Since junior high, there has only been one place I go for serious advice. My dad, much as I love him, comes out with shit that makes even me wonder if he is a member of another species, and my mom has never gotten beyond ‘What did you do now?’ I’m not sure I believe in the afterlife or mediums, but somewhere in my inner fibers I’m sure Pops will still be showing up long after he’s gone, when I really need him.
So on Saturday morning, I go—as I have been going for an hour every Saturday since we all got our second shots—to Aventura Center for Advanced Living. If the owners had their way, you’d move into Aventura when you turned fifty-five and never walk out again. It is meant to be just like the Ritz—the real Ritz—but with walkers. The attendants all wear sport coats and they treat even me in my combat-style boots and nail like they think I’m actually Rihanna in a thin disguise.
Pops is in what they call the middle phase, which means Assisted Living. He has a nice little suite with all the plugs and outlets so that they can give him oxygen, for example, or run an IV drip, neither of which he currently needs, thank God. He has a cheerful attendant named Florence, who makes sure he takes all his meds twice a day. Pops moved in here at the start of 2020. In January, about two weeks after they closed the law firm, he took a terrible spill at home. He fainted, I guess—a problem with his heart meds, it turned out—and hit his head on one of the kitchen counters and ended up with a serious concussion. I came back from grocery shopping and freaked. He was lying on the tile, bloody to the shoulders from the head wound and frighteningly out of it. It was his second serious medical incident within a couple months, and he decided on his own that he needed nurses nearby 24/7.
I wait for him in the so-called Day Room, where there are big windows and fancy drapes and furniture in muted tones. I am in one of the few easy chairs provided for those of us who can still get out of them. Not long after Reception has called up to announce me, I see Pops stumble in on his cane, tossing up a hand in greeting. He looks older every time I come, sagging a little more and getting noticeably yellow. His cancer remains at bay, and his heart condition is under control, but now his liver and kidneys are in decline. Plus he has a harder time than ever getting around.
But he is so goddamned happy! He has had a great time here. He started his own YouTube channel, where once a week he sits down to give his summary of the latest legal news. He has somehow figured out how to integrate all kinds of visuals into his videos, like charts and photographs. Trump, who produced a legal confrontation every week, boosted his viewership, he claims, and he now has about 2,000 followers, which is mind-blowing. I couldn’t get that many people to follow me if I was dropping money on the street.
Most of his mood, we all know, is due to Sondra, his cute little girlfriend, who is right beside him with a hand on his elbow. Sondra moved in here with her former husband after his second stroke. He was almost twenty years older than Sondra—there’s a story there that Pops either doesn’t know or won’t tell—but lasted five more years. By the time he passed, Sondra was happy to stay, since these days you need a golden ticket to get in. She’s seventy-eight anyway, but in great shape. She’s still pretty sporty and leaves at least once a week in the summer to play golf at her country club, with Pops as her chauffeur in the cart.
I was over here every day when Pops first moved in, and by the second week I noticed her lingering around him.
‘I think she likes you,’ I said.
‘I think so, too,’ he said. ‘And I like her as well. But I am uncertain how to approach this.’
‘Are you talking about getting married?’
‘Lord no,’ he said. ‘But this is a small community, Pinky. I enjoy it here. If things do not go well with Sondra, it might become very uncomfortable for both of us. And I am hardly certain that I need this kind of thing as I creep up to ninety.’
I’m not the person people usually come to for relationship advice. But if there is any human being I truly get, it’s my grandfather.
‘Look, Pops,’ I said. ‘I always thought you had an awesome thing with Helen.’
‘As did I.’
‘So that means you’re good at relationships. You can manage the give and take, you get a lot out of it. And you absolutely want to do it, because from what I can tell, it takes a fuck-ton of determination that I, frankly, have never had.’
He laughed. Pops always finds me amusing and endearing. ‘All true.’
‘Then go for it. It’s your nature to pair up.’
I know he would have reached the same conclusion on his own, but given how happy he has been, I’m proud that I gave him that little nudge.
Now the three of us sit down around a table and have a brief chat. Sondra has fourteen grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, so there are always photos to look at and funny stories. Eventually I kind of cough and say I have some confidential legal business I need Pops’s advice on.
“Of course, of course,” she sings, and hugs me and then flies off, right after kissing Pops on the top of his bald head and reminding him that they have a bridge game at eleven. He turns to watch her go, like he can barely stand to have her out of sight.
Everybody in the family, me included, is grateful for Sondra, but we all roll our eyes when Pops describes her as just like Helen. Helen, Rik’s mom, had this incredible thing: If you mattered to her, it felt like she could take an MRI of your heart and lovingly absorb you on your own terms. Sondra is cute as a button—her hairdresser maintains her curly blonde bob, and she’s still fit looking—plus she’s one of those smaller women who always get called perky, meaning bubbly and positive and warm. On the other hand, she’s about half as smart or interesting as Helen and, leaving aside her looks, doesn’t seem to have much else going for her. She grew up in the suburbs and never left, raising her family within a mile of her parents’ house. She is very sweet but doesn’t know much except the best places on the West Bank to eat and shop. Then again, being fair, she is really good at taking care of other people, which I guess is a superpower of its own.
