The self made widow, p.12
The Self-Made Widow, page 12
“A lot of parents have trackers on their kids’ phones,” she said.
“Do you?”
“No,” admitted Ruth. “But I’m sure the minute I get caught doing something wrong, I will.”
“Yeah, well, I didn’t do anything wrong, so I guess she didn’t need a reason to be an ass,” he said. She lost her opportunity to probe any further when he opened up his notebook and said, “Can we run through the work?”
* * *
■ ■ ■
THAT NIGHT, ANDREA had to get Eli from soccer practice and asked Ruth to join her. Getting to sit in the front seat since the summer, Ruth felt more mature now. Certainly, the topic of conversation was more mature than those of the past. Ruth remained torn about how to categorize it to her mother, worried that any particular word would trigger something in her, but not knowing which words those might be. She decided not to include her own opinions, and tried to just repeat what Henry had said.
“Did you record it?” asked Andrea.
“Mom, no!” Ruth exclaimed. “Don’t be weird.”
“Inflection over recollection,” Andrea said. “His actual words tell his actual story more truthfully than your recollections do. It’s as much for his protection as yours, in a way.”
“In a way, sure,” Ruth said. “In a way that lets you spy on him. That’s sick.”
“It’s all a little sick, Ruth,” Andrea said. “The thought of Molly killing Derek is sick, or the thought of me looking into it and asking you to help me. What did your dad always say when he taught all of you how to swim?”
“If you’re in up to your knees, then you might as well go underwater,” Ruth recited. “But isn’t underwater the only way you can drown?”
“Smart-ass,” Andrea said gently. She really did love her daughter.
They pulled into the parking lot at the Duck Pond soccer fields. Ruth replayed her conversation with Henry as they strolled the hundred yards to where Eli’s team was practicing. The lights were on, and fading remnants of sunset colored the horizon orange and purple. Andrea never stopped marveling at the thought of raising her kids in a town that had fields for every major sport across several parks, much less with lighting. When she was little, if the streetlight on the corner of Sixty-fourth Road and Booth Street worked, it became a block party.
“Okay, you described what he said, and your memory was really strong, now tell me what you thought,” Andrea said.
“He’s scared. More than just because his dad died, I think,” Ruth said.
“Keep working it.”
“He’s sad in a bit of a selfish way, because of how this is all going to affect him. And Brett. Because of how difficult things are with his mom. . . .”
“Difficult how?”
“He didn’t exactly say, but I could tell he’s angry at her,” Ruth said. “I don’t know if she did anything, or just, like, regular angry at her.”
“Molly is tough on them,” Andrea said.
“Yeah, I know,” Ruth said. “But something more.”
“Go with it,” Andrea encouraged her. “Follow it, voice it out loud. If your instincts are there, when it feels right, it usually is right.”
“He’s tired of . . . the weight.”
“The weight of what?”
“Expectations,” Ruth said quickly, knowingly. “What everyone expects out of him.” They stopped at the field. Eli was dogging his way through the flying sprint drills that ended the practices.
“You have to go with that,” Andrea said. “Keep talking to Henry.”
“Mom, it really doesn’t feel good to do this,” said Ruth.
“No, it feels like shit,” Andrea said strongly. “Guess what? Have you ever seen a happy investigator on TV? It’s not a happy job. So, if you want to do it, if you want to help me, then you have to understand that and accept it.”
Ruth nodded, thankful for her mother’s bluntness, and for her not treating her like a baby.
“You don’t have to answer now and you absolutely, totally don’t have to do it if you don’t want to, Ruth. Honest,” Andrea said. “The line between personal discomfort and moral distaste is different for everyone and only you can judge for yourself where that line is for you. So, just think about it.”
* * *
■ ■ ■
AT ELEVEN THAT night, Andrea saw light peeking under Ruth and Sarah’s bedroom door. She opened it softly, hoping they might be asleep. Sarah was, but Ruth was wide awake and listening to music on her headphones.
Andrea whispered, “Lights out, okay?”
Ruth pulled out an earbud and said, “I’ll talk to Henry again, Mom.”
“Okay, hon,” Andrea replied. “Lights out, good night.”
She went into Sadie and JoJo’s room. Both were asleep. She’d likely regret not waking the baby for a pre-midnight feeding but decided to roll the dice.
She went to her bedroom. Jeff was in bed, reading The Wall Street Journal on his iPad. He looked up. Almost too innocuously, he asked, “Anything happen with that whole Molly thing?”
“Just poking and seeing if there’s anything there.”
“Is there?” he asked.
She shrugged, noncommittal.
“I have to tell you, I think it all sounds a little bit crazy,” Jeff said. “You really think Molly is capable of doing something like that?”
Andrea got into bed, thinking about what he had said.
After a few minutes, she said, “I think people are capable of anything.”
17
ANDREA couldn’t sleep. Jeff was sawing bones, and she was digging them up. Her past, buried for a reason, continued to insinuate itself into her thoughts. She hadn’t thought about Isaac as often over the past few years. Raising a family in a struggling marriage had made it easier to ignore her guilt over her brother’s death. Made it easy for her to ignore the fact she could amputate a few fingers and still count on two hands how many times her children had seen their grandparents. Her parents hadn’t even met JoJo yet. She could use the excuse that they had moved to Florida, but the truth, Andrea knew, was that her parents had always been scared of her and they had never stopped blaming her for Isaac’s death.
