“Yes, it is.”
“I had the news on, I heard what they said, but I never made the connection.”
“Well, why would you?”
“Damn, I feel bad.”
“So do I.”
“Elaine home?”
“She had a yoga class. She should be home any minute.”
“ ’Less she go straight to the store. You want, I’ll come over, sit with you until she gets there.”
“Isn’t the market open?”
“They ’bout to ring the bell, but it don’t matter. New York Stock Exchange get along without me.”
“No, that’s all right,” I said.
“You change your mind, just call. Won’t take me a minute to close down here and come over.”
I rang off and tried her number at the store. I didn’t think she’d go there, she rarely opens up before eleven, but it was possible. When the machine picked up I tried to keep my voice neutral, telling her it was me and to pick up if she was there. She didn’t, and I was just as glad.
A few minutes later I heard her key in the lock.
I was standing a few feet from the door when she opened it, and she knew something was wrong as soon as she saw my face. I told her to come in, took her gym bag from her, told her to sit down.
I don’t know why we do that. Sit down, we say, pointing at chairs.
Are you sitting down? we want to know, before imparting bad news over 128
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the phone. What difference does it make? Are we really afraid our words will knock the recipient off his feet? Do that many people injure themselves, falling down when they hear bad news?
Brace yourself—that’s what we’re saying. As if a person can. As if one can prepare oneself for such awful intelligence.
“It was on the news,” I said. “Monica’s dead. She’s been murdered.”
16
They weren’t really set up for viewing. The autopsy wasn’t finished, and a woman who looked as though she spent too much time around dead people had us wait, then took us into a large room and led us to a table on which a mound was covered with a plain white sheet. She uncovered the head, and there was no mistake. It was Monica.
“Ah, no,” Elaine said. “No, no, no.”
Outside she said, “My best friend. The best friend I ever had. We talked every day, there wasn’t a day we didn’t talk. Who am I gonna talk to now? It’s not fair, I’m too fucking old to get another best friend.” A cab came along and I flagged it.
I hadn’t wanted to take her to the morgue, but then I hadn’t wanted to leave her alone, either. And it wasn’t my decision to make, anyway, it was hers, and she’d been adamant. She wanted to be with me, and she wanted to see her friend. At the morgue, when the woman warned us it wouldn’t be pretty, I told her she didn’t have to do this. She said she did.
In the cab she said, “It makes it real. That’s why they have open cas-kets at funerals. So you’ll know, so you’ll accept it. Otherwise there’d be a part of me that wouldn’t really believe she was gone. I’d go on thinking that I could pick up the phone and dial her number and there she’d be.”
I didn’t say anything, just held her hand. We rode another block and 130
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she said, “I’ll believe that anyway. On some level. But a little bit less than if I hadn’t seen her sweet face. Oh, God, Matt.” My first thought when we met Mark Sussman was that he was awfully young, and my second thought, a corrective to the first, was that he was within a couple of years of the age I’d been when I quit the job. He was short, with a well-developed upper body suggestive of frequent workouts with weights, and his dark brown eyes were hard to read.
He was a college graduate, which seems barely worth noting these days. I don’t think there was a single man in my class at the academy who’d been to college, let alone got all the way through it. There was a general feeling in the department that college was no good for a cop, that you learned too many of the wrong things and not enough of the right ones, that it unmanned you while suffusing you with an unwarranted feeling of superiority. That was all a lot of crap, of course, but so was most of what we believed about most subjects.
He’d had a split major at Brooklyn College, history and sociology, and was accepted at a couple of graduate schools when he realized he didn’t want a teaching career. He took a couple of graduate courses in criminology at John Jay and decided that was his field, but he didn’t want to study it, he wanted to get out there and do it. That was ten years ago, and now he had a gold shield and a desk in the detective squad room at the Sixth Precinct, on West Tenth Street in the Village.
He sat behind that desk, and we took chairs alongside it. “Monica Driscoll,” he said. “Now we also found documents referring to her as Monica Wellbridge.”
“That was her ex-husband’s name,” Elaine told him. “She never used it.”
“Took her maiden name back. When was the divorce, fairly recent?”
“Oh, God, no. Fifteen years ago? At least that, maybe twenty.” And no, Monica hadn’t been in touch with Derek Wellbridge, and she had no idea how to reach him, or if he was alive to be reached.
