Death Will Pay Your Debts

by Elizabeth Zelvin

  That got a laugh.

  "I even bought one of those wine aerators that you use so you won't have to wait an hour for the wine to breathe."

  That got another laugh.

  "I told myself it's just in case I relapse," he said. "Is that denial or what? I swore I would never relapse, and I haven't. I also swore I'd never need another twelve-step program, that everything I need is in AA and the Big Book. So I'll be glad to hear some experience, strength, and hope about working two programs, this one and DA in particular."

  When the sharing started, I paid more attention than usual, hoping to hear at least one reference to Sophia. I got lucky. A tall, gaunt woman in a black turtleneck, leather jacket, and jeans with graying hair hanging around her face was the first to raise her hand.

  "Hi, I'm Judith. I'm an alcoholic and a compulsive debtor."

  Bingo.

  "I've got five days back."

  Prolonged applause. Making a big deal of a few days' sobriety is one of those AA things that might seem ridiculous, except that everybody clapping, whistling, and tearing up remembers how it feels and how damn hard it is to get there.

  "Some of you have heard already how totally I managed to fuck up: booze, pills, stealing my sister's credit cards since I was too much of a DA star to have any of my own. Borrowing money from old boyfriends and sleeping with them so they'd give me more. I haven't gone back to work yet, and I'm terrified. I don't know whether I blew my cover there or not, because the blackouts started the first day I drank again. I'm not making any excuses. The night I crawled back in here, I had just heard that one of my sponsees had died, a beautiful woman that some of you knew. I have to live with the shame of not being there when she needed me. I hate this disease, and just for today, I hate myself."

  No one commented on Judith's share. That's not the way it works. While a woman shared about how her dog died but it was still a good day because she didn't have a drink and she was glad she could ask for help from her pressure relief group about how to pay the vet's bill, I looked around. I spotted Brent and Dennis sitting together, and we exchanged nods. Neither of them shared. After the meeting, Dennis made a beeline for the coffee. AA coffee is dire, but it's free, while a macchiato or cappuccino from Starbucks is the kind of expense that looks excessive and unnecessary when you write it down in your little book. I made my way over to Brent.

  "Bruce," I said, sticking out my hand. "We met at your cousin's funeral."

  We shook. He didn't wait for me to announce that I was an alcoholic and an under-earner.

  "Can I ask you something?"

  "Sure," I said.

  "Do you have a pressure relief group?" he asked.

  "Well, no," I said. "My money feels kind of personal, you know? I could explain my financial situation to a friend one on one, say, to you, but give two people the right to have opinions about it? I'm not ready."

  "I know exactly what you mean," he said.

  I was relieved to hear it. We were bonding. I'd had a hunch he might identify with my completely truthful unwillingness in this area.

  "Some of DA makes perfect sense to me," I said. "I can identify with the terminal vagueness thing, and I like the idea of having a vision, even though I'm still drawing a blank on what mine is. But other things I don't get. Like what if you have family money? What's wrong with tapping that if you need to? Are you supposed to feel guilty or what?"

  Brent glanced from side to side and over to the coffee area, where Dennis was talking to a couple of women and flinging powdered sugar around as he gestured with a donut. Grace and Pamela were here too. Good. None of them had given up on this meeting, in spite of the trauma of Sophia's death. In fact, the two women were part of a cluster surrounding Judith, eager to give the prodigal daughter hugs and phone numbers and nuggets of soothing wisdom like "Keep coming back" and "One day at a time." I'd probably get ripped apart if I went over and tried to ask her about Sophia's resentments and confidences. I reminded myself that Brent was equally likely to let something relevant slip. Besides, I was interested. I wished I had family money to worry about.

  "Go ahead, man," I said. "I'm listening."

  "Between you and me, I have a family money situation," Brent said. "I can't tell my friends because, well, because of what you're saying. My grandfather, he's the one with the big bucks, is old and not in good health. You know how they talk about family rules?"

