The Oxygen Murder (26 page)

T
he dark young man at the desk, with
RANJIT
on his narrow name badge, was only too happy to check at Lost and Found for my coat. “I still don’t understand how you could have left it in the elevator,” Rose said as we waited at the counter for his return. “It’s not as if you had a lot of bundles.” She frowned and squinted at me. “Did you go shopping without me?”

“No, Rose. I would never do that.” I crossed my heart. “The coat just fell, and the doors closed before I could grab it.”

It wasn’t easy lying to my best friend, but the truth was too scary to relive and too embarrassing, given my overreaction.

I’d called down to the lobby and asked if there had been any reports of elevator problems in the last hour or so. None, I was told.

The thought of reentering the elevator to go down to the lobby had been too much for me. I convinced Rose to come to my room first so she could help me choose which shoes to wear and we could ride down together. She took it as a chummy gesture and loved it.

“Well, I hope they don’t find that coat,” she said to me now.

“Rose!” I feigned shock, though I knew exactly what she had in mind—a little shopping trip to help me find a new, chic wrap like the one she’d bought that very day while cruising Madison Avenue with Grace.

“Here it is,” the young man said with the smile of success.

Rose looked disappointed.

I snatched the coat and shook it out. Getting rid of the bad memories.

A doorman was on hand at the hotel entrance to hail a cab for us. We were to meet Matt at the Sassos’ residence for dinner.

The ride to the Upper West Side was uneventful, compared to my earlier trip to the hotel. Compared to much of the last couple of days.

In between comments from Rose, acting like a tour guide as we passed the new Time Warner Center and various statuary at Columbus Circle, I tried to rehearse bits of conversation that might lead to a discussion of Tina Miller, Amber Keenan, and a Fielding or two.

“I hope Karla can relax and not say a word about business,” Rose said as we pulled up in front of the building. “Don’t you?”

“My turn to pay,” I said, unzipping my wallet.

The Sassos had a magnificent view of Central Park, leading me to think that all the photos I’d seen of the Wollman Rink through the years, some of them on holiday greeting cards, had been taken from their living room windows.

“Not many ice skaters out there tonight,” Roland Sasso said. He poured sparkling water into lovely stemware for Matt and me as we all crowded around the window. “Too cold. The winters are getting worse. So many of our friends have moved to Florida, but could you give up this view?”

“I’d never get anything useful done,” I said. I thought I saw a horse-drawn carriage circling one of the ponds but figured it was an imaginative addition to the scene on my part. Even without the magic of snow, the bare winter trees seemed strategically placed for maximum beauty and dramatic effect.

I’d had a decent view from the windows of my Berkeley condo, looking out over the University of California campus, its impressive campanile, and the San Francisco Bay. On a good day I could get a glimpse of Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge. Here, the combination of Central Park’s Great Lawn, the lakes, the gardens, and the monuments laid out against the layers of skyscrapers beat it all.

“Gloria’s trying to see the Ice Cream Café,” Rose said. “That’s the way I used to get her to go from the Frick to the Met. I’d promise her a hot fudge sundae in between.”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to broadcast my lack of culture to the Sassos, but it wouldn’t be breaking news to them, anyway, I decided. I’d met Roland, a manager of some of New York City’s housing projects, a few times on his trips to Revere, and Grace on her more frequent visits to spend time with her grandson, William.

The couple were almost a duplicate pair to Rose and Frank. All four were trim in physique, elegant in dress and style. Grace and Rose had the same red highlights in their hair and shared a love of the finer things in home décor. As in the Galiganis’ residence, everything in the Sassos’ West Seventy-fifth Street dining room matched. Wine glasses were all the same size, the silver a consistent pattern, and the china plates supported by larger pewter plates underneath them.

