Blood Relations Read online

  “Is she Spanish?”

  “Cuban. She has friends in Miami, but most of the time she’s either in New York or traveling in Europe. She runs with a very fast crowd. Lots of money and influence in the fashion industry. Everyone knows her.”

  “I’d never heard of her,” Sam said.

  “That’s because you’re not in the fashion industry. It’s another world, Sam. Very insular and self-referential. People amusing themselves with dressing well and eating well and gossiping about the celebrities they know. You’ve never heard of Claudia Otero, and I’d be willing to bet she can’t name the vice president or tell you how much a gallon of milk costs, or even gives a damn.”

  Stepping around Sam to see up the street, Caitlin said, “Her store is on the next block. You want to take a look?”

  They crossed the mall and headed west again, staying under the awnings and flat roof extensions that shaded the storefronts. The sun wouldn’t set till around eight o’clock.

  The boutique was called Otero, decorated in black and gold. The mannequins in the window had dark, chopped hair and impossibly long, slender legs. They wore capes and micro shorts, or four-inch heels and dresses that clung and shimmered.

  “She likes to use Spanish themes in her designs,” Caitlin said. “That silver outfit with the matador cape is eighteen hundred dollars.”

  “Jesus. No thanks.” There was a list of cities in a corner of the window. Sam was reading it. “Is this a chain store?”

  She laughed. “Not at these prices, but essentially, yes. Claudia has them scattered throughout the U.S. and Europe. One just opened in Tokyo. Most of her business is in a less expensive line for department stores. Bloomingdale’s, Saks, Lord & Taylor.”

  Caitlin could see Sam’s reflection in the store window, hers next to it, half a foot shorter, a thin blonde in big sunglasses and a skirt to mid-thigh, a canvas bag on her shoulder. He had his arms crossed over his chest, one hand at his chin. He wore a watch with a brown leather strap and a plain wedding band. She let herself look at him. The height and size and angles. The curve of bicep under his sleeve. He could lift her easily. He had done that. Had swept her up and over his shoulder, carried her into her bedroom, and tossed her on the bed. She bounced, giggling, then watched while he unbuttoned his shirt, undid the cuffs, and unbuckled his belt. Starting with the arches of her feet and ending when he smoothed back her hair and kissed her forehead, Sam had touched her till she was dizzy from desire, and words spilled from her lips. Please please Sam now oh God yes do it please. He had entered her slowly, an agony, his solid weight pressing her into the mattress as if keeping her from flying into space. His breath on her face, mouth poised over hers. She had tightened around him and cried out. If a hurricane had brought the ceiling down, she wouldn’t have known it.

  Caitlin realized Sam was looking at her, and she was glad for the sunglasses. A few seconds went by before he asked, “Where is Claudia Otero at present?”

  “Gone. She had a show this week, but she didn’t attend. I think she went to London for Sullivan’s funeral. I don’t know when she’ll be in Miami again. They say she’s heartbroken.”

  Caitlin moved from under the awning. “I don’t have time for a beer, Sam. I really have to go.”

  Sam stayed where he was. He asked, “Who are her friends in Miami?”

  “Friends?”

  “Claudia Otero’s. You said she had friends here.”

  “I don’t know who they are. Every Cuban alive must have friends in Miami.” Caitlin came back a few steps. “There was a lot of Spanish spoken at her grand opening party.”

  “For this store?”

  “Yes, by invitation only. The area was marked off with potted plants and barricades. There was a Cuban salsa band. Models and agents and celebrities all over the place. Gloria Estefan showed up, but she didn’t sing. My God, there must have been three hundred people here.”

  “When was this?”

  “I don’t remember. It’s been a few years. I was here taking pictures for Beach Life magazine.”

  “Could I see them?”

  “What does this have to do with Ali’s case?”

  “I don’t know yet,” he said. “How about it? Your studio’s just down the street. I remember you keep copies of photos you take.”

  “Well, the studio is closed. I moved everything to my apartment, and it’s a total jumble. Besides, I don’t keep prints that old.”

  “What about the negatives? Contact sheets? Or that issue of the magazine?”

  “I doubt I still have them.”

  Sam continued to look at her, his eyes giving nothing away. Finally he said. “That’s all I want, Caitlin. To see the photographs.”

