“Honey?”
He carried the plates to the table in the dining area, a corner of their L-shaped living room. He flipped on the ceiling light. “I’m sorry I’m late. But the food’s not cold. Yet.”
He returned to the kitchen to get the two aluminum trays containing their main dishes, the two cartons of rice, the paper-sheathed pairs of chopsticks, the cellophane-wrapped fortune cookies. He dropped it all on the table.
“Maureen? You okay?”
Finally, he went into the bedroom.
It was a week before Simon Kurnit returned to his apartment, and when he did he had to strip off the yellow police tape on the way in. The apartment was silent and dark, and he sat at the table in the dining area without turning on the light. Someone had thrown out the Chinese food and Windexed the tabletop. He could smell it.
His back ached. He had a headache, too, and he hadn’t shaved that morning or washed his hair when he showered. He’d just stood under the water, barely feeling it though it was turned as hot as it would go.
The company had put him up in a hotel room — a top-of-the-line suite at the Edison with windows facing out over Central Park — while the lawyer Perlow dug up (Find him the best in the city, Steinbach had said when he and Perlow had shown up at the holding cell. Not the second best, the very best) got him straightened out with the police. He’d had Maureen’s blood on him, all over his hands and shirt, and it was natural to take him into custody even though he’d been the one to phone 911, even though he was obviously distraught, even though the knife was nowhere to be found. Many husbands who kill their wives are distraught, and many of them find a way to dispose of their knives before 911 arrives.
But the lawyer, a man named Neville, Stephen J. Neville, was able to get him out, and they tucked him away in the Edison under a false name so the reporters from the Post and the Daily News couldn’t find him. They found him anyway, but since he didn’t come out of the building, didn’t answer the phone or the door, they eventually gave up and left him alone. There were other murders to write about, after all.
Perlow testified that he’d seen Kurnit in the office around the time the murder was estimated to have taken place, and the e-mail logs supported this. Picking up the takeout food added another few minutes; a cop who spoke Chinese got confirmation from the woman at the restaurant. Then, too, there was the fact that the bedroom had been thoroughly ransacked and some large items — a DVD recorder, Maureen’s laptop, her jewelry box — were missing. Kurnit told them about the man he’d passed in the vestibule, the stranger with the bulging black garbage bag, large enough to hold a DVD recorder and a laptop and a jewelry case. They either believed him or they didn’t, but they let him go. He hadn’t formally been charged, and Neville told him he wouldn’t be.
But what did it matter? He didn’t need the police to charge him or a jury to judge him guilty. He knew he was.
Twenty-five minutes.
So it’s a real ten minutes.
Yep.
I can count on it.
Yep.
He had touched the man, they had passed belly-to-belly; he’d been polite, said goodnight to him. While upstairs Maureen was bleeding to death. Or had she already been dead by then? If so, for how long? Ten minutes? Fifteen?
He’d thought he couldn’t cry anymore, he’d thought this repeatedly over the past week, but he’d been wrong every time and he was wrong now. The tears ran down his face like water. His chest heaved. He made no sound. Just sat in the dark sobbing and asking himself what had been so goddamn important that it couldn’t wait till tomorrow, what e-mail was worth Maureen’s life.
They’d sent him flowers, the company had, and the card that came with them was signed by everyone in the office. Steinbach had written, Take as much time as you need. You’ve always got a home here, and he remembered their conversation the day he told Steinbach he was leaving. A home. A home was the one thing he didn’t have, that he’d never have again.
Would ten minutes have made the difference? Would five? If he’d walked in on the man while he was filling his bag, could he have stopped him? Or would he be dead now, too, lying side by side with Maureen in that chilly basement morgue? It didn’t sound so terrible to him. Not nearly as terrible as sitting here in their dark apartment, alone, afraid to open the bedroom door.
He slid the closet door open instead, ran his hand along the coats, lifted the sleeve of one of hers, inhaled deeply. There was no smell of her, but it was her coat, it had held her once, and he pressed it to his cheek as though some residue of her might still be there. Outside, on the street five stories down, cars honked, some drunk shouted at them, life went on. In here, the radiator thumped and clanked as the heat came on, hissing. But it all sounded to him like whispers from a thousand miles away.
He counted the money in his pocket, thought about where, this time of night, he could get a quiet drink, some private spot where no one came and you could sit by yourself and if you cried a little no one would say anything. There was a bar two blocks away — he’d brought Maureen there once but she hadn’t liked it, hadn’t liked climbing two flights of stairs to get there and another flight if you had to use the bathroom; she said it felt like some old, decrepit, falling-apart relic from the ’40s, and she was right, that’s exactly what it was, it’s what he liked about the place, but he’d never made her go there again. Yet she’d been there once, on the stool next to his, and if that stool held no more of her ghost than this coat did, so what? So what?
Then, when he got back, he’d brave the bedroom.
When he got back.
He locked the door behind him and headed to Frankie and Johnnie’s.
It had been a speakeasy once, or anyway that’s the story they told. Perlow liked it because except at theater time it was generally pretty empty. Middle of the day, you just had a few lonely retirees keeping the bartender company, and coming up on midnight you’d have the place to yourself.
At the top of the stairs, the little coat check room was open but no one was manning the counter and the metal rod in the back had nothing on it but hangers. Perlow walked past and pushed the main door open. To the left was the bar, to the right a handful of tables where your more upscale customers could order some food with their drinks. When he’d given Mesh the assignment, they’d sat at a table so they could talk without the bartender hearing, but this time there was nothing to say, and Mesh was waiting for him at the bar.
Mesh was an older guy, well into his fifties. He still had the wooly sideburns he’d grown out when they were the hot new look around the time of the Bicentennial, only now they were white, like the rest of his hair. He had a paunch and his face was deeply grooved, and sitting at the bar in his wind-breaker and turtleneck, he could’ve been any guy in any bar, taking home $375 a week from some union job. But he was taking home lot more than that, and they hadn’t found a way yet to unionize what he did for a living.
Perlow dropped the Duane Reade bag he was carrying at the foot of the empty stool next to Mesh’s, stripped off his coat, draped it over a chair back. He wasn’t going to stay long, but one drink, maybe two, would give Mesh time to finish the one in front of him, settle his bill, quietly pick up the bag, and exit. They hadn’t arrived together and wouldn’t leave together.
The bag contained an envelope and the envelope contained the full 10k he’d promised, even though Mesh had been sloppy this time, had been seen. Perlow had wanted to dock him for that, give him maybe a ten percent haircut just to make a point, but when he suggested this to Steinbach, Steinbach had said no, that’s not the way you do business. A handshake is as good as a contract, that’s the way Wall Street works — billions of dollars change hands on a handshake, and if you say you’re going to pay someone ten thousand dollars you don’t show up with nine. You try that and pretty soon everyone knows and no one will do business with you.