Saturday morning
TIM ARRIVED WITH NEWSPAPERS UNDER HIS ARM, A BROWN LUNCH BAG, and a bunch of orange and yellow tulips in a cone of wrapping paper. Nate was out with Olivia somewhere—Nate had actually spoken her name instead of the usual “I’m meeting someone.” Did that mean it was serious?
Alice, who’d come from New Haven last night, answered the door and after Rannie made introductions, her daughter turned with raised eyebrows, tilted her head to the side and mouthed the word “hot.”
Tim was in running clothes. He had on a Red Sox cap and a pair of wire-rimmed sunglasses. “Extra copies for you,” he said, depositing newspapers on the hall table. “For the scrapbook.” He handed over the flowers and inspected her. “You up for a walk in the park?”
“I’m resourceful and plucky—sure!”
“Ooh, very dangerous to start believing your own press.”
Last night he’d called upon returning from Amherst. He’d heard the news on 1010 WINS. His was the first of many calls that Nate and Alice fielded. Joan checked in and broke some interesting news of her own.
“They’re appointing me interim head,” Joan said.
“Great. A woman heading Chaps. It’s about time.”
“Rannie, the operative word is interim. I was a public school principal. What qualifications do I have?”
“Well, one—you are who you say you are, and two—you’re not going to murder anybody. So right off the bat you’ve got it all over your predecessor.”
Then Joan said, “And my first official act is suspending the Lilys and Elliot for the semester. They sent Tut a threatening note before he died. A nasty prank, can you believe it? Jem was letting them off easy, but I’m suspending them for the semester, and I don’t care how loudly David Ross screams.”
Mary offered to treat Rannie to a week at the Golden Door spa to recover. When Rannie declined, Mary said, “Then you must rest and really take it easy. My Lord, darling! After what you’ve been through.” Her solution was for Earla to come and cook dinner all next week. “Earla’s nodding her head so don’t say no. We insist!”
Soon after, a case of liquor was delivered from Morrells, including a bottle of Dalwhinnie. Daisy’s note, handwritten in girlish, prep-school print, said, “As soon as you’re feeling up to it, I hope we may get together and have a drink in memory of Larry and Augusta. It’s all just too sad!”
The only other call Rannie took was from her mother, whose cruise ship had docked in Miami and who was spending a couple of days at a friend’s condo before flying back to Cleveland. “Louise and I were watching Bryan Williams and suddenly there’s your building! And I see Nate talking to reporters! I’m gone two weeks and look what happens.”
Rannie found her green water jug and plumped the tulips in it, then announced to Tim that she was ready for an outing.
“Nope, sorry, she’s doing ‘Oprah’ that day,” she could hear Al as they stood waiting for the elevator. “No, that’s ‘The Today Show.’ Look, I’ll have to have our people get back to your people.”
“My publicist,” Rannie tossed her head toward the apartment.
“You fought for your life, Rannie. I respect that, I really do. So now it’s your fifteen minutes. I’m with your daughter—go for it.”
It was beautiful outside, one of those last gasp of Indian summer days. In Riverside Park, they walked as far as the promenade and occupied a bench facing the late morning sun. Tim asked how she was doing.
“Good, but still achy in places.” Last night, after taking one of the horse-sized capsules in the tiny white envelope sent home with her from St. Luke’s Hospital, Rannie had curled up in a ball on her bed. The next thing she knew it was eight a.m. “That last moment, on the roof, I thought—okay, I’m going to die. But there wasn’t any ‘This is your life, Rannie Bookman,’ wrap-up. I was just pissed at myself.”
Tim pulled out two bottles of Snapple from the brown bag. “Take your pick.” There was a lemon-flavored one and a peach. Rannie chose peach, which he opened for her.
“You knew more than you let on, didn’t you?” Rannie asked.
“Not that much. I knew David Ross was in Atlantic City by five p.m. the Monday Tut died so he had an alibi that was air-tight, vacuum-sealed. And I knew Augusta Hollins was never a suspect. She was with a friend that evening.”
Yes, Daisy Satterthwaite. “But the first date we had, at your bar, you mentioned the police finding a pair of earrings at Tut’s apartment, and you intimated the cops didn’t believe Tut had ever received a threatening note.”
“A pair of earrings was found. They belonged to Ms. Hollins. She told the cops that she’d stayed over a few nights, nursing Mr. Tut. And the police never actually did see a note. That was true too.”
“But they believed one existed. You made it sound like they didn’t, that she was a suspect.”
“Look, I didn’t know you from Adam. And you were pissing me off with all the questions. Rannie, cops tell me stuff, I’m not supposed to pass it on.” Now Tim took a swig of Snapple. “I told you about the glass with the fingerprints. And the liquor bottle being clean. You got that out of me. And I also tried to tell you to stop worrying so much about your son. Right from the start, the cops didn’t think it was a kid. Ross was who they liked at first.”
“Tim, do you think David Ross suspected Jem?”
“Maybe. If he did, Ross probably figured Marshall was doing him a favor. And maybe if Ross had the goods on Marshall, he was saving it as—”
“As a bargaining chip.”
“Exactly.” Tim paused. “You’ll see this later today in the papers—Ross was blackmailing Mr. Tut. The police found a notebook at school that Tut kept with dates of phone calls, meetings, even photocopies of certain records Ross made. Ross gave them to Tut as proof of what he knew—Tut had a daughter. Ross was threatening to go public if Tut didn’t get the crown prince into Harvard.”
