Ken cocked his head at Rafe. “Is someone suing you? Do you need to put all the art in my name?”
Rafe gave a perfunctory smile. “She’s a detective. She cares about a very old case where I was a witness to the torment of one of the lawyers.”
“Joel?” Ken asked.
Rafe turned his teacup round and round without looking at either of us. “I believe the dead past should bury the dead, but Vic wants to dig it up. I thought someone from my father’s old temple had sent her here to paw through old gossip about Joel and me, but she’s after different gossip. What exactly are you hoping to learn?”
“It’s that old trial,” I said. “But now—I can hardly say what I do want. If you’ve seen the news reports, you know that Stella Guzzo is saying she found a diary her daughter kept, implicating my cousin in her murder.”
“Rafe doesn’t watch the news; he thinks it’s vulgar,” said Ken, “but I do, I know what you’re talking about. Your cousin was the hockey star?”
Ken’s English was accentless and idiomatic. Perhaps the result of his childhood in Japanese consulates.
“Right.” I took a sip of the tea and decided I wasn’t crazy about it, either. “Stella Guzzo has a long history with my family and I let her rattle me. I don’t know why she’s trying to prove her innocence now, instead of twenty-five years ago when she was in court, and I got obsessed with finding a copy of the trial transcript, to see if she or Joel had tried to suggest my cousin could have come to the house and—and assaulted Annie while Stella was out playing bingo.”
“Someone must have a record of the trial,” Rafe said impatiently.
I explained that most trials didn’t have complete transcripts unless someone paid for them. “I hoped Joel’s old firm had kept one, but they don’t exist anymore. You talked to him while the trial was going on. Do you remember what he said—besides whining, I mean.”
Rafe grimaced at my repetition of his word. “It was a long time ago and I wasn’t paying attention. I kept asking Joel why he’d gone into law when he didn’t like it, but he didn’t have a métier of his own and it was too easy to do what Ira and Eunice wanted.”
He steepled his hands, put his chin on his fingertips. “He was scared. Not of what his parents thought or wanted. Someone had frightened him. I didn’t want to know about it at the time, because I thought— He and I had sex together when we were teenagers, sixteen, seventeen. It didn’t last, but I thought someone was threatening to expose him, and that it could land on me. It’s hard to remember now, but twenty-five years ago, public outing could kill a career. Mine, I mean. That’s why I stopped listening to him. I told you I was a coward.”
“No,” I said, “when you’re struggling to survive, no one gets to label you a coward, not even you yourself in your private thoughts.”
Ken clapped my shoulder. “I like this Jehovah’s Witness.”
I smiled absently but spoke to Rafe. “You were afraid of exposure, so if Joel said anything that showed he feared something else, you didn’t register it at the time. Think back now. What did he say, why did you realize he was afraid?”
Rafe thought for a long moment, but shook his head. “Sorry. I can’t remember nuances or words from back then. Just the feeling.”
“And the possibility that Annie was sleeping with Mr. Mandel? Stella says Annie told her terrible things and that’s why she beat her to death. It—I—” I shook my head, trying to clear it.
“Annie was one of my mother’s pupils, she was ambitious, but young and inexperienced. Maybe Joel was right, maybe Mandel was preying on her—it’s a commonplace, older man in a position of power, vulnerable young woman. But what if it was the other way around? What if Stella was right about this one thing?”
“That justifies her killing her own child?” Ken was scornful.
“Of course not,” I said impatiently. “Nothing justifies that, not even Stella’s claim that Annie attacked her. I can’t explain it—it’s twisted up in my childhood, my memories of my mother, my cousin—”
I broke off, unable to put it into words, and even a bit embarrassed at blurting it out in front of these two strangers.
“I want to see the diary Stella claims she found,” I finally said. “It seems too pat that it showed up right after I went to see her. If she knew about it during the trial, why didn’t Joel use it in her defense?”
“Yes, Vic, but what if Annie wrote about Joel in it?” Ken suggested shrewdly. “He wouldn’t want his bosses or the judge and so on to read it.”