Act of God

again.”
    “Larry—”
    “That’s what you just don’t seem to understand. If he told my mom he was faithful, he was. You never knew him. I did. Let me tell you a story, something my father told me once and said he never told even my mother or his partner, Joel. This middle-aged couple was in the store, almost twenty years ago. They saw Joel and asked him if he had a blue couch. Now Joel, he’s more the buyer than the seller in the place, so he hunts up my dad and asked him, ‘Abe, we got a blue couch for these people here?’ And my father, he looks over at the couple, they’re from our temple and he knows them, thinks they’re kind of obnoxious. But he also had this young couple, nice Spanish people, he told me, who’d saved up for a down payment on a couch and they needed a blue one. Now, my father had two blue couches in stock, and he’d shown both to the Spanish couple, but he didn’t know which one they were going to take, they were supposed to come in the next day and decide. So my father says to Joel, ‘No, we don’t have a blue couch,’ because in fact they had two of them. You see what I’m saying?”
    “Your father couldn’t bring himself to lie to his partner for the Spanish couple.”
    “That’s right. He wanted them to get the couch they wanted, but he couldn’t bring himself to lie to Joel about the stupid stock. So instead he just kind of hid the truth.”
    I felt a penny drop somewhere inside my head.
    Larry Rivkind looked at me. “You see, he couldn’t even deceive his partner without telling the truth.”

    “So, was my son any help to you?”
    “Maybe. Back in my office, you told me you asked your husband if he’d ever been unfaithful to you.”
    Pearl Rivkind looked up at me from the bench at the kitchen window. “That’s right.”
    “Do you remember the exact words?”
    “What, Abe’s?”
    “Yours and his.”
    “This... this is important?”
    “Maybe.”
    Rivkind looked out the window. “We were... in the bedroom, and I said—what was it? Oh, yeah.”
    She told me, and I felt the other penny drop.
    My client looked back up at me. “So tell me, you think my Abe lied to me?”
    I watched her face, the lantern jaw, the big brown eyes holding a lot of hope in them.
    “No, Pearl , I don’t think he did.”

26

    “Ah, John Cuddy, isn’t it?”
    “It is, Mr. Quill.”
    “What’s this now? I thought we’d reached a first-name basis.”
    “Where’s Karen?”
    “The greeter? She’s off on break somewhere. Perhaps the employee lounge. I can fetch her if she’s there.”
    “Don’t trouble. Who will I find on the fourth floor?”
    The skin around the ruined but somehow regal nose wrinkled a little. “Why the usual, I expect.”
    “Thanks.”
    “Can I escort you up there?”
    I stepped around him. “Won’t be necessary.”

    “Joel’s not here. He’ll be gone for a couple of hours.”
    “That’s all right. You’re the one I need to talk to.” Beverly Swindell looked up at me. Then she used a stapler to anchor some printouts on Rivkind and Bernstein’s partners’ desk. “Here or my office?”
    “Wherever you’d be more comfortable.”
    Swindell heard something in my voice. “My office, then.’ We moved down the corridor toward the doorway to the back staircase, turning in at her door, which she closed behind me as I took one of the conference chairs in the corner. She pulled back one of the others and sat down, folding her hands on the tabletop like a fifth-grader who took school very seriously.
    I said, “I figured it out, but I don’t know what to do with it.”
    Swindell kept an even gaze. “Figured what out?”
    “What happened here that night. But it still doesn’t make much sense with everything else.”
    “I don’t understand you.”
    “Abraham Rivkind never lied.”
    “That’s right.”
    “His wife asked him if he’d ever been unfaithful to her, and he said he hadn’t.”
    The even gaze. “If Abe said that, then—”
    “Not quite.”
    A couple of blinks.
    I said, “He didn’t quite say that, because Pearl didn’t quite ask him that. What she asked him was, ‘Abe, you having an affair on me?’ ”
    The blinks stopped.
    I took a breath. “And Abe said, ‘No.’ ”
    Swindell’s fingers meshed a little tighter. “Then he was telling the truth.”
    “Yes, he was. Because he wasn’t having ‘an’ affair, he was having two.”
    “I don’t know what—”
    “It’s what Grgo was trying to keep from me,