Final Appeal (11 page)

O
nly an hour later I have crossed the threshold into another world. A scented, serene world, where the colors are chalky washes of pastels and the air carries the scent of primrose. Is it heaven? In a way. It’s the Laura Ashley shop at the King of Prussia mall. I called Ricki to discuss the checkbook and she agreed to meet me here. I trail in reluctantly behind her, holding her bags like a pack animal. “So what do you think?”

“I told you what I think. I think you should go straight to the police. Show them the note from Armen and the checkbook.” She plucks a frilly blouse off the rack and holds it against her chest. “You like?”

“For you or for me?”

“I don’t need blouses, you do. That coffee stain is so attractive.”

I tug my blazer over the brown blotch. “I have enough blouses.”

“No you don’t. You have the yellow one you wear over and and over, and the blue.” She slips the blouse back onto the rack. “But it is a lot of money.”

“The blouse or the bank account?”

“The blouse.”

“So’s the account.”

“I wonder if he declared it, the crook.”

“Don’t say that.” I look around the small store, but it’s empty. Nobody can afford this stuff, not even in King of Prussia. “He’s not a crook.”

“You sound like Richard Nixon.”

I set the bags down beside the rack. “I bet it has something to do with his murder.”

“Murder? You’re losing it, Grace. I told you. The checkbook doesn’t mean he was murdered. Maybe he committed suicide in regret over taking a bribe.” She snatches a blouse from the rack and her hazel eyes come alive; it’s off-white, with billowy sleeves and a Peter Pan collar. She hoists it proudly into the air. “This is perfect.”

“For what? Punting on the Thames?”

Ricki puts the blouse back onto the rack. “You have a bad attitude, you know that?”

“But we don’t know it’s a bribe, Rick. All we know is that it’s a checking account of some kind.”

“A boatload of money under an alias? Come on.” Her concentration refocuses, laserlike, on the next ruffled blouse on the rack. She picks it up and appraises it. “This is nice.”

“What about the note?”

“What about the blouse?”

“Where am I going to wear it, Rick? Tara?”

She slaps it back onto the rack. “Maybe we’ll have better luck with the dresses.” She turns smartly away and heads over to a lineup of dresses whose skirts are so voluminous they puff out like parachutes. Ricki extracts one with an expertise born of practice and waves it at me from across the store. “Very appropriate, don’t you think?” she says.

I pick up the bags and follow her. “No feathers? I want feathers. And a headpiece.”

A young saleswoman, more like a saleschild, perks up from behind a counter littered with fragrant notecards and stationery. She looks like Alice in Wonderland in a black velvet headband and a white pinafore. “That’s one of our most popular styles,” she says.

“I hate it,” I whisper.

Ricki looks daggers at me. “Give it a chance, Sherlock.”

“No.”

The saleschild’s face falls.

Ricki slaps the dress back in place. “You are so stubborn. So stubborn.”

“Rick, listen.”

“You said you wanted me to help you.”

“This isn’t what I meant.”

“Why do I bother? You call me up and I come. My one night without clients and here I am. I should have gone food shopping. There’s no milk in the house.” She puts her hands on her hips and glares at me.

There’s no milk in the house
. The all-time low watermark of motherhood.

I put my hands on my hips and we face off at opposite ends of the dress rack, the High Noon of Mothers. No milk in the house, and Ricki is the most organized of women; it must gnaw at her conscience like an overdue library book. I feel the first pang of guilt, which means she’s quicker on the draw. “Give me the goddamn dress,” I say.

“Good.” She plucks it from the rack and pushes it at me.

“I’m not promising anything.”

“Fine.”

The saleschild comes over. “Can I help you?” she says brightly. Too brightly for minimum wage.

“Yes,” Ricki says. “My friend needs dresses. With her eyes, I think a royal blue would be nice.”

“Rick, I’m standing here. I can speak.”

The saleschild looks from Ricki to me.

“I don’t want anything fancy,” I say.

“Not fancy?” The saleschild looks puzzled; fancy is all they sell. They have a monopoly in fancy.

“She doesn’t mean fancy,” Ricki says, “she means fussy.”

“No, I mean fancy. Empire waistline, hem to the floor. I’m too old for puffed sleeves.”

