Lily believed you could make the world better. Anyhow, she made me better than I was, than I am. I couldn’t remember a time when I hadn’t known Lily. Long time now.
“Lily?”
She was at the kitchen counter, now, head down. I couldn’t tell if she was asleep or crying. I wanted to hold her, take her away. I had never felt I wanted to do anything so much. I stayed where I was.
“I’m sorry I was such an asshole with Dr. Hutchison. Honest, I am,” I said.
She looked up. “I was just resting my eyes.” Lily went to the stereo. She pressed a button. “Listen.”
It was Stan Getz’s People Time, an album I had given her.
“You play this a lot?”
“Yes.”
“For Radcliff?”
“Come over here.” Lily sat on the gray sofa. I sat next to her. “You can’t just go on hating him,” she said.
I laughed. “Why not?”
“Because he’s my friend, and I like him.”
“More than a friend.”
“Yes.”
“Somebody you spend nights with.”
“You weren’t around, Artie.”
“You either.”
“I know that, but you married somebody else.”
“Because you wouldn’t marry me. Because we couldn’t make it work. Not that my marriage worked.” I shrugged. “Maybe I can’t make anything work.”
“I think about you,” she said.
“Me, too.”
“But Virgil’s good for me. He’s a good guy and he’s around and I like him.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I heard you were seeing Valentina Sverdloff. Before she died.”
I had been waiting for her to say it.
“I wasn’t seeing her.”
“But you loved her.”
“Who told you?”
“Tolya. Your friend, but mine, too. We always keep in touch, you know? Tolya and me. He told me he knew you’d loved his daughter, and he told you he’d kill you if you went near her-Val was half your age. But after she was gone, after she was murdered, he was sorry he didn’t let it happen; he knew you had loved her and that she felt the same way about you.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Things happen. It was hard for me, too,” said Lily. “Val was a fantastic girl. She was like the little sister I never had.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“It’s not just Val.”
“What else?”
“I just want to be happy, or at least content, if I can,” Lily said. “I can’t just drop Virgil. I don’t want to.”
I wanted to say, Are you in love with him? but I was too scared to ask. “Do you?”
“Do I what?”
“Play that album for him?”
“No.” Lily leaned over and kissed my cheek, and I saw she still liked me, I saw it in her face, and I thought, right then, that maybe I still had a chance.
This was as close as I’d been to her for a long time. I remembered the times we had spent together, places we’d gone.
We used to love bars, all kinds, fancy bars, low-life bars, music clubs. It was one of the things we did, drinking, eating, wandering around the city, the boroughs.
Not getting drunk, just drinking. We drank in jazz clubs, at funny Korean cocktail lounges where they brought the booze in a watermelon. We’d gone to Brazilian joints where there were pineapple caipirinhas; to Beatrice’s place, where we knocked back bottles of Nebbiolo; to Fanelli’s for beers. Sometimes we had consumed silly cocktails in small, slightly seedy hotels, old places on Madison and Lex, places no one we knew went to.
We’d hang out in booths, half hidden, sipping our drinks, making out, laughing, desperate to run out, grab a cab, and go home to bed. We used to make out in the cabs, too, and in the elevators, all the way up to her place or mine.
Sitting on the sofa in the Armstrong apartment, I just took Lily’s hand and put it against my face.
“You’re right,” I said. “Dr. Hutchison signed off; I’m OK. I really am. I mean it. This is over.”
“Thank you.” She patted my cheek and took her hand back. Lily seemed to have reclaimed her usual self. As if now that Simonova’s funeral had been arranged, she could cope.
All I wanted now was for Simonova to be buried. I didn’t ask again why Lily had lied about calling Dr. Bernard. I didn’t want to know. I tried to forget I’d been hit on the head in the storage room. That Lionel Hutchison was covering up something and Lucille Bernard had been Amahl Washington’s doctor around the time he died.
I could do it. I could forget. My time as a cop was almost over. I didn’t want the life any more. Had I always brought the work home? It had fucked us up, me and Lily. Maybe Virgil Radcliff could do the job right; maybe it was his time.
When Lily had said to me about Simonova “I killed her,” I knew she’d made a mistake, or was covering for somebody. She couldn’t have hurt the woman who’d been her friend.
But what if she had? Would I lie for her? Run with her? I began to sweat, cold, dank sweat that dripped down the middle of my back. I pushed it all away.
Twelve hours, give or take, it would be done. Sunday morning, Simonova would be buried. I wanted to make Lily feel better. I wanted to tell her again, “You didn’t do it. You couldn’t do it. Not to your friend.”
I got up. “Come with me,” I said.
“Where?”
I held out my hand. She took it.
CHAPTER 21
S o far as I could tell, nothing had been touched in Simonova’s apartment except the sofa where I’d first seen her body. It was rumpled now. The shawl that had covered her was on the floor; the funeral home guys who lifted her onto a gurney must have dropped it.
I made my way around the room while Lily waited near the door. I picked up bits of paper from the desk, I went into the bedroom, and looked briefly through Simonova’s clothes. It would take days to search the whole place.
In the living room, Lily was kneeling at the little table by the sofa, looking at the pills.
“Which ones do you think you screwed up?”
Lily picked up a plastic box, the days marked on it, and opened the lid.
“This one,” she said. “I think I forgot this one.” She poured the remaining capsules onto her palm. “I always counted. There’s one more than there should be.”
“Show me.”
I took the capsule, read what was marked on it.
“Why are you smiling?” Lily said.
“Because these are ACE inhibitors, blood pressure medication, Lily, honey. And it’s a low dosage. And you couldn’t kill a mouse if you forgot one, or probably ten or a hundred. Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?”
