Death Will Pay Your Debts

by Elizabeth Zelvin

  Cindy tried to remember if she'd asked specifically about that. She'd been more aware of the need to find out who had seen the victim.

  "We could ask the witnesses if they saw anybody try to take that armchair," she said. "If she said she was saving it for someone, whoever she turned away might remember that."

  "Make a note," Natali said. "You think you'll remember every question you thought of asking, but you won't."

  "What if it was poison?" Cindy said. "How easy would it be for someone to slip something into her latte?"

  "The baristas said they don't pay attention to who orders what," he said. "The one at the cash register takes the money and calls out the order. Whoever's filling the orders puts the drinks on the counter at the other end. No one checks to see which customer is picking them up."

  "When Starbucks gets crowded," Cindy said, "and the orders are complicated, the baristas can get way behind."

  "I know," Natali said. "Everybody thinks they're Jack Nicholson. Hold the whipped cream. Hold the coffee."

  "So things get backed up," Cindy said. "The customer has time to visit the rest room or run into a friend or get involved in grabbing a seat from someone who gets up to leave. In the meantime, the completed order is sitting on the counter. The killer might not have sat with the victim at all."

  "Good thought, Cinders," Natali said. "Keep an open mind until we've got some facts to play with."

  She got home after dark to find that Bruce, to whom she'd recently given a key, had let himself into her apartment in Park Slope in Brooklyn. She had had to choose between space and location, and she'd chosen space. Location would have meant Manhattan. Her parlor level floor-through apartment was not too far on the wrong side of Seventh Avenue, only three and a half long blocks from Prospect Park. It had been nicely renovated with stripped-brick walls, molded tin ceilings, and gleaming parquet floors protected by polyurethane. Bruce sat reading in her second favorite chair with his shoes off and his feet up. He set the book aside and went to meet her.

  "I hope you didn't plan a hot date with someone else tonight," he said lightly. "I'm working at a law firm on Wall Street this week, and it seemed simpler to come here than go home."

  "Not a problem," she said.

  In fact, it felt odd to see him in her living room, dressed for work in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and the neck open and clean chinos. Odd but nice. They were still getting used to seeing each other fully dressed and standing up. It had taken them all summer to make it into bed, but they had started the relationship at the beach, where everybody lazed around in skimpy bathing suits. It was the first clean and sober relationship with potential for a future for both of them. She had to wing it, and she didn't want to screw it up.

  "Do you want some club soda?" she asked.

  "Sure," he said. "In fact, I'll get it. Sit down and take it easy. Long day?"

  "Yes, but a good one," she said. "They finally put me on a case that might turn out to be a homicide."

  "That's great, Cindy," he said. "For you, not for the dead person. You want some too?"

  "Please."

  "Ice?" he called from the kitchen.

  "Yes, please."

  The two glasses of club soda fizzed pleasantly as he carried them into the living room and set them down on a low table near her elbow.

  "So what's the case?" he asked. "Am I allowed to ask?"

  "I can't tell you anything about the investigation," she said, "except what you'd see anyway on TV."

  "Okay, let's turn on the news," he said.

  He sat down on the floor, his back resting against the side of her chair, and clicked on the TV. A reporter was standing in front of Starbucks. The crime scene tape was still up, but there was no longer much police activity. The crowd of bystanders were focused on the media event. As the reporter began to speak, a grinning teenager popped up in the foreground, waving at the camera.

  "I'm here at the site on the Upper West Side where a local woman died after drinking a latte in Starbucks. Should Starbucks addicts change their drinking habits or wait until the cause of the sudden death has been determined? The NYPD will say only that they are in the process of investigating the circumstances. Corporate spokespersons for the popular coffee chain declined to comment."

  Bruce sat up straighter and leaned forward.

  "I know that Starbucks," he said. "It's only a few blocks from Jimmy and Barbara's."

  "Do you go there?" Cindy asked. "Regularly? Recently?"

  "Not by myself," I said, "but there are a few AA meetings in the neighborhood. It's one of the places people go for coffee afterward. They usually sit in the balcony up the stairs."

