I'm Glad I Did (22 page)

We were not prescient in the least.

IT WAS ANOTHER HOT
and sticky evening, but Rosetta emerged from Birdland looking cool and Dulcie-gorgeous in a simple sundress. Her glare was positively icy, in fact. She nodded at Luke and turned to me without so much as a
hello.

“Look,” she said. The sidewalk was crowded with the midtown evening rush, so she drew close to us and kept her voice down to avoid attracting attention. “I wanted to talk to you about the night my mother died. I think I should clear the air about something. After we talked, I remembered where I had seen you before. I'm willing to lay down money that you remembered where you'd seen me, too. It was at my mother's apartment building the night she died. I saw you in the crowd.”

I could feel Luke's eyes on me. I nodded. “When you were up on that stage singing with tears rolling down your cheeks, I did remember seeing you there,” I confessed. “I couldn't help wondering why you hadn't mentioned it.”

She reached into her handbag and dug out a pack of cigarettes. Her hands trembled a little as she fumbled for a lighter. “I needed to think about it. I want to tell you now. I had gone there that evening to tell her that I was clean. I was working my twelve steps. I'm at step five. ‘Admit to God and ourselves and another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.' ” She clutched the lighter and cigarettes without lighting one. “I wanted that human being to be my mother. I wanted to tell her that I was wrong to blame her for my addictions. I had no one to blame but myself and to let her know …” She faltered. “Let her know that I forgave her.”

I nodded, wanting to reach out to her. “I understand—”

“No, you don't,” Rosetta insisted. “I was hoping she would say that she forgave me, too. I was hoping to get my mama back. But I never got the chance. When I got
there, she was lying on the street. It hurts. It hurts a lot. If I had just gotten there earlier, maybe I could have stopped her. But you know where I was? My AA meeting. I had just shared what I was planning to do. It didn't break until six thirty.”

I blinked back a tear. It was almost too tragic to bear. “It wasn't your fault,” I murmured.

She shrugged. “I guess I know that deep down. There was just so much I wanted to say to her …” Her voice trailed off.

To Rosetta's surprise—and mine—Luke threw his arms around her in a bear hug. “I'm so relieved to know that,” he half-whispered.

She pulled away with an arched eyebrow. “Don't get any ideas, white boy,” she said, but her tone had softened.

“No ideas at all. Just really happy that you cleared that up, for JJ's sake.”

“He's a very affectionate person,” I added.

“Well, I ain't,” Rosetta retorted. “Remember that. So we're good?”

“Yeah,” I said. “We're good. But I did want to ask you one thing. That necklace you're wearing—can you tell me where you got it?”

She smiled for the very first time. Pain stirred inside me again; she was such a ghostly reflection of Dulcie in that brief instant. “Someone left it for me six months ago with the hostess. It was Mama for sure, though the woman didn't say who she was. I knew. It made me start thinking about my twelve steps because I think maybe she was working hers. The necklace was a way of making amends
and opening a door. I should have gone to see her back then. But I wasn't strong enough. Too bad for both of us.”

Her tone was so resigned, so final. It was the tone of someone for whom nothing ever worked out. It seemed to me that for Rosetta Brown, constant disappointment wasn't only expected; it was accepted—without a fight or questions. She shook her head. Cigarette still unlit, she turned and walked away, no doubt hoping never to see us again.

Life had its own plans.

The next day, the papers were full of news about the nuclear test ban treaty that President Kennedy had signed with Britain and the Russians. They agreed to ban nuclear explosions in the atmosphere, space, and underwater. But they neglected to include Good Music and the Brill Building, because on that same day, Marla walked in and dropped her own nuke on me.

Just before my lunch break, Rona poked her head into the copy room to say there was someone here to see me. My first thought was that Luke had found out something new, something important, and was too excited to call. Yet when I raced out into the waiting area I was surprised not only to find Marla, but that she was an even worse mess than when I had last seen her. Her face was puffy, and she wasn't wearing makeup. Her hair was tied into a frizzy bun.

“JJ,” she sniffled, “I'm sorry to break into your day, but I have to show you something.”

“Come on in,” I said, grabbing her by the hand. Praying
Bobby didn't spot us, I pulled her into an empty writing cubicle and sat her down beside me on a piano bench. “Is Bernie, okay?”

“For the moment, yes,” she answered with a strange look on her face. “He doesn't know I found this.” Straightening, she reached into her purse and pulled out a slim gold chain with a golden note hanging from it. The very same necklace I'd just seen around Rosetta's neck. The very same one I
hadn't
seen around Dulcie's on the street that night.

“Oh, my God, where did you find it?” I gasped.

“In Bernie's jacket pocket this morning,” she whispered. Her voice shook. “You know, I always check before I take his stuff to the cleaners. I found it there. I knew the second I saw it that it was the necklace you were asking Bernie about, JJ. It came from the same jeweler who made mine. His stamp was on the clasp. Bernie bought Dulcie the cheap mistress version. That explains why the chain broke so easily.” She shoved it back into the bag as if it were contaminated.

I felt sick to my stomach. “What are you planning to do with it, Marla?”