* * *
■ ■ ■
“YOU ARE NOT going to court to see that man again,” Bernice Abelman shouted as Andie, just shy of turning twelve, got dressed in full preparation of defying her mother’s edict.
“Tito is being sentenced today,” she said. “It’s the last time I’ll see him.”
“That man is the reason your brother was killed!”
“You don’t know that,” Andie said. “He said—”
“Tito Envaquera is a convicted felon!” her father shouted from the kitchen.
“He is a con man,” Bernice added. “And he tricked you and all those other children into stealing for him.”
“The Fagin of Forest Hills, the newspapers call him. You were all a bunch of lemmings and he was the Pied Piper!” said Jacob. “Led you all right off a cliff!”
“The Pied Piper led rats,” Andrea muttered, more out of embarrassment over their stupidity than out of any desire to educate them.
“You might as well take off that fancy dress,” shouted Jacob. “You’re not going anywhere and that’s final!”
An hour later, Andrea Abelman walked through the metal detectors at the Queens County Criminal Court entrance. She found the room where Tito’s sentencing hearing was being held. Three of her former club members were there, Caveat, Romeo, and Juliet. She had never learned their real names, just as they had never learned hers. Tito had said, “Who you are out there is not who you are in here.”
“In here” was not a gang, exactly, but more like an exclusive club whose admittance required you to be a child of extraordinary intelligence who was morally comfortable with liberating the worldly possessions from those of ordinary intelligence. It was a fancy way to describe a group of pickpockets, scam artists, and thieves. But to pull off their largest scores had required intensive training, rigid preparation, and coordinated teamwork.
Maybe one out of a million kids, ten million, would have been intelligent enough—and indifferent enough to the concepts of right and wrong—to be adopted by the Fagin of Forest Hills.
Insight, the name Tito had given Andrea, had been one of those kids.
The back doors to the hearing room opened. Tito Envaquera was escorted in by two courthouse officers. He stood next to his lawyer. He didn’t acknowledge the children, but Andie saw him tap his right thigh with one finger to acknowledge her, and then three times on his left to acknowledge the others.
The door to the back of the room opened and the judge entered. Andrea slouched in her chair slightly and covered half her face with her hand. She recognized the judge as a mark whose purse she had lifted two years earlier at the Rego Center.
This wasn’t going to go well for Tito.
When she got back to the apartment, Andrea’s parents read her the riot act for having snuck out. But through the numbing din of their escalating caterwauling, very jarring words came out of Jacob’s mouth: “You’re making us have to leave the city!”
“What?” she asked.
“Your father and I can’t expose you to this any longer,” said Bernice. “You can’t control yourself. Look what happened to Isaac because of you.”
“That was three years ago!” she said. “Where are we going?”
The next day, all her belongings packed into two large green contractor garbage bags, Andie Abelman left Queens, New York, and moved to West Windsor, New Jersey.
* * *
■ ■ ■
ANDREA HADN’T THOUGHT of Tito’s sentencing or her last day in Queens in a long time.
That her parents had left Isaac’s bed in the bedroom she had shared with him for years after he had died had been a daily reminder of his death. But moving to New Jersey had alleviated some of the guilt brought by that constant reminder and had helped her to focus more on herself. She’d been raised in a household where she’d been lied to every day of her life, and she had been part of a gang where she’d been rewarded for lying to others. On the day they had left Queens, Andie had promised herself that all she would ever care about from that point on was the truth. It was a promise she had broken time and time again. But not anymore. No matter what it might cost her.
After all, how could the truth ever hurt as much as the lies had?
18
ON Friday morning, Kenny and Jimmy rode an early train into the city together. They arrived at the Muckrakers office by eight and had finished most of what they needed to get done for the day by noon. Sitara had morning meetings at Netflix, so Kenny wanted to be gone before she showed up at the office.
Shelby had been making calls since the previous night. Between the information gleaned from the Finch, Conover & Stanton website and an “acquaintance” who worked at the New York City Bar Association, she had gotten a solid handle on Derek’s client list dating back several years.
She had checked their names against any outstanding criminal warrants and talked directly to much of his client list, but so far she hadn’t turned any dirt that would have lent itself as motive for murder from that side of his life.
Though Shelby remained skeptical that Derek Goode had died from anything other than natural causes, to her credit she had put the work in to try and dispel that notion. And that was when she was willing to turn it over to Kenny and Jimmy.
She watched with her usual bemusement at their stupid energy as they packed up to leave for their planned assault.
“My MetroCard is out of swipes,” Jimmy said.
“Your card is always out of swipes!” Kenny whined.
“Which makes me super grateful that yours never is,” Jimmy replied as he retrieved his mock messenger bag from the small coat closet.
