Blood Relations (35 page)

Metal scraped on concrete. The old man was moving his chair to get farther into the shade of the roof overhang.

His cane slipped off the arm of the chair and clattered to the porch.

Sam went over and picked it up.

The old guy tilted his head up to see Sam through a pair of thick, black-framed glasses, and his mouth was open.

Cords stretched down his mottled throat like the neck of a featherless chicken. “Thanks.”

Nodding, Sam walked back to his own chair. He didn’t want to get into a conversation. These old people could chatter on forever about their aches and pains, the lousy government, the Spanish moving into the neighborhood.

“I’ve seen you.” The thin voice pursued him. “You used to come visit Caitlin. What’s your name?”

He turned. The old man was still looking at him through the glasses. “Sam Hagen.”

“I’m Harold Perlstein. I live here.” He jerked a thumb at the open jalousie windows behind him.

“Nice to meet you.” Sam sat down. Stared into the street. Wondered how many other people in this building knew she’d had her married lover here. Wondered if any of them had told Frank Tolin about it. Not that it mattered, now that Caitlin had broken it off. Again. Sam assumed she’d go back to Frank eventually. Thinking about it irritated him, so he didn’t think about it.

Sam rubbed his forehead, trying to remember if he’d brought all the files he needed from his office, or if he’d have to go back in tomorrow or Sunda . There was a trial on Monday. Armed robbery, a ca y reer criminal prosecution. Sam had used the phone in his car to call home. Melanie had answered. Dina was still at work.

He’d said to expect him about seven, seven-thirty.

A thought careened out of nowhere. Please, God, don’t let it be that Matthew knew who Caitlin was. Then Sam realized Matthew couldn’t have known. He’d never have come near Caitlin. Matthew had been judgmental about that sort of thing, in a curiously old-fashioned way for a kid. He would have despised her, and he would have skewered Sam with it. Hey, Dad. Guess who I saw at a club last night?

Harold Perlstein’s chuckle broke into his thoughts. The old man’s bony arm was extended toward the walkway. A glossy black bird with an iridescent purple sheen to its feathers was pecking at the edge of the concrete. Ugly bird. Big shoulders and a sharp beak. It didn’t hop; it stalked.

“That grackle. He’s the one. He sits outside our window every morning. He shakes his wings and yells, ‘Up, up, you lazy bums.”

“

The old man’s chest was sunken, and his head seemed too big for his shoulders. Age spots dotted his face. The glasses sat on a curving nose. Behind them the eyes were faded blue. Still laughing, he held out the plastic bag and asked Sam if he wanted a piece of bread for the birds.

Sam replied that he didn’t, thanks. He checked his watch.

She had been up there almost half an hour. He thought about going to ask what the problem was.

Caitlin had the southwest corner on the second floor.

Apartment 12. The two brass digits would be beside the door, which last time Sam had been there had been painted pink. All the doors were various shades of pastel.

The breeze had stopped and the trees were still. Nothing moved. Sam was hot, tired. He leaned on his open palm, sleep dragging at his eyelids.

A telephone rang shrilly inside Perlstein’s apartment.

Then a woman’s voice. Loud, as the voices of the hardof-hearing are loud. She said hello, then must have recognized the person on the other end. Ahhh, ja. Vus machts du, Shayna? Yiddish. Askin her friend how she was doing. Then she switched to English with a New York edge to it. Brooklyn, maybe.

The voice reminded him of his great-aunt Sheila. Married to Hyman, who’d come straight out of somewhere in eastern Poland. Hyman was dead by the time Sam was in elementary school. Never spoke much English, but he made good money in the wholesale button business.

Enough to buy the brownstone in Borough Park. Vus machts du, Shmuel? Hyman would ask him that when he came home from school.

The house had been dark and quiet. Thick curtains at the windows shut out the street noise. Dark wood floors, heavy furniture, a tall, gilt mirror in the entrance. All the mirrors had been covered after his mother died. Aunt Sheila made him wear his suit, which he had outgrown.

His wrists went past the sleeves. She put a yarmulke on his head and gave him slippers for his feet. The visitors washed their hands on the front porch with water from a pitcher. The women loaded the kitchen table with food, then came over to hug him. Their bosoms were soft and wide, smelling of roses. The men squeezed his shoulders.

