Blood Count

CHAPTER 38

I n the strange light I squinted to adjust my eyes to the dusky church interior, tried to work out what was going on, and if I could spot Celestina Hutchison.

A cold New York winter sun streamed in through the colored glass, and the sound of people mumbling rose up inside the old Gothic church on 141st Street. Christmas greenery surrounded the altar. The sound of people praying was what I heard first, then the organ music began, and singing.

I had never been inside a church until I got to New York. Not a lot of churchgoing in Moscow when I was a kid, not a lot in Israel. Before I saw the inside of a church, I was twenty years old.

“I thought they did this stuff in Latin,” I whispered to a young cop standing at the back, leaning against the church wall.

“Not usually. Only Our Lady of Mount Carmel down on 116th Street still does the Tridentine mass,” he told me.

“Got it,” I said. I didn’t.

His name was Alvin. Officer Alvin. I had seen him at the Armstrong. Asked him if he had been assigned to the Hutchison case. He nodded. Said Virgil Radcliff was heading it up. Alvin knew my name.

In the rows of pews, people, a lot of them old, including Celestina, some on their knees, worked at their beads, or stared at the priest up front, at least from what I could see. To me, it was a scene from The Godfather, except these old people were black, not Italian. So I stood in the back and waited for the service to end, and waited for Celestina Hutchison to finish praying.

Religion wasn’t something I knew much about. Didn’t care. Maybe the way I was raised. I had tried to understand once or twice. Had visited a few churches in the city.

I’d dated a girl once who made me go to a synagogue on the Lower East Side. She told me she wanted to connect with her roots. Somebody had played a guitar during the service. It made us laugh. We’d tried a few other synagogues, including one where the women sat separate from the men.

I’d been new to the city then, and it was all fine by me, the music, the holidays, the celebrating, I was OK with it. The girl, I was crazy about her; she was beautiful and funny. Once she’d said wistfully, “I like the idea of community. I like feeling Jewish. I just wish I could find a synagogue without God or pixies.” She married an Indian guy in the end.

Suddenly, as if she knew I was looking, Celestina turned, half raised herself from her seat, and stared at me. She was in a pew surrounded by other women-her sisters, friends, hard to say-all in black, half hidden by their hats. She whispered to them, and they all turned to look at me.

I started toward her, but somebody put a hand on my arm. It was Carver Lennox.

“You told her.”

“Yes,” he said. “Let her finish here, please.”

“I locked the windows, locked the doors. I tried to keep him in, I tried to keep him safe, but I had to go to my sister’s, she was not well, and poor Lionel, whatever did he do to himself, jumping like that?” said Celestina, when she reached the back of the church after the service, speaking to me in her high, small voice. “I do believe he was finished with this life, but then he must have suffered terrible guilt,” she added, adjusting her black felt hat. She handed her mink coat to Carver.

“What for?”

“For all the killing, of course,” she said. “His idea of helping people. Fifty-three years I lived with a man who was a murderer. Thank you, Carver, dear,” she said as he helped her into her coat, then took her hand in his.

“Is that what you think?” I said to her. “That he killed himself?”

“It is what I know,” she said with fury, her head snapping up so that I could see her eyes. “It served his purpose, fulfilled his belief, in a sense, it assuaged his guilt. I know for a fact he felt guilty about those poor, sick people he hurried to their deaths. Surely, for that, and to spite me,” she added. “He knew in my view that suicide is a terrible sin. What do you think, then, Detective Cohen?” She raised her eyebrows, as if actually inviting me to comment, and put her free hand on her hat.

Was this what Lionel had wanted to tell me at the party the night before? Had he planned to tell me he had helped Simonova die? Amahl Washington, too?

I started to ask Celestina where she herself had gone after the party the night before. Quickly, the women who had been sitting with her gathered. Murmuring comforting words, they surrounded her like a palace guard and forced me outside the circle.

At the back of the group of women was Lucille Bernard. She wore a belted black coat with a fur collar, high-heeled boots, and a small hat with a little brim.

She saw me and gestured for me to meet her out on the steps of the church. In the bright, hard light I saw she had circles so deep under her eyes they looked as if they had been engraved into her skin.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Dr. Hutchison was important to you.”

“Yes, he was, and I feel I should have been more tolerant,” said Bernard. “I didn’t see enough of him because I didn’t want to argue with him, and now he’s gone.”

“How did you find out?”

“Carver called me and asked me to meet him so we could tell Celestina together,” she said.

“You’re close to her?”

“I knew her through Lionel, of course. She’s a very old woman now; I’ll do what I can for her.” There wasn’t much warmth in her voice.

“You don’t like her?”

“What does it matter?”

“I’m interested.”

