“Monsieur Vercier?” I said without thinking.

  There was a hesitation on the other end. “What name did you say?”

  “I’m sorry, I was thinking of something else. Who is this, please?”

  “Can I speak to Mr. Peter Simon, please?” A bass voice, slow-talking and authoritative and a little world-weary.

  “Speaking. Who’s this?”

  “Mr. Simon, this is Detective Sergeant Kovalski. I’m over here at the Sixty-first precinct house in Sheepshead Bay. I’m afraid I may have some bad news for you.”

  I’d been in the act of sitting down, but I froze halfway to the chair. Oh, my God. Lily. My heart turned to water.

  “Yes?” I managed.

  “We found the body of a man this morning, and he had your—

  A man. Thank God. I sank bonelessly into the chair, light-headed with relief. “—name and address on him. I was hoping you could help us identify him. In his sixties or seventies, on the small side—”

  “White goatee? Heavy glasses?”

  “I don’t know about the glasses, but goatee, yes.”

  “I think it could be my wife’s father. I mean, I don’t know, but—”

  “Well, we’d appreciate it if you or your wife could come take a look and make sure. It’ll take maybe an hour, total.”

  “Yes, uh … sure.” Lily’s father dead? Despite how quick I’d been to think it, it had only now registered. “How … what happened to him?”

  “I’ll explain when I see you. You know where the morgue is?”

  “The morgue? No!”

  I guess something about the way I said it made him feel I couldn’t be trusted to find my way around the city unaided. “Sir, you’re at home, right? 2017 Eighty-third Street? You just stay right there, and someone will be along for you in five minutes.”

  Someone was, and not long afterward I was standing in a carpeted, purposefully cozy room, much like a doctor’s or dentist’s waiting room, complete with out-of-date magazines, except that one wall had an oversized window, on the other side of which was a “viewing room” with walls of white-glazed brick tile that brought to mind the gorilla cage at the Prospect Park Zoo. Into this room an attendant wheeled a gurney with a sheet-covered form that didn’t look substantial enough to be a human body.

  It was, however. When the attendant bent over it and delicately lifted one end of the sheet, watching my reaction like a waiter displaying the contents of a chafing dish, I saw the old man’s face. Aside from the blue-gray, waxy cast to his skin, I can’t honestly say that he looked any worse than he had when he’d stood on our stoop the previous week; even then he’d had the look of a man with one foot in the grave. If anything, I’d have to say he looked better. His eyes were closed, his facial muscles relaxed. He looked peaceful.

  “That’s him,” I said.

  Sergeant Kovalski nodded to the attendant who gently replaced the sheet. Kovalski then led me to small office a few yards down the hall.

  He didn’t bother to shut the door. “Have a seat.”

  It was the kind of charmless, all-purpose room that was there for the use of whatever cop or deputy district attorney was passing through: gray metal desk, matching Naugahyde armchair and side chair, a telephone and an old Royal manual typewriter. No mementos, no knickknacks, nothing but a few shreds of Scotch tape on the pale-green walls.

  And Kovalski looked like the kind of person who was as much at home there as anywhere else; a baggy-faced, old-shoe kind of guy in his late forties in a poorly fitting black wool suit, with dark rings under heavy-lidded eyes and a slightly fed-up but not really unkind expression that said he’d seen just about everything, so don’t even think about trying to pull anything on him.

  “Name?” he said.

  “Pete Simon. Well, Pierre on my birth certificate, but—”

  “No, his.”

  “Oh, Marcel Vercier.” I spelled it for him.

  “No middle name?”

  “Uh … no, I don’t believe so. Well, I don’t actually know for sure.”

  “Uh-huh. Age?” He was ignoring the typewriter and writing in a notebook, neatly block-printing his letters.

  “I, uh, don’t know that either. Mid-seventies, wouldn’t you say?”

  He shrugged. “Address?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know.”

  “But he lived here? In New York?”

  “I don’t think so. I’m not really positive.”

  His eyes rolled up just a little—what kind of twit was he dealing with here?—as he passed across a transparent plastic envelope with a card inside. On the card was my name, address, and telephone number in pencil, in a European hand.

  “Other side,” he said.

  I turned it over. It was a business card, expensively engraved on thick stock, but dog-eared and stained: Galeria Metropolitana. Antigüedades superiores. There was a telephone number and an address in Barcelona, Spain.

  “Mean anything to you?” he asked. “It was in the breast pocket of his coat, the only thing he had on him.”

  I shook my head. No. Sounds like an antiques store, or maybe an art gallery.”

  “Yeah, so why would he be carrying their card? Was he an art collector or something?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Huh.” He rooted around for another question. “So what did he do for a living?”

  Another shrug. “Sorry.”

  He put down his mechanical pencil and swiveled his armchair to look at me, his mouth pursed. “How long you and your wife been married, Mr. Simon. You mind if I ask?”

  I was starting to get uncomfortable. For one thing, he was looking increasingly dubious. For another, being interrogated by a cop was a new experience for me. Let alone in a morgue.

  “Seventeen years,” I told him.

