In This Rain (36 page)

“If I ain’t in trouble what the fuck you want from me?”

“A great manicure, for one thing. I wasn’t kidding about that. This new guy means a lot to me.” She met Ra’Shelle’s eyes. “For another, I want to ask you about Blowfish.”

For a few moments, Ra’Shelle didn’t move. Ann didn’t either. With Ann’s left hand still in hers, Ra’Shelle skimmed a look over to the other women. A nonstop conversation, none of it audible, was going on around the shampooing, snipping, and braiding.

Ra’Shelle flung the cotton ball into the trash. She dunked Ann’s left hand in the bowl and lifted her right one out. “Blowfish.” She patted Ann’s hand with a towel, picked up a tool, and began work on her cuticles. This could hurt, even if the manicurist liked you. Ann steeled herself, but the process was expert and painless.

“Blowfish,” Ra’Shelle said again. “You know what that is?”

“The fish itself? It’s also called a puffer fish, I think.”

“He call himself that ’cause you don’t know what you doing when you try to eat it, that fish gonna kill you. Other thing about it, though, blowfish be puffing itself up real big, to scare all the other fish. But see”— she reached for a small scissor— “if that puffing thing really working for you, what you need the poison for?”

“You’re not seeing him anymore, are you?”

“Shouldn’t of never been seeing him. That don’t mean I’m gonna rat him out.”

“I’m not asking you to. I need you to corroborate his statement.”

“Do what to it?”

“I’m sorry. Tell me whether it’s true.”

“Blowfish said it, chances is pretty good it ain’t.”

“He said you and he were down by the river a few weeks ago, and that you saw a white man get out of a limo and meet with Kong. Could you describe the man? Would you recognize him if I showed you a photo?”

Ra’Shelle gave her a scornful look. “Ain’t no point. What color you want?”

Ann tapped a bottle of cherry red. “What do you mean, no point? You wouldn’t recognize him, or you won’t look at the photo?”

Ra’Shelle lifted the tiny brush from the bottle. “I mean, ain’t no point because there ain’t no man. I ain’t never been to the river with Blowfish.”

“He said he was ‘getting next to his woman.’ ”

Ra’Shelle painted with deft strokes and didn’t answer.

“I wonder,” Ann said. “If you’re not seeing him anymore, maybe it’s another woman he was trying to get next to?”

“He try to get next to every woman he see. But don’t make no difference. Latin Kings owns that park down by the river. Blowfish, oh, he such a big man, he have to go up in they face when they move in here. Now he got beef with the Latin Kings. He ain’t been across that bridge in two years. Where you want the lightning bolt?”

“Here,” said Ann, though it really didn’t matter. The lightning bolt had already hit her.

Sutton Place

“Mr. Morgenstern. So glad to find you here.”

The jeweler, alone in his office, looked up at the sound of the buzzer. After a moment he stood and approached the door, but didn’t open it. Instead he spoke through the intercom as Ann had, his words metallic when he said, “I’m leaving soon; Friday we have a short day. Everyone’s gone already. What do you want? You don’t have to show the badge around, I know who you are.”

“I’d like to speak to you.”

“I’m busy. I’m working.”

“So am I. And I have to tell you, I’m in a really bad mood.”

For a moment that was it, the two of them facing each other through the thick wire glass in the steel door. Like the prison, when she went to see Joe. Except here the lock, and the buzzer to call for help, were on the inside.

Morgenstern frowned, but he threw the bolt and let her in.

“I thought you were suspended or something like that.” He pushed the door shut behind her. “I read it in the paper.”

“Limited duty. Limited to this case,” she said briskly. “I need you to confirm something.”

“I made my statement already.”

“You made more than one.”

“The first one, I was wrong.”

“No. Walter Glybenhall paid you to say you hadn’t made that jewelry, the bling we found. But first— ” holding up her hand to silence his protest, “first he paid you to say you did.”

“What are you talking about? I saw the pieces, they looked like mine, so I said they were. Then I looked some more, and they weren’t.”

Ann surveyed the room, taking in the safe, the photos on the walls, the jeweler’s tables with their mounted magnifiers and delicate tools. Steel mullions on the windows cut the sun into squares and laid it on the floor.

“I don’t know much about jewelry.” She turned back to the jeweler. “Especially things like this. But I’m told you’re very good at what you do.”

He replied with a cautious “My customers are satisfied.”

