Act of God (34 page)

“I’d still like to talk to him.”

A nod. “I’ll go upstairs, try to get him to.”

She slid out from her bench and stood, but didn’t move right away. “Back there in your office, you told me … you said being widowed, it … passes with time?”

“Some, anyway.”

“How long does it take, John?”

I just shook my head.

“So you got my mother to do your dirty work.”

Larry Rivkind lay on a platform bed, his head and shoulders against one of those corduroy back rests at the wall. There were a couple of football posters in his room, and a framed program showing a hockey player in full stride wearing a crimson uniform with HARVARD across his chest and the legend NCAA NATIONAL CHAMPIONS—1989 beneath the player. A fourteen-inch television with a cable box was on a low bureau, the station MTV or VH-1. The sound was off, the rock group mouthing their lyrics in pantomime.

I said, “How do you mean, ‘my dirty work’?”

“You know what I mean. Sending her up here because you knew if she asked me to talk with you, I’d do it.”

“I figured you might do it anyway.”

“Why should I?”

“Because I spared her some heartache, not telling her about you swinging on me in your father’s store.”

“Yeah, well, heartache, that’s something you’re just trying to bring her more of.”

“She has questions, and she wants answers to them.”

“Even if it means ruining my dad’s memory for her.”

“Is that what the answers would do, Larry?”

He turned away from me, looking at the figures gyrating on the small screen.

Very slowly, he said, “Was my father having an affair with somebody? I don’t know. If my mother found out he was, would it kill her? I don’t think so. But it would sure as shit ruin a nice part of her, a part of what she believes in, what keeps her going through all this.”

“Do you know anybody who had a reason to kill your father?”

Another scowl. “No. He was the best. The kindest, I mean. He hated violence, hardship. He once told me he had to lie all the time in the camp, lie to stay alive. He said he’d never lie again.”

“Larry—”

“That’s what you just don’t seem to understand. If he told my mom he was faithful, he was. You never knew him. I did. Let me tell you a story, something my father told me once and said he never told even my mother or his partner, Joel. This middle-aged couple was in the store, almost twenty years ago. They saw Joel and asked him if he had a blue couch. Now Joel, he’s more the buyer than the seller in the place, so he hunts up my dad and asked him, ‘Abe, we got a blue couch for these people here?’ And my father, he looks over at the couple, they’re from our temple and he knows them, thinks they’re kind of obnoxious. But he also had this young couple, nice Spanish people, he told me, who’d saved up for a down payment on a couch and they needed a blue one. Now, my father had two blue couches in stock, and he’d shown both to the Spanish couple, but he didn’t know which one they were going to take, they were supposed to come in the next day and decide. So my father says to Joel, ‘No, we don’t have a blue couch,’ because in fact they had
two
of them. You see what I’m saying?”

“Your father couldn’t bring himself to lie to his partner for the Spanish couple.”

“That’s right. He wanted them to get the couch they wanted, but he couldn’t bring himself to lie to Joel about the stupid stock. So instead he just kind of hid the truth.”

I felt a penny drop somewhere inside my head.

Larry Rivkind looked at me. “You see, he couldn’t even deceive his partner without telling the truth.”

“So, was my son any help to you?”

“Maybe. Back in my office, you told me you asked your husband if he’d ever been unfaithful to you.”

Pearl Rivkind looked up at me from the bench at the kitchen window. “That’s right.”

“Do you remember the exact words?”

“What, Abe’s?”

“Yours and his.”

“This … this is important?”

“Maybe.”

Rivkind looked out the window. “We were … in the bedroom, and I said—what was it? Oh, yeah.”

She told me, and I felt the other penny drop.

My client looked back up at me. “So tell me, you think my Abe lied to me?”

I watched her face, the lantern jaw, the big brown eyes holding a lot of hope in them.

“No, Pearl, I don’t think he did.”

“A
H,
J
OHN
C
UDDY
, isn’t it?”

“It is, Mr. Quill.”

“What’s this now? I thought we’d reached a first-name basis.”

“Where’s Karen?”

“The greeter? She’s off on break somewhere. Perhaps the employee lounge. I can fetch her if she’s there?”

“Don’t trouble. Who will I find on the fourth floor?”

