admired this man so much. He asked me questions from time to time, as if to consult with a fellow doctor.”
I was a block from the Armstrong now, and I stopped at a red light.
“I’ll get out here, please,” said Marie Louise.
“I’ll take you to the door.”
“Thank you, but no.” She opened the car door.
“Did you follow me earlier? Did you follow me to 125th Street?” I said, but she just smiled, closed the door, and hurried away.
Mr. Cash-a grumpy, middle-aged man with a Jamaican accent in sweatpants and a brown down jacket-led me down to the basement of the bank and unlocked the door to the vault. He took the key I handed him-I’d found it at Lily’s-opened the little door, and extracted a flat metal box from a wall of identical slots in the vault.
“Is that it?” he said. “Will you be long?”
“Yeah, that’s fine,” I said.
“I’ll be next door in my office.” He yawned.
Late night? I wanted to say. He knew I was a cop, he knew I was on business. I didn’t like his attitude, but I just left him, went into one of the little rooms opposite the vault, turned on the light, shut the door, laid the flat box on the ledge, and sat down.
I keep my own stuff in a similar box at my bank downtown. When I got hold of my father’s journals, I’d wanted them safe. I keep the journals in the box, along with cash for emergencies-I usually end up spending it when there’s no emergency at all except my being broke-and a spare weapon and some ammo.
What for? I’ve got a second gun at home. There isn’t any revolution coming. I just like knowing it’s there. In the box I also keep my father’s watch and the gold earrings he’d given my mother the night they went to see Paul Robeson.
I’d put on my glasses and opened the box when my phone beeped. I couldn’t get a signal, but I could see from her text that Lily was back from the cemetery. She was upset as hell that nobody had called her about Dr. Hutchison.
From Simonova’s box, I removed an assortment of little worn leather boxes containing old lockets, gold chains, earrings, a diamond ring, and a few Soviet medals, all tarnished now.
There was an envelope full of twenties-I was guessing around a couple grand-and a plastic bag. In it were vials of pills. Spare medication? But why keep it in the bank? I took the bag.
There was also a worn leather passport case. Inside were two passports, one American, the other Soviet, long out of date, a passport from a country that no longer existed. She had also kept her Communist Party card.
Finally, in a blue folder tied up with cotton string, there was a will.
At first, scanning it quickly, I was relieved. I didn’t see Lily’s name. She had gone crazy when she’d thought Simonova had left her the apartment at the Armstrong. But there was something else, and it hit me like a hammer.
I sat up straight, cleaned my glasses on my shirt, and kept reading. I was still feeling lousy from getting beat up in the basement of the Armstrong and I was taking too many painkillers. I shut my eyes for a moment and then reread the will. I didn’t want to believe what I was reading. But it was there, legal, properly spelled out, signed by a lawyer. I took off my glasses, rubbed my eyes again, fumbled in my pocket for some aspirin, and ate them.
In that little room in the basement of the bank, I got up, sat down, picked up the paper again. I thought I must have been wrong the first couple of times I read the will, that my vision was blurred, that I was tired. I read it again carefully.
CHAPTER 41
I n her will, Marianna Simonova had left almost everything to Marie Louise Semake. All of it: the apartment, furniture, clothes. She had also left her some cash. This was because Madame Semake was a worker and she, Marianna Simonova, in solidarity with the working class, had bestowed what was rightly hers upon the person who most deserved it. I looked at the date. The will had just been signed on Thursday, but when had she given the instructions to the lawyer? Who put it in the safe-deposit box? Had it been Lily who kept the key? Would she have done it without looking in the envelope? Lily had a fierce sense of what was right. She was obsessive about privacy.
The will had been executed by a woman lawyer from a midtown firm, signed and sealed and witnessed by somebody from the firm. The executor was named as Dr. Lionel Hutchison.
Had there been an earlier will?
The lawyer on the will was G. Neuwirth. She was listed. I left a message. Less than five minutes later, she called back.
Yes, said Ms. Neuwirth, she had been up to see Mrs. Simonova, along with her assistant, yes, on Thursday. She wasn’t sure about earlier wills, and she wasn’t in the city. She had picked up the message and called me back from her place in Montauk. No way she could get back today; nobody she could ask, either, not on Sunday. She’d do it first thing in the morning. What’s more, said Ms. Neuwirth, the attorney who had looked after Mrs. Simonova for years had recently died, and she, Ms. Neuwirth, wasn’t completely up to date with the previous material, at least not without looking at her files. She said she’d call first thing in the morning.
Mr. Cash was hovering now, cracking his knuckles. I didn’t know if I should laugh or cry, I was so relieved Lily wasn’t named in the will. The will would trump the letter.
But why the letter to Lily? Did Simonova find out something about Marie Louise she didn’t like? Was she just out of her mind? One of those people who constantly rewrite their wills depending on the state of their relationships?
For a few minutes, I sat, the door closed, the overhead light making my hands yellow. Then I put the document back in the envelope, stuffed it in my canvas bag, along with the few other things I’d found. I returned the box to the bank manager and went upstairs, and by the time I left the bank it was already getting dark.
It was only four, but it was the shortest day of the year, and only a smudge of cold, bright color was left in the sky over the Hudson.
From my car, I called Lily. No answer. I tried Virgil. Nothing. I put in a call to an ex-cop I know who had gone to law school. I needed somebody who hadn’t been involved in writing the will.
My pal had gone into estate law. Said she wanted a quiet life. Told me if the will was solid, Marie Louise Semake could inherit even if she was in the U.S. illegally.
Before I put the key in the ignition, I opened the document. Marie Louise’s address was there, but it was in Mali. She wasn’t illegal in Mali, she was a citizen. Maybe it was what she had told Simonova, that it was her permanent address. Maybe she had worried that if she was illegal, she wouldn’t get the apartment.
Either way, Marie Louise had known. How else would Simonova’s lawyer have had the Mali address?
The apartment, the money, would change Marie Louise’s life. She could hire a good immigration lawyer, stay in America, send her kids to school. Or she could sell the apartment and go back to her country and open a clinic. There were a million ways it could change her life.
Suddenly, I wondered what time she had left the party the night before. Tolya had given Marie Louise a ride from the Sugar Hill Club. It had been my idea. I left him a message, then I called Jimmy Wagner and asked him to get me the time of Simonova’s death. He put me on hold, came back, and said the ME made it for between two and three in the morning.
“One more thing, Artie?”
“Yeah, Jimmy?”
“For sure, he must have been pushed. The way the bones were broken, the angle, all the signs. I have people up on that roof right now looking. Are we getting someplace with this?”
I told him I was on it and hung up.
I married an American and then he died, Marie Louise had said. Was it true? If it was true, why did immigration scare her? If it was true, she was the widow of an American.
Immigrants get desperate. I’d met Chinese who had paid forty grand to get to America on ships where some