Karla’s own kitchen in Revere, on the other hand, was homey. You could tell a teenaged boy lived there, and she’d be likely to hand you a bottle of mineral water without a glass. She wasn’t what you’d call trim but fell somewhere between Rose and me on the BMI charts. Although her home wasn’t as perfect and orderly as that of her parents or parents-in-law, Karla herself always looked ready to appear as an officer of the court, as she did tonight in a navy blue three-piece suit.

“It’s terrific having you here, Gloria and Matt,” Karla said, giving us each a spontaneous warm hug. “This is a great time of year to be in the city, isn’t it? And I always wanted you to come to Mom and Dad’s.”

The tender, welcoming gesture caused me to wish I’d never heard of
Fielding v. Fielding.

Rose’s first order of business at dinner was to invite Karla and her parents to our wedding reception.

“Can’t you just call it a party?” I whispered, not wanting to spoil the chicken with the sweet-smelling feta cheese and basil stuffing that Grace had served.

Rose glared at me. Not a hard glare, but a glare nonetheless.

“Gloria and Matt were married in September. Tell us about the ceremony, Gloria,” Rose said.

My turn to glare.

Matt took the floor, so to speak. “It was nice and simple, at a B and B in Vermont at the height of foliage season. We had a minister from a local church who came right to one of the parlors. They have weddings there all the time.”

“You mean
planned
weddings?” Rose asked.

Matt gave her a silent smile, then turned to me. “Gloria looked lovely.”

How could I argue?

“What did you wear, Gloria?” Grace asked.

My first thought was
Nothing as wonderful as you’re wearing tonight.
Grace had on silk pants and a tunic top in many shades of burgundy and gold, complementing her short brown-red hair. I knew her garnet pendant was not from an unjuried crafts fair at the local church. Roland’s delicately knit beige sweater vest, worn under a brown sports coat, looked like silk also.

“Good question, Grace. I have no idea what you wore, Gloria,” Rose said, clearly not uncomfortable sharing her distress with the Sassos.

“A dress and jacket.”

“Matching?” Karla asked, suppressing a laugh.

“Yes, matching.” I didn’t mention that the sleeves of the jacket were too long and I’d pinned them up. I’d bought the outfit in a hurry at an outlet store on our drive north to Vermont.

“And Matt?” Roland asked. The Sassos were into this joke.

Matt looked down at his Wednesday suit.

Rose lowered her head and put her hand over her eyes.

“This,” he said, trying to look sheepish but ending with a broad grin that made even Rose laugh.

Grace and Roland offered their guests the best east-facing view as we sat in the living room after dinner. Dessert was poached pear with ice cream and a delicious caramel biscotti sauce. Rose and I had brought truffles from a shop in Rockefeller Center, which nicely filled the chocolate gap.

Our storytelling tradition, reminiscent of kindergarten sharing time, extended to the Sassos. I could hardly wait to hear Karla’s story, but Matt, excited from his police museum visit, started off.

“Well worth the trip downtown, if you ever have the mind to. They’ve got photography exhibits and cases full of old uniforms and guns.” Matt looked around the circle, gauging, I knew, whether this was the right audience for a discussion of revolvers, double-breasted jackets, and batons. He switched to department history, giving us an account of the first law enforcement officer in New York City. “His name was Johann Lampo, and he patrolled the streets, well, the trails and paths, in 1625, settling disputes, warning the citizens if a fire broke out at night, and so on.”

“We would still have been called New Amsterdam back then, right?” Roland said.

“Yeah, and they called the residents ‘the colonists.’ ” Matt paused and took a deep breath. “There’s a 9/11 exhibit, too,” he said. Every-one’s head seemed to go down at the memory. “You really ought to see it.”

“Kathleen Gustafson, the DMORT woman Frank and I met on Sunday, talked about 9/11 a lot,” Rose said, her voice somber. “Dr. Gustafson’s team was part of the emergency response in the days and weeks following. She said all told they processed more than fifteen thousand human specimens. Even after all this time, she remembers every detail of that day. I’m sure it will always be with her.”

“It will always be with all of us,” Roland said.

