from the domestic circle. He stood in the open French windows now, smiling down on his stepfather with that particular mixture of mockery and self-satisfaction that never failed to set Glass’s teeth on edge and that was so hard to challenge or deflect. This morning he was dressed in cream slacks and a cream silk shirt and two-tone brown-and-cream shoes with perforated toecaps. A cricket sweater with a pale blue stripe along the neck was draped over his shoulders. He was on his way to a squash game. With his slicked-down hair and those protuberant, little black eyes he bore a strong resemblance to a cartoon Cole Porter.
“Good morning,” Glass said coldly.
Sinclair laughed, and stepped onto the balcony and edged around the little metal table and sat down on a wrought-iron chair. He crossed one knee on the other and laced his fingers together in his lap and happily contemplated his stepfather, who was still rumpled from sleep, and also a little hungover from the four or five whiskeys he had drunk sitting alone on the sofa last night after the rest of the household had gone to bed.
“You’ve certainly upset, Granddad,” the young man said lightly. “What were you thinking of?”
Below, a flock of lacquered, dark brown birds came swooping down from somewhere and settled vexatiously among the ailanthus boughs, windmilling their wings and making a raucous, clockwork chattering.
Glass lit another cigarette and put the pack and his lighter on the table before him. “Have you started your new job yet?” he asked, watching the busy birds.
David Sinclair reached out and took Glass’s lighter from the table and sat back and began to lob it from hand to hand, as he had done the night before with whatever it was he had been carrying then. “Not yet. Mother isn’t quite as ready to relinquish the reins as she likes to pretend. You know how she is.” He smiled, arching an eyebrow; his tone and look suggested he did not for a moment believe his stepfather knew how his mother “was” about the presidency of the Mulholland Trust, or about anything much else, for that matter.
“It’s a large thing she’s doing for you,” Glass said heavily. “I hope you realize that. I hope you acknowledge it, too, now and then.”
The young man’s smile broadened in delight; he loved to irritate his stepfather. He played on Glass’s sensibilities with virtuosic skill, tinkling all the right keys and pressing the pedals at just the right intervals.
“But tell me about this Riley business,” Sinclair said. “A murder, no less, and practically in the family! Do the police know who did it, or why?”
“I don’t know what the police know. They don’t tell me.”
Sinclair was regarding him with malicious glee. “Are you a suspect?”
“Why would I be?”
“Oh, I don’t know. While he was poking around in Billuns’s murky world this Riley might have found out something about you, that you would rather he hadn’t. Hmm?”
Glass gazed at him, and drew on his cigarette and turned away and blew a stream of smoke out over the metal balcony rail with a show of indifference. Once, when he and Louise were not long married, he had hit his stepson. He could not now remember the exact circumstances. He had said something to the boy, reproved him in some way, and David had sworn at him, and before he could stop himself he had struck the little bastard openhanded across the jaw. It had not been a serious blow, but David had never forgiven him for it-understandably, Glass had to admit. He would have liked to hit him again now, not in passion, not in anger, even, but judiciously, flicking out a fist and catching him a quick jab under the eye, or at the side of that fine-boned nose that was so like his mother’s, to knock it out of alignment.
“Do you know my father?” Sinclair asked. “ Mister Sinclair, the pride of Wall Street?” He seemed to find all titles irresistibly funny.
“I’ve met him,” Glass said warily. “I wouldn’t say I know him.”
The young man turned his face aside and looked down into the courtyard where the birds had intensified their ransacking of the birches and the dogwood trees, as if they were trying to shake something out of them. He must have been reading Glass’s thoughts, for now he said: “He used to beat my mother.” Glass stared. “Didn’t she tell you? Oh, not badly. Just a slap or a punch, now and then. I think he was hotheaded”-he turned back-“like you. I tried to intervene, once. I was only a kid. I bit his hand and he tried to throw me out the window. We were in the Waldorf=Astoria, on the eighteenth floor. He would have done it, too, only the window didn’t open. It was the day after Clinton was elected the first time, so I suppose he was feeling sore.” He smiled. “He’s not a Democrat, as you probably know.”
