Fletch Won (21 page)

“Very much,” she said firmly. “Very much.”

“Ex-pired husband. With sounds.
Hay Ha Haw.”

“They’re good poems, aren’t they?”

“I think I believe you. The Poetry of Violence written by…”

“The few critics who reviewed the poems referred to them as that. ‘Poetry of Violence’? I suppose so. Poetry of Truth and Beauty. I don’t like labels.”

“Your writing those poems changes the meaning of them altogether.”

“Does it? It shouldn’t.”

“It changes the perspective.
The sidewalks of the city/ Offer up without pity/ Old ladies to be mugged
. If you think a young man wrote that, it seems cruel. But if you know a sixty-year-old woman wrote it—”

“I don’t know about criticism. I know Tom needed to publish something, to keep himself employed at that
university. His own poems wander around on black shoes like Donald. Never can get ahold of them. So verbose they should be verboten. Well, they are forbidden, essentially. Couldn’t get them published. So I gave him mine. He has my five grandchildren to support.”

“My God. Life is crazy.”

“Interesting thought.”

“Tom talks as if he wrote those poems!”

“He’s supposed to. It’s a secret, you see. Even Nancy doesn’t know. You mentioned perspective. Who’d publish the poems of a little old lady in a private mental home? Tom is a university professor. If he presents something to a publisher, at least it will be read. Right? I can’t help it if the world’s perspective is crazy.”

“When people are corrupt enough to oblige lies, you oblige them.”

“Tom’s working on the second volume now. I’m helping him. It’s very difficult for him, you see. When a person has to lecture almost every day in fifty-minute lumps, it must be nearly impossible for him to think in terms of a simple, concise line, each word pulling more than its own weight, a cadence that works in the briefest moment. Don’t you think?”

“I have no idea.”

“But you see, I, on the other hand, have lived more or less in silence. A silence so profound that when a sound, a word emerges into it, I realize it in the most complete sense, hear it, feel it, touch it, taste it, turn it over and over, in its isolation, in my isolation. Sound, to Tom, in his busy life, with five children, must be resisted, somewhat. Sound to me is cherished, and I coax it into fullness, into meaning.”

“Explored, exploited, explained, exploded,” Fletch said. “Expired.”

“I do think I’ve identified for Tom a previously unadmitted, shall we say? source of beauty. He’s getting
the hang of it. Pretty soon some of these poems will be entirely his.” Louise Habeck looked around the recreation room. “And pretty soon it will be time for supper.”

“There’s a story I’ve heard,” Fletch said slowly, “that Donald Habeck was taking a turn for the religious.”

“Donald was always religious,” Louise Habeck said.

“No one else seems to think so.”

Louise Habeck shrugged.

“He was a liar,” Fletch said. “A paid liar, a professional liar. You yourself said you wouldn’t believe him if he told you he was dead.”

“A liar has a regard for the truth such as the rest of us do not have,” Louise Habeck said. “A liar believes that truth is somehow difficult, mysterious, mystical, mythical, unobtainable, to be pursued. I’ll bet you that while Demosthenes was wandering the earth, searching for an honest man, he was selling gold bricks on the side and cheating his landlords. To the rest of us, truth is as obvious, as common, as plain, as a simple poem.”

“Would you believe Donald would retire into a monastery?”

“Oh, yes. It would be just like him. Just what he would do. He was forever poring over religious tracts, books of sermons, proofs of this and that.”

“How could his children not know that?”

“They know nothing about him, other than what they read in the newspapers. Nobody did. After you read about Donald in the newspapers, you don’t want to know him.”

“Did he ever take instruction in any religious faith?”

“All of them. That’s how he spent most of his evenings. That’s why I never saw him. The children never saw him. Never knew him.”

“Listen,” Fletch said softly, “Donald Habeck had a mighty unusual lady we both know committed to a mental institution.”

