I put the book in my pocket. There was something going on, but I needed time.
Nobody would notice the missing address book. As far as the world was concerned Simonova had died of disease, and the only people who would look at her things were her heirs.
On the table by the sofa were her pills. I grabbed the three vials, read the labels, put them back, then pocketed one of them and ran out, locked the door, went into the Hutchison apartment. Virgil was combing through the dresser drawers in a bedroom.
“Did you get anything?” he said. The day before he had been combative. I had been an ass. We were both on the same side. I could work with this guy. He was good.
“I have to find Lionel Hutchison’s meds. You got anything?”
“Artie, you notice anyone weird hanging around down there, at the scene?”
“What kind of weird?’
“I don’t know, somebody watching. I was pulling up in my car, and I just saw this guy kind of half hiding behind a truck.”
“There’s always wacko sightseers who show up at a scene,” I said, but my stomach turned over. I had felt somebody watching, too. “What’d he look like?”
“Hard to say. North Face jacket. Hood up. Saw me and beat it.”
“Black?”
Virgil looked up at me. “No.”
“You felt he was connected to the case?”
“I just thought, What the fuck’s he doing here so early in the morning? He didn’t look local, he wasn’t walking a dog, so I thought, yeah, in my gut, I felt it was connected. You mentioned Lionel’s meds? What’s that about?”
Everything in the bathroom seemed to have belonged to Celestina-there was no razor, no shaving cream. I pushed aside the hand lotions, the shampoos, the soaps. She favored, as she’d said in the hallway the day before, Jergens lotion. You could smell it everywhere-vanilla, almonds, cherries. It made me want to gag.
I yanked open a drawer in the vanity and found Lionel’s stuff-shaving brush, bottles of herbal remedies, most of them in capsule form. The only prescription medication I could find was in a single vial. On it was her name. The doctor who had prescribed the pills was Lionel Hutchison himself. But so what? She might have run out, he would have written her the prescription.
I took the vial.
“Artie?” Virgil came into the bathroom. “They’ve located Celestina Hutchison, Artie. You want me to go or you want to do it? I also heard from the chief and he’s sending up more people, forensics included.”
“Give me the address where Celestina is.”
“Yeah, sure. Say your prayers, Artie, my friend.”
“Who called you?”
“Carver Lennox.”
I drove over to the drugstore on 145th Street. In my pocket were two bottles of pills. They looked the same, but I wasn’t sure. Simonova’s was labeled Altace. Hutchison’s was Ramipril.
At the local Duane Reade, I pushed past a woman waiting at the counter and got hold of the pharmacist, an Indian guy, name on his tag read Ravi. I him asked what the hell Ramipril was.
“Generic name for something that also goes under Altace,” he said.
“What’s it for?” I asked, even though I knew. Tolya took the stuff but I had to be sure.
“High blood pressure,” said the pharmacist. “People who’ve already had a heart attack, a lot of docs prescribe it for them.”
Can you overdose, I wanted to say, and then the woman I’d pushed past got impatient and yelled at me. I didn’t wait
I got in my car, and drove as fast as I could over to the church. “Say your prayers, Artie,” Virgil had said, when he told me where to find Celestina Hutchison.
CHAPTER 38
I n the strange light I squinted to adjust my eyes to the dusky church interior, tried to work out what was going on, and if I could spot Celestina Hutchison.
A cold New York winter sun streamed in through the colored glass, and the sound of people mumbling rose up inside the old Gothic church on 141st Street. Christmas greenery surrounded the altar. The sound of people praying was what I heard first, then the organ music began, and singing.
I had never been inside a church until I got to New York. Not a lot of churchgoing in Moscow when I was a kid, not a lot in Israel. Before I saw the inside of a church, I was twenty years old.
“I thought they did this stuff in Latin,” I whispered to a young cop standing at the back, leaning against the church wall.
“Not usually. Only Our Lady of Mount Carmel down on 116th Street still does the Tridentine mass,” he told me.
“Got it,” I said. I didn’t.
His name was Alvin. Officer Alvin. I had seen him at the Armstrong. Asked him if he had been assigned to the Hutchison case. He nodded. Said Virgil Radcliff was heading it up. Alvin knew my name.
In the rows of pews, people, a lot of them old, including Celestina, some on their knees, worked at their beads, or stared at the priest up front, at least from what I could see. To me, it was a scene from The Godfather, except these old people were black, not Italian. So I stood in the back and waited for the service to end, and waited for Celestina Hutchison to finish praying.
Religion wasn’t something I knew much about. Didn’t care. Maybe the way I was raised. I had tried to understand once or twice. Had visited a few churches in the city.
I’d dated a girl once who made me go to a synagogue on the Lower East Side. She told me she wanted to connect with her roots. Somebody had played a guitar during the service. It made us laugh. We’d tried a few other synagogues, including one where the women sat separate from the men.
I’d been new to the city then, and it was all fine by me, the music, the holidays, the celebrating, I was OK with it. The girl, I was crazy about her; she was beautiful and funny. Once she’d said wistfully, “I like the idea of community. I like feeling Jewish. I just wish I could find a synagogue without God or pixies.” She married an Indian guy in the end.
Suddenly, as if she knew I was looking, Celestina turned, half raised herself from her seat, and stared at me. She was in a pew surrounded by other women-her sisters, friends, hard to say-all in black, half hidden by their hats. She whispered to them, and they all turned to look at me.
I started toward her, but somebody put a hand on my arm. It was Carver Lennox.
“You told her.”
“Yes,” he said. “Let her finish here, please.”
“I locked the windows, locked the doors. I tried to keep him in, I tried to keep him safe, but I had to go to my sister’s, she was not well, and poor Lionel, whatever did he do to himself, jumping like that?” said Celestina, when she reached the back of the church after the service, speaking to me in her high, small voice. “I do believe he was finished with this life, but then he must have suffered terrible guilt,” she added, adjusting her black felt hat. She handed her mink coat to Carver.
“What for?”
“For all the killing, of course,” she said. “His idea of helping people. Fifty-three years I lived with a man who was a murderer. Thank you, Carver, dear,” she said as he helped her into her coat, then took her hand in his.
“Is that what you think?” I said to her. “That he killed himself?”
“It is what I know,” she said with fury, her head snapping up so that I could see her eyes. “It served his purpose, fulfilled his belief, in a sense, it assuaged his guilt. I know for a fact he felt guilty about those poor, sick people he hurried to their deaths. Surely, for that, and to spite me,” she added. “He knew in my view that suicide is a terrible sin. What do you think, then, Detective Cohen?” She raised her eyebrows, as if actually inviting me to comment, and put her free hand on her hat.
Was this what Lionel had wanted to tell me at the party the night before? Had he planned to tell me he had helped Simonova die? Amahl Washington, too?
I started to ask Celestina where she herself had gone after the party the night before. Quickly, the women who had been sitting with her gathered. Murmuring comforting words, they surrounded her like a palace guard and forced me outside the circle.