  Smiling a little, she put a hand on her hip and walked back to him, then turned her head, gazing along the sidewalk through her sunglasses. “I don’t really believe that,” she said, “but it’s all you’re going to get.”

  He laughed. “Three years and you’d still like to slap my face, wouldn’t you?”

  “Well, Sam, it was rather shallow, what you did, but then, affairs with married men are usually shallow and pointless, so I shouldn’t complain.” As she pivoted she said over her shoulder, “You can wait for me downstairs on the porch.”

  chapter twenty-two

  Caitlin Dorn lived off Meridian a few blocks south of Lincoln Road, in a pale yellow art-deco building with a blue stripe at the top. Over the door a semicircle of bas-relief letters read ENGLANDER APTS. Shade trees grew in the yard, and a low white wall ran around the property. Beyond the wall was a sidewalk, a narrow street with cars parked at the curbs, and more apartments on the other side.

  Sam sat in a folding aluminum chair on the porch watching the street. A car would go by. Then a bicycle. Less often somebody would walk along the sidewalk. One of the tenants of the building would come through the gate occasionally, home from work. There was a line of about a dozen chairs, all of them facing outward so people could do what Sam was doing, sit in the shade and look at this small patch of the world. He stretched out his legs and the chair creaked a little. He thought about finding a deli on Alton Road for a beer, then decided he was too tired to move.

  The old man three chairs down was throwing bits of bread into the yard for the birds. Nobody else was on the porch, just the two of them. Occasionally the muffled clang of a pan or rush of water in a sink would come through the open windows of the corner apartment. Somebody was cooking dinner.

  Caitlin had gone upstairs about fifteen minutes ago to look through boxes of photos and negatives. She’d said it would take her a while. Sam was trying to get clear what exactly he hoped she would find. Photographs of a party three or four years ago at an overpriced dress shop owned by a cubana fashion designer who used to sleep with a man whose brains had spilled out through his handsome face last Saturday night. Charlie Sullivan, the main witness on a rape case that Eddie Mora, the cubano state attorney, had wanted to ignore. Other facts shifted through Sam’s mind. Beekie Duran, Eddie’s deputy chief of administration, hadn’t wanted Sam involved. Dale Finley, ex-CIA spook, had threatened to expose Sam’s affair with Caitlin Dorn if Sam made trouble for Eddie. None of these facts hung together, but Sam continued to play with them as he sat looking out at the street.

  A flutter of wings and a piercing squawk made him glance to his right. A mockingbird was hopping around near the old man’s bony feet. He wore frayed corduroy slippers. Death not too far off, the old man frail as a bird himself.

  Sam looked back at the street. In the gaps between the overhanging trees, the sky was still bright blue. He shifted in the flimsy chair. There was a legal pad in Sam’s briefcase on the front seat of his car. He thought about getting up. He could make some notes, see the details on paper. He had saved some cases by picking at details. Going after faint threads of possibility. Answers wouldn’t come easily or fast, but they would come.

  “Arthritis?”

  Sam glanced around.

  The old man gestured
toward Sam’s hand, which now Sam realized he had been massaging. “I said have you got arthritis?”

  “No. The joints ache sometimes, that’s all.”

  “My wife has it in her hip. The doctor says she needs a replacement, but she won’t do it. My knees are bad, but I don’t have it in my hands, thank God. I’m a scribe at Temple Bet Aviv.”

  Making a noncommittal response, Sam shifted again in the chair. His backside was getting numb. He wondered how these people could sit here like this all day, doing nothing. The old man had a plastic bag on his lap with slices of bread in it. He reached in, pinched off some bread, deftly rolled it into a ball, and flicked it into the yard. A bluejay screamed and went for it. The mockingbirds rose up in a flurry of wings.

  Forcing his thoughts back on track, Sam went over the manner of Charlie Sullivan’s death. The shooter had known what he was doing. He’d been methodical, exact. Maybe a paid hit. Or maybe Sullivan had known the shooter well enough to walk onto a deserted beach at midnight with him, expecting some fast sex. Didn’t want to bring the guy up to his apartment for some reason.

