He tried phoning Lee, but the line was busy. He decided to walk across—better to talk to her in person anyway. It was not going to be an easy conversation.
He found her in the front parlor, wearing a housedress now but still in her slippers, sitting at the table with her address book on the blotter next to the phone. She had been working her way through it in an effort to find out if anyone had seen Irving on Saturday, which is why the line was perpetually engaged.
More than one of her friends had told her the news of Jackson’s exoneration, so it was clear that the word had spread widely.
When she saw Weinstock come through the back door she waved him in.
“I knew Jackson couldn’t have done it,” she declared with satisfaction. “I refused to believe it, and I was right.” She hadn’t been all that sure in the beginning, but any misgivings she’d had were now gone.
Gerry took the wing chair next to the table and reached out his hand to Lee in a gesture of reassurance. She grasped it firmly.
“I’m going to be all right now, Gerry. I’ve accepted Jackson’s death as inevitable. It wouldn’t have mattered whether I was here or not—in my heart I know that. I can’t forgive him for cheating on me, at least not yet, perhaps I will in time. He was a desperate man, and deeply disturbed. That psychiatrist wasn’t helping him at all. Anyway, it’s over now, and while I can’t defend his behavior at least I know he didn’t kill someone else, only himself.”
“Your attitude does you great credit, Lee. You did everything you could for Jackson. It’s not your fault that it wasn’t enough.”
She’s trying to put it behind her, he thought, but she’s much more fragile than she lets on. There’s more tragedy to come. And I’m the one who has to lay it at her doorstep.
“You do realize,” he began, “that with Jackson in the clear, someone else killed Edith Metzger.”
“Of course. Isn’t that the point? I expect the police will figure it out.”
“I had a talk with the police, and I understand they have a suspect.”
Lee gasped. “My God, Gerry, that’s wonderful! Did he tell you who it is?”
“They don’t have a name, just a description, and a witness. Actually there may be two witnesses.” He paused, then withdrew his hand from hers. “I think I’m one of them.”
Lee’s brow furrowed. “What the hell do you mean?” Then her expression changed as she put two and two together. Gerry’s story about the gas station. The promise to take care of Ruth. The cheek wound—she’d seen it in the city. Not Jackson after all. Her worst fear realized.
She stiffened, and closed her eyes tight.
“Oh, no, Gerry. I couldn’t stand it. Please tell me it’s a mistake.”
“I hope to God it is, but he’ll have to be questioned, Lee. I haven’t said anything to Steele yet, but I can’t withhold evidence.”
She was crumbling before his eyes. Not hysterical, not raging—those reactions seemed to have been all used up on Jackson. This time she was imploding. Suddenly she groaned and doubled over with a cramp, almost hitting her head on the table.
He jumped to her side, put his arms around her, and helped her up. “Mags has the car or I’d drive you to the doctor,” he told her. “You need something to help you get through this. Here, lie down on the couch while I call Alfonso. He’ll come pick you up.” He steered her to the sofa, settled her, and stepped across the room to the phone.
It took Ossorio only fifteen minutes to arrive. Weinstock hadn’t given him the details, only said that Lee had taken a bad turn and needed a sedative.
First he had called Dr. Abel’s office. The doctor was in all afternoon on Saturdays in the summer, when a parade of casualties—from fingers impaled by fishhooks to bicycle mishaps and children hit by softballs or fallen out of trees or bitten by the swans in Town Pond—attested to the haplessness of city folk. And he was always braced for a drowning or another car crash. He said he could see Lee right away.
One on either side, they took her into the office. She was silent and uncharacteristically passive, allowing herself to be supported and led. Fortunately there was no one in the waiting room, and the receptionist sent them straight in. They left her in the doctor’s care and said they’d wait in the car. Weinstock wanted to brief Ossorio in private.
“Unbelievable” was the response. “Why would he do such a thing? It makes no sense at all.”
“That was my initial reaction,” said Weinstock. “I doubted myself, just as I doubt all eyewitness accounts in court because I know how unreliable they are. But I’m sure of what I saw, and it fits with what Detective Diaz told me. Someone else saw him at the filing station, too—she didn’t say, but it must have been the attendant. Of course he’s unlikely to have known who he was, but he could give a good description.
“Now I’ve had time to think it through, I can see what might have happened. It’s a case of mistaken identity, all right, but not on my part. It was Irving who made the mistake.”