Blood Count

CHAPTER 57

Virgil’s face was bruised from the fight with Ivan. His hand was resting on an oxygen tank on wheels.

“I got it off Diaz.” He dragged it into the apartment and shut the door. “Listen, you have to get out of here.”

I looked around the room.

“I can’t. Not yet. I’m not finished.”

“Artie, listen to me. I talked to Dawes. He’s taking over. He’s going to work this building, the cases-Hutchison, Lennox. You have to go. He’s not going to like your poring over this stuff. You don’t have a warrant. I can’t stop him.”

“And he doesn’t like me anyway, right?”

Virgil shrugged.

“Listen, you should know, I think Lionel Hutchison fell from the terrace here. There’s evidence, if you look for it.”

“Christ,” said Virgil. “If Dawes finds out you were here and there’s evidence on the terrace, he’ll know you saw it. He’ll go apeshit, Artie. He’ll go ballistic. You should get out. You don’t need the grief if Dawes finds you here, and we have plenty of dope on Ivan and the dead Russkis now. Go,” Virgil said. He stumbled and sat hard on the arm of a chair. “What’s all that?” He was looking at the photographs on the floor.

“Marianna Simonova was pregnant when she came to America. One-night stand in Moscow. Six months after she arrived, she gave birth to a boy. She named him Vladimir. His adopted parents changed his name. She only saw him once after that. Never tracked the father down.”

“This is her?” Virgil picked up a photograph of Simonova in New York, when she was very young, and pretty.

“You’d never recognize her, would you?”

“No,” said Virgil.

I wanted to see if he came up with the same thing I did. I put more pictures in a row. “These came from a leather folder Carver Lennox had on him when he was murdered. I had the feeling he wanted me to see them.” I showed Virgil the picture of a little boy of about three.

He was facing the camera, peering through glasses, the kind that make a child look serious and sad. He had a round face. His suit was too big for him, as if it had been cut down, and the jacket was buttoned up tight. He was holding somebody’s hand, but all you could see was her arm and hand-a woman’s hand, from the look of the cuff of her dress and her glove. He was black. You couldn’t tell about the woman. In the background was the Statue of Liberty.

“It’s Carver, isn’t it?” said Virgil. “You can see it.”

“I also found this in Lennox’s folder.”

It was the same child, same suit, looking at the Statue of Liberty, his hand in a woman’s gloved hand, but with his back to the camera. The woman was Marianna Simonova. It was the picture from her apartment, the one I had seen Saturday morning, the picture that had been missing when I went back.

“Jesus,” said Virgil. “My God.”

“I found these hidden behind one of Simonova’s mirrors.” I showed Virgil the photographs of the same little boy as a baby. I turned the pictures over. On each, written in Cyrillic with a blue fountain pen, were names and dates. “She called him Vladimir. His adoptive parents changed it to Carver.”

“He was her son?” Virgil said. “Carver Lennox was Marianna Simonova’s son?”

“Yes.”

“Did Carver know?”

“Not until recently, far as I can tell. Maybe last week. I have more paper to get through. You need to go, Virgil. You don’t want Dawes for an enemy.”

“But she knew,” he said. “Simonova knew it was her boy?”

“She knew almost as soon as she moved into the building years ago. And she watched. She had the photographs. She decided to make herself into a good mother, she decided to see what Carver needed and give it to him.”

“You think she moved into the Armstrong by chance?”

“I can’t prove it. I guess only Lionel suspected, but she moved in, same building, same floor. You have to think she knew. Anyway, she makes friends in the building, she hears what’s going on with fixing the place up, she gets to know Carver and his part in it. He’s her son.”

“So she kept it to herself for years.”

“I think, and I’m guessing, in her own cracked way she wanted to get it right, do something for him, make up for abandoning him, the way she saw it.”

“She got to know everyone here?” said Virgil. “She knew it all.”

“Yes, she makes herself the center of the action for the old folk in the building. Then she gives to Obama. Carver’s a big supporter. That really gives her clout. She raises money, she holds debate-night parties, she goes to Obama headquarters when she can and makes phone calls. They’re impressed. Here’s this strange white Russian woman, and she’s doing everything for their guy.”

Virgil looked at the door suddenly.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

“Not yet. I’m not finished. I think Lionel might have mentioned to Simonova that he was concerned about Amahl Washington’s death. If she had been involved, that would give her another motive to get rid of Lionel.”

“You’re saying she had a part in that?” Virgil looked at me.

“I don’t know.”

“Did Lionel know about her and Lennox?”

“He was sharp. It’s possible.”

“When?”

“A week ago, two, I’m not sure.”

