Five Months Later
“HAVE YOU SEEN THIS?”
The Manhattan assistant district attorney’s name was Mallory Kennedy. She wore a chic cream-colored business suit, her hair in a short, natural cut. She unfolded that morning’s New York Post on the tabletop.
MILLIONAIRE MURDERED HIS MISTRESS AFTER BABY MAMA DRAMA. A large color photo of Tanya and Evan, dressed to the nines for a charity fundraiser, accompanied the story.
“I’ve seen it,” Letty said, quickly folding the tabloid and handing it back. She nodded toward Maya, who was busily applying stickers to a new workbook Ava had mailed. “It was plastered across the front of the newsstand across the street from our building. I was terrified she’d see it.”
The diner’s door opened and Vikki Hill walked in. She dropped into the red vinyl booth beside Maya. “Hiya, Maya Papaya!”
Letty stared. The FBI agent was hardly recognizable. Her hair was swept into a tight French knot, she wore makeup, black heels and a close-fitting navy pantsuit.
“You came!” Letty exclaimed.
“Miss Vikki!” Maya said, grinning. “Do you live here too, now?”
“For now,” Vikki said, dropping a kiss on the child’s head. “When did you get so big? What are you, eleven or twelve now?”
“I’m five!” Maya said proudly.
“Almost,” Letty corrected. “It’s next week, actually, but we’ve been celebrating her birthday for the past two weeks.”
Letty touched the agent’s hand. “I still can’t believe you’re here. And you’re really going to go to court with us today?”
Vikki motioned to the waitress and held up her empty coffee mug. “Of course I came. I wouldn’t miss seeing you-know-who get his comeuppance.”
She looked over at Mallory Kennedy. “No nasty, last-minute surprises, right?”
“Not so far,” the assistant district attorney said. “But I won’t feel good about this sentencing until the judge signs off on everything.”
The waitress brought the coffeepot and filled Vikki’s mug, but Letty refused a refill. “I’m antsy enough. Any more caffeine and my head will explode.”
Vikki sipped her brew. “I still can’t believe you-know-who’s lawyer insisted on making Maya testify in court about what she saw that day.”
“It was horrifying,” Mallory said. “But as bad as it was for her, I think hearing her tell it, in person, had much more impact than a video would have. You should have seen the look on the jury members’ faces,” she told Vikki. “The foreman, this sweet, grandfatherly-looking guy, looked like he wanted to personally string up you-know-who.”
A second waitress bustled up to the table. Her left arm was covered in tattoos, and her short, vividly dyed red bangs made her resemble a pixie.
“Zoey!” Maya clamored, standing up in the booth.
“Sorry I’m a little late,” the waitress said. “Art was under the impression I wanted to work a second shift today and I had to straighten him out.” She untied her apron and stuffed it in her tote bag. “All ready to go, Princess Maya?”
“Yay!” the child said. She looked over at the FBI agent. “Would you like to go to the movies with us, Miss Vikki?”
“Maybe another time,” Vikki Hill said.
“Thanks again, Zoey,” Letty said. “I’ll call you when I’m done.”
“No hurry,” the waitress said. “I think we’ll go get our toenails painted after the movie.”
The three women watched as Maya, dressed in her sparkling blue princess dress, walked out of the Lazy Daizy, hand in hand with Zoey, before they got back to the business at hand.
“Wingfield’s lawyer saw the jury foreman’s face too, which is why he went to my boss during the recess and asked for a plea deal,” Mallory Kennedy said.
“Manslaughter, as opposed to first-degree murder,” she added. “I told Letty it was up to her, but I did recommend we make the deal, just to get it over with.”
Letty shredded a damp paper napkin in her lap. “I just had one condition. Evan has to admit that he killed Tanya. He has to sign a paper, or stand up in court and say it, or whatever, but I want him to say the words.”
“And he will,” Mallory promised. “His lawyer understands that anything else is a deal-breaker.”
Vikki nodded. “Up to twenty-five years in prison, right? How old is Wingfield now?”
“He’s forty,” Letty said. “My nightmare is that he could get out much sooner, though.”