Glass cleared his throat and stood up, the metal legs of his chair scraping on the balcony’s concrete floor. “I’ve got to go,” he said. “I have work waiting.”
Sinclair was looking up at him, with his insinuating smile, his head on one side. “Of course,” he said softly. “Of course you do.”
Glass had stepped through the French windows into the drawing room when Sinclair called after him: “Oh, Da -ad?”
“Yes?”
“Here.” He held out his hand. “You forgot your lighter.”
It was rush hour, and Glass had trouble finding a taxi. The streets were electric with spring’s sudden overnight arrival, and the trees crowding at the edge of the Park looked as if they were preparing to surge over the railings and set off on a march for the East River. Louise had stopped Glass at the elevator to say that she and David and her father were going out to Bridgehampton, and asked if he wanted to come with them. He said perhaps he would, but later; he did not know if he could face being stranded on Long Island and subject to his father-in- law’s steely geniality and his stepson’s smiling contempt.
In the lobby of Mulholland Tower he was about to show his pass to the electronic eye at the turnstile when Harry on the security desk spoke his name and waved him over. “You got a caller, Mr. Glass.” Harry pointed. “She been waiting an hour.” She was sitting on a bench under the brass wall plaque with its portrait in relief of Big Bill Mulholland’s handsome profile. She looked familiar yet Glass could not say for the moment who she was. She seemed tiny and lost in that great echoing marble space. She wore a crooked skirt and a short, flowered blouse, and a man’s rat-colored raincoat three or four sizes too big for her. He walked across to her, and she stood up hurriedly, fumbling her hands out of the pockets of the raincoat. Her midriff was bare, and she had a metal stud in her navel. “I’m Terri,” she said. “Terri Taylor.”
“Ah, yes,” Glass said, remembering-the Lemur’s girlfriend. “Terri with an i.”
She gave a forlorn, small smile, gnawing her lip at one side. She had freckles and prominent front teeth, and her long straight hair was dyed black, badly. They stood a moment contemplating each other, both equally at a loss. He asked if she would like to come up to his office, but she shook her head quickly. Maybe they would go out and get a cup of coffee, then? “Let’s just walk,” she said. They went into the street. He was about to put a hand under her elbow but thought better of it. She gave a snuffly laugh. “I seem to have done nothing else but walk, since…” She let her voice trail off.
Playful gusts of wind swooped along the street. A DHL delivery man, talking rapidly to himself, wheeled a loaded pallet into an open doorway. A dreadlocked derelict in a St. Louis Cardinals sweatshirt was arguing with a fat policeman. Beside a storm drain three ragged sparrows were fighting over a lump of bagel as big as themselves. Glass smiled to himself. New York.
“How are you managing?” he asked. He was wondering why she had come to him, what she might want. “It must be tough.”
“Oh, I’m all right, I guess,” she said. She had wrapped the raincoat tight around herself; it must have been Riley’s. She was pigeon-toed, and her legs were bare, and mottled a little, from the cold. “Dylan and I hadn’t been together long. Just since Christmas. We met on Christmas Eve, at a party at Wino’s.” She looked up at him sideways. “You know it, Wino’s? Cool place.” She nodded, swallowing hard. “Dylan liked it there.” Now she sniffed. He hoped she was not going to cry.
“Have you got people here?” he asked. “Family?”
“No. I’m from Des Moines. Des Moines, Iowa?” She laughed. “Insurance capital of the world. You should see it, the buildings, every one of them owned by an insurance company. Jeez.”
They sidestepped a jumbo dog turd-must have been a Great Dane, at least, Glass estimated-and arrived at Madison Avenue. He had never got used to the surprise of turning off tranquil little side streets onto these great boulevards surging with mad-eyed shoppers and herds of taxis and bawling police cars.
“He liked you, you know,” Terri Taylor said. “Dylan, I mean-he liked you.”
“Did he?” Glass said, trying not to sound incredulous.
