The Best Friend (Broden Legal #3) - Adam Mitzner Page 0,6

women are not supposed to drown in the bathtub.

“Nicky’s here,” I said. “He’s resting in our bed. He called me right after he discovered her body, and I went straight to their house. The police were already there. I stayed with him until they left. He’s . . . well, you can imagine. Devastated. He took something to calm himself, and then he felt tired. I didn’t want him to be alone.”

Anne took in the information, nodding as I spoke. Then she said something I would hear many times over the next six months: “How can you even drown in your own bathtub?”

“She must have hit her head or something. Maybe getting out and she slid back in.”

Anne brought her hands to her mouth, clearly shaken as she absorbed our new reality.

Nicky and I met shortly after my family moved to Queens, when I was eight. My mother had excitedly told me that our new neighborhood was named after John Jacob Astor, who was the richest man in the country at the beginning of the twentieth century. I later learned that the town elders had hoped that by calling their village Astoria, the town’s namesake would invest in the neighborhood, but Astor gifted the village only $500, and he actually never set foot in the place that bears his name.

Even without his largesse, however, Astoria flourished. The 1960s brought an influx of Greeks into the neighborhood, as was evident by the Greek restaurants, Greek bakeries, and Greek Orthodox churches. One such place was the Apollo Market, owned by Nicky’s family.

I met my future best friend on a muggy August day, about a week before we began fourth grade. Our apartment was stifling hot, and I had no friends to play with outside. In what was a first, my mother gave me a nickel to buy a pack of baseball cards, simply so I’d leave the apartment and stop sulking.

Even though Nicky was only eight, he was working the market’s cash register. He urged me to open my pack in front of him. I cracked the gum in two, giving him the bigger piece, and he looked over my shoulder as I shuffled through the cards.

“Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford in the same pack!” he exclaimed. “I’ve never seen that before. You must be the luckiest kid in the world.”

I’ve often wondered if Nicky and I would have been friends had our bond not formed so early. Not because I wouldn’t have wanted to be his friend—everyone wanted to be around Nicky. He had that sense of ease that you hoped would rub off on you; simply being close to him bathed you in the warmth of the sun that seemed to perpetually shine on Nicholas Zamora. I brought little of that to the table. Although I was a decent athlete, puberty was not kind to me. I topped out at five foot six on my toes and could no longer compete athletically with boys like Nicky, who were half a foot taller. But through our school years, he kept me close, never dropping me for his jock buddies or the girls who flocked around him.

After my parents died, I lived with Nicky’s family during college vacations until graduation, which his parents attended in my parents’ stead. Then Nicky and I shared a walk-up apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. I worked as a paralegal for a big law firm while going to St. John’s Law at night. Nicky tended bar at night while he claimed to be writing the great American novel during the day, but to me it seemed as if he spent most of his free time drinking and bedding beautiful women.

We were still sharing that same place when I met Anne. Back then she joked that she wanted to get married just so she’d have only one husband, not the two she currently felt wedded to because Nicky and I sometimes seemed joined at the hip. The joke was on her, of course. Even after Anne and I were married, the three of us remained inseparable.

Losing my parents had already conditioned me to accept that the unthinkable sometimes happens, and always without warning. Yet Carolyn’s death still shocked me. I couldn’t believe she was actually dead.

Anne, on the other hand, had never suffered a loss of this magnitude, and therefore had the belief that the world made sense and was safe. For her, Carolyn’s death was unfathomable, a breach of the world order upon which she relied. Whereas I