  "One group of witnesses was sitting together up there," she said, "but none of them knew the victim."

  Having cycled through three more local stories, the weather, and national and international headlines, the news program returned to what the media were already calling the latte murder. A picture of the victim that looked like a professional studio portrait flashed on the screen.

  "Shit!" Bruce said. "Is that your victim? I know her."

  "The dead woman, Sophia Schofield, was a publicist and photographer," the reporter said. "Her husband, attorney Lawrence M. Kane, could not be reached for comment."

  "How did you know her, Bruce?"

  "If I say I'm not supposed to tell you, you'll know how I know her."

  "Program? My victim was in AA? Oh, God, now what do I do? I'll have to break my anonymity."

  "They don't know at your job that you're in recovery?"

  "At my old command they did," Cindy said. "They were friends, people I'd worked with for a long time. I was such a spectacular drunk that they noticed when I changed. But with the detective squad, I've been operating on a need-to-know basis, and they haven't needed to know.”

  "I don't see why you should have to tell them now if you don't want to. A friend of yours saw the news segment and recognized the victim from AA, and you thought they ought to know. What's the big deal?"

  "You don't understand, Bruce," she said. "This case is my shot at making detective. I want to make a real contribution. If I simply tell them she was in AA, they'll say, 'Okay, so she was on the wagon.' Recovery is so much more than that. You know it is! Working the Steps is a commitment to being accountable. It would affect her behavior, her honesty, her relationships—everything."

  "I think I get it. They say, 'Joe Jones called her every single day. They must have been having an affair,' and you say, 'If she was his sponsor, he'd check in once a day, more often if he was afraid he'd drink again, and they wouldn't even consider any hanky-panky.' They say, 'How can you know that?' And you say, 'I know because I'm in AA myself, and it really does work that way.'"

  "Exactly."

  "So why not tell them?"

  "Oh, come on, Bruce," she said. "They're cops. A few of us are in recovery, but for every one of us there are dozens who think anyone who doesn't booze it up now and then is a wuss. I've been trying to keep my head down."

  "I don't actually know her from AA," I said. "She was in another program too."

  "What program?"

  "Oh, the hell with it. I can't let you walk into this blind. She was in DA."

  "It's an impossible situation for both of us," Cindy said. "How do you know?"

  "She was Jimmy's DA sponsor. And he'll kill me if he finds out I told you. I already feel guilty. I hate being disloyal to Jimmy."

  "If Jimmy's such a stickler for anonymity, how do you even know Sophia?" she asked.

  "Well, I've kind of been going too," Bruce said.

  "You're in DA? Kind of? What does that mean? Are you in financial trouble?"

  "This conversation is going even worse than I was afraid it would," Bruce said. "I haven't jumped in with both feet the way Jimmy has, but I've been going to meetings with him. I'm not in financial trouble! It seems I'm something they call an under-earner. I'm trying to get the work and money part of my life in order, dammit. Please tell me t
hat doesn't make me sound like a loser."

  Chapter Five: Bruce

  A long-legged blonde on the hoof doesn't spell half as much trouble as a long-legged blonde dead body. I couldn't exactly blame her for screwing up my relationship with Cindy. I was going to tell Cindy I was going to DA. Just not today. Yeah, yeah. Mañana is not a recovery slogan. On top of that, it was my bad luck that Cindy was assigned to the murder of someone I knew.

  My relationship trouble was nothing compared to Jimmy's trouble with the law. He'd emailed his fourth step to Sophia the day before she died, with a note saying, "Looking forward to working Step Five with you in Starbucks." In the fifth step, you admit "to God, to ourselves, and to another human being" all the resentments, fears, and screw-ups you've written in your fourth step inventory. The other human being is usually your sponsor.

  You really, really don't want the police to read your searching and fearless moral inventory. It didn't help that the crime scene was practically around the corner from Jimmy's apartment. I don't know why anyone would pick Starbucks as the place to read their inventory aloud, unless it's because no one could get through it without coffee. Jimmy said he'd been trying to make it less daunting by letting Sophia read it over first. Their original date was for the morning of the murder. Cindy let slip that she'd noted it on Sophia’s desk calendar. Jimmy swore he'd called to change it, leaving a message on her voice mail. The cops were checking into that. But for the moment, he was a person of interest, which I thought sounded even worse than “suspect.”