“What do you think I'm going to do?” she cried. “I'm going to turn it over to that Detective McGrath and tell him where I found it.” She lowered her voice when she saw me cast an anxious glance toward the closed door. “I can't be an accessory to murder. As much as I love Bernie, I couldn't live with myself if I did that.”

“Please, Marla,” I pleaded. I took her shaky hands. “Don't go to McGrath. Please give Bernie a chance to
explain how it got there. I'm sure there's an explanation. If there isn't, please let me tell my mom what's going on, so she can help him.”

Marla began to cry. Her sobs were the big, heaving kind that a little kid makes when they're in despair and out of control. “I can't believe Bernie would kill someone. Since I met Bernie, I felt so safe. I turned to him for everything. He'd always tell me what to do. But I can't tell him this. I have no one to turn to now.”

I put my arms around her on instinct, to try and soothe her pain—even though what she was planning to do would devastate my family. Looking back now, I realized I was compelled to console her because she wasn't just childlike; she was childish. She
demanded
comfort. The love of her life was apparently a murderer, and she was inordinately concerned with her own well-being. Marla may have been many things, but strong wasn't one of them.

“Please, Marla,” I whispered, pulling away, “talk to Bernie about this before you go to the police and give me a day to talk to my mom. It won't change anything, and you can say you needed time to think. Please, I'm begging you.”

She nodded. “Okay, JJ, but just a day.”

I gave her a final hug. She hurried out the door. I watched her leave just to make sure nobody spotted the tall, bedraggled stranger in heels hobble out of Good Music. Once I was back in the copy room, Rona knocked to say I had a phone call.

“I'm off to lunch, so you can take it at my desk,” she said.

I hoped it was Luke. It wasn't. It was the Puerto Rican lady from Dulcie's building.

She spoke quickly and didn't give her name, and she clearly did not want to linger on a call.
“Recuerdo lo que gritó Dulcie,”
she told me.
“No puedo ayudar a cómo mi siento. No trate de hacerme sienta culpable.”

My heart stopped for a second. She remembered what Dulcie had shouted.
“I can't help how I feel. Don't try to make me feel guilty.”
It was exactly the kind of thing something that a woman might yell at a lover she planned to leave, or whose lover was planning to leave her. Either way, it didn't look good for my uncle.

“Gracias, señora,”
I said. Then I hung up and wept. No matter how much I cared about Bernie, I had to tell this to Janny and McGrath. Poor Marla. It was beginning to look as though she really would have to find someone else to take care of her.

From the outside, in the soft summer evening glow, the brownstone didn't look that bad. Luke's basement pad even had its own entrance. But the good news ended there. Inside, the apartment was small and bare, furnished only with a TV set he had taken from the housekeeper's room in his old apartment, a folding table and chairs scored at the Salvation Army and the funky upright piano and crummy record player from George's office. He didn't even have a bed, just a sleeping bag. It smelled like pizza. Of course—there was a pizza box on the tiny kitchen counter. Whatever he ate in here would probably smell up the place for days, given how stuffy and cramped it was.

I couldn't imagine going from the luxury of the condo he shared with George to this. Then again, I knew the reasons, and it just made my feelings for him all the stronger. And he was in a good mood. For one, Janny had given me permission to “hang out with my friend Luke to work on songs” (my sort-of-true words) until eleven—even after I'd
called her and told her everything Marla and the Puerto Rican lady had said. Maybe she suspected the truth about Luke and me and wanted to give me some freedom. More likely, she was too distracted dealing with her brother. Either way, I had four uninterrupted hours to spend with Luke in his new studio apartment.

His accountants were going through copies of George's books. He knew he would soon be paying back some of the recording artists or the heirs of those he'd ripped off. It was amazing, that this seemed to be the one thing that could make him smile: knowing that restitution would be made. When I mentioned Marla's visit and the call from the Puerto Rican lady, he agreed with me that Bernie looked guilty. He pointed out, though, that the evidence was circumstantial. Looking guilty wasn't necessarily the same as being guilty.

“Listen, before we get into all that, I want to show you something I found in George's office today.” He sat me down in one of the rickety chairs and laid an official-looking document on the folding table. My eyes bulged. It was his real birth certificate. And there, with a New York State seal, in official language, were the words that left no doubt: Luke Aaron Silver's mother was Dulcina Mae Brown, a Negro, twenty-seven years of age. His father was George Martin Silver, a Caucasian, thirty-five years of age.

I looked up at him, my jaw slack.

“There it is,” he declared. “Definitive proof.”

“Wow,” I managed. “But … all this time! What did you use in the past when you had to produce a birth certificate, like for school?”

Luke sat across from me. “I told you about all these Damon Runyon characters my dad was friends with,” he said wearily. “I think one of them might have been a professional forger. The birth certificate I saw was completely different from this one. My ‘mother' was Gina La Russo, Caucasian, age twenty-five.”

I reached out and took his hand. “Your dad covered all the bases.”

“That was his way,” Luke said. He turned and grabbed the pizza box off the counter. “Let's have dinner, huh? I hope you don't mind if I didn't splurge …”

“I have something for you, too. It's a housewarming present.” I handed him a bag I'd brought along with my purse. Inside was the record collection Dulcie had given me. “Consider it from me and your mom. These were her favorite singers.”