Death Will Help You Leave Him (23 page)

“But you couldn’t make him. Powerless, remember? So what do you think he did instead?”

“I can think of two possibilities,” Jimmy said. “Say he knew or found out something about the murder, a connection between Frankie and whoever. One, he tried to blackmail the person because he needed money to score. Or two, he just wanted to talk to them.”

“Who do you think it was?”

“It would have to be somebody from rehab. Kevin didn’t know all those Brooklyn people.”

“He could have been wrong,” I said.

“If he was wrong, why did he get killed?” Jimmy asked. “Suppose Kevin thought he knew who killed Frankie. Someone they knew from rehab. What would he do?”

“Code of the streets,” I said. “You don’t squeal.”

“Then there’s the TC model,” Jimmy said. “Rehab too, though they’re not as brutal about it. You confront the person directly.”

“This time I swear it’s over,” Laura said as she whipped us up a postcoital omelette.

I was there against my better judgment, beating eggs and trying to believe her. Her bruises had faded to a streaky green and yellow that would have blended well with the autumn leaves in Central Park if Laura ever went uptown. They hadn’t splinted her broken thumb or put it in a cast, but she was supposed to stay off it. My own hand clumsy in a padded oven mitt, I steadied the pan as she flipped and poked.

“I hope so, after he walked away without waiting to find out if that car had killed you.” I knew Laura’s capacity for forgetting past experience.

“It was just a Honda Civic.”

“You could still be dead.”

“Aren’t you glad I’m not? This thing is done. Hand me that plate. I mean hold it for me.”

She flipped the omelette onto the plate, tossed the spatula in the sink, and managed to glue herself to me all the way down the front with one leg laced around my waist. All without moving an inch away from the stove.

“Can I put the plate down, please? And are we coming or going here?”

“Oh, all right. I guess we should eat while the eggs are hot.” She thrust her hips at me, managing to arouse me and push me away at the same time. Story of my life with Laura.

I still hadn’t told her one word about the murder. Beyond asking if Jimmy was still “seeing that tight-ass Jewish do-gooder,” she had shown no curiosity about our renewed friendship. She didn’t even remember Jimmy had been there when the car hit her. That, at least, could be chalked up to concussion rather than narcissism. But whatever wasn’t about Laura died of inattention, like the houseplants well-meaning short-term girlfriends kept giving me before I got sober.

Once she’d accepted the ground rule of not getting high in front of me or asking me to drink with her, my recovery became another topic we never mentioned. Laura had a knack for bringing out the old Bruce, the guy who always took the course of least resistance. Sometimes it seemed like SoHo was a different planet. Visiting Carola’s gallery twined a couple of threads together. But thanks to the Civic, that trip downtown had ended up being all about Laura too. When I rode the lumbering elevator up to the loft, I never knew if I’d be visiting the mental hospital. I wanted Laura away from Mac. The guy was scum. But did I want her to lay it all on me? The needs, the demands, the hopeless depression, the scary manic swings?

When I left, I took my cell phone out as soon as I stepped into the street, like a space shuttle contacting Houston. I had one new message. I thumbed the buttons to retrieve it as I walked toward the other Houston, the broad street that separated SoHo from NoHo. Had I ever given Luz my cell phone number? No. Maybe I should. I’d never even seen her alone. But I had begun thinking about her a lot. I worried about her. Her boyfriend had been murdered in her apartment, and now she had a stalker. Maybe.

The message was from Jimmy, to say he’d see me at the meeting. That evening, I sat lost in my own thoughts through most of the qualification. Jimmy, bulky in a down vest, gave the speaker his full attention. The guy had just made ninety days and sounded a lot shakier than me. Jimmy was great at squeezing curds of wisdom out of the most unpromising share. It must be those extra fifteen sober years that I would never catch up with.

AA and Al-Anon let out at the same time. Barbara had gone to work that evening, but we ran into Luz right outside the door. Jimmy invited both of us back to the apartment. Barbara should be home by now, he said. While he talked to her on his cell, I took out my own cell phone.

“I’d like to give you my number,” I said to Luz as we trailed behind. “If you’re ever in trouble, you could call me.”