“Don’t be modest.” She pointed to a photo, a gold-toothed hip-hop hopeful with what looked like fifteen chunky rings on his ten fingers. “I understand you’re very hot.”

“People are starting to come to me.”

“That’s what I’ve heard. They say when people can’t afford Jacob the Jeweler, they go to Levi Morgenstern.”

“Afford?” Morgenstern looked affronted. “Affording Jacob, this isn’t the question. People like magpies, who see only glitter, who don’t understand quality, these people go to Jacob, and welcome. Morgenstern’s customers appreciate art.”

“Or, if they don’t appreciate art,” Ann said, “I guess they can get imitations. I know lots of people walk around flashing bling they say is Jacob the Jeweler, and no one can tell the difference.”

“Ha! The man doesn’t have an artist bone in his body. Him, anyone can copy.”

“Come on, Mr. Morgenstern. A few diamonds, a little platinum, I bet a lot of people can make something that looks like a Morgenstern, too.”

“Looks like, maybe. From across the room! The kind of work I do, no one does it anymore, so precise, so fine. A lost art, I’m telling you. I learned from my father, he learned in Antwerp from his uncle. My customers, they recognize the kind of quality you only get from Morgenstern.”

“Really? And yet you couldn’t recognize your own pieces when I brought them here.”

He frowned. “Please, don’t insult me. You’re setting me a trap. Those pieces— ”

“Never mind. My forensic people can, I’m sure.”

“You’re sure what?”

“They can tell a real Morgenstern. Especially with all that precise, fine work to look for. Of course, once Forensics starts looking at those pieces, it’ll be too late.”

“What does this mean, too late?” His innocent delivery was contradicted by the faint sheen of sweat on his face.

“If they can prove those pieces are yours, and that you made them for Kong, I won’t need your statement.” And if I’d thought of this back when Forensics was speaking to me, I wouldn’t need it, either. “This is a homicide investigation, and the city’s been pretty embarrassed by what’s happened so far. They might go after people they think are responsible.” She left that vague, a cloud in the air. “If I don’t need you, I can’t protect you. Look, Mr. Morgenstern: you’re not the only one. A lot of people lied about a lot of things. The ones who don’t get in trouble will be the ones who cooperate now.”

A pause. “I think you should leave.”

When they were reduced to kicking you out, you had them. “However much Walter Glybenhall paid you,” she persisted quietly, “it’s not worth jail time.”

His eyes searched the room again, all corners, the desks, the windows. Nothing had changed since Ann arrived. She waited, motionless, with an unaccustomed patience that was nevertheless unnervingly familiar. Because it’s Joe’s, she realized. It’s how Joe would do this.

“No,” Morgenstern said, gazing down, speaking to the floor, “it’s not worth it. The guilt isn’t worth it either. And to set the record straight, he didn’t pay me. I don’t want you should think I’d lie to the authorities for money.”

“Then why?”

The jeweler shrugged his shoulders. “He owns this building.”

“Glybenhall?”

“Who else?”

“He would have evicted you?”

“Not only. He was going to put it around, Levi Morgenstern is a dead-beat. Doesn’t pay his rent, demands constant repairs on top of it, hires illegals and has them sleeping in the workroom, believe me you don’t want him for a tenant.”

“Put it around? He couldn’t have gotten to every commercial landlord in New York.”

“He doesn’t have to. In my business, you don’t have an address on Forty-seventh Street, you don’t exist. This block, it’s the whole show. These buildings, maybe eight men own them all.”

“Friends of his?”

“Friends? Six of the eight are Jews. After they shake on a deal, Walter Glybenhall I’m sure washes his hands. But still.”

“You think they would have believed him about you?”

“Believe, don’t believe, so what? What he would want, it would be clear: Don’t rent to Morgenstern. Why, they wouldn’t care. Walter Glybenhall asks you a favor, you do it and he owes you. If you don’t, he hates you. To be hated by Walter Glybenhall, this is something no one can afford.”

“And that’s why you did him the favor he asked you?”

Morgenstern nodded glumly.

Gently, Ann asked, “Can you tell me what happened?”

The jeweler sank onto the edge of his desk as though pressed there by a weight. “He called me. Walter Glybenhall calling Levi Morgenstern! I thought he’d seen maybe one of my pieces, not the bling-blings but a ring, a brooch, a refined piece like my father used to make. For his wife or, you know, one of his young ladies.”

