Death Will Pay Your Debts

by Elizabeth Zelvin

  "See the black cloth draped over the mirrors?" Barbara whispered. "You're not supposed to be vain enough to look at your reflection when you're in mourning."

  "What's with the wooden boxes?" I whispered back.

  "The mourners aren't supposed to be thinking about their own comfort," she said. "Don't worry, the visitors are allowed to sit on chairs."

  After shaking hands and muttering condolences to Sophia's husband and his brother, I looked around to see who else it might be my social obligation to greet before I could escape to the food and the balcony, since the booze was not an option. The rabbi excused himself to tuck a granny-type afghan around the legs of an old lady, tiny and fragile, huddled in an overstuffed velvet armchair.

  "Are you cold, Mama?" He bent and kissed the top of her pink scalp with its thin covering of wispy hair.

  "You're a good boy, Seymour," she said.

  If that was the rabbi's mother, Sophia had been her daughter-in-law. Maybe the mother-in-law wasn't considered a genuine mourner. Or not to be so cynical, maybe she'd been exempted from sitting on a box on account of age.

  Two expensively dressed women in their fifties sailed over to the rabbi, each linking her arm in his with an insinuating motion and a coy laugh that might have worked when they were twenty. I figured they counted flirting with the rabbi as one of the perks of their synagogue membership.

  I went over to old Mrs. Kahn and knelt so I could look into her faded gray eyes. I lifted her hand, light as a kitten's.

  "Hello, Mrs. Kahn," I said. "I'm Bruce. I'm sorry about your daughter-in-law."

  "Sorry? Yes." She peered at me. "You look like a good boy."

  I couldn't remember my mother ever calling me a good boy.

  "You know my boys? My Seymour and Larry?"

  I made an ambiguous sound in my throat. It seemed to satisfy her. On impulse, I patted her cheek, thin and crumpled as tissue paper, and dropped a kiss on the top of her head.

  "I bet you were a great mother. You be good, now."

  Her gaze followed me, faintly puzzled, as I stood up, dusted the knees of my pants, and walked away, wondering what had come over me.

  I spent twenty minutes or so on the balcony, gazing out at the boats on the river and the constant stream of traffic crossing the bridges while I thought about nothing in particular. Then I went in and looked around for Barbara and Jimmy. I assumed they had been circulating and talking about Sophia. I had neglected my duties as a sleuth. I hoped Barbara wouldn't give me a hard time about it.

  I heard her laugh from the center of a knot of women, all curly-haired and animated as they talked a mile a minute. It looked like she had found kindred spirits, if not informants. She'd even found them, or maybe steered them, far away from the table piled, as she'd predicted, with bagels, smoked fish, spreads, and rugelach. I was glad she was having a good time. Looking around, I spotted Jimmy in intense conversation with a woman whose compact form and tucked-in features reminded me of a particularly alert parakeet. Her thin charcoal suit, white silk blouse, and makeup were discreet and impeccable.

  Jimmy's expression was so animated that my first guess was that he'd found what AA called a fellow. I got ready to announce that Hi, I'm Bruce if the occasion required it.

  "Bruce, come and meet Miriam. Miriam, this is my friend Bruce. He's not one of us, but he'll be really excited to hear what we've been talking about."

  Huh? Not one of them, meaning her and Jimmy? What could she have in common with him, if not AA?? Was she a history buff? A re-enactor?

  Jimmy was so eager to tell me that he was babbling.

  "Miriam's a software developer. She and her partners have been developing an amazing virtual world project, and now they're all working for Graham Costello. Maybe you haven't heard of him. He keeps a lower profile than guys like Gates and Jobs, but he's in that class, and he's an incredible entrepreneur. She's telling me that Costello is looking for good creative people and I should talk to him. Miriam's had an amazing career. I could tell you some of what she's done, but it's mostly technical, it wouldn't mean a thing to you. And before that, she was—I can tell him, Miriam, can't I? He's my best friend, and he's still a bit of an outlaw himself—she was a hacker. A great hacker."

  Miriam laughed lightly.

  "Queen of the Cybercowgirls, that was me. Bruce—is that it?—is your friend always so effervescent?"

