“That figures,” said Jude as he removed another suit from a hanger and began folding it.
“You would think he might have discussed his will with you. Mom.”
Tart of it is my fault. ” She closed a drawer, wondering how she could have endured this
activity alone.
“I never asked.”
“You shouldn’t have to ask,” Jude angrily said.
“Part of the whole point of living with someone is you share important things with each
other, you know? Like in your case, so you could maybe plan for your future in the event
something happened to him? Which was a good possibility with his rotten health.”
“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?