Gloria had a network of friends all over town, people at the ME’s, people with the Feds. Gloria always returned favors, and she was a really good woman. We had spent some time together. She was funny and sexy. We’d had a lot of fun and I knew she wanted more from me. I could hear the expectation in her voice when she asked if I wanted to come over for dinner or go out later in the week.
I hesitated. I didn’t want to be a jerk with women any more, if I could help it.
“You’re back with Lily Hanes, or is it somebody else?”
“What makes you say that?”
“You think I can’t read you, Artie?” She softened her tone. “What is it you need?”
I told her I had some pills I wanted looked at. She said she’d do her best and I told her I’d get them to her.
“You can still come for dinner one night,” she said. “My mother is crazy about you.” I sent her mother good wishes and hung up, then I called Officer Alvin, who said he would deliver the pills to Gloria, then I went to 125th and Seventh to wait for the bank manager.
Jimmy Wagner had called to say the manager at Simonova’s branch would meet me there. Gave me the guy’s number. His name was Mr. Cash. Hard to believe. I looked at my watch. I called Mr. Cash. He sounded pissed off. It was Sunday, and he lived in Corona in Queens, but he said he was on his way.
I walked, trying to get warm. It was late Sunday morning, and in spite of the cold, a few of the stalls were setting up, owners putting out their goods, the incense sticks and cheap aromatherapy oils, black romances and vampire novels, portraits of Cleopatra painted on velvet, photographs of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Michael Jackson. Most of all, there were pictures of Obama.
The discount stores were full of people looking for cheap Christmas presents and tree ornaments, but the shops with the fancier duds, the leather and fur, the stage outfits, were empty. There were some chains, Starbucks, other signs of progress, but there were also plenty of empty storefronts. For all the tales of Sugar Hill and the promise of real estate deals and fabulous money, the financial meltdown was hitting hard.
The bottom was falling out of the market, all markets, and housing was in deep shit. Houses that had been under renovation were still covered in scaffolding, but work had stopped. A year earlier, they would have gone for at least a million.
Carver Lennox was in trouble. I thought about the incident at the party the night before when the guy with the strange, pale hair had stopped to talk to him. Remembered how scared Lennox had looked. I wondered what kind of debts Lennox had, and who he owed.
In the doorway of a boarded-up building was an old man, clutching his shopping cart full of scraps of old rugs. He was smoking the stub of a cigar.
A guy in jeans and a good leather jacket jogged past the old man, who tried to get his attention, get some change off him.
I turned a corner into a side street, looked up, and saw apartments with broken windows, and laundry hung over the sills, three pillowcases frozen solid. Kids were walking up and down the street, jeans hanging down low on their asses, one slapping a couple of pizza slices together to eat them doggie style.
There was nobody on the stoops, no open windows, no music. It was a bleak place on this frigid day.
I went to the bank. Where the fuck was Mr. Cash? I was getting impatient. I took out his number, I called, and again he said he was running late.
How late?
Coming in from Queens, he said. Bad roads.
I told him to step on it. I wanted to look in Simonova’s safe-deposit box. I wanted to know if there was a will, and I wanted to know before Lily got back from the funeral. If, like the letter, the will named Lily, I had to know before anybody else. Simonova was the kind of woman-I was guessing-who had made a will.
“Excuse me,” said a soft voice, and when I turned I saw Marie Louise.
Wrapped in the beige down coat that was too big for her, her head encased in a yellow wool shawl, the fake Vuitton purse over her shoulder, she stood as if deciding what to do.
“Can I help?”
“I don’t know,” she said so softly I could barely hear.
“I’m not from immigration. I don’t need to know anything about you, but if there’s something you want to tell me, we could talk,” I said. “Something about Mrs. Simonova?”
“Yes, and about Dr. Hutchison.”
“You know?”
“Yes. I went to the building this morning and I saw the policemen.”
It occurred to me that Marie Louise had followed me from the Armstrong somehow. I didn’t ask. She was already nervous enough, talking to a cop.
“Let’s get some coffee,” I said on impulse. “It’s cold. Or lunch? Would you like to eat something?” I gestured to the restaurant across the street. Through the windows you could see people celebrating.
Marie Louise looked at the restaurant with longing, and unable to fight the desire, smiled and said she would like some coffee very much.
“Ten minutes only, before I must go,” she said, and followed me inside Chez Lucienne.
The guy in charge came toward us. I figured him for the owner. He smiled and asked if we wanted a table. Marie Louise answered him in French, and he looked pleased and sat us at a table near the window.
The exchange made her smile. She agreed to a glass of wine and some cheese, and when it arrived, she seemed to sigh slightly as if she had entered a different world, seemed to relax into the woman she might have been when she was a doctor and had status and could speak her own language.
She removed her coat. Underneath it she was wearing jeans and a white turtleneck.
The restaurant was full of people lingering over brunch. People were exchanging gifts, and kissing, the place buzzing with life. Music played. It was as if we’d landed in some safe place, far from the Armstrong, out of the storm.
