Apricot brandy by Lynn Cesar Page B

be legitimized by the Medical Examiner’s Office.
    “Oh, Marty, you randy scamp! It’s like elixir, isn’t it? And so it begins. So what’s your assessment? Is Karen going to stay on?”
    “My feeling is, she will. She really hates us.”
    “That surprises you? She will indeed stay. Rage and guilt will hold her there. Her squeeze-box died there, and of her disease, of drink. Would that be her now? I hear the rhino tread of Babcock.”
    A knock at the outer door, and there was Babcock, bulkily presiding over Karen’s entry. “Thank you, officer,” said Harst. “We’ll call you when she’s ready to go home. Close the door, dear, please. Sit there. I think we could all use a drink.” He set Marty’s glass by his and brought out a third. Filled all three, studying Karen under the cover of a condoling smile.
    How well Harst knew that stunned slump of bereavement! She had her mother’s gold-and-brown coloring, but her father’s beauty, the lathed cheekbones, the jaw more delicately sculpted but just as unrelenting. Her body was stunned, but not her gray eyes studying Harst and Marty in turn, hate like a smoke in those eyes, looking down at the three shots of brandy and back up at Harst. “Smells like apricot,” she said. Her voice, gritty from long silence, was almost Jack’s voice. It made Harst falter in his answer.
    “It’s Jack’s… it’s your father’s, of course. You know he was my dearest friend, the man who saved my life. When I drink his brandy, I commemorate my love for him, as well as my tenderness for his daughter. You’ve had two unbearable bereavements, Karen. I’m deeply concerned for your state of mind.”
    “You mean my sanity?” A mocking challenge here. He had not expected this alertness in her, this… accusation. He did want to probe her sanity, had hoped, thinking to find her helpless and afraid, that she might blurt out something not sane she had lately experienced and thereby pass on to him a sign, a message from Jack. She had picked up her glass and studied it before he could frame his answer.
    “The kind of grief you must be suffering has nothing to do with sanity, Karen.”
    She ignored him. “Marty? Whaddya think? Should I knock back this hooch? Susan died with her blood running two-point-eight, according to Officer Ape.” This with a bright smile and batted lashes.
    “I’m not sure what you’re asking.” Marty a little blustery. “A drink in moderation, to calm you down… .”
    “No offense, Marty,” she smiled, “but you’re such a moron. You boys want to stand me a drink— how not? Okay. I’d like us to drink, not just to Susan, but to my father. I know you two loved him like a father. Maybe more than a father.” She paused, her gaze lingering on Harst. Saw pure poison glow in his lens-smeared eyes. She had guessed! “Such a man as Jack Fox,” she intoned, “is not erased by death!”
    The two men drank and Karen knocked hers back, thrust out the glass. “Hit me again, Doc.” Slammed that one back, held out the glass again. “Three’s the charm, and not so stingy, Doctor.”
    She stood up when she’d drunk this and slammed the glass down. “This the morgue through here?” She led them out.
    Marty’s eyes questioned Harst, who shrugged. He limped quickly into the lead, brought them to the drawer, unlatched and slid it out. Kravnik, Susan. Severe spinal and thoracic damage… .
    It took Karen’s eyes a long time to receive the catastrophic wreckage. She stood witnessing it, withstanding it. Then bent down to kiss her face, eerily lovely and undamaged above the broken ruin of torso and limbs. “Seems I’m always doing this,” she said in a small voice to herself. And then, to Harst, “That’s Susan.”
    She turned and walked back towards the office, then slowed and turned again. “Did I understand right? You don’t know who she hit?”
    “Not yet,” said Marty. “It had to be a head-on— her car was found mid-road, crushed in half. The