Blood Relations (56 page)

Tarpon Springs August 17 Dear Sam, How’s everything in Tampa? We’re allfine here. I got your check, as usual, though it’s more than we needfor now, so I put the rest in the savings account.

Dad got out of the hospitalfor his kidney trouble yesterday, and he’s better, but we don’t think he will be with us much longer. We haven’t told Dina, but she senses it. She and Costas sit on the back porch together in the evenings. He rocks in his chair and she watches the river. It’s a comfort to him, having her home again.

Her new thing on Saturday is cleaning the sanctuary at the cathedral. It’s hardfor me to see my sister scrubbing the floor, knowing what she used to be, but she says it makes herfeel closer to God, the more she’s down there on her knees. Aunt Betty says i she wants to do it, let her. Dina still has no memory of certain things, and that is a blessing. I won’t say she’s happy, but she’s not unhappy.

I hope you’re liking your new job. I guess it’s a change, but we know you’ll do fine, like you always have. (Now, ole buddy, the next thing is to turn you into a fan of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Ha.)

The girls send their love to Melanie, and did she get the pictures they sent? Dottie just told me to tell you hello and take care of yourself. Maybe we can all get together over the Labor Day weekend.

Best regards, Nick

822 W I th St. New York, NY

September 22 Dear Sam, Thank you so much for the lovely letter, which I just this minute read. After a week in Canada, it was nice to be welcomed home by thatfamiliar scrawl.

To answer your question: Yes, of course! I’d love to see you for Christmas. (Only you, Sam, would plan things so far in advance.) And yes, I’ll send you subway maps and bus schedules and lists of touristy things to do, or (my humble suggestion) you couldjust forget about all thatfor once and let me show you around. I’m a terrific tour guide.

Naturally you’ll want to have a long visit with your cousins in Brooklyn (how did you find them after thirty-five years?!), but why not let Melanie spend a day or two with me? I wasn’t much older thanfifteen when I first saw Greenwich Village. My new place is a shoebox, but there’s room for two girls in it. I should know: Ali Duncan came through town after a shoot in London, and she stayed with me for nearly a week.

(Here’s some gossip: Moda Ruffini U.S.A. filedfor bankruptcy, and the store in Miami has closed. Even better: Tereza Ruffini kicked Klaus out of their villa in Milan when she caught him with herfitting model. Ali couldn’t stop laughing when she told me about it.)

I’ll be in Miami at the end of the month. It’s just a weekend, to take some shots of the new trade center. I know Tampa isn’t across the street, but if you could pull yourself awayfrom your clientsfor only a day …

I realized, Sam—dearest Sam-as I read your letter, that next week is the first anniversary of Matthew’s death. I hope you don’t mind my mentioning it, but I have thought of him lately-and not with sadness. He just comes into my mind; then he goes out, like paying me a visit. It’s good to think (if him without dwelling on all the other stuff. If there is a heaven, I’m sure he’s up there. That’s all. I just wanted you to know.

Since our last phone call, I’ve been doing some thinking, as you asked me to. Really, I can’t tell what I want to do in the long term. It’s much too soon to say.

I know you don’t want to put any pressure on me, and I feel the same. However … it’s good to know that after all the hell they’ve been through, two people can still care about each other. I mean really care, not just say the right words. But your words are right. No pretty phrases, just the facts. Oh, well. I don’t try to figure anything out these days. I just look in the lens and click the shutter.

Write soon, Love, Caitlin The noises of South Beach faded and the late summer glare dimmed when Harold Perlstein closed the heavy door. Sam looked around, his eyes adjusting. The place belonged to another country. Another century. Dark wood. The curtains, the candies, the carved pews. Then he noticed the deep turquoise carpet. Not so far from Miami Beach after all.

He put on the yarmulke that Perlstein handed him, patting it down onto his hair.

“You’ll have to excuse me for not remembering much. I haven’t been in a synagogue since I was a kid. I’m just in Miami for the day, anyway.”

“I know. You told me. You’re not religious. That’s all right.” Perlstein led him through a side door. “Come on, I’ll show you around.” They went down a short hallway tiled in cracked squares of green and tan linoleum, then through another door. “This is where I work.”

