We’d hang out in booths, half hidden, sipping our drinks, making out, laughing, desperate to run out, grab a cab, and go home to bed. We used to make out in the cabs, too, and in the elevators, all the way up to her place or mine.
Sitting on the sofa in the Armstrong apartment, I just took Lily’s hand and put it against my face.
“You’re right,” I said. “Dr. Hutchison signed off; I’m OK. I really am. I mean it. This is over.”
“Thank you.” She patted my cheek and took her hand back. Lily seemed to have reclaimed her usual self. As if now that Simonova’s funeral had been arranged, she could cope.
All I wanted now was for Simonova to be buried. I didn’t ask again why Lily had lied about calling Dr. Bernard. I didn’t want to know. I tried to forget I’d been hit on the head in the storage room. That Lionel Hutchison was covering up something and Lucille Bernard had been Amahl Washington’s doctor around the time he died.
I could do it. I could forget. My time as a cop was almost over. I didn’t want the life any more. Had I always brought the work home? It had fucked us up, me and Lily. Maybe Virgil Radcliff could do the job right; maybe it was his time.
When Lily had said to me about Simonova “I killed her,” I knew she’d made a mistake, or was covering for somebody. She couldn’t have hurt the woman who’d been her friend.
But what if she had? Would I lie for her? Run with her? I began to sweat, cold, dank sweat that dripped down the middle of my back. I pushed it all away.
Twelve hours, give or take, it would be done. Sunday morning, Simonova would be buried. I wanted to make Lily feel better. I wanted to tell her again, “You didn’t do it. You couldn’t do it. Not to your friend.”
I got up. “Come with me,” I said.
“Where?”
I held out my hand. She took it.
CHAPTER 21
S o far as I could tell, nothing had been touched in Simonova’s apartment except the sofa where I’d first seen her body. It was rumpled now. The shawl that had covered her was on the floor; the funeral home guys who lifted her onto a gurney must have dropped it.
I made my way around the room while Lily waited near the door. I picked up bits of paper from the desk, I went into the bedroom, and looked briefly through Simonova’s clothes. It would take days to search the whole place.
In the living room, Lily was kneeling at the little table by the sofa, looking at the pills.
“Which ones do you think you screwed up?”
Lily picked up a plastic box, the days marked on it, and opened the lid.
“This one,” she said. “I think I forgot this one.” She poured the remaining capsules onto her palm. “I always counted. There’s one more than there should be.”
“Show me.”
I took the capsule, read what was marked on it.
“Why are you smiling?” Lily said.
“Because these are ACE inhibitors, blood pressure medication, Lily, honey. And it’s a low dosage. And you couldn’t kill a mouse if you forgot one, or probably ten or a hundred. Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?”
“I was scared. How do you know, anyway?”
“Tolya takes this stuff. He says it interferes with his eating grapefruit, and I tell him to eat caviar instead. I tell him he’s an ass. It’s fine, honey.” Putting my arm around her, “Is that why you went to the drugstore?”
She nodded. “I was trying to figure out if Marianna had another prescription, if there were meds I didn’t know about that I forgot to get, or she forgot. She sometimes got confused, especially when her breathing was very bad. It took all her will to concentrate.”
“Who would have prescribed something for her that you didn’t know about?”
“I don’t know. But there wasn’t anything. At the drugstore, anyway,” said Lily. “I’m sorry I’ve been so crazy. God, I’m so glad you’re here. I was sure I had done something awful.” She reached out for my hand. “Thank you.”
“It’s OK.”
“You know what?”
“What, honey?”
“I miss Tolya. Let’s call him and tell him to come over or something. Come on, I’ll make some coffee. I’ll get out some wine. Let’s go back to my place.” Lily made for the door. “You know, if I hadn’t seen you on election night, I might not have had the guts to call you this morning.”
“I’d always come,” I said. “You’re OK now? About the meds? You believe me now, that you didn’t have anything to do with her death?”
“I guess. Yes. I do. I’m going to believe you.”
I looked at the portrait of Paul Robeson on the wall.
“What is it?” Lily said.
“My mother got her gold earrings to see Robeson perform in Moscow. Whenever he came to Moscow to perform, everybody dressed up, some even in evening clothes, the kind that were normally forbidden in the ‘people’s paradise,’ ” I said. “My father got tickets once and my mother says, ‘What will I wear, Maxim? I haven’t got anything nice enough.’ So he takes her out and buys her a blue silk dress and gold earrings with little diamonds, the kind every Soviet woman wanted back then, and it costs him two months’ salary, but she’s so happy. Afterwards, they sit up all night in the kitchen discussing the concert and how heroic Robeson is. My mother told me.” I looked at Robeson’s portrait again. “It must have been like coming home for you in some ways,” I said to Lily. “And for Simonova, too.”
As if a dam had burst, Lily began to talk. About her childhood in Greenwich Village, her stiff-necked father who preferred his politics and his atheism to his kid-they never celebrated Christmas or anything else. Her mother had catered to him; he came first. Lily was an only child, left to fend for herself.
Still, when she grew up, after college, after her parents had died, she went back to the family apartment on Tenth Street. Maybe it was all she had in the way of a past that she could love.
Sitting in Simonova’s apartment now, she looked around her.
“I have all this culture in my bones. My father with his Robeson records,” she said. “His politics, the Civil Rights Movement, all that, it formed me, the good part; at least, I hope it’s only the good part,” she added. “God, my father loved the workers, he loved the whole world, but his own kid, that was something else.” Lily picked up Marianna’s shawl and wrapped it around her shoulders.
When she was little, Lily’s father had given her a copy of Das Kapital, but he had forbidden her the girls’ magazines she wanted; he had been horrified when he found her and her friends playing with their Barbies. On Sundays, he drove her around Harlem so she could see how poor people lived. Afterward, he would stop off at the Plaza Hotel.
“He always drank exactly two Gibsons, never more, that was it, and he smoked two cigarettes, and that was our so-called quality time together. I was ten. He loved books, too, good books, and movies. He did that for me. We went to the movies together,” said Lily. “Sometimes he’d let me pick a movie, and even if it was something stupid with Doris Day, he would secretly enjoy it. He adored the movies, and I guess there was a little softness in him those times, a feel for just pure pleasure.” Lily smiled. “Not like my Uncle Lenny, my mother’s brother, my dad’s best friend; he was obsessed. He gave up his law practice to organize the Mohawk Indians who built the Verrazano bridge. Joe McCarthy’s ghouls hunted Lenny down-he really was a Communist-but he wouldn’t talk and he went to jail. My cousin Nancy was in love with a Russian boy for a while. They were really happy, but it didn’t last. She was a lot older than me. She was a real Red Diaper baby.”
“What happened to her?”
“I don’t know. She disappeared. I haven’t heard from Nancy for twenty years.”