Seven Minutes to Noon

crumpled onto the soft cushions. Alice remained where she was but her eyes stayed with Judy. Poor woman. It was always the ones with the tightest surfaces, the highest sheen of control, who contained the most turmoil.
    “Something happened,” Judy sobbed into her hands, “and now it’s all over.”
    “I’m sorry,” Alice whispered. And she was, though she didn’t know what for. She stood there waiting for an ebb in the tide so she could say good-bye and leave.
    Glancing around the pretty, disheveled room, Alice saw the true impact of the handiwork samples she had noticed around Judy’s desk at the office. The woman seemed to have crafted every soft surface in the room except the rug and possibly the sofa’s silver jacquard upholstery. The seats of two antique armchairs were meticulous canvases of needlepoint gardens. The chairs straddled a small, scallop-edged table holding a framed eight-by-ten photograph of Judy and a man who looked vaguely familiar to Alice. They both smiled broadly, arm in arm, linked together in a happy moment like an old couple. But nothing else here spoke of marriage; it was so completely feminine a room. An antique hutch was draped with an elegant, hand-sewn runner with midnight-blue tassels at either end. On the couch where Judy sat was a collection of needlepoint and bargello pillows, all but one with symmetrical patterns of minute flowers creating the effect of a kind of garden fireworks. The exception was a single pillow whose minutiae had in effect been reversed. Instead of an abundance of flowers, it showed a single bloom in perfect detail, with the tight focus and burgeoning sexuality of a Georgia O’Keeffe painting.
    Alice must have been staring at it because Judy’s sobbing eased suddenly. “It’s supposed to be a peony,” she said, “but like everything else I probably got it wrong.”
    Now Alice saw that it was a peony.
    “It’s beautiful,” Alice said.
    Judy picked up the pillow and ran her shaky fingers on its nappy surface, keeping her eyes on Alice. “It was the French girl’s idea.” Her voice was rough from crying. “Sylvie. She told me about the woman who loved peonies, the one they found in the canal. A woman thrown away like garbage.” Judy began to weep again. “Here.”She threw the pillow to Alice. “Sylvie told me the woman was your friend. This means more to you than me.”
    Alice caught the pillow. “I can’t take this.”
    “It doesn’t matter to me.” Judy took a deep breath in an effort to control herself. She lifted her rheumy eyes to Alice in what looked like both abandonment and plea. “I only make them because I need something to do with my hands. Sylvie backs them for me and takes them over to the Women’s Exchange. I sell them because they mean nothing to me. I don’t need the money. Take it, please.”
    Judy got up and walked over to the divan. She stooped down for her mug and immediately drained it, her eyes avoiding the newspaper.
    “Thank you,” Alice said. “I know just where I’ll put it.”
    Judy waved her off with a nonchalant wrist flick. Holding Peter’s fire truck and the pillow, Alice found the front door.
    As soon as Alice got home, she slid that day’s newspaper out of its plastic sleeve and spread it out on the kitchen table. She flipped directly to the Metro section and quickly found the photo of Julius and his cohort on page three beside the headline BROOKLYN SLUMLORD INVESTIGATED IN BROKER ATTACK, Realtor in Coma, Possible Connection to Missing Pregnant Women, by Erin Brinkley.
    Alice was amazed at the speed with which Erin Brinkley had discovered Julius Pollack. Recently it seemed as if the reporter was reading Alice’s mind. The man in the photograph was identified as his partner, Sal Cattaneo. He was in his fifties, Alice guessed, with a tousled halo of prematurely white hair, and smile lines extending from his eyes. He looked friendly, unlike Julius, who even in this picture, with his smile, appeared hardened. Alice took another look at Sal Cattaneo, the man Pam, with all her connections, had tried and failed to unearth.How had Erin Brinkley discovered him so easily? Sal Cattaneo. Both the name and the face were familiar to Alice but she couldn’t place either.
    Sitting at her kitchen table, she read the article.
In a convergence of three unsolved cases, local police have begun to scrutinize notorious slumlords Julius Pollack and Sal Cattaneo, longtime partners in Metro Properties, in connection