a cyanide case, a Maryland teenager who spiked his friend’s drink with poison and killed him.
“Listen to this,” I said, and read some of it out. “OK, so, Gupta says, ‘It’s remarkably easy to purchase cyanide online…We had some of our producers do it themselves…You can actually have it sent to your home.’ There’s more on how you can get it in pesticides, metal strippers, you can get it at hardware stores, things like that.”
“Jesus, Artie,” Virgil said.
“Yeah, she was reading up. I found a receipt for pesticides from a hardware store midtown. What did she need it for? She got Lionel Hutchison to prescribe extra pills for her, she put cyanide in the capsules and gave him the bottle back. That way she could be sure it would work. That day, the next day. There were five pills.”
“Like Russian roulette?”
“You got it.”
“But why? I mean, unless she was crazy, why do this?”
“For Carver Lennox. Her son.”
“I’m still not sure I get it completely. Lay it out for me.”
“She knew he wanted to take over the building. She knew he wanted those big apartments. And she would make it happen for him. Washington, Lionel Hutchison.”
“Did she know she was dying when she fixed his pills?”
“It didn’t matter to her. Either way, Lennox would get hold of the apartments. She knew Celestina had a soft spot for him; Carver would get her place, and he’d find a way to get Amahl Washington’s.”
“It still doesn’t add up,” said Virgil. “What about the guy who killed Carver? And how come she left everything to Marie Louise Semake?”
“I checked. She arranged it only two days before she died. On Wednesday. There was a tape with a phone call between her and Carver, telling him she had some wonderful news for him, a kind of Christmas gift.”
“Go on.”
“She told him she was his mother, she told him she had fixed for him to get Amahl Washington’s apartment. She didn’t say it outright, but he could have figured it out, he wasn’t dumb. It’s all on one of her phone tapes. He must have been horrified. He didn’t want it. He told her he didn’t want it.”
“Do you think she mentioned that she had planned Lionel’s death?”
“No. Carver would have stopped it.”
“Why didn’t he tell somebody about Washington?” Virgil asked.
“Maybe he intended to. But clearly, after her talk with Carver, she felt he had betrayed her, he rejected her gift, he rejected her, she made a new will. To spite him. And everyone else. And it was too late to change her plans; she had already put Lionel’s death in place.”
“She arranged for Carver’s murder, too?”
“Yes,” I said. “Before she died. She didn’t know she was going to die when she did, but either way, Carver’s death was in the works.”
“The creep? Ivan?”
“Those tapes of her phone call, I found, I’m betting I’ll find a call to Ivan. She had been a true believer, but when the Soviet system collapsed, she did favors for anyone she could-FSB, Russian mob, who the hell knows. Ivan was part of some two-bit mob who used the Commie Manifesto for tats, for a slogan.”
“Ironic?”
“Who knows,” I said, “but it was Ivan who beat me up. He killed the dog because it was barking too loud, maybe for fun, too, his kind of fun, and he killed Carver. All it took was a phone call from Simonova. Ivan owed her.”
I told Virgil I was sure that during the previous six or seven months, as Simonova’s health got worse, Carver Lennox had become her obsession. She was determined to be a good mother. She intended to leave him something. She knew about his ambition for the building.
For her son, she would make a little empire and leave it to him. Ironic, maybe, for an old Communist, she wrote in her diary. But he was her son. For him she would become a capitalist, for him, anything.
She had outlined her ambitions on paper, certain nobody would see her journals, not for a while. She knew she was dying. She had time, though. She would destroy everything first.
“Was she crazy, or just evil?” said Virgil.
“Is there a difference?”
Virgil went to the other side of the room to take a call, and when he came back, he said, “We really need to go. This is a damn crime scene,” he added. “We’ve been doing a lot of breaking and entering, you and me. No warrant.”
“You go. I’ll go soon,” I said. “Just go.”
“Lily’s not at home, by the way.”
“I know that.”
“Is she OK? Where is she?”
“She’s with Tolya Sverdloff.”
“Your pal.”
“Right.”
“I don’t think you take it seriously, Lily and me,” said Virgil. “Just so you know, Artie, I’m dead serious about her, I really am.”
“You still want to fight a duel with me or something over her?”
“I’m not joking, since you ask. I’m going to win. I’m not letting go easy.”
“How serious?”
“That’s up to Lily.”
“Demasiado.”
The oxygen machine was in the middle of the apartment where Virgil had left it. It was a huge thing, all the dials and tubes. I stared at it. I remembered something Diaz had told me. Of Amahl Washington, he had said, “too much” in Spanish. What was the word? He had said you could die from too much oxygen. Demasaido. Too much.
Had somebody turned up Simonova’s oxygen? Had she suffered a seizure? Did Hutchison find her like that and position, pose her so she looked at peace? My heart was jumping; cold sweat ran down my neck.
When I looked closely at the tank, I saw I was right. The dial was turned up to the highest setting. Somebody had turned it up high, and it had killed her, oxygen had flooded Simonova’s brain, and poisoned her.
I took a picture of the machine with my phone. I scrambled now to read as much as I could. More paper. More journals.
Digging into the box Lily had given me, I finally found another audio tape. I put it on. Sat and listened. Lily’s voice first: “This is for a book about Marianna Simonova.” There followed an interview.
It was as if Simonova was daring Lily, speaking in Russian, then in English. Enough of this recording was in English that I knew Lily had understood it; for the rest, she had been waiting for somebody to translate the Russian. Waiting for me.
Was it Lily who had urged Lionel Hutchison to sign the death certificate? To get the case closed as fast as possible? I wasn’t sure.
But Lily had been frantic when I first got here, to the building. She had called me to come. She had been beside herself, crying, scared, shaking. My fault, Artie, she had said. My fault.
I listened some more and realized Lily had put this tape in the box for me. She wanted me to hear, to know.
For a long time, most of a year, she had listened to Simonova’s stories, had admired her, flattered her. Lily listened. Simonova began to trust her. She told her more and more, about her time in the KGB, how she had been sent to seduce young men, the epic adventures. Who could say if it was true?
Then, about a week before Simonova died, the tone of Lily’s questions began to change. It was on this tape. I heard it.
Simonova expressed great trust in Lily. She said they were comrades and she could tell her anything. Maybe it was why she had written the last-minute letter leaving her apartment to Lily.
The last few days of Simonova’s life, she had begun bragging to Lily about loyalty, about the work she did,
