Dead Man's Thoughts (25 page)

“The one in Nathan's bathroom. With the bloodstains. It wasn't Nathan's blood, you said. So it may be the murderer's. So why not test it against my client's blood?”

“Wouldn't mean anything. Not necessarily. Could be somebody else came by, cut himself, and used the towel.”

“Could be,” I agreed cheerfully. I'd learned something about Button in the last few minutes. Push him into a conclusion, and he'd resist like a mule. Let the ideas work on him without pushing, and he'd come around to it himself. I watched him struggle against it, but finally his shoulders sagged and he sighed again, and I knew I'd won. He'd run the blood test, all right. He might never tell me how it came out, but he'd run it. If only to satisfy his curiosity.

T
WENTY
-
NINE

W
e spun along the spaghetti strands of highway that connect the outer boroughs to Manhattan. I hadn't the vaguest idea which one we were on—I only know them from listening to the morning traffic reports. Backed up on the BQE. Rubbernecking delays on the Major Deegan. I was on my way to Queens, to the Long Island City Greek Orthodox Church where they would lay Del Parma's mangled body to rest.

I looked at Dave, who sat in the driver's seat, effortlessly guiding his little car through the maze of roads, all marked with green signs designating places I had no mental picture of.

Dave turned off the highway onto a city street lined with little one-story neighborhood stores. Gloria's House of Beauty. I thought of Gloria Vinci, with her tough, businesswoman's attitude to life. Sal's Pizza. Nick's Shoe Repair. It looked a lot like Cleveland.

The crowd on the church steps was enormous. Not only had Parma, a political animal, had many friends, but the manner of his death and the Winthrop charges had made his funeral a media event. Remembering the man's lifelong courting of publicity, I thought that on the whole he would have been pleased.

The ornate doors swung open, and the crowds began to file into the church. Inside, it looked like an airplane hangar with pews. I found a place in the back and watched the knots of people. The mayor and his retinue. The wife, blonde and dignified in designer black. Young men from Parma's office, alike as to their three-piece suits and ambitious, predatory eyes.

Then I saw her. As I'd expected, she sat in the back row. Her face was pale, devoid of makeup. She wore a drab gray dress and a tiny black hat that surely hadn't been out of her closet since 1962. A pillbox, like Jackie Kennedy's. She took her seat in the back with the furtiveness of an amateur shoplifter. The Other Woman weeping in the back row, just as I'd said to Flaherty. Marian Macready, Del Parma's very private secretary. Dave had explained their extra-curricular relationship.

The service was long and tedious. In Greek, except for the florid funeral oration, which praised Parma as a pillar of the Greek community. While the speeches droned on, I looked around the church. It was all gold, heavy and rich. Flat-faced icons hung on the wall, their eyes staring with blank patience at the generations of worshippers that had knelt here.

At last it was over. The pallbearers, one of them Parma's son—about fifteen, with his father's dark good looks and burning eyes—picked up the coffin. I turned toward the aisle to watch it pass and suddenly noticed that Marian was gone. She had slipped out the side door.

I did the same, from my side of the church. I had to run to catch up with the secretary's retreating figure. I called out, “Miss Macready. Marian. Please stop. I have to talk to you.” I was out of breath, but I dared not pause to catch it. She halted abruptly, turning on me with a look of implacable hatred on her face.

“Leave me alone.” She spat the words out with a venom that shocked me. “I've got nothing to say to you people,” she went on.

It took me a minute, but then I remembered that Parma, too, had taken me for a reporter at first. I shook my head. “No, no,” I said. “I'm not from a newspaper. I'm a lawyer. I came to see Mr. Parma a couple of weeks ago.”

The hatred was gone from her face, but it was replaced by a wariness, a sullen suspicion, that wasn't much more encouraging. She had been badly hurt, and I had to go as carefully as you do with any wounded animal.

“I'm sorry about your boss,” I said simply. “But I have to talk to you. It's possible his death was no accident, that it was involved with the death of a man named Charlie Blackwell and Charlie's lawyer, Nathan Wasserstein. You see, Nathan was my lover, so I have some idea what you're going through right now.”

