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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  For My Mother,

  Lee Clark

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Members of the Sixth Precinct Detective unit for their cooperation in answering some pretty odd questions; the staffs at the U.S. Printing Office and the Social Security offices in New York for their help with Medicaid and benefits questions. Janet, Lynn, Linda, and Hope for their patience, honesty, and input; and as ever, Gregory.

  CHAPTER ONE

  WHERE am I gonna get a gun?

  “… As I told you last week and the week before that, if the out-patient program is not on Medicaid’s approved list, then we do not pay for it,” Mrs. Simpson’s voice droned.

  “I understand that,” Dottie said, gritting her teeth. “And as I told you last week and the week before that, I no longer have private insurance. I have no money. All I am asking is: What agency, or person, I can send these letters to, to get approval for this program?”

  “Again, the program is listed as ‘experimental.’ We don’t pay for experimental programs, and, osteoporosis is not on our list of life-threatening illnesses, therefore we don’t review it.”

  “Oh, Christ! There’s another list?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Weist, and this disease is not on it—”

  “Look, it’s a special exercise program done in a pool to alleviate bone stress and—”

  “It’s experimental! It is not covered,” the woman cut Dottie off. “And even if it wasn’t an experimental program, osteoporosis is a chronic condition. We don’t pay for treatments of chronic conditions.”

  “You pay for AIDS. Are you telling me AIDS is not a chronic condition?”

  “AIDS is a life-threatening illness. Osteoporosis is not listed as a life-threatening condition.”

  “Well, it bloody well should be. My mother died of osteoporosis.”

  “Your mother died of heart failure, Mrs. Weist, you said so on your forms.”

  “She wouldn’t have died of heart failure if all her bones hadn’t broken,” Dottie yelled, exasperated.

  She watched Mrs. Simpson grunt and shake her head. “Don’t raise your voice to me. You think you can come in here and use up all my time—”

  “That’s your job. I’m not asking for favors, I want a name! You jerk!”

  Mrs. Simpson stood.

  “Her name is Hillary Rodham Clinton and the address is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue! Now get out of my office,” she shrieked, and behind her, Dottie heard a cough. She looked over and saw a large guard, complete with gun, standing at the door, looking at her.

  She glared back at Mrs. Simpson and grabbed the letters.

  “I’ll leave, oh, don’t you worry,” she said, stuffing them inside her purse.

  “Good.”

  “My congressman will be hearing about this,” Dottie warned.

  “Send my regards,” Mrs. Simpson yelled after her, as the guard wrapped a large hand around Dottie’s upper arm, led her out of the little cubicle and down the hall.

  She stared straight ahead, holding her head high with as much dignity as she could muster as the guard walked her through the filled outside waiting room. She was escorted down to the lobby, and the guard stood, watching her push through the revolving door. He crossed his arms over his huge belly and stared at her with a sneer, as if saying, “Go ahead, just try coming back inside this building.”

  Dottie stood in front of the large glass doors. She was not going to move until he did.

  She focused in on her reflection in the glass, and was startled by the woman who stared back at her.

  She looked so thin and pale. She’d been a size fourteen for nearly a decade, and now, after a seven-week stay in the hospital at the beginning of the summer, she was a size eight. Her baggy old dress made her seem even thinner and, worse, fragile somehow. She needed a haircut. It had been a while since she’d been able to afford one. For years she’d taken great pains with her hair, keeping it a reddish blond and cut chin-length. Now it was graying and overgrown. She had a sharp nose and dark-blue eyes that were exactly like her mother’s had been. Her eyelashes were long and spiky, and curled up over puffy brows and drew attention to her eyes. She had flat Irish cheekbones which sat high on her face, and thin lips. She could still be considered a good-looking woman, but she looked so haggard in the glass.

  She felt humiliated at having been physically ejected from the office. She had never been thrown out of a place in her life.

  Her hip flashed pain through the right side and she’d only been at Medicaid for five hours. Five hours at their offices was a sneeze, as she well knew. She turned away from the building.

  How dare they make her beg? She was not asking for welfare, she was not asking for a handout. She had worked hard all her life. The government didn’t seem to have any exemption lists when they were taking the money out of her paycheck every week when she had a full-time job. But now that they had to pay some back out, well, suddenly she had to go beg.

  Well, they were going to see.

  Yes, they were going to see, she thought bitterly.

  The government was going to pay.

  From now on, the government was going to pay for everything.

  She got on the train and went directly back to her apartment on Sullivan Street. She tossed her purse with all the medical letters on the kitchen table, and turned on the television. She strode into the bedroom and pulled Nathan’s old address book out of a drawer. Dottie lowered the volume slightly on the television as she passed and sat down at the table in the kitchen.

  She gently balanced her glasses on her nose, making sure the chain went around her neck, so God forbid she wouldn’t drop them. That would be all she needed, breaking her only pair of glasses. Who the hell knew what she’d do then.