As if no other story could follow immediately after a reminder of the 9/11 attack, we all got up and refilled cups, visited the restroom, checked the view again, and came back to different seats in the living room.

Grace chose not to follow the how-was-your-day format we usually used. She took us back in time to her mother, an Austrian immigrant, who was milliner to the stars.

“Karla is named after my mother. She might have told you how her grandmother worked for Saks in the old days and did custom millinery for very famous and wealthy people,” Grace said.

“I knew,” Rose said, “but I don’t think I’ve ever told Gloria.”

Once I heard Grace’s tales—that Sophie Tucker ordered one of her mother’s designs in three colors; that Eleanor Roosevelt wore a special
creation to one of FDR’s inaugurations; that she had a contract with nearly every first lady for twenty years—I was surprised Rose hadn’t told me.

Much as I enjoyed hearing about celebrity hats, I was itching to hear Karla. When she finally took a turn, she began with her “jerk of the year, who shall go nameless here.” I had a feeling she adapted the title to substitute “jerk” for what was probably a stronger, more contemporary epithet, for the benefit of the elders in the room.

“This guy, we’ll call him Joe, it’s his mother’s ninetieth birthday. So he plans a big party. Nice, huh? But he plans a
ski trip.
Now, the woman can barely walk.”

“Tell them what he said, about how his mother could spend the time,” Grace prompted.

“He said she could sit in the lodge and drink hot chocolate. So this poor old woman would be up in the mountains of New Hampshire, away from all her support system, all her doctors, sitting in a ski lodge while everyone else is having a good time. I ask you, who is this ski trip for?”

“People can be thoughtless sometimes,” Rose said. This was about as harsh as Rose could be about another human being.

“No wonder my client wants to be rid of him. She cares more about her mother-in-law than the woman’s own son does,” Karla said.

Is your client’s name Fielding?
I wanted to ask. In the back of my mind all evening had been the question of how—or whether—to bring up Amber Keenan or Tina Miller. I wanted desperately to clear Karla in my mind of any wrongdoing, victimless or otherwise.

I saw my opportunity when Matt and Roland left the living room to look through Roland’s collection of jazz.

Rose was the only one left who might mind my bringing up something work related to Karla, but Karla had already opened that door, as they say in the courtroom, by talking about “Joe.”

I couldn’t think of a smooth segue, so I decided to go with a rough one. “By the way, did you hear about the young woman murdered in a loft downtown?” I asked Karla and Grace. “Amber Keenan. She was Matt’s niece Lori’s camerawoman.”

Rose frowned, as if the mention of the crime had turned her French vanilla sour.

I searched Karla’s face for a telltale response on hearing Amber’s name. I caught a nervous twitch but knew that I might have placed it there myself, like a Photoshop embellishment to a snapshot.

“Mom told me,” Karla answered. “What an awful thing.”

Now what? I hadn’t planned very far ahead, I realized. Might as well spell it out. “Amber also worked for a private investigator, Tina Miller, and some lawyers in town.” An exaggeration, but not my first. “So I thought you might have run into her.”

“It’s a big city, Gloria,” Rose said. “And there must be a million lawyers.”

“Almost,” Grace said. “Didn’t you tell me there were nearly thirty thousand attorneys in Manhattan alone, dear?” she asked Karla.

“Something like that.” Karla’s tone said she’d rather talk about anything else.

“Karla could make ten times more money in New York, but she can’t talk Robert into moving back here,” Grace said.

Rose’s eyebrows went up higher than I’d ever seen them. “Of course, for Robert it wouldn’t be moving
back,
” Rose said, with a thin smile.

Congratulations, Gloria,
I told myself,
you’ve managed to create tension in an otherwise ideal family gathering.

I knew that the subject of long-distance families had come up before, with the Sassos often complaining how hard it was to be part of their grandson’s life when he lived so far away. By California standards, the distance between Boston and New York, about a four-hour drive, was trivial: If you could leave your home in the morning and be at your destination by lunchtime, you were almost neighbors.