Restitution

by Lee Vance

  “Two reasons,” I say haltingly, after the waitress has moved on. “First, I didn’t know who’d handled things. The murderer, Rommy, other people who were in the house. Nothing was clean anymore. And second, it all reminded me of Jenna. I’ve been trying to draw a line. To not think about how things were before.”

  “Before she was murdered?”

  “Before everything. When we were happy.”

  Tilling holds my gaze until my face gets hot. I’m going to walk out if she asks another question. She picks up a spoon and begins studying the bowl.

  “Let’s talk about the time line,” she says. “The package Andrei sent Jennifer arrived at your place at four-seventeen in the afternoon on Monday. Jennifer worked late, and you were sleeping in the city. She disarmed your home alarm at ten-thirty-eight Monday evening, and reset it at seven-thirty the next morning. She drove to work, logged on to her computer at seven-fifty-three, and was in her office all morning, until she got a phone call around ten-fifteen. She told a colleague she had to run home for a few minutes but that she’d be back before eleven. You live thirteen to seventeen minutes from her office, depending on the lights. Figure an extra ten minutes for logistics and you’re looking at thirty-six to forty-four minutes round-trip. She must have been planning to drive straight home and come right back.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “She didn’t have time to drop the package off anywhere. It wasn’t in her car or her office. None of the courier or overnight services picked anything up from her. If she’d opened it, we would have found the wrapping in the trash. The garbage wasn’t collected at your house that morning, and we sealed her office before anyone cleaned it. We double-checked the evidence inventory against the crime-scene photos, just to make sure some light-fingered med tech or beat cop wasn’t pocketing stuff off counters. Nothing’s missing.”

  “You think the murderer took it?”

  “Murderers. Plural.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask, my heart beating faster.

  “The cylinder on your garage door lock was pulled with a slide hammer. The internal scoring indicates that whoever operated it was right-handed. But the angle of the blows that killed Jennifer suggests that the murderer was left-handed. There are some disparate shoe prints and a couple of other things. I’m pretty sure we’re looking for two guys.”

  “Is it significant that they took the package?” I ask, hanging on her words. I hadn’t realized how clueless my investigators actually were.

  “Your house was a shitty target for a daytime burglary. You’re in a cul-de-sac, you’ve got an alarm, and the neighborhood’s patrolled regularly. Two guys enter through your garage, slip on latex gloves, disable the alarm siren, cut the phone line, and open the interior door with a locksmith’s tool. These guys are pros. But they only search the downstairs. Burglars always search the bedroom first. People sleep near their valuables.”

  “Hang on,” I say, struggling to process her implication. I feel light-headed. “You think these guys might actually have been there looking for the package?”

  Tilling shakes her head from side to side slowly, lips pursed.

  “The working theory of the Westchester County District Attorney’s Office is that you paid two guys to fake a burglary and kill your wife. We think you had somebody call her at work and trick her into going home. But that’s an interesting idea you’ve got. It wouldn’t hurt to know what was in the package.”

  I settle back in the booth, my initial excitement waning. The notion that Jenna was murdered by a couple of guys looking for a package from Andrei is too far-fetched to credit.

  “You want me to ask Andrei what he sent Jenna?”

  “No,” she says. “We want you to tell us how to get in touch with him.”

  I vacillate an instant, trying to decide whether it’s smart to put Tilling together with Andrei. Andrei’s careful. He’d never say anything to Katya’s disadvantage.

  “I’ve got his home number back at the house. Or you can call him at work. Turndale’s New York office is at Forty-seventh and Sixth. Moscow’s eight hours ahead, so if you call their New York operator anytime before nine, she should be able to connect you.”

  “We already tried his home number. And we checked with Turndale. They say he left the company back in September, eleven days before Jennifer was murdered. They haven’t heard from him since.”

  “That can’t be right,” I say, wondering why Andrei would have left Turndale so abruptly. “He’s got to be in contact with them. If nothing else, he’d still have money tied up there.”

