by S. J. Rozan
The two cops and I were standing, and Lydia sitting, around the table.
Grimaldi went on, “Or she took it out again right after she threw it away?”
“She came back. Ten, fifteen minutes later.”
“She went back into the Whitney? After they all left?”
“To talk to a client,” I said. “To calm him down. That’s what she told me, anyway. One of Sam’s collectors is a client of their architecture office. She wanted to make nice.”
“Who’s this client?”
I gave Grimaldi Sanger’s name and number. She took a deep breath and looked around at all of us.
“All right.” Grimaldi spoke to Cavanaugh. “Go back to your precinct, Ike. Keep your head down. Start working on those retirement papers. I swear if you’re still on the Job when this case is closed, your ass is mine. Smith, where am I likely to find Leslie Tabor this time of day?”
“Their office, I’d think. Can I come?”
“Are you fucking kidding?”
“Yes. Go with God, Detective.”
“Stay out of my way.” Grimaldi spun and left.
Cavanaugh curled his lip at me. “Go with God? Go to hell!” He stomped out of the diner, bequeathing me and Lydia all the stares from customers and staff. It seemed like a good time to leave that big tip and clear out. I dropped two twenties on the table amid the coffee and doughnut debris.
“Where are we going?” Lydia asked as we swung out the door.
“To find Sam. I get the feeling a lot of shit’s about to hit the fan, and I don’t want him running around loose.”
“Do you have a plan?”
“Not yet. I’m sure he won’t go to Peter’s. But let’s at least find him.”
We headed up the block to the studio building. The news and NYPD vans were gone. So was Epstein; yellow crime scene tape had taken his place at Oakhurst’s door.
“Are you thinking Leslie Tabor found Kimberly Pike’s body and left Sam’s tie there to implicate Sam?” Lydia asked.
“At best,” I said. “Or she killed Kimberly Pike and left Sam’s tie there to implicate Sam.”
“Why Pike?” Lydia asked. “Why then?”
“Because she could?” I said. “Or because she cracked?”
“Or because it’s been her all along?”
“According to Cromley, unlikely.”
“That’s not exactly right, I don’t think,” Lydia said. “Unlikely if these are actual serial killings. But what if they’re something else? Something—what did you say Cromley’s word was—opportunistic?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, keep thinking.”
“As if I wouldn’t.”
Sam didn’t answer when we knocked at his door, so Lydia used his code. We found him sitting in front of the window, staring down.
Lydia walked forward and said gently, “Sam.”
“I killed him.” Sam spoke without turning. “My friend Tony. I killed him, Lydia. Why did I do that?”
“You didn’t, Sam. Someone else did.”
“Who? Why would anyone else?”
“We don’t know yet. But it wasn’t you.”
From the doorway, I gestured to Lydia that I was going next door, and she nodded. I wasn’t gone long, though. Cromley didn’t answer my knock, my thumping, or my yelling. Neither did her Jamaican neighbor; he’d probably given up and gone someplace quieter, like Grand Central Station. I tried the combination that had worked before, but Cromley must have caught on and changed it.
I gave up and walked back to Sam’s studio. I found him slipping drawing pads and pencils into a canvas carryall. He smiled at me. Sam, apparently, had had another mood swing. And Lydia had had a brainstorm.
Sam said, “I’m going to go meet Lydia’s mother.”
When we hit the ground floor, Sam was out the elevator door first, which gave me just enough time to grab Lydia, kiss her, and say, “What did I ever do to deserve such a brilliant partner?”
“Nothing. You don’t.”
We hailed a cab to Chinatown, and Lydia called home. She spoke in Chinese, clicked off, and said, “She can’t wait.”
“I’m sure,” I said.
“No, for real. She’s thrilled I’m asking for her help.”
“Come on, I could hear her yelling at you through the phone.”
“You need to translate.”
“I don’t speak Chinese.”
“The language,” Lydia said, “isn’t what you need to translate.”
The cab left us north of Canal. Sam stared around in wonder as we made our way to the single block of Mosco Street. “Everyone here is Chinese,” he said to Lydia.