The room was brightly lit, painted white, with sunlight streaming in along one side. An air conditioner dripped into a bucket. Perlstein’s desk was heavy oak, scratched from years of use. The veneer was peeling up.

Perlstein wore a blue knit shirt with a horizontal white stripe, and pale yellow pants. “How did he die, your son?

You didn’t say.” He dropped a bib apron over his head, then tied it in the back.

“In a motorcycle accident,” Sam said.

“Ohhh. Too bad. Kids. They go so fast on those things.” He handed Sam some folded pages. A pamphlet.

“This I got for you from the rabbi. Look. This part here.

Yiz-kor Elohim nish-mas b’nee haw-ahoov-”

“What does it mean?”

Perlstein took it back, read it over, then said, ” ‘O heavenly Father, remember … the soul of my beloved son, who I recall with love in this … solemn hour. His memory is in my heart. May his soul … live in eternal life.” Something like that. ‘Amen.” Nice, right?”

“Very nice,” Sam said.

“Yes.” Perlstein patted his arm. “Okay, sit here.”

He clicked on a metal lamp that held a long fluorescent bulb. On a wooden shelf above the desk there was a mug from Cypress Gardens with several big feathers in it. Perlstein pulled one out, a heavy brownish-gray with white flecks. “This is a goose-quill pen. I make them myself.

The parchment is calfskin, but I don’t know how they do it. And the ink is made special. The rabbi blesses it, and so on.”

From the table to his right he lifted a sheet of brown wrapping paper and pulled from under it a page of parchment. The sheet was pearly white and already bore several sections of squarish black letters.

“This Torah, when I finish, will last for hundreds of years, longer than you or 1. When we’re dust, this will still be here. What do you think about that?”

Sam nodded and put on his glasses. Harold Perlstein settled down with his quill and ink. His hand was big, with knobby knuckles, but it moved quickly, leaving a trail of tiny, precise letters. Ink had worked under his cuticles and into the ridges and crevices of his skin.

“There’s a prayer for each letter,” Perlstein said, dipping the quill into the ink, shaking off a drop. “I think that’s so we keep it slow and don’t make mistakes. But I’m pretty fast.” He scratched more letters, writing right to left, lifting his hand to make sure he didn’t smear the ink, blowing on it from time to time. As he worked, Sam could hear the minor-key notes and see his lips move.

From time to time the old man would glance up at a printed page stuck to a corkboard with a thumbtack, but generally he kept his face bent to the parchment.

Finally Perlstein straightened up and leaned back in the chair. “Okay. You see how it goes. I’ve stopped so the next letter is mem. Like an M. For Matthew, your son.

Now, you Out your hand on mine. Not so heavy. Lighter.

Yes, like that. We’ll put him here, on this line.”

Perlstein’s skin was like parchment itself, sinking between the tendons. He sang the chant for M; then his hand moved, and Sam’s moved with it, and the black ink flowed onto the page.

BARBARA PARKER, the new master of the legal thriller Barbara Parker’s first legal thriller, Suspicion of Innocence, was a finalist for the prestigious Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best First Novel by an American Author. Her second, Suspicion of Guilt, gained even wider critical acclaim and legions of new readers. The triumphant Blood Relations confirmed Barbara Parker’s place among the very best lawyer-writers. Now she’s back with Criminal Justice, the explosive story of a burned-out prosecutor who gets a nasty surprise when his girlfriend is found murdered …

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A Dutton Hardcover on sale in January 1997 As soon as the bubbles cleared, Dan Galindo looked up through his dive mask. The boat’s pointed shape bobbed on the surface, and a line of yellow polyester rope angled toward the bottom, ending at a grapnel hook sixty feet down, caught on a pitted white ridge in the reef.

He inverted, kicking slowly with his fins. A school of chub eyed him, then shot away, their sides glinting silver as they turned in unison. Dan moved along at a shallow depth, ten feet or so, till he ran out of air. At the surface, he blew seawater out of his snorkel, took a few deep breaths, then went under again, deeper. A few seconds with his ears above water had been enough. The girl he’d come with had turned the radio to a rock station. Dan had glimpsed only dark hair under a baseball cap, and her shoulders huddled in a sweatshirt. She was probably wishing she had stayed in bed.

