"What can I do for you? There must be something," Lisa teased. "Anything, really."
Quit your job and get away from Bratte, Jack felt like saying. He didn't say it, though, but only because he wasn't up to a fight. She read his mind.
"Are you at least thinking about doing a book? We have a great ghost for you to work with." Lisa kissed the back of his hand. She couldn't help being loyal to Bratte. That was the kind of girl she was.
Jack shook his head. He didn't want to work with a ghost. He hated Bratte. Six months ago he'd allowed Jack to come to the agency Christmas party but hadn't condescended to speak to him once. Now the tables were turned. Bratte was all over him, trying to be his best friend. Funny how fame and fortune changed everything. If he weren't so groggy and miserable, Jack would crack up laughing.
"I made you soup. Would you like some?" Lisa changed the subject, and for a minute the sun came out.
Lisa's soup, which she called Jewish penicillin, appeared like magic with every little ailment. Have a headache, chicken soup. Have a cold, chicken soup. Feel lonely, chicken soup. They'd eaten it every day during the anthrax scare. And they hadn't gotten the disease, proof enough for Lisa that chicken soup cured everything. That and potato pancakes were the only items on her menu. But she did them both well, and since his mother hadn't cooked anything well, two dishes seemed like a lot. Tonight, however, chicken soup wouldn't cure him. He wanted peace and quiet. If he were a drinker, he'd be dead drunk by now. But he wasn't a big drinker.
"What's the matter?" she said. "Was it something I said?"
Didn't she get it yet? A blond TV announcer was mouthing the familiar words about his father's legacy to him and now the unfamiliar words of his new status as a cop saver. Jack was lost. He felt his life was being stolen from him. Even Lisa had been writing about it. Before all this happened, she'd been working on a novel about a man who didn't know who his father was. Her version of his life. Jack's mother also had her version.
Ever since he was old enough to know he was missing a father, he'd blamed only his mother, because she was the one who'd kept him from the knowledge of what had happened between them. Only she knew why his father never called him, never wrote letters, never gave him a birthday present. Many years ago Jack made up a reason for this: His father was a lifer in prison, or maybe even on death row, a man who had committed some huge and heinous crime worse even than abandoning him and his mother. His mother was only protecting him from the immense and irreconcilable shame of being sired by a criminal. It was the only answer that made any sense to him. Certainly his mother had thought of his father as a criminal.
But even with such a big secret at the core of Jack's life-a secret he had to admit he'd never tried very hard to penetrate-he thought he knew who he was. Just a simple, regular guy, raised by a single mom who'd been abandoned long ago, loved him a lot, and hadn't had much to give him in the way of material goods. Not an uncommon story. But it turned out to be not the right story. Jack's father had a plan of his own.
Creighton Blackstone's philosophy was plainly spelled out in his books. He believed that wealth corrupted, that the children of the rich were selfish and spoiled. He'd declared that he didn't want children because he didn't want to raise them with the burden of wealth and a famous name. He'd been so committed to this view that even when he did have a child, he'd covered his tracks so no one knew it. Jack's mother had died with the secret because telling it would have cost Jack his legacy. His father didn't want him to know. A social experiment, as it were. And even after she died he'd kept his silence, letting his son think he was an orphan three years before the fact. He kept the secret to the end. He'd been a hard man, giving his only child a sad lesson in cold calculation. Money had corrupted. It had corrupted him. Jack shivered.
"Honey, I can tell you're uncomfortable. Why don't you take a pill for the pain." Lisa felt his forehead. "You're hot. Come on, it would take the edge off," she urged.
When his segment of the news ended, he shook his head and surfed to another news program to see how far the story was traveling. Would he make national news? The phone rang, and Lisa checked the caller ID.
"Private," she told him.
"Don't answer it."
"What if it's the police again?"
"I've already told them everything."
"It might be my mom."
"If you want to answer it, answer it." He often wondered why her mother had to be a private caller.
He watched her pick up and an uneasy look cross her face.
"What is it?" he asked.
She hung up. "It was that guy again."
"What guy?"
"The one who says, 'Tell Jack not to forget his promise.' "
"Oh, jeez."
"What promise, honey?"
"I have no idea." But the unknown caller was making him uneasy, too. It was about the tenth time now. He shifted painfully so he could see out the window. The detectives this morning had told him a plain-clothes cop was out there watching them. Jack wondered if it was the guy dressed in blue jeans and a sweatshirt who'd been pretending to read the newspaper for the last two hours at a front table in the espresso bar across the street. He hoped so.
Fourteen
April's cell phone rang while she was in the car on her way to her parents' house in Astoria. Glad to have an excuse to ignore it, she didn't even bother to search for it in her purse. For a second or two she did worry that maybe by now Mike had guessed she wasn't at their place in Forest Hills. But it didn't have to be him; could be a lot of people calling. Woody Baum, the detective who drove for her and served as her gofer at Midtown North, would definitely be trying to reach her to report on the day she'd missed. But there was nothing she could do about it. Being mute had its advantages.
Driving back from Hastings on Hudson, April had time to think. She took the Cross Bronx Expressway, then the Whitestone Bridge to avoid getting caught in Manhattan traffic. She didn't feel guilty about visiting Kathy Bernardino without telling Mike. There were a lot of things Mike could do to influence her, but he couldn't tie her up and keep her at home. He wasn't her boss, she told herself. She still had her own mind and wouldn't give that up for anybody.
Still, she was already justifying herself, working on ways around whatever restrictions were in store for her. Back in the day when Bernardino used to hold forth, he liked to describe the difference between Asian and Western thinking this way: An American told not to cross a line in the sand would cross it anyway. But an Asian told not to cross the line would rub it out to avoid disobeying an order. April was like that. Since she would not willfully disobey an order, she'd been forming a plan ever since Mike sent her home.
Conscientious to a fault, she almost never took sick leave, and never just took a day off for fun. Fun was a foreign concept to her, an idea that flickered from time to time like a faltering lightbulb. It couldn't beam out steadily in a world where disaster too often intruded on good times. Even fun like last night's had a way of turning to tragedy without warning. Life threw its little curves, and April was schooled in an ancient culture in which bad luck was always an expected guest.