“So she decided to get rid of Lionel? Isn’t it hard to buy cyanide?”

I showed him the transcript I had just found; it was from CNN, a report by Sanjay Gupta, the network doc, on a cyanide case, a Maryland teenager who spiked his friend’s drink with poison and killed him.

“Listen to this,” I said, and read some of it out. “OK, so, Gupta says, ‘It’s remarkably easy to purchase cyanide online…We had some of our producers do it themselves…You can actually have it sent to your home.’ There’s more on how you can get it in pesticides, metal strippers, you can get it at hardware stores, things like that.”

“Jesus, Artie,” Virgil said.

“Yeah, she was reading up. I found a receipt for pesticides from a hardware store midtown. What did she need it for? She got Lionel Hutchison to prescribe extra pills for her, she put cyanide in the capsules and gave him the bottle back. That way she could be sure it would work. That day, the next day. There were five pills.”

“Like Russian roulette?”

“You got it.”

“But why? I mean, unless she was crazy, why do this?”

“For Carver Lennox. Her son.”

“I’m still not sure I get it completely. Lay it out for me.”

“She knew he wanted to take over the building. She knew he wanted those big apartments. And she would make it happen for him. Washington, Lionel Hutchison.”

“Did she know she was dying when she fixed his pills?”

“It didn’t matter to her. Either way, Lennox would get hold of the apartments. She knew Celestina had a soft spot for him; Carver would get her place, and he’d find a way to get Amahl Washington’s.”

“It still doesn’t add up,” said Virgil. “What about the guy who killed Carver? And how come she left everything to Marie Louise Semake?”

“I checked. She arranged it only two days before she died. On Wednesday. There was a tape with a phone call between her and Carver, telling him she had some wonderful news for him, a kind of Christmas gift.”

“Go on.”

“She told him she was his mother, she told him she had fixed for him to get Amahl Washington’s apartment. She didn’t say it outright, but he could have figured it out, he wasn’t dumb. It’s all on one of her phone tapes. He must have been horrified. He didn’t want it. He told her he didn’t want it.”

“Do you think she mentioned that she had planned Lionel’s death?”

“No. Carver would have stopped it.”

“Why didn’t he tell somebody about Washington?” Virgil asked.

“Maybe he intended to. But clearly, after her talk with Carver, she felt he had betrayed her, he rejected her gift, he rejected her, she made a new will. To spite him. And everyone else. And it was too late to change her plans; she had already put Lionel’s death in place.”

“She arranged for Carver’s murder, too?”

“Yes,” I said. “Before she died. She didn’t know she was going to die when she did, but either way, Carver’s death was in the works.”

“The creep? Ivan?”

“Those tapes of her phone call, I found, I’m betting I’ll find a call to Ivan. She had been a true believer, but when the Soviet system collapsed, she did favors for anyone she could-FSB, Russian mob, who the hell knows. Ivan was part of some two-bit mob who used the Commie Manifesto for tats, for a slogan.”

“Ironic?”

“Who knows,” I said, “but it was Ivan who beat me up. He killed the dog because it was barking too loud, maybe for fun, too, his kind of fun, and he killed Carver. All it took was a phone call from Simonova. Ivan owed her.”

I told Virgil I was sure that during the previous six or seven months, as Simonova’s health got worse, Carver Lennox had become her obsession. She was determined to be a good mother. She intended to leave him something. She knew about his ambition for the building.

For her son, she would make a little empire and leave it to him. Ironic, maybe, for an old Communist, she wrote in her diary. But he was her son. For him she would become a capitalist, for him, anything.

She had outlined her ambitions on paper, certain nobody would see her journals, not for a while. She knew she was dying. She had time, though. She would destroy everything first.

“Was she crazy, or just evil?” said Virgil.

“Is there a difference?”

Virgil went to the other side of the room to take a call, and when he came back, he said, “We really need to go. This is a damn crime scene,” he added. “We’ve been doing a lot of breaking and entering, you and me. No warrant.”

“You go. I’ll go soon,” I said. “Just go.”

“Lily’s not at home, by the way.”

“I know that.”

“Is she OK? Where is she?”

“She’s with Tolya Sverdloff.”

“Your pal.”

“Right.”

“I don’t think you take it seriously, Lily and me,” said Virgil. “Just so you know, Artie, I’m dead serious about her, I really am.”

“You still want to fight a duel with me or something over her?”

“I’m not joking, since you ask. I’m going to win. I’m not letting go easy.”

“How serious?”

“That’s up to Lily.”

“Demasiado.”