“I wouldn’t want to bother you,” Luz said.

“No bother. Honest. I’m always up half the night anyway. Recovery has screwed with my sleep pattern.”

Luz trotted along beside me in purple ankle-high boots. Cute.

“For me, I had trouble right after— right after.”

“And now?”

“It is funny, but I begin to sleep like a baby.”

“You’re not scared?”

“When I go out, yes, sometimes. But I think maybe I imagine, what to call them— shadows in corners. In my apartment I feel safe.”

“Like before— before?” I didn’t want to say “Frankie’s murder” any more than she did.

Luz examined her toes.

“Better than before. With Frankie, often I felt afraid. I guess that makes me stupid for loving him.”

“No, you’re not stupid! Being a person who’s capable of loving— how could that be bad?” I glanced sideways at her. “You may want to pick better next time.”

“You are lucky to have an alcohol addiction.” She added, “You do not mind?”

“What? Talking about my alcoholism? Not at all.” We were having a real conversation. I wanted to keep it going. “How do you mean, lucky?”

“You have a disease,” she said. “You know what it is, and you can fix it.”

“You don’t believe in love addiction?” I nodded toward Jimmy, still on the phone. “Barbara would say it’s all The Disease.”

Luz waggled her hand.

“Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Sometimes I think I understand this thing that makes me act so much against my best interest. Then I have hope, because if I can abstain, some day I will get a chance to make a better choice. But then I think no, Luz, you are making excuses, it is all your own stupidity.”

“Oh, don’t abstain from love. From addictive behavior, yeah, sure, but don’t— ” I wanted to say, “Don’t close your heart.” I hovered on the brink, feeling like a total jerk.

“Let us not talk about this any more,” she said. “What about the— what Barbara calls the sleuthing? Do I have that right?”

“It’s more a joke than a real verb,” I said. “Barbara loves to play detective. You don’t have to get involved any more if you don’t want to.”

“It is painful to think about that woman. Frankie’s wife. There, I say it. You are
simpatico
. I know I must make amends to her. That frightens me. And to find a way to do it without more harm being done.”

“I know what my sponsor would say,” I said. “You’re a long way from Step Nine, so it’s not today’s problem. Anyhow, I think you’re allowed to do it by changing your behavior.”

Luz’s anxious face cleared.

“That I can do. I take a vow— no more married men, not ever!”

I opened my mouth and then closed it. I didn’t want to screw things up by saying the wrong thing. Was “Shut up and be grateful” a slogan? It ought to be.

After a silence, she said, “I would help. I want to. But you have met the brothers and the other woman with the child. You talked to his parents. So many important people he never talked about.”

“Try not to worry about it.”

“What about the cousin Vinnie and those awful women?” she asked. “At the store the other day, he was mad at me, but he didn’t give me away.”

“How about leaving the whole crew of them behind?”

She didn’t answer, but she tucked her hand into the crook of my arm.

When we got to Jimmy’s, Barbara insisted on recapping all of it, including the phony lingerie sale.

“Now we know for sure,” Barbara said, “that they weren’t one big happy family. They all had problems. Frankie was the scapegoat, that’s all.”

“I must be a bad person,” Luz said. “I was glad to see them fighting.”

“You’re only human,” Jimmy said.

“I’d have felt the same,” Barbara said.

“Me too,” I said.

“I think the most important part,” Barbara said, “is the conflict and tension between Netta and her mother-in-law that Luz saw. I’m not sure what it means in terms of what happened to Frankie, but I bet it means something.”

“So what next?” I asked. “Back to darkest Brooklyn?”

“Stella’s our best bet,” Barbara said. “She knows all of them, and she likes me, she’ll talk to me. If necessary, we can tell her who we really are. She didn’t come shopping with Netta the other day, did she, Luz?”

“No, just the rest room girls. They’re called Patti and Shirley.”

“So maybe Stella’s not so close to Netta any more. She might even sympathize with Luz’s story if we tell it right. And we know where to find her— at the bakery.”

“It’s a plan,” I said.

“It’s a plot,” Jimmy said. “I knew Barbara would find a way to get some more of those cannolis.”

