. I was quite upset. I’m sorry. Of course it couldn’t have been you.”
Emily didn’t have the nerve to ask what stage of intimacy Marjorie had interrupted. “My sister plays by her own rules.”
“So did Dana.” Sniffling, Marjorie found a handkerchief. “Poor Ross. This is so difficult for him.”
Emily listened to the plumbing a few moments. “I’m sure he’ll be relying on you more than ever,” she said carefully. Now what? Forbid the poor woman to rise to the occasion? How tacky. Ah, face it: She’d have to accept another contestant, a strong one, on the track now. The tired old wife would just have to run a little faster in a large, empty stadium. Was Marjorie her penance for Guy? Emily stood up, already aching, and went to the washroom. Ross was inside dragging a razor over his cheeks. “Can I do anything for you, sweetheart?” she asked. He didn’t reply at once. Emily finally realized that he wasn’t thinking about an answer, he was just concentrating on his shaving. “Then I’ll let you get back to Marjorie.”
He caught her arm as she was leaving. “Are you going back to work?”
She shrugged. “Where else?”
Bed. He’d really like to go to bed with her now, roll under the sheets and forget everything but her scented skin. Then the phone rang again. Ross heard Marjorie answer and knew he would be stuck here, playing Winston Churchill, for a few long hours. He hugged his wife, inhaled her. “I love you.”
“Ross? It’s Billy Murphy,” Marjorie called. “Should I blow him off?”
“No, I’ll take it.”
Emily handed him a towel. “I’ll call after lunch.” She left as he was listlessly picking up the phone.
Emily’s return to the kitchen at Diavolin
a interrupted a murky powwow at the coffee machine; she didn’t need a psychic to realize that Klepp, Chess, Byron, Yip Chick, and Mustapha had been talking about her. Fighting an impulse to leave the premises, Emily helped herself to a cup of coffee. “Everyone ready to go?” she asked cheerfully. The group trudged sullenly to their stations as she tried to swallow the burning liquid.
Reflecting the mood of the kitchen, a peevish crowd came to lunch. This was one of those days when people went out less to enjoy food than to be served it. The old ladies complained about the seeds in the cucumbers and the young ladies complained about the small portions. Everyone wanted doggie bags; tips averaged 12 percent. At the bar, Ward ran out of ice cubes. Disgusted, she told Zoltan to take over and left to see her therapist again.
At two o’clock, Slavomir still had not come to work. Byron opened his mouth only to bray at imagined slights. Neglecting his baking, Mustapha called twenty oven repairmen, finally finding one who sounded Afro. He didn’t trust the others. When Klepp wondered aloud for the tenth time when Leo might be coming back, Emily left the kitchen. She was lying on the couch in her office, daydreaming about Dana’s great sailing parties, when Detective O’Keefe phoned.
“I’m at the morgue,” he said. “Waiting for autopsy results. I pushed your sister’s boyfriend to the front of the line.”
“I’m sure he appreciates that.”
“That isn’t why I called, actually. You should know that a body just arrived. In his pocket’s a paycheck from Diavolina made out to Slavomir Dubrinsky.”
Emily’s stomach hurt. “That’s my dishwasher.”
“Is he old, thin, dilapidated?”
“Yes. What happened to him?”
“I don’t know. A jogger found him floating in the Fenway. He’s got a head injury.”
“He fell in the kitchen last night. I sent him home around eleven. Alive.”
“Where does he live? Any family?”
“I have no idea. I only met the man last Friday. He didn’t speak much English.”
“Could you identify him?” O’Keefe heard her laugh oddly. “Could someone else? Where’s Ms. Ward?”
“Barfing on her therapist,” Emily said. “I’ll take care of it.”
“Could you bring down an address?”
“I’ll try.” Emily went to Ward’s messy office. Bills, résumés, government notices, and brochures littered her desk; half cups of coffee kept the higher piles in place. The soggy Rolodex reeked of ouzo. Emily lifted Slavomir’s file card out; as she did, an old newspaper clipping that had been stuck to the back of it slid to the desk.
TEEN FALLS TO DEATH, the small headline read. Curious, Emily turned over the brittle paper half expecting to see a recipe on the other side: no. She read on.
A South End woman plunged to her death from the fortieth floor of the newly completed Darnell Building late Saturday evening. A possible suicide note was left behind, according to police sources, who are with-holding the victim’s identity pending notification of the family. “She must have made an extraordinary leap,” said Dana Forbes, architect of the building, noting that the balcony railings were four feet high.
What was Dana doing on the back of a dead man’s file card? Emily found paper and was about to write down Slavomir’s address when she saw that she had pulled not a pencil but a nasty-looking dart from Ward’s pencil cup. Swearing, startled, she crammed it back and got a ballpoint pen. Uneasily copying the dishwasher’s address, Emily left Ward’s office. “I’m going out for an hour,” she called to Zoltan, who was in the dining room checking his reservation list.
She walked through increasingly tattier neighborhoods toward Boston City Hospital. Over the past few years, this area had become a favorite locale of Korean noodle factories; as the frost heaves proliferated on Albany Street, so had the alignment specialty shops. Rush-hour traffic was already piling off the expressway onto Mass Ave, where a stream of ambulances and buses waited in ambush; at this time of day, only a few illegal left turns were necessary to create superior gridlock. A dozen nurses lounged, smoking, on the front steps of the historic hospital, founded a century ago for people who couldn’t afford doctors. It was still a popular place to die, particularly of bullet holes.
