“I was a talk-show host in Moline,” Lolly said. Her voice was chilly.
“Sure thing,” Corsetti said. “And if you’d stayed there, getting knocked up wouldn’t have mattered. But you didn’t stay there, and all of a sudden, getting knocked up became a pretty big deal, because you were selling some kind of true love and total feeling within the frame of marriage ragtime, and here you were, pregnant and single, and you didn’t even know who the kid’s father was.”
Bender looked bored. “Are you through, Detective?”
“What I can’t figure out is why you didn’t abort her.” Corsetti said to Lolly.
I saw Sarah flinch a little. I put my hand on her shoulder. Bender raised his hand toward Lolly, but he was too late.
“I do not believe in abortion,” she said.
Bender’s face showed nothing. “Lolly,” he said. “Silence is golden.”
She looked startled. It was probably a long time since anyone had admonished her.
“Whatever,” Corsetti said. “All of a sudden you found yourself a whizbang, and you had to do something about the kid, so you conned Markham. I don’t know if you conned him because you thought he’d be a good father...”
“He was,” Sarah said loudly.
Everyone in the room looked at her.
“I’m glad he was,” Corsetti said to Sarah, then looked back at Lolly. “Or because he was easy to con and needed money. And the rest of the whole elaborate goddamned thing with Bright Flower, to hide the payments, and then threatening Sunny and the kid when they started looking into her parentage, then murdering a couple of people who knew too much.”
“Do I hear you accusing my client of murder?” Bender said. “On no evidence at all?”
“Not yet,” Corsetti said. “But there’s evidence, and your gofer Delk will roll on you sooner or later. We got conspiracy. We got charity fraud, and we’ll get murder.”
Bender shook his head as if Corsetti was mad.
“Lewis,” Lolly said. “I want this to go away. I can set this child up with a trust fund that will make her secure for life, if that’s what it takes.”
“Two people died,” I said. “It’s not going away.”
Lolly paid me no attention. “You hear me, Lewis?” she said. “I want this stopped now.”
Bender nodded thoughtfully. “We’ll talk again, I’m sure,” he said to Corsetti.
Corsetti nodded and stood. “Only a matter of time,” he said.
Sarah and I stood with him. Corsetti paused a moment and grinned at Lolly. “Nice photos,” he said.
62
I settled into my chair across from Dr. Silverman. I had been seeing her long enough so that I now felt as if I was supposed to be there.
“I go back and forth to New York so much, I’m starting to feel like Amtrak,” I said.
Dr. Silverman nodded. She was carefully dressed and made-up, but very understated. I wondered what she looked like when she was going out to dinner. If she let it go, she’d look like something.
“We have the case about Lolly Drake almost solved,” I said.
“Almost?”
“We know what happened — we can’t quite prove everything yet.”
“But you expect to?” Dr. Silverman said.
She was equally interested in everything I said. But somehow she never let me ramble. She concentrated entirely on me for the fifty minutes I was there. She saw every movement, heard every intonation.
“It’s the old domino thing,” I said. “We have a whole bunch of freestanding hypotheses. We need one hard fact to tip the whole thing. One person to say ‘I did it.’ Or ‘She did it.’ Or ‘They did it.’ Or whatever. It’s like we have the fulcrum but we need a lever.”
Susan nodded.
“And Sarah?” she said.
“In a sense, we’ve solved her part. We know who her mother is, and we know that we will probably never know who her father is.”
“So that the questions she asked you to answer are answered or prove to be unanswerable.”
“Yes,” I said, “except, what the hell is she supposed to do now?”
Dr. Silverman tilted her head to the side a little.
“I mean, she’s twenty-one, and with my help she discovered that she’s alone.”
“And you feel responsible?”
“Not for finding out things. That’s what I do. But... on the drive back from New York, I gave her a small lecture on it. She was responsible for herself. She needs to stop smoking, stop the drugs, stop sleeping around, stop drinking too much.”
Dr. Silverman smiled.
“And was that effective?” she said.
“Of course not. She needs a shrink.”
“What you have done, which may be more effective, is to give her an image of competent adult womanhood, living alone.”
I smiled.
“And needing a shrink,” I said.
Dr. Silverman acknowledged what I said with a small single nod.
“Would you see her if she wanted to come?” I said.
“Have her call me,” Dr. Silverman said.
We were quiet. Dr. Silverman seemed perfectly comfortable with quiet.
After a while, I said, “I had a good talk with Richie the other day.”
“Really?” Dr. Silverman said. “What made it good?”
“He told me things about himself that he’d never told me when we were married.”
Dr. Silverman nodded. She was leaning forward a little in her chair, resting her chin on her fist.
“He also said he still loved me... more than his wife... and he told me it’s never over until it’s over.”
“Do you think that solves your problems?”
“I... I don’t... it made me feel thrilled and hopeful,” I said. “But I suppose it’s a little soon.”
She nodded very slightly, but I knew she thought it was a little soon, too.
“And there is the wife,” I said.
“And there is the wife,” Dr. Silverman said. “Do you think he’s changed?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I think I have.”
“How so,” Dr. Silverman said.
“Well,” I said, “I had lunch again with my father.”
“Let’s talk about that,” she said.
63
I was doing lunges up and down the length of my loft. Rosie kept a foot in front of me, looking at me over her shoulder, getting in the way, and having a nice time. The cordless phone rang. I picked it up and kept going and said, “Hello.”
“Sunny,” a man said, “this is Felix Burke.”
“Uncle Felix!” I said.
He was a pretty bad man but a pretty good uncle, and he kept his word. I kind of liked him.
“You got a cop you trust?” he said.
“Several,” I said.
“Well, bring one of them and meet me at Richie’s place at two.”
“The saloon?”
“The saloon,” Felix said, and hung up.
Through the magic of cell-phone technology, I found Brian Kelly and he agreed to pick me up at 1:30. Then Rosie and I had a late breakfast. I took a shower and put on my makeup and got dressed. I noticed I was unusually careful about which clothes I wore. Brian and I had enjoyed an interlude shortly after Richie and I had parted. Things linger.
At 1:35, Rosie and I got into Brian’s car outside my loft. I opened the passenger door, and Rosie jumped in and settled into the passenger seat. I had to pick her up and put her on my lap so that I could sit.
“I think it’s against regulations to transport animals in a City of Boston police car,” Brian said.
“Unless they are exceptionally cute,” I said.
“That would cover all three of us,” Brian said.
Richie’s place was down an alley off School Street, past the old City Hall. Brian parked the car, as illegally as was possible, up on the sidewalk past the Parker House. It was ten minutes before two.