  “They claim not, and they’ve declined to answer any follow-up questions on the grounds of ‘employee confidentiality.’ ”

  More HR bullshit.

  “Can’t you subpoena their records?”

  “The DA says no. Andrei’s tangential, Turndale’s connected politically, and she wants us to stay focused on you.”

  “I’m at a loss,” I say uneasily.

  Tilling taps the spoon against her palm.

  “Turndale gave us Andrei’s emergency contact. Oksana Zhilina, his mother. You know her?”

  “She’s a real piece of work,” I reply without thinking.

  “What do you mean?” Tilling asks quickly.

  “Just that the couple of times we met, she seemed very opinionated,” I say, not wanting to get into all the stories I heard about Mrs. Zhilina over the years, or the friction she created between Andrei and Katya.

  “Are she and Andrei close?”

  “As far as I know.”

  “Then it must surprise you that she claims not to know how to get in touch with him, either.”

  I’m beginning to wonder if Tilling’s toying with me. Mrs. Zhilina must have a number for Andrei, and if for some strange reason she doesn’t, she would have suggested the police speak with Katya.

  “That’s right. It does.”

  “You’re his friend,” Tilling says, setting the spoon down and folding her hands. “So you tell me. What’s the best way for me to find him?”

  “Let me make a few calls.” The prospect of speaking with Katya is almost too daunting to contemplate, but I can’t risk giving her name to Tilling without warning her first. “I’ll get back to you later today.”

  “Wrong,” Tilling says gratingly, shaking her head. “Remember? That’s how I said it wasn’t going to work. We’re going to do the police work, not you or your hired cops. You tell us who to talk to and we’ll take it from there.”

  I look around, unwilling to meet her eye. A Mohawked teenager is arguing with the Greek manager, who’s refusing to sell him cigarettes. I’m pretty much fucked here. Not mentioning Katya’s name could be as revealing as mentioning it, if Tilling already knows who she is.

  “The best I can do is call you later,” I say.

  “Bullshit,” Tilling barks, angry pink blotches visible under her eyes. She jabs a finger toward me. “This is more rope-a-dope. I want to know who his old girlfriends are, where he likes to hang out, everything. Right now.”

  “What happened to no obligations?”

  “That was before. You think I spent twenty minutes describing our investigation just to hear myself talk? I’m making nice here, Peter. I’m offering you another chance to get on board and start helping us out. The DA’s got me on a short leash. You cooperate, and maybe I can persuade her to let me widen my investigation a little bit. If not, we’re going to keep chipping away at you.”

  “Look,” I say, anxious to grab hold of the lifeline she’s offering me. “I am going to help. I just need some time.”

  Tilling stands abruptly, knocking against the table and overturning an empty water glass. She stuffs the manila folder back into her coat as the glass rolls slowly toward the edge of the table. Ellis has her eyes fixed on me, motionless. I catch the glass as it falls and set it gently back down on the table.

  “You’re making a big mistake here, Peter,” Tilling says. “The DA is riding me hard about you. Ellis and
I are the only people even considering the possibility that you didn’t do it. We’re your only friends, and we like you less and less all the time.”

  There’s no doubt in my mind she’s telling the truth.

  “I’ll phone you later,” I say. “Promise.”

  Tilling pulls a business card from a pocket and drops it on the table.

  “My cell number is on the back,” she says. “I’m expecting to hear from you today.”

  8

  WORSENING WEATHER made the train seem the best bet to New York City, but the thermostats are all set for tropical, one car hotter than the next, the windows hermetically sealed. My shirt’s already sticking to my back as I settle down in an orange plastic seat, leaning my forehead against the cool window and watching the snow fall outside. A stream runs next to the tracks, the projecting stones covered with a thin layer of ice. I tried Andrei’s home in Moscow yet again after I left Tilling, but his phone rang endlessly, not even a machine picking up. Absent other options, I called Katya, unsure what to expect. She was curt, and insisted we meet in person. The glass fogs as I exhale heavily. I haven’t got the energy for a confrontation with her. It’s important to me that I speak with Andrei, though—not just to learn what he sent Jenna but also to see that he’s okay, and to try to make things up with him. We’ve been friends for a long time.

