Final Appeal Page 6

  “You know what would happen to her. You saw Lady and the Tramp.”

  “They don’t do that right away, Mom. They wait about six or five weeks.”

  “No, they don’t wait that long.”

  “Somebody else could have adopted her.”

  “I don’t think anybody would have. You should have seen her in the cage.” I flash on the scene at the pound; Bernice penned by herself, barking frantically next to a streetwise pit bull. “Nobody would have taken her, Maddie. Most people like puppies, not dogs.”

  “I like puppies. Little puppies.”

  I sigh. I got my second wind when I washed Bernice, but the day’s awful events and my own fatigue are catching up with me.

  “It’s not my fault, Mom.” Maddie pouts. “She’s scary.”

  “I know, you’re being very brave. How about you go up to bed now? You look tired.”

  “I’m not tired. You always say I’m tired when I’m not.”

  “All right, you’re not tired, but I am. Go up to bed, and I’ll be right up.”

  She makes a wide arc around Bernice, then scurries upstairs, and I take the disappointed dog into the kitchen and put her behind an old plastic baby gate. She whimpers behind the fence, but I don’t look back. I reach Maddie’s room just as she turns off the light and hops into bed. “She’s so big, Mom,” she says, a small voice in the dark.

  I sit down at the edge of the narrow bunk bed and let my weariness wash over me. I smooth Maddie’s damp bangs back over the uneven part in her hair. It reminds me of Sally Gilpin, and I feel grateful to have my daughter with me, however terrified she is of big dogs. That much is right in the world. “I understand, baby.”

  “Where will she sleep?” Maddie says, digging in her mouth with a finger, worrying a loose tooth from its moorings.

  A good question, only one of the hundred I haven’t answered. “I have it all figured out.”

  “Mom, look,” she says with difficulty, owing to the fist in her mouth. Her eyes glitter in the dim light from the hallway. Huge round eyes, like Sam’s; my color but his shape. Across the bridge of her nose is a constellation of tiny freckles too faint to see in the dark.

  “Look at what?”

  “Look.” She moves her hand, pointing at one of her front teeth, which has been wrenched to the left.

  “Gross, Maddie. It’s not ready. Put it back the way it was, please.”

  “Everyone else has their teeth out. My whole class.”

  “But you’re younger, remember? Because of when your birthday is.”

  “Duh, Mom.”

  “Duh, Mads.”

  She punches the tooth back into place with a red-polished fingernail. “It doesn’t even hurt when I do that tooth thing. I like to stick my tongue up in the top.” Which is exactly what she does next.

  “Stop, Maddie.”

  “You know how there’s like the top of your teeth? And you can stick your tongue in the top and wiggle it around?”

  “Kind of.”

  “Well, I like to stick my tongue in there and make like buck teeth.”

  “Terrific. Just do it with your tongue, not your finger, okay? And don’t show it to me or I’ll barf.”

  “Why can’t I use my finger? It works better.”

  “You’ll give yourself an infection.”

  “No, I won’t.”

  “Fine. Don’t blame me when your mouth explodes.”

  She giggles.

  “You think that’s funny?”

  She nods and giggles again, so I reach under the covers and tickle her under her nightgown. “No. No tickling!” she says.

  “But you love to be tickled.”

  “No, I hate it. Madeline likes it. You can tickle her.” She fishes under the thin blanket and locates her Madeline doll, which she shoves at my chest. “Tickle her.”

  I look down at the soft rag doll with its wide-brimmed yellow felt hat. Madeline has a face like a dinner plate, with wide-set black dots for eyes and a smile stitched in bumpy red thread. Her orange yarn hair is the same color as Maddie’s, but we didn’t name Maddie after the Ludwig Bemelmans books, we named her after Sam’s grandmother. When I gave Maddie the doll at age three, they became inseparable. “You really do look like Madeline, you know?” I say. “Except for the hat.”

  “No, I don’t. She looks like me. I look like myself.”

  I laugh. “You’re right.” I lean over and give her a quick kiss. Her breath smells of peanut butter. “Did you brush?” I ask, second-rate sleuth that I am.

