Something must have been communicated through the ether between them, for Lucy twisted and looked back at Marlene, startled.
“Spying on me again?”
“It’s not spying. I’m your mother. I’m required to stare at you-it’s a New York statute.”
Lucy rolled her eyes and said something low and not in English.
“What was that?” asked Marlene.
Lucy giggled. “It means, ‘they will believe it in Hunan.’”
“Yes, dear. Correct me if I’m wrong, but little Chinese girls don’t talk that way to their devoted parents,” said Marlene. She sat down next to Lucy, who closed her notebook, in a gesture of privacy.
“What’re you working on?”
“Math. Factoring.” Casually said.
Marlene put an impressed expression on her face. “My, my! Do you need any help with it?”
“No, it’s easy. Tranh showed me how to do it.”
Ah, Tranh, you indispensable monster!
“You’re still getting on okay with him?”
“Uh-huh. He’s neat. It’s like having our own private restaurant here. He’s learning more English too. He says, ‘I watch much of TV.’” A pause. Lucy looked into her mother’s face; Marlene looked into her husband’s eyes. “Is Tranh, like, in trouble?” the girl asked.
“Not that I know of,” said Marlene carefully. “Why?”
“Oh, nothing. Uncle Harry hates him. He was saying bad words to himself in his office. About Tranh. He was supposed to watch Miranda’s mom, wasn’t he? I mean, Tranh was.”
A chill went through Marlene. “What gives you that idea, darling?”
“Because I was in Tranh’s room and I saw the whatchamacallit, the folder with the pictures and stuff …?”
“The case file?”
“Uh-huh. The case file about Ms. Lanin and that guy who was chasing her. He got killed, didn’t he?”
“That’s right, he did.”
Lucy thought for a few seconds and then said, “Probably Tranh did it.”
Marlene swallowed hard “What makes you say that?” she asked, managing with some effort to keep her face placid and her voice steady.
“He had a big spot of blood on his sneaker yesterday, the other pair. I saw it in his closet. But now it’s not there. Also, he has a gun in his bag. A weird semi-auto. With Russian writing on it. It’s not a nine or a forty-five, or-”
Marlene interrupted the gun talk, to which her daughter had become regrettably prone of late. “Yeah, but that’s not what the police think, Luce. They think that Ms. Lanin got the gun away from the man who kidnapped her and shot him with it. He was shot with that gun, the bad guy’s gun. That’s the first thing. Second, it’s not allowed to go poking around in other people’s stuff. So don’t do it anymore, okay? I mean it! And also, what you just said about Tranh? I don’t want you to talk about it to anyone else, ever. Understand?”
Lucy nodded. “Sure, Mom. I would never say it to anyone but you anyway. I’m not a dope!”
“No, you’re certainly not,” said Marlene. “But, Lucy? Don’t even say it to me.”
“Okay.” She held a forefinger to her temple. “Bzzzt! It’s erased. Can we go shooting?”
Was this a quid pro quo? Amnesia in exchange for a treat? Marlene hoped not, although being taken to the range to bang away with a.22 was very nearly Lucy’s favorite activity. She decided that math prowess, in any case, deserved a reward. Marlene looked at her watch. “Sure. After your homework’s done,” she said.
The Music Lover carefully pasted the review from the Times into his scrapbook and took the opportunity to peruse the volume once again. He was in the room of his little apartment dedicated to Edith Wooten and her music. The walls and the ceiling were papered over with concert posters and programs, from the very first one to the one just passed. A white wooden shelf held more intimate souvenirs: a pair of white panties, a white brassiere, a toothbrush, a set of keys, pink lipstick, a pair of tan leather gloves. Above these, pinned to the wall, was his private photo gallery, both standard publicity shots and his own compositions-Edie on the street, Edie shopping, Edie practicing, and several shot with a telephoto lens, of Edie in her bathrobe, Edie in a half slip, one small breast showing. His favorite.
He placed the scrapbook back in its special trunk with the three others and lay down on the camp bed that was the room’s only other furniture. The bed was made up with a white duvet covered with a white cotton duvet cover printed with tiny pink roses, the same as the one on Edie Wooten’s bed up on Park Avenue. The pillow was a square one in oyster-colored silk that came from Edie’s bedroom. That had been his biggest coup once; it still smelted of her Jean Naté. Now of course he could get anything he wanted. It was easy since he had learned how to make himself invisible.
Perhaps too easy? No, the thrill was still there. The Music Lover became excited, thinking about the treasures he would soon possess, thinking about control, about the power he had over her, over the music. He went to the closet and brought out a huge boom box. He really needed a good stereo system, but he moved so much, and so quickly too, that it was impossible. Into the slots fed a tape of Edie playing Schubert’s Quartet in A Major, the Rosamunde. As the music swelled through the room, he lay back on the bed and fixed his eyes on the ceiling, where he had taped a poster-sized blowup of Edie playing her cello. It was an informal shot, taken during practice at a summer music festival. Edie was wearing a tank top and shorts, her head was back, and her face was full of joy. She was laughing, in fact. Exposing her throat. The Music Lover opened his bathrobe. He pressed the pillow against his cheek. Her naked thighs were pressing against the bare wood. The music swelled. He breathed in her fumes, her music, he stroked himself slowly, trying to make it last until the end of the first movement.
ELEVEN
Sunday dawned, a dull day with yellowy-gray city clouds and a cold December wind. Karp the Infidel snored in bed, and Marlene got her daughter ready for church. Marlene and her husband had been walking on eggs since the shooting of Pruitt. Given the peculiarities of their respective personalities and professions, however, this did not bother them as much as it would have another couple. Shortly, Marlene knew, there would be the crisis-both of them would bellow, trample around like hippos, yolk-stained to the knees, and, still snarling, fall into bed.
Lucy was ready when Marlene came out of the bedroom, dressed in white tights and a deep purple velvet dress with a lace collar and little black buttons up the front. She had a round-brimmed hat in the same color held in her hands, and she had clearly tried hard with her hair. It shone, and the tangles were mainly at the back. Lucy liked church, as she liked all serious things, non-kid things-guns, for example. It was another aspect of her eight-going-on-thirty personality. Marlene sometimes feared that she was even a trifle too dour.
“Ow!” as Marlene plied her hairbrush.
“Be quiet, and think of the holy martyrs, as my mother used to say,” said Marlene. Finishing, she stood back.
“There! Gorgeous! Ready for church. In fact, in that outfit, you look like a tiny monsignor.”
Lucy was not amused by this remark. She put on her hat and her camel-hair coat, now somewhat too small, showing skinny wrist bones, and made for the door. They walked the dog, boarded the yellow car, which was nursed with many a prayer into fretful life, and drove to Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Mulberry Street off Prince. In the car, Lucy asked, “Do you think they’ll let girls be, like, priests while I’m alive?”
“I don’t know, Luce. John Paul and I are trying to work it out, but we’re still pretty far apart. Why? Feeling a vocation coming on?”
Shrug. “It would be neat to be, you know, holy.”
“You could be a nun,” suggested Marlene, shriveling.