He knocked at the door again.
"Who is there?" came the voice.
"Detective Flack," he said.
"I'm not prepared for visitors," she said. "I've just bathed."
"Police business," he said.
Gladys Mycrant opened the door. She was wearing a black silk robe with colorful red and yellow flowers. Her hair was down and she wore makeup. Flack wondered if the makeup might be the tattooed kind.
"Yes?" she said, examining him and making it clear from her look that he came up short in her estimation.
"May I come in?"
"If you must."
She stepped back, hand holding her robe closed at the breast. He entered and she closed the door.
"When am I getting Patricia's body?" she said. "I want to give her a decent burial. It's awful to think of her, the way she is, in some cold police mausoleum.
"The medical examiner had to complete another examination and run some tests."
"Tests?"
She sat in an armchair, legs crossed, bouncing impatiently.
"According to the medical examiner, your daughter's body is slightly yellow."
"Jaundice. Patricia drank. I told her what it would do to her liver, what it had done to her father's liver. Detective, I have a vivid imagination that helps me in my business but hampers me in my thoughts. I'd rather not think of my daughter as she is now."
"She was being poisoned," said Flack, looking down at her.
He didn't want to sit. His back told him not to. She was watching him. He knew she would see him wince, even if it were slight, when he tried to get out of a chair.
"Poisoned?"
"Arsenic," said Flack. "The ME found it in her nails, skin."
"ME?"
"Medical examiner."
"Oh my God," she said. "Something in the water? The walls? Am I poisoned too?"
"I doubt it, but we can check. She was dying from chronic arsenic poisoning," he said. "Slow."
She was silent now, biting her lower lip, thinking.
"You have plants?"
"Plants? In the house? No."
"You do on the roof."
"Yes."
"We'll check the soil for arsenic."
"She spent too much time with those plants, tending them. I shouldn't have- "
"You told me she didn't like to go on the roof, remember?"
"Did I? Yes, that's true, but she did enjoy the plants."
"We'll check your supplies for prints. You have arsenic?"
"No," she said indignantly. "Why would I have arsenic?"
"It's used for plant care," he said. "Mind if we look at your supplies?"
"I don't- "
"Gladys," he said gently. "Enough."
Her head was down. She wept into her silk robe.
"Patricia didn't die from arsenic poisoning," she said. "She was murdered by that maniac."
"But you were killing her slowly."
She nodded.
"She hadn't changed, wasn't changing. That group was doing nothing for her. I could tell by what she said, watched, listened to, the way she looked at children on the street. Bad genes. I've always attributed it to bad genes from her father's side. Nothing you can do to help someone with bad genes."
"So you were killing her."
"Softly," she said looking up. "Very softly. She was my daughter. But I didn't kill her, did I?"
"No."
"So you can't arrest me."
"The district attorney's office says that I can. I'm calling it attempted murder for the record, but they can straighten it out when you get there."
He read her her rights and told her he would wait while she dressed and called a lawyer. Gladys got out of the chair slowly and looked at him.
"You understand, don't you? You understand why I had to do it?"
"Doesn't matter what I understand," he said, but that was a lie. It mattered to Flack. It mattered very much.
17
Three Days Later
DEXTER THE UMBRELLA MAN was now Dexter the Sunblock and Sunglasses Man. It hadn't rained in three days. He was a man who moved with the tides and the weather. He set up his table on Sixth Avenue, a block from Rockefeller Center in front of a McDonald's. Well, not right in front, but a few feet to the side.
The table folded with two quick moves and became a box with a handle. The box was filled with #45 Sol Ray Lotion whose label said it was made in Brazil, and with Protecto-Vision Sun Glasses, dark wrap-arounds with little stickers on the side that also read "Made in Brazil."
Both products, Dexter knew, were made in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Business wasn't bad.
He kept watching the sky. No clouds. If it rained, he was prepared to fold up his box and go into McDonald's and eat dollar burgers and Cokes till it passed. Dexter was not going to duck under any awnings, not again, not ever. You never knew what might come through an awning.
Waclaw Havel finished packing.
He had made it through his son's funeral, held the hands of his grandchildren, comforted his daughter-in-law and grieved with them and the friends who had shown up at the church and the grave site.
The night before they buried Alvin, Waclaw had worried that the ground would be too wet, that they would be up to their ankles in mud and water and that the coffin would be lowered into a pond.
But it had been reasonably dry. No one had mentioned what had happened to Alvin. No one would mention what Alvin had done to bring it on himself.
The children would grow up. They would find out, but maybe not until they were adults or nearly so.
Anne was going to move as soon as she sold the house, move back to Milwaukee where her parents and family lived and where she had grown up. No one from Anne's family had come to New York for the funeral. No one in Milwaukee wanted any connection to the man who had married Anne and brought shame and headlines in the New York Post.
Waclaw pushed the latch of his one suitcase and checked to see that it wasn't loose. Anne and the children were driving him to JFK. He would be back in Poland the next day. In Poland they would know nothing of Alvin's death and he planned to tell them a lie about that. Alvin will have met a terrible fate at the hands of a thwarted thief on the streets of the mythical and dangerous city.
"Ready?" asked Anne, standing in the doorway.
Waclaw nodded.
"You can stay. You don't have to leave. You understand?"
He understood. There was nowhere to stay. He would be part of the past for her, for the children. He could not go with them to Milwaukee. He didn't want to go there.
He shook his head. He was ready.
Anne had given him photographs for his wallet, photographs of the children, herself and Alvin. He smiled. He smiled because he knew what he would remember, knew the tale he would tell to his family. He would tell them of the rain. He would tell them how he had floated on his back on a river. He would tell them how he had been rescued by a wild man wearing a plastic garbage bag.
They might even believe him.
Ellen Janecek was grateful. She really was. They had stopped Keith Yunkin. They had rescued Jeffrey. The sun was shining. She was grateful, but she wasn't happy. They wouldn't let her see Jeffrey. They didn't understand. Paul Sunderland had understood. It was simple, but every time she explained it to almost anyone she was met with patient or exasperated looks that made it clear they thought she was either a criminal or a crackpot.
Mac Taylor had told her that Jeffrey and his family were moving out of New York and that there was a court order for her to stay away from them. They had given Ellen court orders before. She had ignored them. They didn't understand. She was hurting no one. There was no victim. She would find him.
Jeffrey's mother had a younger sister who headed maid services at a big hotel in St. Louis. The sister offered Jeffrey's mother a job at almost twice the pay she was now getting. An apartment was also available at half of what she was now paying. St. Louis sounded good to her.
It didn't sound good to Jeffrey. He would be half a continent away from Ellen. He would move with his mother. He would enroll in school. He would do whatever he was supposed to do, even get an after-school job. He would do it till he had enough money saved and whatever he could steal from his mother's purse to get back to New York.