The Hard Way (17 page)

“That's the thing. The register's emptied every afternoon. And when you think about it, what do you see here that someone would pay cash for? People don't walk around with this kind of money on them.” Shaking his head at the stupidity, the waste.

“Hiring cops to do the work, that would be a step up from the agency guards.”

“There's more experience, more training, true, but what happened, it could have happened to anyone.”

I took the jacket to the small closet in the back where the blue jacket I'd worn was hanging next to the black one Richard wore when he was playing Ricardo. I wondered if it was too late to visit Sylvia now, but I waited until I was outside to call her. She said she'd put the kettle on. I said I'd be there in ten minutes, walking toward the corner as we spoke and lifting my hand for a cab even before hanging up.

“This was Gardner's favorite tea.
He read somewhere it was good for his prostate.” Sylvia shrugged, poured a cup and handed it to me. “I don't have a prostate and I can barely stand the smell of this tea, but it seemed appropriate for tonight. Already the smell is reminding me of things you might want to hear. Try some honey in it. It helps mask the taste.” She poured her cup and leaned back against the plump cushions of the flowered couch.

If I'd expected that the old man had found himself a young chippie, I would have been sorely mistaken. Sylvia was definitely long in the tooth, late sixties, maybe early seventies. She was soft, pillowlike, in fact, with a round face, large breasts, heavy limbs and ample storage fore and aft, in case of famine. She moved slowly, perhaps she had arthritis, but her eyes, when she looked me over, when she checked out Dashiell, told me not to be fooled. She may have sagged physically, but I had the feeling she could hold her own mentally with people half her age.

“Tell me about the breakup,” I said, not being one to beat around the bush, not thinking she was either.

“Who told you that? Eleanor?”

That got my attention.

“We never broke up, darling. He just told her we did.”

“And why did he do that?”

“Listen, darling, you work for her. You're in her employ. I don't feel good about where this conversation went—one two three—almost the minute you walked in the door.”

“You want me to take it more slowly?” I checked my watch.

“We're still going to end up in the same place. I appreciate the tea,” I told her, “or at least the trouble you took, but this isn't a social visit. I'm on the job, trying to find out—”

“Relax, relax. It's what I used to tell him. All that”—she circled her hand in front of her chest—“it's not good for the heart. Fat lot of good my advice did him. It wasn't his heart that killed him. It was a crazy person.” She spooned some honey into my cup and stirred it, motioning me to take a sip. “Enough? Or you need more? I had a cousin. He had a heart attack, he became a macrobiotic. Brown rice was going to save his life. You know from this insanity?” When I didn't answer, she went on. “You live on rice and vegetables, you can still get hit by the bus, no? I mean the figurative bus, of course.”

“Or the literal one,” I said.

“Or that one.”

And then we sat there looking at her oriental carpet for a while because it occurred to both of us that it wasn't such a big leap from getting hit by the bus to getting pushed in front of a train.

Her teeth weren't the ones God gave her. If you listened carefully, which I always did, you could sometimes hear them shifting. But despite her protest about Eleanor, my employer, I had the feeling that what would eventually come out of her mouth would be pure gold, that I wouldn't regret having taken the time to make this visit.

“He wouldn't touch honey, my crazy cousin,” she finally said.

“‘I need maple syrup for my tea,' he'd say. ‘And why is that?' I asked. I loved the fruity answers he always gave me. ‘It's from a tree, not a bee,' he says. Cuckoo. People have the strangest ideas.”

“Including Eleanor?”

“I see already, you're like a dog who sees a bone. Like her. A one-track mind.”

“And hers is?” Pretty sure what she was going to say.

“Money. What else?” She lifted her cup and put it down again.

“He said caffeine gave him the jitters,” she said, her hand over the rim of the cup now, shunning the taste but feeling the warmth.

“Gardner?”

She nodded. “He worked hard, too hard, but not hard enough for the daughter. The new store?”

“Fourteenth Street?”

“Yes. The palace. She insisted. It was never enough for her.”

“But why the lie?”

Sylvia looked toward the window. The apartment faced the river but you couldn't see much in the snow.

“Two years ago, she was keeping company with this man. He was a broker, also rich like Eleanor, also a workaholic. Gardner thought finally she'll get married, she'll have some sort of life outside of the business. She had a ring. They set a date. And at the last minute, gone, called off.”

“Did she say why?”