  “I don’t have to brush if I don’t want to.”

  “Oh, really? Who said?”

  “Daddy. He told me it was my decision.” Her tone elides into the adolescent sneer that comes prematurely to six-year-old girls.

  “Don’t be fresh.”

  “Don’t be fresh. Don’t be fresh. Daddy says you can break the rules sometimes.”

  “Oh, he does, does he?” Easy for Sam to say. After his highly suspect charitable deductions, fidelity was the second rule he broke. Sam is a high-powered lawyer who lost interest in me at about the same time I became a mother and quit being a high-powered lawyer myself; ironically, I thought that was just when I was getting interesting.

  “Gretchen says that if your tooth comes out too soon, you have to wait a long time for a new tooth to grow.” She twists a hank of Madeline’s yarn hair around her finger.

  “Is Gretchen a girl in your class?”

  “Gretchen knows about bugs and gerbils. She knows about why it’s a hamster and not a gerbil. She has three teeth out. Madeline likes her.”

  “Then she must be nice.”

  “She is. She has long hair, really long. Down to here.” She makes a chop at her upper arm. “She wears a jumper.”

  Like Madeline. “Do you eat lunch with her?”

  “Sometimes. Not usually. Usually I’m alone.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know that much people, so nobody ever sits next to me.”

  I try to remember what I read in that parenting book. Talk so your kid will listen, listen so your kid will talk; it’s catchy, but it means nothing. “What can we do about that?”

  “I don’t know.” She shrugs.

  I forget what the book says to do when they shrug. “Would you like to have Gretchen over? Maybe one of the days I’m off from work?”

  “She won’t come.”

  “You don’t know that unless you ask.”

  “But I don’t know her exactly as a best friend, okay?”

  “But, honey, that’s how you get to know someone.”

  “Mom, I already told you!” She turns away.

  I am at a loss. There is no chapter on your child having no friends. I even spied on her at recess last month after I went food shopping. The other first graders swung from monkey bars and chased each other; Maddie played by herself, digging with a stick in the hard dirt. Her Madeline doll was propped up against a nearby tree. I found myself thinking, If she’s digging a grave for the doll, I’m phoning a shrink. Instead I telephoned her teacher that night.

  “She’ll be fine,” she said. “Give her time.”

  “But it’s March already. I’m doing everything I can. I help out in the classroom. I did the plant sale and the bake sale.”

  “Have you set up any play dates for her?”

  “Every time I suggest that, she bursts into tears.”

  “Keep at it.”

  “But isn’t there anything else I can do?”

  “Let it run its course. She’s on the young side.”

  “But she was fine last year, in kindergarten. She was even younger.”

  “Weren’t you home then?”

  Ouch. Then my alimony ran out and almost all my savings; with child support, I can swing part-time. “Yes, I only work three days a week, and she has her grandmother in the afternoon. It’s not like she’s with a stranger.”

  “She’s just having some trouble with the adjustment.”

  Well,
duh, I thought to myself.

  But I didn’t say it.

  Bernice’s ears prick up at the sound of a soft knock at the front door and she takes off, barking away, back paws skidding on the hardwood floor. In a minute, there’s the chatter of a key in the lock; it has to be Ricki Steinmetz, my best friend. She’s the only one with a key besides my mother.

  “Rick, wait!” I shout, but it’s too late.

  The door swings open and Bernice bounds onto Ricki’s shoulders. “Aaaiieee!” Ricki screams in surprise.

  “Bernice, no!” I yank the dog from Ricki’s beige linen suit, leaving distinct rake marks in the shoulder pads, and hustle Ricki and Bernice inside before my neighbors call the landlord.

  “Is that a dog?” Ricki says, backing up.

  I hold a finger to my lips and listen upstairs to hear if Bernice’s barking woke Maddie. Ricki understands and shuts up, her mouth setting into a disapproving dash of burgundy lipstick. There’s no sound from Maddie’s room. Bernice chuffs loudly on Ricki’s cordovan mules.

  Ricki gasps. “Did you see that? She threw up on my shoes!”

