“But we don’t know it’s a bribe, Rick. All we know is that it’s a checking account of some kind.”
“A boatload of money under an alias? Come on.” Her concentration refocuses, laserlike, on the next ruffled blouse on the rack. She picks it up and appraises it. “This is nice.”
“What about the note?”
“What about the blouse?”
“Where am I going to wear it, Rick? Tara?”
She slaps it back onto the rack. “Maybe we’ll have better luck with the dresses.” She turns smartly away and heads over to a lineup of dresses whose skirts are so voluminous they puff out like parachutes. Ricki extracts one with an expertise born of practice and waves it at me from across the store. “Very appropriate, don’t you think?” she says.
I pick up the bags and follow her. “No feathers? I want feathers. And a headpiece.”
A young saleswoman, more like a saleschild, perks up from behind a counter littered with fragrant notecards and stationery. She looks like Alice in Wonderland in a black velvet headband and a white pinafore. “That’s one of our most popular styles,” she says.
“I hate it,” I whisper.
Ricki looks daggers at me. “Give it a chance, Sherlock.”
“No.”
The saleschild’s face falls.
Ricki slaps the dress back in place. “You are so stubborn. So stubborn.”
“Rick, listen.”
“You said you wanted me to help you.”
“This isn’t what I meant.”
“Why do I bother? You call me up and I come. My one night without clients and here I am. I should have gone food shopping. There’s no milk in the house.” She puts her hands on her hips and glares at me.
I put my hands on my hips and we face off at opposite ends of the dress rack, the High Noon of Mothers. No milk in the house, and Ricki is the most organized of women; it must gnaw at her conscience like an overdue library book. I feel the first pang of guilt, which means she’s quicker on the draw. “Give me the goddamn dress,” I say.
“Good.” She plucks it from the rack and pushes it at me.
“I’m not promising anything.”
“Fine.”
The saleschild comes over. “Can I help you?” she says brightly. Too brightly for minimum wage.
“Yes,” Ricki says. “My friend needs dresses. With her eyes, I think a royal blue would be nice.”
“Rick, I’m standing here. I can speak.”
The saleschild looks from Ricki to me.
“I don’t want anything fancy,” I say.
“Not fancy?” The saleschild looks puzzled; fancy is all they sell. They have a monopoly in fancy.
“She doesn’t mean fancy,” Ricki says, “she means fussy.”
“No, I mean fancy. Empire waistline, hem to the floor. I’m too old for puffed sleeves.”
“Fussy,” Ricki says again.
The saleschild looks at Ricki, then at me. The poor girl’s getting dizzy. I hand her the dress for balance.
“Where are the business-y dresses?” Ricki asks.
“I’m out of a job, Rick.”
“Then you need interview clothes.”
“Follow me,” says the saleschild. She pads in ballet slippers to a rack of dresses and takes three from the rack. Any one of them would work at my coronation, but Ricki badgers me to try one on. We squeeze together into the flowered dressing room. Ricki always comes into dressing rooms with me; she doesn’t realize this was okay when we were in high school but now that we’re almost forty, is a bit odd.
“Are we having fun yet?” I mutter, stepping into the billowing dress.
“Let me zip it up for you,” Ricki says.
“It’s the least you can do.”
She zips the dress more roughly than necessary and I regard myself in the mirror. The style makes me look tall and thin, which must be some sort of optical illusion. Still, all I can see is that my eyes look too small and my nose looks too big; my father’s Sicilian blood, acid-etched into my features. I look terrible.
“You look stunning!” Ricki says from behind me.
“Uncanny. That’s just what I was thinking.”
“The neckline is so pretty.”
I look down at my chest and catch sight of the scalloped bra, barely covered by the dress. It reminds me of Armen, of that night.
But she’s busy picking up a flowered scarf and tossing it around my neck. She’s caught brain fever from the shopping, like early man, blood-lusting after the kill. She found the right dress, now the whole village can eat. “Here, if you’re not in love with the neckline.”
“Rick, what do you think about the note?”
“What note?” She drapes the scarf to the left, then squinches up her nose.
“The one I found in my pocket.”
She rearranges the scarf over my shoulder. “Are we talking about that again?”
“Yes.”
“I’m trying to take your mind off your official police duties, but you’re not letting me.”
“Just tell me where the note fits in, huh? Is that the act of a man who would kill himself a few hours later? You’re a shrink, you tell me. You must have handled suicide in your practice.”
“Only one, thank God.” She crosses herself quickly even though she’s Jewish.
“But depressed people, right? You must see tons of depressed people.”
“Oh, they ship ’em in.”
“Rick, will you help me? You may actually know something here.”
“Why, thank you.”
“You know what I mean.”
She ties the scarf around my neck. “Okay, so you’re asking me? Professionally?”
“Yes.”
She pats the knot and steps back, squinting at my costume like a movie director. “I think your friend the judge was a very interesting personality, and I think his behavior was totally consistent with suicide. Even the note.”
“But how?”
“Let me ask you this. How well did you know this man?”
“Armen? I knew him well.”
“You worked for him for three months. Part-time.”
“We worked closely together. I knew him well.”
“Think about it,” she says. “You didn’t know he loved you. You didn’t know he was sitting on a pile of money. You didn’t know he had an apartment.”
“But I knew what mattered, what kind of man he was. Everybody knew that. And what’s this have to do with psychology anyway?”
“Everything. He was a very important judge, a powerful judge, and the husband of a United States senator. On top of that, he’s a
“Yes.” I feel vaguely like I’m being led where I don’t want to go.
“So people like that, they’re managing constantly under the pressure to live up to very high standards. The standards of others, of the community. It’s tough to keep that veneer perfect, to keep up appearances. They begin to keep secrets, like he did, and pretty soon what they know about themselves grows further and further away from what the world thinks of them. In the right circumstances, a person like that falls apart. The veneer cracks, and so
