Эд Макбейн - Criminal Conversation

What the newspapers did not know was that Sarah Fitch Welles — they kept adding her maiden name, as if she were Hillary Rodham Clinton — had met Andrew Faviola six months earlier. Only Mollie knew this. Well, her father knew it, too, but in a slightly different way; they had told him all about Andrew Farrell , the nice young man who’d saved her life. So what the hell was her mother doing in that restaurant with him last Wednesday?

Well, with him, who says she was actually with him?

Her father insisted he’d been on the way to meet her there, so Mollie had to believe the restaurant employees were mistaken about her mother sitting there with a gangster, holding hands with a gangster, in deep conversation with a...

Was Andrew really a gangster?

That was his picture in all the papers, unmistakably his picture.

The Boss.

Who the DA’s Office was saying had been sitting there alone when her mother accidentally walked past his table into a “deadly fusillade,” as the Daily News called it. But wouldn’t her mother have recognized Andrew on the way to the ladies’ room? Wouldn’t she have yelled “ Andrew! How nice to see you again! Do you remember saving Mollie’s life, do you remember saving my darling daughter’s life? ” Wouldn’t she have recognized him, for Christ’s sake? I would have recognized him in a minute.

Mom, she thought, Mommy, she thought, what were you doing in that restaurant last Wednesday?

She thought maybe she should ask her father if he really had been on his way to meet her when this thing happened. When her mother got murdered last Wednesday. Instead, she asked him if all the stuff they were saying about this Andrew Faviola person was true.

Her father said, “Yes, Mollie, it’s all true.”

So she didn’t tell him Andrew Faviola was the same Andrew Farrell who’d once saved her life a long time ago, when she was just a kid.

Michael found the pages while he was going through Sarah’s effects. He found them in an envelope in her attaché case, along with several other papers she’d been carrying home from school last Wednesday.

The pages were typewritten, double-spaced on good bond paper.

They had been written by someone named Luretta Barnes, whom Michael recalled Sarah mentioning every now and then, one of her best students, wasn’t she?

Typed onto the first page was the title What I Will Do This Summer.

Sitting on the French lieutenant’s bed in the den where first he’d played the incriminating tapes for Sarah, the grandfather clock ticking noisily down the hall, he thought at first that this was an assignment Sarah had given the kids. But he knew her well enough...

Had thought he’d known her well enough...

Had once, long ago, thought he’d known Sarah better than any woman on earth...

Still...

Knowing her...

... this did seem a somewhat simplistic assignment to have given any of her classes, even the youngest ones. So he had to assume the student, this Luretta Barnes, had come up with the title herself and was using it to put spin on all the “What I Did Last Summer” papers she’d been forced to write ever since kindergarten.

Her intent became immediately apparent the moment Michael began reading:

What I will do this summer...

When school lets out...

What I will do...

I think I’ll watch the dockers and the dealers and the dopers doing their dance of death on this block in hell where I live, and I’ll hope to stay alive.

What I will do this summer...

I think I’ll dodge the bullets of the dealers firing nines from their sleek deadly drive-by machines, and I’ll leap over pools of blood on my way to church each Sunday, where I’ll pray to stay alive.

What I will do this summer...

I think I’ll stare at infants in withdrawal in their cribs and I’ll curse their junkie moms and the pricks who sold them death, but I’ll plan to stay alive.

What I will do this summer...

I’ll keep running from the man who’s trying to rape me where I live in hell and I’ll pray to God every day he dies of an overdose before he succeeds because I don’t know if I have the strength to stay alive even though I plan to.

At least until the fall.

Because in the fall...

In the fall, I’ll move from here to another world where there’s a beautiful woman, I would like to be someday.

In the fall, I’ll go back to her and become alive again.

Until next summer, at least.

What I will do next summer, I think, I’ll start counting the days and weeks and months till autumn.

And... if I can survive hell one more time...

I’ll go back to my school and my teacher.

Michael was suddenly sobbing. Alone on the cast iron bed, he wept uncontrollably, until at last he was able to catch his breath again. Drying his eyes, still clutching the pages in his hand, he went to find his daughter in the empty apartment.

Luretta kept wondering if Mrs. Welles had ever got around to reading those pages she’d given her. She guessed maybe she hadn’t. Probably, planned to read them sooner or later, maybe after she got home from dinner with her husband one night, walked instead into something worse than any drive-by.

Up here where Luretta lived, the drive-bys were a common thing, you learned to live with them, same as you learned to live with a junkie chasing after you all the time, trying to get in your pants, she’d kill him next time. She had sworn that in church on Sunday, she would kill him the next time he came at her. Mrs. Welles had taught her April was the cruellest month, but she’d been wrong. June was really the month that got you. June was when you had to face it, girl.

Luretta walked through this evening spread against the sky, seeing this place where she lived with laser-beam eyes. White-hot laser cutting through the jiveass dealers on every corner, pushing their six-bit hits off of crack pipes. White-hot eyes burning through hookers no older than herself strutting like movie stars in high heels and silk, selling blowjobs to cruising motorists for twenty bucks a throw. Her ears tuned out the incessant word fuck that rang on the air like a one-note call-and-response. Her ears closed to the screaming police sirens, and the screaming fire engines, and the rapping of the automatic pistols, and the rage everywhere, the white-hot rage reduced to cold dead ashes by her white-hot eyes and her indifferent ears. She wished to be Eliot’s hyacinth girl, her arms full, her hair wet, speechless, neither living nor dead, looking into the heart of light, the silence. He had written of a heap of broken images where the sun beat. He had written of a cry of fear in a handful of dust. Walking alone and breathing deeply of a night turned suddenly gentle by the first flush hint of summer, Luretta wished with all her heart that Sarah Fitch Welles was still alive to show her what roots might clutch, what branches grow out of this stony rubbish.

On the ninth day of June, the day before Hanover Prep and most of the other private schools in the city were scheduled to close for the summer, Winona Weingarten took the M-11 bus uptown from where she lived on Seventy-Fifth and West End, and then walked through Morningside Park on her way to the old stone building behind the cathedral.

It was a beautiful day, the kind New York City was often blessed with in early summer, the sky a piercing blue, the air crisp and clear. Winona was wearing the school uniform with the short pleated skirt and the white blouse and blue jacket with the crest over the pocket.