“Fussy,” Ricki says again.

The saleschild looks at Ricki, then at me. The poor girl’s getting dizzy. I hand her the dress for balance.

“Where are the business-y dresses?” Ricki asks.

“I’m out of a job, Rick.”

“Then you need interview clothes.”

“Follow me,” says the saleschild. She pads in ballet slippers to a rack of dresses and takes three from the rack. Any one of them would work at my coronation, but Ricki badgers me to try one on. We squeeze together into the flowered dressing room. Ricki always comes into dressing rooms with me; she doesn’t realize this was okay when we were in high school but now that we’re almost forty, is a bit odd.

“Are we having fun yet?” I mutter, stepping into the billowing dress.

“Let me zip it up for you,” Ricki says.

“It’s the least you can do.”

She zips the dress more roughly than necessary and I regard myself in the mirror. The style makes me look tall and thin, which must be some sort of optical illusion. Still, all I can see is that my eyes look too small and my nose looks too big; my father’s Sicilian blood, acid-etched into my features. I look terrible.

“You look stunning!” Ricki says from behind me.

“Uncanny. That’s just what I was thinking.”

“The neckline is so pretty.”

I look down at my chest and catch sight of the scalloped bra, barely covered by the dress. It reminds me of Armen, of that night.
This is the beginning for us. I love you
. “What about the note he wrote me, Rick?”

But she’s busy picking up a flowered scarf and tossing it around my neck. She’s caught brain fever from the shopping, like early man, blood-lusting after the kill. She found the right dress, now the whole village can eat. “Here, if you’re not in love with the neckline.”

“Rick, what do you think about the note?”

“What note?” She drapes the scarf to the left, then squinches up her nose.

“The one I found in my pocket.”

She rearranges the scarf over my shoulder. “Are we talking about that again?”

“Yes.”

“I’m trying to take your mind off your official police duties, but you’re not letting me.”

“Just tell me where the note fits in, huh? Is that the act of a man who would kill himself a few hours later? You’re a shrink, you tell me. You must have handled suicide in your practice.”

“Only one, thank God.” She crosses herself quickly even though she’s Jewish.

“But depressed people, right? You must see tons of depressed people.”

“Oh, they ship ’em in.”

“Rick, will you help me? You may actually know something here.”

“Why, thank you.”

“You know what I mean.”

She ties the scarf around my neck. “Okay, so you’re asking me? Professionally?”

“Yes.”

She pats the knot and steps back, squinting at my costume like a movie director. “I think your friend the judge was a very interesting personality, and I think his behavior was totally consistent with suicide. Even the note.”

“But how?”

“Let me ask you this. How well did you know this man?”

“Armen? I knew him well.”

“You worked for him for three months. Part-time.”

“We worked closely together. I knew him well.”

“Think about it,” she says. “You didn’t know he loved you. You didn’t know he was sitting on a pile of money. You didn’t know he had an apartment.”

“But I knew what mattered, what kind of man he was. Everybody knew that. And what’s this have to do with psychology anyway?”

“Everything. He was a very important judge, a powerful judge, and the husband of a United States senator. On top of that, he’s a
macher
in the Armenian community. A hero, right?”

“Yes.” I feel vaguely like I’m being led where I don’t want to go.

“So people like that, they’re managing constantly under the pressure to live up to very high standards. The standards of others, of the community. It’s tough to keep that veneer perfect, to keep up appearances. They begin to keep secrets, like he did, and pretty soon what they know about themselves grows further and further away from what the world thinks of them. In the right circumstances, a person like that falls apart. The veneer cracks, and so do they.”

“But it wasn’t a veneer. He really was—”

“Perfect?”

I feel it inside. “Yes. In a way. He believed in things. He cared, really cared, and he fought hard.”

“Don’t you think you’re idealizing him, Grace?”

“No, I’m not idealizing him.” My throat tightens, but it could be the scarf. “Take this frigging thing off. I feel like a boy scout in drag.”

She avoids my eye and unties the scarf. “You worked for him for a short time. You had a business relationship with him until one night. Now you’re charging around, going to the police, ransacking his office for clues.”

“I wasn’t ransacking.”

“You’re acting like it was a fifteen-year relationship, like he was your husband. But he wasn’t. In fact, he was somebody else’s.”