  Andrei and I started at Klein and Klein on the same day, hired into a two-year training program intended to teach us the rudiments of investment banking and prepare us for business school. The deal was pretty simple. The firm paid us triple the money public school teachers made, and tacitly encouraged us to run up the corporate tab eating at Delmonico’s and club hopping in hired cars. In return, we were expected to work eighty to one hundred hours a week, be on call constantly, and cheerfully endure actionable abuse. It seemed fair.

  Andrei phoned me around midnight one evening, about a month after we’d started.

  “You working on anything important?” he asked.

  “Proofreading an equity pitch to an oil-services company. Why?”

  I swung round in my swivel chair to stare at his back, eight feet away. He was hunched over his desk, cupping the receiver so the other two guys in our office couldn’t hear him.

  “Can you spare a few hours?”

  “Sure.”

  I hadn’t really gotten to know Andrei yet. He was tall and lean-faced, with an accent that wandered from Oxford University to Coney Island, depending on whom he was talking to. Blond hair and blue eyes made him appear less Russian than his name suggested. It was clear from day one that every woman in the office was lusting after him, but he didn’t seem to be taking much advantage. He struck me as a decent guy, and I was happy to lend a hand if he needed help.

  “You got your kit?” he asked.

  “My what?”

  “Kit. Gear. Workout clothes.”

  Regardless of accent, Andrei defaulted to British vocabulary.

  “Yeah.”

  Klein had a nice gym. Most of the professional staff exercised regularly to burn stress or fend off exhaustion. A good workout gave you an extra few hours of clarity.

  “Take the lift down to B three in ten minutes, and bring your kit.”

  He met me there, guiding me through the basement and onto the loading dock. The triple-height exterior doors were closed. Eight or nine guys were shooting balls at a hoop clamped to a lamppost while fifteen or twenty guys watched. Andrei introduced me to an older man in blue coveralls, who was holding a cigarette pinched between his thumb and first finger.

  “Peter. This is Leo. He’s the night maintenance manager.”

  “So, Peter,” Leo said, stressing the first vowel in my name. “Andrei says you played college ball.”

  “Small-time college ball.”

  “You want to play with us?”

  “Why not?”

  Andrei explained the rules while we changed in a bathroom. Two on two, game to eleven baskets. The winning team stayed on court, no rest until they lost. Each team put up fifty dollars a game, with the winners taking the pot. The real action was in the side bets.

  “Can these guys play?” I asked.

  “I watched the other night. Some are good; some are bruisers. Leo refs, and he won’t call anything that doesn’t draw blood.”

  “Why the secrecy?”

  “They’re all union, mainly maintenance and security. Some from this building, some from other buildings. They don’t want the tenants to learn how they’re earning their time and a half. Leo’s Russian, one of my people. We got to talking about Dinamo in the lift the other day and he invited me to play. I vouched for you.”

  “Dinamo?”

  “One of Moscow’s football teams.”

  I looked Andrei over while we dressed. He was wiry like a climber, and had a long zipperlike scar on his left shoulder. He caught me staring and tapped the wound with a finger.

  “Rugby. I played hooker, the fellow in the middle of the scrum who’s supposed to kick the ball back to the line. An opposing player bit our left prop on the neck and the scrum twisted. Ripped my humerus right out of the socket.”

  “Sounds like a great game.”

  “Biting’s a bit frowned on, actually.”

  “You played much basketball?”

  “Enough,” he said. “I’ll feed you the ball and set picks. We’ll get by.”

