"You? Mellow?"
"It could happen."
"Never!"
He returned her smile. "I hope you're right. But in the meantime, what say we hit Broadway this weekend?"
"A play?"
"Sure! Best seats in the house. Our penny-pinching days are over." A new cut began on the Nyro album. "Hear that? That's us. We're gettin' off the Poverty Train. You've got the section there. Pick a play, any play, and we'll go."
Carol thumbed to the front. She saw ads for I Never Sang for My Father, How Now Dow Jones, You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, none of which much appealed to her. Then she came to a full-page ad quoting rave reviews for Neil Simon's latest.
"Let's see Plaza Suite."
"You got it. I'll call a ticket agent and see if he can dig us up a couple of good seats—price no object."
Carol hesitated. "Do you think we could make it a matinee?"
"I guess so. Why?"
"Well, after last week…"
"Sure," Jim said with a reassuring smile. "We'll be out of the city by dark. We'll drive back here and have dinner at Memison's. How's that sound?"
"Absolutely wonderful!"
In a burst of warmth for Jim, she opened her arms and he fell into them. She wanted to make love to him right here and now in this big old chair. She kissed him, trailing her hand into the tangle of one of his sideburns. He pulled away for a second to place the journal he had been reading on the table beside the chair. That was when Carol noticed the writing along its bottom edge.
"What do those mean?" she said, pointing.
Jim picked up the book again. "Never noticed them."
He held it closer. A series of numbers and letters had been printed in a line:
33R—21L—47R—16L.
"My God, Carol!" he said, leaping from the seat. "That's a safe combination! And it's written on the bottom of the 1938 journal, the one right before the gap! Got to be to the safe upstairs!"
Carol was filled with a sudden foreboding. She grabbed at Jim's arm.
"Why don't we leave it locked?" Jim's expression was frankly puzzled. "Why?"
"Because if Hanley—your father—locked it away so securely, maybe it should stay that way. Maybe there's stuff in there he didn't want anyone to know, stuff he would have destroyed if he'd known he was going to die."
"Whatever's in that safe is the truth. And I've got to know the truth—about who my mother is, or was; and about my father's relationship with her."
"What difference does that make? It's not going to change who you are!"
"I need my past, Carol. I've got the Hanley half. Now I need the rest—my mother's side. This Jazzy Cordeau he mentions may be her. But no matter what Becker digs up on her, I'll only be guessing as to whether she's the one. But I've got a strong feeling that after we open that safe, I'll know."
Carol hugged him against her. "I just hope you don't regret it. I don't want you hurt."
"I can handle it. I don't know what Hanley's hiding. The truth may not be pretty, but it's got to come out of that safe." He smiled. "What's that they say, 'The truth will set you free'? That's the way I feel about what's in that safe. Besides, how bad can it be?"
He stood up and held out his hand to her.
"Come on. Let's open it together."
Carol felt her queasiness double as she rose and followed him upstairs.
3
It took Becker most of the early afternoon to track down anything on the Jasmine Cordeau murder. After all, as the cops told him time and again until he was sick of hearing it, the case was nearly twenty years old.
Yeah, so what? he wanted to shout.
But he kept his cool, kept smiling in their faces. After all, his press card could only take him so far, especially with his long hair and all. Longhairs tended to call cops pigs, and cops didn't take too kindly to that.
A desk cop took him to the basement and pointed to a jumble of filing cabinets and told him that if the file on that old murder was still around—and no one was saying it was—it would be in one of those.
Maybe.
More scut work.
Gerry had spent the morning in the New York Public Library's periodical section, spinning through an endless stream of microfilmed pages, scanning the obits and local news, determined to find Jazzy Cordeau.
Because Jazzy Cordeau was Jim Stevens's mother.
No doubt about it. Something deep inside Becker was as sure of that as he was sure of his own name. And that wasn't all. The journal's casual mention of her "pitiful attempt at blackmail" left little doubt that there was something ugly between Hanley and the Cordeau broad. Something juicy.
But what?
That was what made this search so intriguing, what had kept his burning eyes fixed on the screen all morning, fighting vertigo as the pages whirred by.
Finally he had found it, buried in the lower right-hand corner of the October 14 late edition, a single paragraph:
WOMAN STABBED IN MIDTOWN ALLEY
THE BODY OF A YOUNG WOMAN, WHO WAS LATER IDENTIFIED AS ONE JASMINE CORDEAU, WAS DISCOVERED IN AN ALLEY OFF FORTIETH STREET BETWEEN EIGHTH AND NINTH AVENUES EARLY THIS MORNING. SHE DIED OF MULTIPLE STAB WOUNDS. HER PURSE WAS MISSING.
That was it! Jasmine—Jazzy—it had to be!
Excitement still quivered through him. Stabbed to death. Why had she been killed? To shut her up? To put an end to another "pitiful attempt at blackmail?"
He rubbed his sweaty hands together as he approached the filing cabinets. Despite the drudgery ahead, the thrill of the hunt began to work its spell on him. This was going to be good!. There was something really rotten here. Even twenty years later he could still catch a whiff of the stink.
After two hours of bending and kneeling and pulling and sifting until his hands were filthy and his back was killing him, Becker found a single sheet on Jazzy Cordeau. And that was by accident. It was folded between two other files, as if it had dropped there by accident.
He held it up to the naked bulb hanging from the ceiling and cursed after he read it. This was no damn good! It was a summary face sheet from the coroner's report, saying Jasmine Cordeau had died from a deep laceration to the left carotid artery and multiple stab wounds to the anterior chest causing lacerations to the anterior wall of the myocardium.
So? She'd had her throat cut and was stabbed in the heart. That didn't tell him anything new, other than the fact that someone seemed to have wanted Jim Stevens's mother dead real bad. Who? That was what he wanted to know. Who was Jazzy Cordeau, and who had killed her?
He took the face sheet up to the Records Department. The sergeant there wasn't too surprised that the file couldn't be found. He took one look at the sheet and grunted.
"When'd y'say dis happened?"
"October 14, 1949. On West Fortieth."
"Kelly might be able to help yiz. Used to walk dat beat."
"And where do I find this Kelly?" Becker said.
"Dat's Sergeant Kelly. Right here. He's on d'next shift. Be here'n a coupla minutes."
Becker took a seat and wondered what kind of cop was walking a beat twenty years ago and was now only a sergeant in the Records Department. When the balding, overweight Kelly finally strolled in, Becker got a pretty good idea why: The whole department was suddenly redolent of cheap Scotch.
He gave the shifts a chance to change, gave Sergeant Kelly a chance to settle in, then approached him. He showed him his press card and the coroner's face sheet.
"I was told you might be able to help me find the rest of this file."