“Not happening,” Vikki said succinctly. “We just executed a search warrant for all of Wingfield’s financial records. And it’s a treasure trove. He’s going down on the RICO prosecution. Bribery, conspiracy, bank fraud, tax evasion. And now that he’s pleaded guilty to the manslaughter charge, that means it was a predicate act in furtherance of the racketeering stuff. My boss is a very, very happy lady. Wingfield is nailed, big-time. And in addition to the criminal and civil penalties, the government will seize his real estate holdings.”
“What about prison time?” Letty asked.
“Well, the RICO prosecution could take another year or so,” the agent admitted. “But he can get up to life imprisonment, on top of the state charges. He’ll be an old, old man by the time he sees daylight again.”
“We’d better get moving if we’re going to get over to the courthouse in midmorning traffic,” Mallory said. She dropped some bills on the table and the three women went out into the glaring September sunlight.
The courtroom was a study in seasonal neutrals. The presiding judge sat on the bench in her somber black robe. Mallory wore creamy linen, and her counterpart, Evan Wingfield’s lawyer, was dressed in a conservative charcoal pin striped suit.
But it was Evan himself who commanded Letty’s attention. He was dressed in an orange prison jumpsuit and black rubber shower shoes. As he entered the courtroom, Letty took malicious satisfaction, noticing the halting gait that she felt sure was a result of Vikki Hill’s bullet. His hair was cut close to the scalp, and he looked stooped and gaunt. Without Evan’s favored trappings of wealth—the designer jeans, tailor-made dress shirts, and expensive Belgian loafers—he was a surprisingly ordinary-looking man, like an unnamed extra in a made-for-television movie.
Letty wiped her perspiring palms on her skirt. It was one of the few remaining items of clothing Tanya had gifted her over the years; a blue-and-white Indian block-print cotton skirt whose hem brushed her ankles. She wore it with a gauzy low-necked white peasant blouse and navy espadrilles, and a necklace of blue and green plastic pop beads fashioned for her by Maya.
The court clerk was reading a document now, and the judge was speaking, but his words seemed to be swallowed whole in the high-ceilinged courtroom. Mallory stood and she shot Letty a reassuring nod. She read her statement in her high, clear voice. Letty heard the words, but her ears buzzed with a sort of electric energy.
Then it was Vikki Hill’s turn. She was crisp and devastatingly professional, but Letty wasn’t really paying attention to the gist of her statement.
Finally, the judge gestured at Evan. He directed him to stand, facing the spectator benches. Letty’s eyes bored into him, but Evan’s return gaze was blank, seemingly focused on a wall-mounted clock on the far wall.
Good, Letty thought. She hoped Evan Wingfield would watch clocks for the rest of his life. Let him mark all the seconds and minutes and hours as they ticked off in endless drudgery. She decided she didn’t need to hear him speak after all, so she stood up, turned her back on him, and walked briskly out of the courtroom.
The heat and sunshine on the sidewalk outside were a relief after the arctic chill of the courthouse. Letty walked a few blocks, then hailed a cab. She called Zoey and told her about her plan for the afternoon. Then she called Sammi, who agreed to meet her at Tanya’s town house.
“You sure you want to do this today?” Sammi asked, as she punched the security code into the new lockbox the real estate agent had recently installed.
“Yes,” Letty said.
Her heart was thumping wildly as she stepped into the dimly lit foyer. Sammi flipped a switch and the immense crystal chandelier blinked on, its prisms catching the afternoon light.
The black-and-white-checkerboard marble floor was waxed to a high gleam. Letty let out the breath she’d been holding. There were no ghosts here. Only the faint scent of lemon polish.
“The real estate agent thinks it will show better furnished, if that’s all right with you,” Sammi said. “And of course, if you like, you can just sell it furnished and not have to bother with all this stuff.”
“Let’s sell it furnished,” Letty said. Tanya had loved the opulence of her home, had reveled in how far she’d come since that long-ago double-wide in West Virginia, but none of the gilt-edged furnishings held any sentiment or attraction for Letty.
She and the lawyer walked from room to room, snapping on the lights, looking around, and then moving on.
They climbed the stairs and went into Maya’s bedroom. The fairy-tale furnishings that Tanya had obsessed over seemed garish and overdone now. “You don’t think Maya wants any of these toys or books?” Sammi asked, gesturing at the shelves overloaded with picture books and playthings. She pointed at the large walk-in closet. “What about all those beautiful clothes?”