  She turned the pages until her eyes stopped midway down at the N’s.

  Newhouse, Fred and Teresa.

  That was the number.

  When had she seen them last?

  Christ, Agnes’s wake. Fred had worn his usual baggy brown suit with a little paisley bow tie at the neck and a gray felt hat.

  In the sixties it had looked sharp; in the nineties it looked like something that should have the smell of mothballs.

  And Teresa, she had grown immense over the years. When they appeared in the doorway at the wake, her size made Fred seem scrawny. Teresa was the kind of woman Dottie saw over the years only when their husbands got together, or heard about through their mutual friend Roberta, who had grown up with Teresa. Other than that, she and Teresa had absolutely nothing in common. They’d never been friends.

  When had Agnes’s wake been? Dottie tried to remember. Well, she’d try the number. Fred would know a fence; honesty was not his long suit.

  Her eyes looked up at the clock on the kitchen wall.

  Two thirty-five.

  She couldn’t call Fred and Teresa till after three, that was what Nathan had always told her. She was edgy, and she stood up, looking around for something to occupy the time.

  The kitchen was easily the largest room in the apartment, and had a serv
iceable but old refrigerator, a stained and pitted double porcelain sink, an equally serviceable four-burner stove. A large white porcelain table, ringed with a black stripe and scratched from years of use, sat in the middle of the room and served as both the only workspace and the dinner table. She remembered how many evenings she had slid the extension out and placed folding chairs around for her husband’s poker games.

  She and Nathan, Jr., would watch television in the big bedroom in back until he fell asleep. Then she would turn off the set and sit up and read. Most evenings she would fall asleep like that and would come out in the morning to find Nathan snoring on the couch, the porcelain table smudged by cigar and cigarette ashes, littered with overflowing ashtrays and juice glasses with stale beer in them.

  How many years had she put up with that?

  How many years had she excused herself from doing anything about Nathan’s gambling? And what was her big stand?

  That Nathan, Sr., was not allowed to play in the house since the child had to be up early, and his bed was the fold-out couch in the middle room. Dottie shook her head.

  When Nathan died, she rearranged the apartment a bit, moving the television into the living room so she could watch it during dinner. Eventually she moved herself onto the couch, where she would fall asleep to the drone of the television. She walked into the living room and began making up the fold-out couch.

  Well, she liked to think of it as a living room, even though it was mostly a kind of hallway connecting the bedroom in front, which overlooked the street, with the kitchen in back, which overlooked an air shaft. She carefully tucked in the top sheet on one side of the couch.

  She had never thought it would come to this.

  She winced and felt her stomach go on her again. She’d had a weak cup of coffee for breakfast and that was it. And at the hospital they’d given her this whole list of “calcium-rich” foods she was supposed to eat each day. Her stomach burned. She was lucky if she could afford the coffee.

  She walked around to the other side of the couch, smoothed out the sheet, and folded it into a hospital corner on the end.

  That stay in the hospital.

  If that hadn’t happened, then she wouldn’t be in this situation … although, maybe, the hospital hadn’t been that bad. After all, they’d fed her, given her clean clothes, and … she felt a wave of anger go across her chest.

  There was something wrong when a hospital stay was the highlight of your year.

  All she’d done was fall down crossing Fourteenth Street in the early summer. She’d woken up in St. Vincent’s Hospital, to be shown ghostly X rays of broken-up pieces of bones all over the place. And this doctor, whose accent was so thick she could barely make it out, had given her some kind of explanation for all of this in big medical terms, but it all boiled down to this: Her bones were becoming too brittle to hold up her body.

  And Dottie knew from experience it was not going to get better. She thought of her own mother, and all the time at the end when she had lived in the hospital. And she remembered the operations, and the pins in her hips and her knees, the broken wrist from trying to get out of bed. And all the weeks and months of broken bones until finally … Dottie couldn’t think of it anymore.

  Good God, dying of broken bones. She always thought she’d die from emphysema from all those cigarettes she’d smoked in Joe’s smoke-filled nightclub. Hell, if she’d have known, she wouldn’t have quit smoking twenty years ago. But not to be able to walk … She remembered how high she could kick in a chorus line.

  That was always the complaint about her performances: “Dottie, you got legs forever, but you can’t kick that high! Makes the rest of the girls look like they ain’t even trying.”

  She could kick so high she could kiss her knee without having to move her neck forward even a little. When she was a little girl, her one indulgence had been dancing lessons. First ballet, then tap and jazz … oh, the pairs of shoes and tights she went through.

  Broken bones. It wasn’t fair. She’d already spent too much time in hospitals with Nathan in the end. And yes, even though he’d lived to an old age—he was over seventy when he died—it had scared her.

  The pain of being so close to her own mortality, that was what frightened her about Nathan’s death.

