Death Will Help You Leave Him (4 page)

I thought about it as she blew a few warm breaths on my neck and twiddled my left ear.

“I don’t mind if you don’t.” I had no intention of telling her anything. Not that I had anything to tell. I did, however, want to hear about this guy. What had once been jealousy seemed to have evaporated. “So tell me. What’s his name?”

“Mac.” She pushed the short syllable out grudgingly, like a little girl caught lying. It made me feel tender. I pushed the flyaway cloud of hair back from her face and put my lips against her forehead.

“How long have you been seeing him?”

“About a year.”

“You’re so tense.” I began to lick along her hairline, working my way from left to right. I could always do anything with Laura. Sex didn’t embarrass her one bit. And if you’ve met anyone more uninhibited than a bipolar on an upswing and off her meds, you’re even farther from Kansas than I am.

“So what’s he like?” I murmured, spitting out a curly strand. She twitched her head away, though her hips against my groin sent me a different message.

“Oh, you know.”

“No, I don’t,” I said.

“You didn’t use to talk this much,” she said peevishly. “What is this, the Inquisition?”

“Hardly.” I burrowed down toward the foot of the bed, keeping my hands on her and stroking as I went. “Would the Inquisition do this? Or this? Or this? Jeez, Laura, you went magenta all the way.”

“Ow!” She jerked away.

“What did I do?” I had only pressed the palms of my hands against her thighs. They’d always been soft and satiny in spite of her thinness, and I knew them well. “Did I hurt you? Let me look.” I flipped the quilt back.

“No!” She tried to pull it back over her, but I was stronger. In the dusty afternoon light, I could see her creamy thighs were marred by some nasty-looking bruises. A couple were the blue-black of recent marks, but the rest, in various stages of discoloration, swirled green and yellow and lavender against the pale surrounding skin. I might have imagined it, but I thought I saw finger marks.

“But is it art?” Okay, I get flippant when I’m stuck.

She blew air out through her nostrils and made a soft sound in her throat. For a second, I thought I’d succeeded in amusing her. But she pulled her legs away and sat up. Arms around her knees, she drew herself up into a defensive ball. Even depressed, the Laura I knew did not go small. With horror, I saw a tear roll down her right cheek. But Laura never cried. Well, yeah, during a major depressive episode. This was not that. This was not good at all.

“Dammit, Laura.” I sputtered, thinking of half a dozen things to say and rejecting them all.

She gave me a lopsided grin with absolutely no attitude in it. This was pathetic. I felt like crying myself.

“It’s okay,” she said.

“No, it’s not!” I shot back. “Does he hurt you?” I might have been jumping to conclusions. I’d had some strenuous and even kinky sex with Laura myself. But this looked like abuse. It made me very angry.

Her beautiful voice got wispy without going up the scale at all.

“I can’t help it, Bruce. I’m in love with him. I know he’s not good for me, but I can’t leave.”

“I can’t believe you talked me into this,” I bellowed over the clamor of the train.

Jimmy and I swayed as we hovered over Barbara in classic New York subway straphanger position.

“Who, me?” Jimmy knew damn well I didn’t mean him. “I’m a stranger in a strange land myself.”

“No way would I venture into the wilds of Brooklyn without you guys,” Barbara screamed. “I need Jimmy to cover my back when I brave Catholic rituals. And Jimmy needs you for moral support. Anyhow, we’re doing it for Luz.”

Luz sat across the aisle of the subway car, wedged up against a guy in floppy gangsta pants. His body language suggested he had his Walkman ratcheted all the way up on a heavy mega bass beat. She saw us conferring and raised her eyebrows in inquiry. Barbara shook her head and patted the air with her hand:
Nothing, never mind, don’t worry.

We were on our way to Frankie’s wake.

Barbara beckoned me to bend over so she could get her lips close to my ear. It didn’t stop her from yelling, the way people do on their cell phones.

“Bruce, have you ever been to a wake?”

“Not a wake,” Jimmy corrected, “it’s a viewing.”

“Same thing nowadays,” I said. “They don’t make funerals like they used to.” Except in the movies, I’d never been to the kind of wake the word evoked. This one would be held in a nice, sanitized funeral home, not the front parlor. The deceased wouldn’t come back to life in the middle of the night. And no booze. Just as well.

