"What's that?"
"Chainsaw," he said.
Nat had his own key and had let himself in. Abe and Treya heard the stertorous rumbling that marked Nat's sleep from down on the sidewalk.
He was on the living room couch. The rule was not to wake him up on purpose, although occasional, accidental noise in the background was considered kosher and often did the trick. So Abe put on a CD of the opera Turandot, which featured his middle son Jacob in his first commercial recording, albeit among the chorus, where Abe swore he could pick him out. With the music at conversational level, they parked Rachel in the playpen with some toys and began unpacking their groceries in and around the kitchen.
They hadn't quite finished the first bag when Nat was in the doorway, scratching his white hair around his yarmulke, pulling his sweater down over his belt. "For a minute with that music," he said, "I thought I must have died and gone to heaven."
"He sounds great, doesn't he?"
"Outstanding."
"You guys talking about Jacob?" Treya asked. "I don't think he's on this track."
Father and son exchanged a look. "You don't hear him?" Nat asked. He paused, listening, pointed. "There!"
"Ah." Treya smiled at her father-in-law, turned back to her groceries. "Oh, there."
"She doesn't hear him," Abe said.
"I do," she insisted. "Right in the middle of those other voices. He really stands out." She pushed it for her husband's benefit. "It's like he's in the next room." But then something struck her and she turned, suddenly all business. "But wait a minute. It's Saturday, Nat. What are you doing here? Is everything all right?"
Nat was an observant Jew and spent a great deal of time inside his synagogue. He took the Sabbath seriously, and normally he would not move from his apartment except to walk to temple, where he'd remain until sundown. But at Treya's question, his expression went blank for a beat. Then he remembered. "Ach, this Silverman thing again."
Abe stopped pulling groceries from his bag. "What about it?"
He shrugged. "I'm talking to Sadie today outside temple."
"How's she holding up?" Treya asked.
"You know. A good few minutes, a bad day or two. It's still so soon. We only just laid him down, when…?" Nat lost his thread to sadness for a second. "Anyway, she asks would I please thank you for telling her about this man they arrested, this friend of your friend Hardy."
"They haven't arrested him yet, Dad. He's still at large."
Nat took on a querulous tone. "I swore you said they arrested him."
"No. Not yet."
After a moment, Nat shrugged again. "Well, maybe that's just as well."
"Just as well? Why do you say that?"
"Because this morning she's watching the television and the news has the story of all the evidence they found at this man's house-the money and the rings and so on. Especially this one sapphire ring."
"What about it?"
"What about it is that Sam only had one ring like they described-this one-and it definitely wasn't missing when Sadie and I went to take the inventory there. Remember? When you came that night? We never got too far, but we looked in the jewel case. The ring was in there that night. She was sure of it."
"Maybe the one they found was another ring like it, Dad. This one had Sam's tag on it."
He shook his head. "That's what I'm saying, Abraham. Listen to me. It was Sam's, all right, but it was still in his case when we went there. So whoever killed him didn't take it during the robbery. Something's got to be wrong with this, don't you think?"
Treya, too, had stopped unpacking groceries. She stood with her arms crossed, leaning back against the counter. "Does Sadie think she's sure about this, Nat?"
He looked at the two of them. "Not just Sadie. I saw it, too. We even talked about it, how it was good Sam never had to sell that one, his favorite piece in the shop. He thought it was lucky, for the cards, you know. So no. No question. It was there."
"Anybody shoot at you recently?"
"No."
"You call Kroll yet?"
"I'm still deciding."
"How about Holiday?"
"How about him? Why, what's up?"
"You know how I wasn't going to get involved?"
"It filled me with admiration."
"Me, too. But alas, short-lived. There's been a development."
"Talk to me."
The way Glitsky decided he had to play it was to have Sadie call the police and appear to take care of the matter herself. His own involvement under any guise wasn't going to be appreciated, no matter what spin he put on it. He felt pretty much out of spin in any case.
Sadie lived in a stand-alone bungalow on Palm Avenue, not far from the synagogue. Inside, the place was a pin-neat kitsch warehouse. Every conceivable surface-the top of the television set, the breadbasket in the kitchen-every inch of flat space was covered with a doily and then a knickknack or doll, a porcelain piece or souvenir. Coney Island! Disneyland! Niagara Falls! The Grand Canyon! Tiny dogs and cute little cats. Pincushions.
Sadie cleared a spot big enough to hold a teapot and cups on the small table in front of the sofa in the living room. It had grown dark outside by now. With two small sconced wall lights by the door providing the only illumination, Glitsky thought it probably wasn't light enough to read, but neither his father, who sat next to her on the couch, nor Sadie herself seemed to mind, or even notice.
She poured his tea and sat expectantly while he tried to explain. "I know that because I'm with the police, it seems like I would be the natural choice to take your information, especially since I know you. You know Nat. We're all a little like family. But that's not really how it works."
"I know how offices work," she said, laying a frail hand on his. "Somebody's afraid you're going to get the credit."
"Maybe there's some of that. But basically there are two inspectors in the homicide detail who are handling the case-in this instance probably all of these cases-and whatever information comes to the police ought to be funneled through them."
Sadie was smiling at him as though he were somehow feeble. She had left her hand, cool and crepe-skinned, over his, and now she exerted some slight pressure for emphasis. "I'll do whatever you tell me and talk to anybody you want. All I know is what I saw."
"I saw it, too," Nat repeated, and Sadie rewarded him with a grateful look.
"And that's the ring, this sapphire ring?"
"Well, yes, that one stands out. But really, there wasn't any jewelry taken at all, although that would of course be harder to prove."
"And why is that?"
"Because they may have taken something I'd never seen. Maybe Sam had taken in some stones or something that day. I wouldn't have known they were there, then, would I?"
"No. Of course you're right." Glitsky decided he'd fallen into the error of assuming that Sadie wasn't as sharp as a younger person might have been. Enough of that. "So you could swear that the sapphire ring was in the case when you went there with Nat?"
"Yes. No doubt of it. We-Nat and I-we even wrote it on the inventory before you stopped us. I've got it saved."
Given the condition of the house, this didn't surprise Glitsky, but he was still glad of it. "That's good. You might want to bring that with you when you talk to the inspectors."
"Well, shall we call them now?" she asked. "I'd like to get this out of the way. It just doesn't seem right that this other man…"
"John Holiday?"
"Yes, that was it. That this Mr. Holiday-well, I don't see that he killed Sam, let's put it that way. I think somebody must have been trying to be too clever by half. Maybe they didn't know-they must not have known-that Nat and I had been in the shop that other night. If it had only been the money, that would have been stronger."