“Documentation?” The woman was staring at her as if she were speaking in a foreign tongue.
“Yes. Visits to the emergency room or private doctors. Calls to the police. Any witnesses to the violence. . I’m sorry, you find this amusing?”
The woman brought her giggling under control. Definitely pills, thought Marlene. “No, I’m sorry, really. I realize I must seem crazy to you. But. . no, there’s no witnesses. No documentation. And that’s not why. . whew!” Fein took several deep breaths. “We got off on the wrong foot, Ms. Ciampi. I don’t want you to pursue my husband in any way. I want to hire you for something else altogether.”
Marlene cocked her head, the attitude of disbelief, and also, in her particular case, the way in which she focused attention with her one good eye. “Excuse me. It’s a reasonable assumption. This is a battered women’s shelter you’re in.”
“Yes, and I do need protection, and I’m incredibly grateful for it, but this is something I have to do, and I can’t do it from home. My husband would not approve, and he’s an extremely watchful and suspicious man.”
“Uh-huh. And what is it you want to hire me to do?”
“I want you to investigate the death of my father, Gerald Fein. He was a lawyer. He supposedly committed suicide in 1960.”
“And you think there’s something suspicious about his death, that it wasn’t a suicide? How did he die?”
A bleak smile. “I see you’re not a New Yorker.”
“But I am, born and raised. You mean you think I should recall a suicide twenty-odd years ago, of a-” Marlene clapped her hand to her mouth. “Oh, shit! You don’t mean Jumping Jerry was. . Oh, Christ, I’m sorry, that was crude of me.”
“Oh, please, we’re used to it. Well, I don’t think you ever get used to it, but you learn to live with it. You must have jumped rope to the, whatever, the rhyme, if you were a city kid.”
“I was a little old. My younger sister did, though. It must have been unbelievably bad for you.”
“Yes. We loved him very much. And we thought he loved us.”
Marlene did not know what to say to this, and she did not particularly want to learn. The story now percolated back up from deep storage from where it had lain alongside Brooklyn Dodgers team rosters and the Ozone Park rules for ring-a-levio. And jump-rope rhymes, of course. Gerald Fein had gone to his office building one day and instead of getting off at the 57th floor, where his firm had its suite, he had traveled up to the observation deck, where he had somehow gotten past the barrier and, achieving the actual parapet, had walked into space, thus becoming the last man to jump successfully from the Empire State Building. After some moments of uncomfortable silence Marlene said, “Ah, Ms. Fein, regarding this investigation-I don’t, that is, in my connection with the shelter, I don’t do investigations, except for things like locating a spouse for child-support payment. But my firm, the Osborne Group, has an investigations division. I could put you in touch with them.”
The woman was shaking her head. “No, I want you to do it.”
“I’m sorry, Ms. Fein, but I don’t have the time or the resources to handle a serious investigation into something that happened twenty-three years ago. Osborne does, and I ought to tell you now that if they take the case it’s going to cost you. And, not to be harsh, but you don’t look like you have a whole lot of bucks at your disposal.”
“I can pay!” the woman cried. Moving like a frightened bird, she darted her hand under the pillow of the narrow bed and snatched out a crumpled paper bag, which rattled as she brought it to her lap, and reached in. Light flashed in her hand.
“That’s real, I presume,” said Marlene, who could not help a thick swallow at what she saw.
“Oh, yeah, it’s real. One thing about Sa-my husband, he only buys the best stones. This is a six-and-a-half carat D color VVS2 quality stone in platinum. It’s worth at least a hundred forty grand.”
There was something about the way this statement popped out of Vivian Fein’s lush little mouth that raised for Marlene the notion that perhaps the deserted hubby was not one of society’s ornaments, though filthy rich, that perhaps Ms. Fein (and what was her married name, after all?) had spent some time around the hard boys. Come to that, Marlene thought further, wasn’t old Jumping Jerry mobbed up in some way? Another reason to avoid additional involvement. She stood up again and pulled her eye away from the fabulous glitter of the ring.
“You want to put that in a safe, Ms. Fein. Some of the ladies here are fairly hard types. I’ll have someone from our investigations division give you a ring. A call, I mean.”
“Take it!” said the woman. “You have to, you have to. .” She leaped up and grabbed Marlene’s sleeve, and tried to press the diamond into the pockets of Marlene’s shirt. They shuffled around the floor for a while like a pair of folk dancers from a particularly ungraceful folk, and Marlene thought, absurdly, of her tiny grandmother trying to press packets of leftovers on recalcitrant relatives, both of them doing the same sort of dance. Vivian was again weeping, Marlene saying, “Please. . excuse me. . please,” and wondering whether she would have to get rough to make her escape, when a long, full-throated scream sounded in the hallway outside.
Vivian froze. All the pink drained from her face, and her eyes showed white all around their blue centers. From outside another yell and the sound of cursing and shrill cries. Vivian jumped back from Marlene and, with crazed stupidity, looked around for somewhere to hide in the tiny cell. In a hoarse, high-pitched whisper she said, “Oh, shit, oh God, oh shit. . it’s him, oh, shit, oh, God. .”
“Stay here,” Marlene commanded inanely, pulled her pistol from its holster, and stepped out of the room. At the end of the narrow hallway a small crowd of women and kids had formed a yelling circle around what was obviously a fight. Marlene crouched down and looked between the legs of the spectators. As she had expected, one of the combatants, the one on the bottom, getting creamed by a hefty brown woman, was Brenda Nero. Marlene replaced her pistol. Heavy treads on the stairway and here came Mattie Duran at the trot, darkness on her brow. The spectators scattered before her as she pierced the circle and grabbed a handful of each combatant, heaving them to their feet and holding them apart like a pair of squabbling puppies.
“What the hell is going on here?” she yelled.
Marlene heard a familiar voice wail, “I didn’t do anything!” Brenda’s old refrain. Brenda never did anything, yet where she dwelt chaos reigned. On her last unlamented visit to the shelter she had, among other stunts, spilled a bottle of nail polish (borrowed without asking, of course) and wiped it up with “an old rag” that proved to be her roommate’s baby’s baptismal dress, the last pathetic remnant of the poor woman’s lost respectability. Marlene imagined it was something like that this time, too, or a remark at just the wrong moment, or a secret casually revealed. What her life with Chester Durrell was like, Marlene could barely imagine, yet she was prepared to talk to Chester about keeping his temper and not going with the fists. In fact, she had to admit, she would rather deal with Chester than with Brenda. Let Mattie deal with Brenda.
As for Vivian Fein, Marlene suspected that her case made Brenda and Chester look like Ozzie and Harriet. Not interested, was Marlene’s thought, not even in why Vivian Fein So-and-So had decided to split from an abusive man at just that time and look into her father’s long-ago death, and she took the opportunity to slip-slide away, down the stairs and out of the shelter, into a nice, warm, smelly New York purple evening. But of course, now she couldn’t get the damn skipping rhyme out of her head.
Jumping Jerry jump so high
Really thought that he could fly