  "Absolutely not," I said. "Never. You must have impressed the hell out of him."

  "He's impressed me too," she said. "I meant it about Costello, Jimmy. He's always looking for people who not only write brilliant code but can also come up with cutting edge ideas, the more ambitious the better. He's probably already heard of you. The world of geeks in gaming and virtual worlds is smaller than you might think."

  "Supergeeks like you, you mean," Jimmy said. "I don't know if I fit the category. But thanks."

  "What are you doing here, Miriam?" I asked. "I mean, which mourner are you visiting? How did you know Sophia?"

  "This is my home," she said. "I'm the rebbetzin. The rabbi's wife."

  "Oh," I said. "I'm sorry for your loss. Well, go on talking tech, don't let me interrupt you."

  I beat a hasty retreat. I didn't know what to say to a rabbi's wife or a supergeek either. I looked around, hoping to spot at least one program person. There was Eleanor, Jimmy's pressure gal, all alone in a corner scarfing down a bagel with cream cheese oozing out the sides. I sauntered over to her.

  "Hi, I'm Bruce, a you know what from you know where. Jimmy's here too. Have you seen him?"

  Eleanor held up one finger, chewed, and gulped.

  "Not the place to talk about his spending plan," she whispered, leaning so close that the dab of cream cheese on her nose transferred itself to my ear.

  "Are you going to the thing up at Woodlawn?" I asked.

  "No," she said, "this is it for me. I'm Jewish, so coming today felt like the right thing to do."

  "Are Dan and the others here?"

  "No, just me," she said.

  "How about Sophia's sponsor?" I put my hands in my pockets, the better to sound as casual as I could.

  "I've only heard about her," Eleanor said. "I don't even know her name. Not to break her anonymity, but I heard she has a job at the Met."

  "I heard she went out," I said, "but I didn't know whether to believe it. You know how rumors start. Someone might have gotten the wrong end of the stick."

  "She relapsed all right," Eleanor said, "but I've heard she's back now. She used to go to that AA meeting that's also for people in DA."

  "That's good news," I said.

  If she thought I meant I was glad to hear that an addict had made it back from relapse, well, I was. But what I really meant was that she might be able to cast some light on Sophia's death.

  Chapter Thirteen: Bruce

  The three of us took the subway up to Woodlawn a couple of days later. If all you know about the Bronx is "the Bronx is burning" and "Fort Apache" from the 1970s, you'd be surprised how much of the Bronx is green. I am, every time. Not even counting upscale neighborhoods like Riverdale, there's Van Cortlandt Park, which is big enough to be called an "urban forest." There's Pelham Bay Park, where Cindy once told me there's a mounted police unit, horses and all, buried deep in the woods. There's the Botanical Gardens and the Bronx Zoo. There's City Island, which is like a seaside village, with marinas and seafood restaurants and people living on houseboats. And there's Woodlawn. The place is chock full of famous dead people: Herman Melville, Irving Berlin, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Fiorello LaGuardia, Admiral Farragut, and Jay Gould, the original robber baron. His mausoleum looks like the Parthenon. Isidor and Ida Straus, who owned Macy's and died on the Titanic, have a mausoleum, though obviously they aren't in it. Barbara got all excited about Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of the original champions of women's rights, whom it is incorrect to call suffragettes.

  Woodlawn isn't only a tourist attraction. It's still a working cemetery. Sophia's final resting place was
the Brookside Cremation Garden. It was very peaceful and pretty, with low stone walls and a rock garden and a real brook, probably manmade but nice, gurgling away as it descended in a series of small stepped waterfalls. The niches were artistically tucked into the landscaping, both above the ground and under it. Sophia got a rock by a clump of ferns alongside one of the waterfalls. I wouldn't have minded resting there myself, if I had to pick a place. I don't know about cremation. Urns of ashes seem to elicit comedy too often for my taste. But Sophia's family had done all right by her.

  There was a brief nicheside service, I guess you could call it. An Episcopal priest who was a friend of the family said a few words. A woman with a pair of lungs on her that could have blown down the walls of Jericho sang "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot." There was a moment of silence in which all you could hear was the twittering of birds and the water babbling down from step to step and the wind tossing the leaves overhead. For a moment, my usual cynicism left the room and I could feel the presence of a Higher Power.