  No matter what she told people about facing death, the fact was that deep down she felt she was going to be the exception to the rule and live forever. And watching him die had been like being hit in the face with cold water.

  Here she was, alone, with nothing! Nothing! Where the hell had all the years gone? Where was her life?

  It was especially bad when she was alone in the hospital with all those foreigners sticking things into her, taking things out of her, rolling her here and rolling her there. She’d count every day waiting for the end.

  And now she was on her steady diet of pills, and she spent her days waiting for the next round of broken bones.

  It didn’t matter anyway. No one was concerned with Dottie O’Malley Weist.

  She looked back up at the clock.

  Quarter to three. She just wanted to get this over with.

  She had begun to feel as if she didn’t exist anymore. She had lived alone for four years now.

  After Nathan died she’d made an effort to get out, get involved with something. She’d signed up for a senior citizen’s group which met every Thursday night in the basement of St. Anthony’s Church.

  Jesus! Had that been depressing!

  A roomful of ancient women who spent each evening recounting the deaths of their husbands in, it seemed to Dottie, unnecessarily graphic detail. And when they had exhausted that topic, they would move on to the disgusting operations and ghastly deaths of friends and family.

  Dottie soon stopped going to these meetings.

  Slowly, a kind of eerie anonymity began to creep over her life. It was almost like being in solitary confinement, even though she lived in a city of eight million people.

  For instance, she could recall one whole month going by without actually being addressed by another human being. Dottie felt her eyes begin to get itchy. She had to change the subject in her head …

  And not to be touched by another human being—that she could count in years. Just to have someone hold her hand, or give her a pat on the shoulder, even … she began to hunger for that, and so for a while she would deliberately walk slowly and let busy people brush against her …

  She finished making up the couch, and glanced up at the clock. Three on the nose. She moved over to the phone and dialed Fred and Teresa’s number.

  The television was still blaring as usual behind her. She’d gotten into the habit of turning on the set whenever she entered the apartment. She couldn’t stand the silence of the place. She was thinking she should have turned it off before she dialed the number, but it was too late now, the line was ringing. She waited for the phone to pick up, and she sat, tapping a pencil.

  “Hello?” A voice came on after the ninth ring.

  “Is this Teresa Newhouse?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  “Dottie Weist, Teresa,” she said as calmly as she could.

  “Dottie? Weist?” the voice croaked back to her.

  “I’m Nathan’s wife? I saw you last at Agnes’s wake, er, several years ago. Teresa, do you know who this is?”

  There was a silence.

  “Yeah. What you think, I’m stupid? What you want?” she demanded.

  That was Teresa. Rude, with an edge in her voice that could cut through walls.

  “I want to speak to Fred.”

  “He’s dead.”

  Dottie exhaled. “When?”

  “Five weeks ago.”

  “I’m sorry, Teresa. Is there anything I can do?” Dottie’s voice softened.

  She detected just the tiniest sob, and then there was a long silence; it sounded as if Teresa had put the phone down. Dottie waited patiently for Teresa to pull herself together.

  “Dottie? You there?”<
br />
  “I’m here.”

  “I gotta go.”

  “Sure thing. Look, you need some company maybe?” she asked. There was a silence.

  “I ain’t got nothin’ in the house,” the gruff voice came back.

  “Well, I’d just like to pay my respects.”

  There was another silence, and she waited for Teresa to make some sort of decision.

  “When you wanna come over?”

  “I could come over now, this afternoon.”

  “All right. I’ll be here,” she said, as if it was a major concession for her to have to socialize with Dottie.

  “Fine. I’ll see you around four.”

  She waited and finally heard the click.

  She prayed Teresa would be able to give her the number of a fence.

  * * *

  TERESA DENUNZIO NEWHOUSE sat at the kitchen table and stared at the phone.

  What the hell did she want to come up bothering her for? She took a deep drag on her cigarette and blew the smoke hard, so it shot out in a stream at an angle.

  Miss High-and-Mighty.

  And all the men, they would swoon over her like she was some kind of delicate flower or goddamn queen.

  Well, Dottie O’Malley Weist was no queen.

  Oh yeah, she knew her. She always had these airs, as if she were better than the world, but Teresa knew it was all an act. For instance, she wouldn’t read the Star or the National Enquirer, like the rest of the world. Oh, no. She read “literature.”

  All those books she was always reading. The real thick kind, with the plastic library covers on ’em. She’d bury her nose in them and not talk to anyone else.

  But Teresa knew what the truth was about those.

  She wasn’t really readin ’em.

  She was just pretending. No one really reads those things. Says so right in all the newspapers all the time. Not with a kid and a husband to look after. It was just that she did it so good. Her eyes would actually move across the page as if she knew what all them words were, but Teresa had proof Dottie wasn’t really reading.

  Her lips didn’t move.

  And no one reads without moving the lips, this was a fact.