Anyway, Pops is totally smitten. They were already talking about spending nights together when the pandemic closed in on this place and forced everybody into life behind locked doors. After the two families consented, they became a pod of two. Pops says it was just like another honeymoon. I will never get it when it comes to couples, which I suppose is the lesson of the week. I keep thinking that at some point, I will ask for the spicy details of what exactly happens in that bed they share, given that Pops is looking straight down the barrel of ninety, but I never quite have the nerve. It works for them, whatever it is.
“And what exactly is this legal problem?” Pops asks warily as soon as Sondra is out of sight. I can tell he’s afraid that I’m back to my old ways and have gotten busted or am about to. His face lifts noticeably when I start out by telling him I’m not in trouble.
“I just don’t know what to do,” I say. I have always shared pretty much everything with him, even though he has sometimes sat through the details of my personal life like I’m a doctor putting one of those Popsicle sticks right down his throat. He knows about the Chief’s case—I have been keeping him posted weekly—and he heard about Blanco’s death on the news. But what I haven’t told even him, until now, is that Koob and I got a little involved, since before that I’d been rattling on to him like everybody else about my weird neighbor, the spy.
“Even so, I still have no real idea why he was in Highland Isle,” I say. “He would never talk about work. And here’s the hard part, okay? The night that Blanco was killed, Koob was supposed to come by and he didn’t, and instead I heard him get back next door at about three. And then at some point the next day, probably while I was at work, he vanished, emptied the apartment and is just gone.”
“No communication?”
“No.” I can’t pretend that doesn’t irritate me. How much effort does it take to slide a note under my door? ‘Bye, it was a blast.’
“And as I recall, your assumption was that he was some kind of surveillance expert?”
“I mean, I don’t know what he is actually. He seems like such a sweet guy, contained and all that, but really genuine, so, you know, a hit man, it doesn’t compute. But a hired killer is probably insanely good at compartmentalizing. And he was Special Forces, so it’s not like he was trained to teach preschool. And then, I’ve thought at times, Who says he’s alive? Maybe somebody came and whacked him and cleaned out his apartment while I was gone.”
Pops buttons up his mouth to think all of this over.
“All right. And what’s the precise question, Pinky?”
“I mean, do I have some kind of duty or something to the Chief to tell anybody about all this?”
“Is the Chief a serious suspect in this death?”
“Well, not serious, but they haven’t ruled her out. It’s just a strange situation. Rik keeps telling her that the city attorney has no choice but to dismiss the P&F complaint against her, since Blanco’s dead and his testimony doesn’t count because he can’t be cross-examined. But for some reason, probably because it’s so political, Marc hasn’t done it yet. The mayor’s opponent, Steven DeLoria, keeps insinuating that maybe that’s why the Chief killed Blanco, to get the case dropped. We think Marc doesn’t want to add fuel to that fire. In the meantime, Moses—”
“How is Moses?” Pops asks. “He actually came out here for lunch a couple of months ago.”
“He’s a good guy, you know. He issued a statement saying that at this point there are no persons of interest regarding Blanco’s death, so that kind of kiboshed Steven’s bullshit.”
“Good.”
“Right, but Moses could say that because they still don’t know if it was actually a homicide. The autopsy didn’t show anything, so the best guess right now is natural causes, probably cardiac arrest—maybe during rough sex. But there’s no damage to the heart muscle and no blockages in the arteries. Apparently, on rare occasions, somebody can get so stressed that there’s a spasm in the main coronary artery. Or maybe he got like a freak electrical shock from some appliance that shorted out, which given everything else, they’re guessing might be a plug-in vibrator.
“But there are two injection sites on his upper arm they can’t really account for. They’re trying to find Blanco’s doctor, to see if he got any shots recently. It’s even possible that the marks are mosquito bites, because some people don’t react much to skeeters. The police pathologist took a tissue sample, which they’re sending to a bug specialist.”
“An entomologist?”
“Right. I found this squashed mosquito in the bathroom, and the blood inside it was recent. Type A positive. Which isn’t Blanco, by the way, meaning someone else was with him.
“All in all, though, the injection sites are probably needle marks, up high on the arm so they wouldn’t show when Blanco put on a short-sleeve shirt in this weather. But it’s at a funny angle to be jabbing yourself, so he was probably getting high with whoever he was messing with, and they were shooting up one another. But even though that makes sense, the preliminary tox screen showed nothing. It will be a few days before they get the final word on that. But the bottom line right now is a whole lot of who-the-fuck-knows.”
Pops nods through all of this and takes a second to ask a couple more questions to be sure he has the details straight.
“Pinky, it sounds like you were at the crime scene—you say you found this mosquito. Why was that? You’re very well informed, given the usual secrecy in a homicide investigation.”
“The lead detective is actually a woman I met in the academy, Tonya Eo.”