Rannie nodded. Rannie remembered Ms. Hollins mentioning how Mr. Tut appeared so troubled in the weeks before his death. Ms. Hollins had assumed more threatening notes had come. Rannie now guessed the likely source of Mr. Tut’s anxiety was David Ross’s threats of blackmail.
“Will he be indicted?”
“No. The notebook can’t be used as evidence, but sometimes just creating a nice big tabloid stink is worth it. D.A.s love rattling the chains of apes like Ross.” Then Tim rubbed the back of her neck soothingly and turned slightly to her. “Look, Rannie, I need to talk.”
Although she couldn’t see his eyes behind the sunglasses, his tone was serious, nervous.
“Fine. Just as long as the word murder doesn’t come up.”
“I can’t promise you that, but it has nothing to do with Chaps.”
“So talk.”
“It’s about what you saw in my room,” he turned to her. “The thing from the police academy,” he added as if she had needed any elaboration. He paused for another swig of iced tea, then sat for a moment, holding the bottle in both hands between his splayed legs, nodding a couple of times as if encouraging himself to keep going. “Look. I want to explain…. You picked up on me being an alcoholic, right?”
“I’m aware you don’t drink.”
“I stopped sixteen years ago. I’m in AA. The call I got the first night we met, when we were in that coffee shop…. It was from a friend scared he was going to drink.”
“I think it’s wonderful you’re—”
“No. Let me finish. I was one mean fuck when I was drunk. The whole time I was on the force I drank…and the car crash, the one that killed my wife, I told you I was at the wheel, didn’t I?”
She nodded. “Were you drunk?”
“Shit-faced. We were fighting. We’d been at a party. She wanted to drive but I wouldn’t let her. Told her she could get in the car and shut up or walk home. She chose the car, like I knew she would because she didn’t want to make a scene. I still can remember slamming my foot down on the gas. I wanted to scare her. I didn’t even make it two blocks before I plowed into a tree. I got out of the car without a scratch.”
Although she had never seen him anything but stone cold sober, Rannie could picture him drunk—drunk and nasty and scary—much more easily than she would have wished. He seemed to intuit that, because he waited and nodded, as if he was satisfied that she understood and saw him for who he was, before going on.
“A couple of my buddies who’d been at the party came running. And when the ambulance arrived, one of them told me, ‘You shut the fuck up. We’re handling this.’ So they did. They flashed their badges and the EMT guys let them take me home while they’re dealing with my wife. Putting her in a body bag. I watched them.”
The cold glass of the ice tea bottle felt suddenly colder in her hands.
“So I killed somebody, somebody I loved, and I got away with it.”
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to say.”
“What’s to say?” He shrugged a shrug of self-contempt. “My buddies, they told me, ‘Don’t think we’re doing this for you. We’re doing it for Chris. He’s got no mother now. Now all he’s got is you, that poor fucking kid.’
“I resigned from the force. A week after the funeral I went into rehab. One of my sisters stayed with Chris. Twenty-eight days later, when I got out, I started trying to become a father and a human being and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“I’m not saying I love you; I don’t, and maybe that’ll never happen, but meeting you…it’s the first time since Deborah that I want more than sex from a woman. You get on my nerves but I like that. I like feeling annoyed. I want you, Rannie, I want to be with you but I don’t want you thinking I’m somebody I’m not.”
“Your son? Does he know?”
“Yeah, Chris’s known for a couple of years now. One night, we’re having dinner and out of nowhere he comes right out and asks. He always half-suspected but didn’t want to know for sure. I don’t blame him. I’m his father. I’m all he’s got and yet it’s my fault I’m all he’s got.”
Rannie nodded. In answer to her question about how Chris reacted, Tim frowned. “For a few months it was rough; Chris talked about moving out, living with Deborah’s parents, like he owed it to them. He’s never going to forgive me, not completely, and why should he? The truth is I don’t want him to.”
That Rannie understood. Sometimes forgiveness wasn’t an option.
“Is a bar the smartest business to be in?”
He laughed sardonically. “It’s like a penance, I guess. It’s the Catholic in me—my version of a hair shirt. Keeps what I am smack in my face. I need that temptation right in front of me.”
Rannie could almost hear her mother. “You don’t have enough problems of your own, Rannie? This man has enough baggage to get to the moon and back!”
“I haven’t been serious about any man, not since Peter and I broke up…. And there are lots of times I wonder if even my marriage counts as a serious relationship. I liked it that Peter never seemed all that committed. I knew down deep I wasn’t either.”
“So with me? Is it just about the sex?” Tim had taken off his glasses now. He was as naked as if he had on no clothes.
His eyes had a depth that scared her. What did they have in common? Nothing. And yet she could not look away from him. “No, it isn’t. It’s more.”
Again the grin that reminded her of a small boy, one who’d just received something he wanted but hadn’t expected. “So are you in?”
“Yeah, I’m in.”
“Good.” He stuck out his hand, half-jokingly. Nevertheless, she extended hers and they shook on it.
“I’ll be back—” He looked down at his watch. “Twenty minutes max.”
Rannie watched him for a moment as he loped off, his finely shaped legs pumping up and down with the regularity of pistons. Then she opened the grocery bag which had contained the Snapples. In it were two sandwiches on Wonder bread, cut in neat triangles inside separate baggies. Rannie opened one. The ratio of peanut butter to raspberry jam was just as she liked, a little heavy on the jam. She smiled and took a bite.