“Why don’t you eat something else?” I said in French, thinking if I could keep her a while she’d talk. I put my phone on the table, waiting for the bank manager to call back.
She asked where I had learned French. I told her I had learned some back in Moscow, that my mother had loved the language.
“Do you have children?” she asked me.
I shook my head and ate some bread. I was hungry. I ordered a burger, urged Marie Louise to have something. She looked at the menu and asked for an omelette.
“What about you?” I said.
“Two nice boys,” she said in French, and then switched to English. She probably figured my French was rusty. “I was just shopping for their presents.”
“Their father is in your country?”
“I married an American, then he died. I don’t want to talk about this.”
“Your English is very good,” I said to change the subject.
“Not very. I spent only one year at a school in England,” she said. “Can I say something to you?”
“Of course.”
“Madame Simonova? Sometimes I cleaned for her.”
“She was sick for a long time?”
“I am not sure.”
“You don’t think she died just because she was sick, do you?”
“No.” Marie Louise turned suddenly and stared as a customer came into the restaurant carrying a little black dog in her arms. “They should not allow that,” she said.
“What?”
“A dog in a restaurant is not right.”
“It’s a little dog,” I said. “You know? Nobody will care. Maybe it’s too cold out for the dog.” I was making idle conversation, trying to get her to relax.
“I do not like dogs.”
“Do you think somebody hurt Mrs. Simonova?”
She looked at her hands, took a sip of wine, and put her hands together around the stem of the glass.
“I think so, yes.” Her eyes darted toward the woman with the dog.
“What is it?”
“I am afraid of all dogs, but the black dog which belongs to Madame Hutchison is a very dangerous dog. Some ti
mes when I clean for her, I lock the dog in the bathroom.”
“I see.”
“You think I am a little bit crazy?”
“No.”
“Thank you.”
“It’s nothing. Something worries you?” I said. “Something else?”
She nodded. “Can I mention a name here, do you think?”
“Nobody’s listening. Somebody at the Armstrong?”
“Yes. He is living there.”
“On the fourteenth floor?”
“Yes,” she said, looking around, lowering her voice. “I need the job, but Mr. Lennox is a strange person.”
“Strange in what way?”
“He wants all those big apartments. I hear him talking sometimes on the phone. He doesn’t bother hiding it. He thinks because I do not speak very good English, I have no brain.”
“OK, so this guy wants the apartments, so he squeezes people. But would he kill them for it? Some of them are old anyway. Why doesn’t he wait?”
“This is a very impatient man. And there is something else.”
“What?”
“He has guns.”
“Guns?”
“Yes. I clean drawers, I find guns.”
“How many?”
“Four, five, I do not remember, but there are many guns. I know in this country you often keep guns, but why so many? He is always very polite with me, very correct, he pays me on time, he does not shout at me. Still, I am scared. I feel that I wait for something to happen.”
I watched her, and I drank my wine. Neither death had involved guns, but I was interested in the information that Lennox kept them.
“He has a temper?”
“Never with me,” she said.
“But with others?”
The food came. We ate.
“This is very nice,” said Marie Louise.
My phone rang. I picked up a message from the bank manager saying he’d be another forty minutes.
The burger tasted good, so did the fries. I ordered another glass of wine. The people at the next table finished their coffee and left.
“Do you want to talk to me about Mrs. Simonova,” I said.
“I was inside her apartment last week, two evenings at least. She wasn’t feeling well. She wanted me to help with the Christmas presents. Wrapping the gifts.”
“You liked her?”
She shrugged. “She was ill. She needed help.”
“Go on.”
“I work for all of them on that floor, you see, they share me,” she said. “Like a valuable property. It is not easy to get somebody to clean and cook at the drop of a hat-is that what you say?”
“Yes.”
“Sometimes Madame Simonova asks me to spend the night when she is feeling very ill, as I have said, or Madame Hutchison asks if I will do her shopping.”
“And Carver Lennox?”
“Yes.”
“And you worked as a waitress for him at his Christmas party at the club?”
“For extra money, yes. It was a good job. I work for Lily some times, but that’s different. She helps me. She tries to help me get papers. She is a very nice woman.”
“I’m glad.”
She looked at me. “She loves you,” she said.
“What?”
“Lily. She loves you.” Marie Louise smiled at me. “Perhaps this is why I feel I can trust you. I saw how she looked at you today, yesterday. Once I saw her staring at a photograph of you. Virgil Radcliff is nice, but it’s different.”
I was flustered. I wanted to hear more, much more. Instead, I just said, “Go on about Mrs. Simonova, please.”
“Often people played cards at her apartment early on Friday evening, but this past week, she was feeling too ill. She asked me to stay late, and I was in the other room when Dr. Hutchison came to visit.
“What did they talk about?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t hear much, but I think he gave her some medicine, because later she asks me to return some pills to him. When I returned them, I saw the label had his name on the bottle. Miss Celestina took the bottle from me.”
