As soon as it was almost morning, I called Lisa to confirm that she had called me in the middle of the night. She had. Her best information was that there was good evidence for the arrest, but she still did not know what. She was working every source she had. She extracted a deal from me: we share anything we find. It didn’t hit me until later that I might be one of her sources.
I called Ramos. I called him a few times, but there was no way to reach him except to leave a message. I conceded to myself, bitterly, he must be busy dealing with his arrest of the wrong person. And I still needed to tell him about that recent phone call. Mary Pat’s number, still making mysterious calls, just as she had.
I turned on a news channel but when they finally got around to the story, no one knew more than I did. In fact, they seemed to know slightly less.
It was an ordinary morning. Chris was at school. I would be at my part-time museum job and life would be normal if I could forget this disturbing news. Of course I could not but I tried, in between a few more calls to the lieutenant and checking the news online.
And otherwise, so it was, an ordinary day. No lurkers on my block. No emergency calls from Chris, only a text in mid-morning.
Prob? Oh, probably. Well, good.
I banished my personal life from my mind and hunkered down. I sat in the library doing photo research for an upcoming exhibit and daydreamed about abandoning my dissertation forever. A dumb idea in reality but a pleasant occasional escape. I even took a walk at lunchtime. The museum neighborhood is on a hill, looking out over New York Harbor. The chilly breeze off the water cleared out some cobwebs.
It couldn’t last. Ramos got back to me a minute before I left work and said he was too busy to talk now but would I stop by his office on my way home?
He looked like a man who had not been home in the last two days. He confirmed that was true. I plunged right in anyway.
“You arrested Jennifer? That’s crazy.”
“No, it’s not. You’re doing police work? You don’t know everything we do.”
“Yeah? It is not possible that she’s the one I saw that night. So tell me.”
“No, I’m not telling you. This is just a…call it a courtesy. It goes both ways.” He put up a hand to stop my protests. “I know you believe you told me everything, but you never know. I want to go over it one more time and if you do have anything, then we make it official, okay? I’m trying to be nice here.”
“Believe me.” I put my backpack down. “I’ve gone over it again and again, and there’s nothing. But I can tell you this for sure. She is absolutely not the man—or woman—I saw pull that trigger. She’s taller, bigger. That I can swear to.”
“Let’s do it one more time anyway.”
We went over it step by step, what I’d seen, what I might have seen, what was on the periphery. He hadn’t asked that before.
“Wait. Do you think she was there also? Hiding somewhere? Can that possibly be what you’re asking me?”
“I don’t think anything. The possibility that someone else was there is a question to be asked. We know you said no before, but it’s worth taking another look.”
“No. No, definitely not. If there was anyone else there, I didn’t know about it. No matter what you’d like me to say.”
He looked carefully neutral, no skin in the game. “I don’t want you to say anything but what you are sure you remember. We don’t want any random answer, only the right one. Got that?”
I already knew that. Probably, I knew that.
“But Jennifer? That’s ridiculous.”
“How well do you really know her?”
That stopped me. The answer was, not very. And I wasn’t sure I even liked her. Was I taken in by the everyday hominess of meeting in Mrs. Pastore’s warm kitchen? And Jennifer’s classy aura? Her style? In what alternate reality could the Jennifer I had met even know someone who would shoot a man in cold blood? As impossible to imagine as her pulling the trigger herself.
Ramos looked even more harassed. “Believe me. She was there, nearby, that night. Witnesses put her at a…well, near. Very near where you were.”
“What? Sitting in a car? Lurking out on the street? Disguised as a hooker? Come on!”
I saw in his face a second of wanting to say no to what I had suggested. I tried to picture what was there.
“At a bar?”
A glimmer of a yes in his face and a quick, “There’s more. Things she said. Things she did. It might not be airtight yet, but we’ve got her.”
“Not even close!”
“Come on, Erica. Who had the best reason to want him dead? You know the gossip about him?”
“Like maybe there was another girlfriend?”
He looked at me, not committing to anything.
“So you think she decided she’s better off as widow than divorced?”
“And after Jennifer, who hated him most?” He gave me a hard look. “You know it was his first wife.”
“Annabelle? No way! Impossible.” That cheerful and kind old woman? Mrs. Pastore’s friend? No. Definitely no.
“And she also had reasons to hate Mary Pat Codman.” He saw my indignant expression. “You were forgetting about that, weren’t you? It’s too much of a stretch to think these murders were unrelated. Only thing is, we can’t find anything that links it to her. Believe me, we looked.”
“Other people hated him. Why not one of them? Harbor history has plenty of crooks. The mob. Labor rackets.”
“That doesn’t fly. These days it’s mostly businessmen and politicians involved there. Even if they are dishonest—yes, maybe—they don’t go in for violent crime. You know that. It’s a crazy move for a respectable guy.”
He saw my skeptical look. “Even a wannabe respectable guy. Besides? Conti had no real power anymore, so why now?” His expression got more set with every word. “We think we’ve got it figured out. What I don’t get is why you care about Jennifer. For me, getting at the truth is my job. For you? Advisor still scaring you?”
“It’s my job, too. I have to find out what happened, to make my chapter true.” He nodded. Maybe he understood that. “Besides. I don’t know. Maybe the bad dreams will stop when it’s all solved.”
He almost smiled. “I hear you on that. And now I have to get back on the case, anyway.” He pointed to his phone. “I got urgent messages while we were talking.”
“I have one more thing. It’s about phones. I know this is crazy.” I played my most recent, and I hoped final, mystery call from Mary Pat’s number. When I was done, he had a page of notes, had recorded the message and was shaking his head.
“We can do something with this, you know. Should of called right away.’
“I know. I know. I didn’t want to deal with it. Talking about makes it too real.”
He nodded.
“Was it a real threat?”
“Who the hell knows? I’ll keep in touch when we learn something. If we learn something. In the meantime, be careful? Doors locked, no late night subway rides, alert on the street. You know.”
I had to smile. “What I always do, right?”
He nodded again.
“You look blitzed.”
“Sure am.”
“I still think you’re wrong about Jennifer.” I was collecting my jacket and pack.
“Unless something else happens, I am going to be off tomorrow night. Would you want to talk over dinner, somewhere more comfortable than this office?”
I said yes without thinking. It was a chance to ask more questions, nothing more. I thought. And I left, admitting to myself that Jennifer at a crummy bar near the Yard was pretty strange. Now I owed Lisa a call.
I should have known her first response would be, “Did he say what bar?” and her second would be “I’m going to cruise the bars tonight. Got to. Be my wing man?”
“What in the world are you talking about?’
She laughed. “Seriously, it would be great if you come along. You were there that night! You’d be great backup. And think what you would learn.” As I hesitated, she threw in, “Come on. It will be fun.”
Trudging around to dive bars after a long day? Not my idea of fun. Then again, I’d never done a bar crawl. Life had interfered with what would have been that stage of life. And Chris had plans for this evening.
I asked Lisa where to meet.