  “You been married seventeen years and you don’t know where your wife’s father lives? You don’t know what he does? You don’t know if he has a middle name?”

  “I’ve only seen him once—last week. I thought he was dead.”

  “Yeah, well, he’s dead, all right.”

  “I mean already dead. Twenty years ago.”

  That took some explaining, and by the time I finished I was sweating and jittery, and making dumb remarks. I’d make a hell of a criminal, I thought. I was practically ready to hold out my wrists and let him put the cuffs on me.

  Kovalski jotted in the notebook while I spoke, then snapped it shut and slipped it into a pocket. “Well, under the circumstances, I think we better get your wife to come in too. You know, to confirm the identification and fill us in a little more on the old guy.”

  “You mean here? To the morgue?” Lily had been so tightly strung, so … fragile all week that it worried me to think of her being hauled out here to look at her father’s corpse. I shook my head without meaning to. Using Lily and overstrung in the same sentence was something I wasn’t used to.

  Kovalski, God bless him, must have sensed what I was feeling. “No, I don’t think she needs to view the body itself. We’ll use a nice photograph from the neck up, nothing too terrible, and we can do it at the station house. Coney Island Avenue, just above Avenue W. That’d be easier to get to. Today would be good.”

  I looked at my watch. It was 3:30. “She’ll be out of school in an hour. It’s not far. I could have her there by five.”

  “Good enough.” He got up and extended his hand. “Okay, Mr. Simon, thanks a lot for coming in. We’ll get you back home now.”

  “What did he die of, do you know?” I asked on the way back down the hallway.

  “I wouldn’t put it this way to your wife,” Kovalski said, “but he died of getting the shit kicked out of him.”

  I stopped short. “He was murdered?”

  “With a baseball bat, a lead pipe, something like that.”

  “But his face—it wasn’t—there weren’t any—”

  “He took it in the stomach; the stomach and the back, down here.” He put his hand on his hip, about where his kidney was. “Busted ribs, cracked pelvis, internal injuries.”

  “Well … but …”

  I was stunned. He’d looked so ill when I’d seen him before that I’d assumed he’d died of whatever it was that was eating him up. And now this, coming out of the blue on top of everything else. It just seemed like too much to deal with. How was Lily going to handle it?

  “It didn’t take much,” Kovalski said. “The doc said he was on his last legs anyway. Panactic cancer, something like that.”

  “Pancreatic?”

  “Yeah, pancreatic. Anyway, they dumped him in a marsh down by the bay. What was it, robbery? You said he had nothing on him but the card.”

  “Yeah, probably.”

  I shook my head. “But why would they want to beat him up like that? What kind of fight could he put up, that they’d have to do that to him?”

  Kovalski snorted, blowing out his lips. “What, they need a reason? Look, I don’t suppose you’d know if he carried a lot of cash on him?”

  “No, I don’t. He was staying in a suite at the St. George, so I suppose he must have—no, I don’t.”

  “No, I didn’t think so.”

  He swung the front door open for me. “Listen, buddy, don’t worry about your wife. We’ll be as gentle as we can. You can come in with her if you want.”

  But of course I did worry. On the way home in the squad car I kept wondering how she’d react. If seeing him on the doorstep had unhinged her the way it had, what would happen when I told her he’d been killed? I wasn’t even sure whether it would be bad news or good news. I simply had no idea what to expect, and that was one more strangeness added to all the rest. If someone had told me a month ago that I’d ever think of Lily’s behavior as unpredictable, I would have laughed. But things had changed and I wasn’t laughing now.

  * * *

  My wife is employed three days a week as a counselor at a junior high school on King’s Highway, six or seven blocks from our house, where she works with handicapped kids. On most days she likes to walk there and back but occasionally I drop her off or pick her up. Since she wasn’t expecting me today, I parked smack in front of the main entrance, where I could see her come out, instead of in the parking lot.

  While I waited I suddenly became aware that the muscles at the base of my skull, which had been tense for going on a week, had unknotted, and that I was actually feeling … what?

  It took a minute to admit to myself that it was relief, plain and simple. Whatever discord and trouble that unhappy old man had brought with him and dropped into our laps, it was ended now, already in the past and telescoping backward. Sure, I had some distressing news (at least I thought it would be distressing) to break to Lily, but after that it would be over, done. We would be as we were before.

  When the doors opened and she emerged chatting with some friends, I waved to her from the car. She came smiling, thinking that I was picking her up as a peace offering and eager to accept it. I did my best to return the smile—I wished it had been a simple peace offering too and nothing more—but something in my face must have been off-key. Her smile faltered as she got into the car.

  “Pete, is anything wrong?”

  I wasn’t sure what the answer to that was, so I borrowed Kovalski’s approach. “Lily, I’m afraid I have some bad news.”

  A muscle twitched near her mouth but she didn’t say anything; just stared at me with wary eyes.

  “Your father’s dead. The police found him this morning.”

  She turned away and looked at the sidewalk. “I see.”

  “Someone … he was murdered.”

  Her head spun back. “Murdered? He was murdered?” I could see that her mind was whirling, but I couldn’t tell what was she was thinking. Or feeling. Surprise, of course, and maybe consternation, or even horror. I was pretty sure it wasn’t grief.

