I had to sit through a bunch of testimony for the defense before my turn came up. Seems the guy had beaten up a woman who was an ex-client, and there was an ex-wife who had some gruesome stories. Locked her in a closet while he beat the kid. Public humiliation, rape, we got to hear it all. And a chorus line of doctors attesting to the multifarious wounds of the defendant. It didn’t make me want to get up and go to work the next day either.
So it was open and shut. With him coming down the stairs at her like that, imminence wasn’t even a remote improbability. But that’s not why I didn’t want to remember that night. It was the paramedic who strolled up the driveway, hung out waiting for the photographer, and pretty much ignored me, walking right past me like I was a tree. I got her out of earshot, when she was busy inspecting her manicure, and said, “Hi, remember me? The one you had an affair with last week.”
“Yeah.” She looked up, and some kind of recognition played across her face. “Oh yeah,” she said. “I was there.”
Sometimes her social skills weren’t too good either.
Do I have any regrets? No. Well, maybe only one. I was a bit hasty in organizing our victory lunch. Lee, your ex-wife, was there, and Rachel, the girl friend (she’s not only going to get her jaw fixed, she’s going for a facelift, and a Ph.D. in media studies). Lee and I always wanted to learn Italian, so we’ll buy a villa on Capri (we chose one already, through an estate agent). You see, what we didn’t count on was that “accidental death” clause that includes self-defense and awards a double policy. We’ve well endowed every charity that remotely tugged on our heartstrings.
I was a bit worried about being hasty with the luncheon. After all, we were supposed to have set eyes on each other only in court. And there we were, chatting away like old friends (after all, they’d seen me through bruises, and beatings, fixed me up-and sent me back). We were drinking champagne, high on the knowledge of total financial security for life, jubilant that we’d done it ourselves (we’d never had a conflict about the split either) when I saw her. That police officer, She was behind a pillar, lunching, in fact, with the sour-faced paramedic that had scooped up the gray matter around your head. I did something I’d never done before. I looked her straight in the eye and raised my champagne glass to her. She spotted me and her eyes swept with mounting recognition across the faces of my luncheon companions. I saw her process the whole thing; she seemed to freeze. But then slowly she turned her back (the whole time I was thinking about my research, double indemnity, double jeopardy, and insurance companies that are not mandated to recollect), and as she turned around I saw what was in her hand. A champagne glass, and she raised it toward me.
THE CUTTING EDGE by Marilyn Wallace
The cases of police detectives Carlos Cruz and Jay Goldstein have entertained readers for several years, and such excellent novels as A Single Stone, A Case of Loyalties, and Primary Target are among the best books of their type. The last-named combines an excellent puzzle with strong political commentary. In addition, MARILYN WALLACE is the editor of the very successful Sisters in Crime series of anthologies. Ms. Wallace resides in San Anselmo, California.
If I weren’t Rico’s mother and if I didn’t live 3,000 miles away, I probably would have reacted differently to Catherine’s two-sentence note, and to the invitation. Someone slipped this under the gallery door. What do you make of it? her curlicued scrawl asked.
The note was paper-clipped to an invitation to the opening of Porterfield’s, her new art gallery on West 51st Street. Thursday, December 4. Seven to nine P.M. Meet the artists, etc. I was familiar with the text not only because Rico was one of the artists but because my New York office, Happenings East, was coordinating the event.
It wasn’t until I turned the invitation over to look at the image on the other side, a montage portrait of the three artists each standing in front of one of their paintings, that I noticed a gash running from the right edge in toward the center of the card. It cut right across the picture of Rico. The edge of the cut appeared to be smeared with dried blood.
Dried blood? Surely I was imagining that.
Like my attempts to persuade him to finish his undergraduate studies, any implied threat would only make Rico-full of promise, so damned stubborn-more determined to pursue painting. My shudder of fear was his frisson of excitement. So what else was new?
I showed the card to David. After twenty-five years of marriage, we still count on each other to put a new spin on things. He held it close to the light, touched his finger to the cut.
“Why don’t you call Rico and see what he thinks? I’d guess it’s probably just a tear, a coffee stain, nothing to get worked up about.” He kissed my cheek; he seemed more concerned about my worrying than he was about Catherine’s note.
I granted the possibility that someone had slipped the note under the gallery door, that it had caught on a splinter, that perhaps coffee or something-wine, paint-had been spilled on it. But my anxiety level continued to rise as I dialed Rico’s number and listened to the phone ring and ring, unanswered.
I’ve never been very good at waiting and that seemed to be all I could do: wait for Rico to answer the phone, wait for Thursday when David and I were scheduled to fly to New York for the opening. David was just starting a four-night piano gig at Yoshi’s and couldn’t get away earlier.
By nine o’clock, despite David’s calm assurances, I had convinced myself that my New York staff needed my help. After all, the final mailing had to be done, the wine and hors d’oeuvres ordered, the work hung. I turned over the details of the California events to my Happenings West staff and bought a night-flight ticket from SFO to JFK.
I sat by the window, watching for those staccato glitters of light that are the small towns of nocturnal America. I tried to occupy my mind with one of Monk’s atonal melody lines that resolves itself three bars later than I always expect it to, and with keeping the plane in the air by the strength of my will.
After a while, convinced that the plane would be fine on its own, my mind was free to tend to other things. I thought about my friend Catherine. After struggling for twenty years to gain critical or commercial recognition for her own paintings, she had given up. A mother for the first time at forty-two, she spent a year at home with Michael before she decided that if she couldn’t paint, at least she would make a place for herself in the art world and open a gallery.
Images of Rico kept intruding. I remembered the moment I first held him and looked at his red, wrinkled fade and knew that my most difficult task as the mother of this miracle would be to learn how to let him go. I pictured his delight when he uncurled his fingers from mine and took three steps on his own. I recalled the pained confusion when he found out that two of his seventh-grade friends forgot to ask him to go to the movies with them.
Somewhere over Nebraska, I demoted the torn invitation to a prank perpetrated by some bored art-scene crisis junkie. No one would want to hurt Rico-why should they? I put on the earphones and let the jazz channel distract me the rest of the way across the continent.
The gray mist that hung over the city welcomed me home, the light so familiar that I wanted to embrace it. I headed for the first cab in the long yellow line and got in. Murray Feldman, number 3905467, nodded when I gave him Catherine’s Brooklyn address. I needed to hear what she thought before I laid my mother-worries on Rico. The cab careened into the Kennedy exit maze.
“Take the Van Wyck to Atlantic Avenue,” I said.
Murray grumbled and pulled into the proper lane and I closed my eyes, happy to be cm the ground.