“Yes,” Louise Habeck said. “Me. It was very kind of Donald, very correct. Living here is much nicer than
living with him. I get to watch other people eat. All of the people here” —she waved her arm around the room— “are better company than Donald was. I come and go as I please. People give me rides. They talk to me, usually. I tell them stories about Peru. And Donald was right: I was buying rather too many washing machines and lawn mowers.”

“Have you ever been to Peru?”

“No, but neither have they.”

“Mrs. Habeck, your son is a monk who can’t find peace. Your daughter and grandchildren live in squalor. Your son-in-law is a pudgy impostor.”

“What does that have to do with Donald?”

“Donald could have helped them, gotten help for them, at least have been accessible to them, tried to know them, see them.”

Louise Habeck stared at the floor between them for a long moment. “Donald wandered away,” she said, “after God. I hated him for it.” Somewhere in the building a soft gong sounded. Her eyes rose to meet his. “The poetic irony would be,” she said, “if Donald were shot before he could escape his life of lies.”

“Did you shoot him?”

She smiled. “At least now I know where he is.”

People were hurrying out of the room.

“Come on,” she said. “I’ll show you out the side door. It’s much simpler than going through all that rigamarole at the front door. Your not signing in would confuse your signing out.”

“Thanks for doing my laundry,” he said, following her. “Although your delivery system leaves something to be desired.”

Walking down the corridor ahead of him, she said, “Washing your clothes, I came to love you.”

At the Emergency Egress Only, Fletch said, “Okay if I come by someday and take you for a cup of tea?”

Louise Habeck shook her head. “I doubt I’ll be thirsty.”

Fletch rang several times and waited several minutes but no one answered the door at 12339 Palmiera Drive. The sun was lowering. It was getting cooler. There were no cars in the driveway, no wreath on the front door. Louise Habeck was in a home for the mentally unwell. Robert Habeck was fretting in a monastery. Nancy Habeck was living in squalor with a husband who was a fraud. And Donald Habeck was dead, murdered.

And Jasmine?

Fletch backed up from the front door and looked up at the curtain that had moved as he was leaving that morning.

It moved again.

He smiled, waved at the curtain, turned, and walked to his car at the curb.

As he was getting into his car, the front door of 12339 Palmiera Drive opened. The silhouette in the door was as the gardener had drawn it in the dirt.

Fletch closed his car door and started back up the flagstone path.

She came down the steps to the walk. Behind her, the door closed.

“Oh, damn,” she said. “I just locked myself out.”

“Are you Jasmine?”

She nodded. She was older than she looked at a distance. Older, heavier, face more scarred by cosmetics, eyebrows more plucked, hair more dyed.

“My name is Fletcher. I work for the
News-Tribune.”

“How am I going to get back into the house?”

“Cook’s not here?”

“I couldn’t pay her. She went.”

“Why did you come out?”

“I was curious.” Jasmine was wearing an unmournful, low-cut, yellow sweater blouse, lime-green slacks, spike-heeled shoes. “That bundle of clothes you dropped off this morning. They were Donald’s clothes.”

“Sorry I couldn’t have them cleaned before I dropped them off.”

“Are they part of the investigation?”

“No.”

“I mean, I know they weren’t the clothes he was, uh, dead in.”

“No. They were just his clothes. I was returning them.”

“Oh.” That seemed to satisfy her. She looked worriedly at the house.

“Jasmine, I’m puzzled.”

“Aren’t we all. I mean, really!”

“Did Donald discuss giving five million dollars to the museum with you?”

“No.”

“Not at all? He never mentioned it to you?”

“Not a peep. To the museum? I read in the paper he was planning to give money away to somebody.”

“Did he ever mention religious art to you? Show you any?”

“I don’t even know what it is. Religious art? I thought only people could be religious.”

“Did he ever talk about religion to you?”

“No. Lately he’s been reading big books instead of sleeping. Big novels.”

“Did he ever mention to you his visiting the monastery in Tomasito?”

“Where his son is? No. I’ve never been there.”