The oxygen machine was in the middle of the apartment where Virgil had left it. It was a huge thing, all the dials and tubes. I stared at it. I remembered something Diaz had told me. Of Amahl Washington, he had said, “too much” in Spanish. What was the word? He had said you could die from too much oxygen. Demasaido. Too much.

Had somebody turned up Simonova’s oxygen? Had she suffered a seizure? Did Hutchison find her like that and position, pose her so she looked at peace? My heart was jumping; cold sweat ran down my neck.

When I looked closely at the tank, I saw I was right. The dial was turned up to the highest setting. Somebody had turned it up high, and it had killed her, oxygen had flooded Simonova’s brain, and poisoned her.

I took a picture of the machine with my phone. I scrambled now to read as much as I could. More paper. More journals.

Digging into the box Lily had given me, I finally found another audio tape. I put it on. Sat and listened. Lily’s voice first: “This is for a book about Marianna Simonova.” There followed an interview.

It was as if Simonova was daring Lily, speaking in Russian, then in English. Enough of this recording was in English that I knew Lily had understood it; for the rest, she had been waiting for somebody to translate the Russian. Waiting for me.

Was it Lily who had urged Lionel Hutchison to sign the death certificate? To get the case closed as fast as possible? I wasn’t sure.

But Lily had been frantic when I first got here, to the building. She had called me to come. She had been beside herself, crying, scared, shaking. My fault, Artie, she had said. My fault.

I listened some more and realized Lily had put this tape in the box for me. She wanted me to hear, to know.

For a long time, most of a year, she had listened to Simonova’s stories, had admired her, flattered her. Lily listened. Simonova began to trust her. She told her more and more, about her time in the KGB, how she had been sent to seduce young men, the epic adventures. Who could say if it was true?

Then, about a week before Simonova died, the tone of Lily’s questions began to change. It was on this tape. I heard it.

Simonova expressed great trust in Lily. She said they were comrades and she could tell her anything. Maybe it was why she had written the last-minute letter leaving her apartment to Lily.

The last few days of Simonova’s life, she had begun bragging to Lily about loyalty, about the work she did, the way she was still in the service of her country, how the new Russians, oligarchs, officials, agents, needed her. And paid her well. The tape ended abruptly. I turned it over.

I pressed play again.

“Even now I am old, I give help to Russian government,” Simonova said. “Last summer, they call and say, Marianna Simonova, we need you; we are concerned about this man who lives in New York City who is called Anatoly Sverdloff.”

“How did you help?” a voice said. It was Lily. Even through the plastic box, I could hear Lily strain for calm, could feel how it had taken every ounce of self-possession for her to remain attentive. “How did you help?” she said again.

Simonova laughed triumphantly. “They congratulate me for my idea. I help them locate daughter of Anatoly Sverdloff. I say to them always best way to deal with father is through child. The name of girl is Valentina.”

“When did you help them find Sverdloff’s daughter?”

“Late in last spring,” Simonova said.

It had been late last spring when Valentina Sverdloff was murdered.

So I knew.

Lily had wanted me to hear it. She had given me the box with the tapes. I knew now why Lily had wanted me to help her instead of Virgil. I knew why the oxygen had been turned too high. Simonova didn’t die because Lily forgot her medications, or because Lionel Hutchison tried to keep her from suffering. She had died from too much oxygen, that and her need to boast of her triumphs. She bragged to Lily. It had been Simonova’s big mistake.

I turned the dial on the oxygen down to a normal setting. I wiped it off. I pushed it in the closet.

In the kitchen I found a metal garbage can and a big black plastic bag. I took them out onto the terrace. I stuffed in everything-tapes, notes, the address book-everything with Lily’s name or references to her. I put in the old cassette player, the answering machine.

I turned my back to the wind as best I could, lit a match and set fire to the leftovers of Simonova’s life, and waited while it burned, praying nobody would notice. When the paper had turned to ash, the plastic melted, I took the whole mess, put it in the black bag and went back into the apartment.

I put on my jacket. I picked up the black bag. When I left the apartment, I took it all with me, all of it.

But noise came from the hall. The kind of uninhibited noise cops make. I went back outside. I climbed over the wall to the Hutchisons’ terrace and then to Carver’s. I waited. Somebody had decided to look around. If Simonova had poisoned Lionel Hutchison, that alone gave them plenty of reason. I looked into the hallway. The cops must have been inside Simonova’s place.

I knew I had to get away. They’d smell the stink of ash. I had to find Lily. I called Tolya.

“She’s not here,” he said.

I ran into her apartment, managed to avoid anyone seeing me.

She was gone. Her clothes were gone, her computer, everything.