by Susan Isaacs
“Out!” she barked at her parents. Paralyzed, they stood by the bed, her mother still making mouse sounds, but softer now. “Get out!” she said even louder, and to her amazement, they about-faced and double-timed out. A little too eagerly. Lee realized that now, if anything happened—if Robin died—she would be blamed. It was too silent. Then she heard the rumble of the jeep and then Jazz’s voice: “Hey, I found this little store with gallons of tonic!”
“In here!” she called. “In Robin’s room.”
Ira shuffled his feet, probably meaning to move out as well, but he was too stoned to actually ambulate. “What the hell is going on with her?” Lee yelled at him. In slow motion, Ira raised his narrow shoulders into a shrug. She raced around the bed and stood right before him. He smelled musty, like a dank basement. “I know it’s heroin. Is it an overdose or is it withdrawal?” Ira managed to hoist his head so he could look directly at Lee, but all he did was look; he had nothing to say. “Overdose or withdrawal?” she bellowed. Still nothing. She grabbed his throat in her hand and squeezed. His Adam’s apple bobbed about in terror. He clutched her wrist and tried to pull it away, but he lacked the strength or the coordination. “Tell me, you son-of-a-bitch, or I’ll squeeze tighter. I’ll choke you to death and bury you in the sand, and no one except the fucking crabs will know about it. Overdose or withdrawal?”
Ira managed to get out a tiny sound: “Withdrawal.”
“Why? Did she want to stop?” When he didn’t respond, Lee slammed him against the wall. “Did she want to stop or did you just take too much?”
“Me,” he said.
“How do the two of you take it? Intravenously?”
“Yeah.” It was less a word than an exhalation.
“Do you have any more? Answer me.”
“Not much.”
Jazz came into the room, bouncing in his sneakers. Then he saw Robin and froze. “What …?”
“Heroin,” Lee said. She waited, expecting Jazz to do something, but he just stood there, hands at his sides, staring at Robin’s naked, sweat-drenched body. Lee separated the sheet from the blanket that lay twisted on the floor and covered her sister.
“Listen to me,” Lee said to Ira. “You’re going to get the heroin right now and show me everything: the stuff itself, the needles, all the shit you use. So I’ll know exactly what you have. Then you’re going to put the smallest possible amount in the needle and give it to her so she comes out of this convulsion.”
“Okay.”
She looked over to Jazz, but he was looking down at the floor. “You’re going to give it all to me,” she told Ira. “I’ll be first-vice-president in charge of heroin. If we can avoid going to a hospital here I’d like to, because I don’t know if they’re any good with drug problems. And I don’t know anything about the island’s drug laws. I don’t want my sister winding up with a life sentence on St. Bart’s. So if you can get her stabilized, we’re going to hire a plane and get her to a hospital back in the States and get her detoxified properly.” She took a deep breath. “If she needs another shot, you’ll give it to her. How often does she”—Lee squeezed Ira’s throat until his tongue bulged out—“shoot up?”
“Four, five times.”
“A day?” He nodded. “Right before we land, we’ll have to get rid of the drugs. We can’t risk bringing them in. You’re going to stay with us until she gets wheeled into the emergency room. Then you get a hundred bucks. You get your clothes. You get out of her life permanently. If you don’t, I will personally take a knife and slit your throat. Do you understand me, Ira?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think I mean what I say?”
Ira hesitated, but at last, wiping his nose on the back of his hand, he said: “Yeah.”
“Then let’s move it.” She moved in front of Jazz, staying with Ira as he knelt down and pulled a leather shaving kit from under the bed. She watched as he prepared the drug and filled a syringe. His fingers seemed flaccid, and she winced as he fumbled with the drug paraphernalia. “Ira, if you give her too much, you’re dead too. You understand that, don’t you?”
“Yeah.”