“She’s got Ellie, the only toy she really cares about,” Letty said. “And she’s outgrown all her clothes. Let’s donate it all to a children’s charity.”
Sammi hesitated in the hallway outside Tanya’s bedroom. “Do you want to go in there?” She gestured at the closed door. “I know this must be hard for you.”
Letty’s hand grasped the crystal doorknob. “I need to make sure there’s nothing of Tanya’s that she’d want Maya to have. Let’s just rip off the Band-Aid, shall we?”
Inside the bedroom, she trailed her fingers over the mirrored dressing table arrayed with Tanya’s cut-glass bottles of perfume and the row of sterling-mounted brushes and combs neatly arranged on the tabletop. Letty opened a deep drawer and stared down at all the bottles of foundation, the eye shadow palettes and eyeliner pencils and tubes of mascara. She closed the drawer and opened another, finding the small silver-mounted baby brush Tanya had used to brush Maya’s curls before bed every night. She put the brush in her purse and closed the drawer.
Sammi stood near the enormous walk-in closet, gazing in. “It’s like being back in Bergdorf Goodman’s,” she whispered, as though she were in a church instead of a dead woman’s bedroom.
Letty smiled. “I’m not going to keep any of these things, but if there’s anything you’d like, Sammi, please, help yourself. That’s what Tanya would want.”
“She was always so generous,” Sammi said, stepping into the closet. “So spontaneous. If I commented on a pair of earrings she was wearing, or a pair of yoga pants, the next thing I knew, she’d insist on giving them to me.”
“That was Tanya,” Letty agreed. She went over to the freestanding jewelry cabinet in the middle of the closet and rifled through the velvet-lined drawers. She didn’t know or care which pieces were costume or which were the real thing.
In the middle drawer of the case she spied a brooch she recognized, probably the cheapest piece in the jewelry box: a circlet of fake pearls. The faux-gold mounting was greenish with age. The brooch had been a Christmas gift to Mimi from their bopbop, and she’d worn it on Sundays, pinned to the collar of her church dress. Letty hadn’t seen it in decades, and she’d certainly never seen Tanya wear it.
She fastened the pin to her blouse and turned to the racks of clothes and shoes.
Sammi was holding a pair of wickedly sexy sling-back black pumps with red soles. “These look like your size,” she said. “And they’re Louboutins!”
“Take them if you want them,” Letty said. “I couldn’t walk a step in those things.”
“Really?” Sammi squealed. “They don’t look like they’ve ever been worn. We could take all these designer shoes to a consignment shop. And the handbags too. Gucci, Prada, Chanel. They’re worth a lot of money, Letty.”
“You keep those and whatever ones you like,” Letty said firmly. “I’ve been thinking. Since you know more about this stuff than me, take all the designer stuff, the jewelry, clothes, shoes, whatever to a consignment place. You keep part of the money, because you did the work, and all the rest of the money, and whatever is left of the clothes, I want to donate to charity.”
Sammi nodded. “That’s a great idea. I bet Tanya would like that.”
“See if you can find a battered women’s shelter, okay?” Letty asked. “Tanya would absolutely hate that anybody thought of her as battered. Or a victim. But that doesn’t change the fact that she was.”
She turned to the racks of handbags. There were dozens of them, lined up on shelves that reached nearly to the ceiling of the closet, many in soft flannel bags with the designer’s name stitched or stenciled on the outside. She squatted down on the floor, reading the labels, shunting the bags aside, then stood and repeated the process, shelf by shelf.
Finally, she fetched a velvet upholstered bench from beneath the closet window, stood on it, and searched the top shelf. When her hand closed on the worn, pebbly surface of a particular handbag, she knew she’d found what she was looking for.
Letty set the pocketbook on the top of the jewelry cabinet.
“Louis Vuitton,” Sammi said. She ran an appraising finger across the frayed stitching of the shoulder strap and peeked inside the bag. “And it’s the real thing. See? Here’s the date code. There’s a huge secondary market for these bags. It’s too bad about the condition, though. There are stains in the canvas lining.”
“This one’s not for sale,” Letty said firmly. “She was so damned proud of this silly purse. She bought it with the money she earned from her first television commercial. At the time, she didn’t have enough money in the bank to buy a full tank of gas. But she had to have a Louis Vuitton bag. She took it to all her auditions and casting calls. She said it was better than a good headshot. It meant she was a success.”
