She glanced up at Anna Lia’s balcony and gasped. The sliding glass door had shattered. The wooden railing was splintered and charred; the door to the utility closet, at one end of the balcony, had fallen off its hinges. Libbie noticed Anna Lia’s hibachi, her tiny red smoker, and a black wrought-iron chair on its side.
Carla leaped from the van in Danny’s direction, but a skinny cop stopped her at the tape-line. Libbie walked slowly past the camera crews, her eyes on the balcony. She expected Anna Lia to appear any minute and shout, “Just a joke, guys! You can all go home now!”
Danny ducked beneath the tape, hugged Carla, then Libbie. “They’ve already made up their minds!” he said. He jerked his thumb at the cops. “I don’t believe it.”
Carla held his arm. “Tell us, Danny. What’s happened?”
“They’re saying she killed herself.”
“She’s dead?” Libbie said. She’d refused the word till now, though she’d felt the fact of it when she saw the balcony.
“Blew herself up. Making a bomb.” Danny stabbed a finger at the man with dark hair. “I told them,” he said. “I told them this asshole’s their culprit, but they got no fucking ears.”
The man, who by now had been joined in the doorway of his apartment by a guy who looked just like him — only older — turned back inside. His knee didn’t bend when he walked.
The uniformed cops tried to shove Libbie and Carla back across the tape-line. Carla screamed, “We’re her friends!” Tears sprayed in all directions when she shook her head.
The policemen told them to stand by. “We may need you for a statement,” one said. As soon as the cops walked away, the reporters approached in a cramped, sweating bunch like a basketball team. “Did you say you were friends of the dead woman?” a short man asked. He wore a striped cotton shirt. “Was she a Communist? Were you all in some kind of group together? What were you planning to do with the explosives?”
“What?” Libbie’s eyes hurt — volcanic cinders. “What are you talking about?”
“The police captain says she’s a foreigner. A foreign Communist. Where was she from?”
“Eye-talian, I heard,” another reporter said.
Libbie blinked hard. “I don’t — I don’t have — ”
“No comment,” Carla shouted. Her voice was husky. She blew her nose into a flowering wad of Kleenex and shouldered past the newsmen. Libbie followed her, then sat on the gravelly bottom step of the stairs to Anna Lia’s apartment. She wondered where the body was. Still up there? She didn’t see an ambulance or anyone she’d recognize as a coroner from all the TV crime shows she’d seen.
Though the sun kept sliding in and out of the haze in the air, the morning was already steaming. The clouds were grouped like the dinosaur ribs she and Hugh had seen once in a natural history museum: thick, smooth, lightly curled at the ends, mightier than anything you’d care to lift.
She closed her eyes. The crowd’s voices looped around her, a mad swirl like an old sixties drug tune: Sgt. Pepper-ish. At one point, a cop asked her name. She had to repeat it. “Schwinn,” she said. “Libbie Schwinn. Like the bicycle.”
He said he’d get back to her. Then Carla was sitting beside her. “Listen, Danny can’t handle all this.”
“Have they told you anything?” Libbie asked.
“No. They’re giving us one story and the press something else — ”
“Why?”
Carla shrugged. “Danny wants us to stay with him tonight.”
“Where?”
“In his apartment. He’s in no shape to go anywhere, and he says he can’t be alone. What do you say? I’d feel better if you were with me.
Libbie rubbed her face. She felt filthy in all this grime. What had she planned to do today after school? Run by the caterer’s. Right. And visit the florist. That silly little flower man had already screwed up twice. What else? She’d have to call Hugh —
“Sure,” she said.
“All right.” Carla squeezed her arm. “Wait here. I’m going to phone my sis and tell her where I’ll be.”
Libbie studied the balcony. It didn’t look solid — more like a prop.
She tried to cry but couldn’t.
Anna Lia wasn’t her first friend to die. Jenny Morgan and Lisa Turner had both been killed in car wrecks when Libbie was in the eighth grade. In high school, Tom Snipes, whom she’d dated once or twice, died of a heroin overdose. Brain cancer claimed Emily Dawes, her best buddy in grad school, a brilliant premed from the heart of the Big Thicket with her love of cats and the children she wanted to cure.
Libbie’s folks worried her, too — diabetic, both of them, plagued by ulcers, arthritis, high blood pressure — but they managed, somehow, in that little two-bedroom they’d bought in the fifties soon after their wedding. Each day they fell into a yelling match (“My aches are worse than yours, you’d think you could do this one little thing for me, a glass of water, that’s all I ask, is that too much after forty-five years, a glass of water with a little bourbon in it, maybe, and some ice while you’re at it”). Now, Libbie believed they’d survive even her, outgrieving each other by her graveside.
She’d never reconciled herself to losing her friends, especially Emily, sweet Emily, but at least she understood their passing. Accidents, drugs, tumors, a cranky old age — these were the things people died of.
But blowing yourself up? In your own apartment? No one died that way. No one you knew, anyway. Mafia men, maybe. Terrorists. B-movie actors. But not Anna Lia.
As afternoon hushed into evening — receding traffic, birds feeding in trees, the soothing chrrr of faraway crickets — the crowd at the Continental Arms thinned out. The newspeople went home. The ash in the air cleared, but it was replaced by mosquito spray from the city’s sanitation trucks.
Libbie spent three hours, off and on, telling a young, pimpled cop how she’d come to know the woman he insisted on calling the “victim,” what she knew about Anna Lia’s marriage and affairs.
The cop shuffled through papers stapled loosely inside a manila folder. “She a Communist?” he asked Libbie.
She was exhausted; the question irritated her. “Absolutely not.”
“Right here.” The officer tapped the folder. “Communist Youth League.”
“Every kid in Italy joins the Communist Youth League,” Libbie said. “It’s like the Girl Scouts. It doesn’t mean anything. Anna Lia was the most apolitical person I’ve ever known, and if you’re going to stamp her as some kind of spy — ”
“Ms. Schwinn.” The young man waved his hand. “I’m just trying to establish — ”
“You better get your facts straight, that’s all I’m saying.”
“You know any Girl Scouts ever make a bomb?” He smirked.
Libbie stood. Most of the afternoon, she’d sat on the concrete steps beneath Anna Lia’s balcony. A few yards away, on another set of steps, Danny was being questioned, and beyond him, Carla spoke to two other detectives.
Libbie overheard Danny tell a uniformed policeman how, last year, he’d saved enough overtime to secure a loan for the record store, Discomundo, which specialized in Latin music. It had been Anna Lia’s dream to run a place like that.
Yes, Danny said, he supposed that’s where she’d met Roberto Capriati. He must have come in looking for the latest hits. Danny didn’t know. That’s right, he’d continued to support her after their separation. He was paying her rent. “It’s not like we’d stopped speaking to each other,” Danny said. “I mean, we both lived right here. I saw her pretty often. I was still attached to her.”