I looked up online all I could find about Courtney Burns, but there isn’t much. Her obituary was scarce on details. Her social media pages are long gone. Her death has long since been ruled a suicide. “I’m looking for details about a woman named Courtney Burns. She committed suicide about four years ago.”
“And what’s this for?”
“Just… curiosity.” I pause. “Will you do it, Riley?”
There’s a long silence on the other line. What I’m asking Riley to do isn’t exactly kosher, but he’s done it for me before. “Okay,” he says. “Give me a couple of days.”
A few days later, Riley sends me a text, asking if I would meet him out in Queens. At a pizza place where we used to eat a while back. Dino’s. Great crust, oily cheese. I haven’t eaten a slice of Dino’s Pizza in almost ten years. These days, if somebody brought a pizza pie into my house, I would yell at them. That’s the sort of woman I have somehow become.
Ironically, I have to ask April to pick up Leo so I can meet Riley. The kindergarten day ends at noon. The boys get in a whopping three hours of school, then it’s all over. April is so cheerful about agreeing to pick Leo up, I feel a stab of guilt.
I show up at Dino’s ten minutes early. Ever since I can remember, I’ve been a stickler for promptness. Nothing upsets me more than when somebody can’t be bothered to show up on time. So it pleases me when I walk in the door of Dino’s and find Riley already waiting at a table.
“Julianne Abrams.” He stands up to greet me. “It’s been a while.”
It has been a while. A long while. I feel suddenly self-conscious in that way you always feel when you’re in the presence of somebody you used to have that sort of relationship with a long time ago. Worrying if my hips have gotten too wide or if the makeup has concealed the crow’s feet. To make matters worse, Riley looks great. Still so solid and muscular. Same reddish-brown hair, now a little gray at the temples, but it suits him. There’s a scar on his right jaw that I don’t remember from the last time I saw him. And he still had those unassuming light blue eyes that make people trust him—a valuable commodity for a detective.
“It’s Bressler now, actually,” I say as I sit down across from him.
“Right.” He nods. “Keith Bressler. That was the guy you gave it all up for.”
“Right.”
He grins at me. “I’ve gotta be honest, Jules. I never got what you saw in the guy.”
He always says that. The God’s honest truth is I never liked Keith the way I liked Riley. But Keith was who I was expected to marry. You don’t move out to Long Island and become president of the PTA if you’re married to Riley Hanrahan. That would be a very different kind of life. At the time, picking a man like Keith seemed like the right thing to do.
“Really,” I say, “it’s none of your business.”
That only makes Riley grin wider. “Funny. That’s exactly what I expected you to say. That’s your answer whenever you don’t have an answer.”
I just roll my eyes.
“And what about the DA’s office? When are you coming back?”
“I don’t know,” I say quietly. Every time I mention the idea to Keith, he’s unenthusiastic. He says if I go back, it should be on the defense side. Better money to be had. But I never liked the defense. From what I could see, almost everyone who walked into that courtroom was guilty.
“You need to come back,” he says. “The guy who took your place? He sucks. They need you.”
I try not to let on how pleased his words make me. I’ve been doing a lot of things with my life since I quit my job: motherhood, the PTA, volunteer work, far too much time at the gym. But nothing ever seems to fill that void.
We each get two slices of cheese pizza with pepperoni on top. At first, I start counting calories, but then I say to hell with it. Today, I’m going to have two slices of greasy pizza. And I’m going to enjoy it.
“So this chick Courtney Burns,” Riley says, when his mouth is stuffed with cheese. He always seems to have something to say when he has a mouthful of food. “That was an interesting one.”
I raise an eyebrow. “Really? How so?”
He puts down his pizza slice. “This is between us, right? This information doesn’t leave Dino’s.”
“Of course.”
“Well…” He takes a drink of soda. I watch him, wondering how he got that scar on his jaw. “Officially, it was ruled a suicide, but they were investigating it as a homicide. The woman was hot and heavy with her boss, some big shot lawyer. And from what I gathered, she was pressuring him big-time to leave his wife and kid. He didn’t want to. But she wasn’t rolling over easy.”
“I see.”
“And then all of a sudden, she takes a bunch of pills and offs herself? No, that doesn’t make sense to me.”
I agree with him. But I keep my mouth shut.
“But the lawyer had an airtight alibi,” Riley says. “He was at work at the time they estimated Burns took the pills. Lots of witnesses. And the lawyer’s wife—they looked into her too—she was home the whole night with her baby and also her mother was visiting. So again, there was a witness.”
I think back to the other day at the nursing home. Janet’s words: I won’t tell anyone. I swear. I’ll say she was with me the whole night.
“Maybe they put the pills in her food?”
“Nah, sounds like they checked for that. And anyway, it wasn’t like she swallowed a few drops of cyanide. It was a huge overdose of one of her own prescription medications—she never would’ve done that by accident. They found the empty bottle of Ativan in her medicine cabinet. And you want to hear the other crazy part?”
I swallow a glob of pizza. “What?”
“She hacked off all her hair before she killed herself.” He makes a snipping motion with his fingers. “With a knife. It was all over her bathtub. Disturbing stuff.”
“Was there a note?”
Riley shakes his head. “No note. And her family and friends also swore there was no way she would do something like that. But you never know. People do crazy stuff. You know it better than anyone.”
“Yes…” That was, after all, how Riley and I first met. He was assigned as a detective on a murder trial where some guy killed and buried his girlfriend in the backyard. I’m the one who made certain the guy was locked up for life. But we wouldn’t have had a chance of nailing the guy without Riley’s solid detective work.
“So.” He picks up his pizza again. “Why the interest?”
I consider telling a lie, but Riley stuck his neck out for me. The least I can do is be honest. “The wife of the lawyer is my neighbor.”
He laughs. “Figures—that’s the suburbs for you. Anyway, if I were working the case, I’d bet odds the wife killed Courtney Burns. So, you know, be careful.”
“Don’t worry about me.”
“Except I do.” The smile drops off his face. “You know, if you got a problem, you can still call me.”
“Right.”
“I mean it.”