They were the only two in the small funeral parlor chapel where Gert Longman lay in an open pine coffin. She looked smaller than she had in life. Her stiff face seemed to be fashioned from wax.
The Wyant brothers fronted him fifty-five hundred dollars for the funeral. They gave him their preferential rate of two points a week.
Leonid lingered at the casket while Twill stood to the side-half a step behind him.
Behind the pair two rows of folding chairs sat like a mute crowd of spectators. The director had set the room for a service but Leonid didn’t know if Gert was religious. Neither did he know any of her friends.
After the forty-five minutes they were allotted Twill and Leonid left the Little Italy funeral home. They came out onto I he bright sun shining on Mott Street.
“Hey, Leon,” a voice called from behind them.
Twill turned but Leonid did not.
Carson Kitteridge, dressed in a dark gold suit, walked up.
“Lieutenant. You met my son Twill.”
“Isn’t it a school day, son?” the cop asked.
“Grief leave, Officer,” Twill said easily. “Even prison lets up in cases like that.”
“What you want, Carson?” Leonid said.
He looked up over the policeman’s head. The sky was what Gert used to call blue-gorgeous. That was back in the days when they were still lovers.
“I thought that you might want to know about Mick Bright.”
“Who?”
“We got an anonymous call five days ago,” Carson said. “It was about a disturbance in an apartment building on the Upper East Side.”
“Yeah?”
“When the officers got there they found a dead girl named Lana Parsons and this Mick Bright-also dead.”
“Who killed ‘em?” Leonid asked, measuring his breath.
“Looks like a rape and robbery. The kid was an addict. He knew the girl from the Performing Arts high school.”
“But you said that he was dead too?”
“I did, didn’t I? Best the detectives could tell the kid was high and fell on his own gun. It went off and nicked his heart.”
While saying this Carson stared deeply into McGill’s eyes.
Twill glanced at his father and then looked away.
“Stranger things have happened,” Leonid said.
Leonid had long since realized that Lana found the pistol in her mother’s metal box too. He knew why she’d killed Gert and had Bright kill her. She wanted to hurt him and then send him off to prison like he’d done to her father.
It was as good a frame as he would have thought up himself. The lawyer would make the letters available to the cops. Once they suspected Leonid they’d match his semen inside her. She would expect him to have kept the expensive jewelry. Robbery, rape, and murder and he would have been as innocent as Joe Haller.
I’d die for him, she’d said. She was talking about her father.
“I been knowing about the case for days,” Kitteridge said. “The girl’s name stuck in my head and then I remembered. Lana Parsons was the daughter of Nora Parsons. You ever hear of her?”
“Yeah. I brought her information about her husband. She was considering a divorce.”
“That’s right,” Kitteridge said. “But he wasn’t fooling around. He was embezzling money from their own company. They sent him to jail on the dirt you dug up.”
“Yeah.”
“He died in prison, didn’t he?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
Leonid burned the letters Lana had intended to incriminate him.
His work for Lana’s mother had driven the girl to murder and suicide. For a while he considered sending the photograph of Richard and his girlfriend to Lana’s mother. At least he could accomplish one thing that she intended to do. But he decided against it. Why hurt Nora when he was just as guilty?
He kept the picture, though, in the top drawer of his desk.
The shot of Richard with his hand up under the receptionist’s red dress, out on Park Avenue after a spicy Brazilian feast. Next to that he had placed an item from the New York Post. It was a thumbnail article about a prisoner on Ryker’s Island named Joe Haller. He’d been arrested for robbery. While waiting to stand trial he hung himself in his cell.
DEAR PENTHOUSE FORUM (A FIRST DRAFT) by LAURA LIPPMAN
You won’t believe this, but this really did happen to me just last fall, and all because I was five minutes late, which seemed like a tragedy at the time. “It’s only five minutes,” that’s what I kept telling the woman behind the counter, who couldn’t be bothered to raise her gaze from her computer screen and make eye contact with me. Which is too bad, because I don’t need much to be charming, but I need something to work with. Why did they make so many keystrokes, anyway, these ticket clerks? What’s in the computer that makes them frown so? I had the printout for my E-ticket, and I kept shoving it across the counter, and she kept pushing it back to me with the tip of a pen, the way I used to do with my roommate Bruce’s dirty underwear, when we were in college. I’d round it up with a hockey stick and stash it in the corner, just to make a pathway through our dorm room. Bruce was a Goddamn slob. “I’m sorry,” she said, stabbing that one key over and over. “There’s just nothing I can do for you tonight.”
“But I had a reservation. Andrew Sickert. Don’t you have it?”
“Yes,” she said, hissing the “s” in a wet, whistling way, like a middle-school girl with new braces. God, how did older men do it? I just can’t see it, especially if it really is harder to get it up as you get older, not that I can see that either. But if it does get more difficult, wouldn’t you need a better visual?
“I bought that ticket three weeks ago.” Actually, it was two, but I was seeking any advantage, desperate to get on that plane.
“It says on your printout that it’s not guaranteed if you’re not at the gate thirty minutes ahead of departure.” Her voice was oh-so-bored, the tone of a person who’s just loving your pain. “We had an overbooked flight earlier in the evening and a dozen people were on the standby list. When you didn’t check in by 9:25, we gave your seat away.”
“But it’s only 9:40 now and I don’t have luggage. I could make it, if the security line isn’t too long. Even if it’s the last gate, I’d make it. I just have to get on that flight. I have… I have…” I could almost feel my imagination trying to stretch itself, jumping around inside my head, looking for something this woman would find worthy. “I have a wedding.”
“You’re getting married?”
“No!” She frowned at the reflexive shrillness in my voice. “I mean, no, of course not. If it were my wedding, I’d be there, like, a week ago. It’s my, uh, brother’s. I’m the best man.”
The “uh” was unfortunate. “Is the wedding in Providence?”
“ Boston, but it’s easier to fly into Providence than Logan.”
“And it’s tomorrow, Friday?”
Shit, no one got married on Friday night. Even I knew that. “No, but there’s the rehearsal dinner, and, you know, all that stuff.”
More clicks. “I can get you on the 7:00 a.m. flight if you promise to check in ninety minutes ahead of time. You’ll be in Providence by 8:30. I have to think that’s plenty of time. For the rehearsal and stuff. By the way, that flight is thirty-five dollars more.”
“Okay,” I said, pulling out a Visa card that was dangerously close to being maxed out, but I was reluctant to give up my cash, which I would need in abundance Friday night. “I guess that’s enough time.”
And now I had nothing but time to spend in the dullest airport, Baltimore-Washington International, in the dullest suburb, Linthicum, on the whole Eastern Seaboard. Going home was not an option. Light Rail had stopped running, and I couldn’t afford the thirty-dollar cab fare back to North Baltimore. Besides, I had to be in line at 5:30 a.m. to guarantee my seat, and that meant getting up at four. If I stayed here, at least I couldn’t miss my flight.