“My mother’s Chinese, too. Just so you know.”
We climbed the four flights to the Chin family apartment, me in the rear. “Take your shoes off,” Lydia said to Sam as she turned the locks. He did immediately, with the result that when the door opened and Sam went to shake hands with Lydia’s mother, he offered her his shoes. She stared, broke into laughter, and pointed at the entryway floor. Sam put his shoes down, precisely lined up with the pair beside them.
Still smiling and shaking her head, Lydia’s mother said in English, “You come in.” She did shoot me the usual suspicious glare, but that seemed pro forma.
Sam peered around in frank fascination. He spotted Lydia’s father’s collection of mud figures—small, delicate brown clay sculptures of peasants, fishermen, and monks—and marched across the room. He stood at the cabinet, drinking them in.
Lydia’s mother said, “We have tea now.” The English must have been for Sam’s benefit; I never got that many words in a row.
Sam turned, a delighted smile transforming his face. “These are great, these statues! Oh, look at the ducks!” He pointed to a brushwork scroll that hung over the couch.
Lydia’s mother brought out a pot of tea and four tiny cups. We all sat and Lydia poured, first for her mother, then for Sam, then me, herself last. Sam watched carefully to see how Lydia held the delicate little cup and followed exactly. He sipped just as she did, then put his cup down and pointed at the old worn chair that none of us had sat in. “That’s important, right?” he said.
Lydia nodded. “It was my father’s.”
“He’s dead?”
“Yes.”
“So’s mine. All I have now is my brother. You have your mom, that’s nice.”
“Yes, it is. I also have brothers. Four of them.”
“Do they take care of you?”
“They try.”
Lydia’s mother had been following this conversation as though it were a ping-pong game. Now she said, “Ling Wan-Ju brother, all very smart, very good son. Like Ling Wan-Ju, all same. My children, all same.” She sat back and sipped her tea with a self-satisfied smile.
Lydia said to Sam, “Ling Wan-Ju is my Chinese name.”
I said, “Holy—” I stopped myself before a word got out that I was sure was in Lydia’s mother’s limited vocabulary. I stood. “Thank you, Mrs. Chin. The tea was delicious. Thank you for looking after my friend.” I bowed.
Lydia shot me a quizzical look and also stood. She spoke in Chinese to her mother, who answered. They went back and forth, seemed to reach the end, and Lydia said to Sam, “She says to make yourself at home. You can sketch anything you want.”
“Will she sit for me?”
Sam, not just working with someone else in the room, but drawing from a live model? When I had time, I’d consider this astonishing turn of events. Right now I was tying my shoes.
Lydia spoke to her mother, her mother laughed and swatted the air, and Lydia told Sam, “She says no one wants a picture of an old lady.”
“I do.”
Lydia and her mother exchanged words again. Lydia said to Sam, “She thinks you’re ridiculous, but she’ll try to be a good host.”
“So, yes?”
“Yes. See you later.”
Lydia slipped her shoes on and we le
ft. “What?” she said as soon as we were out the door.
“Your mother. She’s a genius, like you.”
“That word’s being thrown around too much today. What are you talking about?”
We double-timed down the stairs and headed for the subway. I pulled out my phone and called The Tabor Group, only to be told Peter was still home sick and Leslie was out at a meeting. I wondered if the meeting was with Grimaldi, who’d hauled her down to the precinct, or if the detective was cooling her heels in some client’s waiting area while Leslie finished up. Grimaldi cooling her heels was a concept I wasn’t sure I could wrap my head around, though if anyone could make it happen, my money was on Leslie.
I called Grimaldi and got voice mail. “I’m on my way to Brooklyn, to Peter Tabor’s,” I said. “Call me.” I wasn’t sure what my inspiration would be worth to her, but I also didn’t want her to get on my case for freelancing.
“So?” Lydia demanded as I put the phone away. “What about my genius mother?”
“Your genius mother said all her children are the same.” We reached the entrance to the subway.
“You think she’s going to admit to an outsider that her daughter’s a black sheep?”
“What if all the sheep are black?”