  We played once or twice a week for the next two years, winning more than we lost from the first day. Andrei never sank much from outside the key, but he understood the game and was terrific under the boards. Sometimes there were a hundred spectators, and thousands of dollars changing hands. Leo was constantly scouting the neighborhood for new talent. We played firefighters, some Con Ed workers, a couple of porters from the fish market. The real competition were the guys who grew up playing Harlem street ball. They played a beautiful, jazzy game—intricate dribbling, seamless fakes, balletlike spins to the basket. Andrei and I weren’t flashy, but we worked well as a team, each learning to anticipate what the other was going to do.

  We went out for a couple of beers one night shortly after we started playing together. We were sitting on top of a picnic table outside a TriBeCa dive when I noticed a girl waiting to cross Greenwich Street. She was wearing jeans, boots, and an open leather jacket over a Ramones T-shirt, her hair loose around her shoulders. She looked like a slumming Disney princess. I nudged Andrei with an elbow and nodded toward her.

  “What?” he said.

  “What do you mean, ‘What?’ ” I said, nodding toward her again.

  “Not my type.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  The girl darted across the street between cars and made for the entrance to the bar. She picked Andrei and me out of the shadows and walked toward us, smiling. He stood up and kissed her on the cheek.

  “My twin sister, Katya,” he said. “She’s just started with Turndale, the asset-management firm.”

  Katya extended a hand for me to shake. She was small and finely boned, with jet hair and a round, elfin face.

  “That’s supposed to be a great outfit,” I said. “There was a profile of William Turndale in the Journal a couple of years ago.”

  “Every new employee gets a copy of that article,” she said, smiling wryly. “They called him a modern-day Medici. A patron of the arts and a prince of finance.”

  “What’s he like to work for?”

  “I don’t really know yet. We only spoke once, and I was busy knuckling my forehead and groveling.”

  I laughed.

  “But let’s back up a second. You were reading the Journal in college?” she asked, letting her eyes go wide.

  “Yeah,” I said, amused by her show of incredulity. “Why? What were you reading?”

  “The Daily Worker and Mother Jones. College is when you’re supposed to get that social justice stuff out of your system. A guy like you is unreliable. You’re going to have a delayed crisis of conscience some day, just when you could real
ly make a killing by stepping on the neck of the proletariat.”

  “Whereas you’ll have no scruples?”

  “None,” she said sweetly. “Been there, done that. Isn’t one of you supposed to be buying me a beer about now?”

  “My shy sister,” Andrei said, putting his arm around her.

  A couple of beers turned into half a dozen. Katya kept up in the same vein, drawing Andrei and me out about work and basketball, and then deftly satirizing us, pricking our vanities and mocking our ambitions. I thought Jenna would like her. Katya’s English was unaccented, a contrast she scornfully explained as the result of Andrei having been shipped off to an English boarding school when he was eight to learn to be a leader of men, whereas she’d been kept home in New York to concentrate on domestic skills. Andrei went inside when it was his turn to buy another round, and she picked my hand up off the table, turning my palm to the light. My skin tingled to her touch.

  “You tell fortunes?” I asked.

  “Some.”

  “Another thing you learned in college while I was busy with the Journal?”

  “One of the domestic skills I picked up. My mother’s a witch and my father’s a prince. I take after him, but I can work the odd magic when the spirit moves me.”

  I wasn’t sure whether or not to laugh.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “You see a crisis of conscience in my future.”

  “That’s just work stuff.”

  “So what else do you see?”

  “A couple of kids and a house in the burbs. Peanut butter fingerprints on your suit pants.”

  “And?”

  She studied my hand intently.

  “A cat you don’t like. Fluffy or Fuzzy. He’s going to pee in your golf shoes.”

  “That’s it?” I asked, feigning disappointment.

  She traced a finger lightly across my life line, making me tremble. I leaned toward her, inhaling her scent, and realized I was drunk.

  “Difficult,” she said. “It might help if you crossed my palm with silver.”