by Triss Stein
I finally curled up on the couch under a quilt from Chris’ baby days, and fell asleep. I woke to Chris rattling around in the kitchen. She was fully dressed, hair combed, jacket on.
“I’m making a snack to take out. Going for a walk, okay? See you later.”
Her cheerfulness made me want to bury my head under the comforter. I was unhappy with myself and unhappy with Joe. My computer pinging did not make feel better. Unless it was Joe. Who usually calls. But still.
It was Dr. Adams. And I realized that minute that I was supposed to check in yesterday, discuss my progress, assure her I had really, truly, finished this chapter and moved on toward conclusions.
The message was crisp and clear. “See me Monday. Two sharp.” I was briefly tempted to claim I had to work at the museum, but no. Telling lies would not improve our relationship. And I knew this was a relationship that was important in my life, whether I wanted it or not. I had better respond. I would, as soon as I was ready to explain why there was not much progress. If I was stuck now, I would have to show her how I would get unstuck.
Then I found Ramos’ card and called him. It did seem like a good idea in that moment.
“Hey, Erica. Have you had another useful memory flash for me?”
His friendly voice cut through my bleak mood.
“No, sorry, but I’d love to talk about Michael Conti some more.”
“Pressure from above?”
“Ah. Yes. Yes for sure.”
“You’re scared of your advisor? Tough young woman like you?”
Was I scared of her? Oh, yes. That thought was humiliating.
“I might possibly be able to help. How about we discuss over dinner? I’m off tomorrow night. Do you like seafood?”
I said yes to all of the above. I had no reason not to. It was work. He had useful information for me. That’s all. Absolutely all.
Chris was back and I went to harass her about that diary. She maintained that she was still reading it herself, but said she had a later date to go running with some of the girls from the basketball team. I could have it then.
She seemed to get great joy from saying sternly, “As long as you are careful and don’t harm it!” I’d raised a smart aleck, that was for sure. Dad would say I had no one to blame but myself.
Housework called. What it actually murmured was, “I could be more interesting right now than your dissertation” but I pretended I heard, “Be a real homemaker for a few hours. It will be a treat.”
Just as I was pulling the cleaning supplies out from under the sink, I had a call. The number looked vaguely familiar. The voice was not.
“Forget what you think you know. Forget everything. No gossiping. Or you will be sorry.”
“What? What? Who is this?”
But the phone had already clicked off.
I sat on there the floor, shocked and annoyed in equal parts. A wrong number? A crank call? A real threat?
I looked again at the calling number and quickly scrolled through my calls of the last few weeks. It was, impossibly, from Mary Pat. Not Mary Pat, not really, but Mary Pat’s phone.
Now I was so shocked I dropped my own phone.
Someone had found Mary Pat’s missing cell phone. Ramos had told me they never found one but I had seen her using it. That was the only possible explanation. And was using it to do…what? Call people he had found in her calls made list? Or just me? To what purpose? I didn’t know anything, just had the bad fortune of being a witness. Or had some idiot randomly found the phone and was pranking? Just because he could?
I would have to call the lieutenant yet again. Even if it was meaningless. I told myself it was meaningless. I decided to deal with the turmoil in my mind by throwing myself into my chores.
By the time Chris headed out again, I had cleaned the bathroom, done a load of laundry praying the ancient washing machine was still functioning, and made a soup where you open several cans of broth and throw in whatever vegetables are around, plus leftover rice and a can of chilies. It’s the only kind of soup I know how to make.
Concrete, visible work was done. I felt tired and just a little more in control of my life. With Chris gone, it was time to read more of that diary. And take lots of notes. I wanted to know what it felt like to Philomena to be there then, doing the work she did. It could be no more than a sidebar for my chapter, but maybe we could do something with it at the museum. And I didn’t say it to myself, but I knew that it would be interesting enough to crowd my real life out of my mind.
Philomena flourished at her job. “It’s so real. Real metal, real tools. Someday a real blow torch if I can do it. Not like making change all day and saying, Hi, Mrs. So and So, and asking about her son in the Army or promising the tomatoes are ripe.”
She didn’t mind the damage to her nails and repaired her manicures every time she went out. She didn’t mind the sweat and the dirt. “That’s what the bathtub is for. As long as they don’t start rationing Ivory soap!
She went to dances for servicemen. I could hear the giggles in her words. “They look so handsome in their uniforms, and they clean up and shave for the dances. Makes my patriotic young heart beat faster. All those boys from the south talk REAL slow. They’re so cute when they say ‘ma’am.’ ” She was only a few years older than Chris, after all.
“We’re not supposed to leave the dances but sometimes we sneak out for a cigarette and a little privacy.” She drew a heart next to that sentence and then added, “Dear diary: Mom and Dad don’t know I started smoking. It makes me feel like Bette Davis. And about that sneaking out? Nothing but kissing, even when they try. And do they try! And only if they are really, really cute and nice. I’m still a good girl.” She was so young it hurt.