  "Don't trust, don't talk, don't feel?" The ACOA program was big on those.

  "Children of alcoholics, right?" Brent said. "Well, yeah, but I was thinking of some other rules my family lives by. Like 'Buying a cheap Scotch is a false economy' and 'Always keep the money in the family.' My two cousins and I are the only ones in our generation, and none of us has kids."

  "That would be Sophia and her sister?"

  "Right. Now that Sophia's dead, Aggie and I are Grandpa's sole heirs. So what's the point of writing down every penny and calling it a slip if I spend a little more than I make?"

  "Oh, I agree," I said. "It makes no sense at all. Your parents don't get anything?"

  "My mom and the girls' father don't need it, and the whole family knows that Miles, that's my alcoholic uncle, would go through it in no time, down his throat and up his nose."

  "You and your cousins would spend it sensibly."

  "I don't know about Aggie," he said. "Sophia's been ruthlessly practical since she got sober and solvent. She dragged me into program so I'd become more responsible. She had a long list of bad ends I might come to if I didn't clean up my act. I agreed to go along with it, and I can't say she was wrong. Aggie calls herself an actor and uses what she thinks is a classy stage name, but she's never going to make it. She wanted Sophia to use her PR contacts to promote her career. She thought Sophia could make her a star or at least one of those celebrities who's only famous for being a celebrity. Sophia said nothing doing. Aggie was furious. She said if she spent the next twenty years waitressing, it would be all Sophia's fault. Sophia said no matter what she did, she couldn't make Arden Daventry a good actress."

  "Did she say it to you or to Arden?"

  "Only to me at first," Brent said. "She didn't want to hurt Arden's feelings. She was right. Arden's acting is lousy. But Aggie kept pestering Sophia until finally, to shut her up, Sophia had to get brutal with her. She did it in front of the whole family, too. It ended with everyone telling her she had no talent and she should stop wasting her time chasing a fantasy and get a real job."

  "She must have been crushed," I said.

  "Hopping mad, more like it," Brent said. "She called Sophia a heartless bitch and threatened to get even. It was quite a performance. If she showed half as much emotion on stage, she'd be getting the parts and even the reviews she dreamed of. But she can't summon it up at will, and that's kind of the definition of an actor, don't you think?"

  "Frustrating for her," I said. "When did this meltdown happen?"

  "Three or four weeks ago," Brent said. "Not long before Sophia died."

  At that point, some woman came up to give Brent a hug, and Grace and Pamela came up to give me a hug.

  "I saw you talking to the woman who shared about her relapse," I said. "If I picked up, which thank God I haven't yet, I don't know if I'd have the guts to walk back in here."

  "Another reason to stay sober." Pamela shuddered. "I've never had a slip, and I hope I never do. You should talk to Judith. She's amazing. So honest."

  "I didn't want to barge in," I said.

  "Don't be silly," Pamela said. "She needs as much support as she can get. She was Sophia's sponsor. She was telling us how terrible she feels because she ignored some voice mails Sophia left while she was drinking."

  "Really? What else did she say? I mean, that must have been awful."

  "Just that she knows she has to forgive herself if she wants to stay sober," Pamela said, "but she's having a hard time with it. She said she's going to do ninety in ninety."

  "Ninety meetings in ninety days? I guess if I'd been
in relapse, I might be motivated enough to try that. I don't know ninety meetings."

  Pamela giggled.

  "Silly. You don't have to make ninety different meetings, just go every day for ninety days. She was saying she'd try to hit some of the big AA meetings that have been around forever, like Mustard Seed, and as many DA meetings as she can. I told her about an AA meeting down in the Village that I love. So many people there have strong sobriety."

  "Oh, yeah?" It sounded like a better way to make contact with Judith than pushing myself on her now. "What day is it? Show me on the meeting list."

  We both took out our meeting lists, hers a lot more dog-eared and marked up than mine. I'd get Jimmy to go with me.

  "How is your business going?" I asked Grace.

