Act of God (33 page)

Bernstein had said the same, something off about her. “Go on.”

“I sometimes … sometimes I thought Darbra was working with us as part of something else.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, like I told you before, she was always trying to do things a little different than what you wanted?”

“The paperwork example.”

Swindell’s head bobbed. “It was almost that she was … using the job, not trying to learn it, but more learn from it. Only not to do it better. Just to do it differently, like … vary it, keep her interested in it without trying to better herself at it.”

“Any idea why?”

“I got the impression … Maybe I shouldn’t say this.”

“Maybe you should.”

A hesitation. “I got the impression that Darbra was just using us, too. Like her in here that night, kind of using me as an audience for a little scene she was playing with that poor man she threw the wine at.”

“Again, any idea why?”

“No. None.”

Swindell seemed sad, and I regretted having to add to it.

I said, “Have the police been in touch with you about Darbra’s boyfriend?”

“The boy who was killed in her building?”

“Yes.”

“They came by Sunday, just before we were closing, and talked to us.”

“Us?”

“Joel, me. Finian, too, I think.”

“I tried to see Quill today. Karen at the door said he wasn’t around.”

“I don’t know where he is. Joel might.”

“I think I’ll have to skip that.”

Swindell tried a smile, but it didn’t work. “Everything’s been kind of a mess since …”

She didn’t have to finish it. “What did the police ask you?”

Swindell looked at me a little sharply. “It’s okay for me to tell you that?”

“Unless you don’t want to.”

Another hesitation. “Don’t see that it makes any difference. They—this policewoman—asked me did I know the boy, a musician?”

“Rock band.”

“And I told her I didn’t, and Darbra never mentioned him.”

“Did Cross also tell you how he was killed?”

“No.”

Something in Swindell’s face made me ask it differently. “Did you read about it?”

She shook her head but said, “Yes. In the
Herald,
yesterday, but the paper didn’t say anything about Darbra, just the address, which I recognized.”

“Recognized.”

“From Darbra’s personnel file. For her W-4, health plan, that kind of thing, I had to send notices to her apartment.”

“She ever mention keeping a spare key around the office?”

“No. She kept things pretty close that way.”

“What way?”

“Personal things. Didn’t really talk to me about them. Didn’t really talk to anybody at the store about them, far as I know.”

Darbra, the butterfly at the Jersey shore with Teagle, the caterpillar in her cocoon at work. “Her apartment was ransacked by somebody last Thursday into Friday.”

“Ransacked?”

“Yes. Anything she could have had that somebody would want?”

Another head shake, this one slow. “Wouldn’t know to tell you. Like I said, she wasn’t the confiding type.”

“Cross also ask you where you were when Teagle was killed?”

“Yes.” A little defiance behind it.

“And I should ask her?”

“No, I’ll be happy to tell you. I was at the store Saturday into Saturday night and all day Sunday, working with Lupé.”

“Who’s that?”

“The temp in Darbra’s office.”

“So you were breaking her in.”

“That’s right. She’s a good girl, learning fast.”

“And you were working Saturday night, too.”

“Like I said.”

“Was Joel Bernstein?”

Swindell stood. “You’ll have to take that up with him.”

As she walked out, I guessed I’d be paying for the drinks.

“Look this way at things. She not throw it in your face.”

I said, “The way Darbra would have?”

Grgo Radja shrugged as he sat in a different chair than Beverly Swindell had used. He glanced at her full cup, clean spoon.

“There was something wrong with the coffee?”

“I don’t think so.”

The hooded eyes moved to my iced tea. “Yours?”

“We just didn’t get around to them.”

“You want try something else to drink?”

“This is fine.”

“I don’t want force you, but maybe you join Grgo in some slivovitz?”

“What is it?”

“Brandy from plum, Croatia drink.”

I wondered if this meant he wanted to talk to me, especially given how tight he’d been about Abraham Rivkind and Darbra the first time I’d seen him. “Sure, thanks.”

Radja bellowed out a foreign word, which brought the waiter running, then conversationally, “Slivovitz,” and something else.

The waiter reappeared with a brown bottle, squat and oval, and two bell glasses half the size of a big brandy snifter. The waiter poured several ounces of the slivovitz into each glass. Then he left the bottle on the table and went back to the kitchen.