She wrote about other things too, pieces of her life. Handsome Tyrone Power in the pictures, and Frank Sinatra whose voice made every girl all shivery. Francis, actually, the same name as her brother Frankie. Barbara Stanwyck. “She has so much moxie.” And she pasted pictures from a movie magazine next to that page. New shoes and how hard they were to get. Using makeup to tint her legs when she had no stockings left.
Philomena became more of a real girl to me with every sentence. Her writing wasn’t sophisticated or deep. It was the diary of a girl barely out of her teens whose world was growing her up fast.
I wondered what Chris was making of all this, and soon had a chance to find out. I heard her tramp upstairs, then come hurtling down. She often took the stairs at a controlled free fall
“Where is my diary? I mean, Grandma’s diary?”
“You mean Philomena’s?”
“Yes, Mom, you know I do.” She looked at my desk with narrowed eyes. “I see you snitched it.”
“And no harm done. Chris, this is so fascinating. Are you loving it?”
She collapsed on my other office chair, the impulse to complain blown away. “Are you kidding? Yes, most definitely. She is so…so…like, I could know her even now.”
“Except she takes you into a different world, right?”
She nodded, soberly. “Did you get to the part about her friend’s brother?”
“No. What was that?”
“He got hurt bad. Wait and see.” She shook her head. “But the parts about the boys are funny. Dating life was so different then.” She put her hand out. “Now I need to go back to it.”
I wanted to protest. I wanted to keep reading it myself. But what responsible, academic mom throws a roadblock in the study plans of a child?
***
That night I dreamed about Philomena. She was in her work clothes, looking, looking, looking for something. A phone was ringing but she didn’t answer it. It was ringing and ringing. I finally knew it was not her phone. It was mine.
I dragged myself awake, fumbling to pick it up
“Erica, did I wake you? It’s Lisa. I heard something.”
>
“What?” I sat up, willing my brain to start working.
“It’s Lisa. I told you! And I heard something about the Conti story.”
“Okay. Okay. Now I’m awake.”
“They have arrested Jennifer Conti.”
“What?” Was I still half-asleep?
“The widow. Jennifer Conti.”
“That’s impossible.” I was not accepting that. Not for a minute.
“I heard it two minutes ago from a source I trust. They have something more but I don’t know what. Yet.”
Chapter Sixteen
As soon as it was almost morning, I called Lisa to confirm that she had called me in the middle of the night. She had. Her best information was that there was good evidence for the arrest, but she still did not know what. She was working every source she had. She extracted a deal from me: we share anything we find. It didn’t hit me until later that I might be one of her sources.
I called Ramos. I called him a few times, but there was no way to reach him except to leave a message. I conceded to myself, bitterly, he must be busy dealing with his arrest of the wrong person. And I still needed to tell him about that recent phone call. Mary Pat’s number, still making mysterious calls, just as she had.
I turned on a news channel but when they finally got around to the story, no one knew more than I did. In fact, they seemed to know slightly less.
It was an ordinary morning. Chris was at school. I would be at my part-time museum job and life would be normal if I could forget this disturbing news. Of course I could not but I tried, in between a few more calls to the lieutenant and checking the news online.
And otherwise, so it was, an ordinary day. No lurkers on my block. No emergency calls from Chris, only a text in mid-morning.
Chem test went ok. Prob.
Prob? Oh, probably. Well, good.
I banished my personal life from my mind and hunkered down. I sat in the library doing photo research for an upcoming exhibit and daydreamed about abandoning my dissertation forever. A dumb idea in reality but a pleasant occasional escape. I even took a walk at lunchtime. The museum neighborhood is on a hill, looking out over New York Harbor. The chilly breeze off the water cleared out some cobwebs.
It couldn’t last. Ramos got back to me a minute before I left work and said he was too busy to talk now but would I stop by his office on my way home?
He looked like a man who had not been home in the last two days. He confirmed that was true. I plunged right in anyway.
“You arrested Jennifer? That’s crazy.”
“No, it’s not. You’re doing police work? You don’t know everything we do.”
“Yeah? It is not possible that she’s the one I saw that night. So tell me.”
“No, I’m not telling you. This is just a…call it a courtesy. It goes both ways.” He put up a hand to stop my protests. “I know you believe you told me everything, but you never know. I want to go over it one more time and if you do have anything, then we make it official, okay? I’m trying to be nice here.”
“Believe me.” I put my backpack down. “I’ve gone over it again and again, and there’s nothing. But I can tell you this for sure. She is absolutely not the man—or woman—I saw pull that trigger. She’s taller, bigger. That I can swear to.”
“Let’s do it one more time anyway.”
We went over it step by step, what I’d seen, what I might have seen, what was on the periphery. He hadn’t asked that before.
“Wait. Do you think she was there also? Hiding somewhere? Can that possibly be what you’re asking me?”
“I don’t think anything. The possibility that someone else was there is a question to be asked. We know you said no before, but it’s worth taking another look.”
“No. No, definitely not. If there was anyone else there, I didn’t know about it. No matter what you’d like me to say.”
He looked carefully neutral, no skin in the game. “I don’t want you to say anything but what you are sure you remember. We don’t want any random answer, only the right one. Got that?”