  The M.E. had retrieved fragments of a .45 hollow-point from Sullivan’s chest. Sullivan had been dead, or dying, when he hit the ground. Then the shooter had fired into the base of the skull. Charlie Sullivan’s casket in some London funeral chapel would be closed. Nobody would see that face again. It wasn’t there anymore.

  Metal scraped on concrete. The old man was moving his chair to get farther into the shade of the roof overhang. His cane slipped off the arm of the chair and clattered to the porch.

  Sam went over and picked it up.

  The old guy tilted his head up to see Sam through a pair of thick, black-framed glasses, and his mouth was open. Cords stretched down his mottled throat like the neck of a featherless chicken. “Thanks.”

  Nodding, Sam walked back to his own chair. He didn’t want to get into a conversation. These old people could chatter on forever about their aches and pains, the lousy government, the Spanish moving into the neighborhood.

  “I’ve seen you.” The thin voice pursued him. “You used to come visit Caitlin. What’s your name?”

  He turned. The old man was still looking at him through the glasses. “Sam Hagen.”

  “I’m Harold Perlstein. I live here.” He jerked a thumb at the open jalousie windows behind him.

  “Nice to meet you.” Sam sat down. Stared into the street. Wondered how many other people in this building knew she’d had her married lover here. Wondered if any of them had told Frank Tolin about it. Not that it mattered, now that Caitlin had broken it off. Again. Sam assumed she’d go back to Frank eventually. Thinking about it irritated him, so he didn’t think about it.

  Sam rubbed his forehead, trying to remember if he’d brought all the files he needed from his office, or if he’d have to go back in tomorrow or Sunday. There was a trial on Monday. Armed robbery, a career criminal prosecution. Sam had used the phone in his car to call home. Melanie had answered. Dina was still at work. He’d said to expect him about seven, seven-thirty.

  A thought careened out of nowhere. Please, God, don’t let it be that Matthew knew who Caitlin was. Then Sam realized Matthew couldn’t have known. He’d never have come near Caitlin. Matthew had been judgmental about that sort of thing, in a curiously old-fashioned way for a kid. He would have despised her, and he would have skewered Sam with it. Hey, Dad. Guess who I saw at a club last night?

  Harold Perlstein’s chuckle broke into his thoughts. The old man’s bony arm was extended toward the walkway. A glossy black bird with an iridescent purple sheen to its feathers was pecking at the edge of the concrete. Ugly bird. Big shoulders and a sharp beak. It didn’t hop; it stalked.

  “That grackle. He’s the one. He sits outside our window every morning. He shakes his wings and yells, ‘Up, up, you lazy bums.’”

  The old man’s chest was sunken, and his head seemed too big for his shoulders. Age spots dotted his face. The glasses sat on a curving nose. Behind them the eyes were faded blue. Still laughing, he held out the plastic bag and asked Sam if he wanted a piece of bread for the birds. Sam replied that he didn’t, thanks. He checked his watch. She had been up there almost half an hour. He thought about going to ask what the problem was.

  Caitlin had the southwest corner on the second floor. Apartment 12. The two brass digits would be beside the door, which last time Sam had been there had been painted pink. All the doors were various shades of pastel.

  The breeze had stopped and the trees were still. Nothing moved. Sam was hot, tired. He leaned on his open palm, sleep dragging at his eyelids.

  A telephone rang shrilly inside Perlstein’s apartment. Then a woman’s voice. Loud, as the voices of the hard-of-hearing are loud. She said hello, then must have recognized the person on the other end. Ahhh, ja. Vus machts du, Shayna? Yiddish. Asking her friend how she was doing. Then she switched to English with a New York edge to it. Brooklyn, maybe.

  The voice reminded him of his great-aunt Sheila. Married to Hyman, who’d come straight out of somewhere in eastern Poland. Hyman was dead by the time Sam was in elementary school. Never spoke much English, but he made good money in the wholesale button business. Enough to buy the brownstone in Borough Park. Vus machts du, Shmuel? Hyman would ask him that when he came home from school.

