“But you adjusted.”
“Oh, yes. I didn’t stay long in Alphabet City because it just didn’t feel safe to me. Nothing ever happened to me, but I kept hearing about people on the block who’d been mugged or raped or stabbed, and as soon as I could I moved to Madison Street. That’s on the Lower East Side.”
“I know where it is. It’s not exactly Sutton Place either.”
“No, it’s a slum. Anywhere else in America it would all be torn down, but it wasn’t as drug-infested as East Tenth Street and I felt safer there. My first place was a share, but then I got an apartment of my own, three little rabbit-warren rooms in a tenement where the hallways smelled of mice and urine and marijuana smoke. And nothing ever happened, nobody ever bothered me on the street or in the building, nobody ever forced the door or came in off the fire escape. Not once. And then I met a man who swept me off my feet and took me away from all that and moved me into this incredible place, everything’s new, nothing smells, there’s an attendant in the lobby twenty-four hours a day.
“And here I am,” she said, her voice rising. “Here I am, sitting on a new sofa with my feet on a new oriental rug, everything’s new, and I’m looking out my window and I can see for miles. And I’m here in this safe place, this clean safe place, and I’ve got a dead baby and a dead husband, and how did that happen? Would you mind explaining that to me? How did it happen?”
I didn’t say anything. I don’t suppose she expected an answer. I watched her face while she worked to get control of herself. It was a perfect oval, the features regular and even. She was dressed neatly, wearing a dove-gray cardigan over a matching crew-neck sweater and a pleated navy skirt. Her shoes were black and plain, with one-inch heels. The overall effect was of a grown-up parochial-school girl, but what had been prettiness six months ago now verged on beauty.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought I had myself under control.”
“You do.”
“Can I get you something to drink? We’ve got scotch and vodka, and I don’t know what else. Oh, and there’s beer in the refrigerator. And I’ve got to stop saying ‘we.’ What can I get you, Matt?”
“Nothing just now, thanks.”
“Coffee? There’s some made, and I think that’s what I’m going to have. I’m afraid it’s not decaf, if that matters.”
“Actually, I prefer regular.”
“So do I, but Glenn could only drink decaf at night. We went to a restaurant a few months ago and the waiter actually asked if we wanted decaf or non-decaf. Can you imagine?”
“I don’t think I’ve heard that one before.”
“I hope I never hear it again. How do you take your coffee? Your non-decaf coffee?”
I told her and she went into the kitchen to get it. When she came back I was at the window looking down at Hell’s Kitchen or Clinton, as you prefer. I could see DeWitt Clinton Park and wondered if TJ was down there.
She said, “You can’t quite see it from here. The corner of that building’s in the way.” She was at my shoulder, pointing. “I went over there the day after it happened, or maybe it was the day after that. I don’t remember. Just to see for myself. I don’t know what I expected. It’s just a street corner.”
“I know.”
“Have you been?”
“Yes.”
“I put your coffee on the table. Tell me if it’s all right.” I sat down and tasted it. It was good, and I told her so. “Good coffee’s a weakness of mine,” she said, “and decaf never tastes right to me. I don’t know why.” She sat down and drank some of her own coffee. “This is going to be hard to get used to,” she said. “Being a widow. I was just getting used to the idea of being a wife.”
“How long were you married?”
“It was a year in May, so that’s what, seventeen months? Not quite a year and a half.”
“When did you move in here?”
“The day we got back from the honeymoon. When we met Glenn had a studio apartment in Yorkville and of course I was still on Madison Street. After the wedding we flew to Bermuda for a week, and when we came back there was a limousine waiting for us at the airport. We came right here and I thought the driver got the address wrong, I thought we were going to live at Glenn’s place until we found something larger. The next thing I knew Glenn was carrying me over the threshold. He said if I didn’t like it we could move. If I didn’t like it!”
“Quite a surprise.”
“He was full of surprises.”
“Oh?”
She started to say something, then caught herself. “I should be businesslike,” she said. “But I don’t know exactly what I’m supposed to do. I’ve never hired a detective before.”
“I already have a client, Lisa.”
“Oh? Did he hire you?”
“Did who hire me?”
“Glenn.”
“No,” I said. “Why would he have hired me?”
“I don’t know.”
I plunged in. “A man named Thomas Sadecki hired me,” I said. “His brother was arrested for Glenn’s murder.”
“And he hired you—”
“To explore the possibility that his brother didn’t do it. You should understand that I’m not trying to get Sadecki off if he’s guilty. But there’s a slim chance that he’s innocent, in which case your husband’s real killer is walking around free.”
“Yes, of course.” She thought about it. “You’re trying to find someone in Glenn’s life with a reason to kill him.”
“That’s one possibility. The other is that he was shot down by a stranger, but that the killer was someone other than George Sadecki. Eleventh Avenue is different at night than it is by day. They stop selling cars and brake jobs and switch over to drugs and sex. That kind of activity puts a lot of wrong people on the street, and it could have been one of them who ran into Glenn.”
“Or it could have been someone he knew.”
“Yes, that’s possible, too. I met Glenn for the first time in April, and of course I did see him a couple of times after that around the neighborhood. But I didn’t really know him.”
“Neither did I.”
“Oh?”
“I told you he swept me off my feet. That was no exaggeration. We met at his office, I think that came up in conversation the night we all got together—”
“Yes, I remember.”
“He made a real play for me, courted me as I’d never been courted before. He gave me a real rush. I talked with him every day. If we didn’t go out, he would call me on the phone. I’d had boyfriends before, I’d had men who were interested in me, but nothing like this.
“And at the same time he didn’t pressure me sexually. We went together for a month before we went to bed, and during that time we probably saw each other an average of three or four times a week. Well, AIDS and all, people don’t automatically go to bed on the third or fourth date anymore, but do they wait a month?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’d have worried about it, but I had the sense that he was in charge and he knew what he was doing. I always had that feeling. And one night we had dinner in his neighborhood and he took me back to his apartment. ‘You’ll stay over,’ he said. And I thought, okay, great. And we went to bed. And two days later he proposed marriage. ‘We’ll get married,’ he said. Okay, great.”