I already knew that. Probably, I knew that.
“But Jennifer? That’s ridiculous.”
“How well do you really know her?”
That stopped me. The answer was, not very. And I wasn’t sure I even liked her. Was I taken in by the everyday hominess of meeting in Mrs. Pastore’s warm kitchen? And Jennifer’s classy aura? Her style? In what alternate reality could the Jennifer I had met even know someone who would shoot a man in cold blood? As impossible to imagine as her pulling the trigger herself.
Ramos looked even more harassed. “Believe me. She was there, nearby, that night. Witnesses put her at a…well, near. Very near where you were.”
“What? Sitting in a car? Lurking out on the street? Disguised as a hooker? Come on!”
I saw in his face a second of wanting to say no to what I had suggested. I tried to picture what was there.
“At a bar?”
A glimmer of a yes in his face and a quick, “There’s more. Things she said. Things she did. It might not be airtight yet, but we’ve got her.”
“Not even close!”
“Come on, Erica. Who had the best reason to want him dead? You know the gossip about him?”
“Like maybe there was another girlfriend?”
He looked at me, not committing to anything.
“So you think she decided she’s better off as widow than divorced?”
“And after Jennifer, who hated him most?” He gave me a hard look. “You know it was his first wife.”
“Annabelle? No way! Impossible.” That cheerful and kind old woman? Mrs. Pastore’s friend? No. Definitely no.
“And she also had reasons to hate Mary Pat Codman.” He saw my indignant expression. “You were forgetting about that, weren’t you? It’s too much of a stretch to think these murders were unrelated. Only thing is, we can’t find anything that links it to her. Believe me, we looked.”
“Other people hated him. Why not one of them? Harbor history has plenty of crooks. The mob. Labor rackets.”
“That doesn’t fly. These days it’s mostly businessmen and politicians involved there. Even if they are dishonest—yes, maybe—they don’t go in for violent crime. You know that. It’s a crazy move for a respectable guy.”
He saw my skeptical look. “Even a wannabe respectable guy. Besides? Conti had no real power anymore, so why now?” His expression got more set with every word. “We think we’ve got it figured out. What I don’t get is why you care about Jennifer. For me, getting at the truth is my job. For you? Advisor still scaring you?”
“It’s my job, too. I have to find out what happened, to make my chapter true.” He nodded. Maybe he understood that. “Besides. I don’t know. Maybe the bad dreams will stop when it’s all solved.”
He almost smiled. “I hear you on that. And now I have to get back on the case, anyway.” He pointed to his phone. “I got urgent messages while we were talking.”
“I have one more thing. It’s about phones. I know this is crazy.” I played my most recent, and I hoped final, mystery call from Mary Pat’s number. When I was done, he had a page of notes, had recorded the message and was shaking his head.
“We can do something with this, you know. Should of called right away.’
“I know. I know. I didn’t want to deal with it. Talking about makes it too real.”
He nodded.
“Was it a real threat?”
“Who the hell knows? I’ll keep in touch when we learn something. If we learn something. In the meantime, be careful? Doors locked, no late night subway rides, alert on the street. You know.”
I had to smile. “What I always do, right?”
He nodded again.
“You look blitzed.”
“Sure am.”
<
br /> “I still think you’re wrong about Jennifer.” I was collecting my jacket and pack.
“Unless something else happens, I am going to be off tomorrow night. Would you want to talk over dinner, somewhere more comfortable than this office?”
I said yes without thinking. It was a chance to ask more questions, nothing more. I thought. And I left, admitting to myself that Jennifer at a crummy bar near the Yard was pretty strange. Now I owed Lisa a call.
I should have known her first response would be, “Did he say what bar?” and her second would be “I’m going to cruise the bars tonight. Got to. Be my wing man?”
“What in the world are you talking about?’
She laughed. “Seriously, it would be great if you come along. You were there that night! You’d be great backup. And think what you would learn.” As I hesitated, she threw in, “Come on. It will be fun.”
Trudging around to dive bars after a long day? Not my idea of fun. Then again, I’d never done a bar crawl. Life had interfered with what would have been that stage of life. And Chris had plans for this evening.
I asked Lisa where to meet.
Chapter Seventeen
It turned out to be not much of a bar crawl. We started with the one closest to the Yard. It was a run-down dive, all right. Dirty windows, sticky tabletops, and the smell of beer set the tone. The clientele was mixed as to race and similar as to shabby clothes. They were certainly a few beers ahead of us. And they were all male.
I ordered a bottle of Budweiser so I could skip a questionable-looking bar glass. The bartender was indifferent to our presence. I followed Lisa’s lead and pretended I was perfectly comfortable. The beer actually was fine.
Jennifer being here seemed even more unlikely than me being here. Yet here I was.
About halfway through her beer, Lisa signaled the bartender. “Two again, and could I ask a question, if you’re not too busy?”
He wasn’t busy. I wondered if Lisa was softening him up.
“Yeah, okay.” He shrugged as if to say, “No big deal.”
“I’m trying to see if a woman was here last Tuesday. I have a picture.”
