“I’ve planned for my own future.” Hammer looked around the room, knowing that every molecule within it would have to go.
“I don’t do so badly on my own.”
Randy was younger and angrier. As far as he was concerned, his father had been selfish and neurotic because he was spoiled and made no effort to think about others beyond what function they might have served in his wasteful, rapacious existence.
Randy, especially, seethed over the way his mother had been treated.
She deserved someone who admired and loved her for all her goodness and courage. He went over and wrapped his arms around her as she folded a Key West shirt she remembered Seth buying on one of their few vacations.
“Don’t.” She gently pushed her son away, tears filling her eyes.
“Why don’t you come stay with us in LA for a while?” he gently said, holding on to her, anyway.
She shook her head, getting back to the business at hand, determined to get every reminder of Seth out of this house as fast as she could, that she might get on with life.
“The best thing for me is to work,” she said.
“And there are problems I need to resolve.”
“There are always problems. Mom,” Jude said.
“We’d love it if you came to New York.”
“You know anything about this Phi Beta Kappa key on a chain?” Randy held it up.
“It was inside the Bible in the back of this drawer.”
Hammer looked at the necklace as if she had been struck. The key was hers, from Boston University, where she had enjoyed four very stimulating years and graduated near the top of her class, with a double major in criminal justice and history, for she believed that the two were inexorably linked. Hammer had grown up with no special privileges or promise that she would amount to much, since she was a girl amid four brothers in a household with little money and a mother who did not approve of a daughter thinking the dangerous thoughts hers did. Judy Hammer’s Phi Beta Kappa key had been a triumph, and she had given it to Seth when they had gotten engaged. He wore it for a long time, until he began to get fat and hateful.
“He told me he lost it,” Hammer quietly said as the telephone rang.
West felt terrible about bothering her chief again. West apologized on the cellular phone inside her police car, as she sped downtown. Other units and an ambulance roared to the heart of Five Points, where another man from out of town had been brutally slain.
“Oh Lord,” Hammer breathed, shutting her eyes.
“Where?”
“I can pick you up,” West said over the line.
“No, no,” Hammer said.
“Just tell me where.”
“Cedar Street past the stadium,” West said as she shot through a yellow light.
“The abandoned buildings around there. Near the welding supply company. You’ll see us.”
Hammer grabbed her keys from the table by the door. She headed out, not bothering to change out of her gray suit and pearls. Brazil had been driving around, in a funk, when he’d heard the call on the scanner. He got there fast, and now was standing beyond crime-scene tape, restless in jeans and T-shirt, frustrated because no one would let him in. Cops were treating him as if he were a reporter no different than others out foraging, and he didn’t understand it.
Didn’t they remember him in uniform, out with them night after night, and in foot pursuits and fights?
West rolled up seconds before Hammer did, and the two women made their way to the overgrown area where a black Lincoln Continental was haphazardly parked far off Cedar and First Streets, near a Dumpster.
The welding company was a looming Gothic silhouette with dark windows.
Police lights strobed, and in the far distance a siren wailed as misfortune struck in another part of the city. A Norfolk Southern train loudly lumbered past on nearby tracks, the engineer staring out at disaster.
Typically, the car was rented, and the driver’s door was open, the interior bell dinging, and headlights burning. Police were searching the area, flashguns going off and video cameras rolling. Brazil spotted West and Hammer coming through, reporters moiling around them and get ting nothing but invisible walls. Brazil stared at West until she saw him, but she gave him no acknowledgment. She did not seem inclined to include him. It was as if they had never met, and her indifference ran through him like a bayonet. Hammer did not seem aware of him, either. Brazil stared after them, convinced of a betrayal. The two women were busy and overwrought.