'Whoever he's having an affair with.'
'Your husband is currently having an affair with someone?'
'Yes,' she said, and frowned. 'I didn't know that until just now. I knew it, but I didn't know that I knew it. I wish you had never taken this case. I wish Mr. London had never heard of you in the first place.'
'Mrs. Ettinger-'
She was standing now, her purse gripped in both hands, her face showing her pain. 'I had a good marriage,' she insisted. 'And what have I got now? Will you tell me that? What have I got now?'
Chapter 15
I don't suppose she wanted an answer. I certainly didn't have one for her, and she didn't hang around to find out what else I might have to say. She walked stiffly out of the coffee shop. I stayed long enough to finish my own coffee, then left a tip and paid the check. Not only hadn't I taken her five thousand dollars, but I'd wound up buying her coffee.
It was a nice day out and I thought I'd kill a little time by walking part of the way to my appointment with Lynn London. As it turned out I walked all the way downtown and east, stopping once to sit on a park bench and another time for coffee and a roll. When I crossed Fourteenth Street I ducked into Dan Lynch's and had the first drink of the day. I'd thought earlier that I might switch to Scotch, which had once again spared me a hangover, but I'd ordered a shot of bourbon with a short beer for a chaser before I remembered my decision. I drank it down and enjoyed the warmth of it. The saloon had a rich beery smell and I enjoyed that, too, and would have liked to linger a while. But I'd already stood up the schoolteacher once.
I found the school, walked in. No one questioned my entering it or stopped me in the corridors. I located Room 41 and stood in the doorway for a moment, studying the woman seated at the blond oak desk. She was reading a book and unaware of my presence. I knocked on the open door and she looked up at me.
'I'm Matthew Scudder,' I said.
'And I'm Lynn London. Come in. Close the door.'
She stood up and we shook hands. There was no place for me to sit, just child-sized desks. The children's artwork and test papers, some marked with gold or silver stars, were tacked on bulletin boards. There was a problem in long division worked out in yellow chalk on the blackboard. I found myself checking the arithmetic.
'You wanted a picture,' Lynn London was saying. 'I'm afraid I'm not much on family memorabilia.
This was the best I could do. This was Barbara in college.'
I studied the photo, glanced from it to the woman standing beside me. She caught the eye movement.
'If you're looking for a resemblance,' she said, 'don't waste your time. She looked like our mother.'
Lynn favored her father. She had the same chilly blue eyes. Like him she wore glasses, but hers had heavy rims and rectangular lenses.
Her brown hair was pulled back and coiled in a tight bun on the back of her head. There was a severity in her face, a sharpness to her features, and although I knew she was only thirty-three she looked several years older. There were lines at the corners of her eyes, deeper ones at the corners of her mouth.
I couldn't get much from Barbara's picture. I'd seen police photos of her after death, high-contrast black and whites shot in the kitchen on Wyckoff Street, but I wanted something that would give me a sense of the person and Lynn's photograph didn't supply that, either. I may have been looking for more than a photograph could furnish.
She said, 'My father's afraid you'll drag Barbara's name through the mud. Will you?'
'I hadn't planned on it.'
'Douglas Ettinger told him something and he's afraid you'll tell it to the world. I wish I knew what it was.'
'He told your father that your sister was carrying a black man's child.'
'Holy Jesus. Is that true?'
'What do you think?'
'I think Doug's a worm. I've always thought that. Now I know why my father hates you.'
'Hates me?'
'Uh-huh. I wondered why. In fact I wanted to meet you mostly to find out what kind of man would inspire such a strong reaction in my father. You see, if it weren't for you he wouldn't have been given that piece of information about his sainted daughter. If he hadn't hired you, and if you hadn't talked to Doug-you did talk to Doug, I assume?'
'I met him. At the store in Hicksville.'
'If you hadn't, he wouldn't have told my father something my father emphatically did not want to be told. I think he'd prefer to believe that both of his daughters are virgins. Well, he may not care so much about me. I had the temerity to get divorced so that makes me beyond redemption. He'd be sick if I got into an interracial romance, because after all there's a limit, but I don't think he cares if I have affairs.
I'm already damaged goods.' Her voice was flat, less bitter than the words she was speaking. 'But Barbara was a saint. If I got killed he wouldn't hire you in the first place, but if he did he wouldn't care what you found. With Barbara it's a different story altogether.'
'Was she a saint?'
'We weren't that close.' She looked away, picked up a pencil from the desk top. 'She was my big sister. I put her on a pedestal and wound up seeing her feet of clay, and I went through a period of holier-than-thou contempt for her. I might have outgrown that but then she was killed, so I had all that guilt over the way I'd felt about her.'