Letty reached inside the bag and was surprised to see that it wasn’t empty. She emptied the contents onto the top of the cabinet. A half-empty tube of Tanya’s favorite Chanel lipstick, crumpled tissues, a plastic TicTac box, some faded Duane Reade receipts, and a prescription pill bottle tumbled onto the surface, along with a pale lavender sealed envelope.
The typed pill bottle label was for Tanya Carnahan, the drug’s name was one Letty didn’t recognize, and a single tablet rattled around inside. She handed it to Sammi. “It’s an antianxiety med,” Sammi said. “Looks like some doctor prescribed it not long after Maya was born.”
Letty looked at the envelope, which was somewhat smudged and crumpled on the edges, but blank.
She slit the flap with her thumbnail and extracted a greeting card featuring a whimsical Victorian drawing of two little girls.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY!
I SMILE BECAUSE YOU’RE MY BIG SISTER
I LAUGH BECAUSE THERE’S NOTHING
YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT.
Letty recognized the handwriting inside.
Happy birthday, Letty Spaghetti—
xoxo Tanya Lasagna
“Oh wow,” Sammi said, reading over Letty’s shoulder. “How sad. I guess she just didn’t get around to sending you this card. I wonder if she bought it right before … you know.”
“No,” Letty said firmly. “Tanya hadn’t carried this bag in ages. The pill bottle, and the Duane Reade receipts, they’re all from before and right after the time she had Maya.” She turned to the lawyer. “Did Tanya ever tell you that we were estranged back then? We had a fight. Over Evan. After she told me she was moving in with him and she was pregnant with Maya. I was so furious. I didn’t speak to her for more than three years—until I finally caved in and went to Maya’s third-birthday party.”
“I knew there’d been some kind of rift,” Sammi admitted. “But I didn’t press her for details.” She tapped the card. “Look, there’s writing on the back.”
Letty turned the card over. Tanya’s writing on the back was unlike the big, looped writing inside the card. This message was in tiny, cramped cursive.
Sissy—I’m so sorry for everything I did. Please don’t be mad at me anymore. You and my baby are the only good things in my life. I miss you, Letty Spaghetti.
Letty tucked the card back into the envelope. A single tear spattered on the lavender paper. She put it inside the Louis Vuitton tote and brushed away another tear.
“All right,” she said, her voice shaky with emotion. “Let’s get out of here.”
Sammi gave her a sympathetic hug. “Want to go get a drink? I know I could use one.”
“You go,” Letty said, slinging the Louis Vuitton tote over her shoulder. “Order a cosmo and drink it in Tanya’s honor, will you? That’s what she used to order when she first moved up here, you know. She never missed a rerun of Sex and the City. She thought drinking a cosmopolitan actually made her as sexy and sophisticated as Carrie and Samantha and Charlotte.”
“What about you?” Sammi asked, as they locked up the town house. “What are your plans?”
They were standing on the brownstone stoop, looking down East Sixty-Third Street.
Letty pulled her phone from the pocket of her skirt. “I need to call a guy.”
Sammi gave her a knowing smile. “I see. Keep in touch, okay? We’ll need to finalize some paperwork, but that can easily be done online.” She leaned over and pecked Letty’s cheek. “I still miss her, you know? But seeing you helps. You’re much more like her than you know. And that’s a compliment.”
“Thank you, Sammi.”
Letty sat on the top stoop of the brownstone. The marble step felt cool beneath the fabric of her skirt. She scrolled through the contacts on her phone until she found the one she wanted.
The icon was a photo she’d snapped of Joe at sunset, standing knee-deep in the surf, silhouetted against the glowing orange sky with his fishing rod cocked, mid-cast, over his bare shoulder.
She hadn’t talked to Joe since the night she’d arrived back in New York—just a brief call to tell him that she and Maya were okay. She’d sent a few emails and a couple of texts, but had been steely in her resolve not to call him.
Letty’s finger hovered over the tiny icon on the phone screen. Maybe he wouldn’t answer. She realized, with a start, that it was the Friday of Labor Day weekend. Maybe he was working. Or out on the boat. Maybe he’d ignore her call.
Enough uncertainty, she decided. Enough hesitation, enough maybes. Nothing in life was promised to us, Mimi had always preached. She tapped the icon and held her breath.