  It wouldn't have mattered if it had turned out that Sophia had choked on a scone or even committed suicide. But Cindy got her wish: it was homicide. Sophia had died of cyanide poisoning. It's awfully hard to imagine a scenario in which cyanide gets into someone's latte by accident. And if a crowded Starbucks is a bad place to share all your past misdeeds with your sponsor, it would be a terrible place to kill yourself.

  Now Cindy had a dilemma. She'd shared a group house in the Hamptons with Jimmy. She didn't want to get kicked off her first homicide. She said she couldn't date a suspect's best friend. She thought it would be better if she stopped seeing me. I was trying to talk her out of it. We were all freaking out for various reasons. Jimmy didn't want to be a murder suspect. I didn't want Cindy to dump me. Cindy didn't know whether to tell her boss she could help with the recovery angle on the case, that she knew us from the Hamptons, or both, or neither.

  "Come on, Cindy," I said. "You know as well as I do that Jimmy didn't do it."

  Jimmy had rescheduled his appointment with Sophia. He had spent the morning at home, watching the super fix a leak in the bathroom. He'd kept the super in sight the whole time, because if he hadn't, the guy would have turned the water off, dropped tools all over the bathroom floor, and disappeared. New York apartment dwellers will recognize this scenario. So the super could give him an alibi.

  "We have to check it out," she said. "It'll take us time to go through the voice mails."

  "How about the super?"

  "We haven't been able to connect with him. It's not our first priority."

  "He's good at disappearing," I said. “It's what supers do."

  "I knew this wouldn't work," she said. "Cops and civilians shouldn't mate."

  "Please, Cindy, don't say that. It works if you believe it will." Groveling would get me nowhere, but I had to try.

  "I don't know what to do." She paced the floor, biting at a corner of her nail. "Nobody can predict how any given person will react when you tell them you're an alcoholic. I can tell Natali and Sergeant Washington that there may be a recovery angle to this case, and that I should know. But what if they don't buy it? They could throw me off the case and put it in my record that I'm a drunk with bad judgment. There goes my promotion, maybe my whole career. Besides, everyone would find out. I'd probably never live it down."

  "Hang a big red AA around your neck, huh?"

  I was trying to make her smile. I hadn't seen that snaggle-toothed grin I found so erotic in a while. It didn't work.

  "You don't understand," she said.

  "Look, you've only just found out that Jimmy may be part of the case. If you tell your boss first thing tomorrow that you know him slightly, he can't blame you for not mentioning it sooner. You can say you weren't close. You wouldn't be lying, not really. Have you even seen what he wrote?"

  "Not yet."

  "I don't think 'Bruce and Cindy are an item' is part of Jimmy's fourth step, do you?" I said. "You don't have to say anything about being in the program yourself. So you have some brilliant insights about the recovery side of the case. Why shouldn't you? You're a detective."

  She swiped her fingers down the sides of her pants and started nibbling on her lower lip instead.

  "Being a detective means collecting evidence that will hold up in court and keeping your mind on the job," she said.

  Her eyes and voice were colder than I liked. I didn't want to lose her. What happened to happily ever after? We'd been so good together. I refused to believe it had been just a summer fling. Jeez, we'd waited till Labor Day weekend. That had to count for something.

  "But it helps to know all you can about the victim's life, doesn't it? I could help. You wouldn't have to tell me anything. I could go to meetings and ask around. I'd tell you what I heard, and it would give you a better idea where to look closer. You wouldn't have to break your anonymity or anyone else's."

  "If you snooped and told me, you'd be breaking these people's anonymity. Doesn't that bother you?"

  "If it helps you and Jimmy," I said, "it's worth it."

  "I don't know, Bruce," she said. "I know you and your friends ran around playing amateur sleuth last summer."

  "It worked out, didn't it?" I said.

