Free Somebody Else's Music by Jane Haddam Page B

how to spend money on herself. She thought for a moment of all those things in Maris’s apartment—the Steuben glass tumblers, the one-of-a-kind handmade king-sized down-filled
quilts, the shoes from Brooks Brothers and Coach—but that, of course, was because Maris had never had children. She had nothing to spend her money on but herself, and besides, she was used to having that kind of thing in her life. If she were ever forced to go without it, she’d be too depressed to function.
    Liz checked, one more time, to make sure that she had everything she’d brought with her packed up and ready to go. Then she hoisted the tote bag over her shoulder and went out the door at the side of the podium, out the wide corridor with its twenty-foot-high ceiling, into the sun and light and spring of Morningside Heights. Students at Columbia liked to tell their friends back home that they were going to school “in Harlem,” but although it was technically true, it was fundamentally a lie. On an afternoon like this, Columbia could have been set in the middle of a field in Vermont or on the edge of an English village, it had so little in common with the raw violent ugliness of so much of the city around it.
    And not just Harlem , Liz thought, flagging an empty cab on its way downtown. She settled herself in the back and gave the driver the address of Jimmy’s apartment. She put the tote bag on the floor at her feet and her head back on the curved top of the seat. Jimmy’s apartment was in the Dakota. His neighbors had approved mightily when they had first taken up together—they liked to think of themselves as cultivated and intellectual—but approved less so now, when her picture was on the cover of every tabloid in the supermarket. Sometimes, she wondered what it would take for her to stop feeling so guilty, because guilty was what she felt, all the time, about everything, and especially about Maris. It seemed to her that the things that had happened for her had been entirely a matter of chance and circumstance. A lot of people who were better writers than she would ever be had not been given spot after spot on CNN. A lot of people who had had more promise and more talent than she could ever have imagined in herself had ended up flat on their faces, like Maris, through no
fault of their own. Of course Maris drank, Liz thought. She would drink herself, if she were Maris, if she had started out with all of Maris’s brilliance and talent and promise and watched it come to dust in her hands. Liz knew what they said about her, at home: that she had somehow caused Maris to fail; that she had no right to succeed when Maris had failed so badly; that it wasn’t fair . She knew, too, that this was the kind of thing people did as they reached middle age and found that their lives had not worked out the way they wanted them to. What she couldn’t shake was the feeling that, in her case, they were absolutely right. It wasn’t fair, and she had no right to any of it. What had happened to her was not like working hard and getting ahead, but more like winning the lottery. One day, the numbers on her particular ticket had been drawn, and forever afterward—
    What?
    The cab had pulled up to the curb in front of the Dakota, on Central Park West, not around the corner at the gate where John Lennon had died, because Liz truly hated that gate. She remembered taking a friend from out of town up there on the morning after it happened, when she was still an editorial assistant and her friend was still in graduate school. They had been lovers once, but her move to New York had been too much for whatever they’d seen in each other. He was the kind of man she’d gotten used to in college, with family money and the disdain for routine work that went with it, and by the time she had been working and on her own for a month, she was already disappointed in him. What bothered her about the Dakota now, of