Maybe it had always been that way in Harlem, for black people. Maybe it still was. Maybe no matter if you were a doctor or a teacher, you had to toe the line when you were outside, when you went to work or school in white America, or were confronted with white people, cops especially. Were you always somebody else? Even in 2008? Even after Obama’s election, after that one dazzling night in November?
Did Carver Lennox feel that I threatened his empire? When he’d suddenly come up behind me on the roof, had he been planning to help me, or push me over?
CHAPTER 36
V irgil was looking through a pile of mail in the Hutchison apartment when I told him about Lennox, and the roof, and he just nodded then examined his iPhone as if it would give up the answers to everything. I figured it was the way he did his thinking.
“Sorry.” He put his phone away. “You find anything up there?”
“Hutchison didn’t just fall off the roof. He wasn’t a fool. You have to make a big effort even to lean over the edge of that fucking roof,” I said. “He’d have to get up over a wall, and why the hell would he do that?”
“What are you saying, Artie? He was pushed?”
“I’m not sure about anything. There’s stuff on the roof, that’s for sure, prints in the snow, indicates it’s not impossible. There’s only one set, far as I could see. Lionel could have gone off the roof, but not by himself. Where the fuck is that dog?”
“I don’t know. Did you talk to Lennox much at the party last night?”
“Talked my fucking ear off, most of it about the building, said he wanted what was best for everybody. He was like a politician. In between the lines I got the feeling he had money troubles.”
“What about Celestina?” said Virgil.
“She was there. Holding court.”
“She left before Lionel?”
“Before he got there. I don’t think she pushed him though, do you? She weighs about ninety pounds, I’m guessing.”
“Maybe she convinced Lionel to off himself,” said Virgil. “Maybe he was sick and only she knew, and she went on at him about his believing in euthanasia. Maybe she played on him, made him feel guilty.”
“Doesn’t sound right,” I said. “Lionel didn’t seem like a guy to feel guilt about his beliefs, and if he was sick, he’d have used pills or something.”
“I’ll get some more input from the ME, then.” Virgil looked around the living room. “Sad room,” he said.
“You see it like that?”
“I do, Artie. There’s something about it, like it’s a shabby old museum piece. Suspended in time. People can’t stand change, some of them.” He tossed the mail on the table. “Nothing here except some real estate brochures from the islands. Maybe that was it,” Virgil said. “From what I heard, Celestina couldn’t stand Lionel, and she wanted to sell up here and move south,” he added. “She was jealous of him and the Russian.”
“Enough to kill him? How jealous could a ninety-year-old woman be?”
“Oh, Artie, man, you just have not met a lot of old folks,” said Virgil. “They are just like us, only more, a lot more. You think old people don’t have sex? Trust me.”
“You’re an expert?”
“I have a grandfather who’s ninety-five out in California; my great-granddad died at one hundred and five; my own father is going up to seventy.”
“Fine. Meanwhile, we need to talk to Celestina Hutchison.”
“You have a plan?” Virgil said.
“I want to see her here, with Hutchison’s things. I want to see her reaction. Tell her if she wants any of her clothes, anything like that, they’re gonna seal the apartment up tight as a drum until the ME releases Hutchison’s body and the will goes to probate, at least that long. Lennox said he thought she might be at some church. Get her here. Can you do that?”
He was already on his phone. “Right,” he said. “Fine.”
“I need the keys to Simonova’s place,” I said.
“I already borrowed them from Lily’s place.” He gave me the keys. “You have any idea when Lily’s coming back?”
I looked at my watch. “It’s a long way to the cemetery. It’s out on Long Island some place. She said she had to go by herself, some kind of duty thing.”
“Simonova exploited Lily,” Virgil said. “I told you I thought that. She made Lily listen to her stories, do her errands. Lily has some kind of liberal guilt, so she just did it.” Virgil got a set of keys out of his pocket and gave them to me. “You going into Simonova’s place, Artie?”
“I want a look at her terrace.”
He held up his phone. “I’ll keep on Celestina. I can do more on the phone than running around now. I got guys out there in cars spread out everywhere. Anyway, I want more time in this apartment OK? Try to keep Wagner’s other guys out, if you can. Buy me a little time, Artie.”
“Check in with the ME, too,” I said. “What about that dog?”
“I have a really fucking bad feeling, Artie. About that dog, I mean,” said Virgil.
“Keep me posted.” I left the apartment, and went over to Simonova’s place. Something was nagging at me.
CHAPTER 37
F or twenty-four hours now, more, I’d been in this strange capsule that was the Armstrong. Now it was Sunday. It was 8:45 and Jimmy Wagner was in a hurry. He wanted Hutchison’s case wrapped up fast. You have until Monday, he’d said. Get on it.
I was hungover, my head hurt, so did my ankle. The Oxycontin, the lack of sleep, the night I’d spent in Lily’s bed, it was all making me nuts.
I couldn’t stop thinking about Lily, the hours we’d been together. Where we were going-if we were going anywhere. Neither of us had said anything this morning; she had been on her way to Simonova’s funeral, and I didn’t want to ask. I got out my phone now. I hadn’t heard from her since she left.
In Simonova’s apartment, prowling from one room to the other, I was desperate. Again and again I had come back to this place with its endless rooms and books and old smells. Maybe it was the Russian thing. I knew I’d missed something. But what?
I tried to get my bearings. I knew Hutchison had been here often. Knew he had been the last to see her, that she had somehow grabbed at the button on his jacket and it had stayed in her hand where I’d found it; the dead hand curled around it.
He had loved this woman, one way or another. He would not have let her suffer. Did he come in to give her something to release her from her pain? Did he come back to clean up after himself?
Suffering is not noble, he had said; pain cripples our best selves and makes us at best hopeless, at worst evil, he had said.
I thought about Hutchison his sense of history, of hardship, his humor, the intellectual rigor. Maybe he was also a zealot, a believer, obsessed with a mission.
I knew about zealots, all kinds, religious, political-I’d met them all my life. Hutchison didn’t seem to fill the bill-he had been too lively, he told jokes, had seen the comic side.
Marianna Simonova was something else. This was a woman who kept a hammer and sickle for a paperweight, and a picture of herself with Stalin. It was still on the mantelpiece: Marianna as a girl handing Stalin a bouquet.
Something was missing.
I saw it as soon as I looked at the row of photographs. One of the pictures I had seen earlier was gone. I looked everywhere. Where was it?
I couldn’t find the picture of Marianna Simonova with a little boy, his face turned away to look at the Statue of Liberty, his suit too big. Why would anybody have taken it?
I went through Simonova’s papers in her desk fast as I could. There was a small leather address book with phone numbers and notes in her tiny writing crammed onto the pages.
From the notes, I saw she had Russian connections, some in New York, some in Moscow, even a few in Miami and Los Angeles.
But who was she working for? She had been a devout Communist, and there were the names of sympathetic organizations. But the pages with their details were old and brittle and I knew most of the groups must be defunct.