“I remember Tonya!” he says. Pops never seems to forget anything about me, and he confirms that vague memory I have that I brought Toy out to the West Bank with me when I visited him and Helen one weekend back then. I guess there may have been a second or two when I was more serious about her than I remember now. Anyway, Pops says he picked up at once on how smart she is. “I thought she would get over her shyness,” he says. “She struck me, frankly, as being in culture shock.”
“Completely. And you were right. She’s just totally crushing it as a cop. She’s so self-confident now it makes me jealous.”
“And you’re seeing her, too?” Like I say, he knows how my life works.
“No, we’re just buds now. It took a while to work it out.” I explain that Tonya wanted me at the crime scene to get word to the Chief. “She probably tells me more than she’s supposed to, like about the autopsy. But she really respects the Chief and kind of wants her to know what’s going on without informing her directly. And I came up with some good stuff when I was in the apartment, so I mean I’m sorta-kinda part of the investigation.”
He nods like ‘It’s Pinky, so there are never straight lines.’
I say, “The apartment was definitely wiped down, like all the surfaces in the living room. Whoever Blanco was with was scared of something. Here and there there’s ridge detail that isn’t Frito’s, but there’s nowhere near enough to identify somebody from the print database. Maybe they could confirm if there was a definite suspect, but you can’t work the other way.”
He understands. “And your concern is that perhaps your friend could fill in some important details?”
“Well, who knows? I mean, the only real connection between him and any of this is inside my head. I wouldn’t have any reason to think he even knows Fabian Blanco’s name if I hadn’t talked to him about Blanco’s testimony and that photograph. Maybe Koob bouncing suddenly is just a coincidence. Or maybe he was sick of me.
“But you know, on the other hand, I’m really down for the Chief, who’s gotten incredibly messed over, and I want to do anything to help her. But if I talk about this dude, Koob, everybody’s going to end up super pissed with me. You remember Rik made me promise that I was going to stay away from him—”
“Just so. I recall telling you that Rik had given you excellent advice.” He raises his eyes to give me a little poke.
“Yeah, okay,” I answer. “But like I say, nobody’s gonna be okay about Koob. Tonya, she’s trying to be cool, but she’s just got this thing about men, especially me and men.
“So like I’m seriously confused. And I know I could throw a lot of shade at this dude and the way he ghosted me, but you know, we said free and easy, hit and run was fine. If he turns out to have no connection with the case, then he’ll think I pulled him into this because I’m a vengeful bitch. And I hate that kiss-and-tell shit anyway. I mean, what people tell you in bed, that should be like what you say to your priest and lawyer, don’t you think?”
He smiles a bit. “That is not a privilege recognized in court.”
“But it should be. Right? I mean, it is if you’re married.”
“Well, let’s not debate the law, Pinky. The question is how we solve your problem.”
“Right,” I say. “Like every now and then I think I should just hunt him down and press him to the wall for answers.”
Pops shakes his head vigorously for the first time.
“That is the one thing you clearly should not do. Go confront someone who might be a hit man, Pinky? No. And whatever his activities in Highland Isle, it is obvious that he did not want to explain them or the reasons for his departure with you. Undoubtedly, he had to make a quick getaway. As Rik told you some time ago, even if all your friend was doing was illegal wiretapping, he cannot talk about that freely without risking legal jeopardy. And besides, dear Pinky, how would you find him?”
“Well, how many people named Koob do you think there are in Pittsburgh?”
“If that is truly his name.”
“That’s his name,” I say. I am emphatic enough that it surprises even me, and Pops draws back.
“But there are many places in the world to run to besides Pittsburgh, surely?” he says.
“He really missed his kids,” I answer. “He went to Pittsburgh.”
“Just so,” says Pops, which means he gets it. He raises his face to look straight at me then, a look I love because it means his big brain is working at high speed on my behalf. Finally, he says, “Pinky, I think we find ourselves in a familiar spot.”
“What spot is that?”
“Well, I suspect you have come here largely to talk to yourself. I can provide an answer to your legal question, which is, very much as you have said—you have no concrete information beyond your own suspicions. Because of that, I see no duty to share your concerns with anyone—Rik or the Chief or Tonya. You can keep your peace. For the time being. It might be wiser to speak up now, because in the event that this fellow ends up in the middle of the investigation, everyone will have some sharp questions for you. But my guess is that there will still be time to volunteer details if something more solid materializes. For example, if they had found something in that seedy apartment, which suggested the use against Blanco of sophisticated electronic surveillance, well, then it would have been time to come forward.”
“Understood.”
“And I can certainly tell you what the most foolhardy course of action is, which is to conduct a private manhunt for someone who clearly does not want to be found.”
“Okay.”
“Yet we both know that as usual, you are going to do what you want. I would say you have come here only to find out if you are actually free to do so.”
“Okay. And what is it that I’m going to do?” But he’s right. I know.
He reaches for my hand.
“Please text me every hour to give me your exact location in Pittsburgh. And tell me now that you will understand if I contact the FBI when I don’t hear from you.”