I said to Radja, “If you’d like to smoke, I don’t mind.”

He picked up his glass in both hands, rolling it between his palms like a potter with clay on a wheel. “The cigar is for me a sometime thing.” He looked to his hands. “This warm up the brandy, more flavor, but maybe you try first, see you like it.”

I took a sip. Fiery, with a flavor like the plum sauce for a Szechuan moo shu. “Excellent.”

“Yes, so. Cannot find the slivovitz here now, because of the wars over there. Slivovitz I think is only thing we agree about, Serb and Croat. In my country, they … but you not here to learn more about Croatia, eh?”

“No, I’m not.”

Radja nodded, more like a slight, sitting bow, and inhaled over his glass. The smudgy eyelids got dreamy, then he tossed half the drink at the back of his throat, making a thick sound of satisfaction. “Only a little is enough, you do things right way.”

“That’s true.”

The eyelids blinked slowly. “So, this Darbra, you find her?”

“Not yet.”

“You still ask about Mr. Rivkind?”

“If you feel like talking about him.”

“No. Not to tell you things. Maybe tell you not to ask things still.”

I took another nip of the slivovitz. “Why is that?”

“What can you find to help him now?”

“I’m trying to help his wife.”

“Same thing. A man and his wife, no good to find things, push things out can’t help nobody.”

“What kind of things?”

“Any kind. Mr. Rivkind, he good man. He no kind of man for you to ask question about.”

“It’s my job.”

“Maybe you need other job.”

“I like this one.”

In a lower voice, Radja said, “Maybe better you find other job still.”

I tried warming my glass the way he had, my shoulders square to him. “Is that a suggestion or a threat?”

Radja shrugged, the beard riding his collar like a surfboard on a wave. “Croat like me, we don’t make threats. We just see what is right, and we do that.”

I said, “Grgo, there some reason you didn’t want Mrs. Swindell to know we’d had a talk already?”

He considered it, like he’d prepared a speech about it. “Mr. Rivkind good to me, save my restaurant because he bring his people here. I don’t want these people think Grgo talk to you. I don’t want you talk to these people, these good people, give them pain in their heart.”

“Somebody already did that, by killing Abraham Rivkind. Darbra Proft is involved in this somehow, and I hope to find out how and why.”

The eyelids seemed to get blacker, the beard bristling now. “Pain in the heart is terrible thing. I know that, you know that. People, they maybe die from it.”

Grgo Radja tossed the rest of his slivovitz at the back of his throat, rose, and gave me the same slight bow he’d used before. Then he picked up the bottle and moved with deliberation toward his kitchen.

I
WALKED FROM THE
restaurant back to my office. Checking for messages, I had only one I cared about.

The chocolate-brown garrison looked much as it had earlier that day, with the twin lampposts at the foot of its driveway and the Mazda coupe near the garage. However, the car was on the other side of the driveway now, and there were no green plastic newspaper bags on the path or lawn.

Leaving the Prelude at the curb, I went up the drive and the path to the front door. The bell chimed inside, and I heard a young male voice call out something I couldn’t catch. A few seconds later, the door swung open.

Larry Rivkind scowled at me. He had on jeans again but a different polo shirt, and his skin seemed a shade or two darker, as though he’d been working on a tan. “What are you doing here?”

“Back from your trip, Larry?”

“What business is it of yours?”

From a few rooms away, Pearl Rivkind’s voice said, “Larry? Larry, who is it?”

The boy didn’t answer, just posturing for me. “You tell my mom about our fight?”

“No.”

Rivkind’s face looked skeptical. “How come?”

“You were upset, had a right to be. I was just a convenient target.”

He seemed to turn that over. “Mr. Forgiveness.”

“Can I speak to your mother?”

“Why?”

“That’s kind of between her and me.”

“Larry?” Closer now.

Rivkind stood aside dramatically. “I can’t stop her from being stupid if she wants to be.”