The skin around the ruined but somehow regal nose wrinkled a little. “Why the usual, I expect.”

“Thanks.”

“Can I escort you up there?”

I stepped around him. “Won’t be necessary.”

“Joel’s not here. He’ll be gone for a couple of hours.”

“That’s all right. You’re the one I need to talk to.”

Beverly Swindell looked up at me. Then she used a stapler to anchor some printouts on Rivkind and Bernstein’s partners’ desk. “Here or my office?”

“Wherever you’d be more comfortable.”

Swindell heard something in my voice. “My office, then.”

We moved down the corridor toward the doorway to the back staircase, turning in at her door, which she closed behind me as I took one of the conference chairs in the corner. She pulled back one of the others and sat down, folding her hands on the tabletop like a fifth-grader who took school very seriously.

I said, “I figured it out, but I don’t know what to do with it.”

Swindell kept an even gaze. “Figured what out?”

“What happened here that night. But it still doesn’t make much sense with everything else.”

“I don’t understand you.”

“Abraham Rivkind never lied.”

“That’s right.”

“His wife asked him if he’d ever been unfaithful to her, and he said he hadn’t.”

The even gaze. “If Abe said that, then—”

“Not quite.”

A couple of blinks.

I said, “He didn’t quite say that, because Pearl didn’t quite ask him that. What she asked him was, ‘Abe, you having an affair on me?’ ”

The blinks stopped.

I took a breath. “And Abe said, ‘No.’ ”

Swindell’s fingers meshed a little tighter. “Then he was telling the truth.”

“Yes, he was. Because he wasn’t having ‘an’ affair, he was having two.”

“I don’t know what—”

“It’s what Grgo was trying to keep from me, that you and your boss were having an affair, only I wasn’t sharp enough to notice it the first time I talked with him in the restaurant. I thought he was just steering me away from Rivkind and Darbra Proft. Grgo tried to be a little more direct today, but it still didn’t hit home until Larry Rivkind told me a story about two blue couches and a young couple who wanted to buy one.”

Swindell looked at me, not so evenly now. “That was almost Abe’s favorite story, Mr. Cuddy.”

“His son told me that Rivkind never mentioned it to his wife or his partner.”

There was a surge in her voice as she said, “He told it to me. How he managed to avoid telling a lie and still kept somebody from being hurt. He said he’d been able to do that in the camp—Buchenwald—a few times, and whenever he thought of it, it always made him … cry.”

I said, “You can say something to me if you want to, or you can just listen.”

Swindell shook her head.

I took another breath. “You were all working that Thursday night here, Finian Quill down on the first floor, Bernstein and Rivkind in their office, you in yours, running the daily numbers. As Quill was closing up the front entrance, Bernstein went to the men’s room. My guess is Rivkind picked that time, when he knew his partner would be gone awhile, to call Darbra, maybe to set something up, maybe just to say hello. But Darbra was out that night, so he got her answering machine. The call showed up on the telephone company’s local line records, which made the police aware of it, but Darbra told them the message was just dead space. That’s not quite true, is it?”

Swindell gave me just the even gaze, hands still folded in front of her.

I said, “Abraham Rivkind was on the telephone leaving Darbra a message, a message you overheard when you came into his office with the printouts. You couldn’t believe your ears, that he’d betray you like that. Without thinking clearly, you pulled the poker from its holder. Hanging up the phone, Rivkind heard that noise behind him and started to rise and turn. And then you hit him, in anger and with strength, and he fell to the floor.”

Swindell could have been a statue.

“When I finally saw it, I thought you must have just panicked after that, run to the end of the corridor and pushed the panic bar itself on the staircase door, started yelling. But that wouldn’t have given the ‘burglar’ enough time to get down the stairs before Finian Quill heard you screaming from the rear door on the first floor. So I’m guessing you walked from Rivkind’s office to the end door, opened it to set off the alarm, then hurried back to Rivkind’s office before screaming and running again to the door, screaming down the staircase where Quill heard you on his way back in from the alley and Bernstein found you on his way back from the men’s room.”