  Then it was over. One of the middle generation of Schofields, in between Grandpa and Brent, announced that the family was adjourning to a nearby restaurant for drinks and a buffet lunch, and everyone was welcome. Grace, the only one of Sophia's program friends who'd showed up this morning, was standing with us when Brent came over.

  "Please come," he said. "You really are invited. Personally, I could use some company that won't be getting sloshed. Uncle Miles organized it so he wouldn't run dry."

  "I'll come," Grace said. She had dressed down for the occasion: a black dress with conservative black heels and opaque black stockings covering the tattoos. She had left her nose ring home, the better to troll the gathering for prospective clients.

  "The group is smaller today," Barbara murmured in my ear as we followed them down the path. "I bet she came to network. That little black clutch purse she's carrying is probably stuffed with her business cards."

  When we arrived at the restaurant, a couple of dozen people were already standing around with drinks in their hands. Brent met us at the bar, where they were dispensing designer water and club soda along with wine and real booze.

  "Tell us who everyone is," Barbara said, smiling at Brent as she squeezed a wedge of lime into her fizzing glass. She liked an occasional glass of wine. It was no big deal for us if she did. Everyone knows that real men don't drink Chardonnay. But now that she was drinking for two, alcohol was off her food plan. "I know the tall blond men are Schofields."

  "Uncle Miles is the one with the glass of single malt glued to his fist," Brent said. "Uncle Simon over there is Sophia's dad. The tall blonde woman chugging a double is my mother, Iris. The guy tugging ineffectually at her sleeve, which has never stopped her, is my father, Jason Martin. The silver-haired old stooped guy, formerly tall and blond, matching her chug for chug, is Grandpa."

  "Where's Sophia's mother?" Barbara asked.

  Brent pointed to an olive-skinned older woman impeccably clothed in black with a double strand of pearls so luminous you could almost see them pulsing from fifteen yards away and raven hair that even a raven could only have acquired in a salon where the cheapest service was a three-figure haircut.

  "That's Aunt Persephone," he said. "Her real name is Aglaia, but we call her Persephone because she's forced to spend six months of the year in Hades, aka Palm Beach, Florida, because of Uncle Simon's arthritis. The younger woman with her is Sophia's sister Agape. She calls herself Arden these days. She's an actress, but don't ask her what shows she's been in. Either you haven't heard of them or you have, but if you blinked, you missed her. That's the family. We don't breed much. If you want to know who the rest of them are, you'll have to ask them yourself. Larry's friends and family, Sophia's friends and clients. I'd better circulate, or my mother will start nipping at my heels. See you later."

  "Later," Jimmy echoed.

  "I'm headed for the buffet," Barbara announced.

  "Can I ask a dumb question?" I asked. "Why is it okay to eat here when it wasn't at the shiva?"

  "That was midafternoon," she said. "It would have been a snack, and I don't snack. This is lunch."

  Silly me. It would have been nice if she'd assured me it wasn't a dumb question.

  "Go mingle," Barbara said.

  "Yes, ma'am."

  By this time, most of the guests were well lubricated, chattering and laughing the way they would at any party. By common consent, Jimmy and I skirted around a gaggle of ladies comparing notes on estrogen and liposuction and a clot of lawyers haw-hawing about little blue pills and getting snipped. Kane himself didn't seem so jocular. Maybe his colleagues thought they were cheering him up. We were almost past them when one of them broke away and accosted us. Jimmy slipped away as the guy turned his devastating charisma and perfectly capped teeth on me.

  "Damian Kerensky." He handed me a card. "I'm running for City Council."

  He had the perfect politician's handshake, dry and firm without crunching your knuckles or lasting too long. A lock of brown hair without a hint of gray flopped over his left eye. A bony, arched nose saved his face from prettiness. Laugh wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, charming enough to run for office on their own, kept him from looking like a kid.

  "Bruce Kohler," I said. "How did you know Sophia?"

