“Just friends’ confidences,” I said.
“Low blow.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“And unfair. I was trying to help you.”
“Okay, I’m sorry. What’s up with the NYPD?”
She gave me a second or two to stew. “The NYPD believe that Natalie Avery witnessed a murder-that she, in fact, saw the killer and can positively identify him. The NYPD further believe that the perp is a major figure in organized crime. In short, your Natalie has the ability to put away one of the leading mob figures in New York City.”
I waited for her to say more. She didn’t.
“What else?” I asked.
“That’s all I can tell you.”
I shook my head. “You must think I’m an idiot.”
“What?”
“The NYPD questioned me. They showed me a surveillance video and said that they needed to talk to her. I knew all that already. More to the point, you knew that I knew that already. A show of good faith. Come off it. You’re hoping to gain my confidence by telling me what I already knew.”
“That’s not true.”
“Who’s the murder victim?”
“I’m not at liberty-”
“Archer Minor, son of Maxwell Minor. The police believe that Maxwell put out the hit on his own kid.”
She looked stunned. “How did you know that?”
“It wasn’t hard to figure out. Tell me one thing.”
Shanta shook her head. “I can’t.”
“You still owe me the show of good faith, right? Does the NYPD know why Natalie was there that night? Just tell me that.”
Her eyes moved back to the swing set. Mackenzie was off the rocking horse and heading up toward the slide. “They don’t know.”
“No idea?”
“The NYPD went through the Lock-Horne Building’s security footage. It is pretty state-of-the-art. The first video they got was of your girlfriend running down the corridor on the twenty-second floor. There was also footage of her on the elevator, but the clearest shot-the one they showed you-was when she was exiting out the lobby on the ground floor.”
“Any video of the killer?”
“I can’t tell you more.”
“I would say, ‘can’t or won’t,’ but that’s such a hoary cliché.”
She frowned. I thought that she was frowning at what I said, but I could see that wasn’t it. Mackenzie was standing on top of the sliding board. “Mackenzie, that’s dangerous.”
“I do it all the time,” the girl retorted.
“I don’t care what you do all the time. Please sit down and slide.”
She sat down. She didn’t slide.
“The bank robbery?” I asked.
Shanta shook her head-again this action was not directed at what I had said, but at the stubborn girl at the top of the sliding board. “Have you heard anything about the rash of bank robberies in the New York area?”
I recalled a few articles I’d read. “The banks get hit at night when they’re closed. The media calls the robbers the Invisibles or something.”
“Right.”
“What does Natalie have to do with them?”
“Her name came up in connection with one of the robberies-specifically the one on Canal Street in downtown Manhattan two weeks ago. It had been considered to be safer than Fort Knox. The thieves got twelve thousand in cash and busted open four hundred safety-deposit boxes.”
“Twelve thousand doesn’t sound like a ton.”
“It’s not. Despite what you see in the movies, banks don’t store millions of dollars in vaults. But those safety-deposit boxes could be worth a fortune. That’s where these guys are cleaning up. When my grandmother died, my mother put her four-carat diamond ring in a safety-deposit box to give me one day. That ring is probably worth forty grand alone. Who knows how much stuff is there? The insurance claim for one of their earlier robberies was three-point-seven million. Of course people lie. All of a sudden some expensive family heirloom happened to be in the box. But you see my point.”
I saw her point. I didn’t much care about it. “And Natalie’s name came up with respect to this Canal Street robbery.”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“In a very, very small way.” Shanta put her index finger and thumb half an inch apart to indicate how small. “Almost meaningless, really. It wouldn’t be anything to care about on its own.”
“But you do care.”
“Now I do, yes.”
“Why?”
“Because so much of what’s surrounding your true love makes no sense anymore.”
I couldn’t argue with that.
“So what do you make of that?” she asked.
“Make of what? I don’t know what to say here. I don’t even know where Natalie is, much less how she might be connected in a very, very small way to a bank robbery.”
“That’s my point. I didn’t think it mattered either, until I started looking up the other name you mentioned. Todd Sanderson.”
“I didn’t ask you to look him up.”
“Yeah, but I did anyway. Got two hits on him too. Naturally the big hit surrounded the fact that he was murdered a week ago.”
“Wait, Todd is also linked to this same bank robbery?”
“Yes. Did you ever read Oscar Wilde?”
I made a face. “Yes.”
“He has a wonderful quote: ‘To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.’”
“From The Importance of Being Earnest,” I said because I am an academic and can’t help myself.
“Right. One of the people you asked about comes up in a bank robbery? That’s nothing to get excited about. But two? That’s not a coincidence.”
And, I thought, a week or so after the bank robbery, Todd Sanderson was murdered.
“So was Todd’s connection to the bank robbery also very, very small?” I asked.
“No. It was just small, I’d say.”
“What was it?”
“Mackenzie!”
I turned toward the scream and saw a woman who looked a bit too much like Shanta Newlin for my taste. Same height, same relative weight, same hairstyle. The woman had her eyes wide open as though a plane had suddenly crashed in the backyard. I followed her gaze. Mackenzie was back standing on the slide.
Shanta was mortified. “I’m so sorry, Candace. I told her to sit down.”
“You told her?” Candace repeated incredulously.
“I’m sorry. I was watching her. I was just talking to a friend.”
“And that’s an excuse?”
Mackenzie, with a smile that said, My work is done here, sat, slid down the slide, and ran toward Candace. “Hi, Mommy.”
Mommy. No surprise there.
“Let me show you out,” Shanta tried.
“We’re already out,” Candace said. “We can just go around the front.”
“Wait, Mackenzie drew the nicest picture. It’s inside. I bet she’ll want to take it home.”
Candace and Mackenzie were already heading toward the front of the house. “I have hundreds of my daughter’s drawings,” Candace called back. “Keep it.”
Shanta watched them both disappear into the front yard. Her normal military posture was gone. “What the hell am I doing, Jake?”
“Trying,” I said. “Living.”
She shook her head. “This will never work.”
“Do you love him?”
“Yes.”
“It’ll work. It’ll just be messy.”
“How did you get to be so wise?”
“I was educated at Lanford College,” I said, “and I watch a lot of daytime talk shows.”
Shanta turned and looked back toward the swing set. “Todd Sanderson had a safety-deposit box at the Canal Street bank,” she said. “He was one of the victims of the robbery. That’s all. On the surface of it, he’s pretty meaningless too.”
“But a week later, he gets murdered,” I said.
“Yes.”