“Did he ever suggest to you that he might like to enter a monastery?”

Her eyes widened. “No!”

Fletch too looked at the house. “So. We’re all puzzled.”

“He lived like a monk,” she said. “Up all night, reading.
War and Peace. The Brothers Karaminski.”

Fletch’s eyes narrowed. “Harm no more?” he said. “Something like that. Go away and do no more harm?”

“Yeah,” she said. “He said something like that. Two or three times.” She shrugged. “I never knew what he was talking about. When he talked.”

“He never mentioned going away with you?”

“No. Why should he?”

Fletch shook his head. “I get less puzzled for a second, and then more puzzled. You are Jasmine Habeck, aren’t you?”

“No. The newspaper was wrong about that.”

“Your name is Jasmine?”

“Only sort of. We never married. Donald never divorced his first wife. Louise. Have you met her?”

Fletch heard himself saying, “Yuss.”

“Sort of weird lady. Sort of nice, really. She’d sit and
say nothing for the longest while, and then she’d ask, ‘Jasmine, what do you think of the word
blue?’
and I’d say, ‘I don’t think about the word
blue
all that much,’ and then she’d say something really weird like, ‘Blue Donald blew away in a blue suit.’ Really! Very strange.”

“I’m becoming less puzzled.”

“That’s good.”

“You were just living here as his friend?”

“Well, sort of I had to, you see.” She shifted on her heels. “Maybe you can tell me what to do.”

“Try me.”

She took a step closer to him. “I’m in the Federal Witness Program, you see.”

“Oh.”

“I testified in a trial in Miami against some bad guys, for the government. They really weren’t bad guys, I didn’t think so, they had lots of money, and didn’t care whether it was day or night. But they were in trouble, and the government said I should help them out, testify against them, or I could go to prison, too, and I hadn’t done anything bad, taken a few jewels from Pete” —she pointed to a turquoise ring on her finger— “my favorite fur, so I said, ‘Sure,’ hung around a long, long time, went to court and answered all sorts of dumb questions about seeing the naked women working in the coke-cutting factory, things like that, you know? So I was to be protected by the federal government. You think I should call someone in Washington?”

“What did all that have to do with Donald Habeck?”

“Nothing. I was in this lawyer’s office in Miami, and Donald came in to see a friend. At that time they were going to send me to St. Louis when I was done, and my girl friend, this Hispanic
chanteuse
, said that’s where the Bibles are printed and it’s awfully muggy there, and that didn’t sound like me. Donald invited me for a drink. Two
days later I came back here with him. We was never married.” She concluded with, “My real name isn’t Jasmine, of course.”

“Of course.”

“No one’s is, I think.”

“I suspect not.”

“I mean, have you ever actually met anyone named Jasmine?”

“Never before. Not even now, I guess.”

“That’s why I chose it. If I had to go be anoniminous, at least I wanted an outstanding name. Wouldn’t you?”

“I suppose so.”

“So what should I do now Donald’s dead? Call someone in Washington, or what?”

“What federal officer did you deal with in Miami?”

“That’s the trouble. I can’t think of his name. It was either John or Tom.”

“What about Habeck’s partners? Do they know you are in the Federal Witness Program?”

“I don’t think so. I think they thought I was Mrs. Habeck Part Two. The few times we were together they never spoke to me. I mean, except for, ‘Get me a drink, will you, Jasmine?’ Pete and those guys were much nicer. At least they knew I was a woman, you know what I mean? They didn’t treat me as no equal, for God’s sake. I’m glad I came out here with Donald before I finished testifyin’ against them.”

“I see.” Fletch looked at a few of his toes through the tops of his sneakers. “So you’re sitting here without any money, any friends….”

“Yeah. I want a friend.”

“You’re not Donald Habeck’s widow, you’re not even Jasmine….”

“I’d be little Miss Nobody, ’cept I was married twice once.”

“Do you have any idea of Donald’s plans for you, if he went away, if he went into a monastery?”