Swindell opened her mouth, but it wasn’t as though she was addressing me. “At first, it was because I needed the job. Fifteen years ago, I didn’t know much, but I wanted to learn, needed to learn, so I joked around with Abe, didn’t try to encourage him along, but didn’t discourage him, either. He wasn’t … forceful. I’d had some bad experiences with that kind of man. I wasn’t real good-looking, just good-looking enough to get bothered by men. But Abe was gentle, kind. He was just right, in a lot of ways. So we had … I don’t know, it’s awful hard to call it an ‘affair,’ but I guess that’s what it was. We’d see each other here, and we’d have dinner at Grgo’s or drinks at some other places. Once in a while, we’d slip off to some motel or other, and Abe would pay cash and wink at the clerk, and—I don’t know, that makes it sound kind of dirty, but it wasn’t. It was … he was sweet, the nicest man to me I ever had.”

Hearing Swindell talk about it, I suppose I should have felt more. After all, crime of passion or not, she’d still brutally killed Abraham Rivkind. But I’d already made up my mind on what to do about that. For Pearl’s sake.

Swindell jerked her head up suddenly, as though she thought I wasn’t paying attention. “Then Darbra came to work here. I noticed it right away, her … twitching herself past Abe, hanging on his words, his arm, just here or there, but no question. I kind of denied it, denied it to myself, and I never asked him about it straight out, but it was like telling my head that my hand wasn’t in a fire. I suppose I shouldn’t have been so surprised. I mean, if he cheated on his wife with me, why shouldn’t he cheat on me with somebody else? But all I know is that night, when I came into his office and—”

“Found him dead on the floor, you did what anybody would have done.”

Swindell blinked. “What?”

I said, “When you found Abraham Rivkind dead on the floor, the poker nearby, you did what anyone would have. You panicked and ran for help. Joel Bernstein and Finian Quill, picking up the poker as they did, unfortunately ruined any fingerprints the police could have found on it.”

“What … what are you saying now?”

“I’m saying there’s no physical evidence to prove who killed Abraham Rivkind, so it’s hard for me to tell his wife it was anything but a burglar who killed her husband, who wasn’t having ‘an’ affair on her.”

I wondered if I’d changed gears on Beverly Swindell a little too abruptly, but she began to bob her head. “You’re not going to tell the police about me, are you?”

“Tell them what? You haven’t confessed anything. They should have been able to find out that a dead man had an affair with one of his employees, an affair that would break his widow’s heart if she found out about it. With no physical evidence, it’s a long stretch to the employee being the killer, what with other people like Joel Bernstein and Finian Quill around to back up the burglar story. At best, the finger starts pointing at anybody in the building that night, and with opportunity and probably their own motives, at least Bernstein and even Quill look like a lot of reasonable doubt to me. Maybe the employee would get convicted, but I’d bet against it. And all this about ‘Honest Abe’ would have to come out for no good reason.”

Swindell set her jaw. “My time in this life, I haven’t met anybody who gives away something for nothing.”

“And you still haven’t.”

“What do you want, then?”

“I want to know what happened to Darbra Proft and why her boyfriend, Rush Teagle, got himself killed.”

A determined tone. “If you believe I lied to you and the police before, then you don’t have any cause to believe me right now.”

“I’ll believe you.”

Swindell paused, then swung her head slowly, keeping her eyes on me. “I don’t have any idea what happened to that girl or her boyfriend or why. I swear to you I don’t.”

I let out a breath. “I was hoping otherwise.”

She just kept swinging her head.

I stood, pushing back my chair, then snugging it under the table. “Good-bye, Mrs. Swindell.”

As I got to the door, I heard behind me, “Should have been his wife.”

I turned. Swindell was speaking to her clasped hands.

“What?”

She looked up, unfolding the hands in an almost supplicating way. “Abe shared things with me. Not just food or some laughs or a bed now and then, but things he cared about, like his time in the camp or that story about the Spanish couple and the couches. I should have been his wife, not his girlfriend.”

I said, “Jesus Christ,” and Beverly Swindell probably thought the surprise in my voice had something to do with her.

Y
OU HAVE THE INDIVIDUAL
facts, but they never come together because you run into them separately, from different people who don’t seem involved, or much involved, in your problem. And then you remember something, or hear it next to something else, and it’s like one of Nancy’s computer searches, where she asks the machine to find a phrase within a certain number of words from another, and it hits you.