  "I have a meeting with my pressure relief group set up for this weekend," she said. "This phase of my business plan was based on merging with Sophia, so I have to rethink the whole thing. We hadn't put anything in writing yet. We were still at the talking stage, but we'd shared a lot about each other's clients, you know, to figure out how we could help each other effectively. We'd been having lunch together once or twice a week for the past couple of months. Do you think I should tell the police?"

  "Actually," I said, "if she put her lunches with you on her calendar, chances are the cops will ask you about it at some point."

  "Omigod," she said, "they already have my name. I don't know what they'll think. I wouldn't have hurt Sophia just to get her business, but they don't know that. You know we were all in Starbucks when Sophia died? It might be less suspicious to tell them we were in recovery together. What do you think? We're going for coffee now, by the way. Come along if you want to."

  I shrugged and smiled, reminding myself that Grace's dilemma was not my circus, not my monkeys. Once the detectives knew about her double connection with Sophia, they might get very interested in her. She could have put the poison in Sophia's latte as easily as anyone. She could even have ordered an extra latte and switched the cups.

  People don't really want to hear your opinion. Grace turned away, already chattering to someone else. Should I go and hang out with them at Starbucks? None of them seemed to mind returning to the crime scene. For recovering alcoholics, coffee runs a close second to sobriety in the hierarchy of needs. I took out a cigarette to smoke as I walked, offering one to Dennis, who had fallen into step beside me.

  "No thanks," he said. "Another addiction I'm letting go of. Forty-two days, eleven hours, and six minutes."

  "Congratulations," I said.

  "It sucks," he said, "but it's the last frontier."

  "Yeah, I know what you mean," I said. "I keep telling myself to saddle up and hit the trail, but so far, it's never today."

  "Good luck," he said. "They keep telling me I'll get my taste buds and my sense of smell back, but I'm still waiting."

  "Tell me something," I said. "Why didn't Sophia sit with you that day?"

  Dennis wasn't stupid. I didn't have to specify what day.

  "She was meeting someone," he said. "She told us."

  "Did she tell you who?"

  "Not a clue," he said.

  "Did you mention it to the police?"

  "No way," he said. "If we'd admitted we knew her, they'd have asked a lot more questions, and the whole program thing would have come out. None of us wanted that. We didn't want to break our anonymity." He hunched one shoulder in a defensive gesture. "Or Sophia's anonymity. It was the only thing we could do for her."

  Hypocrite. It wasn't the first time I'd noticed that recovery didn't turn anyone into a saint. As my sponsor liked to say, the principles were perfect, but sometimes the people you met in the rooms were recovery side up, and sometimes they were disease side up. Depending on how you looked at it, an AA meeting was a church basement full of folks trying to turn their lives around for the better, or—and—a church basement full of champion bullshitters.

  Chapter Twenty: Cindy

  Larry Kane made no objection to a search of either of Sophia's darkrooms or to the police examining his late wife's files, both paper and electronic, or her phone records.

  "We see it all the time," Natali told Cindy. "He thinks that if he comes across as completely transparent, we won't suspect him."

  "Do we?"

  "Of course we do," Natali said. "We always suspect the husband. Too bad we still don't have probable cause to check his records. But that could change any time. Keep looking, and don't blink."

  They found no products containing cyanide in either darkroom. Miranda Spence provided invoices for all the purchases of darkroom chemicals.

  Back at the office, Cindy made a beeline for her computer.

  "What were you doing?" Natali asked when she slid her keyboard forward and stood up. "We've got all this paper to look through."

  "Looking up potassium ferricyanide," Cindy said. "They stopped using it in darkrooms as a reducer in the 1950s or so. So if the darkrooms are important to the case, it's for some other reason."

  "Right," Natali said. "We're detectives, not mystery writers. We don't make assumptions based on something we saw in the movies."