Ouch. “That’s beside the point. The man was murdered, Ricki.”

“You don’t know that. It’s not your job to investigate it, even if it
is
true. If you were my client, I’d ask you why you’re doing all this. What would happen if you didn’t?”

“His killer would go free.”

“And what’s the matter with that?”

I look wildly around the frilly dressing room. “What’s the matter with murder? It’s very bad manners, for starters.”

“Don’t be snide, I mean it.”

“But what kind of question is that, What’s the matter with murder?” I hear my voice growing louder.

“No, the question is, Why does it matter if his killer goes free?”

I hold back my snidehood. “It’s terrible. It’s
unfair
.”

“Then it’s the unfairness that strikes you.”

“Yes, of course.”

She purses her lips. “You’re a person who’s been treated unfairly. By your father, then by Sam. You had a baby, he wanted out. He broke the contract.”

I feel a churning inside. “Yeah, so?”

“So maybe it’s not
this
unfairness you’re fighting about, maybe it’s unfairnesses in your past. Ones you can’t do anything about.”

“Oh please, Ricki.”

“Think about it. Keep an open mind.”

“The man is dead, Rick. Am I just supposed to ignore that?”

She folds her arms calmly, like she always does when I get upset. Therapists never have emotions; that’s why they want to hear ours. “How long have we known each other?” she asks.

I boil over. “Too damn long.”

“Well, that’s a very nice thing to say.”

“If you wouldn’t analyze me at every turn—”

“You asked me to.”

“I asked you to analyze
him
, not me.”

“Why do you need me to analyze him if you know him so goddamn well? Hmm?”

I have no immediate answer. The word
uncle
comes immediately to mind, but I push it away.

“Well?” A triumphant smile steals across her face. “I should’ve been a lawyer, right?”

Right. Or a personal shopper.

The red-lighted numbers on the clock radio say 4:13
A.M.
; they’re oddly disjointed, constructed like toothpicks laid end to end. It flips to 4:14.

The house sleeps silently. The dishwasher stopped cranking at 1:10, leaving only the clothes dryer in the basement. A wet bathroom rug thudded against the sides of the drum, keeping me awake until 2:23. Since then I have no excuse except for my own feelings, tumbling as crazily as the rug in the dryer. The fury, grief, and confusion cycle: it comes right after spin-dry.

Maddie’s in the next room, her door closed against Bernice, who sleeps in my bed like a mountain range bordering my right side and curling under my feet. This must be why they call them mountain dogs. I shove her over, but she doesn’t budge. My thoughts circle back to Armen.

He said he loved me, but there’s obviously much he didn’t say. A secret bank account. An alias. I sit up and shake two powdery generic aspirins from the bottle, then swallow them with some flat seltzer from a bottle on my night table. I flop back in bed and stare up at the white ceiling with its cracked paint, trying to put away my emotions.

But I’m having less success than usual. Anxiety makes my chest feel tight. I wonder vaguely if they have a drug for that, and then I remember that they do.

Alcohol.

The thought warms me like brandy. I throw off the covers, slip on a terry bathrobe, and tiptoe down the creaky stair. Bernice looks up but doesn’t follow; she won’t go in the kitchen now unless she’s dragged into it.

I flick on the kitchen light and dim it down, then open up the tall kitchen cabinet that was built into the wall sixty years ago. My landlord let me strip the old paint away, and underneath was a fine bare pine, which I scrubbed and pickled white. I love this cabinet, a true old-fashioned larder, which finds room for every grocery I buy on its five shelves. The liquor is at the top, like a penthouse above the stories of oversized cereal boxes, cans of soup, and baked beans.

I grab a stool, climb up on it, and pull down a thick shot glass, one of the multitude my mother gave me a long time ago. Half I threw out and half I stowed in the basement until Maddie found them. I eventually had to sneak them away from her, finding something unseemly about a child’s tea party with shot glasses and a steel jigger. I hid them up here, where they line up like pawns guarding the liquor bottles.

I peer at the dusty bottles and try to make a decision. What shall I treat myself to? It’s all left over from my wedding, the last time I had more than two drinks. Alcohol goes right to my head, but that’s suddenly what I want.