“Is it, detective, that you’re interested in us like some kind of sociological study? Is that what you’re saying? You have a soft spot for black folk? You like our music or something?”

“Lionel Hutchison is dead. I found him. This is a case I’m working.”

“You think this is a case?”

“It is now. The police are involved. There’s an autopsy going on. At first when I saw him, I thought he just fell over, but the ME doesn’t think so.”

“You mean, fell over suddenly, like Marianna Simonova, for instance?”

“For instance.”

“He wasn’t sick,” Bernard said.

“He seemed pretty vital to me. Unless he was sick and didn’t want anyone to know.”

“Sick and thinking of indulging in suicide? He would not have jumped. He would have used an easier way. We argued about it. I felt he’d used his skills as a doctor to kill people.” She took a deep breath. “I guess we’re both aware that this makes three people who have died at that damn building recently.”

“Yes. You knew them all?”

“You think I was involved? Do you want to question me? Is that why you’re here?”

“Only for what you can tell me about the two who were your patients-Marianna Simonova, and Amahl Washington,” I said quickly. “Can we go somewhere and talk?”

“Let me see,” she said, adding that on Sundays, the ladies often had breakfast together after mass, usually at somebody’s apartment. Today they would go to Celestina’s sister’s, it would do Celestina good to eat, give her strength to prepare. She would have to identify the body.

“There are plenty of others who can do that.”

“Celestina will want to do it. If necessary, I’ll go with her,” Bernard said.

At the edge of the sidewalk was a girl, maybe fifteen, sixteen, and she was high on some shit. Singing to herself, she was dancing around a fire hydrant, stepping down to the gutter, back up on the sidewalk, pulling up her shirt-a dirty yellow T-shirt with silver glitter on it-pulling it back, playing with her hair, giggling, jiggling, calling out curses. Her hair was dirty, her eyes vacant, and over and over, she did her little dance, prancing out into the street as cars passed by, propositioning the drivers.

From the church steps, the women stared at her, and at least one made to go over, to help her, another pulled a sweater out of her bag and tried to put it over the girl, but she just jerked away, taunting the women, and continuing her dance.

The sun was bright but cold. I saw Alvin, the young officer, head for the girl. I told him to back off and stick around with the ladies. I told him to keep with Mrs. Hutchison when she went to breakfast and then to the morgue, to act polite, as if the department had assigned him to drive the woman officially. He nodded, and up close I saw he was just a kid, maybe twenty-two, glasses, short hair, skinny.

“Wait for me here,” said Bernard, sounding imperious but weary. She walked down the street a few yards, returned with Carver Lennox by her side.

“Carver will go with the ladies. He can go with Celestina to the morgue. That way you and I can talk,” she said to me.

“Just so long as Celestina isn’t bothered anymore, I’ll be happy to help out,” said Lennox. “She’s very agitated, not being home for Lionel, being at the Christmas party and then at her sister’s all night.” Then, quickly, offhand, as if it were a matter of course, he gave me an accounting of Celestina’s time over the past twelve hours, even before I asked for it.

I leaned close to Lennox and said, softly, because I wanted to see his reaction before he heard it from anyone else, “I think Dr. Hutchison was pushed.”

He was silent.

“Pushed from behind, maybe from the roof, or hit first, so by the time he was pushed he was either dead, in which case he wouldn’t bleed, far as I know. Isn’t that right?” I said to Bernard.

“Most likely.”

“Or had a heart attack from the trauma when he hit the ice. Or maybe not. Maybe he lay there on the ground dying slowly.”

Lennox looked at me. “My God,” he said. “What should I do?”

I told him to take care of Mrs. Hutchison, just keep her calm, and I’d get back to him.

He lowered his voice, and there was fear on his face. “You believe whoever killed Lionel, if somebody did, had a hand in Simonova’s death, don’t you? Isn’t that right?” said Lennox, and without waiting for an answer, followed the women to breakfast.

While I waited for Lucille Bernard, I called Jimmy Wagner. Told him even though it was Sunday, I needed access to a safe-deposit box at a bank on 125th Street.

I’d found a charge for a safe-deposit box on Simonova’s bank statement earlier, and I had the address of the bank. If there was a box, maybe there was a will.

Wagner told me he’d do what he could, sounding harried. “Just find me somebody I can nail for this one,” he said. “This was an old guy, pillar of the community, Christmas is coming, it’s the best building in the neighborhood. Just get me something.”

I told him about possible prints on the Armstrong roof. I asked him to let me know what the ME came up with, if there was anything unusual in Hutchison’s system when they cut him open.

“That woman that died in the building, the one I only heard about this morning, you think we should check on that, get the ME to look at her, do a tox screen?”

“It’s too late.”