“That, too, if you want to know. I suppose there aren’t enough nice black women for him,” she said sarcastically. “Look, just forget the sociology. I want to see Lionel’s apartment.”
Lucille Bernard began, very softly, to weep, as we got to the Hutchison apartment.
A cop in uniform was on his hands and knees, looking at the carpet, peering at fiber. When he got up, I asked him to leave Lucille Bernard and me alone in the living room.
Sitting on the edge of a chair, she said, “I loved Lionel. He was good to me, he was a mentor when I was very young. He got me into the City College program. He helped me. God, I spent so much time in this apartment when we lived here.”
“When you were married to Lennox?”
“We’re not divorced. I think you knew that,” she said.
“You don’t believe in divorce.”
“That’s right. Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
Lucille Bernard sat up. Her eyes wet, she looked like a very young woman, young, vulnerable, and very pretty. She was tough and I liked her. I called her Dr. Bernard, though. She had never asked me to use her first name.
From her purse she took a handkerchief and wiped her face. “I think Carver’s in big trouble,” she said.
“It matters to you.” I called her Dr. Bernard. She had never asked to use her first name.
“He’s the father of my kids.”
“What kind of trouble would it be?”
“Money.”
She told me that she and Carver had split up because of his business. It consumed him, she said. There was no room for anything else. He was generous, though, she added. Paid for the kids, the teenage girl, her younger brother. He spent time with them. Had offered Lucille money to buy her house.
According to Bernard, Lennox had made a ton of dough in the years before the crash. Hedge fund, she said. Derivatives. Whatever. But lately he had been erratic, she knew he was losing money. His obsession with the Armstrong, fixing it up, selling it off, had become his only subject. The kids told her he talked about it all the time.
“So he’s in serious financial trouble, right?”
“Yes. The market tanked, and Carver got scared. He was heavily invested in this building and others-he has other property-and then the real estate market turned bad. I think somebody’s getting ready to call in his debts. I think he’s on the verge of losing his job. I saw him at the Christmas party and I saw panic in his eyes.”
“How much panic?”
“Enough,” she said. “He wanted too much. It’s not healthy.” Bernard got up. “I want to look at Mrs. Simonova’s medication.”
“I looked,” I said. I took the bottles out of my pocket, gave them to her. She slid on a pair of glasses.
“This is what you found?”
“There was other stuff in Simonova’s place, but all of it was prescribed by you. The only interesting thing was that there were the same pills in her apartment and Hutchison’s.” I held out a vial of blue capsules.
“This is only blood pressure medication,” said Bernard.
I was on the verge of asking, of saying, Can you get these pills checked? I stopped myself. Better to ask a friend, to keep any evidence until it was needed. Use it. Ignore it.
“You let me come up here because you wanted to see my reaction to being in Lionel’s apartment?” asked Lucille Bernard. “Is that it?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you for being straight with me,” she said, and left the apartment.
CHAPTER 40
G loria Lopez picked up on the second ring. In the background I could hear a radio and a little kid chattering. “Hey, Artie, good to hear from you,” said Gloria, who’s been a friend since we’d met on a case out in Red Hook. She was a detective, but when she got married and had a kid, she’d gone into forensics. After she divorced her miserable husband, she and her boy went to live with her mother up in Washington Heights.
Gloria had a network of friends all over town, people at the ME’s, people with the Feds. Gloria always returned favors, and she was a really good woman. We had spent some time together. She was funny and sexy. We’d had a lot of fun and I knew she wanted more from me. I could hear the expectation in her voice when she asked if I wanted to come over for dinner or go out later in the week.
I hesitated. I didn’t want to be a jerk with women any more, if I could help it.
“You’re back with Lily Hanes, or is it somebody else?”
“What makes you say that?”
“You think I can’t read you, Artie?” She softened her tone. “What is it you need?”
I told her I had some pills I wanted looked at. She said she’d do her best and I told her I’d get them to her.
“You can still come for dinner one night,” she said. “My mother is crazy about you.” I sent her mother good wishes and hung up, then I called Officer Alvin, who said he would deliver the pills to Gloria, then I went to 125th and Seventh to wait for the bank manager.
Jimmy Wagner had called to say the manager at Simonova’s branch would meet me there. Gave me the guy’s number. His name was Mr. Cash. Hard to believe. I looked at my watch. I called Mr. Cash. He sounded pissed off. It was Sunday, and he lived in Corona in Queens, but he said he was on his way.
I walked, trying to get warm. It was late Sunday morning, and in spite of the cold, a few of the stalls were setting up, owners putting out their goods, the incense sticks and cheap aromatherapy oils, black romances and vampire novels, portraits of Cleopatra painted on velvet, photographs of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Michael Jackson. Most of all, there were pictures of Obama.
The discount stores were full of people looking for cheap Christmas presents and tree ornaments, but the shops with the fancier duds, the leather and fur, the stage outfits, were empty. There were some chains, Starbucks, other signs of progress, but there were also plenty of empty storefronts. For all the tales of Sugar Hill and the promise of real estate deals and fabulous money, the financial meltdown was hitting hard.
The bottom was falling out of the market, all markets, and housing was in deep shit. Houses that had been under renovation were still covered in scaffolding, but work had stopped. A year earlier, they would have gone for at least a million.
Carver Lennox was in trouble. I thought about the incident at the party the night before when the guy with the strange, pale hair had stopped to talk to him. Remembered how scared Lennox had looked. I wondered what kind of debts Lennox had, and who he owed.
In the doorway of a boarded-up building was an old man, clutching his shopping cart full of scraps of old rugs. He was smoking the stub of a cigar.
A guy in jeans and a good leather jacket jogged past the old man, who tried to get his attention, get some change off him.
I turned a corner into a side street, looked up, and saw apartments with broken windows, and laundry hung over the sills, three pillowcases frozen solid. Kids were walking up and down the street, jeans hanging down low on their asses, one slapping a couple of pizza slices together to eat them doggie style.
There was nobody on the stoops, no open windows, no music. It was a bleak place on this frigid day.
I went to the bank. Where the fuck was Mr. Cash? I was getting impatient. I took out his number, I called, and again he said he was running late.
How late?
Coming in from Queens, he said. Bad roads.
I told him to step on it. I wanted to look in Simonova’s safe-deposit box. I wanted to know if there was a will, and I wanted to know before Lily got back from the funeral. If, like the letter, the will named Lily, I had to know before anybody else. Simonova was the kind of woman-I was guessing-who had made a will.
