You Should Have Known (13 page)

“I'm sure the moms at Dalton are already calling each other up and saying, ‘It never would have happened here!'”

“But it didn't happen here,” Grace reminded her. “We have no idea what Malaga's life was like. I never heard one thing about her husband. He wasn't there at the benefit, was he?”

“You kidding? The way she flirted with all those guys?”

“They flirted with her,” Grace corrected.

“Please.”

She sounded so bitter. Why did she sound so bitter? None of those guys had been her husband. She didn't even have a husband!

Instead of saying any of this, she said: “But Malaga was married, right?”

“Yes. Well, according to the parent directory. Guillermo Alves, same address. Nobody ever saw him, though.”

How many people, Grace wondered idly, had Sylvia asked in order to produce this “nobody”?

“Did you ever see him?” said Sylvia.

“No.”  Grace sighed.

“Yeah. It was always just her, taking the son to school every morning and sitting in the park with the baby, and then coming back in the afternoon.”

And with that, any distance evaporated, redepositing all of the awfulness—murdered mother, orphaned children, poverty (clearly, relatively), and sorrow—at her feet. This was a terrible, terrible thing. Did Sally, did Sylvia, understand how very terrible it was?

“Oh, I've got to go,” Grace said. “I hear my one o'clock patient coming in. Thanks for letting me know, Sylvia,” she said somewhat disingenuously. “Let's try to sit tight till we hear from the police about what actually happened.”

“Of course,” said Sylvia, equally if not more disingenuously. And then, as if to drive the point home: “I'll talk to you tomorrow.”

Grace pressed the button to end the call, then set down the phone. Her one o'clock had not, actually, arrived but would soon. Bizarrely, she wasn't sure what to do in the interim. What she wanted, of course, was to talk to Jonathan, but she almost never called Jonathan during the day; his work was too turbulent in itself to be interrupted with trivial matters, and it wasn't fair to make him worry that there was some emergency. But Jonathan wasn't at the hospital today. He was in Cleveland, at an oncology conference, and probably had his phone turned off. Which meant that she could call and leave a message without fear of interruption. But what, really, was there to say?

Henry had programmed her phone with photographs: a violin for himself, a stethoscope for his father, a fireplace for their home line, a boat dock for the house in Connecticut. Grace's father was represented by a pipe (though he hadn't smoked one in years) and Rearden by the school crest. Everyone and everything else was an ordinary number; clearly, the images were the tent poles of Henry's existence, and perhaps her own as well. She pressed the stethoscope and held the phone to her ear.

“This is Jonathan Sachs,” her husband said, the voice mail picking up right away. “I can't answer your call right now, but I will get back to you as soon as possible. If this is an urgent matter, please call Dr. Rosenfeld at 212-903-1876. If you are experiencing a true medical emergency, please call 911 or go to the emergency room. Thank you.”

After the beep, she said: “Hi, sweetheart. Everything's fine, but something came up at school.” She thought quickly. “Not—Henry's fine, don't worry. Just, when you get a chance, give me a call. Hope the conference is going well. You didn't say whether you were getting back tomorrow or Friday. Just let me know so I can tell Dad and Eva if you're there for dinner tomorrow. Love you.”

Then she waited, as if he might magically emerge from the other side of the voice mail, out of the cast-iron room into which these disembodied voices were sent to wait until they could be heard—trees falling in the forest, not yet making a sound. She imagined him in a bland but comfortable amphitheater in Cleveland, a bottle of water—provided by some eager drug company in the lobby—uncapped in the cup holder, making notes on a disappointing statistic from the latest trial of a once promising new drug. What was the death of an unknown adult woman—a person neither he nor his son even knew by sight—to someone who routinely tried to comfort children who might or might not know they were dying, and their parents, who always knew? It was like pointing out a smudge of grime to one of those “extreme cleaners” charged with shoveling filth and waste out of foul houses. She pressed the button to end the call and set down her phone.

Now she regretted calling. She regretted the childish impulse to ask him to say some magical thing and make it better. Jonathan, who carried around far more important things, should not be distracted from his own tasks because she needed—and why, again, should she need it?—some sympathy. Like anyone—like Sylvia, obviously—Grace was skilled at the human response of that-would-never-happen-to-me. A woman raped in Central Park?
Of course it's horrendous, but you have to ask, What was she doing going for a run at ten p.m.?
A child blinded by measles?
I'm sorry, what kind of idiot parents don't vaccinate?
Travelers robbed at gunpoint on a Cape Town street?
You're surprised? You were in Cape Town!
But no clear indictment was presenting itself in the death of Malaga Alves. It had not been her fault that she was Hispanic and presumably poor. And it was certainly not a bad thing that she had managed to secure a scholarship for her child at one of the city's best schools. That's what scholarships were for! Where were they—where was Grace—supposed to insert the wall that separated her from this poor woman?

