Guilt By Degrees

38

I woke up at the obnoxiously early hour of six thirty a.m. with an aching throat and a monster of a sinus headache, the aftereffects of too much booze and too many tears. I crawled out of bed and rinsed my face with warm water. After a few splashes, the congestion started to clear, and I felt marginally better. But my brain still seemed foggy, so I doused my face with cold water-a painful but effective remedy. Then I threw on my robe and, although I had little appetite for food, ordered a bagel and cream cheese to soak up the acid of the large pot of coffee I intended to slug down.

The day was blustery, and a thin, stinging rain spattered against my windows. I appreciated the fact that the weather had decided to work with my mood. Though I still felt fully justified in my fury at the way Graden had violated my privacy, self-righteousness is a cold form of comfort.

And the one thing that really would’ve helped was the one thing I couldn’t have: the shoulders of my buds Toni and Bailey. I’d definitely have to explain why Graden wasn’t around anymore, but I couldn’t tell them the truth, because I’d never told them about Romy. It would’ve been different if it’d just been a fight. I would’ve made excuses for his absence until we made up. But this was a breakup, not just a fight. Graden had violated my privacy once, and that meant it could happen again. Like a crack in the windshield, the damage caused by this breach of trust would only spread over time. I couldn’t see a way to patch this up-ever.

A depressingly familiar isolation wrapped itself around me, bringing back the old feeling of inhabiting a separate plane, peering in through life’s window at a party to which I’d never be invited. My throat tightened, and hot tears sprung to my eyes as the memories of my childhood after Romy’s abduction flooded through me.

Abruptly I shook my head to stop the thoughts. Enough. I wasn’t that little girl anymore. I had a new life, wonderful friends, and a career I loved. And I detested self-pity parties. I resolutely swallowed and blinked until I’d forced back the wave of emotion.

Luckily, it was only Wednesday. That meant I’d have three days to dive into work and put some buffering between my breakup with Graden and the now-unclaimed “freedom” of the upcoming weekend-a looming black hole of unwanted solitude that offered too much time to ruminate on my once-more single state and, more important, the reasons that led to it…again.

Stop it. I tightened the belt on my robe and deliberately picked up the Bayer file and flipped to my to-do list, then called Bailey.

“Since when are you up and at ’em this early?” she asked.

Without even thinking about it, I defaulted into white-lie mode. “Since I went to bed early. Want to know what I had for breakfast too?”

“No,” Bailey said flatly. “It’s too early to be that bored.”

“I’d like to get back out to the scene and see who else has surveillance cameras on the sidewalk,” I said. “See if we can get a different angle on the stabbing.”

Bailey agreed to come by and pick me up at eight fifteen, and I pushed out my room service cart and headed for the shower. I’d finished dressing and still had an hour to kill. Since the meeting with the prosecutor, Larry Gladstein, I’d found my thoughts returning again and again to Lilah. I wasn’t quite as sure of her guilt as Larry was, and even he couldn’t explain why she did it. Whether she was guilty or not, I needed to know who this woman was if I was going to track her down. I started my own private to-do list entitled LILAH. Engrossed, I lost track of time-until the jangling of my room phone made me jump out of my chair. I looked at the clock: eight twenty. Rats. I picked up the phone. “I’ll be right down,” I said.

“Or I’m leaving,” Bailey said, and hung up.

By eight thirty, she had found a parking space next to a fire hydrant. It was early, so there were other legal spaces to park, but Bailey’s devotion to her job perks bordered on the religious.

“Am I right about you saying Detective Stoner never got to any of these places?” I asked as we got out of the car.

“Sort of,” Bailey replied. “He did get to the Subway, but the camera wasn’t working.”

“The bank video come in yet?” I asked.

“No,” she replied. “But any day now.”

I looked up and down the street. “Okay, we got the check-cashing place already. That leaves the dry cleaner, the liquor store, and the travel agency.”

We decided to hit the dry cleaner first and work our way down the street.

An older heavyset woman with crooked red lipstick and hair that’d been dyed a metallic rainbow of blond hues stood behind the register, talking on her cell phone in what sounded like Russian. A bell tinkled as we opened the door, and she looked up. She said something into the phone before addressing us. “Yes?” she said, her tone annoyed. “You have something to pick up?” she asked impatiently in a heavy Russian accent.

I guess business was so good she could afford to treat customers like a nuisance. Glad to be able to disappoint her, I replied, “No, we’re here on a murder investigation.”

This information impressed her not at all. She gave us a stony expression. “What murder investigation? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I reminded her.

“Hmmph,” she replied. “I can’t tell you anything. I was working, I don’t have time to be looking all around. Anything else?” she asked in a tone that heavily suggested her preferred answer.

“Yes,” I answered. “We’d like to see the footage on your surveillance camera from that day. So maybe you should tell your friend you’ll call back.”

“You have some ID?”

We flashed our badges.

The woman exhaled heavily and all but rolled her eyes, but she signed off with her friend and motioned to us. “Follow me.”

She led us to a back room, behind the motorized racks of hanging clothes in plastic bags. We gave her the exact date and time, and she tapped some keys on the computer on her desk.

“Would you mind starting it an hour before so we don’t miss anything?”

Bad choice of words. Of course she minded.

“I can’t sit here for an hour,” she replied. “I’ll miss customers.”

Suddenly she’s Ms. Customer Service? I raised an eyebrow. “That’s what the bell on the door is for, isn’t it?”

She gave me another of her stony looks, then tapped some more keys. Grainy black-and-white images of the sidewalk began to play on the screen. It took almost the full hour for Simon to appear. He was walking toward the camera. The woman I now knew to be Lilah was five feet ahead and almost out of frame. Because there were so many people on the sidewalk, it was hard to tell who, if anyone, in the surrounding crowd might’ve been with her. I told the woman to slow the footage.

Simon moved toward Lilah in jerky frames. His hands were both out and visible. “No weapon in either hand,” I said.

Bailey nodded. “And he’s, what, five feet behind her?”

I stared intently, hoping to get a view of the stabber and maybe a clearer view of Simon at the moment he grabbed Lilah. The latter would tell me definitively whether Simon had pulled out the box cutter at the critical moment. But as Simon closed in on Lilah, he moved out of frame. That was the last frame that showed Simon. No stabbing. No stabber.

“Damn it,” I said, frustrated. “And we can’t even see what happened after Simon grabbed Lilah.”

“Yeah,” Bailey acknowledged. “But it helps as far as it goes.”

I shook my head. “If the bank video doesn’t give us a view of the killer, Lilah’s our only hope.”

Bailey and I exchanged a look. The prospect of having to rely on Lilah was not a promising one.

Just then, the bell chimed.

“You’re done?” the woman asked.

It was tempting to say no just to irritate her, but I didn’t want to waste the time.

“For now,” I said.

We followed her out to the front of the store, where a young man in jeans and a big parka was waiting, bopping to the beat playing through his headphones. I hoped he paid her with a bad check.

“Make sure you hang on to that footage,” Bailey ordered her. “And don’t go anywhere. We may need to talk to you.”

“What for?” the woman asked.

“You’ve got a customer waiting,” Bailey pointed out, deliberately evading her question. She gave the woman an insincere smile. “Have a nice day.”

As we hit the sidewalk, I had one happy thought: if she gave us that much grief, she wouldn’t be so quick to cooperate with reporters. It didn’t take much to cheer me up these days.