up in a delicate gesture.
“I know what you mean,” said Hester Kohn. “I wore glasses for almost twenty-five years. They were such a part of me I felt naked the first few times I went out without them.”
Caryn DiFranco peered into Rick’s brown eyes. “Do you wear contacts, Rick?”
“No, ma’am.”
“
Rick flushed. “Sorry. I keep forgetting people don’t say that up here.”
“It’s okay, kid. You’ll be as rude as the rest of as soon enough.” She caught a glimpse of passing street signs and tapped the driver on the shoulder. “Let me out at Macy’s, okay?”
The driver grunted.
“I’ve got to buy and mail presents to half of Michigan,” she complained to Hester Kohn. “Be grateful you’re Jewish.”
“I frequently am,” Hester said dryly.
As the taxi double-parked in a no-parking zone and Caryn DiFranco opened her door, Hester added, “Thanks for coming down, Caryn.”
“Don’t thank me. You’ll get the bill. Speaking of which, do we bill that MCP partner of yours or the gallery?”
“The gallery.”
“Right. Stay out of mischief, Rick, and don’t talk to any strange cops.”
“Thanks, Miss DiFranco,” he said.
She rolled her eyes, slammed the door and disappeared among the crowds of Christmas shoppers.
The cold air that rushed in when Caryn DiFranco got out had briefly dispersed Hester Kohn’s gardenia perfume, but as the cab swerved back into the flow of traffic, the sweet scent again filled the space between them even though Rick had moved to the far side of the seat. For him, it was a disorienting smell, one connected with hot drowsy summer days, swinging on the porch of his mother’s house, a porch surrounded by those glossy bushes heavy with waxy white blossoms. Somehow it seemed all wrong to be smelling his mother’s gardenias here in this New York City taxicab on a cold December afternoon. Especially with the new associations the heavy scent of gardenias now held.
Dusk was falling and rush hour had begun in earnest. All lanes were clogged at Forty-second Street.
Forty-sixth, Forty-seventh, another snarl in front of Radio City Music Hall.
Hester Kohn smoothed her dark hair and loosened the top button of her red wool coat. “Want to tell me what’s really bothering you?”
“Nothing. ” Without a camera to shield himself from her quizzical face, he unconsciously sank deeper into his corner and kept his eyes on the neon-lit stores and buildings they were now creeping past.
A complex blend of affection and irritation and a few stray tendrils of pity as well swept over Hester as she remembered Rick’s first few weeks at the gallery.
Her own virginity had been lost so long ago that she had forgotten what terrors true sexual innocence could hold. Despite their age difference, she had dazzled him, made him want her, made him helpless to resist; yet, until they were well into the act, she hadn’t even considered the possibility that it might be his first time. In that moment she had become tender and sentimental and had almost broken it off because she suddenly found herself panged by a conscience she didn’t know she still possessed.
Too late. Already the sweet liquids of youth were spilling from his touchingly inept body.
With those first hot rushes of manhood, another boy might have become immediately cocky and boastful, a royal nuisance. Instead, Rick came to each subsequent session reluctantly and seemed miserable and guilty afterwards.
As he was now, in this overheated cab. It wasn’t only his involvement in Roger Shambley’s death that made him shrink into that corner, yet Hester knew that if she removed her glove and touched his bare, chapped hand with hers, he would be unable to resist. She considered testing her power, but they were now too close to the gallery.
Instead, she sank back into her own corner and wondered if young Rick had, after all, seen or done more last night than he was willing to admit.
Over in Queens, an artificial Christmas tree decorated the main lobby of the Lantana Walk Nursing Home and an electric menorah stood on the reception desk with two bulbs lit for this second day of Hanukkah. As Detective Bernie Peters soon discovered, he had arrived at the most restless hour of the day for ambulatory residents, and Mrs. Palka was not in her room.
“The dinner shift is promptly at five,” explained the new resident director, “but they begin gathering outside the door by four o’clock. No doubt that’s where we’ll find Mrs. Palka.”
They walked through halls wide enough for two wheelchairs to pass each other, into a lounge decorated with more symbols of Hanukkah and Christmas. There they found a querulous elderly woman with thick glasses and a hearing aid struggling to understand what she could expect for dinner as her incurably cheerful friend read the menu aloud.
“Roast ham?” she sniffed. “We had ham for supper last night and dry, stringy fodder it was, too, with a smidgen of honey glaze or pineapple.”
“Lamb!” her friend enunciated loudly. “Roast
“Wheat beans? What’re wheat beans? Do speak up, Dora.”
“There she is,” said the director, gesturing toward the cheerful little dumpling of a woman, who leaned heavily upon her aluminum walker and watched their approach with lively curiosity.
The director introduced Detective Peters to Mrs. Palka, pointed them to a quiet corner of the lounge, and expertly vectored Mrs. Palka’s hard-of-hearing friend toward another group of residents waiting for their dinner.
“My daughter told me someone from the police might be up,” beamed Mrs. Palka. She lowered herself painfully into a chair, refusing Peters’s help. “I had a hip replacement two years ago,” she explained. “Eighty per cent who get it can go dancing in six months. I’m part of the twenty per cent who have to hang up their dancing shoes.”
“I’m sorry,” Bernie Peters said awkwardly. The infirmities of age made him uncomfortable. Even though he knew intellectually that everyone grows old, he was still young enough to believe he would somehow be exempted:
Mrs. Palka patted his hand. “Don’t be sorry. I danced plenty in my lifetime, believe me.” She sat erectly in her chair and cocked her small white head. “So! Dead babies in Gregor Jurczyk’s attic. Whose babies were they?”
“Well, that’s what we were hoping you could tell me, Mrs. Palka. Your daughter thought you were friendly with the Jurczyk family and might remember some of the people who lived in that house.”
“Pauline says between 1935 and 1947. That right?”
“Those were the dates on the newspapers we found them wrapped in,” Peters nodded.
“Now let me think. The Depression was going strong then and then came the war. They couldn’t have been Barbara’s. She was very good, very religious and would never. Besides, she and Karol-that was her husband, lovely man- they couldn’t have babies. And Angelika was a businesswoman, worked as a secretary in one of those big- shot investment places on Wall Street. She never married, so it couldn’t have been her. There was a Mr. and Mrs. Rospochowski, but they had a new baby almost every year. When did she have time to slip in four more? Now there
“Ah, but what am I talking?” Mrs. Palka shook her head ruefully at what she considered a failing memory. “That one didn’t come till after the war started.”
“What about Mr. Jurczyk? Was he married?”
“Not that one. Too interested in the almighty dollar to spend a penny on a wife.”
The dining room opened and residents began a modest surge through the doors. The smell of roast meat and steamed broccoli spread through the lounge and stirred those still seated to action. Even Mrs. Palka began to move her walker into a ready position.
“But really, Barbara’s the one who could tell you better about the people who lived there,” she said. She took a
