Act of God

I shouldn’t have been so surprised. I mean, if he cheated on his wife with me, why shouldn’t he cheat on me with somebody else? But all I know is that night, when I came into his office and—”
    “Found him dead on the floor, you did what anybody would have done.”
    Swindell blinked. “What?”
    I said, “When you found Abraham Rivkind dead on the floor, the poker nearby, you did what anyone would have. You panicked and ran for help. Joel Bernstein and Finian Quill, picking up the poker as they did, unfortunately ruined any fingerprints the police could have found on it.”
    “What... what are you saying now?”
    “I’m saying there’s no physical evidence to prove who killed Abraham Rivkind, so it’s hard for me to tell his wife it was anything but a burglar who killed her husband, who wasn’t having ‘an’ affair on her.”
    I wondered if I’d changed gears on Beverly Swindell a little too abruptly, but she began to bob her head. “You’re not going to tell the police about me, are you?”
    “Tell them what? You haven’t confessed anything. They should have been able to find out that a dead man had an affair with one of his employees, an affair that would break his widow’s heart if she found out about it. With no physical evidence, it’s a long stretch to the employee being the killer, what with other people like Joel Bernstein and Finian Quill around to back up the burglar story. At best, the finger starts pointing at anybody in the building that night, and with opportunity and probably their own motives, at least Bernstein and even Quill look like a lot of reasonable doubt to me. Maybe the employee would get convicted, but I’d bet against it. And all this about ‘Honest Abe’ would have to come out for no good reason.”
    Swindell set her jaw. “My time in this life, I haven’t met anybody who gives away something for nothing.”
    “And you still haven’t.”
    “What do you want, then?”
    “I want to know what happened to Darbra Proft and why her boyfriend, Rush Teagle, got himself killed.”
    A determined tone. “If you believe I lied to you and the police before, then you don’t have any cause to believe me right now.”
    “I’ll believe you.”
    Swindell paused, then swung her head slowly, keeping her eyes on me. “I don’t have any idea what happened to that girl or her boyfriend or why. I swear to you I don’t.”
    I let out a breath. “I was hoping otherwise.”
    She just kept swinging her head.
    I stood, pushing back my chair, then snugging it under the table. “Good-bye, Mrs. Swindell.”
    As I got to the door, I heard behind me, “Should have been his wife.”
    I turned. Swindell was speaking to her clasped hands.
    “What?”
    She looked up, unfolding the hands in an almost supplicating way. “Abe shared things with me. Not just food or some laughs or a bed now and then, but things he cared about, like his time in the camp or that story about the Spanish couple and the couches. I should have been his wife, not his girlfriend.”
    I said, “Jesus Christ,” and Beverly Swindell probably thought the surprise in my voice had something to do with her.

27

    You have the individual facts, but they never come together because you run into them separately, from different people who don’t seem involved, or much involved, in your problem. And then you remember something, or hear it next to something else, and it’s like one of Nancy’s computer searches, where she asks the machine to find a phrase within a certain number of words from another, and it hits you.
    But it hitting you and you proving it are two different things. Especially if you’re trying to protect someone like Pearl Rivkind and her memories of her husband as you’re doing it. I stayed at my place solo that night, not answering the phone, just thinking about what I needed to find out the next morning.

    “Hold me up and fan me quick.”
    “Mo—”
    “I don’t see you for what, months at a time? And now it’s three times in a week?”
    He was leaning back in his desk chair, the dead cigar at the corner of his mouth. I took the chair in front of the mound of paperwork on his desk.
    “I need some help, Mo.”
    “Huh, tell me about it. You need help? I need help. First I don’t have any story ideas, now I got too many.”
    “Too many?”
    “Yeah, I got this story here about Chinese fortune cookies.”
    “Mo, my—”
    “Did you know fortune cookies don’t come from China?”
    “No,