Svetlana and her father were already seated in the dining hall when Emily entered with her tray. Svetlana waved her over before her father could object.
In deference to the injunction not to let her father know about Emily’s unofficial role in the investigation, Svetlana asked Emily how her work was going.
‘It was going reasonably well before … well, before yesterday.’ She smiled brightly at Saul. ‘I’m working on a book about Dostoevsky. Are you familiar with him at all?’
Saul shook his head, mouth full of sandwich.
‘How about other Russian writers? Tolstoy? Pushkin?’
He finished chewing (mostly) and said, ‘Nope. No time for that nonsense. Takes all my reading time just to keep up with the law journals.’
‘I just thought since your wife is Russian you might have an interest. Didn’t you meet in Russia?’
He shook his head again. ‘Never been there. Met when she was on tour over here. We fell in love and she never looked back.’
Svetlana’s expression suggested that this might be a slightly romanticized version of the actual events.
If Saul had neither visited St Petersburg nor read Pushkin, the chances of his recognizing the Bronze Horseman statuette for what it represented were slim. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t still have noticed it, taken it, and used it to implicate Daniel.
‘I’ve never been to Russia either,’ Emily said, ‘but through the literature I do feel as if I know it to a large extent. All the landmarks in Moscow and St Petersburg seem familiar, like St Basil’s Cathedral, the Hermitage, the equestrian statue of Peter the Great on Senate Square.’ She watched Saul narrowly, but no flicker of recognition passed over his features. She decided to risk being a little more open. ‘Svetlana, doesn’t Daniel have a miniature copy of that statue? I think I’ve seen it on his desk.’
Svetlana’s eyes widened momentarily in alarm, but her voice was controlled when she answered. ‘He did, but it’s gone missing. I have no idea what happened to it.’
Still Saul ate doggedly on with no reaction. As a lawyer he would naturally have cultivated a poker face, but it must be an awfully good one if he did actually know anything about the statuette. He gave every appearance of being clueless as to the significance of what they were discussing.
She took another tack – a back-door approach to his alibi for Monday night. ‘I understand the police want everyone connected with Curzon to remain in town until they close the case. I hope you have a comfortable place to stay.’
‘Benson. Good hotel. Damned inconvenient having to stick around, though. Work to do at home.’
‘You could make it a vacation. Sample the Portland nightlife, for example.’
He gave a derisive snort. ‘Not a nightlife person. Work best in the morning. Early to bed, early to rise, that’s my motto.’
She couldn’t approach that subject any more directly without tipping her hand. Apparently what happened at the Benson was going to stay at the Benson, at least as far as Saul Goldstein was concerned.
Emily was racking her brain for some neutral topic to bring up when Sidney approached the table. She felt enough at a loss to be almost glad of his presence. At least she could count on him to take over the conversation.
‘Greetings and salutations, all,’ he said in his nasal voice as he sat down, uninvited as always. ‘Svetlana, would you do me the honor of introducing me to this gentleman?’
Her face pinched, Svetlana complied. ‘Papa, this is Sidney Sharpe, a classmate. Sidney, my father, Saul Goldstein.’
Sidney extended his hand with a sycophantic smile, but Saul ignored it, both hands on his sandwich. Sidney blinked and dropped the hand but not the smile. ‘Pleasure to meet you, sir. Have you come to support your daughter through this difficult ordeal?’
Saul bridled. ‘Ordeal? What ordeal? Sveta has nothing to do with the murder.’
‘No, of course not. Far be it from me to suggest such a thing. But I hear our Daniel is being held for questioning. And I’m sure that’s a terrible worry to you, dear Svetlana.’ Sidney put on an exaggeratedly sympathetic face.
‘Sveta has nothing to do with that miscreant Daniel, either. At least she won’t have from now on.’ Saul glared at his daughter, who averted her eyes, her cheeks flushing.
Saul shot a sidelong glance at Sidney, taking in his sportscoat, tie, and slicked-back hair, all so weirdly formal for a Bedie, with something that looked like tentative approval. ‘I’m a lawyer. Came to bring suit against that slut Curzon, and now that she’s out of the way, the damn cops won’t let me leave. What’s your line?’
