The Midnight Club_ A Novel - James Patterson [41]
The back of Stefanovitch’s shirt was already soaked. Airconditioning was blowing down on his neck and shoulders. None of it really mattered.
He wasn’t going to see the Bear again. That mattered. How many real friends did you get in your lifetime? Four or five at the most? If you were lucky. Now one of his was gone.
After a few minutes, a trumpet struck the first familiar and dreaded notes of taps. Bear Kupchek’s funeral was beginning.
39
AFTER THE SERVICE, Stefanovitch and Sarah McGinniss left the church together. They went over to the Kupcheks’ house in his van. Sarah had come out to Ridgewood with a representative from the police commissioner’s office. She needed a ride anyway.
The Bear’s oldest son, Mike, Jr., was only fifteen, but he already resembled a football middle linebacker at the college level. He was a junior Bear in almost every way, lumbering and cuddly at the same time. Stefanovitch didn’t know whether to laugh or cry as he hugged Mike, Jr., as he talked to the boy about nothing, mostly, desperately needing to communicate affection to the Bear’s son.
Later on, Stefanovitch and JoAnne Kupchek talked in the kitchen for over an hour. They drank Glenlivet from the same water glass. They held each other, trying to find comfort, eventually singing an old Polish love song from JoAnne and the Bear’s wedding. They were both missing him terribly.
Stefanovitch had promised Sarah that he’d drive her back to New York. It was past five when they finally got onto Route 17 again, heading toward the George Washington Bridge.
They were stalled in heavy commuter traffic at the bridge. Cars were backed up a mile from the tollbooths. For the first time that day, they talked about the murder investigations; what Kupchek might have found out the night he was killed; whom he might have seen. Neither of them really had the heart for the talk.
Back in the city, Stefanovitch turned onto Fifth Avenue. Sarah asked him to make a left on Sixty-sixth. Her apartment was between Park and Madison.
“That’s the place. The green canopy,” she said a few moments later.
Stefanovitch stopped the van in front of a prewar building with a forest green canopy. A spiffy doorman was there, Johnny-on-the-spot. A huge directory desk was visible through the open door into the lobby. Fancy place.
“Please come in for a minute. Don’t play the hard-nosed New York City cop. Not right now, not tonight. Have one drink with me, Stef? Please?”
Sarah didn’t give Stefanovitch a chance to answer. She called out the open window to the doorman, who was already approaching, cleaning his wire-rimmed eyeglasses as he lumbered forward.
“Mr. McGoey, will you take care of Detective Stefanovitch’s car? Find a spot for it?”
“Of course, ma’am. No trouble at all.”
A rustic fieldstone fireplace dominated the living room of Sarah’s apartment. She started a modest blaze, and it seemed peculiar at first—the warm, crackling fire with the air conditioner on—but the aromatic smells of oak and pine quickly permeated the room and made it special.
The two of them began talking. They shared ironic perceptions and stories much more comfortably than they had at the beach house.
Stefanovitch eventually told her about growing up in coal-mining country, about his three years of globe-trotting, and finally finding himself in the navy, then his four-year marriage to Anna. For her part, Sarah finally told some stories about Stockton, California. Her humor about growing up was mostly self-effacing, and Stefanovitch liked her for it. Putting herself through school, she’d been an onion topper, cherry picker, Mexican-café hash slinger, McDonald’s girl, Baskin-Robbins ice cream girl, plus a door-to-door encyclopedia salesperson for one day in Oakland, actually for four and a half hours.
Stefanovitch suddenly realized that he wasn’t used to having a woman as a friend. He thought that most men still weren’t ready for that—no matter how many