“Larry, who—”

Pearl Rivkind stopped cold when she saw me. Without makeup, the lantern jaw really dominated her face, which still looked weary but somehow brighter than when I’d seen her in my office. There was some color in her cheeks, and the big brown eyes were clear and wide. She wore a lightweight pink sweat suit with white strings in the front tied like a ribbon on a present. There was a dish towel in one hand, the other looking a little wet and red.

“John, I called your secretary.”

I said, “My answering service.”

“Oh. Yeah, maybe. She didn’t seem to have any information, said I’d have to talk with you.”

Without looking at her son, I said, “That’s why I’m here. Is there some place we can talk?”

Larry Rivkind said, “I’m going up to my room. Call me if you want me, huh?”

Pearl Rivkind nodded at her son without looking at him, either. As he left us for a stairway on the right, she said, “Kitchen all right, John?”

“Fine, Pearl.”

We moved through a tasteful living room in which the furnishings seemed perfectly proportioned for the space and color-coordinated with each other. The kitchen had a bright, peened linoleum floor in yellow with matching appliances and daisy wallpaper. There was a breakfast nook with high-backed benches that were quaint but somehow too small for the wall and Palladian window they abutted. The window reminded me of the ones at Value Furniture.

“You want to sit in the nook, I’ll make some coffee?”

“The nook’s fine, but no coffee, thanks.”

“Tea? Tonic?”

Rivkind still used the old New England expression for carbonated drinks like Coke or Pepsi. “Tonic would be good.”

“We got Sprite or Diet Dr Pepper.”

“Sprite, please.”

“Ice?”

“Not if it’s already cold.”

She went over to a large double refrigerator, stopping on the way for a pair of tall, crystal glasses. Opening the door, she pulled out a two-liter bottle with both hands, then couldn’t turn the top.

I said, “Can I get that for you?”

“No, thanks. Larry has to go back to his job soon, and I need to be able to do these kinds of things for myself.” Rivkind tried the dish towel to help her grip. I heard the fizz noise that meant she’d been successful.

“There.” She used both hands to tilt the bottle and fill the glasses. Rivkind seemed to perform each task carefully and slowly, as though it were ritually important to do it right.

“Where does Larry work?”

“Up in New Hampshire. Kid’s camp. Imagine, he goes through Harvard, degree in philosophy, and he wants to be a camp counselor?”

“Maybe it gives him a chance to think out what he really wants to do with his life.”

Rivkind brought the glasses over and sat down across from me. “You know, this is almost the only thing we brought with us from the old house.”

“This nook?”

“Yeah. Abe and me bought it for our first place together, because we were just kind of scraping by. Then, when the store was doing well back in the early eighties, we moved here. Good idea, and we gave our old furniture to Hadassah, let somebody else get some use from it. All but this little nook, where we’d have our coffee every …”

Rivkind looked away from me, out the window, biting her lip as she seemed to check the shrubs for flowers. No tears, though. “Your Sprite, it’s all right?”

I hadn’t tasted it yet. “It’s fine, Pearl.”

She nodded, still at the bushes.

“You and Larry went away for a while?”

“Yeah.” She came back to me. “Yeah, I’m sorry, I guess I should have called you.”

“No problem. I stopped out here once today, but it was on my way. The police swung by, let me know everything was okay.”

“Everybody’s been real good that way. Mr. Khoumanian, across the street, he mowed our lawn. Then his back went out, he couldn’t get over to pick up the papers, but he said he called the cops on somebody this morning. I’m sorry if they scared you or anything.”

“They didn’t. How was the trip?”

“It was good, John. Real good. A chance to get away, have some fresh air. This is where I want to be, this house, I mean. At least for a while. But getting away like that, Larry taking care of all the arrangements … for the trip, I mean. It’s funny, how your child comes to be an adult and take care of you when you need it. All Abe’s stuff is done except for the lawyer and”—she looked at me differently—“I guess, for you.”

I drank some of the Sprite.

“You found out anything, John?”

“Not really.”

“Does that mean you think it’s hopeless?”

There was emotion behind her voice, but it was hard to gauge which one it was. “I’ve talked to everyone I can think of, except your son.”

Rivkind bit her lip again, then tasted her Sprite, more for something to do than something to drink. “Larry, he’s like my lawyer, he doesn’t think it’s so good for you to be working for me.”