He took a length of rubber tubing, the sort that would be used in a hospital, and made a tourniquet around Robin’s thin arm. Then, with a casualness more appropriate to handing someone a cup of coffee, he ran his finger over her skin until he found an accessible vein and injected her. Within seconds, the convulsion stopped. Robin’s lashes fluttered as if she were a belle flirting with a new beau. She began to smile at Ira, but then she spotted her sister. “Hey,” Robin said, the smile vanishing. She dabbed away at the dried white foam on her chin. “You don’t belong in here. Out. I mean it, Lee. Haul ass!” Then she closed her eyes again.
It was only after Lee sent Jazz out to have her father hire a plane—now!—to fly to Miami that she came up on the side of the bed and smacked her sister across the face.
Fifteen
My secretary, Sandi Zimmerman, was born with a happy face. Add to her button nose, round brown eyes, and congenitally upturned mouth a ponytail that curled up at the end into a cheery little smile-shape, and you had a person strangers wanted to meet.
People who knew her, however, avoided her whenever they could. It wasn’t that Sandi was obnoxious or even mean; it was that beyond her two good qualities, honesty and diligence, she had no redeeming social value. Give her a friendly “Hi” and she’d act perplexed. “Hi?” she seemed to be wondering; how peculiar; how alienating. Finally, after a too long pause, Sandi would respond with an edgy “Oh. Uh … hi.” Invite her to join you for a cup of coffee, inquire if she’d watched the Oscars the night before, ask her what her vacation plans were—in short, treat her as you would any casual acquaintance—and Sandi would stiffen, jerking back her head as if you had suggested she join you and a quadruped in a bizarre sexual practice.
Then there was her nerves. From font changes on the office’s word-processing program to the introduction of the four-digit suffix for zip codes—everything rattled her: There was nothing about which Sandi was not anxious. Every client walking into the office was a maniac about to pull out a machete and cut us down—or, if not slaughter us, at least set us up by means of a subtle and nefarious ruse so we’d be easy pickings for a malpractice suit. Although she had been working for me for fifteen years, I had no idea how she’d come to be so strange since questions about her family or her childhood made her even more apprehensive. All I really knew about Sandi was that she was my age, lived with a divorced sister and a bachelor brother in Huntington, was a terrific stenographer and typist, and had a fondness bordering on fixation for Celestial Seasonings Lemon Zinger tea.
Naturally, in the back of my mind, I sensed that a decade or two on the couch probably wouldn’t hurt her. But in an office relationship, it’s easier to assume the weird person you are dealing with is eccentric rather than a fellow human being in terrible pain. But Sandi kept getting stranger and stranger.
Being a forty-five myself, and a feminist, I was reluctant to blame her increasing oddness on menopause. But I overcame my reluctance. About three months before Norman became a client, she had started going nuts about dirty telephones: The only phone in the office she would use was the one at her desk; arriving in the morning or coming back from the ladies’ room or lunch, she would spray the entire receiver—mouthpiece, handpiece, earpiece—with Lysol. A couple of weeks after that, she began to spend her lunch hour in the conference room, where, after glugging down one can of vanilla Ensure and one can of Diet Slice, she cut out elaborate doilies from old copies of the Law Journal. I was tempted to ask her what the doilies were for, but I was afraid my question might set her off on a psychotic voyage from which she’d never return and I would then become one of those lawyers who get ten years taken off their life by having to deal with temp agencies.
Still, it did come as a surprise to discover (as I was dictating a memo to files in re Torkelson) that Sandi had fallen madly in love with Mary Dean. “It is worth
noting,” I was saying, “that in a conversation with me on May ninth of this year—several days before Mary Dean admitted to having been in Bobette Frisch’s house—Ms. Dean showed a familiarity with the layout and furnishings of the premises that indicated she had spent a considerable amount of time there.” I swiveled around in my chair a few times as I constructed the next sentence and noted that the patent leather on my pumps was looking dull. Then I noted that Sandi was writing with her right hand—her usual practice, but toying with her bangs with her left. God knows why, but she must have curled her bangs; the rest of her hair was straight. It looked as if she had glued a piece of poodle to the top of her forehead. Nervously, over and over, she kept sticking her finger into the center of each curl. “The observations Mary Dean made—about a collection of purple perfume bottles on Ms. Frisch’s dresser, the furnishings of a second bedroom next to Ms. Frisch’s—suggest that far more than the hurried glimpse she has admitted to, she has a detailed knowledge of the house—”
“Because Norman described it to her!” Sandi broke in.
