Stubbs shuffled the folders, laid them side by side, put a palm on each of them. He wanted the two dead Russians to be connected, and then again he didn't want them to. Connecting them might turn two unsolved cases into only one, and he might feel only half as bad. Then again, police work was about the possible, and if the two stiffs were connected, that argued that there was in fact a Mafia involved, and if there was a Mafia Stubbs might very well be stymied altogether and end up feeling twice as bad.
He got up from his desk and paced. He was hungry. He thought about the coffee-sodden weight of a donut. Then he remembered something that he'd only half-noticed before. He opened the Lazslo Kalynin folder. The body had been found by a housekeeper. The cop who'd first arrived at the crime scene was Carol Lopez.
He raised her on the radio and asked her to meet him at the morgue in half an hour.
"Little hard to tell without the nose," said Lopez, when Ludmila had been slid out on her slab. "But yeah, height, shape, I'd lay a bet that's her."
Stubbs looked down at the blue skin, the matted tangled hair. "She say anything you remember? Anything at all?"
Lopez pushed her hat back with her forearm. "Barely spoke English. Said hello and pointed. I sent her home."
"Very upset?" said Stubbs.
"No," said Lopez. "Not that showed."
"Maybe she saw something she shouldn't have seen."
Carol Lopez shrugged. "Wonder what got the nose."
"Grab a donut?" said the homicide detective.
An attendant slid the corpse back into place. The slab locked in like a file drawer.
Stubbs said mostly to himself, "Maybe I'll see if Markov can ID the body. Gimme an excuse to talk to him again at least."
Chapter 36
The Mangrove Arms was strangely quiet.
The woman who occasionally appeared to do the breakfast had straightened up and left. The few guests had had their fresh-squeezed juice and their muffins and their sliced papaya, and had gone out to sightsee or were lazily baking at the edge of the pool. Aaron and Suki—faces close, arms intertwined—had been nailing down a puckered runner on a stairway, and now they took a break for coffee.
They sat down in the unromantic kitchen, and Suki counted Band-Aids on Aaron's hands. "Only four today," she said.
"Getting better with the hammer." He tried to smile but it didn't quite work. He looked at her. The undaunted gleam was back in her unlikely eyes. Her bruises were healed and her tanned neck flowed down to rosewood shoulders. They were alone and it should have been wonderful, but Aaron was fretful and preoccupied.
Suki, in his house and not his lover, could not help wondering if it was because he regretted inviting her to stay. She sipped some coffee, hid her face behind the cup. "Something wrong?"
"Wrong?" said Aaron. A pathetic evasion. Even in business he'd never got comfortable with fibbing. "Guess I miss my father. Can't help being worried."
Suki wrestled with an impulse. She wanted to put her hand on his. But touch was not a simple thing. Between a man and woman who were not lovers, it could easily go wrong, or go too right; a gift of comfort could seem too bold, a gesture of solace could cross over into awkwardness. She held her coffee mug and the moment slipped away.
Aaron said, "You think it's weird? How close we are?"
"I think it's great," said Suki. "I can't imagine wanting family in my face, but the two of you, I think it's great."
Aaron drank some coffee, glanced at the outsize pots and pans hanging from their racks. "Growing up," he said, "all my friends, their fathers worked too hard. Never around. Or around and exhausted. Everyone felt gypped. I didn't. My father was around. We did things. He taught me stuff."
"My old man taught me stuff too," said Suki. "Pour boiling water on roast beef if people said it was too rare. Check dinner rolls for bite marks before putting them in the next guy's basket... Wha'd he teach you?"
Aaron pushed his lips out, searched for a way to sum up the oblique and scattered and half-learned lessons of a childhood. Finally he said, "He taught me to make the most of what I had."
"Example?"
Aaron pondered, looked out the French doors to the glaring water of the pool. "Pitching."
"Pitching?"
"Pitching. Baseball. I was a skinny kid. Smallish. Weak. But I loved to play. I wanted to pitch. My father said, 'We'll study up.' We watched the little guys, the Whitey Fords, the Bobby Shantzes. So great, watching Whitey Ford with my father's arm around my shoulder. My father said, 'Aha! Mechanics and control! You don't have to be a shtarker—'"
"Shtarker?" Suki said.