As a tractor trailer thudded past, Emily rang the doorbell of the pathology building. O’Keefe admitted her to the morgue’s decrepit foyer; no point spiffing up a place where the clientele saw nothing and their relatives would only be visiting once, in a hurry. Straight ahead was a short stairway flanked by two gilt sphinxes. Emily blinked her eyes; the recessed lighting made the statues glow, almost throb, as if they truly guarded the dead. The half-flight of stairs between them descended to two doors arched with gold laurel. Ross would appreciate this, Emily thought; the architectural symbolism was dignified, very Brahmin. But he wouldn’t like the restoration job. The sphinxes had recently been regilded; they pounced out of the gloom, almost attacking the eye. The net effect was a bizarre clash of Radio City and the River Styx.
“You have a choice,” O’Keefe said. “Would you prefer to identify Dubrinsky by video or in person? I recommend video. The camera’s all set up.”
“Okay.” Emily wanted to do her duty and leave; the soul felt nervous here.
They went down the stairs, between the statues, to a small room with a television set. O’Keefe conferred briefly with a pathologist. “I appreciate your coming down,” he said, patting Emily’s cold hand as they waited for a picture.
Slavomir’s still face suddenly appeared onscreen. His eyes were closed but his mouth had frozen in a ghastly rectangle. The welt on his cheek had become a violent purple. Emily stared in disbelief, waiting for the eyelids to flutter, for the mouth to burble Russian poetry; although she had known the dishwasher for only a few days, she had only known him alive. This image on the screen was some kind of fake. “That’s Slavomir,” she said.
O’Keefe turned the picture off and handed her a form to sign. “He drowned around midnight, we think. Blood alcohol level was off the charts.”
“He drank a half bottle of port at the restaurant.”
“And a couple slugs of grain alcohol afterward. How’d he get the head wound?”
“He fell over a tool case and hit his cheek.”
“How about the back of his head?”
“He didn’t hit the back of his head. Just his cheek. And he cut his wrist on some broken dishes.”
O’Keefe studied Emily’s eyes for a moment. She seemed sober and intelligent, but they all did in the beginning. “The poor bastard was an alcoholic, judging by the condition of his liver. Did he have any enemies at work?”
“How would I know?”
“Could he have committed suicide?”
“He was a simple dishwasher!”
“Not quite. He served twenty years at Dutworth for statutory rape. That was a long time ago, of course. Did he talk to you at ail?”
“No. I think I frightened him.”
Deciding not to press her on that point today, O’Keefe lay a small orange tassel on the table. “This was in his pocket. Recognize it?”
“No. It’s not from Diavolina.”
O’Keefe wrote a few words near the bottom of a document, then capped his pen. “Were you able to bring any information about Dubrinsky’s next of kin?”
“No, only his address.” Emily gave the paper to O’Keefe. “What if no one claims him?”
“The city will take care of it. Eventually. Care for a lift back to the restaurant?”
She followed him past the sphinxes into the soft, cruel sunshine. O’Keefe edged his car into the traffic on Albany Street and began slaloming between potholes. “Heard from your sister?”
“Not yet. She’s been doing interviews all day.”
“Ask how her stomach’s feeling.” O’Keefe stopped his car in front of Diavolina. “Forbes’s lab reports should be back in a few hours.”
Emily studied his eyes a moment, surprised: They were the same ice blue as Guy’s. Odd s
he hadn’t noticed them before. Maybe he hadn’t looked at her like that before. For one wee second she imagined O’Keefe inside of her. It probably wouldn’t be bad at all; it would just be futile. “Keep me posted,” she said, leaving the car.
Ward was at the bar concluding, or perhaps canceling, her latest therapy session with a triple martini and a computer printout. Behind her, Zoltan stacked clean wineglasses on the shelves. “Hey Major,” she called cheerfully. “Maybe I should sign a contract with your sister. Have her show up once a month with a—” Ward caught herself just in time. “Next time you talk with her, please say thanks. We sold more booze last night than we did on New Year’s Eve.”
“Thank Byron. His friends bought it.”
“His friends also clipped two champagne buckets and three pepper mills.” Ward swallowed an inch of her drink. “Shit-heads.”
Emily wondered why Ward always returned from her therapist in a sour mood. Maybe she was sleeping with him. “Detective O’Keefe called, Ward. I was just down at the morgue identifying a body.”
“Didn’t you do that already?”
“I’m not talking about Dana. Slavomir drowned in the Fenway last night.”
Zoltan rapidly crossed himself; Ward caught her breath. “Impossible,” she whispered.
“It was the dishwasher. Believe me.”
“No way. There’s been a mistake.” Ward stomped out.
“He was her favorite,” Zoltan muttered after the kitchen doors had finally returned to a standstill. The late-afternoon sun brought out the ocher in his heavy makeup. When he looked at Emily head-on, it was like conversing with a rotting pumpkin. “Leo will be very upset as well. I would not tell anyone in the kitchen about this now, if I were you.”
“Why the hell not,” Emily snapped. “They’re going to find out soon enough.”
“First Leo, then last night, now this. Poor Slavomir! How is that possible, drowned?”
“Simple. He got drunk and swallowed a lot of water. Did he have a family? You’re supposed to know everything around here.”
“No family, I think. Only Leo.” Then the headwaiter recalled a more relevant tragedy. “And now no dishwasher either. Excuse me. I should do some telephoning.” He left the bar.