The plan was simple: wait outside the FCS building to see if anyone from Derek’s team went out for lunch, then basically accost them. They struck pay dirt within five minutes of arriving as Derek’s associates, Darrah Smalls and Bill Winthrop, emerged onto the street together. She went uptown. He went downtown.
“Dibs on the Nubian goddess,” said Jimmy, not even waiting for Kenny’s response.
“Shit,” he muttered. And to Jimmy’s back, added, “Focus on Derek and not your groin!”
“I can do both!” Jimmy shouted back as he jogged through traffic to cross the street.
Kenny stayed several yards behind Bill, who walked two blocks to a Cava. Kenny hated Cava. Now he’d have to go inside and pretend it was an amazing coincidence he had bumped into Bill at a fast-food place he hated. He approached the entrance, then waited. He hadn’t really made a run at anyone in months. Stoked, he waited impatiently for someone else to go in before him to put some space between himself and Bill. A homeless man bugged him for change. Kenny shooed him away just as a Brooklyn hipster, who must have had Raynaud’s phenomenon because he was wearing a wool cap in seventy-degree weather, entered the Cava.
Kenny followed. Bill stood with his back to him, looking at the menu board. There were about eight people in line in front of Bill. Kenny would wait until the lawyer turned around, then feign a spontaneously accidental meeting. He was fairly confident that it was at a Cava on Pennsylvania Avenue that Woodward and Bernstein had gotten Deep Throat to spill on Watergate.
* * *
■ ■ ■
JIMMY CAUGHT UP to Darrah on the corner of Fifty-fourth Street and Avenue of the Americas. He decided to go full-on annoying wannabe player, because what savvy city woman wouldn’t be attracted to a loud, obnoxious messenger? His usual tactic was to let women come to him. That method had worked since he was in middle school. He found that being ridiculously handsome, tall, and buff, combined with a general indifference to the attentions thrown his way, usually made him irresistible to the opposite sex.
Though Darrah was gorgeous, Jimmy wasn’t looking for a date, or even a hookup. For that matter, he didn’t care much whether she knew anything, or even whether Molly had murdered her husband. Jimmy just wanted to have fun, and his life had certainly become a lot more fun since he had used his cable locator to find buried body parts for Kenny a year ago.
“Hey, beautiful! You work at FCS, don’t you?” Jimmy said, loudly enough to cut through the noise of the city.
Darrah turned, offering over the course of one second exactly the reaction Jimmy had expected: disdain at the disrespectful approach, followed by appreciative curiosity at his good looks, culminating in self-recrimination for having expressed any interest at all. To a climber like Darrah Smalls, Jimmy’s gorgeous-ocity could never win out over his being a messenger. Maybe she’d be willing to go for a roll after four drinks, but he certainly wasn’t someone to be considered as relationship material.
“I saw you at the office last week,” Jimmy said. “You are one totally fine Perry Mason package, lady.”
“Yeah, that might play with the bar trash who frequent your corner dive, but it won’t work on me,” she said.
“You like ’em white, rich, and married, I’m guessing,” Jimmy said, figuring he should go for the fences with the first swing. Kenny might have danced a bit, but Jimmy lacked that kind of patience. Plus, he’d passed a gyro food cart on the corner of Fifty-third and he was starving for lunch.
“What the fuck did you say?” she snapped.
Jimmy smiled. He had a beautiful smile that said “I love you” and “Fuck you” at the exact same time. “I figure, law firm, white boss, climbing the ladder? I mean, no judgment.”
“What the hell is your problem?” she said.
“My momma says I got hit too much playing football, but I don’t think so, since no one could ever touch me,” he replied.
“I must have missed you catching a corner route from Mahomes on Fifty-second Street,” she said.
Jimmy laughed. He could really like this woman if his job wasn’t to make her hate him.
“Listen, sorry, I’m coming on strong, but I’m not a messenger. I was hired by an insurance company to find out if Derek Goode’s death was on the up-and-up,” Jimmy said. “His wife stands to cash in on a pretty sweet policy.”
She took a moment to let that sink in, for the first time looking directly into Jimmy’s eyes to try and gain a measure of him. He backed up from her just a bit, sensing his bombshell hadn’t landed in the way he had hoped it would.
“So, you want to know if Derek was having an affair?” she asked. “Or if he was doing drugs, or anything that might have exacerbated his heart condition and violated the policy?”
“Yeah, I don’t know what exacerbated means, but yeah, like that.” He smiled. Charming Jimmy now.
“That’s odd, since right before I left for lunch and before you rudely got all up in my face, I had two men in my office who were representatives of Derek’s insurance company and they were asking me those same exact questions,” Darrah said.
Jimmy stood, flummoxed.
“So . . . who the hell are you?” Darrah snarled, her face inches from his chest. She needed to crane her neck to look him in the eyes, but she still totally dominated their space.
Jimmy paused, unsure of what to say. This hadn’t been in any of the scenarios he had discussed with Kenny. It was a situation that required quick thinking.
He turned and ran at a full sprint in the opposite direction.
He made his getaway, deftly weaving through the lunchtime pedestrian traffic.
Looking over his shoulder to make sure Darrah hadn’t chased after him, Jimmy stopped at the food cart and got two gyros.