Luck. Plain luck. And money, which in her own case had also been luck.

She lived in the apartment she had grown up in, an apartment she could never have afforded at its current market value, and sent her son—who was probably no more, though certainly no less, bright than any of his classmates—to her own school, which looked kindly on the children of alumnae and which her own father had sometimes helped her to pay for, because the tuition was simply, mind-spinningly, high, and practicing psychotherapy and pediatric oncology were not efficient means of acquiring great wealth in the city of Wall Street. Filthy luck. Not like Sylvia, who might also have benefited from her alumnae status, but who worked like a fiend to send her brilliant daughter to Rearden and keep them both in a one-bedroom on York.
I should be reaching out more to Sylvia
, she heard herself think, as if she were the lady of the manor. Perhaps what she meant was that she ought to have reached out more to Malaga, but then again, maybe it was safe to feel that way now.

And now she really did hear the buzzer from the outer door and pressed the button on her intercom until the door clicked open. There was the sound of talking in the vestibule as the couple settled in the chairs there. She heard the hum of their voices, at ease and subdued, unusually so among her patients, who often came coiled to attack. These two were nice people, open to therapy, earnestly willing and earnestly trying, and she liked them, though they were both so deeply harmed by their early lives that she hoped, in some private way, they would come around to a decision not to have children. Some people should but couldn't; others could but should not—it wasn't fair, really. This couple, having found each other, were luckier than most.

She was not accomplishing anything sitting at her desk, staring at her phone, trying and failing to gain some toehold on what had just happened. Nothing prevented her from giving these extra minutes to the woman and man waiting on the other side of her door—a gift, a gesture on her part. She could get up now, open the door, and greet them early. She could, she ought to, probably, but for some reason she didn't, and the clock ticked forward as if nothing had changed, and Grace just sat there as if nothing had changed, because she wanted to and because she could. But not for much longer.

H
enry was first violin in the Rearden Middle School orchestra, a secret he and his mother conspired to keep from Vitaly Rosenbaum, who technically forbade the influence of any other teacher over one of his students. Rehearsals were on Wednesday afternoons, after classes had ended for the day, and afterward he walked home alone, or at least alone with his cell phone. She worried, of course, but not terribly, because the city was safe now, and even if it weren't, the Upper East Side was safe. And the phone—that made all the difference.

She made a couple of stops on the way home after her last patient: first to the Duane Reade on Lexington and 77th for gift envelopes (they used them for year-end tips for the doormen and superintendent), then to Gristedes for lamb chops and cauliflower, two items her son could be relied upon to eat. She had been thinking, as she rounded the corner to her building on East 81st, of boiling water and preheating the oven, and then of the name of this new doorman, who stood just outside the door, under the canopy (“The Wakefield,” it said), talking to two large men, one of whom was smoking, and then about whether the holiday bonus for a new doorman had to be the same as the bonus you gave to someone who had worked all year. Was that fair? And then, in the instant before the unnamed doorman looked up, and saw her, and pointed in her direction, and the two men also turned, and the one who was smoking tossed his cigarette (or was it a cigar? it looked tan or brown, like a thin cigar a woman might smoke, or might once have smoked) on the ground, and she thought:
Pick that up, you jerk
.

“That's her,” she heard the doorman say.

She nearly looked over her own shoulder, to see who was there.

“Mrs. Sachs?”

One of them was wiry and bald, with a gold stud in one ear and a cheap-looking brown jacket. The other, the smoker, was taller and wore a very nice suit. Knockoff Italian, though good fabric. Jonathan had a suit like that, Grace thought. But his was real.

And then it hit her.

Something had happened to Henry. Something…between here and Rearden? How many blocks was that? But it didn't matter how many blocks. It took only one instant. A driver who wasn't looking. A mugger. A crazy person. Most of the crazy people were off the streets, had been since the 1990s,
fucking Giuliani
. But it took only one. She couldn't get the words out.

“What is it?” She didn't want to say Henry's name. How crazy was she? “Did something happen?”

Of course something had happened. Why else would they be here?

“Is it my son?” she asked them, listening to herself. She sounded utterly unlike herself, but calm.

They looked briefly at each other.

“Mrs. Sachs? I'm Detective O'Rourke.”

Naturally
, she couldn't help thinking. What a cliché.

“It's not about your son,” the other one said. “I'm sorry if we frightened you. We do that sometimes. We don't mean to.”

She turned to him, but her gaze seemed to follow at its own pace, leaving stop-motion traces behind it, like an acid trip, she supposed. She had never taken acid.

