Contini. Michael Contini. You’d think I’d remember; I’d processed his application. But I’d processed a lot of applications, learned a lot of names, and tonight my mind was on other things.
Lane Glazier was the only person in the room with a glass made of glass rather than plastic, and he tapped its side with a metal letter opener. He said “Everybody...everybody...” and the room quieted.
“Thank you for coming,” he said. He had a round, soft face that generally looked beleaguered and sympathetic, and it looked both of those things now. “All of you knew Dorrie. Some of you knew her better than others, but we all knew her. She was our friend, she was our student—” he nodded toward Stu Kennedy, seated on the sofa “—she was our family.” Heads turned toward the one person in the room none of us knew, except by name. I’d encouraged Lane to invite her and regretted it when she showed up looking less mournful than furious, as though we were all to blame for her daughter’s death.
“We’re here tonight to remember Dorrie, to remember her the way we knew her; she was a special person—”
“Her name was Dorothy,” the mother said. Her voice could have cut steel. Lane stopped speaking, the rest of his sentence suspended halfway out of his mouth.
“Dorothy. Not Dorrie. Dorothy Louise Burke.” She glared at us, her head swiveling to the left and then to the right. “At least call her by her fucking name.”
None of us spoke. What could you say? We were all embarrassed for her, wishing she wasn’t there or that we weren’t, that this woman could be alone with her grief and leave us to ours.
Finally Lane said, “Dorothy. I’m sorry. Dorothy was a special person. Dorothy Louise Burke, your daughter, was a special person and we all miss her very much.” His soft face and spaniel eyes begged for acknowledgment, a gesture of sympathy, something. But the mother just kept staring, her eyes like coals in a snowbank.
Eva Burke was a short woman but not a small one. She had the build of a weightlifter, broad shoulders and hips and tree trunk legs. You couldn’t see her daughter in her, or at least I couldn’t. Which might lead you to think that Dorrie took after her father, but that wasn’t true either. In a fruitless attempt to help her with the seminar assignment she was working on for Stu Kennedy, I’d tracked her father down for her, and he turned out to be a short, wiry, swarthy, sweaty, hairy man, while Dorrie had had long, graceful limbs and delicate features. Of course, I didn’t look much like my parents myself.
I’d thought about inviting the father, too, but Dorrie hadn’t seen him in years and I remembered what she’d told me about her parents’ break-up—putting those two in the same room would not have been a good idea. Not that inviting just the mother had been such a great one.
The lounge was empty now except for me and Mrs. Burke. I was cleaning up, throwing out used cups and paper plates and bagging the unused ones, moving gingerly because of my bandaged chest; so far I was only a bit more than a day into the six weeks the doctor had told me it would take to heal, and I’d been through a rough night on top of it. Mrs. Burke was standing in the center of the room, more or less where she’d stood throughout the evening. I was covering a plate of cheese with plastic wrap when she spoke.
“You’re Blake?”
I put the plate down, came over to her. “Yes.”
“I want you to do something for me.”
“Of course,” I said. “What would you like?”
“I want you to find the man who murdered my daughter.”
It took me aback. I’d thought she was going to ask me for a glass of wine or some cheese. “Mrs. Burke,” I said, “I’m not—I don’t know what Dorrie told you about me, but I haven’t—”
“Dorothy told me one of the men she was taking classes with was a detective. John Blake. That’s you?”
“It’s me,” I said, “but I quit that job years ago, almost three years now.”
“You used to do it. You can do it again.” I shook my head, and she shook hers right back at me. “Yes, you can. You knew her. You’ve got a better chance than some stranger of finding the son of a bitch who killed her.” She unsnapped the clasp of her purse, reached in, and pulled out a checkbook and pen. “I don’t care what it costs. You tell me. A thousand dollars? Is that enough? Two thousand? What?”
I took the pen out of her hand, dropped it back in her purse. “I know you’re upset, Mrs. Burke—”
She slapped my hand away from her. “Don’t patronize me. Someone killed my daughter and the police aren’t doing anything about it. That means I’ve got to. All I want you to tell me is, how much is it going to cost?”
I thought carefully about how to say what I wanted to say. “Mrs. Burke, there’s a reason the police aren’t doing anything. No, listen to me. There’s a reason. They found her in her bathtub with a copy of Final Exit on the floor and a plastic bag over her head.” I took her hand, held onto it even when she tried to shake me loose. “They found sedatives in her system, the newspapers said at least twenty pills. Nobody forced her to take those pills. Nobody put her in that bathtub. Nobody made her read that book.”
That wasn’t entirely true, of course. She’d found the book on the table next to my bed.
“Mrs. Burke,” I said, “I know you don’t want to hear this, but Dorrie’s death—Dorothy’s death—probably was what it looked like.”
Her hand leaped out of mine. The index finger jabbed at my face while the rest of the fingers coiled into a fist. “That’s bullshit, young man, and you know it. She did not kill herself. My daughter would never do that. You should be ashamed of yourself.”
I didn’t say anything.
“What’s wrong with you?” She didn’t wait for an answer, which was just as well because I didn’t have one to give her. “I’ll find someone,” she said. “If you won’t help me, I’m going to find someone else who will. But if, because you didn’t help, the person who did this to my daughter gets away with it, if my daughter’s killer gets away because of you, I want to know how you’ll live with yourself.” She was practically shouting now, and the sound had brought Lane to the doorway from his office across the hall. He stood there in his suit jacket and his loosened necktie looking desperately unhappy.
“Mrs. Burke? Please, John has work he needs to finish up tonight.”
Dorrie’s mother stood between us, looking at each of us in turn the way a bull might look at a pair of picadors. Then she gathered herself and shoved past Lane, walking in silence down the hall to the elevator. “Let her go,” he said, but I followed her.
“I’m not finished,” she said as she waited for the elevator to arrive. The building is only five stories tall, but the writing department is on the fifth and the elevator takes forever to drag itself to the top.
Something in my face must have made her think I doubted her. “I’m not,” she said.
I didn’t doubt her. I wished I did.
“Listen,” I said. I grabbed a piece of paper someone had scotch-taped to the wall (“Submit to Quarto!”), turned it over, and took a pen out of my pocket. “I’ll give you the name of someone I know who can help you.” I wrote a name and phone number on the back of the piece of paper. “She’s very good at what she does. Better than I ever was.”
The indicator next to the elevator door lit up and the door sluggishly slid open. A maintenance man got out, pulling a cart of cleaning supplies behind him.