Two hours before dawn he had come fully awake, a bitch of a hangover finally catching up like an icepick through his eye sockets. The moon was a ghostly white globe in a corner of the window. He had carefully lifted Kathy’s arm off his chest, but she woke up and asked where he was going. He told her the truth before he could stop himself-out on the boat to see the sun come up.

His apartment was only a block from the marina near the causeway at Seventy-ninth Street and the bay. Dan carried the bag with his dive gear. Kathy followed, stumbling sleepily, holding a mug of coffee. She wore a swim Excerpt from Criminal Justice 441 suit under jeans and a sweatshirt, but she didn’t want to go in. She didn’t like the water, which Dan thought bizarre for someone who had moved to Miami from Ohio or Iowa-he couldn’t remember which.

It was still dark when he turned his twenty-five foot outboard south on Biscayne Bay. In moonlight, Dan passed under the causeways connecting the mainland to Miami Beach, then picked up speed once beyond the bridge to Key Biscayne, Streetlights began to wink off as the sky turned from gray to pale blue. Not many boats were in the water at this hour on a Monday morning-an old shrimp boat coming in and some million-dollar sportfishers churning at high speed for deep water. A stain of pink appeared on the horizon. A few miles farther along, with the mainland reduced to a line of misty green in the west, he guided the boat through the narrow channel at Sands Cut, just north of Elliot Key, then headed for Triumph Reef. The sun had risen ahead of them, a fiery ball of orange.

The depth finder held steady at thirty then went to forty, fifty. Dan slowed. At sixty he cut the engine. Their wake caught up to them and the boat rose and fell. Another quarter mile out, the bottom would drop quickly to a depth of hundreds of feet.

For a while they drifted, hearing only the gurgle of water on the hull. Then Kathy started telling him about the gig coming up next weekend, and the demo record her band was going to do, and the no-talent little bitch who was trying to take over the vocals, and can you fucking believe we are up this early? It was when she started fiddling with the dial on the radio that Dan tossed the anchor overboard. He cleated off the bow line, clipped the dive flag to a pole, then suited up.

He told Kathy he’d be back in a while, don’t go away.

He lowered his mask, bit down on the snorkel, and jumped in. The sea closed in over his head in a froth of bubbles, and he sank into perfect silence.

Dan kicked slowly, moving along, watching a queen parrot fish with its beaklike mouth dart and turn below him. The fish was bright turquoise now, but bring it to the surface, the color would fade as life ebbed away. Visibility was good all the way down, where patches of sand Excerpt from Criminal Justice appeared bone white among the grayish rocks of the reef The uneven terrain dropped into rocky holes between out croppings of coral, where purple fan grass waved in the slight current. The reef was alive with fish. Dan spotted a longnose butterfly, blue tang, and a gray angel. Rolling over, he took the snorkel out of his mouth and blew out air. The bubbles floated upward, rocking side to side, then were lost against the bright surface of the water. He wanted to follow them, to climb back into the boat, sit in the sun till his headache went away. But Kathy was up there waiting for him. Coming along to be a good sport, but wanting to go in now, let’s get breakfast. Or worse, she would take off her clothes and expect him to finish what he hadn’t been able to do last night. It was enough to make him consider sucking in a double lungful of seawater.

A curse bubbled from between his lips. His watch showed eight-fifteen. There was a client coming at ten o’clock. A competent secretary, if he had one, might help him out. Why, Mr. Galindo just called from court. His appointment with the judge (or trial or emergency bond hearing) is running longer than expected…. But Alva, who belonged to the old lawyer Dan rented space from, might look up from slamming the keys on her ancient electric typewriter long enough to take her cigarette out of her mouth and say, No, he’s not here. I don’t know where the hell he is.

Coming up again, Dan pushed his mask to his forehead and looked toward the boat. Kathy was asleep on the bow with the radio blaring. Her forearm was over her eyes, and one foot moved to the beat of drums and a screeching guitar.

Her swimsuit top was off, and the rosy nipples pointed sky ward. There was a dagger tattooed on the underside of her breast.

Dan spit into his mask and sloshed it with seawater. He began to breathe deeply. In, out. Slower. Pulling air into expanded lungs, then pushing it all out, purging the car bon dioxide. He was going to the bottom. He counted fifteen long breaths, took a look at his watch, then did a one-eighty.