Earlier in the temple the rabbi had chanted the mourner’s prayer. Yisgadal Vyiskadash sh’may rabo-The only part Sam could recall, and he didn’t know what it meant.

Birds fluttered closer to the porch, squawking. They pecked at the ground where the old man had thrown pellets of bread. Sam turned away and pulled in a breath. He was dizzy with heat and fatigue.

He didn’t know what the hell he was doing here. He would look at the damned, pictures if Caidin could find them, then go home and work on his case. Cross examination of defense witnesses. Now he remembered.

He had left the deposition transcripts on his desk. For a while Sam weighed whether to go by his office on the way home.

He remembered Charlie Sullivan in his office, sitting in one of the battered chairs facing the desk. Blond hair combed back just so. Chiseled features, full lips. And the smooth British accent. I knew your son, Mr. Hagen. A terrific guy. I was so shocked to hear of his death.

Sam had been afraid of this; he knew it now. When Matthew had said he wanted to go into modeling and live on South Beach, Sam had made some jokes. Lame ones. Matthew hadn’t laughed. He’d called him narrowminded. Probably right. But Matthew had never given him a chance to prove otherwise. He had taken that last ride, sailing beyond the reach of understanding or forgiveness for either of them.

Sam decided to leave the transcripts on his desk till tomorrow. It didn’t matter. He had tried hundreds of cases.

After a while they all ran together, but the moves were the same. A long line of criminal defendants’. like a carnival shooting gallery. Knock them down, they come back around. Whatever Sam Hagen did, the cases would come and go, and the inhabitants of Dade County, Florida, would continue to murder, rape, and rob each other. For a while, Sam sat and wondered what he could do with himself if he lost the election. Victoria Duran would not make life pleasant at the office. He could keep his head down and his mouth shut. Or leave. To go where? And do what?

Open his own office? Defend the same bastards he’d been trying to convict for eighteen years?

Slowly Sam became aware of a sweet, yeasty smell drifting through the open windows. The smell had been working its way into his consciousness for a while, he realized. Bread baking in the oven. And another smell besides the bread. Roasting chicken. Sam’s stomach was an empty pit.

“Smells like Shabbat in there,” he said half to himself.

Perlstein looked around, a bread ball still balanced on his thumb. He considered Sam through his glasses, tilting his head. “You’re Jewish?”

“No. I used to be.”

“Used to be. How does a person used to be Jewish?”

“My mother. We lived in Brooklyn with her aunt and uncle. She died when I was ten. God, the way they cooked. As if we’d never eat again.”

“So what are you now?”

“I’m not religious.”

“That can be fixed. A bar mitzvah, even at your age.”

Sam smiled and shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

Perlstein aimed the bread so the smaller birds could reach it. His fingers were remarkably deft, with quick, sure movements.

He saw Sam looking at his right hand, then looked at it himself, turning it palm up. The dark stains on the thumb and first two fingers had worked their way under the nails.

“Ink,” he announced.

Sam nodded. “Right. You said you were a scribe.”

“Good memory. I thought you weren’t paying attention.

Temple Bet Aviv, Third Avenue, not the oldest congregation on Miami Beach, but close. The rebbe is pushing eighty. These days we’re lucky we get a minyan. You know that word?”

“A quorum, isn’t it?”

“We’re going to have to start counting the ladies, God forbid.”

“A scribe,” Sam repeated. “What do you write?”

“Write?” The old man studied Sam as though he couldn’t decide if he were serious. “The Torah. I write the Torah. I copy it. I make new scrolls.”

“By hand?”

“What should I use, a copy machine? A typewriter?

Please. Not even a ballpoint pen could I use. No, no. You have a new congregation, you need new scrolls. I use ink made the way it was since the beginning. And not paper.

Parchment, from the skin of a kosher animal. The scrolls will last a long time. Hundreds of years, who knows? This may be the last one I do. The eyes are going. The hands are all right, but I don’t see as good as I used to. God takes us piece by piece, if we live long enough.”

The branches shifted and cast spots of light and shade on the yard. The colors had changed, turning more golden as the sun moved farther down in the sky.

Bracing both hands on the arms of his chair, Harold Perlstein stood up. He shuffled to the edge of the porch, upended the bread wrapper, and shook the last crumbs into his palm. He flung the crumbs into the yard. Birds descended on them. Chuckling, Perlstein dusted his palm on the front of his shirt.

