“Earned it how?”
“I did the books for my pop’s construction company. I managed the office. I did a little estimating. Whatever he had time to teach me I learned, because that was the real world, and he taught me more than any professor ever did. Do you know how you work construction in New York and New Jersey?”
She was into it now, leaning forward on the bed, schooling me in the catechism of Rachel Ruffielo.
“You make deals. You talk to this guy. You talk to that guy. Another guy comes to see you. Down there, union is just another word for mob, and everyone has their hand out-the local city councilman, the cops, the feds, the zoning commissioner, the building inspectors. If you don’t play, someone comes and burns down your building.” Her voice had grown strong and robust and the New York accent more overt. She was demonstrating the parts she could, holding out her hand for a bribe. “That’s what I learned from my pop. You’re paying one way or the other; it’s a cost of doing business, so just pick your poison and close your eyes.”
I swung around on my bench to face her directly. My hair was just going to have to dry itself. “Everyone makes compromises in life. That’s survival. It doesn’t explain why you have to treat someone who loved you as much as Harvey did-and inexplicably still does-the way you did.”
She looked at me with genuine surprise. “What did I do to him that was so bad?”
“You dumped him. You got tired of him and walked out and married a younger man.”
“Are you so sure that was such a bad thing?”
“I think he would tell you it was a watershed moment in his life, and not in a good way.”
She blinked a few times and looked stricken, but she got over it. She stood and walked over to a framed photo on the wall, a black-and-white of Harvey’s grandfather from a long time ago. Her arms were crossed again, but more in contemplation than defense.
“The first time I ever met Harvey, he looked at me with those big cow eyes. I didn’t want anything to do with him. But then there was this one time when my whole department went out to a little club down the street from the office where we liked to go sometimes. Here comes Harvey, out of the blue, dressed in a gray suit and a low-key tie, looking like some kind of undertaker at a wedding.”
Her head tipped ever so slightly to go with the tinge of wistfulness that had crept into her voice. If I could have seen her face, I probably would have seen a smile. But when she turned to slouch against the wall, all she showed me was her poker face.
“He asked me to dance. I couldn’t believe it. This schleppy guy with toner on his fingers and a suit that didn’t fit had the balls to come up and ask me to dance. I was hot, too, back then.” She put her shoulders back and thrust out her chest. “I mean, what’s he doing there in the first place? It’s not like anyone asked him to come. I sure as hell didn’t ask him. So, I decided I was going to teach him a lesson. Take him out on the dance floor and show him up so he would never come near me again.”
She was talking to me now as if we were old pals sharing the warm and funny stories from our past. I hated her for it. I understood how hard it must have been for Harvey to follow her to that bar. I hated her for wanting to punish and humiliate him for it. I hated her more for expecting me to laugh about it with her.
“Anyway, we went out on that dance floor, and he just…he blew me away. Have you ever seen Harvey dance?”
I had barely ever seen him walk.
“Harvey has moves. When he was coming up, they had sock hops and school dances and stuff like that, and he really took to it. So, here we were out on the floor doing twirls and dips, and I was having fun with this mope if I just kept my eyes shut. And then he asked me out on a date.”
That might have been even harder to fathom than Harvey dancing.
“He caught me in a moment of weakness. I said, ‘Yeah, what the hell,’ figuring we’d go dancing again and I wouldn’t have to talk to him. Do you know what he did?”
In spite of myself, I leaned forward, waiting for the next verse.
“He showed up at my house with this big bouquet of flowers. He was wearing one of his dopey suits, but he walked me to his car and opened the door for me. He bought me dinner and poured my wine. Then he took me to this little jazz club I had mentioned I always wanted to go to. They had a trio playing there. We danced for hours. Then he took me home and gave me a sweet little peck on the cheek.”
“It sounds nice.”
“I had fun.” She shook her head and smiled, just thinking about it. “With him, it was never like ‘Let’s get a pizza, go to your place, and fuck like rabbits.’ He was sweet to me.” She reached back to touch the hair on the back of her head, then left her hand clamped around her neck. “He was always sweet to me.”
“So, you just had to throw him over for a younger stud.”
The smile faded, and whatever image she had in her mind was gone. “I was thirty-three years old. I didn’t have that many years left to attract a man.”
“You had a man.”
“A man who would stay with me.”
“Oh, come on. You can’t tell me you believed Harvey would walk on you.”
“I didn’t believe it. I knew it.”
“Well, that just strikes me as so much horseshit.”
She drifted back to the photograph. I didn’t know if it held a specific fascination or if it was just something to focus on. “I wouldn’t have given him any choice. I would have made it so hard on him that he would have had to leave me.”
“What, you were possessed?”
“If I had stayed with Harvey, I would have just ended up hurting him. The nicer he was to me, the more I would hurt him.”
“Why?”
“Because I hurt people. That’s what I do. I couldn’t stand knowing how much he loved me and knowing how much I was going to hurt him. Every day it got harder. I couldn’t stand it, so I left.”
This time, when she turned to look at me, I saw something in her eyes that might have passed for pain. I never knew with her what was purposeful manipulation and what was genuine, but I did know what she was talking about. I was on to that theory of hurting someone before they had a chance to hurt you first. She had, however, let him down in the most brutal possible way.
“If you were trying to make him stop loving you, you failed.”
“Story of my life. I couldn’t even do that right. But I give myself credit. At least I was smart enough to figure it out and leave before I hurt him any worse.”
“I don’t think there is a way you could have hurt him any worse.” I started to turn back to the mirror but had another thought. “I take that back. There was one thing you could have done to hurt him worse.”
“What would that be?”
“Come back. You never should have come back.”
33
BY THE TIME I’D FINISHED DRYING MY HAIR, IT HAD BEEN half an hour, so I did my Max Kraft routine, beeping him and putting in my number and 911, just in case he needed a reminder to check his e-mail. I called Felix and told him he was on standby. Then I tried Bo again and finally got him. He was still in Philadelphia and would be until things in Boston cooled down. Timon was with him for the same reason. I felt bad for having dragged him into it. He told me not to worry, that he had done what he did for Harvey. He gave me detailed instructions on how to reach Radik if I needed help.
Harvey had spent most of the night before going through Lyle’s research. He had organized it and put it all into a nifty leather portfolio. I should have tried to sleep, but I was too wired. Besides, there was no way I wasn’t going to listen to more of what Tony Blackmon had to say. I unzipped the portfolio and pulled the contents out. Harvey would have come up with some kind of index or summary. I sifted through the stack and found it. The tapes were there, one still in the small player I’d bought from Staples. It was at the end of the B-side of the second tape, which meant Harvey must have listened all the way through. He was thorough that way.