‘What a coincidence! I’m a combined Russian–computer science major, but I plan to go on to law school. Hopefully Harvard, if I can make the grade. My uncle Moishe went there, and he says it’s the best.’
The thawing of Saul’s attitude was tangible. ‘Good man. Couldn’t do better. Best lawyers in the country come out of Harvard.’ He gave Sidney a closer once-over. ‘I know people there. Let me know when you’re ready to apply and I’ll see what I can do.’
Svetlana’s look of panic escaped her father’s attention but not Emily’s. This was the first she’d heard of Sidney being either a prospective lawyer or Jewish, as dropping his uncle’s Hebrew name was clearly meant to imply. Could he be putting on a front just to gain Goldstein’s approval? A Jewish lawyer was exactly what Goldstein wanted for his daughter. Could Sidney possibly be putting himself forward as a potential suitor for Svetlana’s hand?
Surely not. Sidney was Daniel’s friend, or at least his follower. He wouldn’t take the first hint of an opportunity to cut Daniel out with his beloved. Daniel hadn’t even been arrested yet, let alone convicted. Chances were good he’d be free and cleared within days, and his future with Svetlana would go forward in spite of any obstacle her father could throw in their way.
Provided, that is, that Emily could accomplish her task of finding some evidence that would clear Daniel and/or implicate someone else. So far, that wasn’t going terribly well.
Having no idea how to proceed with her investigation at this point, Emily took Svetlana back to the library with her after lunch and got her started on the task of inputting notes while she attempted some further research. But Svetlana’s fingers were slowed by exhaustion, and Emily’s concentration had gone the way of Daniel’s missing memory of Monday night. She was relieved when she got a call from Colin. Asking him to hold a minute, she sent Svetlana to her dorm to rest and stepped outside to take the call.
‘I hope you have lab results for me.’
‘I do, but you’re not going to like them. Based on blood type – DNA will take longer – the blood on Daniel’s jacket looks like a mixture of his and the victim’s.’
Emily’s heart sank. ‘Was it only the jacket that had blood?’
‘No, the shirt did too. Shirt was all his own.’
She pondered. ‘Does that make sense to you? If he had killed her, wouldn’t her blood be on both?’
‘Not if he had his jacket zipped up when he did it.’
‘Then how would he have gotten his own blood on his shirt?’
‘His head wound must have happened at a different time. When he wasn’t wearing the jacket.’
‘But if that were the case, why would his blood be on the jacket? It was on the outside, right, not just on the lining where it would have transferred from the shirt?’
‘Yeah. So he put the jacket on right after, while he was still bleeding. I don’t know. Why does it matter? The point is her blood was on him. That means he came in contact with the body.’
‘I suppose. But that still doesn’t necessarily mean he killed her. He could have come in right after the murderer left and bent over her to see if she was dead, or even tried to revive her.’
‘Could have, might have, maybe. What it comes down to, Emily, is that you’re grasping at any straw to clear this guy when the fact is that every single piece of evidence we have points straight to him. There may be a reasonable doubt, but that will be for a jury to decide. We’re arresting him.’
So she had failed. Svetlana would be crushed, and Daniel would most likely spend his life in prison. Probably a short life, as he was not the sort of person who could survive in there for long. She shuddered to think what could happen to a good-looking, sensitive, emotionally and physically fragile young man surrounded by hardened criminals.
But what if he was guilty, after all? She didn’t want to believe it, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t possibly be true. What if he had wandered into Curzon’s office in the midst of his blackout, maybe hoping to persuade her once and for all to leave him alone? What if she had assaulted him again, or had taunted him with his stolen statue and he had simply snapped, grabbed the statue, and struck out, without necessarily intending to kill? It wouldn’t have taken much to break him even in the state he’d been in on Monday afternoon, let alone in the aftermath of a seizure. Maybe Emily should give up kicking against the goads and bow to what appeared to be the facts.
But she couldn’t do that without at least talking to Daniel. ‘May I visit him, then?’
‘Tomorrow. Come in tomorrow morning at nine, do the ID thing on your mafia guy, then you can visit him. I’ll set it up tonight.’
Tomorrow. Emily sent up an earnest prayer that Daniel’s memory would come back to him overnight – if blackout memories could ever come back at all.