“Joe Mendoza,” said the one who wasn't here about Henry. He held out his hand, and she supposed she shook it. “Detective Mendoza. Sorry. Can we talk a minute?”

It wasn't Henry. Was it Jonathan? A plane crash? But he wasn't flying today. He was at the conference today. Was there crime in Cleveland? Of course there was crime in Cleveland. There was crime everywhere. Then she thought:
Is it my father?

“Please just tell me,” she said to both of them. She could see the new doorman staring at her.
Crazy person in 6B
, she thought wildly.
Okay, fine. Now fuck you.

“You might have heard that a woman whose child attends your child's school was killed,” said Mendoza. “I think the school sent out a message? They didn't name the person.”

Oh.
She felt the relief, like an egg cracking over her head, an endless egg, dripping sweet release through every vein. She could have embraced them both and scolded them:
You had me so worried! Don't do that!

“Yes, of course. I'm so sorry. It's just…well, any parent would be terrified.”

They both nodded, but one more pleasantly than the other.

“Sure. I have two,” said the classic Irish cop. He was the one with the earring and the cheap jacket. Not so classic, maybe. “Don't apologize. Do you mind if we talk somewhere? Maybe a little more private?”

She nodded. He was her savior, and she wanted to please him. How could she refuse him now? And yet some new voice was trying to get her attention, holding out against the soaring flow of her relief. It said:
Don't let them upstairs
. And she listened to it.

“There are some seats inside,” she told them. Like most lobbies in most New York apartment buildings, there were chairs or couches or both. No one ever seemed to use them. The doormen had their own chairs or desks. Tradespeople waited in the vestibule to be let upstairs and deliverymen waited there, too, to be paid by someone who came down in the elevator. The seating was not so much a vestige of an earlier time as something that had always been out of place, and in all her life—as a child in this building and now a grown-up, a mother raising her own child here—she could not recall a single instance of these armchairs (redone a few years earlier in unsightly hotel-ese floral fabric) being used for actual conversation. She led the two men here, and sat, and set down her purse and plastic bag from Gristedes.

“I just heard about Mrs. Alves,” she said as soon as they were settled on the chairs. “I had no idea what the message meant when I read it. The message from the school,” she clarified. “I couldn't make any sense of it. Then someone called me and told me she'd died. It's awful.”

“Who told you about it?” O'Rourke said. He had removed a small notebook from the breast pocket of his ugly jacket.

“My friend Sylvia,” Grace said. Immediately, illogically, she wished she had not volunteered Sylvia's name. Could Sylvia get in trouble for gossiping? Then she remembered that it hadn't been Sylvia, actually. “But…you know, another friend left a message on my cell phone before that. So it wasn't really Sylvia.”

“Sylvia who?” said O'Rourke. “What's the last name?”

“Steinmetz,” said Grace, feeling guilty. “Though the message was from a woman named Sally Morrison-Golden. She chaired a committee at our school that we were all on. And Mrs. Alves.” Though Malaga Alves hadn't really been “on” the committee. That is, she hadn't really done anything, only attended that one meeting. Had her name been listed on the committee in the auction catalog? Grace couldn't remember.

“And that was at what time?”

“I'm sorry?”

“What time did you learn about Mrs. Alves' death?”

That was awfully specific, Grace thought with some irritation. If they were going to go through everyone in the school community and ask them when they'd heard—it seemed more like a sociology project than a police investigation. “Oh…,” she considered. “Well, wait, let me just check my phone.” She dug it out of her bag and scrolled through the call log. It wasn't difficult to pinpoint. “Twelve forty-six p.m.,” she announced, unaccountably relieved, as if this offered some definitive proof of something. “We spoke for a bit over eight minutes. But why is that important? I mean, if I can ask.”

The one named Mendoza gave an oddly musical sigh. “I never think about what's important anymore,” he said, smiling a little. “Once upon a time I only asked what I thought was important. That's why it took me way too long to make detective. Now I just ask everything, and I sort it out later. You're a shrink, right? You only ask the important stuff?”

Grace looked at him. Then she looked at the other one. They weren't smiling.

“How did you know I was a shrink?” she asked. “I mean, I'm not a shrink, I'm a therapist.”

“Is it a secret?” he said. “You got a book out, right?”

“She wasn't my patient,” Grace said, jumping to a thoroughly illogical conclusion. “Mrs. Alves? I wasn't her therapist. I was on a school committee with her. I don't think I ever really spoke to her. Just, you know, chitchat.”

“Chitchat about what?” said Mendoza.