“I’m a nice Jewish girl,” Barbara said. “I like it better when the corpse is stowed away before the party starts, and they give you plenty of bagels and chopped liver to take the edge off your grief. It creeps me out to have to look at the departed all decked out in his best suit and looking almost but not quite like himself.”

“You guys hustle them underground in twenty-four hours,” Jimmy said. “That seems strange to me.”

“We lived in a hot climate until the Diaspora,” Barbara said. “I hope this expedition isn’t a big mistake.”

So did I. Luz would be braving Frankie’s family. And we’d be crashing the party. But she had been determined to come, and Barbara, equally determined to support her.

“I have to say goodbye to him,” Luz had insisted.

Jimmy and Barbara had tried to persuade her to make her farewells at the funeral instead. The funeral mass would provide no opportunity for a scene. Jimmy especially hoped fervently that Luz didn’t want a scene. “I don’t want any trouble” is his personal motto. I’d gone head first into plenty of trouble in my time. In this case, I felt what Barbara would call detached. I’d never known Frankie, to my knowledge, and I’d only met Luz the other night. Jimmy was right, though. We’d all feel safer in a church, with everybody facing front, their eyes on the priest and their minds on Jesus and or at least their own mortality.

Luz remained stubborn.

“I have to see him up close one last time. If I don’t, I’ll always remember him on the floor in his blood.”

She had said the same thing again this morning, in tears, over a fortifying greasy spoon breakfast on the Upper West Side before the four of us boarded the train. Barbara had handed her a pack of tissues. Jimmy had made one more attempt to talk her out of going.

“What about his wife? It will be so uncomfortable for you.”

That was putting it nicely. She must know on some level that she was setting up a potential social catastrophe.

“She’s never seen me. You know how it is. The widow is overwhelmed, so many people come up to her, they take her hand, they say how sorry they are. She says thank you, thank you. She doesn’t ask who they are— if she doesn’t know, she pretends she does.”

“She’s got a point, Jimmy,” Barbara said. “They won’t give us name tags.”

“You’re willing to go up and take her hand?” Jimmy asked. Good question.

“If I have to.” Luz’s shoulders hunched. I thought of a mule pulling a plow through a rocky field.

“What about his friends, Luz?” Barbara asked. “It won’t be just her family, you know. The place will be crawling with people who do know you.”

“The ones on my side won’t betray me. The ones on her side don’t know me.” She made it sound simple.

Jimmy and I both let out what Barbara calls our ACOA sighs. Jimmy’s would have blown a strike on a bowling alley. She, being an adult daughter of Eastern European Jewish parents, said, “Oy veyzmir.” We all accepted the inevitable.

“What if the two detectives we met are there?” I had kept my mouth shut up to this point, but it wouldn’t hurt to consider strategy.

“Oh, I am so tired of them,” Luz said. “They keep coming back and asking the same questions.”

“It’s an opportunity,” Barbara pointed out. “Not just for them, but for us. If Luz didn’t kill Frankie, this viewing is our best chance to meet a whole flock of people who could have.”

“If?”

“Cops’ ‘if,’ our ‘since we know’,” Barbara said.

“Oh, Barbara,” Luz said, looking at her sponsor with touching faith, “it will be wonderful if you can find out who did it. Then the police will have to leave me alone.”

Jimmy kicked me under the coffee shop table.

Still, it might be kind of interesting. In spite of the ominous presence of the corpse, the viewing would play out as a social event. We’d have a chance to talk to people who’d been close to Frankie and might have their own reasons to kill him.

Jimmy had already told me privately that he doubted the stabbing was purely “business” from higher up the drug dealing chain.

“Dealers have guns,” he’d said, looking grim. He didn’t have to say that investigating would be a helluva lot less of a lark if professionals were involved. Or that this wouldn’t deter Barbara.

We couldn’t completely rule it out. Frankie might have tied off loose ends before he went away to rehab for twenty-eight days. Or he might have left his affairs in a mess to cause trouble the moment he came out. He could even have gone to rehab to avoid preexisting trouble. It wasn’t unheard of. What if he’d cheated someone he owed drug money to? What if he’d sold bad drugs to users, either adulterated with some inactive ingredient or cut with something toxic? Luz had believed that Frankie meant to get and stay clean. She was new to the program. She was still on that pink cloud they talked about, dazzled by the bright and shiny miracle of recovery. The rest of us knew too many addicts whose bullshit had never diminished, no matter how long they didn’t use.