“But that wasn’t it?”

“What he’d seen, he’d seen the chain and the ring for Mr. Kong. He asked, ‘Morgenstern, did you make them?’ ‘Yes, Mr. Glybenhall, I did.’ ‘The police will be asking you about them,’ he says. ‘You can say you made them.’ ‘I can say?’ I ask. ‘What else would I say?’ ‘That you didn’t make them,’ says he. ‘Which you will, when you hear from me.’ I said I didn’t understand, and he explained.”

“He explained why?”

“No. He explained it would be a good idea for me to do like he was telling me.”

“Did he give you a reason?”

“A reason to do it, he gave me. A reason he wanted it? Why would he have to? He’s Walter Glybenhall.”

“You didn’t know there was a homicide involved?”

“Know? In my wildest dreams, I didn’t guess! I thought, insurance fraud. Usually, when people ask a jeweler to lie, it’s insurance fraud.”

“That happens a lot?”

“It happens sometimes.” Quickly, he added, “Never before did I agree.”

“I believe you.”

He nodded, sighing. “This, I didn’t understand, this pretending my pieces are copies. But men like Walter Glybenhall, they live in a different world. Whatever scheme he was scheming, saving an insurance company money didn’t seem worth risking my business to do.”

“So when we brought you the pieces— ”

“I told the truth. They’re mine. Whether Glybenhall tells me to say it or doesn’t, it’s still true. So that was easy. Then I thought, maybe he won’t call again, maybe it’s a joke or a bad dream or whatever he’s doing he can do it without Morgenstern. But in a couple of days he called. ‘Morgenstern, tomorrow morning you’ll get in touch with Inspector Montgomery. You’ll tell her those pieces are copies.’ ” He sighed again. “So I did.”

“He used my name?”

“I had it anyway, you left me your card. But he gave it to me, to make sure. He didn’t want I should call the wrong person.”

“No, I’m sure he didn’t.”

Morgenstern shrugged. “I can get back to work now?”

“I want to thank you, Mr. Morgenstern. There’s one more thing I’m going to need— a signed statement,” Ann said.

“I can’t come to your office now, it’s almost Shabbos. Can it be Monday?”

“Well, we could type up something here, if you’d sign it.”

“Now?”

“Please.” Since we’d get thrown out of my office if we showed up there anyway. “Just something short. Saying Walter Glybenhall asked you to lie. That he threatened you. That you made all those pieces for Kong, and none of them are fakes. That will do until we get a formal statement.”

For a moment she thought he hadn’t heard her. Then he rose slowly and walked to a desk, where he clicked a computer screen on.

“Just to say what happened?” he asked.

“Yes, please.”

“All right. But it’s not exactly what you said.”

“What’s not?”

“I didn’t make all those pieces for Mr. Kong.”

“Wait— what have we just been talking about? You said they were your pieces.”

“I made them, Inspector. And the first two you brought me, those were Mr. Kong’s. But the chain with the big K on it, I made that for Mr. Glybenhall.”

Sutton Place

Ann walked slowly along Sixth Avenue in the purple light, cell phone in hand. Joe would be home by now. She pictured him in the garden, cutting blossoms, feeding roots. Tamping dirt around a three-leafed twig because in his mind he could see the tree it would become. He’d hear the phone, wipe his hands as he headed to the house to answer.

She didn’t call.

In Bryant Park she slumped into a chair near the café. Perfect circles and shapeless blotches from a day’s worth of coffee cups alternated across the tabletop, disparate expressions of the same mistake.

How could she call?

Now that she saw. Now that she knew the mistake, and whose it was.

Chairs rattled as an elderly couple shifted them to sit side by side. The woman brushed a flower petal from the man’s jacket; the man pointed to something, someone, passing by on the sidewalk, and they both softly laughed.

Ann stood abruptly, cast around as though picking a direction— all directions were wrong, though— and without reason chose to wander through the park. It was that time of evening when pale colors, whites and faint blues, loomed like materializing ghosts. The ornate blossoms of peonies released an achingly sweet scent as she passed. Joe had peonies in the rear of his garden. The sound of the stream came back to her, the rumble and hiss she’d heard while she balanced on the rock she’d nearly fallen from. The stream and the garden: everything in the garden rooted and remaining, while the stream raced heedlessly ahead, cutting a gorge deeper and deeper with each rushing minute.