  "Yeah, after you almost got yourself and Barbara killed," she said. "Anyhow, I wasn't involved in the investigation. This is different. We're talking about the job here. The law. My career. And what happens if you find you can only help me or Jimmy, but not both of us? Where would your loyalty lie?"

  "It won't happen," I said, "because Jimmy's not a murderer. Fine, we'll do it the way you want it. I won't tell you anything I might know because I'm in program. As for us, I don't want to lose you. But if you want to cool it for a while, I'll do whatever you want. I love you, Cindy. I want you to have what you want, including your career."

  Cindy looked startled, as well she might. Neither of us had ever said the L word. I hadn't meant to. It slipped out. But I wasn't sorry I'd said it. I can't deny I was also glad she was so taken aback that she didn't notice what I hadn't said. I'd promised not to repeat to her anything I learned at meetings. I hadn't promised that I wouldn't ask any questions.

  Chapter Six: Bruce

  As I stepped off the elevator in Jimmy and Barbara's building, I could hear them arguing. This was not the sweet-tempered Jimmy and the recovery-conscious Barbara I knew. Sure, she was a chronic relapser in Al-Anon, but all that meant was she could never resist minding everybody's business. She could also get a tad controlling. Barbara had a mental list of things she wished she could change about Jimmy. She said that every woman does. But she worked the program. If she criticized or nagged, she made amends. She knew she had no right to take his inventory. So who was the pregnant Stepford girlfriend screeching that he was immature and passive aggressive and self-absorbed and a genetic disaster waiting to happen and just another fucking alcoholic after all? Whoa! That last one ricocheted off Jimmy and hit me too.

  I rang the doorbell anyway, because I'd come to pick up Jimmy and go to a meeting. In the circumstances, a church basement would be the safest place for him. Barbara jerked open the door. She nearly knocked me over storming out.

  "I'll be back late," she yelled back into the apartment.

  She knew I'd heard. Pretending I hadn't, I greeted her with as much nonchalance as I could muster. She didn't respond. Her face was brick red, and she couldn't meet my eyes. I held the door open and stood looking at her as she waited for the eleva
tor, shoulders hunched, foot tapping impatiently. I couldn't just go in and leave her there.

  "Hey," I said. "Barb. Talk to me. I want to help."

  Her shoulders twitched in rejection. We could hear a big dog barking in the next apartment and a small dog yapping farther down the hall. The elevator pinged as it creaked from floor to floor. People with kids and dogs and cell phones and bikes and shopping carts and scooters getting on and off and banging around laid a carpet of white noise under the silence. The elevator was only one floor away when Barbara burst into tears and rushed past me back into the apartment.

  "Jimmy? Jimmy! I'm sorry, I'm really sorry!"

  I followed her in, stopping in the foyer. Ordinarily, the multimedia high-tech noise that Jimmy is partial to blasting whenever Barbara's not around would have been streaming through the apartment door: elaborate world-class video games, Hitler marching into Poland on TV, anything from the 1812 Overture to heavy metal on the radio. That was Jimmy's normal way of pulling his cocoon around him. In fact, if he'd been as passive aggressive as she'd accused him of being, he would have turned it all on before she made it out the door. But he hadn't. He wasn't even hiding behind the computer. He was standing in the middle of the living room looking devastated. He held out his arms, and she burrowed into them. I looked at the ceiling.

  Barbara turned her head without lifting it off Jimmy's chest, smearing tears and snot across the front of his T shirt.

  "It's okay, Bruce," she said, "you can come in and shut the door. Just give us a minute. Go in the kitchen and get yourself a Diet Coke or something."

  I stared into their refrigerator, wondering what on earth had made me think I wanted to be a couple with Cindy. Neither of us was calm and nice like Jimmy. What would happen to us when major stuff like pregnancy and murder hit the fan? I had what my sponsor called the gift of sarcasm, and Cindy had the kind of martial arts skills you didn't want to mess with. Oh, and she had a gun. I sipped my Diet Coke and played with their refrigerator magnets while I waited for five minutes to pass.