Chapter 2 - DRAWER FOURTEEN
My first instinct was to run to the shop. It was a terrible instinct, and I knew it even while reaching for my coat. Someone had sent me a photograph of the open drawer. Anyone who could enter my workroom could be waiting there still.
Instead, I forwarded the message to Detective Ellis and called Miriam Alvarez, my oldest friend. She managed a tiny bookstore in the East Village and had spent twelve years telling me to stop acting as though asking for help were a moral failure.
"I saw something frightening," I told her.
"Then you're coming here," she said. "I've made soup."
"Miriam, I can't explain everything on the phone."
"Then you can explain while you eat."
Her apartment smelled of cumin and old paper. I stood in the doorway and discovered I had been holding my breath since leaving Dominic's building. Miriam took my bag, examined the red mark on my neck, and said nothing until I was sitting on her couch.
Then she asked, "Who did that?"
"A man who was supposed to protect the person I was working for."
"Are the police involved?"
"Yes."
"Good. Eat."
It was the simplest kindness anyone had offered me all day.
I showed her the photograph of the cupboard. She recognized the green paint immediately. She had been with me when I cleared my father's workroom after his funeral. Samuel Clark had loved practical things: good shears, sharpened chalk, buttons sorted by weight. He did not have the temperament for secret compartments.
At least, that was what I had believed.
"That drawer was always locked," Miriam said.
"Matteo told me the slide was bent."
"You believed him?"
"I trusted him."
She put her bowl down. "You can trust someone and still discover they kept a secret. Both can be true."
The next morning, Detective Ellis called before I had finished my coffee. She had officers visit my shop overnight. The rear window had been forced, but no one remained inside. Whoever entered had opened drawer fourteen and left most of the room untouched. The message photograph had been taken before officers arrived. She wanted me present for a careful inventory, and she had arranged for a forensic technician to photograph the drawer before we handled its contents.
"Is Matteo really dead?" I asked.
"There is a death certificate and a hospital record. His passing appears genuine. We're requesting more information about the circumstances. Don't let anyone tell you we have ruled out questions we haven't investigated."
I sat very still. For three days I had been carrying hope that he might simply be hiding. Now the hope folded in on itself.
"Can I call his niece?" I asked. "He has family in Queens."
"You may tell her you loved him. Please don't speculate about a cause of death."
By ten, I was back inside my shop with Ellis, a forensic technician named Ortiz, and Miriam at my side. The place felt violated in ways that had nothing to do with the broken window. My father's measuring tape was on the floor. A reel of navy thread had unwound across the tiles. On the counter sat the envelope containing the five thousand dollars, exactly where I had locked it after returning from the penthouse; the thieves hadn't taken the cash.
"They wanted one thing," Ellis observed.
"And I don't know what it was."
Drawer fourteen was open. Its contents had been thrown into a shallow cardboard tray: old cloth labels, blank order forms, three rusted cuff fasteners and a packet of yellowed tracing paper.
I knelt beside it. "There was more here."
"What makes you think so?" Ortiz asked.
"The drawer has a false depth. The rear panel should go back another two inches."
He gave me room to examine without touching. I pointed at a faint square in the dusty wood.
"My father constructed this cupboard. He couldn't bear wasted space."
After photographing and documenting the area, Ortiz carefully loosened the removable rear panel. Behind it lay an envelope flattened by time. The thief had opened the front, but evidently hadn't realized another piece of wood could move.
On the envelope my father had written: FOR B., WHEN SHE CAN CHOOSE.
My chest hurt.
The technician lifted it into a clear sleeve. Inside was a piece of patterned cloth, blue-gray wool with a tiny silver stripe, and a page from a tailor's cutting ledger. Across the page ran four columns: a customer's name, a date, a garment number, and the initials of the person who accepted delivery.
At the bottom was a note in Samuel's handwriting.
ANTHONY RUSSO. OCTOBER 14. COAT LINING REPLACED. ASK MATTEO ABOUT EXIT 3.
"What year?" Ellis asked.
"Ten years ago," I said. "The night he died."
Miriam looked from the paper to me. "Your father worked for the Russos?"