  The house had been dark and quiet. Thick curtains at the windows shut out the street noise. Dark wood floors, heavy furniture, a tall, gilt mirror in the entrance. All the mirrors had been covered after his mother died. Aunt Sheila made him wear his suit, which he had outgrown. His wrists went past the sleeves. She put a yarmulke on his head and gave him slippers for his feet. The visitors washed their hands on the front porch with water from a pitcher. The women loaded the kitchen table with food, then came over to hug him. Their bosoms were soft and wide, smelling of roses. The men squeezed his shoulders. Earlier in the temple the rabbi had chanted the mourner’s prayer. Yisgadal v’yiskadash sh’may rabo—The only part Sam could recall, and he didn’t know what it meant.

  Birds fluttered closer to the porch, squawking. They pecked at the ground where the old man had thrown pellets of bread. Sam turned away and pulled in a breath. He was dizzy with heat and fatigue.

  He didn’t know what the hell he was doing here. He would look at the damned pictures if Caitlin could find them, then go home and work on his case. Cross-examination of defense witnesses. Now he remembered. He had left the deposition transcripts on his desk. For a while Sam weighed whether to go by his office on the way home.

  He remembered Charlie Sullivan in his office, sitting in one of the battered chairs facing the desk. Blond hair combed back just so. Chiseled features, full lips. And the smooth British accent. I knew your son, Mr. Hagen. A terrific guy. I was so shocked to hear of his death.

  Sam had been afraid of this; he knew it now. When Matthew had said he wanted to go into modeling and live on South Beach, Sam had made some jokes. Lame ones. Matthew hadn’t laughed. He’d called him narrow-minded. Probably right. But Matthew had never given him a chance to prove otherwise. He had taken that last ride, sailing beyond the reach of understanding or forgiveness for either of them.

  Sam decided to leave the transcripts on his desk till tomorrow. It didn’t matter. He had tried hundreds of cases. After a while they all ran together, but the moves were the same. A long line of criminal defendants, like a carnival shooting gallery. Knock them down, they come back around. Whatever Sam Hagen did, the cases would come and go, and the inhabitants of Dade County, Florida, would continue to murder, rape, and rob each other. For a while, Sam sat and wondered what he could do with himself if he lost the election. Victoria Duran would not make life pleasant at the office. He could keep his head down and his mouth shut. Or leave. To go where? And do what? Open his own office? Defend the same bastards he’d been trying to convict for eighteen years?

  Slowly Sam became aware of a sweet, yeasty smell drifting through the open windows. The smell had been working its way
into his consciousness for a while, he realized. Bread baking in the oven. And another smell besides the bread. Roasting chicken. Sam’s stomach was an empty pit.

  “Smells like Shabbat in there,” he said half to himself.

  Perlstein looked around, a bread ball still balanced on his thumb. He considered Sam through his glasses, tilting his head. “You’re Jewish?”

  “No. I used to be.”

  “Used to be. How does a person used to be Jewish?”

  “My mother. We lived in Brooklyn with her aunt and uncle. She died when I was ten. God, the way they cooked. As if we’d never eat again.”

  “So what are you now?”

  “I’m not religious.”

  “That can be fixed. A bar mitzvah, even at your age.”

  Sam smiled and shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  Harold aimed the bread so the smaller birds could reach it. His fingers were remarkably deft, with quick, sure movements.

  He saw Sam looking at his right hand. Harold looked at it himself, turning it palm up. The dark stains on the thumb and first two fingers had worked their way under the nails.

  “Ink,” he announced.

  Sam nodded. “Right. You said you were a scribe.”

  “Good memory. I thought you weren’t paying attention. Temple Bet Aviv, Third Avenue, not the oldest congregation on Miami Beach, but close. The rebbe is pushing eighty. These days we’re lucky we get a minyan. You know that word?”

  “A quorum, isn’t it?”

  “We’re going to have to start counting the ladies, God forbid.”

  “A scribe,” Sam repeated. “What do you write?”

  “Write?” The old man studied Sam as though he couldn’t decide if he were serious. “The Torah. I write the Torah. I copy it. I make new scrolls.”

  “By hand?”

  “What should I use, a copy machine? A typewriter? Please. Not even a ballpoint pen could I use. No, no. You have a new congregation, you need new scrolls. I use ink made the way it was since the beginning. And not paper. Parchment, from the skin of a kosher animal. The scrolls will last a long time. Hundreds of years, who knows? This may be the last one I do. The eyes are going. The hands are all right, but I don’t see as good as I used to. God takes us piece by piece, if we live long enough.”