Luz trotted down the street, trying to hurry without appearing to. It would take only a couple of minutes to reach her apartment. Ordinarily, this block felt safe enough, even though the whole neighborhood knew it was a crack block. Luz had negotiated it without difficulty just that morning. When the sun shone and addicts hung out in the street as if it were a block party, waiting for their drugs to arrive, Luz could not feel fear. She had gone to school with some of them. They looked frail and desperate, arousing only her impatience and compassion. At night, the orange sodium lights usually provided a measure of security. But three of them were out, and the street was striped with shadows.

Luz wondered if the dealers had deliberately broken the streetlights. Maybe not. Down on Madison Avenue where she worked, and even around Barbara’s on the Upper West Side, the city was quick to replace a burned out bulb. They weren’t so eager to venture into Spanish Harlem. She hiked up her purse a little tighter under her armpit. Not that mugging was the only danger. Everybody knew someone who’d been killed in the street. Kids shot for a jacket or knifed for a fancy pair of sneakers. Luz struggled every workday to maintain the balance between looking too expensive in the neighborhood and too shabby down in midtown.

She caught a flash of movement in her peripheral vision and whirled to face it. It was hard to know which would work better, acting fearless and defiant or oblivious. This time, it was only a cat. She watched as it squeezed under the chain-link fence that blocked the street’s one empty lot. The fence didn’t do much good. The cat hadn’t bothered to use the front door, a hole where the wire had pulled away from the metal post. Luz knew an old lady who got in daily to leave open cans of food in there for
los gatos.
She was a friend of the
tias
, now gone a little crazy. Or maybe she was only kind. Kindness could seem crazy enough in this
loco
city.

Kindness made her think of Bruce. She thought he was attracted, but she wasn’t sure. It made her feel shy. Frankie had filled her world so that weeks after his death, she still felt a pang of terror at the thought of touching another man. Frankie had been so jealous. He would interrogate her for half an hour if she was ten minutes later than she’d promised coming back from visiting the
tias
or an outing with some of the cousins.
Who was there? Who paid attention to you? Did you encourage him? Did he put his hands on you?
All in the name of love. The punch line was always
Don’t you know I love you?
If she answered wrong, it ended in a punch. Frankie did love her in his way. And they had had some good times. When she walked down this block at night with Frankie, she was never scared.

A deeper patch of shadow loomed ahead where one streetlight was out and another smashed. Half hidden by the bulk of a high stoop, someone lurked in the area used outside most brownstones for garbage cans or a few pitiful plants in pots. None of the brownstones on that stretch of the street had lighted windows. How could everybody not be home? Maybe they were all in their kitchens, which faced onto the hidden yards and gardens between this street and the next. Was he watching her, waiting for her to pass? Would he snatch at her purse? Or at the gold chain around her neck? She always tucked it underneath her blouse when she got on the bus to come home, but she patted her neck to make sure. That was not the worst, though. What would she do if he had rape in mind? Her crotch liquefied with terror at the thought. Any woman who wasn’t afraid of rape was a fool. In denial, anyway.

She couldn’t tell if he was looking at her. No definition of the face, no gleam of eyes. As she got closer, she saw why. He was bundled up, more than the brisk fall night deserved. A dark watch cap pulled down over his ears met a dark scarf wrapped so it covered not only his neck, but his mouth and nose as well. His coat, a heavy wool jacket with the collar turned up, and his trousers were also dark. He had jammed his hands into his pockets, so she couldn’t tell if he was black, white, or brown. What should she do? March steadily past him and not look back? Break into a run and scream? Use her cell phone? It was in her purse, tumbled among her keys and lipsticks and all the junk that lived in there. While she fumbled for it, he might grab her.

Panic seized her. For a moment, she imagined herself running wild, howling with fear as she raced down the street. Would that merely provoke him? Would he turn out to be the kind of hunter who got excited at the scent of prey? Luz thought this not in words, but in a vision of herself fleeing from wolves. She set her jaw and went on marching forward, her eyes on the traffic light at the far end of the block. She sent a brief prayer up:
Please, God, just help me reach the light.
She thought she saw the man begin to move toward her. Where was everybody? Had some evil force put the whole neighborhood under a spell? Her step faltered, and she almost broke and ran.