unreadable. “You don’t have any pictures.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you have family. In South Philly.”
“Yes.” I flash on the car barreling by me down my parents’ street. “How did you know that?”
“Your accent. It’s a dead giveaway.” He pauses beforeBlack’s Law Dictionary and runs a thick finger along its binding. I can’t gauge his mood, I don’t know him well enough. He seems distracted. Tense. “Do you ever use this thing?”
“No.”
“Then why do you have it?”
“My parents gave it to me.” The detail makes me feel exposed to him, increasing my nervousness. I tell myself to relax. I handled Lombardo, I can handle him. “Did you have an office like this when you were an associate?”
“When I started out, we were in the Fidelity Building on Broad Street. All the windows opened.” He laughs, abruptly, and slaps his breast pocket. “Do you smoke?”
“No.”
“Shit.”
“Sorry.”
“So.” He leans against the file cabinet. “Mind if I close the door?”
I feel my chest flush. “Uh…why?”
He cocks his head. “Now why do you think, Mary, Mary?” Suddenly he grabs the door and slams it shut. “Alone at last,” he says, with a dry chuckle.
I find myself rising, involuntarily. I scan my desk for a pair of scissors or a letter opener. Nothing’s there except a stapler and a dictaphone. I have no protection. I back up and feel the cold window at my back.
“Aren’t you standing kind of close to the window, Mary?”
I glance over my shoulder. The clock face glows fiercely at me through a thunderstorm. We’re forty stories up, in a tower of black mirrors that flexes and groans in high winds. I tell myself to stay cool. “Why don’t you just tell me what you’re doing down here, Sam?”
His eyebrow arches in surprise. “Enough with the small talk, is that the idea?”
“Exactly.”
“Fine. Two reasons. One: I’m having a reception for the Rules Committee tomorrow night in Conference Room A. Eight o’clock. The litigation partners and the district court judges are invited. You should be there.”
“What?” I don’t understand.
“There’s a reception tomorrow night, and I want you there. Conference Room A. Eight o’clock.”
“Me, at a partners’ reception?”
Berkowitz looks at me like I’m crazy. “Yes, you. Do you go to receptions, Mary, Mary?”
“Yes.” I relax slightly.
“Bring Carrier. You two are pals, aren’t you?”
“Yes. We are.” I breathe easier and step away from the window. I hear a thunderclap outside and step even farther away from the window.
“Good.” He fingers his breast pocket again. “Well. Okay. Two: This goddamned thing with Tom Lombardo. I got a call today. He said you saw what happened.”
“I did.”
“Well, forget you did.”
“What?”
“Forget about it.”
“I’m just supposed to forget-”
“Yes. That’s an order.” His tone is gruff.
I’m beginning to understand what he’s saying. “I get it-it’s a deal. You want to trade off my partnership and Judy’s for my forgetting about what happened with Lombardo? And maybe to Brent?”
“Mary, it’s none of your fuckingbusiness! ” he explodes, out of nowhere. With his face suddenly florid, he looks like a devil. But I fight the devils now and win. Fuck back, even when you’re fucking with the devil himself.
“Don’t you scream at me!” I lean toward him. We’re almost nose to nose over the desk. Berkowitz, the King of Fucking Back, and me, a pretender to the throne.
Suddenly, he breaks into a sheepish smile. The redness in his face vanishes. “That’s what my wife always says.”
“You ought to listen.”
He laughs loudly. “Lombardo’s right. You got balls.”
“No, I don’t. So what was it about?”
“Would you believe me if I told you it’s not your concern?”
“You mean not to worry my pretty little head?”
“Okay. Down, girl.” He looks amused but still tense. Whatever it is, it’s driving him nuts. “All right, it’s about Delia. She’s got her hand in the till. She’s taken a hundred thou over five years.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Wish I were.” His face falls, he shakes his head. “I thought it was somebody in Accounting, maybe that asshole bean counter we let push us around. I didn’t think it was her. It never even occurred to me it was her. I asked Lombardo to track it down for me, but I didn’t want to believe him.”
“So you hit him?”
He looks pained. “Hey, you know, it hurts. She betrayed me after I took good care of her. I loved that kid.”
I meet his eye. Was Brent right about them?
“Don’t give me that look. I know everybody says I’m running around with her. I let’em think it. Fact is, she’s my best friend’s kid, her father was my sparring partner. He and I were like this.” He holds up two tight fingers in a gesture I haven’t seen in ages.
“For real?”
“For real. I’m her godfather. The first Jewish godfather in history.”
I laugh, with relief. Part of the puzzle falls into place. “Is that why she’s so mad lately?”
“Oh, yeah, Delia’s mad at the world; she must’ve seen it coming. She won’t even talk to me, even though I convinced the policy committee not to prosecute her. All she lost was her job, and we got a payment schedule worked out. She throws in one, I throw in ten. Can I drive a bargain or what?”
“You do okay.”
He slaps his breast pocket again for a cigarette. “Anyway, she left this morning. Now I have no secretary. Got a good one I can steal?”
I think of Miss Pershing. “No.”
“So. We all better here, Mary, Queen of Scots?”
“All better.”
“Okay, I gotta go. I don’t have to tell you not to mention this, do I?”
“Nope.”
“Tomorrow night,” he calls out, as he opens the door and walks out.
I collapse into my chair, hugely relieved. Tired. Drained. So the fight I saw wasn’t about Brent after all, and Berkowitz isn’t having an affair with Delia. I wonder what Brent would say to that revelation, but Brent isn’t here. I miss him. And I think I know who killed him.
My eyes fall on the note, sticking out from underneath the mail. Ned, my lover. My love. I feel heartsick and scared. He must be crazy, really crazy. Maybe that stuff he told me about the Prozac was just a story; I never did go back and check the dates on the bottles. Is the man I slept with really capable of killing Brent? And Mike, a year earlier? Maybe, if he’s obsessed with me like Judy says. And am I safe from him, or will he turn on me now that I’ve rejected him?
I check the clock. 7:02. Too late for me to be alone in the office. Rain falls in sheets on City Hall; I feel the
