Retirement Can Be Murder

CHAPTER 15

She started talking before he even said hello.

“You should know a few things about that man. Abram Samuels likes to put up a front.” She had a voice like a cough. Brooklyn, old Brooklyn. “Did you know his son is a hairdresser for a living? Abram will be happy to tell you about himself, but his son is living somewhere in New Jersey giving women perms for a living. Abram is a very handsome man of course. But his son is pretty.”

When she stopped he told her his name.

“Ech,” she said. “I’m Sheryl Goldfein.”

Sheryl Goldfein. He remembered what Charlotte had said about Sheryl. She’d roll over you. He wasn’t sure what had happened to Charlotte, but he could say he agreed with her judgment of character. Sheryl didn’t wait for him to write down her name.

“Where you from?”

“Me?”

“No, the palm tree.”

“I live here in Sarasota. Before I came down, I was living in Long Island City-”

“You had a place?”

“Yeah.”

“Why didn’t you live in Manhattan? While you’re young?”

“Well, I’m from Queens, and the salary is a little-”

“Ech.” She dropped another weed from her hand. He hadn’t realized she was still holding one. “So why are you here?”

“Did you hear about Charlotte?”

“That she kicked it?”

“I wouldn’t put it like that.”

She shrugged.

“I don’t have enough fingers to count the relatives I’m missing. Let alone friends like Charlotte. She missed her husband anyway. Now him, he was all right.”

“So you heard that she died?”

“I heard. I’m sad.” She shrugged and scratched her head. “She was our fourth for a long time. We played bridge a good deal. She was always there, always very dependable. Do you put grease in your hair?”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“Your hair. It looks like a grease trap.”

“I don’t follow.”

“You know how you fold a slice of pizza, and all the grease drips off? It looks like you stood under a piece of pizza this morning.”

“I use some product,” he said and touched his hair. Baked in the sun. Hardened.

“I can tell.”

“That’s not the point.” He looked back at his notebook. He’d written down “hair” unconsciously. “I don’t understand.”

“What?”

“You just said that Charlotte was your fourth in bridge. I thought you’d stopped playing bridge with her. You kicked her out.”

She snorted and pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose.

“This month we stopped playing, of course. But she knew why.”

“Why?”

“It’s a long story.”

“I have time.”

She started walking toward a bench further down the path. She shifted side to side as she walked, giving each side of the sidewalk equal pressure. He couldn’t see where she’d been finding weeds. The whole sidewalk seemed perfectly clean. But somehow she had found them. They walked toward a white bench underneath a palm tree. Sheryl talked loudly even though she seemed taxed by the effort.

“Charlotte was an arrogant woman. She was my friend, but she could be arrogant.”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you not know the word arrogant?”

He ignored her.

“She told me that things between you two went sour.”

She muttered something he couldn’t hear.

“What did you say?”

“I said that she knew why.”

“Why then?”

She ignored it and fired back at him.

“Do you play bridge?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Of course not. You play videogames.”

“I’m a little old for that.”

“But you don’t play bridge?”

“What did you mean when you said ‘she knew why?’”

She ignored his question.

“Charlotte was arrogant. Last winter, she says her daughter is a doctor. We find out she was a podiatrist!”

“They’re doctors.”

“Ech. Charlotte took everything she could. Even when other people needed it more…”

She wiped her forehead.

“Why didn’t I move to Arizona? A place with a dry heat.”

“Please, continue.” They finally sat down on the white bench and looked at the buildings below. Jake knew he could see Charlotte’s window from there, but he wasn’t sure which one it was. Sheryl looked out to the water.

“Once we stopped playing bridge with Charlotte, she couldn’t accept it. Things always have to be her way. That’s the reason she started protesting the community, going off on wild investigations, and trying to ruin me.”

“She told me about that. She said you were switching the charities and that you didn’t have any information about the new one you were choosing.”

“After the meeting,” Sheryl continued, “she went over to Abram Samuels. Abram was a gentleman, of course. But she says, ‘I’m thinking about starting my own bridge group.’ It was horrible!”

“But you wouldn’t let her play bridge with you, right?”