  “She just sneezed.”

  “These are Joan and David!”

  “Come in the kitchen, would you?” I take Bernice by the collar and walk her like Quasimodo into the kitchen. “What are you doing here? It’s almost nine o’clock.”

  Ricki snatches a paper napkin from the holder on the dining room table and follows me into the kitchen. “Didn’t your mother tell you I called? I wanted to come over and see how you were, after what happened,” she says, wiping her shoe. Ricki is a family therapist who takes clothing as seriously as codependency. She still looks put together even after a day of seeing clients; her white silk T-shirt remains unwrinkled, her lips lined. In fact, she’d look perfect if she didn’t have those rake marks on her shoulders and that goober on her shoes.

  “It’ll dry.”

  “Disgusting.” She slips on the shoe. “It’s the judge’s dog, isn’t it?”

  “Yep.”

  “Tell me you’re taking it to the pound.”

  “Nope. I own it. Her.”

  She stands stock-still. “You’re kidding me.”

  “Don’t start with the dog. I heard it from my mother, I heard it from my daughter. You came over to be supportive, so start being supportive.” I sit down on one of the pine stools at the counter in my makeshift eat-in kitchen, and Bernice stands beside me, tail wagging. I scratch her head.

  “Sorry. You want some coffee, on you?”

  “I’ll make it.” I start to get up, but Ricki presses me onto the stool with a firm hand.

  “Sit!” she says.

  Instantly, Bernice plops her curly-coated rump onto the floor.

  “Wow,” I say, astonished. “I never saw her do that.”

  Bernice pants happily, her long tongue unrolling like a rug.

  “Cute,” Ricki says.

  “And pedigreed, too. When can I drop her off?”

  “No way.” She opens the freezer.

  “But you have more room than I do. You need a Swiss dog. Think of the boys, if they get lost in the mall.”

  “I’m ignoring you.” She rummages through the boxes of frozen vegetables. “Where’s the coffee?”

  “On the door.” I give up and watch my new dog lie down at the foot of my stool, shifting once, then again, to get comfortable on the tile floor. She needs a dog bed, but I’ll be damned if I’ll buy that, too.

  “What happened to that cappuccino decaf I gave you?” Ricki shouts from inside the freezer. Icy clouds billow around her chic wedge of thick brown hair.

  “It’s gone. Use the Chock Full O’ Nuts.”

  “You don’t have flavored?”

  “I have coffee-flavored. Now close the door.”

  She grabs a can and shuts the door. “I’m going to understand your crummy mood because you’re entitled to it. You have a good reason to feel crummy.”

  “Is this the supportive part?”

  “Yes. I’m validating you.”

  “Like parking, you stamp my ticket?”

  “Just like that.” She pries the plastic lid off the can and spoons the coffee into the basket, then pours the water into the coffeemaker. I watch her as if I’ve never seen this done, my brain stuck in a sort of stasis. The red light on the Krups blinks on: a machine, highly reliable and predictable. People are not machines, and so they do unpredictable things. Things that strike like a bolt from the heavens, stunning you where you stand.

  “You okay?” Ricki asks.

  I watch the coffee dribble into the glass pot. “I still can’t believe it.”

  “I know.” Ricki puts her arm around me, but I don’t feel her touch, not really. A spring storm howls outside, rattling the loose storm windows. These things seem like they’re happening around me, and not really to me. “It’s a shock,” she says.

  I think of Armen. His hand in my hair. How easily he lifted me to the couch. The weight of his body, the strength of it. He was lovely. “It’s just not possible.”

  “I know,” she says, stroking my hair.

  He was happy. I know he was. “He didn’t even own a gun.”

  “I read it was registered to his wife.”

  Susan. She’s the one who found him. He was going to tell her about us. “She put Bernice in a dog pound, Rick. What kind of a woman does that to her husband’s pet?”

  Ricki glances at Bernice, comatose on the floor. “I can see it.”

  “They had a terrible marriage, no matter what she says. They were going to divorce.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “He told me.”

  “He told you about his marriage? Since when?”