There was still a dullness in the red-rimmed eyes, but there was a touch of color in her cheeks. She was coming alive, just a little. I had to wake her up completely.

“If you help me,” I said carefully, “we just might be able to nail whoever killed your boss.”

“Nail him?” she asked. “You mean put him in prison?” There was a hint of life in the red-rimmed eyes. She looked like she was coming back from a long distance. There was something to live for after all. Revenge. It wasn't a nice emotion to stir up, but it was the only thing that could have penetrated her pain.

“Where can we talk?” she asked in a hoarse voice. She looked around a little wildly, and I realized she'd left the church blindly, with no clear goal in mind.

“We could go somewhere for coffee,” I suggested, looking toward the business street Dave had turned off to find his parking space.

She shook her head. “No,” she said, “I don't want to be seen like this.” She gestured deprecatingly with her hand at the drab gray dress that made her look like a Dorothea Lange portrait. “We can go to my house,” she decided.

I nodded my agreement. She turned and walked up the street. Quickly. She had a purpose now. To get the guy who'd killed her lover. I followed, trying not to feel like a heel. She stopped at a red Toyota and unlocked the passenger door, then walked around to the driver's side. I stepped in and closed the door. She started the engine and pulled the car, with negligent expertise, out of its cramped parking space and into the flow of traffic.

After a few turns that left me even more bewildered than before, we turned onto a street of neat little row houses. Light red brick with white shutters, white ironwork fences, and multicolored flagstone walks and patios. Lots of window boxes. Empty now, but by June they'd be filled with geraniums or petunias, depending on how much direct sunlight they got.

We parked the car in the driveway and walked up the stairs to what in a brownstone would be the parlor floor. Marian opened the two-toned green door with keys suspended from an expensive-looking gold ring. I found myself wondering if it had been a gift from Parma.

Inside, the room was as far from the impression I'd formed of Marian as possible. Instead of the vibrant colors she'd worn at our first meeting, the room was all soft blue, ivory, and gold. Elaborate, fake-antiqued, somebody's idea of high-class decorating. There was a wistful quality to it, like the genteel pillbox hat.

I let her putter in the kitchen getting coffee. The kitchen looked homey, with none of the phony touches I saw in the living-dining room. The spiritual center of her home, I told myself, a little fancifully. She should have been the mother of six, preparing huge home-cooked meals which she would set proudly before her brood. “I love to watch a man eat,” she would say as hefty sons devoured her offerings. Instead, she'd cooked for one man. Whenever he could plausibly get away from his own dinner table. It seemed such a waste.

She came into the living room and set a tray, laden with coffee pot, glass cream and sugar set, tiny spoons, and two fragile cups, on the ivory coffee table. We went through the ritual of pouring and stirring, then sat in awkward silence for a moment. The intensity that had propelled her home seemed to have dissipated. She looked unbearably weary. I wondered if she'd slept at all since hearing the news.

“I don't know where to start,” I began. Then I looked into the troubled gray eyes and began to talk about Nathan. Somehow explaining him to a stranger was comforting. I warmed to the subject and talked freely, telling Marian about Charlie Blackwell and the Burton Stone trial. She recalled the name, nodding her head as I repeated the suspicion that the trial had been fixed.

“Riordan,” she said flatly, definitely. “It was that Matt Riordan. Everybody knew what kind of lawyer he was.”

“That's what Mr. Parma thought, anyway,” I concurred. “But it started to look like it wasn't Riordan after all. Or that if it was him, he had help. From somebody in the office. Somebody Parma trusted.”

“Just because Jesse Winthrop printed those lies—” she began hotly.

I held up my hand. “Winthrop was wrong about your boss,” I agreed. “But he may have been right, too. There may have been someone in his office who wanted Parma to look bad.”

To my surprise, Marian turned white. “That's what he thought,” she breathed. “That's why he locked up those files.”

“What files? Who locked up what, Marian?”

“Del did,” she said simply. “He took a lot of files from the old days and locked them in his office. He said he was going to go through them. I guess he wanted to find out if someone could have been—doing what Winthrop said.”

