fuck.”
“Nina-”
“Loved talking to you, Captain.”
And she hung up and left him with a buzz in his ear.
And a new worry on his mind.
“That was the lawyers,” Joe Vine said, hanging up the phone. “The subpoenas have been served.”
His wife, Cindy, was wearing her faded red bathrobe and sitting with her knees drawn up in a corner of the sofa. They’d had hamburgers for lunch, and the scent of the fried beef and onions still permeated the apartment. “I wish Alan would get well and come home so none of this was necessary.”
“We all wish that,” Vine said, irritated. He’d hoped she’d cheer up when she learned the lawsuit was going forward. “Don’t you think I wish that?”
“Of course I do. I know you’re suffering just like me. But I also think you want revenge.”
“Sure, I want them to pay for what they did to Alan. Especially that bitch in charge of the radiology department.”
“That’s what I mean, Joe. With you it’s personal.”
“Personal is our son lying in a hospital bed for weeks without moving unless somebody turns him over. Personal is me listening to you grinding your teeth all night while you whimper with bad dreams. And personal is me having to listen to you imply I care more about revenge and money than I do about our son.”
“I didn’t mean it that way, Joe, and you know it.”
“Stop telling me what I know.”
She looked away and wrapped her arms tightly around her bent knees, gently rocking back and forth. “I’m afraid for Alan. I’m afraid of what your hate might do to us, Joe. I’m afraid of courts and lawyers. I can’t help it, I’m fucking afraid!”
“This might not even get to court. The hospital might try to settle.”
“They already tried once.”
“Cindy? Stop rocking! You look like a goddamn nutcase!”
She seemed to hear only her own internal rhythm.
“Cindy? Honey? Damnit! Answer me!”
She did, in a mumble he couldn’t understand. She was talking more and more like that lately, as if they were speaking underwater and she was drifting away from him.
He leaned closer. “Cindy?”
She mumbled again. It sounded something like “God help us.”
“A subpoena!” Anne cried to Horn that evening as soon as she came home from work. “For Christ’s sake, a subpoena!” Stress had clenched her face like a fist. A strand of blond hair stuck out above one ear, while another dangled over her forehead. She slammed the door behind her, shutting out the world beyond the brownstone.
“I’ve seen them before,” Horn said, staying calm, hoping it would be catching. He put the Cuban cigar he’d been contemplating taking outside to smoke back in his pocket, then gently pried the envelope she was waving around from her hand.
He unfolded the document inside, kinked from the pressure of her tense fingers, and scanned it.
“Court date’s not for two months,” he said, handing the subpoena back to her. “Give yourself some time to think about this, Anne. Plenty of things can happen over two months.”
“Such as?”
“A settlement.”
“You don’t seem to understand that I, the radiology department, the ER personnel, the hospital, have done
“I do understand. I’m usually the one trying to reassure you of that. Remember, you were telling me the other day about how guilty you felt.”
She gave him a weary, disdainful look, then turned her back on him and trudged up the stairs, moving like an arthritic.
“Feeling and knowing are two different things,” she said without looking back.
He took the cigar back out of his pocket and went outside to smoke and walk, and think.
22
Paula had spent the rest of the day talking to people in Will Lincoln’s neighborhood. Everyone, from Lincoln’s barber to the patrons of a corner tavern, Minnie’s Place, where he sometimes stopped in for a drink, held a positive view of Lincoln. A sweet-natured, friendly kind of guy, they all said. A regular guy, despite the odd way he had of turning a dollar, buying and collecting scrap metal, worthless junk, and welding it into art.
It wasn’t until Paula talked to a Mrs. Dorothy Neidler, who lived in a small clapboard house directly across the street from Lincoln’s similar house, that a sour note was struck.
“C’mon in,” Mrs. Neidler said, when finally convinced Paula was a genuine NYPD detective and wanted to chat about Lincoln. Paula had the feeling that Lincoln was one of her favorite things to talk about.
The living room looked like a worn-out, badly designed set from a fifties sitcom. Tables and chairs were blond
Paula guessed they went okay with the sculpted gray wall-to-wall carpet. Clear plastic still covered the shades of the matching lamps on the matching tables on each side of the sofa. In a corner, near some red drapes, sat a blond console TV with a black ceramic panther on it. The panther was actually a planter that featured plastic flowers and a night-light. Paula wondered, where was the basket chair?
Dorothy Neidler was in her seventies and thin, hunched, bitter, and gray. There were short vertical slash marks above her upper lip that looked like old scars from when someone had sewn her mouth shut. When she moved she left in the air a cloying wake of perfume that didn’t quite disguise a sharp medicinal scent.
As soon as Paula had seated herself on the stiff blue sofa, Mrs. Neidler offered her a glass of lemonade. Paula accepted and five minutes later was not at all surprised to find the lemonade almost too sour to drink. But she did drink it, sipping cautiously and not making a face. She said nothing, knowing from experience when to wait. It was obvious that a tale or two bounded around in the older woman’s mind, itching to escape to a sympathetic ear. That ear would be Paula’s, if she could be patient.
Mrs. Neidler trained faded blue eyes on her.
Paula smiled. Sipped.
“So somebody figured it out,” Mrs. Neidler said.
“Only partly,” Paula said, playing along, thinking maybe she was dealing with the neighborhood witch, a busybody with too much imagination.
But Mrs. Neidler seemed reasonably normal. She had no overt symptoms of being a neurotic or an irrational gossip, simply a gossip. Her clouded eyes seemed permanently pained and narrowed by what might have been a lifetime of disappointments, but Paula had seen the same look on a lot of older people. It was as if they were bewildered and bitter from having glanced in the mirror one day and noticing that somehow they’d suddenly aged.
Mrs. Neidler shifted about in her stiff blue chair.
Paula sipped silently, knowing the pump was primed.
“Well, maybe I can enlighten you on the other part,” Mrs. Neidler said.
Paula leaned forward, not overdoing it.
“Those two are having trouble.”
“Uh-huh,” Paula said.
“I guess you people know what kind of trouble.”