“Explain, please,” Lydia said as we slipped through the turnstiles. The R to Brooklyn pulled in and we got on.
“I told you Peter tried to get Sam to draw flowers and stick figures when they were kids?”
“I remember. But Sam never did.”
“He wouldn’t fake it. Probably less ‘wouldn’t’ than ‘couldn’t.’ Peter could. He told me he didn’t care any more about flowers than Sam did, it was just to keep the grown-ups happy. He said the drawings he made that he liked were the ones that only he understood. He once told his mother a drawing was camels when it was people and dogs.”
“Hidden meaning in the drawings. Like Sam’s, but not like Sam’s.”
“Not like Sam’s. But like Sam.”
Lydia’s eyes went wide. She grabbed my arm. “Oh my God.”
“Peter Tabor’s a space cadet. Not like Sam, but like Sam. A genius who never really bloomed until Sam was locked up.”
She stared at me. “And the first of these killings…”
“If the one in Hoboken actually was one of these, if it was the first, it was just about when Peter learned Sam would be getting out.”
“A stress event. The stress event triggers are real.”
I nodded. “They’re just not Sam’s.”
39
Peter and Leslie lived on a tree-arched block of brownstones in Cobble Hill. The neighborhood was quiet, the afternoon sun glowing through the fresh green of spring in the branches, when Lydia and I made our way from the subway stop to the Tabors’ house and up the tall front stoop. Nothing happened when I rang the bell. We waited. I considered yelling through the door that Peter had better let us in or I’d go howling up and down the block pissing off the neighbors. I was disappointed in myself for the lack of imagination demonstrated by my willingness to use the same threat twice in one day, but I was about to do it anyway when the door cracked open.
“What the—Oh, for shit’s sake.” Peter paused. “I thought you were the pizza guy. Get out of here.” He looked the way he’d sounded yesterday on the phone: like hell. His red-rimmed eyes were sunken, his face unshaved. Worst was the defeated slump of his shoulders. Hunched and drooping, he looked more than ever like Sam.
“No.” I pushed past him—an easy task—and Lydia followed me in, shutting the door. We stood in the parquet-floored entry, before a curved staircase. “Peter.” I said. “We know.”
“You know what?”
Nothing, really, but while I was thinking how to phrase my suspicions, Lydia spoke.
“We know you didn’t mean it.”
“Didn’t mean what?” Peter asked.
“At least, not the first time,” Lydia said. “The time in Hoboken.”
Peter’s features, his body language, nothing changed. He kept his eyes on Lydia, but I wasn’t sure he was seeing her.
“You were just—what was it Leslie called it? Tomcatting. You just wanted a good roll in the hay. That’s what you told yourself. Though you like your rolls in the hay a little rough, don’t you, Peter? Isn’t that why Leslie stopped sleeping with you? That’s what she told Bill.”
That wasn’t exactly what Leslie had told me. But I could see what Lydia was doing. She was letting Peter think we knew more, and on a more intimate plane, than we did. Softening him up. Breaking him down.
She continued, “Though you probably didn’t consider that any more of a loss than Leslie did.”
At that, Peter flinched.
“But that night in Hoboken,” she said, “you’d just learned Sam would be getting out. That he was going to be your problem again. You picked up a girl, took her to the park, and that night’s roll was a little rougher than usual. Maybe she didn’t like it, maybe she screamed, maybe she hit you. Maybe you only took out your pocketknife to make her shut up, but she didn’t stop, so you stabbed her. You stabbed her like Sam had when he killed Amy Evans. And you felt a thrill. Sam never felt it. But you did.”
As Lydia spoke, Peter’s expression changed bit by bit. Looking at her now, he wore the face Sam had worn as we’d driven over the bridge—absorbed, attentive, fascinated.
“You took one of her earrings,” Lydia went on. “You wanted to remember how it felt. You wanted to remember, because as great as it was, that feeling while it was happening, it was also horrifying once it was over, to think you’d done it. You wanted to remember because you weren’t ever going to do it again.