Sylvia shrugged. “Whatever she said, Gardner never knew what really happened. Eleanor doesn't talk much about anything but the business.” She waved a hand, as if to brush away an insect. “Gardner thought something happened, that he cheated on her, something of that nature. I always thought that Eleanor was the one who changed her mind. She's already married.”

“To the business,” I said. “But I thought her father was as well.”

Sylvia shook her head. “Yes and no. When he was starting out, he had to put in incredible hours to make a go of it. When it began to take off, when he began selling bags to the better department stores, he couldn't afford to hire enough people to spread the work around. He still did much too much, to make sure they wouldn't go under. You've seen how people do things, a big splash and then the bottom drops out.”

I nodded.

“He used to talk about taking a cruise. He'd sit there,” she said, pointing to the chair that was facing the window, “and he'd say, ‘When the season's over, Sylvia, we'll go to Europe the old-fashioned way. We'll get on a boat. We'll relax. We'll have some time for us.' But the season was never over and Eleanor never let up on him to keep on top of things, to work those same long hours as when he was younger. And then I became the focus of her discontent. If it wasn't for me, if he didn't spend so much time with me…” Again she waved a bug away. “He thought it best to tell her we'd broken up. It was the only way to get her off his back. He didn't want trouble. He was an old man, Rachel. He just wanted a little peace.”

“So you never called him at work?”

“Darling,” she said. And then she stopped, her eyes shining, a few tears clinging to her lashes. I handed her a napkin and she nodded her thanks. “‘Sylvia,' he told me, ‘one more season and then I'll retire.' To tell you the truth, I didn't believe it. I didn't think he ever would. I hoped, but I didn't believe.” She shook her head and wiped her eyes again. “The apple didn't fall so far from the tree.”

“So he complained about the pressure from Eleanor but…”

“More of it was from habit. You make your life about making money, it doesn't turn off like a faucet.” She poked at her own chest. “Something in here makes you keep on going after the almighty dollar as if that's your life's breath. You gain all that dough, but you lose something along the way. I loved him. But…”

“His life was out of balance,” I said. I pictured Florida stepping back when he was pushed, losing his footing, stumbling.

“They were both obsessed with making every nickel they could. Sometimes he'd come over at ten o'clock at night. ‘Sylvia,' he'd say, ‘you have a little something I could eat or should we order in?' They'd had a meeting, he'd tell me. Pricing. They'd stayed in the shop until nine-thirty trying to figure out the highest price to the penny they could get for a bag, a coat.”

“Even a dog coat,” I said.

She nodded.

“I remember when they decided to have a version with a fur collar, for dogs. I thought it was the silliest thing I'd ever heard. And worse—wasteful. But no matter how the economy goes up and down, his customers can afford a dog coat with a fur collar, and Gardner sat in the studio until late at night, like always, to make sure it was just right. He knew the clients. He knew what they would go for.”

She picked up the cup and took a sip, making a face. I noticed that she wore no jewelry and I had the feeling there wouldn't be a leather coat in her closet either.

“Would you care to guess how long it took to decide how to secure the dog coat? Snaps, buttons, a zipper, Velcro? Every decision is a big deal. Everything is thought out. People pick their life's work with less thought than went into how to close the dog coat.”

“You loved him very much, didn't you?”

“I did, darling. More than even I knew.”

I took a sip of the tea. It had a sickening taste, as if it were made from the remains of someone's ashtray. No amount of anything from a bee or a tree had a chance in hell of making it palatable. But I had the feeling Sylvia would gladly make it every day to have her workaholic sweetie back.

“You're looking for the homeless man who pushed him, is that what Eleanor wants?”

I nodded. “But it may be more complicated than that,” I said.

She sat forward. “Tell me. Don't spare me even one detail.”

“I found him. Actually a friend found him, on the tracks at Penn Station. He claims someone pushed him into Gardner.”

“And you believe him, this homeless man, this good-for-nothing bum?”

“Enough to try to find out if anyone else had a reason to want Gardner dead.”

Sylvia was staring at my neck. Some of Florida's fingerprints must have been visible over the top of my turtleneck sweater. She
shook her head from side to side. “This work you do, it can be dangerous.”

“Not as dangerous, apparently, as retail.”

After that, we sat for a while. I tried another sip of the tea to see if it might taste better on a second try. It didn't. Sylvia smoothed back her long white hair, caught at the nape of her neck in a roll, the way my great-grandmother Rachel Sarah, for whom I was named, wore hers. I'd never met her except in pictures and still kept one of those in the drawer of my nightstand so that every once in a while, I could remind myself of where I came from.

