Rachel Alexander 04 - Lady Vanishes

stopping my belt.
    She didn’t answer, thinking over if she should tell.
    “Who?”Sounding like an owl.
    “Why, it was Harry,” she said.
    As if I should have known.
    “Harry Dietrich?”
    Venus nodded.
    “Harry Dietrich,” she repeated.
    “But he was seventy-four,” I blurted out. She couldn’t have been more than forty, forty-two at most.
    “And ugly ,” Venus said. “Homely as a toad. But I loved him to pieces.” Venus swiped at her eyes, then took a deep breath. “And he loved me.”
    “What did he say when he saw it was you?”
    “He stood and took my hand, turning it over and kissing the palm. Then he pulled out a chair for me and said, ‘Sit down, darling, we have so much to talk about.’ ”
    “As if he knew? ”
    “As if he’d won the lottery.”
    “And then?”
    She seemed lost in thought.
    “Rachel, the funeral is at ten, at the Ethical Culture Society on Central Park West. You’ll be there? You won’t forget?”
    I nodded.
    “But—”
    “I’m sorry to run like this. I have to see the lawyer. I’ll speak to you tomorrow, Rachel. You do understand, I couldn’t have just blurted this out to you. What would you have thought?”
    “There’s more, isn’t there?”
    “Oh,” she said, “count on it.”
    What was she doing, taking her time to build up some trust in me before she blurted out the rest, not unlike the kids in her actions?
    But according to Venus, we didn’t have time to build trust. We needed a leap of faith, if we were going to find out what we needed to know by Friday.
    “Venus—”
    “I’m going to be late.”
    “Just a quick question,” I told her, not taking no for an answer this time. “I was told it was you who called nine-one-one. How did you know something was wrong, that Harry had been hurt?”
    “Molly told me. She said Cora was arguing with Dora in the dining room and that when she’d had enough, she’d turned her back to her, which meant she was then facing the window. She began to bang on the glass, Molly said, and when Molly rushed over to tell her to stop, that she might break the window and hurt herself, she said she was trying to wake up Harry, that he’d taken off his shoes and was taking a nap on the sidewalk and that that wasn’t right. He ought to be in his bed, she told Molly. That’s the rule. Molly looked out, saw Harry out there, and came running to tell me.
    “Had Cora seen the accident happen?”
    “Not that I could tell. I think she must have looked out minutes afterward. You have to understand, Rachel, with this population, there’s no way of knowing things like that. I’ve got to go now. I really do.”
    I would talk to Cora myself. But if Venus couldn’t find out anything right after the fact, there wasn’t much chance I’d get a straight story days later.
    I watched her walk toward the locker room. When she was out of sight, no one around except Eloise, the gym cat, sitting on the back of the couch watching Dashiell sleep, I turned my belt back on, stepping on and again slowly increasing the speed, as if staying where I was would help me figure out what to do next.
    I have to see the lawyer, she’d said.
    What lawyer?
    Harry’s lawyer, I thought, no doubt about it.
    I let that sit, feeling the weight of it.
    It was time to find out who might stand to gain from Harry Dietrich’s demise, I thought, hoping Venus White would not be on that list, knowing she would be, right at the top, her life in danger because of it.

Chapter 11
    I Wanted To Shake Her

    I wanted to shake her, push her back onto a chair, stand over her, one finger poking at her chest, demand that she tell me the rest of it, now —this exasperating woman, building me up for each piece of her autobiography so I wouldn’t think ill of her. What did that have to do with anything anyway?
    What did she think—that if she told me everything at once, I wouldn’t understand?
    Or was it that I would?
    She was going to see Harry’s lawyer. Shouldn’t I be in the locker room, too, cleaning up, telling her, like it or not, I was going with her, that she wasn’t letting me do my job, that, no two ways about it, I had to find out what the lawyer had to say, I had to know once and for all what the rest of the story was, whatever was keeping her up nights, scaring the hell out of her?
    But if I did go with her, would the lawyer talk? Who the hell was I that Harry’s lawyer should talk to me? And what made me think Venus would let me rush this, find out