In all the years she had worked for me, she had never commented on anything I dictated. In fact, although her transcriptions were astoundingly accurate, I had always felt that while she got the words, she didn’t hear the music. So I was stunned. My mouth may have dropped open in quintessential stupnagel fashion. Not that my reaction mattered to Sandi. Her face was flushed dark red. I could sense her outrage, although with her strange, upturned smiley mouth and round cheeks, she just looked happy.
“No, it was not something she heard,” I responded slowly. “Mary said something like ‘I couldn’t believe my eyes.’ She saw the place. She was in there.”
“He’s a con man!” Sandi insisted, a hysterical screech creeping into her voice. “He made it seem so real it became real to her.”
“Boy, I’m glad you’re not on my jury,” I said. “Anyway, since when have you become a Mary Dean fan?”
Sandi set down her pen and steno pad. “My heart goes out to her. She’s so good. You can see it!” Her lips parted. Her eyes shone. I sensed I was watching something that ought to have been private. “Oh, I know with those kind of clothes you think she’s tawdry. Not a good person. Iwas put off by it at the beginning. But under all the makeup, she’s so innocent.” Sandi placed her palms together as if she were about to pray. “A saint, that’s what she is! You can see it in her eyes.” What I was seeing in Sandi’s eyes was a moist, mad glow. “And she’s been dragged down by that man, dragged into the gutter—”
“Before Mary Dean met that man she had twenty-seven arrests for prostitution, which might lead one to believe the gutter was not exactly terra incognita,” I commented.
I was shaken by Sandi’s outburst. Sure, there’d been plenty of emotion in the office, but it had come from my clients or their wives and girlfriends. Weeping, wailing, fainting, pounding on the desk—or on the client’s head. Once, I billed the Perich brothers, two contractors I was representing for tax fraud, an extra two hundred bucks for a carpet cleaning to remove bloodstains after Frankie hit Billy in the gut and Billy socked Frankie in the face and Frankie had a nosebleed all over my rug. But it was easy to keep a distance from my clients’ craziness. They were supposed to go off the wall.
Well, that makes it sound so easy: dealing with people who didn’t feel obliged to keep a stiff upper lip. It wasn’t. Even viewed from the objective distance I had trained myself to maintain, it often exhausted me. So what I needed to protect me from those client storms was tranquillity, peace in the workplace. That’s why I found Sandi’s explosion terribly jarring. Just as I depended on our receptionist to be obtuse, on our associate to try to act cool while walking up the courthouse steps, on Chuckie to be droll, I relied on Sandi to be reassuringly, perpetually dull.
“I’ll tell you what,” I announced. “Take a break. Then you can finish up the paperwork on that Eastern District case, that transportation of stolen property.” I got up. “See you later.” And I bolted.
For about half a minute I considered putting on the sneakers I keep in the trunk of my car and going for a five-mile walk to clear my head. But in the next half minute, I got into the car and headed toward Mary Dean’s. Was she, as Sandi was maintaining, an innocent? Or was she guilty of murder and, perhaps, a con of her own?
“I don’t want to talk to you,” Mary announced. She stood in the doorway, blocking entrance to the apartment. Not inviting, but not belligerent either. She was wearing matching shorts and crop top in a peach so vivid it was almost a new color. Her hair, tossed on top of her head, was held in place with a banana clip. As I’d suspected, her complexion without makeup was without blemish. Her skin’s only flaw was a patch of blue, a dried-up piece of facial mask, that was stuck between ear and jaw.