I pulled a card out of my pocket and handed it to her. “Sylvia, is there anything else you can tell me about the business, something Gardner might have been concerned about, a rival, a buyout attempt, something of that sort?”

“Nothing I can think of.”

“If you should, later on, would you call me?”

“If I remember something, if I call you, you'll come again?”

“Only if you promise not to make tea for me next time.”

She smiled. “We'll order in Chinese.”

“His favorite?”

She got up and took my hands in hers. “You'll come again. We'll eat.”

I told her I would. She saw me to the door. It was late and it was cold but instead of taking a cab, Dashiell and I walked along the river in the snow. There wasn't a soul around to care or issue a summons, so I unclipped Dash's leash and watched him run ahead, making the first footprints in the fresh snow, footprints that would disappear long before we found our way home.

I picked up
the
Times
from where the delivery lady had shoved it through the wrought-iron gate, Tuesday's paper as well, too disheartened to bother when I'd gotten home from St. Vincent's the night before. They were each inside an electric blue plastic bag to keep them dry, better protection than some people had when they were out in the weather. I fetched the mail, also two days' worth, carrying the catalogs and bills with me into the garden, then up the steps to my front door. I fed Dash, made a fire, poured a glass of wine, remembered I hadn't eaten and ordered a pizza. It was only ten-thirty, but had it been three in the morning, I still would have been able to order in black bean chicken or a plain pie well done, one of the great things about living in New York.

Sitting on the couch, the fire giving the room a homey glow, I started with Tuesday's paper, skipping all the bad news in the front section and turning the Metro section over. The back page was fashion news, and since I was in the biz now, or had to appear to be, I started with that.

“Throw out your tweed pencil skirt,” the article demanded. This season longer skirts were in, flat shoes and luxury. “Price,” the article said, “was not the issue.”

There were the usual pictures, in color, of women in the most degrading, foolish-looking clothes you might imagine. Change
that—you'd
never
imagine things so idiotic and so expensive. Nor could you dream up the following: “If a young woman used to spend two paychecks for a coveted handbag,” the article said, “she will soon be spending an entire month's wages if it means that much to her.”

One of the models wore what seemed to be a red tutu, something you might see if you went to Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, the hilarious all-male troupe I'd seen twice at the Joyce Theater dancing on pointe in their size-eleven toe shoes. Tufts of hair graced their underarms and poked out of their bodices and when they leaped or twirled, it was no secret at all that these were men, not women, despite their frilly tutus and beribboned toe shoes. Under the model's tutu, she wore not tights but bicycle shorts. As if that weren't foolish enough, she wore what appeared to be a powdered wig, the kind British lawyers and judges used to wear in court.

If a scan of Eleanor's brain would show
money, money, money,
she'd be one happy lady in the coming year because, even though I personally would not be wearing a tutu, enough women would be discarding last season's hideously expensive clothes to buy this season's ridiculous items to keep people in the business laughing all the way to the bank.

I myself never thought of money as a route to happiness. It was great to have what you needed, a home, food, something decent or even fun to wear, a dog and the money to feed him well. Beyond that, accumulating wealth because it made you feel like a winner didn't work for me. But it worked for a lot of people. Having money and making sure other people knew you did was the name of the game for lots of folks, and Eleanor Redstone was more than likely going to keep accruing wealth for as long as she could, any way she could, even at the cost of a home in the suburbs, a white picket fence and two and a half kids. For Eleanor, apparently, retail was the American dream.

The issue, from what I could understand, was profit margin,
or rather, raising the profit margin, even if that meant not giving hardworking, loyal employees a raise. Or worse, cutting their margin of profit by scaling back on their commissions. But I didn't see Meredith or Richard murdering anyone because of it. What good would it do? In point of fact, the cuts came after Gardner Redstone had been killed. And from what I've read in the paper over the last few years, going elsewhere would only give them more of the same—commission cuts, loss of benefits, the opportunity to do more work for less money. And that wasn't only true in the fashion industry. It was true across the board.

I found a pen between the couch cushions, as well as enough crumbs to feed the entire pigeon population of New York City for a week. I wrote on the edge of the newspaper.
“Had there been commission cuts before Gardner died?”
I needed more time with the files. I needed to work late, the way Gardner used to before and even after he met Sylvia, and see what I could figure out.