  “Why? Who did it?”

  “They don’t know.”

  “How was he—how did it happen?”

  I told her as much as I knew, editing Kovalski’s description into something a little more tolerable. “The police would like you to come in this afternoon. I told them I’d bring you.”

  “You mean this afternoon? Right now?” She was sitting straight up on the front edge of the seat. Her knuckles were tense on the dashboard. “Why?”

  “Well, to confirm the identification—”

  “No, I’m not looking at his body.”

  “No, you won’t have to. I already did that. They want you to come to the police station, not the morgue. They’ll show you a picture of his face, that’s all. It isn’t bad to look at, there aren’t any—they didn’t hurt his face. And I guess they want to ask you some questions. A Sergeant Kovalski. Not a bad guy, you’ll see”

  She shook her head slowly back and forth. “I never, never thought …” She didn’t tell me what she never thought; she just let the sentence drift away and sank back against the seat. “All right,” she said quietly.

  “I’ll go in with you, if you want.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Or not,” I said. “Either way. Whatever you want.”

  “I’d rather do it alone.” She glanced at me. “Do you mind?”

  “No, of course not.” Like hell, I didn’t. Was I supposed to not mind being kept out of her life? I needed to help her, to offer whatever support I could.

  We drove without saying anything for a few minutes, until I turned south off Kings Highway. “Honey, you’ll have to tell them the truth, you know. Whatever it is.”

  “I know that.”

  “Aside from whatever was wrong between you and your father, this is a murder investigation we’re talking about.”

  “Pete, I said I know,” she said and went back to looking stolidly out the window on her side.

  Me, I sulked on mine, but when I parked a few yards down the street from the station and turned off the engine she didn’t get out right away. Instead, she reached out tentatively to cover my hand with hers. “Pete …”

  I looked at her. Her expression had softened, become uncertain. “Pete, I know I haven’t been fair and I’m sorry. You’ve been fantastically patient with me.”

  I waited.

  Her eyes dropped to our hands. “Do you remember what you asked me a couple of nights ago? Did my father ever … did he—”

  “Take advantage of you?”

  She nodded, still looking down. “I said no, but I wasn’t telling the truth. When I was seven years old he started to … to …” She cleared her throat and waited a few moments with her eyes closed. “It went on for weeks—at least I think it was weeks, I can’t really remember, but it was horrible, I can’t tell you … When I finally found the nerve to tell my mother, there was a huge explosion and she threw him out. I never saw him again. Not till last week.”

  She looked up savagely. “I hope to God he rots in hell,” she said through clenched teeth.

  I leaned across and gently kissed her forehead. “You could have told me, baby, you should have known that. Did you really think it could make any difference in the way I feel about you?”

  She squeezed my hand. “I know, I should have told you in the first place, years and years ago, but I so much wanted you to like me. There’d been so much ugliness during the war, so much filth. I wanted you to think of me as clean. I was so young, Pete … I made up that story about the executions, and after that I couldn’t bring myself to tell you the truth. And the longer it went on, the more impossible it got. I guess I convinced myself that it was all dead and buried, but then when he showed up, it all came back. I just couldn’t—I didn’t know what to do, I was so afraid you’d be—”

  “Well, I’m not; of course I’m not. I’m glad you finally told me.” I pressed the tip of her nose with my finger, which made her laugh the way it always did. “Okay,” I said happily, “now that that’s out of the way, you go and tell the sergeant about it too. And that’ll be the end of it. I’ll wait here for you.”

  “I will.”

  “And when you’re done, what would you say to dinner and a movie?”

  She nodded happily, her pretty eyes brimming, and reached for the door handle. “My gosh, I love you.”

  I touched my fingers to my lips and blew her a kiss.

  * * *

  Not for a second did I believe her. Oh, I don’t mean about loving me, I believed that, all right; I’d really have been in bad shape if I didn’t believe that. But the story about her father: that hadn’t rung true. When I’d suggested something of the sort the other night her shocked, disgusted denial had been a hundred percent genuine, I was sure of it. (Considering the fact that she’d successfully flummoxed me for seventeen years about his being dead, I suppose I shouldn’t have been so certain, but I was.) And something about this new story, or rather about the way she told it, convinced me that it had been contrived on the way to the police station, concocted to get her out of a jam.

  I didn’t believe it, but that didn’t do anything to affect that overwhelming feeling of relief. Whatever it was, whatever nastiness or imagined nastiness had transpired between her and her father it was over now, and if she wanted to let the past lie and go back to being my good-humored girl, I was more than ready to go along. What did I care about what might have happened twenty years ago or more? Could it change what I felt about this woman I knew so well, or what she felt about me? Of course not—not unless we let it, which we’d been doing since he’d appeared. But that was it; no more.

  Did I give any thought to the idea that she was in there, in the Sixty-first precinct house, lying to Detective Sergeant Ivan Kovalski in connection with a murder investigation? That what she told him—or failed to tell him—might send him down the wrong path? That because of her, some brutal thug who’d beaten a sick old man to death might conceivably get away with it?