“What the hell were you doing on the roof, by the way?” I said.
“Saving your ass, it looks like,” said Lennox, and hurried into his apartment.
Carver Lennox was fucked up over Hutchison’s death, but it felt like grief he might have borrowed from some TV talk show, public grief, standard cliches. What really worried him, was that the death would give the building a bad rep.
Or maybe I was wrong. There were things about Lennox I didn’t get. I had met guys like him, bankers, lawyers, hedge-fund guys on the make, had met them in restaurants, at parties. But Lennox was black. There weren’t a lot of black guys like him on Wall Street, and I wasn’t sure I’d read him right.
There was plenty I didn’t understand about the building, too, about what I’d seen and heard: the decent old doctor, as limber and healthy as somebody twenty years younger, who believed in euthanasia, was sharp as hell, talked about status and light skin and dark, laughed about New Harlem, had loved Marianna Simonova; the African woman who thought the place was haunted by evil spirits in the shape of black dogs; Celestina Hutchison’s bitterness; the stiff-necked Dr. Bernard; Virgil Radcliff, the young detective who didn’t play by the book, whose father looked like a white man.
It was more than that. I was a white cop in a black neighborhood-I had felt the tensions between Jimmy Wagner and his black detectives. I was an outsider. For all my love of black music, I didn’t belong. I should have been used to it. I’d been an outsider as a kid at school in Moscow, a nonbeliever, with a mother who became a refusenik and a father who was kicked out of the KGB; I’d been an outsider in Israel, where I spent most of my time hanging with peaceniks or Arab kids or lolling on the beach with sexy Sabra drop-outs, girls who liked smoking dope better than fighting wars.
New York, too, those first years, when I still had an accent, and got lost in the subway, and later at the academy, where I tried to be a tough cop.
Finally, I had found a place I could belong. When I lost my accent, ditched my past, became a real New Yorker, it seemed right. For a long time now, I’d been at home here, along with all the millions of foreigners and outsiders.
But now, I felt it again, that disconnect, the sense of being on the outside that made me wonder if I understood anything.
Am I getting anything right? I kept thinking. Is it just I’m so focused on Lily, or did the beating I got in the storage room fuck me up in some way I couldn’t determine? Was I tone deaf in a different country? A code I couldn’t quite catch, or hear, or translate? I thought of the bebop guys back when they invented music so fast, so complex, almost nobody got it at first, and how, in a sense, they did it to outfox whitey.
In the Soviet Union, we had done the same thing, though without the genius. Ways of dealing with the system. You left home, you stepped out the door, you took on a different role-at school, at work, any place where you pretended to listen, pretended to follow the party line, at least until you got home where you could take off your mask, sit at the kitchen table, curse the bosses.
Maybe it had always been that way in Harlem, for black people. Maybe it still was. Maybe no matter if you were a doctor or a teacher, you had to toe the line when you were outside, when you went to work or school in white America, or were confronted with white people, cops especially. Were you always somebody else? Even in 2008? Even after Obama’s election, after that one dazzling night in November?
Did Carver Lennox feel that I threatened his empire? When he’d suddenly come up behind me on the roof, had he been planning to help me, or push me over?
CHAPTER 36
V irgil was looking through a pile of mail in the Hutchison apartment when I told him about Lennox, and the roof, and he just nodded then examined his iPhone as if it would give up the answers to everything. I figured it was the way he did his thinking.
“Sorry.” He put his phone away. “You find anything up there?”
“Hutchison didn’t just fall off the roof. He wasn’t a fool. You have to make a big effort even to lean over the edge of that fucking roof,” I said. “He’d have to get up over a wall, and why the hell would he do that?”
“What are you saying, Artie? He was pushed?”
“I’m not sure about anything. There’s stuff on the roof, that’s for sure, prints in the snow, indicates it’s not impossible. There’s only one set, far as I could see. Lionel could have gone off the roof, but not by himself. Where the fuck is that dog?”
“I don’t know. Did you talk to Lennox much at the party last night?”
“Talked my fucking ear off, most of it about the building, said he wanted what was best for everybody. He was like a politician. In between the lines I got the feeling he had money troubles.”
“What about Celestina?” said Virgil.
“She was there. Holding court.”
“She left before Lionel?”
“Before he got there. I don’t think she pushed him though, do you? She weighs about ninety pounds, I’m guessing.”
“Maybe she convinced Lionel to off himself,” said Virgil. “Maybe he was sick and only she knew, and she went on at him about his believing in euthanasia. Maybe she played on him, made him feel guilty.”
“Doesn’t sound right,” I said. “Lionel didn’t seem like a guy to feel guilt about his beliefs, and if he was sick, he’d have used pills or something.”
“I’ll get some more input from the ME, then.” Virgil looked around the living room. “Sad room,” he said.
“You see it like that?”
“I do, Artie. There’s something about it, like it’s a shabby old museum piece. Suspended in time. People can’t stand change, some of them.” He tossed the mail on the table. “Nothing here except some real estate brochures from the islands. Maybe that was it,” Virgil said. “From what I heard, Celestina couldn’t stand Lionel, and she wanted to sell up here and move south,” he added. “She was jealous of him and the Russian.”
“Enough to kill him? How jealous could a ninety-year-old woman be?”
“Oh, Artie, man, you just have not met a lot of old folks,” said Virgil. “They are just like us, only more, a lot more. You think old people don’t have sex? Trust me.”
“You’re an expert?”
“I have a grandfather who’s ninety-five out in California; my great-granddad died at one hundred and five; my own father is going up to seventy.”
“Fine. Meanwhile, we need to talk to Celestina Hutchison.”
“You have a plan?” Virgil said.
“I want to see her here, with Hutchison’s things. I want to see her reaction. Tell her if she wants any of her clothes, anything like that, they’re gonna seal the apartment up tight as a drum until the ME releases Hutchison’s body and the will goes to probate, at least that long. Lennox said he thought she might be at some church. Get her here. Can you do that?”
He was already on his phone. “Right,” he said. “Fine.”
“I need the keys to Simonova’s place,” I said.
“I already borrowed them from Lily’s place.” He gave me the keys. “You have any idea when Lily’s coming back?”
I looked at my watch. “It’s a long way to the cemetery. It’s out on Long Island some place. She said she had to go by herself, some kind of duty thing.”
“Simonova exploited Lily,” Virgil said. “I told you I thought that. She made Lily listen to her stories, do her errands. Lily has some kind of liberal guilt, so she just did it.” Virgil got a set of keys out of his pocket and gave them to me. “You going into Simonova’s place, Artie?”
“I want a look at her terrace.”
He held up his phone. “I’ll keep on Celestina. I can do more on the phone than running around now. I got guys out there in cars spread out everywhere. Anyway, I want more time in this apartment OK? Try to keep Wagner’s other guys out, if you can. Buy me a little time, Artie.”
