“He’s my neighbor.”
“Well, that’s no answer. You did 31C, didn’t you?”
“It’s my own fault. Why did I ever start playing this game with you? I really asked for it, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, you pump me more than I’d ever have the nerve to ask you. But then, I’m a year older than you are, so I probably have a bit more experience.”
“Where did that expression start do somebody? Is it a squad term? I can’t believe I even answer you when you ask if I’ve ever had a sexual encounter with someone.
“Did you do him?” It’s disgusting, Mike I’m beginning to agree with my father that I’ve been at this job too long.“
“So who’s Dr. Mitchell? Good-looking guy didn’t he ever ask?”
“As a matter of fact, no, he never did.”
David and I had been neighbors for more than two years.
He was in his late forties, divorced, and with a thriving private practice that made him one of Manhattan’s most successful shrinks. For someone like me, convinced that psychobabble and therapy are for other people, I had an abundance of free sessions just by having cocktails with David once a week. He listened to my problems, jogged with me on the occasional mornings he could coax me off my treadmill and around the reservoir, and regularly critiqued my social companions.
“I must be losing my touch, Mike. Anyway, I’ll get the ice out. You call Steve’s Pizza it’s auto dial number four.”
“Who are the first three?”
“My parents, and each of my brothers. And they should consider themselves very fortunate to be placed above Steve’s in my list of priority numbers. When I’m on trial, Steve’s is my lifeline.”
Most of my acquaintances were pretty quick to learn that one of the things I had never managed to take time to master was cooking. I had dinner out most evenings it was usually when I spent time with friends and when I was at home by myself, I could whip up a very tasty tuna salad by opening a can of Bumble Bee and adding a dollop of mayo.
But I lived on a block surrounded by great take-out stores and delivery places: Steve’s for superb pizza, which always arrived hot; P. J.
Bernstein’s, the best deli in town when I craved a turkey sandwich; Grace’s Marketplace for elegant dinners that simply needed a five-minute microwave zap; and David’s for a moist roast chicken when I felt like being virtuous.
“What do you like on it, Coop? I can never remember.”
“Extra-thin crust, well done, no anchovies, and any combination you want. I’m just going to change help yourself to a drink. I’ll be out in a minute.”
I went into the bedroom and closed the door behind me.
I walked over to the dressing table next to my bed and stared at the answering machine, flashing its red light in the dark. There was no one I wanted to hear from, not even my friends, because I couldn’t deal with calling anyone back right now and explaining the situation. Sitting at the table, I laid my head on my arms and let the tears slip out, debating whether to play the messages now or later.
Later. At least two Dewar’s later.
I rested a few minutes then picked my head up, turned on the lights, pulled off my panty hose, and draped my suit over the grip on the treadmill. My leggings and t-shirt felt much more comfortable, and I washed my face in the bathroom sink, sprit zing on some Chanel 22, before going out to join my baby-sitter in the den. There was something about my favorite perfumes that always soothed me, and I was sorely overdue for soothing.
Mike muted the television as I walked into the room, handed me my drink, and let me settle into my chair before he asked me whether I still wanted to talk about the case.
“Is there anything else we have to talk about tonight?”
“No,” he responded.
“It just bothers me. You know as well as I do that most homicides are completely random.
I mean if they’re not domestic or drug-related, then the killer and victim have absolutely no connection. The best cop in the world can spend a lifetime on a case and never solve it unless somebody walks into the station house and confesses. An outdoor shooting like this, there’s no fingerprints, no DNA, no clue. Maybe it’s just a hunter who let off some shots and Isabella was in the wrong place at the wrong time. That’s how most victims get it. Bad timing.“
“It isn’t hunting season, Mike.”
“You know what I’m talking about. Let’s knock it off you’re right. Dinner will be here in another fifteen minutes.
Then I’ll get out of your hair till the morning.“
“I’ll drink to that. Cheers.”
We watched CNN until the pizza arrived Third World civil wars were generally a diversion from a day at the criminal courthouse and then moved to the dining-room tab leto eat, working on our second drinks.
“You know what you said when we came in tonight, about your father thinking you’ve been at it too long?
Were you kidding, Alex?“
”No, but that won’t change anything. You know how I feel about my job. It’s just that no one in my family no one in my life understands that attraction. It’s not quite what they envisioned for their kid.“
I had been raised in a comfortable suburban neighborhood north of Manhattan, the third child only daughter of parents who were old-fashioned and uncompromising in their devotion to each other and their families. My father’s parents were Russian Jews who emigrated to this country in the 1920s with his two older brothers, then he and his sister had been born in New York. My mother’s background was entirely different. Her ancestors had come from Finland at the turn of the century and settled on a farm in New England, re-creating the life they had known in Scandinavia, down to the primitive wooden outhouse and sauna on the edge of an icy cold lake.
She and my father met when he was an intern just out of medical school and she was a college student, both caught up one night in the same disaster. Manhattan’s most famous nightclub in the fifties the Montparnasse was a major attraction because of the combination of its glamorous crowds and its great jazz. My mother was there with a date one November evening, while my father was trying to get in the door with three of his pals who had just finished a tour on duty at the hospital. A raging fire broke out in the kitchen and spread quickly through the crowded club, igniting damask tablecloths and chiffon dresses and silk scarves. The four young doctors turned the Park Avenue sidewalk into a makeshift emergency room, tri aging the fleeing patrons and performers, socialites and staff, as people trampled each other in an effort to escape the treacherous inferno.
My father spent the rest of the night riding the ambulances back and forth from nearby hospitals, unable to help the eighteen men and women who had perished inside the club, but saving scores of lives and calming dozens more who had been overcome by the combination of smoke and fear. The untrained volunteer who worked beside him for hours had been among the fortunate few to emerge unharmed from the Montparnasse. He learned only her first name that night Maude but was taken as much by her strength of spirit and gentle manner as by her perfect smile, green eyes, and wonderful long legs which she disappeared on when the ambulance delivered its final two patients to New York Hospital. When he told the story of that night he always used to say that the only way he could get the deadly images of the injured out of his mind’s eye was to conjure up the vision of my mother, sitting across from him in the ambulance all night, holding the hands of the patients he labored over, and then the nightmares subsided. Two weeks later, when Life magazine printed the story of the fire and the rescue, my mother called to thank the young doctor whose name was printed beneath one of the photographs of the HEROES OF JINXED JAZZ CLUB: Benjamin Cooper. She had tried to find him before that, and knew only that his friends had called out to him as “Bones’ the night of the fire. She assumed that was a med school nickname that had something to do with an orthopedic specialty and so had called that department at several hospitals with no success. When she finally reached him and he invited her to meet for dinner, she laughed to learn that the name had been given to him as a child by his grandmother, in Yiddish, because he was so thin only skin and bones.
They married a year later and my father went on to do his residency in cardiology. I was twelve years old when he and his partner invented a half-inch piece of plastic tubing called the Cooper-Hoffman Valve, which changed our comfortable suburban lifestyle as much as it changed the face of cardiac bypass surgery. For the next decade, barely an operation of that nature in North America proceeded without the use of a Cooper-Hoffman, and