“Did you notice what color?”
“Blue,” she said, and I thought of the Altace from the drugstore. “The same sort of pills she asked me to pick up a few days earlier.”
“On 145th Street? At Duane Reade?”
“Yes. From this Ravi at the pharmacy. I always speak with him.”
“Did anyone else visit Simonova Friday evening?”
“Sometimes, I heard Madame Simonova on the phone, but that evening, Friday, Mr. Lennox visited her, the second time during the week, or perhaps even the third. Almost every evening he would drop in, and each time the words became more and more angry.”
“And he was there Friday, you’re sure?”
“Yes.”
“Before or after Dr. Hutchison?”
“After. Yes, definitely, I am sure. I was frightened to leave the kitchen, they were so angry, especially him. He was very angry.”
“You hear anything?”
She shook her head. “Only their angry voices.”
“Did anybody else come?”
“One woman. I don’t know who she was,” said Marie Louise, finishing her wine. “That was delicious,” she said. “Thank you. I must go now,” she added.
I paid, trying to absorb everything she’d told me without getting out a notebook. I didn’t want her to stop talking. I didn’t want to make it look official.
I excused myself and went into the bathroom and scribbled what I could on the receipt for lunch. I called Virgil, told him to stay with the building. I had to get back to the Armstrong. I almost called the bank manager-Mr. Cash-and told him to forget the meeting, it could wait, but he sent a text saying he was twenty minutes away now, no apology, but he was coming. Wait for me, he said.
“I’ll drive you,” I said to Marie Louise.
“Thank you. It is very cold. To 116th Street, please,” she said. “Just for one minute to check at home, and then I will go to the Armstrong, where I have work to do.”
My car was parked across the street from the restaurant and we got in. She settled back, smiling as if enjoying some unexpected luxury, and gave me directions. For a few minutes we drove silently through the icy day while Marie Louise closed her eyes.
At 116th Street, she asked me to pull up in front of a little shop. She got out, pulling her down coat around her.
“Is this where you live?”
“Yes,” she said, and went through a narrow door next to the shop. I got out to look in the window.
It was a crummy storefront, the window jammed with bottles and boxes, dusty jars of dried herbs, and dusty jars with strange names, not in French, but some African language, I guessed. I got back in my car.
Marie Louise came back out of her apartment five minutes later and she turned into the shop. I could see her through the window, inspecting various items, turning over the bottles with fierce intensity.
“You often buy things in that store?” I asked when she got in the car.
“Yes.” She indicated her purse. “Madame Simonova is dead, so I have purchased some things to try to help her.”
“Help who?”
“Madame Simonova.”
“But she’s dead.”
“In my country, we hold many things in our heads at the same time, old and new, do you understand? One day you may have a modern procedure at a clinic, the next day you visit a native doctor. In Bamako, our capital city and my home, we are known for our treatments for many things. Western doctors visit just to procure these, many from our baobab tree,” she said, looking at me, and smiling. “This is what I explained to you about the black dog.”
“I see.”
“These djinn, these ghosts in the Armstrong, I try to make them disappear,” she said. “This is difficult for Americans to understand.”
“Yes.”
“But many of them are so superstitious,” she said. “Many of them give a
ll their money to faith healers, to psychics, they believe God created the world in seven days, as in a film, rather than evolution, they believe in some heaven where God resembles a big black actor, isn’t that right?”
I nodded, then I stopped short at a red light. “Are you OK?”
“Yes, fine,” said Marie Louise. “You know, this is a strange, difficult country,” she said. “Before I come, I read how many American people of color say they have roots in Africa, they admire Africa, yet here many look down on us. They think we are poor and backward, except perhaps for a few musicians.”
“That’s hard for you.”
“Yes. It is ironic now that we are Africans in Harlem, from Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, Mali, Cote d’Ivoire, but we are the lower classes.” She paused, looking at me. “They say they are African Americans, but so many have never been to Africa, and know nothing. Many speak no foreign languages, and also they have a chip on their shoulder-is that what you say?”
“You can say that.”
“I understand this, I married an American, and then he died, as I told you, and nobody believed I was married. I had lost the papers in Mali, where I married him. I went to see his family, his sister, but she was angry all the time, angry at me, angry at everybody,” said Marie Louise. “She told me about slavery in the United States as if no one else has ever experienced this, even though she had a good job and a nice apartment.” Marie Louise grinned. “I told them that it was black people, Africans, who sold her ancestors into slavery. She was quite unhappy with me.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“It’s not your fault,” said Marie Louise. “And your Lily has always been so nice, and also Dr. Hutchison, I admired this man so much. He asked me questions from time to time, as if to consult with a fellow doctor.”
I was a block from the Armstrong now, and I stopped at a red light.
“I’ll get out here, please,” said Marie Louise.
“I’ll take you to the door.”
“Thank you, but no.” She opened the car door.
“Did you follow me earlier? Did you follow me to 125th Street?” I said, but she just smiled, closed the door, and hurried away.
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