  "CSU reports that Sophia's fingerprints were all over the place in the home darkroom," Cindy said, "and no one else's were, not even Kane's. Is it possible that he never went in there? If my husband had a darkroom, I'd want to snoop. If I had a husband."

  Natali tipped his chair onto its two back legs and clasped his hands behind his head.

  "Could be. Or it could mean that someone with another agenda, someone who didn't want his presence known, was in there wearing gloves."

  "The killer?" Cindy tapped her fingers on the desk as she thought. "Wiping away any traces of himself before he left? Or herself. What other agenda? Compromising photos? It's not like Sophia was a private eye. She didn't go around snapping adulterers in the wrong beds; there wasn't a single photo or scrap of paper to suggest she did. Most of her photos were obviously for PR purposes: groups of people at public events, some of them quite glitzy."

  "Let's take a closer look at those," Natali said. "If we identify all the people, we might spot somebody important somewhere they shouldn't have been."

  "Or with someone they shouldn't have been with," Cindy said. "You're not suggesting that Sophia was a blackmailer, are you?"

  "Not unless we uncover evidence to that effect," Natali said. "She might not even have known the photo was compromising, but the subject might still have felt threatened and wanted to shut her up."

  "Wait a minute," Cindy said. "If the killer—the hypothetical person with gloves—snuck into the darkroom and stuck around long enough to clean up after himself, he'd have taken any damaging photos away with him and probably destroyed them."

  "You're not thinking retro enough," Natali said. "In a darkroom, what are the prints developed from?"

  "Oh," Cindy said. "Negatives. Hold on. They could have taken the negatives. It would have been pretty hard to identify individuals, though. They'd have to have taken every print of a given event. And they still might have missed shots that weren't developed yet."

  "Or the lack of fingerprints could simply mean the Kanes have a crackerjack cleaning lady," Natali said.

  "Wait, I asked Kane about that." Cindy thumbed through her notes. "It's a cleaning service. Three recent immigrants with not much English and a terrific work ethic. Their last visit was a few days before Sophia died, If she hadn't used the darkroom after that, we wouldn't have found her prints."

  "What did he say about access?" Natali asked. "Want half a tuna on rye?"

  He took an oil-stained brown paper bag from his desk drawer, drew out and unwrapped an overstuffed and aromatic sandwich, and waggled it invitingly.

  "No, thanks," Cindy said. "Maybe later. Kane said that ordinarily, no one else got into the darkroom, even him. He had to knock and ask nicely. It makes sense that if she was developing, she'd have the safelight on and wouldn't open the door. But he made it sound more like it was her sacred space and he
wasn't welcome."

  "There will be no later." Natali took a big bite of tuna. His voice muffled, he said, "Rule 37 for detectives: Say yes to lunch when you get the chance, because you may have to hit the ground running at any moment. Ordinarily?"

  "If she wasn't there," Cindy said, "Kane could have snuck in any time, and so could anyone visiting the apartment, like the fifty people at their last cocktail party or the caterer and her crew."

  "When did this party take place?" Natali asked. "Last call for tuna."

  Cindy shook her head and grinned.

  "The Saturday night before she died."

  "Get the guest list and the caterer's contact info," Natali said, still chewing. "It's possible some of them didn't know the darkroom was there. They could have been looking for the bathroom."

  "Or said they were, if anybody saw them," Cindy said.

  "Check out the cleaning service too," he said. "My guess is they cleaned before the party and came back to clean up after it."

  "They might have skipped the darkroom the second time," she said, "since it was supposed to be off limits to the guests. I'll ask."

  She saw Natali beginning to wipe his oily fingers on the paper bag and handed him a stack of the Starbucks napkins that tended to accumulate in her handbag.

  "I don't suppose we can do anything with DNA?" she asked.

  Natali finished giving his fingers an efficient scrub and tossed the wad of napkins into the nearest wastebasket.

  "You know how long that takes and how much it costs," he said. "Or if not, you should. We check the evidence for DNA transfer once we have a suspect in custody and not before. Not even then unless it's needed."