“You never finished your lunch,” I said.
She didn’t say anything.
“How ’bout that snow?” I said.
Silence.
“If you don’t like the weather in New England, wait a minute,” I said.
She looked down at her desk.
“Everybody talks about the weather,” I said. “But nobody does anything about it.”
She looked up from her desk.
“All right,” she said. “Enough. I’ll talk to you. What do you want?”
“Thank God,” I said. “I was almost down to singing ‘Stormy Weather.’”
She almost smiled.
“At least I escaped that,” she said. “What do you want?”
“Know a man named Ariel Herzberg?” I said.
“No.”
“Your daughter does,” I said.
“So?”
“I saw him visiting her at Walford last week,” I said.
“So?”
“He’s killed two people that I know of, and tried twice, so far, to kill me.”
She kept looking at me, and her breathing became harder, as if she was short of breath.
“If she’s involved with a man like that . . .” I said.
“Who did he kill,” Winifred asked.
Her voice was raspy.
“He killed Ashton Prince,” I said. “And the superintendent in my building. Super’s name was Francisco Cabrera.”
“Was that part of the attempt to kill you?”
“Yes.”
“Did the super interrupt them?” she said.
“No,” I said. “They interrupted him. Apparently they rang the bell. When he answered, they put a gun on him and forced him to open my door. Then they took him to the cellar and shot him in the head.”
“Did Ariel do this himself?”
“Probably not,” I said. “He probably had people do it for him.”
“And you’ve seen her with him?”
“Missy,” I said. “Yes.”
“And you assume they’re involved.”
“They were people who knew each other,” I said.
“Is there anything I could say . . . or do . . . to make you leave this alone?”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“You have an office just down the street,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Let’s go there to talk,” she said.
“Okay.”
52
I’d given her some coffee, and she was sitting in a client chair with her legs crossed, sipping it. Her knees were good-looking. She looked past me for a time, out my window, where the small snowflakes fell. They were well spaced and in no great hurry. She didn’t seem to be in much of a hurry herself. That was okay. She hadn’t come here to drink coffee and look at the snow.
I was behind my desk. In my Aeron chair. With the right-hand top drawer of my desk open, and a cup of fresh coffee in my hand. I drank some. And looked at her knees. And waited.
After a little while she shifted her gaze from the snowfall to me.
“When I was with the Bureau,” she said, “before Missy was born, I was young, single, and ferocious. I was going to prove something. I was going to be the best goddamned agent since Melvin Purvis.”