It had been almost three years since Sam had climbed the stairs to Caitlin’s apartment. He went to the correct door and knocked. The door was no longer pink but white.

Even so, the same apartment. Second floor, southwest corner.

Her voice said to come in, it wasn’t locked.

Sam came in. Caitlin knelt among half a dozen cardboard boxes at the far end of the room. There were more boxes stacked along the wall and on the table. The living room doubled as a dining area, with an opening leading to a tiny kitchen. She turned to look at him, and pushed her hair back from her face.

He said, “It’s hot out there, and Harold Perlstein was driving me crazy.”

“Close the door, don’t let the cat out.” Caitlin stood up.

“I’m sorry. I should have brought you something to drink.

I didn’t realize this would take so long.”

The apartment was cool and quiet. An air-conditioning unit hummed. Green plants hung at the windows, and the late afternoon sun came through and made a patch of light on the opposite wall. There were framed photos and prints Sam hadn’t seen before. She had a different sofa. The same tabby cat watched him from the end of it.

Sam asked, “You find anything?”

She said, “Negatives and contact sheets and two magazines that ran some of the photos.” She stepped over a box. “I have some beer. Or sodas. Whatever.” Her earrings rotated slowly. Silver ovals. She crossed her arms, trying to be casual about his being here.

“A beer would be great,” he said.

“Sit down, why don’t you?” She went into the kitchen.

He heard the refrigerator open, then a cabinet. She called out, “On the table. See those two magazines on top of the boxes?”

“Yes.

“I’ve marked the places. They both have stories about Claudia Otero.”

Sam took his glasses out of his shirt pocket and sat down in the armchair by the window. The chair had a back that came up just behind his head, and a roomy seat.

He shifted to pull a small batik pillow from under his hip and toss it to the couch. The cat stopped licking its paw and looked at him, then resumed, closing its eyes.

The first magazine was an issue of Vanity Fair, which contained an article about the South Beach scene, with Claudia Otero’s grand opening included as an example of how hip the Beach was getting. A new boom in fashion and modeling. People coming from all over. The article began with a typical candy-colored photo of Ocean Drive.

Palm trees, blue sky, hotels like iced pastries. Then on the next page a photo of a woman on the back end of a turquoise ‘58 Caddy, holding on to one of the outlandish tail fins. Claudia Otero was, as Caitlin had described, a black-haired beauty. Next page: pictures of nightlife, the clubs. Claudia’s boutique, her standing out front in tight pants and a short sequined jacket with padded shoulders, hair pulled back like a Spanish dancer. In the text, names were mentioned, the usual run of celebrities. A couple of minor actors. A rock singer. A writer. Sam turned another page. More shots of South Beach as a destination for the young, tanned, and prosperous. He went back to the photo of Claudia Otero. She looked familiar. He’d never met her, but he had the feeling that if she walked through the door, he’d know her.

Caitlin came out with two beers in mugs frosted with ice. She kept them in the freezer, he recalled. “Thanks.”

He drank deeply, then wiped a knuckle across his upper lip. The cold liquid seemed to seep into his body like water on dry sand. She put a couple of coasters from Club Deuce on the end table, and he put his mug on one of them. She slipped out of her sandals and sat on the end of the couch, one leg under herself, the other swinging.

Sam settled back. The next magazine was Beach Life.

Same topic. Caitlin’s name in small type credited her for the photos. Sam spotted Charlie Sullivan in the background of one of them. Linen suit, open collar, teeth and hair shining. In another photo George Fonseca had his arm around Claudia Otero’s waist, grinning at the camera.

Curly black hair, black leather vest.

“George Fonseca is a friend of hers?”

“Not particularly. He planned her party. Her PR person probably hired him.”

“Did he bring his goodies?”

“Everyone brought their goodies.” Caitlin laughed and rolled her eyes. “You could breathe hard and get high off the dust in the air.”

There were five other photographs in the article, and the captions contained quite a few Spanish surnames. Sam didn’t recognize any of them, but he asked Caitlin if he could borrow the magazines.

She told him he could, then said, “You probably ought to see the contact sheets, too.” Leaving her beer on the end table next to his, she crossed the room and sat on her heels beside the boxes. Her narrow skirt rose up her thigh, and her bare toes spread out on the carpet. “Where the hell did I put it? Ah. Here.” She found what she was looking for, then went over to her desk to rummage in a drawer for a rectangular magnifying glass.