When the bell rang, I slipped my coat back on, grabbed a twenty and headed for the gate to get dinner. But when I got there, it wasn't the kid from the pizza place who was holding the box. It was Brody, his coat collar turned up against the wind, his head bare and covered with snow. The snow was landing on the box, too. I could see where it had gotten wet, the hot pizza melting the cold snow.

I unlocked the gate, the twenty-dollar bill still in my hand.

“Detective,” I said. “Moonlighting, perhaps?”

“I was headed to my car when I happened to glance at your gate.” He nodded toward my hand. “It's paid for,” he told me.

The gate was open, but he hadn't moved. He was still standing on the sidewalk in the snow.

“Are you hungry?” I asked him.

“I could eat,” he said.

I thought he'd smile then and that that would wipe away the last few months, time during which we might have been in touch but weren't. I thought if he smiled, everything would be okay, the way it had been before I'd saved his life.

But he didn't. He remained neutral, the way he had when I first met him, showing me the cop but not the man. I moved out of the way to let him pass and locked the gate behind him. He was waiting in the middle of the tunnel, where we'd once kissed. I thought I smelled his aftershave, but it was probably only a memory, what with the pizza and all the snow, the wind blowing toward the garden, blowing his scent away from me.

Dashiell must have opened the door because now he was in the tunnel, too, barking and jumping up on Brody. Or was it the pizza that had him so excited?

The light from the living room poured out into the garden. It was inviting and we both walked toward it, toward the smell of the fire, toward the open bottle of wine. We sat on the floor, Dashiell there, too, and Brody said he was going to call me because he'd arranged the visit to Dustin's school for the morning of January tenth, the first Tuesday after the Christmas break.

“She didn't want them to go to the station house?” I asked.

“I kind of liked the idea of locking them all in a holding cell, taking their fingerprints, showing them what policemen wore a century ago.”

Brody shook his head. “She said with these kids, it made more sense for us to go there. Then she said she wished she could fit us in before the holiday so we could talk about fire safety because many of the kids would have Christmas trees, but she couldn't because there was only tomorrow, then a half day on Friday and none of that time was free. I neglected to tell her she had the wrong department,” he said, “that it should be a fireman who would remind the kids to water the Christmas trees every other day and to make sure no one left candles burning when they went to bed.”

“So we're going there?”

He nodded.

“She knows we're coming with a pit bull and a gun?”

Brody nodded and took a sip of wine. “I told her I'd talk to them about gun safety and that that was appropriate any time of
year. I said I'd also talk to them about how to be safe in regard to strangers.”

“If only life were that simple, follow the rules and you'll be okay.”

Brody just looked at me.

“I promised them you and Dashiell, too. I said you'd say a few words about safety around dogs.”

“I can do that.”

Dashiell had been waiting patiently for leftovers. I took the tiniest piece of crust, held it between my lips and leaned toward him. He slipped it out with his lips, then made a big production out of chewing it, as if I'd given him a whole slice instead of a tiny crumb. Of course if I had given him the slice, he would have bolted it down in two shakes.

“And a trick or two?”

I nodded.

“But not that one.”

I nodded again and handed Dashiell the rest of the slice, then picked up the pen I'd dropped on the coffee table when the bell rang. I ripped off a piece of the box and wrote on it. Then I showed it to Dashiell and said, “Here, buddy. Read this.” He looked at the cardboard, then at me, wagging his tail. I handed the torn piece of the box to Brody and finally got that smile.

He read what I'd written. “‘Wag your tail,'” he said. “Good one. They'll love it.” He got up and picked up his coat. “You look tired,” he said.

I got up, too. “It's been a long day,” I said.

“Most of them are.”

We stood there for a moment, the empty wine bottle behind us on the coffee table, on the floor, the pizza box with one slice left. The fire was dying down. If I'd planned on staying downstairs, I would have poked at it, then added another log or two, but I
was
tired and I had a job to get to in the morning.

Brody touched my arm and then headed for the door. Dashiell
and I walked out with him so that I could unlock and relock the gate. Half in the tunnel and half out on the sidewalk, the gate ajar, he turned to face me.

“The tenth,” he said, “at ten-thirty, in case we don't get the chance to talk again before,” his voice barely a whisper, as if he were breathing the words into my neck instead of saying them out in the snow, someone passing with a big dog who stopped to mark the sign for the bus stop, a horn honking just past the corner, on Hudson Street.

“Thanks for the pizza,” I said.

He nodded.

I watched him cross the street, reaching into his pocket for his car keys. I'd never said his name. He'd never said mine.

“Michael,” I called out. But a car alarm had gone off down the block and he never heard me.