"Not regularly. Matteo had big clients. Dad handled the difficult alterations. He never told me their names."
The bottom corner of the ledger had been torn away. A line ended after three tiny black dots, drawn in ink. I suddenly saw that same mark on the memory module, then Anthony's wrist in Dominic's description.
"My father drew these," I said. "Maybe he used the mark to identify Anthony's coat."
"Maybe," Ellis replied. "We'll compare ink and paper, and try to locate the matching page."
She was careful about maybes. It made her easier to trust.
While she arranged for the evidence to be logged, my phone rang. The caller identified herself as Alessia Russo.
"I'm Dominic's sister," she said. "He told me you found something in Matteo's jacket."
Her voice was controlled, but the silence between her sentences was full of strain. She lived in Philadelphia and worked as a legal aid attorney. Our conversation lasted only a few minutes before I realized she was asking questions Dominic hadn't thought to ask.
"Did Matteo ever contact you about a man named Gideon Shaw?"
"Not by name."
"Did he mention my father's old business partner?"
"No."
"And what did Victor do when the module came out?"
I told her about the gun. For the first time, her voice trembled.
"Victor was there the night my father died," she said. "He told me he was too late to help. He said he saw the ambulance lights from the street."
"The video shows him inside the building."
"I know. Dominic sent me a still."
She took a breath. "There's something else. Our mother called me last night. She said Father's number rang her phone too. She didn't answer."
I felt the room narrow. "The disconnected number?"
"Yes. Whoever is using it knows all three of us will recognize it."
"It might be a spoofed number," I said.
"That's what I think. But Mother is frightened."
I looked through the shop window at the street where my father once waved to me after school. "I'm sorry."
"I'm sorry for you too," Alessia said. "Matteo fitted my first school blazer. I used to complain he made the sleeves too long."
A lump rose in my throat. "He always left room for growing."
"Exactly."
She promised to contact Ellis about the calls. Before hanging up, she added, "My brother looks intimidating. He often forgets that doesn't mean people trust him. If he starts deciding what you should do, tell him I said to stop."
I laughed despite everything.
By late afternoon the shop was cleared for limited use, though the drawer and its contents remained under police supervision. My landlord appeared as I was locking the front door. He had a letter in his hand and would not meet my eyes.
"Beatrice, I hate this," he said. "But the building was sold."
"Sold? When?"
"The closing was yesterday. The new company intends to redevelop the block. They've issued a notice disputing your lease renewal."
I took the paper. The buyer was a holding company called Mercer Property Services. Its registered agent was a law firm, not a person I recognized.
"You can't just evict me tomorrow," I said.
"I know. You should talk to a tenant lawyer."
My father had spent thirty years in that room. I imagined his green cupboard being dragged into a dumpster. The thought made me furious enough to be useful.
I called Miriam. She gave me the number of a legal clinic. Then I called Ellis and told her about the timing of the sale.
Afterward I walked to the river and watched the traffic darken beneath the elevated road. Dominic called once. I let it go to voicemail while deciding whether I wanted to speak to him.
His message was brief. "Alessia says you found one of my father's fittings. I've asked an independent firm to preserve our old garment invoices. I won't come to your shop unless you invite me. I hope you're safe."
I called him back.
"My lease is under attack," I said.
He paused. "By whom?"
"Mercer Property Services."
A silence.
"Dominic?"
"Gideon Shaw used that company for property acquisitions ten years ago," he said. "I thought it had been dissolved."
I looked at the water, black between the pier lights.
"Then someone isn't just hiding what happened to your father," I said. "They're trying to erase the place where mine kept the record."
"Beatrice, listen to me."
"I am."
"Please don't face them alone."
I thought of Matteo and Samuel, of Alessia's frightened mother, of Victor's gun. "I won't," I said. "But I'm not going to disappear either."
When I returned to Miriam's apartment, a folded paper was waiting under her door.
It wasn't a threat. It was a copy of a ten-year-old photograph: Matteo, Samuel, Anthony Russo, and a fourth man in front of my father's shop.
Someone had circled the fourth face in red.
May you like
On the back, a single sentence read:
ASK WHY HE WASN'T AT THE FUNERAL.
