“The apartment appeared to be empty,” says Rose Darling, a lovely name for a woman who is, well, not lovely. Splotchy complexion, overweight, dark frizzy hair. Lu amuses herself by coming up with various tricks to remember the woman’s name, which will be useful when they meet again. Public defenders vote, too, and everyone yearns to be remembered. My public defender is like a red, red rose. Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my darling defender Rose. Lu feels bad about the woman’s cheap suit. Public defenders make even less than state’s attorneys. Lu takes special care to make sure that her expensive clothes do not look expensive. Her inherited wealth is one of those ugly topics always just below the surface. During the campaign, Fred called her a dilettante, tried to suggest that she wanted his job so she wouldn’t be bored. Has anyone ever suggested that a rich man wanted to work simply because he had nothing else to do?
“When?” Mike asks. “When did you break in?”
Drysdale shakes his head frantically. He looks a little younger than his age, uncommon in a man who spends so much time outside. And he does not appear mentally incapacitated, aside from his aversion to speaking out loud. Once dressed in a suit, he will look presentable at trial. That could work for him or against him, Lu decides. If she were his attorney, she’d try to have him ruled incompetent to stand trial, given his history of hospitalizations. She wouldn’t win on those grounds, but she’d at least try. Rose-what was the surname, oh my darling, oh my darling-Darling doesn’t even seem to realize it’s an option. She’s the one on the verge of boxing him into a certain set of dates. Drysdale at least seems to realize that the less said about timing, the better.
He leans in to whisper to her again. Rose Darling says: “My client is not admitting he broke in and he says he cannot be sure of when he was there. He doesn’t keep a calendar.”
“Did you know Mary McNally, Rudy? Had you seen her at the Silver Diner? Or around the neighborhood?”
He shakes his head no, but only after a long pause.
“Why were you in her apartment?”
He whispers in his lawyer’s ear then, and the lawyer says: “He’s not admitting that he was in her apartment.”
“He already did,” Mike says.
More whispers. “He can’t be sure he was in her apartment because he doesn’t know who she is. He doesn’t know Mary McNally, has no knowledge of her whatsoever. He entered an apartment in the Grove. He doesn’t remember when and he doesn’t know who it belongs to. If there was a body in there at the time, he might not have entered that room.”
“Buddy, we got fingerprints. You’re all over the place. On the door that was open, which was inches from her head, and on the door that was closed. You’re on the thermostat. So, what, you climbed up on her balcony, saw the open door, stepped over her body, went to check the thermostat, then left by the other door, which you carefully closed? Is that the story you want to tell?”
Rudy stares at the ceiling as if the conversation has begun to bore him. His affect is like a teenager’s, checking out as his parents discuss his failings at the family dinner table. Asked how he got into the apartment, he continues to stare at the ceiling. Asked how Mary McNally died, he makes eye contact only with the light fixture over his head. Asked if he can account for his whereabouts over the past week, he smiles and shakes his head, as if the detectives are being silly. Fine, don’t speak, Lu thinks. The fingerprints put him at the scene, he’s been IDed in a lineup. He’s going straight from here to a judge, who will almost certainly order him held without bail.
“I almost feel sorry for that public defender,” Lu says to Mike when just that scenario plays out. She has sent Andi to the bail review, an easy bone to toss.
“Yeah, she’s a mess. Jury might end up feeling sorry for her, too. And him. What a sad sack. Local guy, went to Wilde Lake Middle and High School.”
“That’s where I went,” Lu says. “Also my brother.”
“Really?” Mike is too polite to note that the school’s reputation is lackluster these days. The original “villages” of Columbia are now called the “inner villages,” and the pejorative echo of inner city is not accidental. The money has marched west, and the desirable school districts are in what were cornfields and wilderness in Lu’s lifetime. “Still, he has an almost plausible story. All he has to do is claim that the sliding door in the second bedroom was unlocked-we can’t prove he was the one who pried it open-that he came in that way, noticed it was cold, checked the thermostat, then-”
Lu holds up a hand. She’s not a superstitious person, anything but. Yet she has no patience with worst-case scenarios. Bad news will out soon enough, why put it in the universe? When the twins were six weeks old, there were a couple of bad nights with Justin, the smaller of the two, and Gabe kept trying to bring up the possibility of colic. She wouldn’t let him say the word out loud and she would hold the screeching baby as if his screams didn’t grieve her. Lu believes that you must will yourself not to dwell on all the bad things that can happen, only the good. She imagined herself as state’s attorney and here she is. The bad things still find a way to happen.
And if she’s honest with herself, there were days when Gabe was forever on planes and corporate jets and traveling to far-flung places that she wondered what life would be like if he just didn’t come back. Now she knows. Now she lives it every day. She had thought she was doing everything, that he contributed almost nothing to their children’s daily care. But gone is not dead. She had to learn that the hard way.
Gabe’s ghost seems to hover at her elbow that evening, as she tries to help Penelope with her math homework. Lu has a firm rule that homework must be done on Friday nights, not Sundays. She is a big believer in getting unpleasant things out of the way, and homework has become particularly unpleasant. In her heart of hearts, she hadn’t really believed the dire warnings she heard from other parents about how difficult and demanding homework had become. She never believed any of the dire things people told her about raising children, and yet every stage seemed to arrive as foretold by the Oracle of Delphi. Now multiply that by two children, subtract one spouse-there was a math problem even more daunting than the multiplication tables that Penelope was struggling with long after Justin had breezed through them and earned his hour of screen time.
“It’s so unfair,” Penelope whines, her hazel eyes filmed with tears, a strand of hair in her mouth. The thing is, it is unfair. Lu knows firsthand what it’s like to have a brother who’s better than you in everything. But at least AJ was eight years older than she was, so she had the consolation of thinking she would catch up to him-in height, in talent, in looks, in social skills. Penelope is six minutes older than Justin and they look so much alike that they could be twins in a Shakespearean comedy, destined to switch identities at some point. They look nothing like Lu, although people claim to see a resemblance. As babies, they were little Gabes, dark and beetle-browed. Now they have that magical combination of olive skin and light eyes, with brown hair that turns golden in the summer sun. They are close, as twins tend to be, and that only aggravates Penelope’s frustration.
“Take a deep breath,” Lu says, stroking Penelope’s hair, even as she yearns to move two hours ahead into the future, when she can sit by herself for a few minutes. She had been a good student and has no idea what to say to a bad one. And how can Gabe’s daughter not have an affinity for math? Lu has a brainstorm, tells Penelope that she can put her homework away for now, come back to it tomorrow. “You’re tired, I think. That’s all. Your brain is fogged.” At bedtime, she reads Penelope a chapter from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, the one where Francie conquers arithmetic by turning it into a story. If Penelope did not inherit Gabe’s genius for numbers, maybe she can learn Lu’s talent for creating narratives. While many prosecutors consider their most violent cases to be their most pivotal, Lu is perversely proud of a theft case she had to try, one that involved a complicated accounting scheme at a city hospital. Any jury can follow a story of murder or rape. Leading them through a thicket of numbers required much more skill.