  “And Sarah, one of the law clerks, worked on Susan’s campaign. I think she came by chambers late at night. She got nervous when I told her about the tapes.”

  “Tapes?”

  “It was a bluff, but it worked.” I hear myself sounding slightly hyper. “Then there’s Galanter.”

  “Galawho?” Ricki steps away from me, concerned.

  “Judge Galanter, who becomes chief now, for the next seven years. He’d never have gotten to be chief if Armen hadn’t died. He would have been too old to be eligible, past sixty-five. I wonder if he drinks.”

  “A judge, drinking? A federal appellate judge?”

  “What, it’s confined to the trades?” I experience it again, as a flash of insight: the fighting, a woman’s fists pounding futilely against a man’s bulky shoulders. My mother and my father. I can’t remember any more than that. I was six when he left.

  “Grace, you’re losing it.” She looks at me like I’m crazy, and maybe I am. I feel it welling up inside of me.

  “Is it possible that he didn’t commit suicide? Is it possible that he was murdered?”

  “What?” she says.

  I tell her the whole story, about Armen and me. She looks drained when I’m done, but still caring, and I imagine that’s what she looks like after a session with one of her flakier clients. She sets down her empty coffee mug with finality. “I’m worried about you, Grace. You’ve lost a man you cared for, and not for the first time. There was Sam.”

  “What’s Sam have to do with it?”

  “It’s a loss.”

  “No, it isn’t. It’s not a loss when you lose someone who doesn’t want you. Happily ever after, just not together.”

  Ricki crosses her arms. “You don’t mean that.”

  “I sure do. You may not think my life turned out so great, but I do. I’m okay. At least I was until this happened.”

  “Maybe Armen’s death is kicking up a lot of stuff for you.”

  “What stuff?”

  “Abandonment. Loss. Think of your father.”

  “My father?” I almost laugh. I hate it when she turns into a shrink. “How do you guys make these connections? My father was a drunk. Armen was wonderful.”

  “But they both left you. It makes sense that you’re having trou
ble accepting it.”

  He left you. It hurts to hear her say it; that much is true. “I don’t think that’s it. I can accept that he’s gone, Ricki. What I can’t accept right now is that he committed suicide. At least I can’t accept it without question, like the rest of the world. I don’t understand it, okay? Not yet, anyway.”

  She holds up two neatly manicured hands. “Okay. Okay. I’ll shut up. After all, you’re the cop here.”

  “What’d you say?”

  “You heard me.”

  But she’s right. I did, and it gives me an idea.

  10

  EXECUTIVE PARKING LOT, says the sign on the steel racks of Samsonite briefcases. It’s the only spark of humor in the grim police station, from the aging alcoholic asleep in the lobby to the battleship-gray paint peeling off the cinder-block walls. Detective Ruscinjki blends in here, with his gray hair and gray eyes. He folds his furry arms behind an ancient typewriter in the bustling Central Detectives’ office and looks up at me. “You sure you’re not with the media?” he asks.

  “No.”

  A black detective in shirtsleeves and shoulder holster walks by, ignoring us.

  He looks unconvinced. “We got lots of calls from the media on this case. Print media. Electronic media. They’d say anything to get past the desk, anything to get the gory details.”

  “I’m not a reporter. I told you, I worked for Judge Gregorian. I have court ID if you want.”

  He leans back in his chair at a long table in the common room. “All right, Miss Rossi, so you’re not with the media. You’re not his lawyer, either, or a member of the family. That means I tell you what I tell the reporters. The case is closed. We have no reason to believe that the judge’s death was anything other than a suicide.” A lineup of battered file cabinets sits behind him, solid as the stone wall he’s putting up for my benefit. Or detriment.

  “I was just wondering how you can be so sure. Is there some physical evidence you found?”

  “Not that I intend to discuss with you. Trust me, it was a suicide. I saw it.”

  I feel my mouth open. “What? You saw Armen?”

  He frowns, confused for a moment. “The judge? I was on the squad Monday night, I got the call. That’s why you asked the desk man for me, isn’t it?”