  "She was managing my campaign," he said. "It's a terrible loss. Election Day is months away, but you start building support early. Are you a registered Democrat?"

  "Had you known her long?"

  "I'm a colleague of her husband. I was at their wedding. It's a sad day, a sad day. I'm a litigator. I've done a lot of corporate work, but I've been moving into tenant law and the green side of environmental disputes, so I've got an understanding of how a broad spectrum of New Yorkers feel about the issues. "

  "Good for you." I nodded a few times like a bobble-headed doll.

  He hadn't taken long to go from sad to campaign mode. He looked pumped. Circulating like a fever in the blood and talking about himself was probably what he did best.

  "Good to meet you, Bruce. I hope we'll see you at the polls in November." He twinkled, shook my hand again, and bounced off to charm another voter.

  I caught the eye of a woman with the kind of outfit, hair, and nails that took a lot of money to achieve and the kind of legs you got from running ten miles a day. She had been watching Kerensky with an unreadable expression. If I asked if she was training for the Marathon, she'd know I'd been checking out her legs. So I said something else more or less at random.

  "Do you believe that power corrupts? Bruce Kohler." I held out my hand.

  "Marcia Baldwin-Kerensky. If you're looking for a clever answer, I don't have one." She shook, with a smile as creamy as her paw, which felt like it bathed in asses' milk every day like Cleopatra. "I'm the candidate's wife."

  "Are you an attorney too?" I asked.

  "No. One lawyer in the family is enough. I do a lot of volunteer and charity work."

  I recognized that as code for "got a lot of money." I wondered if it was Kerensky's money or hers. Maybe she was financing his campaign.

  "Good for you," I said. "What kind of causes do you support?"

  "Clean water," she said. "Clean air."

  "Your husband mentioned environmental issues," I said. "Were you the inspiration for his going green?"

  "It's hard to tell what inspires a politician," she said. "We can only hope they do a little good and not much harm."

  "You're not excited about him running for office?"

  "I'll be more excited when he gets in," she said. "It's been very pleasant talking with you, Mr. Kohler. Excuse me, I have to go powder my nose."

  I didn't know anybody said that any more. Live and learn. I drifted over to the food table and filled a plate for myself. There was an awkward moment when I picked up a glass of club soda and lime that looked just like mine but wasn't. It belonged to a woman with curly auburn hair. She was packed into a stretchy copper-colored dress like a particularly luscious sausage. May
be she was in AA too.

  "Sorry!" I said. "Are you a friend of Bill?"

  "Bill? I don't know any Bill. Sophia's husband's name is Larry."

  If she'd been one of us, she'd have known the code, for use at funeral buffets and on bulletin boards on cruise ships, where sober folks might need an anonymous meeting of "friends of Bill."

  She came around the table with a friendly smile, willing to chat.

  "Never mind," I said. "How did you know Sophia?"

  "We were friends in college," she said. "I'm Tracy Miller."

  "Bruce Kohler," I said. "Old friends, huh? It must have been a shock."

  Tracy shook her head, the auburn curls and some of her anatomy bouncing.

  "Until recently," she said, "we only saw each other at college reunions. We were getting in touch more often lately because I edit an e-zine that reaches a lot of people. She wanted to get me interested in some of her clients. We're not Salon.com or the Huffington Post, but we're moving in that direction."

  She handed me her card, which said she was editor in chief of Next.

  "I've heard of this," I said, tucking the card into my breast pocket. "Now I'll have to start reading it. What was Sophia like in college?"

  "A wild child," Tracy said.

  "Really!" Weren't we all, when we were drinking and doing drugs? "Had she changed much?"

  "She was very focused," Tracy said. "It was all about work, not partying. She didn't even drink any more."

  I nodded at her salad and club soda.

  "How about you? Any wild child left in you?"

  She laughed.

  "Not this early in the day. I'm pretty work-oriented too."

  "So you still got along."

  "To tell the truth, I got the feeling that she wasn't particularly interested in me as a friend, only what Next could do for her. And she wasn't up front about it either. That is, she wanted to talk business, and that was okay, it's what we do. But whenever we got together, it was like there was a glass wall between us. I didn't really know her any more."