Friday morning, Helen was waiting for me. “Judge Pritchard’s office just called,” she said, following me into my office.
“Let me guess,” I said as I sat down. “They want to reschedule the Burnett motion.”
She perched on the edge of the chair opposite, clutching in her hand a stack of telephone messages scribbled on pink paper.
“He’s going to be out of town on Wednesday. They want to reset it for Tuesday the following week at two o’clock. Your schedule is clear.”
“Did you tell them my schedule was clear?”
“No, I said I’d have to check with you.”
“Good. Call them back. Tell Pritchard’s clerk that I don’t have anything open for weeks; tell them that this damn thing has been reset twice before; tell them that the defendant has a right to have his motion heard; and then tell them that if the judge wanted to have Wednesdays off, he should have become a goddamn doctor!”
Nothing I did, nothing I said, ever made the slightest impression on her. “Right,” she drawled, making a note to call the clerk and ask very politely whether there might be some way to fit it in anytime at all next week.
“What else do you have?” I asked, gazing out the window.
The telephone rang. “I’ll get it,” Helen said as she got to her feet.
“Take it here,” I said, handing the receiver to her as I pressed the flashing light on the console.
The telephone pressed to her ear, the fingers of her other hand fidgeted with the curled cord. “Law offices of Joseph Antonelli,”
she announced in a voice that managed to be both friendly and pressed for time. “I’m afraid Mr. Antonelli is in conference and can’t be disturbed.” It was the standard all-purpose lie, told so often she could have passed a polygraph each time she told it.
Glancing through the stack of messages she had placed on the desk in front of me, I did not notice at first when she began to scribble on a scrap of paper.
“Yes, I understand,” she said. “Is there any message you’d care to leave?” Reaching across, she waved the paper under my nose.
“Could you hold for just a moment?”
I read the name she had written down. It took me a moment before I was certain who she was. Helen handed me the phone and, shutting the door behind her, left me alone. I sat straight up and plopped both elbows on the desk.
“This is Joseph Antonelli,” I said with all the formality I could summon. “What can I do for you?”
My head moved back and forth with the rhythm of what I heard. “Yes,” I replied, “I’d be glad to do that. Six o’clock would be fine.”
I looked around until I found a pen. “Would you give me that again. Yes, I know where it is,” I said as I wrote down the address. “I’ll see you at six. Thank you for calling, Mrs. Jeffries.”
I do not know why I agreed to see her. Perhaps it was nothing more than the desire to see for myself how she lived and what she was really like. Perhaps it was something else, an instinct that told me there was more to her husband’s death than I knew.
The address she had given me was on the West Side, just minutes from downtown, a tall apartment building constructed sometime before the Second World War. It was something of a landmark and one of the city’s most expensive places to live.
A heavyset man with a pockmarked face and slow-moving eyes was sitting behind a small wooden desk just inside the high-ceilinged lobby. I waited while he lifted a black telephone receiver that looked like it had been in use since the day the building opened and announced, “A Mr. Antonelli is here.” He nodded silently and then hung up. “Sixteenth floor.” He pointed a stubby finger across the gray marble floor to the walnut-paneled wall on the other side. “The elevator is just around the corner.”
There was only one elevator. I pushed the tarnished brass button and heard a buzzer echo high above. The elevator rattled ponderously down the shaft and thudded to a stop. The door creaked open and an old man in a coat that hung off his hollow shoulders and a dress shirt two sizes too large for his shriveled throat stood with his pale white hand on the lever. “Floor?” he gasped. My hands folded in front of me, I leaned against the back of the mirrored, gold-leaf compartment. With a teeth-clenching groan, the ancient elevator began a tedious ascent to the top floor.
Two doors faced each other across the landing. On the wall opposite the elevator, a large blue vase filled with fresh-cut yellow chrysanthemums stood on a narrow, granite-topped table in front of a gilt-edged mirror. The flowers looked too perfect, and I touched one of them to make certain they were real. I started to pull the piece of paper out of my pocket to check the apartment number when the door to 16A swung open.
I had seen her at a distance at the dinner, and I had seen her picture in the newspapers after Jeffries’s murder, but the way she looked now reminded me more of the way I remembered her when she was still a young woman married to her first husband.
She was wearing black tights, a black turtleneck sweater that clung to her ribs and fell halfway down to her knees, and a pair of unremarkable flat shoes. Her shiny brown hair was pulled back around her head and tied in a ponytail.
She extended her hand, stiff-armed, straight out from her shoulder. “Thank you for coming, Mr. Antonelli.” Her voice seemed forced and artificial. As soon as we had shaken hands, she stepped away from the door. “Please come in.”
The apartment was an oriental masterpiece. Hand-knotted rugs, blood red and midnight blue, littered the hardwood floor. Teak and mahogany cabinets, filled with delicate porcelain vases, lined the walls. In the corner of the large living room, a five-foot ivory sculpture of a Mandarin clasped in its tapered fingers a parch-ment scroll.
She gestured toward a light blue sofa opposite the window.
“Can I get you something?” she asked as she removed the stopper from a crystal glass decanter that, along with several others, stood on a silver tray on the coffee table.
“No, nothing, thank you.” Whatever she was drinking, the only thing she mixed it with was a little ice.
She sat down, and a moment later sprang back to her feet and began tapping her fingers on the top of a bamboo chair. She was tall, and quite thin, but she had fairly wide shoulders and extremely long fingers with large, misshapen knuckles. They were the hands you would expect to see on a migrant worker, a woman who was bent over all day long in the fields, pulling things out of the ground, or standing on her tiptoes in an orchard, picking fruit out of the trees. They were constantly in motion, closing, opening, grabbing, letting go, or, as she was doing now, drumming them in quick bursts with staccatolike speed, before they suddenly stopped what they were doing and started doing something else.
Staring straight ahead, her fingers still tapping on the hard surface of the chair, she took a quick gulp of whatever she was drinking and then sat down again.
“Are you sure I can’t get you something?” she asked. She held the drink in both hands, while her wrists rested on her knees, which were pressed tight together. Her eyes jumped from side to side and then settled on the squat, black-lacquered Chinese coffee table.
“I’m sorry,” she said abruptly, looking up. “Did I ask you if you wanted anything?”
“Nothing, thank you.” Leaning forward, I began to draw an invisible figure on the table’s hard gleaming surface. “I was very sorry about what happened to your husband, Mrs. Jeffries,” I began tentatively. “If there’s anything I can do…”
Her eyes flashed with the kind of contempt lavished on fools.