The Sandler Inquiry Part 76

"Why not?" Her question was sympathetic, not challenging. She knew the answer. The other man in her life, the one she'd revealed the previous night.

"I don't think it would be a good idea. I need perspective."

"Perspective on what?"

On you, he thought, but he didn't say it.

"On the case" he said to her.

"Lawyer-client -relationships," he said, "shouldn't be at the mercy of personal relationships" She seemed nonplussed, a little hurt, and certainly surprised.

"I.

... I don't understand the problem" she stammered, apparently more upset than she'd been when disposing of a body off the stern of the ferry. Or when slashing Thomas loose from strangulation in an elevator door.

"The problem he said, "is you. I'm emotionally involved. And I shouldn't be" "Ah" she said, her accent apparent even with that single sound.

She lowered her eyes as if embarra.s.sed.

"I see," she said.

"You didn't know. Until now?"

She shook her head.

"I hacwt been thinking. Not about that."

"Of course," he said, as if in resolution. His tone changed.

"I have to get into. my apartment anyway," he said.

"I have papers there.

Briefs. Books. I have motions that have to be filed for you. Right away, if possible." He let a few seconds pa.s.s.

"In other words" he said,

"I'm still working for you. No matter what."

"Be careful," she said.

"In and out of your apartment, I mean."

He nodded.

"You're precious'" she said. She leaned to him and kissed him on the cheek, a gesture of both affection and grat.i.tude.

He watched Leslie McAdam disappear into the shabby building.

He waited until she raised the window shade upstairs, signaling that she'd pa.s.sed through the odorous hallway uneventfully.

Then he drove back uptown, wondering if this last case in his legal career would ever make any sense. By Fifty-seventh Street his thoughts were drifting. He wondered how Andrea Parker was get Part Six ting on with Augie Reid. How long could a man in his fifties hold her? New York was a young man's town, he tried to convince himself Chapter 26 It was quarter past six when Hearn returned to the Nineteenth Precinct from the downtown headquarters at One Police Plaza.

He strolled casually through the squad room and continued upstairs to the cubicle where he and Sha.s.sad shared two desks.

His red hair was disheveled. Half of this thoughts were on his nine-year-old daughter who had the measles. The other half were on the contents of a manila envelope which he carried under his arm.

He arrived at Sha.s.sad's desk, found his partner, and tossed the envelope across the desk, where it nearly knocked over a paper cup holding dark lukewarm water and a tea bag.

"Tea?" Hearn asked, seeing the untouched cup.

"It's that idiot in the delil" answered Sha.s.sad.

"I ordered coffee with milk. He gives me tea. Tea!" he repeated, playing with the word and trying to sound like an English butler.

"He must think I look like a fairy." He picked up the envelope.

"What's this?"

"Drop a coin in the slot and see what you get," said Hearn.

"Or send down a pair of thumb impressions and see what comes back "

Hearn's expression was anxious, yet sober. Sha.s.sad instinctively knew that the folder within the envelope contained something new on the Ryder case.

"It's the fingerprint readout for our buddy at 457 Park Avenue South'"

added Hearn, sitting down on the edge of his own desk. You like it. I promise ' "It's about time Sha.s.sad answered. He opened the folder and frowned slightly.

"It took a while they told me" Hearn continued, "because they had to go to a back-date file. The guy who belongs to that thumb died in 1965.

Supposedly."

Sha.s.sad examined ten different fingerprints on the master chart returned to him, ten small black-and-white squares enclosing mazes of gray lines. The left thumbprint matched jacobus's.

But the name? The name on the file was all wrong.

"I can't even p.r.o.nounce this c.r.a.p," said Sha.s.sad.

He read. Sergei Sholavsky.

"What the h.e.l.l's this Sholavsky bulls.h.i.t?" Sha.s.sad mumbled to his partner.

"Jacobus's real name?"

"In a sense," said Hearn.

"Yes. I think it is." He paused as his partner glanced through the printout with considerably increasing fascination.

"Aram, fella," he said, 'do you get the idea about what we're getting into?"

Sha.s.sad looked at the front and side profiles of the man named Sholavsky. Then his eyes skipped to the text below.