“But the night after Sam got out of prison, you went out. You said you were with clients, but no, you were picking up Tiffany Traynor. And the night after Sam’s show opened, when you found Annika Hausman. Those were big stress events for Sam. He drank himself into a blackout. But they were also big for you, and you dealt with them differently.
“You took earrings those nights, too. And two nights ago, at the Whitney. Kimberly Pike’s earring. But that one you took from the other ear. Tell me why.”
“No,” Peter said, in a calm, reasonable way. “I didn’t.”
“There’s no point in this, Peter,” I said.
He turned the interested face, Sam’s face, to me.
“Now that we know it was you,” I said, “the cops can show your picture around. Trace your movements. Talk to your clients. It’ll be over soon anyway. But right now, the cops are focusing on Sam, and he’s starting to crack.” Actually, Sam was probably focusing on his sketch pad, shading Lydia’s mother’s features while the two of them laughed and talked incomprehensibly to each other. “You’ve spent so much of your life helping Sam keep it together. You’ve been a great brother to him. You have no way out of this. But you can still help Sam.”
“Fantastic! Just fantastic.” A new voice: Leslie, coming around the staircase from some room in the back. She spoke to Peter. “You let them in? What the hell is wrong with you?”
“Leslie,” I said.
“Oh, I heard you.” She fixed an angry glare on me. “The ‘you’re such a great brother’ speech. The ‘save Sam’ speech. I’ve heard it before, heard it for years in all kinds of different ways from Sam. ‘You’re my brother, save me, save me!’ Even from Peter, about himself. The ‘I’m such a great brother’ speech. The ‘the hell with my career and my marriage, look, I’m saving Sam again!’ speech.”
Peter tried to answer. “Les, I—”
“Oh, shut up, Peter! Bastards, both of you. Goddamn geniuses, the rest of the world has to step aside, stand on our heads, do whatever has to be done so the Tabor Brothers can express their brilliance. All my life, Peter, all my goddamn life, that’s what I’ve been doing for you, and now you and your crazy brother ruined everything!”
I suddenly thought of Sam’s answer when I’d asked the other day if he wanted to go to Peter’s. You’re as crazy as I a
m, he’d said. The Crazy Brothers.
With a change of tone, Leslie turned to me. “If the cops are focusing on Sam, fine. Because Sam’s a killer. He’s guilty. All Peter’s guilty of is being a flaming jackass and doing everything he could think of to throw his life away—and mine with it. They arrested Sam because they have evidence. They’ll find more.”
“Peter’s guilty of a lot more than that,” I said. “And so are you. The evidence they have—Sam’s hairs on Kimberly Pike’s sweater—was planted by that cop Ike Cavanaugh. The one who worked the Amy Evans killing.”
Leslie narrowed her eyes. “What are you talking about?”
“He was sure Sam was guilty, too, and sure he was going to get off. So Cavanaugh did what he could.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Figure it out. I don’t care. That’s not why we’re here. From the moment I told you the cops had been to Sam’s yesterday, you said they must have evidence and they’d have more. You didn’t know about the hairs, but you knew about the ‘more.’ You knew all about the box and the tie.”
Leslie’s face flashed crimson.
Peter, looking from me to Leslie, said, “What tie?” His voice now also sounded like Sam’s, that perennial confusion: There are so many things I don’t get.
“Sam’s tie from the Whitney was in the truck with Kimberly Pike’s body,” I told him. “Tony Oakhurst took it, though. Oh, you didn’t know that?” I said to Leslie as her lips parted soundlessly. “The cops never found it. They didn’t find the box, either, but they have it now. Peter, you asked, ‘What tie?’ but you didn’t ask about the box. You know what box.”
He swallowed and nodded. “The one with the earrings.”
“Shut up, you idiot!” Leslie roared.
He looked at her. “You took it. You said you were going to hide it or throw it away or something.” Any difference between the sound of Peter and the sound of Sam was now gone. “What did you do with it?”
“Christ!”
“She put it in Sam’s studio, Peter,” I said. “The same way she put the tie in the truck with Kimberly Pike. So the cops would be sure to find it. To implicate Sam. But they didn’t find it. Ellissa Cromley took it, like Tony Oakhurst took the tie.”
