Knockdown: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery

J
ACOBIA. COME ON NOW,” SAID VICTOR. “BE REASONABLE.”

Her husband’s voice on the telephone had a soothing tone, the one he used on patients who would recover if they did just as he said.

His definition of
reasonable
. Victor was a brain surgeon, and he always tried that voice on her, too, before he brought out the big guns.

Bazookas of sarcasm, rocket launchers of scorn.

But not yet. “Jake, I was here at the hospital all along. The ward clerks must not have realized it, that’s all.”

“Uh-huh. And they didn’t page you.”

She knew they had. It was nine in the morning and she was sitting on a wrought-iron café chair, on the prettily landscaped terrace of their penthouse apartment overlooking Central Park.

The café chair was enameled absinthe green. The shrubs in the huge clay pots were Himalayan forsythia and dwarf Japanese maple.

On the wrought-iron bistro table, a grease-stained paper plate holding a slice of last night’s pizza sat alongside a jelly glass stenciled with the image of Yosemite Sam.

There was a bite out of the slice. In the glass was some of the two-hundred-dollar bottle of wine she had opened once it became clear that not only was he not coming home for dinner as he’d promised, he wasn’t coming home that night at all.

“If they did page me, I didn’t hear it. Maybe I was catching a nap
in the on-call room. I don’t exactly always have the luxury of keeping a normal schedule, you know.”

His tone shifted to the terse, coldly annoyed one he used on underlings, nurses or junior surgeons, who hadn’t obeyed an order of his quickly enough. “Some of us have …”

Real jobs
. Ones that matter. Life-or-death occupations whose demands trump everything else.

Including you
, he didn’t finish, but he might as well have. But she was immune to that now. Especially since she knew perfectly well that he hadn’t been at the hospital last night, as he claimed.

She drank the red wine out of the Yosemite Sam glass in a couple of swallows, refilled it, then picked up the paper plate with the slice on it and sailed it out over the terrace’s railing like a Frisbee, not watching to see where it went.

“I was there,” she said. “At the hospital. You were signed out.”

Brief silence from Victor. From down in the street came the blare of a car horn, possibly as a pizza-laden paper plate landed on a windshield.

“What?” Outrage now. “You mean you came over here to …”

“Check on you. Yes. At midnight when you hadn’t shown up and you weren’t answering your cell, I got worried. So I went out in my party dress and the diamond-and-platinum earrings you gave me when we got married.”

She drank more wine. It was pretty good, actually. She’d have finished it the night before if she hadn’t been distracted by the decanter of forty-year-old Scotch.

“To make sure that you were okay, that you hadn’t had some kind of an accident on the way home, or gotten mugged. Because we had a date, remember?” she added gently, her voice breaking.

Which was silly, really. But the tears prickled in her eyes nonetheless, blurring the soft green tops of the trees in Central Park. It was spring, and the lovers down there were walking hand in hand along the paths beneath the flowering cherries.

No doubt. She swallowed hard. Probably her tears were only on account of the wine. Because she couldn’t still care so much, could she?

“It was embarrassing,” she said. “The ward nurses all looked at me with pity in their eyes.”
Poor thing. Wouldn’t you think she’d’ve had enough of it by now? Why doesn’t she wise up?

Why, indeed. “Yeah, I suppose it would be embarrassing,” he retorted angrily. “How would you like it if I …”

I would like it
, she thought.
If you cared enough to bother, I would like it very much
.

But he didn’t. He didn’t even care if she’d humiliated both of them; not really. It was only that this change of subject was convenient for him, focusing as it did on what
she’d
done instead of on what he’d been doing.

Which she also knew. Because while she’d lingered at the nursing station, waiting for them to page him even though he was signed out and then waiting some more while he didn’t answer, she’d seen the nurses’ schedule posted on a bulletin board.

The schedule listed who was on duty that night, and who was off. Most of the names were familiar; Victor had been a surgeon at the hospital for several years now.

But one name was new. It was also in the phone book, with an address. “I guess nurses must make pretty good money these days,” she said.

“What?” he demanded in the kind of voice that meant someone was being difficult past all reason. “What are you …?”

Talking about
. “Monica,” she said. “That Greenwich Village row-house she lives in? That your car was parked outside all last night? It’s nice. The house, I mean.”