“Do you use mouthwash?”

“What?”

“You should consider it.” She pulled at her collar. “It’s this time of day that it gets the hottest. And what am I doing? Talking to someone from Queens.”

“Sheryl,” he said. “You stopped letting Charlotte play bridge with you, right?”

“True. But it lacked class for her to start rumors and bother everybody. It wasn’t the right thing to do.”

“So you kept her out? Why did you do it?”

“Of course we kept her out. The way she acted…she was always immature. Always selfish. ”

He looked at Building B again. Maybe that was Charlotte’s window, the one in the center. The sun glinted off it and made the blinds and inside invisible.

“Sheryl, do you wish you hadn’t done it?”

“Done what?”

“Banned her from bridge. After what’s happened to her?”

She paused then caught herself.

“I wish certain things had been different.”

Then she looked down where Jake had been looking, at Building B. She seemed to slow down. She wiped sweat from her face again, right at her cheeks, and looked out a little longer.

“I don’t think that we caused it. Whatever happened.” Her voice had softened, from a saw to sandpaper. “I think she knew that. She knew that it was getting to be the time to go.”

“I don’t think she did.”

“And you knew her how long? A day?”

“I knew her.”

“Ech,” she said. Hard again. “It’s too normal of a thing. You’d get used to it. It’s the way things are. There’s nothing you can do.”

“I don’t feel that way.”

She shrugged and patted out the wrinkles in her pants. She stood up, slowly.

“I think you’ll be OK.”

“This isn’t about me.”

“Then why are you asking these questions?”

“Why don’t you answer my questions?”

“I never heard about you.”

“I’ll tell you about Charlotte.”

The pages had started sticking together, but he leafed through it all quickly. What would Thompson do? Be aggressive. Put it out there. He read over the notes. Charlotte’s threat. The end of the bridge games. The suspicious timing on the beach. The silhouette, running away. Charlotte had seemed paranoid, but there had to be something there.

“Sheryl, I don’t think that Charlotte simply died. I think that she was murdered.”

She sighed and barely reacted. She swallowed and looked down at Building B, where the reflected light shone back up. She breathed out slow, like she was exhaling cigarette smoke.

“Do you know what I did?” she asked. “When I was working?”

“No, how would I know that?”

“I was a nurse. My husband was a cop, not a chief. A guy on the street. So I had to make money too. For a long time. I worked before we had our kids, and then when they turned twelve I went back to it. You’re from Queens?”

He looked at the palm tree above them, its leaves drooping.

“Yeah.”

“Well, then you know what I saw in Brooklyn. When I was working a long time ago, it wasn’t like it is now. It was different. I saw all the kids who were shot up, all the junkies, you know, all that.”

“OK.” He wasn’t writing, just listening.

“And you know, some black kid would get shot. And he dies. And then the mother would come in. Some of them were quiet. But a lot of them, they come in yelling about the doctor killing their babies. Or about malpractice, if they knew what malpractice was.”

“What did you do?”

“That doesn’t matter,” she snapped. “It got fixed. But I always noticed that those people were the ones who were the angriest. They were the ones looking for somebody to blame for their children getting shot or overdosing. The other patients’ families-a lot of them poor, too-they never yelled about that. It was always the parents of kids in gangs, or junkies.”

“Right.”

“They thought they could make up for what they had let their kids do. They thought they could make up for being a bad parent by yelling about malpractice or a bad doctor. But they couldn’t.”

“I guess not.”

“They couldn’t. The kid was gone. But these people couldn’t understand that the kid was just gone. That was it. You can’t earn extra points.”

She looked at him and waited. He had to be aggressive.

“Sheryl, this is different than your patients. I may not have known Charlotte.” He thought for a second. “But I can still believe in Charlotte. And I’m not stopping. Your story isn’t going to trick me into quitting. Maybe I’ll find nothing. But I’m going to look-even if you won’t help me.”

“Have it how you want it.”

She rose and began walking down the hill. She walked slowly, spreading her stride across the sidewalk, scanning in between the cracks. Then she bent down. The sidewalk had appeared perfectly maintained. But she found a weed and pulled it out.