Grace was suddenly aware of her neighbor, the woman who lived directly upstairs, crossing the lobby. She had her portly Lhasa apso on a leash and carried a Whole Foods shopping bag. She looked amazed to see three people in the lobby chairs, having what looked like an actual conversation. Did she know the men were cops? Grace thought automatically. The woman had lived above her for nearly ten years, alone except for the dog, and another dog before that. Willie, or Josephine—the dog, not the woman. The woman's name was Mrs. Brown, and Grace didn't know her first name. That was a Manhattan co-op for you, she thought.

“I don't…Oh,” she said, remembering, “her daughter. Her baby. We admired the baby's eyelashes. I remember that. I told you, nothing important.”

“She discussed her baby's eyelashes?” Mendoza said, frowning. “That strike you as odd?”

“We were just admiring the baby. You know.” Though perhaps they didn't. Perhaps they had never admired a baby out of politeness. “‘What a cute baby. What long eyelashes.' It wasn't a memorable encounter.”

O'Rourke nodded, writing this terribly important thing down. “And this was at the committee meeting last Thursday, December  fifth.”

Had she said December 5? Grace thought vaguely. They seemed to be holding a bouquet of useless facts. “Well, I suppose so. That was the only time I spoke to her.”

“Apart from the benefit on Saturday night,” Mendoza said.

And then Grace understood. Of course, they had talked to Sally already. Sally had probably called them, she thought irritably. Sally had probably said:
I knew her! I was in charge of the committee! Grace Sachs will confirm it all!
Fuck Sally.

“I saw her on Saturday, at the party,” Grace corrected. “But I didn't speak to her.”

“Why not?” said Mendoza.

Why not?
The question didn't really compute. There wasn't a “Why not,” just as, if she had spoken to Malaga Alves at the benefit, there wouldn't really have been a “Why.”

She shrugged. “No special reason. I didn't speak to most people at the party. I was downstairs for a lot of it, handing out auction flyers and name tags. By the time I got upstairs there was a huge crowd. And then the auction started. There were a lot of people I didn't talk to.”

“Did you happen to notice anyone Mrs. Alves did speak to at the party? Even if you weren't speaking to her yourself. Did you see her with anyone in particular?”

Aha,
Grace thought. She looked at them, instantly torn between her feminist and pre-feminist selves, not to mention her wish to be helpful and her disdain for Sally. She was no Sally, full of vitriol at the arrival of a prettier girl—or a girl possessed of some potent pheromone, capable of luring the beaux away. If men like the men at the Rearden fund-raiser wanted to gather around Malaga Alves, forsaking their wives for such a succulent newcomer, she had no opinion about it, especially since her own husband hadn't been one of them. Malaga was not to be blamed for her obvious sensuality, which she seemed—on the contrary—not to flaunt, even in such conducive circumstances. Those men sniffing around her had only their consciences, and of course their wives, to answer to.

Then again, it wasn't her place to point the finger.

“I guess you're asking whether I noticed all the men around her,” she said, taking the bait, but on her own terms. “Of course I did. I think it would have been hard to miss. She's…she
was
. An attractive woman. But the little I saw, I thought she was acting very properly.”

She waited a moment while Mendoza finished writing this down. She was thinking:
But even if she hadn't been, I hope you're not implying she deserved to be killed.
I thought we were past that
, she nearly said. But she stopped herself.

“You said you never spoke to her. On Saturday,” Mendoza said, finishing.

“No,” Grace agreed. It had occurred to her that Henry would be here any minute. She didn't want him to see this—this tableau in the lobby.

“But you must have greeted her when she came in.”

Which one said this? She looked at them both, as if she might read the answer from the muscles of their throats. But one, O'Rourke, had a throat concealed by stubble and the other, Mendoza, by fat. Neck fat was something she'd always been a little repelled by. She had never seriously contemplated plastic surgery, but if her own jaw ever became obscured by neck fat, she knew she would not be able to live with herself.
My personal line in the sand
, it occurred to her now,
is a jawline
.

“Yes?” Grace frowned.

“You said you were downstairs in the lobby. At the party.”

“Benefit,” the other one, Mendoza, the one without a jawline, corrected.

“Yeah. You must have spoken to her. You said you were giving people the name tag.”

“And the catalog,” said Mendoza. “Right?”

“Oh. Sure. Maybe. I don't remember. People were arriving all at the same time.” She felt so profoundly frustrated. What could it possibly matter if she gave Malaga Alves her stupid auction catalog and name tag? There wasn't even a name tag! Malaga hadn't even RSVP'd!

“So would you like to revisit that earlier statement?” he said, affably enough.

A word had been buzzing at her, for the last…how long? Five minutes, at the most. But five minutes was a long time. The word was
lawyer
. Actually, there were more words than that. In addition to
lawyer,
she kept thinking:
Wrong
. As in:
This is wrong
. And also, for some incomprehensible, ridiculous, and incidentally infuriating reason:
You idiots.