Frankie was more than just a drug addict. He was also a guy who hit women. He’d been violent with Luz even after he got clean. How many other women had he hurt? How many women had it in for him as a result? Or the women’s friends and family? And what about the wife? I hoped Luz was right that the wife had never heard her name or seen her picture. If she had, I hated to think what might happen when we walked into the funeral parlor. He must have cheated before. And maybe he’d battered his wife as well as his girlfriends. Her family, whom we were about to meet, would have plenty of reason to hate Frankie. In spite of myself, I felt detective fever taking hold. It didn’t have the kick of getting high, but it had its own fascination. Part of me could hardly wait to meet all these people.

The funeral home was so far into Brooklyn that the train emerged from its tunnel to run along an elevated track. We rattled along above dingy rows of storefronts and rubbish-strewn empty lots. Cramped back yards flashed by, stuffed with a tangle of last summer’s flowers, persistent weeds, beat-up lawn furniture, and decrepit children’s toys. After making about a hundred local stops, the train decanted us onto a deserted platform high above the street. A rickety set of iron stairs led downward. Ahead of me, Barbara slipped her hand into Jimmy’s. That would have been fine if the stairway had been wider. She tripped on his heels and nearly knocked him over.

“Sorry!” Barbara said.

Jimmy wrenched his hand away to grab the railing, remarking mildly that if he intended to die in Brooklyn, he’d pick a more interesting way to go. Luz giggled nervously. I thought better of offering her my arm. But I waved her ahead of me. I figured if she lost her footing, I could catch her before she plunged forward. And if she tripped and fell backward, she’d hit my chest rather than the sharp edge of one of the metal steps.

Jimmy winked at Luz.

“Codependency is always having to say you’re sorry, even when you didn’t do anything.”

Luz laughed a bit more naturally, and a couple of wrinkles between her eyebrows smoothed out. It occurred to me that she must be wary of both of us, no matter how much Barbara sang our praises. With her history, Luz might expect any man, even us, to switch without warning from charm and affection to rage and using his fists.

The funeral home stood on a king-size corner lot in a residential area a few blocks off the shopping street that ran below the elevated tracks. The neighborhood looked prosperous. Detached brick houses squatted amid manicured patches of lawn and bunchy foundation plantings of rhododendron and azalea that were probably spectacular in the spring. The funeral home must get plenty of business. The place had more square footage, more abundant plantings, and more expensive paving, trim, and roofing than anything else on the block. The front door, of polished oak, sported a brass lion’s head knocker and a doorbell that played the first couple of bars of Bach’s
Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring
. It wasn’t locked, anyhow. Jimmy pushed it open as the music ended.

We walked into a sumptuous entrance hall that fulfilled the promise of the exterior. The decorators had pulled out all the stops: crystal chandeliers, etched glass wall sconces, and mahogany furniture with dark red and gold velvet upholstery. If we’d taken off our shoes, our toes would have sunk right into the lush Persian rugs.

A gentleman with a bald head so shiny it looked polished greeted us with an inaudible generic murmur and an outstretched hand. He wore a dark suit with the faintest whisper of a pinstripe, matching silk tie and breast pocket handkerchief in a subdued burgundy, and a professionally mournful face. We all shook. His hand felt warm, fat, and solid, like a bunch of tightly packed sausages. We glanced around at the three or four doors that led to different reception rooms.

“Like gladiators wondering which one leads to the tiger,” Jimmy whispered in my ear.

Luz muttered Frankie’s family name, Iacone. I hadn’t heard it before. So he was Italian. And Luz was Puerto Rican. That alone meant trouble. Diversity is a fact of life in New York. So is ethnic clannishness, whether or not it’s considered “correct” to say so. At any rate, this Frankie might be the Italian guy I’d done business with. I would know for sure as soon as I checked out the casket.

The undertaker beckoned us to the nearest door on the right. Sorry, funeral director. It swung open with a discreet swish. The room, thank God, was crowded. By the modulated exhalation of Jimmy’s breath, he was equally relieved. We couldn’t see the coffin, no less the widow. When Luz stopped short, the rest of us had to brake suddenly in order not to crash into her. We had agreed we wouldn’t call attention to ourselves if we could help it. Knocking her over would not have made a good beginning.