Blood Count

CHAPTER 37

F or twenty-four hours now, more, I’d been in this strange capsule that was the Armstrong. Now it was Sunday. It was 8:45 and Jimmy Wagner was in a hurry. He wanted Hutchison’s case wrapped up fast. You have until Monday, he’d said. Get on it.

I was hungover, my head hurt, so did my ankle. The Oxycontin, the lack of sleep, the night I’d spent in Lily’s bed, it was all making me nuts.

I couldn’t stop thinking about Lily, the hours we’d been together. Where we were going-if we were going anywhere. Neither of us had said anything this morning; she had been on her way to Simonova’s funeral, and I didn’t want to ask. I got out my phone now. I hadn’t heard from her since she left.

In Simonova’s apartment, prowling from one room to the other, I was desperate. Again and again I had come back to this place with its endless rooms and books and old smells. Maybe it was the Russian thing. I knew I’d missed something. But what?

I tried to get my bearings. I knew Hutchison had been here often. Knew he had been the last to see her, that she had somehow grabbed at the button on his jacket and it had stayed in her hand where I’d found it; the dead hand curled around it.

He had loved this woman, one way or another. He would not have let her suffer. Did he come in to give her something to release her from her pain? Did he come back to clean up after himself?

Suffering is not noble, he had said; pain cripples our best selves and makes us at best hopeless, at worst evil, he had said.

I thought about Hutchison his sense of history, of hardship, his humor, the intellectual rigor. Maybe he was also a zealot, a believer, obsessed with a mission.

I knew about zealots, all kinds, religious, political-I’d met them all my life. Hutchison didn’t seem to fill the bill-he had been too lively, he told jokes, had seen the comic side.

Marianna Simonova was something else. This was a woman who kept a hammer and sickle for a paperweight, and a picture of herself with Stalin. It was still on the mantelpiece: Marianna as a girl handing Stalin a bouquet.

Something was missing.

I saw it as soon as I looked at the row of photographs. One of the pictures I had seen earlier was gone. I looked everywhere. Where was it?

I couldn’t find the picture of Marianna Simonova with a little boy, his face turned away to look at the Statue of Liberty, his suit too big. Why would anybody have taken it?

I went through Simonova’s papers in her desk fast as I could. There was a small leather address book with phone numbers and notes in her tiny writing crammed onto the pages.

From the notes, I saw she had Russian connections, some in New York, some in Moscow, even a few in Miami and Los Angeles.

But who was she working for? She had been a devout Communist, and there were the names of sympathetic organizations. But the pages with their details were old and brittle and I knew most of the groups must be defunct.

I put the book in my pocket. There was something going on, but I needed time.

Nobody would notice the missing address book. As far as the world was concerned Simonova had died of disease, and the only people who would look at her things were her heirs.

On the table by the sofa were her pills. I grabbed the three vials, read the labels, put them back, then pocketed one of them and ran out, locked the door, went into the Hutchison apartment. Virgil was combing through the dresser drawers in a bedroom.

“Did you get anything?” he said. The day before he had been combative. I had been an ass. We were both on the same side. I could work with this guy. He was good.

“I have to find Lionel Hutchison’s meds. You got anything?”

“Artie, you notice anyone weird hanging around down there, at the scene?”

“What kind of weird?’

“I don’t know, somebody watching. I was pulling up in my car, and I just saw this guy kind of half hiding behind a truck.”

“There’s always wacko sightseers who show up at a scene,” I said, but my stomach turned over. I had felt somebody watching, too. “What’d he look like?”

“Hard to say. North Face jacket. Hood up. Saw me and beat it.”

“Black?”

Virgil looked up at me. “No.”

“You felt he was connected to the case?”

“I just thought, What the fuck’s he doing here so early in the morning? He didn’t look local, he wasn’t walking a dog, so I thought, yeah, in my gut, I felt it was connected. You mentioned Lionel’s meds? What’s that about?”

Everything in the bathroom seemed to have belonged to Celestina-there was no razor, no shaving cream. I pushed aside the hand lotions, the shampoos, the soaps. She favored, as she’d said in the hallway the day before, Jergens lotion. You could smell it everywhere-vanilla, almonds, cherries. It made me want to gag.

I yanked open a drawer in the vanity and found Lionel’s stuff-shaving brush, bottles of herbal remedies, most of them in capsule form. The only prescription medication I could find was in a single vial. On it was her name. The doctor who had prescribed the pills was Lionel Hutchison himself. But so what? She might have run out, he would have written her the prescription.

I took the vial.

“Artie?” Virgil came into the bathroom. “They’ve located Celestina Hutchison, Artie. You want me to go or you want to do it? I also heard from the chief and he’s sending up more people, forensics included.”

“Give me the address where Celestina is.”

“Yeah, sure. Say your prayers, Artie, my friend.”

“Who called you?”

“Carver Lennox.”

I drove over to the drugstore on 145th Street. In my pocket were two bottles of pills. They looked the same, but I wasn’t sure. Simonova’s was labeled Altace. Hutchison’s was Ramipril.

At the local Duane Reade, I pushed past a woman waiting at the counter and got hold of the pharmacist, an Indian guy, name on his tag read Ravi. I him asked what the hell Ramipril was.

“Generic name for something that also goes under Altace,” he said.

“What’s it for?” I asked, even though I knew. Tolya took the stuff but I had to be sure.

“High blood pressure,” said the pharmacist. “People who’ve already had a heart attack, a lot of docs prescribe it for them.”

Can you overdose, I wanted to say, and then the woman I’d pushed past got impatient and yelled at me. I didn’t wait

I got in my car, and drove as fast as I could over to the church. “Say your prayers, Artie,” Virgil had said, when he told me where to find Celestina Hutchison.