“I wish you would talk to me,” I said. “I’d really like to see things from your point of view.”
“Sorry.” Inside the apartment, a TV was on, a talk show. One guest was shrieking at another, who kept hooting back: “I’m laughing in your face.”
“I bought us cappuccino,” I said, holding up the white paper bag. “One with cinnamon, one without. Which do you want?”
“Uh,” she said.
“Either one’s fine with me.”
“Cinnamon,” she said, standing back so I could walk into the house. “But I don’t have any cookies or anything.”
“I have a couple of biscotti. Those hard cookies.”
“I was always scared I was going to break a tooth on one of those,” Mary said, turning off the TV, clearing off a small round table on the far side of the living room. She had been clipping supermarket coupons. “Then I learned to dunk”—a coupon for Dove soap fell to the floor—“so it’s better, except when you dunk for, like, one second too long. Then it gets all gooky and falls into the coffee.”
We sat across from each other. The atmosphere was companionable, two hausfraus having a kaffeeklatsch. Mary, who was able to sit in shorts and a crop top without even a millimeter of flab showing anywhere, said she wished she and Norman could settle down in one place; there was a coupon-clippers newsletter she was dying to subscribe to, but since they were never in any town longer than three months, it didn’t pay. Since we were getting on so well—she showed me the box in which she kept her coupons filed, a green metal thing decorated with rolling pins and egg beaters—I did not mention I was more than half hoping that her only long-term address would be in care of an upstate maximum-security facility.
“You know who I spoke to?” I asked, taking what I hoped was a casual sip of cappuccino. “Carolyn Knowles. The woman you had that altercation with in Annapolis.”
“Oh,” Mary said, a wispy sound. “Gee.”
“She said you smashed her head against the sidewalk.” Mary stretched out her hands in a gesture that said: I can’t remember what happened. “Want to tell me about it?” I asked.
“How did you find out?”
“It wasn’t hard.”
“Do the police know?”
“I don’t think so. If they knew the fingerprints at Bobette’s were the same as those made in another instance of an attack on an older woman, they might have a few questions for you.”
Mary toyed with a drip of coffee meandering its way down the Styrofoam cup. “Like what?”
“Like what happened? What set you off down there in Annapolis?”
“She said, ‘Get out of here, you whore.’ She didn’t even know who I was! She kept looking at my dress like it was cheap. It wasn’t!”
I tried to look shocked and distressed. “Tell me about it.”
“I was just hanging around—”
“Her house?”
“Yes. I mean, just checking it out. Norman said it was gorgeous. You should see it, he said. It’s called a landmark! She couldn’t paint it a different color without permission because it was history.”
“Were she and Norman there at the time?”
“No.”
“Where were they?”
“They went for a drive. She had a convertible.” She shook her head. “Why is it that when you should have a convertible you can’t afford it, and every time you see a really great car, some old poop-head is driving it?” As I had just recently been wavering between a financially secure old age and buying a BMW 325i ragtop, I merely shrugged. “So I walked around her house. She had gardens. That’s what you call it when rich people have, like, a place for roses and another place for vegetables and another place for tulips or whatever. Not a garden. Gardens, even if it’s all in the same backyard.”
“So you looked at her gardens.”
“Yuck. Lots of little, low things. If you wanted to smell the flowers, you’d have to crawl around on your hands and knees.”
“Did you go inside, Mary?”
She sat up straight, alert. “No.”
“No? You didn’t even try to get in?” She shook her head vehemently. “Mary,” I said, giving her what I hoped looked like an indulgent look. “Come on.”
She came back with a sheepish smile. “It was locked.”
“Did you try the windows?” She chewed the inside of her cheek for a while. “Mary, I’m Norman’s lawyer. You can tell me.”
“I tried.”
“Did you get in?” She nodded, not without a gleam of triumph in her eye. “And found some jewelry?”
“Yes. So great.”
“What made you take the jewelry? Weren’t you afraid you’d ruin Norman’s chances of a score with her?”
