At the back of the group of women was Lucille Bernard. She wore a belted black coat with a fur collar, high-heeled boots, and a small hat with a little brim.
She saw me and gestured for me to meet her out on the steps of the church. In the bright, hard light I saw she had circles so deep under her eyes they looked as if they had been engraved into her skin.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Dr. Hutchison was important to you.”
“Yes, he was, and I feel I should have been more tolerant,” said Bernard. “I didn’t see enough of him because I didn’t want to argue with him, and now he’s gone.”
“How did you find out?”
“Carver called me and asked me to meet him so we could tell Celestina together,” she said.
“You’re close to her?”
“I knew her through Lionel, of course. She’s a very old woman now; I’ll do what I can for her.” There wasn’t much warmth in her voice.
“You don’t like her?”
“What does it matter?”
“I’m interested.”
“Is it, detective, that you’re interested in us like some kind of sociological study? Is that what you’re saying? You have a soft spot for black folk? You like our music or something?”
“Lionel Hutchison is dead. I found him. This is a case I’m working.”
“You think this is a case?”
“It is now. The police are involved. There’s an autopsy going on. At first when I saw him, I thought he just fell over, but the ME doesn’t think so.”
“You mean, fell over suddenly, like Marianna Simonova, for instance?”
“For instance.”
“He wasn’t sick,” Bernard said.
“He seemed pretty vital to me. Unless he was sick and didn’t want anyone to know.”
“Sick and thinking of indulging in suicide? He would not have jumped. He would have used an easier way. We argued about it. I felt he’d used his skills as a doctor to kill people.” She took a deep breath. “I guess we’re both aware that this makes three people who have died at that damn building recently.”
“Yes. You knew them all?”
“You think I was involved? Do you want to question me? Is that why you’re here?”
“Only for what you can tell me about the two who were your patients-Marianna Simonova, and Amahl Washington,” I said quickly. “Can we go somewhere and talk?”
“Let me see,” she said, adding that on Sundays, the ladies often had breakfast together after mass, usually at somebody’s apartment. Today they would go to Celestina’s sister’s, it would do Celestina good to eat, give her strength to prepare. She would have to identify the body.
“There are plenty of others who can do that.”
“Celestina will want to do it. If necessary, I’ll go with her,” Bernard said.
At the edge of the sidewalk was a girl, maybe fifteen, sixteen, and she was high on some shit. Singing to herself, she was dancing around a fire hydrant, stepping down to the gutter, back up on the sidewalk, pulling up her shirt-a dirty yellow T-shirt with silver glitter on it-pulling it back, playing with her hair, giggling, jiggling, calling out curses. Her hair was dirty, her eyes vacant, and over and over, she did her little dance, prancing out into the street as cars passed by, propositioning the drivers.
From the church steps, the women stared at her, and at least one made to go over, to help her, another pulled a sweater out of her bag and tried to put it over the girl, but she just jerked away, taunting the women, and continuing her dance.
The sun was bright but cold. I saw Alvin, the young officer, head for the girl. I told him to back off and stick around with the ladies. I told him to keep with Mrs. Hutchison when she went to breakfast and then to the morgue, to act polite, as if the department had assigned him to drive the woman officially. He nodded, and up close I saw he was just a kid, maybe twenty-two, glasses, short hair, skinny.
“Wait for me here,” said Bernard, sounding imperious but weary. She walked down the street a few yards, returned with Carver Lennox by her side.
“Carver will go with the ladies. He can go with Celestina to the morgue. That way you and I can talk,” she said to me.
“Just so long as Celestina isn’t bothered anymore, I’ll be happy to help out,” said Lennox. “She’s very agitated, not being home for Lionel, being at the Christmas party and then at her sister’s all night.” Then, quickly, offhand, as if it were a matter of course, he gave me an accounting of Celestina’s time over the past twelve hours, even before I asked for it.
I leaned close to Lennox and said, softly, because I wanted to see his reaction before he heard it from anyone else, “I think Dr. Hutchison was pushed.”
He was silent.
“Pushed from behind, maybe from the roof, or hit first, so by the time he was pushed he was either dead, in which case he wouldn’t bleed, far as I know. Isn’t that right?” I said to Bernard.
“Most likely.”
“Or had a heart attack from the trauma when he hit the ice. Or maybe not. Maybe he lay there on the ground dying slowly.”
Lennox looked at me. “My God,” he said. “What should I do?”
I told him to take care of Mrs. Hutchison, just keep her calm, and I’d get back to him.
He lowered his voice, and there was fear on his face. “You believe whoever killed Lionel, if somebody did, had a hand in Simonova’s death, don’t you? Isn’t that right?” said Lennox, and without waiting for an answer, followed the women to breakfast.
While I waited for Lucille Bernard, I called Jimmy Wagner. Told him even though it was Sunday, I needed access to a safe-deposit box at a bank on 125th Street.
I’d found a charge for a safe-deposit box on Simonova’s bank statement earlier, and I had the address of the bank. If there was a box, maybe there was a will.
Wagner told me he’d do what he could, sounding harried. “Just find me somebody I can nail for this one,” he said. “This was an old guy, pillar of the community, Christmas is coming, it’s the best building in the neighborhood. Just get me something.”
I told him about possible prints on the Armstrong roof. I asked him to let me know what the ME came up with, if there was anything unusual in Hutchison’s system when they cut him open.
“That woman that died in the building, the one I only heard about this morning, you think we should check on that, get the ME to look at her, do a tox screen?”
“It’s too late.”
CHAPTER 39
L ionel was murdered,” said Lucille Bernard.
“How do you know?”
“I can read you, detective. It’s what you think. And whatever else you may be, you’re not stupid.”
“What do you think?” I held the door of my car open and she slid in to the front seat. I got in, too, and closed the door.
“Thank you,” she said. “It’s cold out there.”
“Go on.”
“I’ve been thinking about Lionel. He was a tough old bird, and he was strong. I would have known if he was sick.”
“How?”
“He would have come to me. We disagreed, but he knew I could keep any secret. He taught me well.”
“Right.”
“Whatever his beliefs, this was a man who loved life,” Bernard said. “He held on to his misconceived ideas, such as they were, because he felt they enhanced life; the avoidance of pain, the avoidance of suffering at the end, was worth it.” Her voice wavered. “He so enjoyed himself. When he was younger, my God, I remember when I was in med school, and I saw him much more often, he would invite students over, and I don’t think we’d ever met anybody who was more involved in his subject, but who also experienced so much joy in life.” She took a deep breath. “Once in a while, even these last few years, he would call me, and we would go out and eat and talk until all hours, about music and medicine and Yeats-he loved poetry. He loved Langston Hughes, and Yeats, and Whitman. He would always gossip about the building-he adored that bloody place-and now somebody has killed him in it.”