'It's a long, boring story.' She took the glasses off and twirled them around her finger.
'Well, I got time.' Mike checked his watch. 'Let's hear it.'
'Fine. My husband had gambling debts. He got in some trouble. You know…' She jerked her head toward the ceiling, as if the trouble were up there.
'He got beat up.' Mike finished her sentence.
She nodded, clamping teeth onto her bottom lip. 'Harry's been a good friend.'
'How did you meet him?'
'We met at the track. Saratoga.' A little smile came to her face. 'We used to run a lot of horses up there… We had a good business.' She lifted a shoulder. 'You know how it goes.'
'No, how does it go?'
'Things change,' she said wearily.
Mike guessed her husband had his weaknesses. Gambling and drinking kind of went together. 'So how did Harry help you?'
Up came the shoulder again. Cherry heaved a sigh, deep into nostalgia. 'He talked to the guys. He fixed it for us.' Clearly she was proud to have a friend who could do that.
'The guys who beat Bobby? Or the guys he owed money to?'
Cherry looked surprised that he knew her husband's name. 'Whatever.'
Mike stroked his mustache, then started tapping two fingers on the table. This was an irritating habit he'd developed recently. He wasn't as patient as he used to be. He figured Harry was a gambler, so he'd probably known all the players. A cop, even one from down in New York City, could help out his friends. Maybe Harry had been involved in the gambling himself. He'd probably always had the hots for Cherry. And she must have looked a lot better fifteen years ago. But who didn't? He got the picture and nodded, then glanced at Marcus.
Marcus had told Mike that Cherry had been hiding out in a crummy apartment in White Plains. He'd gone up there early this morning to get her. He didn't say who'd told him, and Mike didn't want to know. Marcus reported that she'd been sleeping when he knocked on the door and had tried hard not to let him in. Apparently they'd had some harsh words. Clearly Harry had his reasons for keeping his honey out of sight. Marcus was flush with accomplishing his mission under deadline.
'How did your husband die, Mrs. Packer?' Mike asked.
'You can call me Cherry; everyone else does.' Cherry sniffed.
'How did Bobby die?'
'He had a heart attack,' she said flatly. 'They killed him anyway.'
'He had the attack at the time of his beating?'
'No, about a month later.'
'That's too bad. When was that?'
'Five years ago.' She teared up and reached for a tissue.
'All right, so Bobby died. Then what happened?'
'Look, I didn't kill anybody. I don't even know who died. What does he have to do with me?'
'Do you know what an accessory is, Cherry?'
'Yeah, hat, bag, belt. Necklace.' She laughed at her own joke.
'No, the other kind, when you help someone who committed a crime. You don't tell the cops something important because you don't want to hurt someone who helped you out a long time ago.'
'I don't know anything, and that's the truth. I don't know why you want to talk to me. I have nothing to say.'
'You know, if you're an accessory to a crime, you can go to jail for almost as long as the guy who did the crime. The law says you're a crook, too.' Mike tapped his fingers.
'Harry's a good guy,' she said softly. 'He wouldn't kill anybody. He told me that.'
'Then what were you doing in White Plains, honey bee? Why did Harry call you and tell you to get out of your house?'
'He didn't. I went to visit friends.'
'Oh, yeah, what friends?'
'Her brother got sick. He had to go to the emergency room.' Cherry looked at herself in the viewing-window mirror, not at Mike.
'What are you talking about? You're not making sense. Come on, you're heading into the racing season, and you left your horses to visit imaginary friends in a run-down dump? Nobody shows any respect for my intelligence.'
'It was tough. We'd already lost a lot of business. We had a few horses left. I wanted to keep the stables.'
Mike frowned. Where was she going now? 'Whose stables?'
'Mine. Well, they were my dad's. He passed on in 'sixty-eight. They've been mine since then.' She heaved another sigh.
'Cherry, you're digressing.' Mike checked his watch again.
'I'm not undressing,' she said angrily. She didn't have much of a vocabulary. Mike suppressed a smile.
'Harry gave you some money.' He tried to lead her back.
'He didn't give me any money. He invested in a very promising three-year-old,' she said defensively. 'He's going to get it back in spades.'
'I'll bet. Did Harry tell you how he got the money?'
Cherry squirmed a little. 'No, of course not.'
'Oh, come on. He's been your close friend for fifteen years. He's helped you out of trouble-I'm guessing here- over and over these past fifteen years.'
She lifted a shoulder.
'Then suddenly out of nowhere he comes up with the money to buy one of your horses and doesn't tell you where he got it? Harry, who's always a little short himself? Come on, you can go to jail for lying to me.'
'Look, he told me a friend won the lottery.'
'Cherry, that friend was murdered last week. Your boyfriend is linked. We need answers to tie him in or let him go, understand?'
She nodded. 'I do. But Harry didn't give me the money last week. He gave it to me a month ago, before Harry's friend died.'
'A month ago?' Mike was flabbergasted. If that checked out, then Harry was telling the truth. A first!
'Yeah. What's the matter?'
'How about some breakfast, huh? Marcus here will get you whatever you want, okay? See you later.'
Mike was out the door before she could say another word. A month ago. The money had changed hands almost as soon as it had come in. That meant Bernardino had given it to his friend, but why? The rest of the day April and Mike worked on Harry and Cherry, trying to get at why so they could eliminate Harry as a suspect, but Harry and Cherry weren't saying. With Bill still the prime suspect, maybe the why didn't matter. Maybe it was just one of those things: Bernardino got generous; Harry got lucky. End of story. April didn't believe it. Mike didn't believe it either.
Thirty-two
By the time Birdie Bassett's York U dinner came up, she had already lunched with the president of the Museum of Modern Art and the chairman of Lincoln Center, both friends of Max's, who were suddenly eager to acknowledge her as a friend. People were moving on her fast, and she was getting a sense of how the giving game was played. If she had five million a year to give away, that made her a very desirable acquisition to anyone's donor list. She was getting a crash course in having the power to decide where a lot of money was going to go. It meant jobs and careers and programs, prestige, and it was entirely a personal thing, just as Al Frayme had told her it would be.
Much of the time grant making was about connecting with the person who made the ask, and not about the cause itself. Since all kinds of people were bothering her with their impassioned requests, Birdie couldn't evaluate whose cause really appealed to her. People were pushing her in all directions, and it was a little scary. Voice mail