“Jesus!” A chill ran through me. Here was a murder motive—Del Parma about to expose the person who had been sabotaging his cases.

“I can't believe it,” Marian said sadly. “We were always a close-knit office. A real sense of camaraderie, if you know what I mean.”

“Yeah,” I answered shortly. That's how I'd thought of my office until Nathan's murder turned it into an armed camp. Everyone on one side and me on the other. “But it's possible that someone in the office wasn't really pulling for the team. That while your boss was going after the crooks in good faith, somebody who worked for him was doing his best to see that those cases got dismissed or reversed. And whoever did that,” I went on, playing my trump card, “made Parma look bad. Made him look like a crook. You don't want him to be remembered like that, do you?” Deliberately, I paraphrased the words I'd used to Dorinda about Nathan. “You don't want people a year from now to hear Parma's name and say, ‘Oh, yes, the Special Prosecutor who turned out to be on the take.' Do you?”

The gray eyes were hard. “What do you want to know?”

“Did he say anything about the files? The ones he locked up?”

“He did't tell me in so many words,” she began a hint of doubt back in her voice. I nodded encouragement, and she went on. “But I think he was on his way to meet somebody the night he was killed.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Well, in the first place, he broke our date. I was going to fix something special for him here.” Her face glowed reminiscently. “Blanquette de veau and potatoes Anna. Asparagus. Fresh. With hollandaise, the way he liked it. It was sort of an anniversary. When he canceled out,” her face fell, “I thought it was because of
her.”
I didn't have to ask who she meant. Marian must have had quite a few meals spoiled because of
her
.

She reached for her coffee cup with a shaking hand. I noticed for the first time that while one of her hands was perfectly manicured—long nails, red-lacquered—the other hand had short, stubby, but also painted nails. I ran through the possibilities. Was she a nail biter who only bit one hand? A one-handed typist? Hated her left hand? Had arthritis in the right so that filing the other hand was difficult? Maybe Sherlock Holmes could have figured it out, but it beat the hell out of me.

She put the cup down and resumed her story. “But if he was on his way home,” she asked, “what was he doing on the downtown platform of the subway?”

It was a good question. “He lived uptown?” I asked.

“He lived in Glen Cove. On Long Island. Where
she
was brought up. He took the Long Island Rail Road from Penn Station. He would have taken the uptown IND. Instead, he was pushed from the downtown BMT.”

“So if he had an appointment,” I thought aloud, “it would have been where? Downtown Manhattan or—Brooklyn?”

“Not Manhattan,” she said decisively. “He would have walked. Nobody would take a train to go two or three stops. Especially not Del. He was a great one for walking.” She broke off with a watery smile.

“Okay,” I said crisply, businesslike. “So it was Brooklyn. He didn't tell you where or who?”

She shook her head. “I wish I knew,” she said simply.

“All right. Let's try another angle. What time did he leave the office that night?”

“It was early, real early. Four o'clock or so. He never left that early unless he had a meeting somewhere. Said it set a bad example if the boss ducked out before everybody else.”

“And as far as you know, nobody else left at the same time?” I asked. After all, the likelihood was that whoever was named in the locked-up files was the person who killed Parma, and it was also probable that the killer was an assistant special prosecutor. Of course, if that was the case, why the trip to Brooklyn? This was getting confusing, I told myself.

Marian shook her head. “I'd have noticed. They'd have to pass my desk to get out of the office.”

I nodded. The reception area in Parma's office was centrally located, and Marian's office was right next to it. She would have to have seen anyone leaving early.

“Of course,” she added, as though she'd been reading my mind, “the files Del locked up were pretty old. They went back to the first year the office was in existence. Most of the assistants we had then are gone now. Went on to other things. Went to law firms. Ran for office. A couple of them became judges. Working for Del was a good start to any career,” she finished proudly. I didn't tell her that I for one found it less than a glowing recommendation.

We talked for a little longer, but I'd gotten all I was going to get. Still, I told myself, it was more than the police, still looking for a teenage punk, had gotten. I thanked Marian and got directions for the subway.