Gotcha
. Not that she took any pleasure in it. She was just tired of Victor thinking he’d put one over on her, was all.

Thinking that she was stupid. She drank the rest of the wine and resisted the urge to send the bottle over the railing, too.

“Good-bye, Victor,” she said tiredly, and hung up. Probably he had an excuse for why he was at one of the nurses’ homes last night instead of with her, celebrating their thirteenth wedding anniversary. But she didn’t want to hear it.

Not, she reflected, tipping the empty wine bottle upside down sadly, that there was much to celebrate. The phone rang, the display showing Victor’s hospital number.

Now he would try to shame her by telling her how paranoid she was, how her pathological suspicions were driving him to find solace in the arms of another woman.

Although she knew only too well that the arms weren’t what interested him. Ditto the eyes, the ears, the face, or the brain.

Especially not that. The phone kept on ringing. She looked at it for a long moment, then picked up.

“Hello? Is that by any chance my lying, cheating, son-of-a-bitch husband calling me? Because if it is, listen to this.”

She smashed the device hard against the terrace railing and smiled as its parts flew everywhere.

“And that goes double for your latest girlfriend, the poor little dope,” she said into the phone’s shattered shell.

Behind her, a blare of what at normal volume might’ve been music thundered through the penthouse apartment. But cranked up this way, it was more like a sound-wave-based demolition device.

She could practically feel the walls cracking. Any minute, the building superintendent would be up here. She hurried inside.

“Sam!” She hammered on his door. She’d have gone in, but he kept it locked.

He was twelve. “Yeah.”

“Sam, turn it—”

The volume lowered abruptly.

“—down!” she shouted.

“Yeah.”

She contemplated the door. “You okay in there?”

“Yeah.”

She looked at herself in the hall mirror: showered, dressed, and with a little foundation and lipstick applied, in spite of everything.
Okay
. She’d run a comb through her short dark hair, too, and she had shoes on her feet.

Whoop-de-do
, she thought bleakly, eyeing her reflection with skepticism. No beauty queen, but the navy slacks and jacket over a silk blouse were respectable enough, as were the black pumps. Luckily, she had the kind of lean, dark looks that didn’t require much upkeep.

Yet.
Much more of this and I’ll be laying on the makeup with a trowel just to look human
.

“Sam, I’m leaving for the office. I’ve got an appointment.”

Brief silence. Then, “Okay.”

Well, at least it wasn’t
Yeah
. “You’re going to school, right?”

He knew she’d call the school later to make certain he was there. The music volume went back up a little, but not as much as before.

She glanced at her wristwatch, the black Movado museum piece she’d bought for herself the first year she’d made any real money on her own.

Or what she’d thought of back then as real money. A few more minutes and she’d be late. “Sam?”

The music went up a notch. “Sam, this is your mother out here talking to you. Now you answer me this minute or I’ll—”

What?
she wondered despairingly. What would she do? Summon a locksmith? Or call 911 and have the door broken down?

There was no point talking to Victor about this. If she did, he’d have a fatherly chat with their son, and after Sam fooled him again with another tale about how she was just overreacting as usual, Victor would confront her.

And she didn’t want to hear that, either. Didn’t know what she would do, actually, if she had to—

Sam’s door opened an inch. Through the crack, her son looked out flatly at her, and even as angry as she was at him, the sight was a relief.

She managed a smile. “Hi.”

Sam had dark curly hair, long-lashed eyes, and a full mouth like his dad’s. She wanted to ruffle his hair, but if she tried he would probably slam the door on her wrist.

“Sandra should be here in a minute.” The housekeeper, she meant. “She’ll drive you to school.”

And make sure you go in
. Sandra was fat, fair, and forty: not Victor’s type. More important, she was onto Sam’s tricks.

“I left you a casserole in the refrigerator, in case I’m late.” Stouffer’s, actually. But it didn’t matter; he wouldn’t eat it.

“Thanks.” Patiently, waiting for her to leave him in peace.

“Are you going out with your friends later?”

Might as well at least pretend she still had any say in what her son did or didn’t do. She thought lately he was hanging out with the Tooley boy from the fifth floor, but she wasn’t sure.

The Tooley boy was sixteen and had already been in juvenile detention. Still, he was better than the crew Sam used to spend time with, shoplifting and riding the tops of subway cars at all hours of the day and night.