Love Nest (5 page)

“I live in a small house. My father bought the land, all woods then, and cleared it on weekends. He and some buddies built the house themselves, his gift to my mother. They’re both dead now. The house is their gift to me.”

“Poor Sonny.”

He shot a hard look at her. “You’ve never had much to worry about. Silver spoon, wasn’t it?”

“Sugar on it. And Daddy still does for me, dividends every quarter. When I’m thirty I’ll be rich. Want to marry me?”

“I doubt you’d have me.”

“The odds are against it. Poor you again. Poor Melody. She loved you, Sonny.”

“It would be nice to think that,” he said, pulling sharply into the side lot of the police station and squeezing in between cruisers, one belonging to Officer Billy Lord. He silenced the motor and glanced over his shoulder. “She asleep?”

“Pretending. Sit up, kitten.”

There was a stir, and seconds later, with pudgy fingers clasping the top of Sue’s seat, Natalie wrenched herself up. Her glasses were back on, her cap was off. She blinked at the sight of the mock-colonial station. “What are we doing here?” she asked and received no answer. Dawson looked toward the street. Cars glittered by in the cold sunlight.

“There’s the problem of the funeral,” he said slowly and felt the chill of Sue’s breath.

“I’ll take care of it.”

“I’d like to help,” he said, but she shook her head, which was held high, her neck a ramrod. “Where?” he asked.

“Here, your turf. That way, every year, you can put flowers on the grave.”

“You make it sound like penance.”

“Make it what you want.”

He turned his gaze to the station. Billy Lord had stepped out and was scratching himself. Despite the shield on his jacket and the holster on his hip, he looked more like a letter carrier than a policeman. Dawson said, “If you don’t mind, somebody else will drive you back to Boston.”

“Sure, Sonny.”

“In front of others, call me Sergeant.”

“Whatever you say. Are you hurrying to get rid of us?”

In a strained voice, as if retrieving himself from a clutch of bad thoughts, he said, “I’m hoping for a development.”

“Then you don’t know who did it.” The voice, which sounded clogged, was Natalie’s. She was crying silently, her face a puddle of tears.

“I didn’t say that,” Dawson said and tapped the horn to gain Officer Lord’s attention.

• • •

A hulk of a man with a baggy face sounded the chimes with two quick jabs, his signal, and then let himself in. “Rita, I’m here,” he called out in a raspy voice and heard her heavy tread on an upper level in a room with a cathedral ceiling. He stood on the white pelt of a sheep and waited for her. She came down in a caftan of a shade between tangerine and pumpkin, her black hair flowing, a look about her of Halloween.

“I expected you yesterday.”

“I was busy.”

“Have one,” she said, reaching into a Waterford dish of root beer drops.

“No thanks.” He never ate hard candy. He imagined the horror of choking on it.

“I got a problem with the kitchen faucet. Damn thing drips.”

“I’ll look at it,” he said and made his way to the kitchen. His name was Ralph Roselli. Once a week, more often if needed, he drove up from Boston to look in on her, to do chores, run errands. In the summer he watered the shrubs, and in the winter, a curious sight in a camel’s hair coat and Florsheim shoes, he shoveled snow from the walk. He did all this out of equal measures of loyalty and guilt. He had been her brother’s driver and bodyguard, an assassin when called upon, but a mere bystander bereft of choice when small-caliber bullets had been pumped into the back of Tony Gardella’s head.

In the luxurious kitchen he tossed his coat over the back of a chair and busied himself at the sink. As a boy he had worked on cars, some stolen, and in the army, when not in the stockade, he had been a demolition specialist, which accounted for the scars that ran up one side of his body. He had stood too close to somebody much less of a specialist than he.

“Needs a washer,” he said when Rita O’Dea came into the kitchen. “Next time I’m here I’ll bring one.”

Her mouth pouted. “That means I got to wait a week.”

“I fixed it a little. It ain’t so bad.” He looked at her fully. Her eyes were puffy. “What’s the matter? You sick?”

“I didn’t sleep all that great.”

“Stuff on your mind?”

She gestured with an impetuous hand. “Get the cups and sit down.”

Over coffee and buttered biscuits she told him of Attorney William Rollins’s late-evening visit and of the news he had borne. Roselli listened quietly, his face a large loose mask of attentiveness, his eyes encased in stupendous pouches. She said, “You didn’t know her like I did. It turned my stomach and hurt my heart.”

“I remember her. You were teaching her to cook.”

“Showing her sauce.”

“She didn’t look like what she was.”

“She was lonely is what she was. Like me. She was younger, I would’ve adopted her. As it was, I should’ve made her my companion. I mean, I could’ve insisted.”

Roselli ate part of a biscuit without haste, his eyes fixed on it. When he looked up, she was staring at him. Her voice went heavy.

“Everybody’s lonely, Ralph. Even you.”

He licked butter from a blunt finger. He seemed to be listening mechanically now, his ear admitting sounds his brain might or might not bother to sort out later.

“Don’t tell me you don’t wake up in the middle of the night and wonder what’s left.”

He said, “I can’t stay long like last time. You got more you want me to do.”

“I got a list.”

He dug a tortured spoon out of the garbage disposal, unclogged the hose to the vacuum cleaner, and installed fresh batteries in the smoke alarms. In the laundry room, squatting between soiled bedding and a bottle of bleach, he tightened the drum in the clothes dryer, which had been making an undue noise. Later, as he was passing a window, something outside caught his attention.

“Rita, c’mere.”

She was in the kitchen, her hands wet. She brought paper toweling with her and positioned herself beside him. “What’s the matter?”

He pointed. “There’s a kid out there.”

At first her squinting eyes passed over the boy, who stood tall, husky, and quite still, the green of his athletic jacket blending him into the distant shubbery. Then, drying her fingers and puffy wrists, she glimpsed the shock of blond hair and made out the face. “It’s all right. That’s my godson.”

“Just standing there, looks weird.”

“He looks cold.”

“What’s he want?”

“My arms.”

Roselli looked at her curiously.

“Go get him, Ralph. Tell him I got biscuits.”

W
illiam Rollins removed his tinted glasses, and his face looked limp without them. He was in his law office, elbows on his desk. A nag of a headache and an uneasy feeling in his chest made him meditate death. Shoulders drawn, as if preparing himself for death, he wondered whether people waited for you beyond the grave. Was there a welcoming? Would his mother wave so that he would be sure to see her? The details of dying engrossed him to the point that he gave a start when he realized his secretary was gazing in at him.

“What is it?”

“I don’t want to interrupt.”

“You’re not.”

She was plump and middle-aged and always seemed somewhat dazed and apologetic. She had been with him several months, almost as long as he had kept other secretaries. He wanted none of them to know too much, which meant that this one’s days were numbered.

“Is it all right if I go to lunch?”

“Yes, please do.” He fitted his glasses back on, and his face immediately strengthened.

“Is it all right if I take an hour?”

“That’s what you’re entitled to.”

“I usually take only a half hour.”

“Go for broke,” he said with unwonted sarcasm, but in a voice so dry it did not reach her. It was something his mother might have said to his father, the words not quite reaching him either. Their images, idealized by the craft of a professional photographer, smiled from a frame on the busiest part of his desk. He said, “Have a good lunch.”

From the window he watched her tramp toward Main Street. His office was on Punchard Avenue, right off downtown, on the second floor of an old Victorian dwelling converted to commercial use. When she vanished, he went to the wall safe and worked the combination with thin, agile fingers. Inside the safe his hand plunged directly to a large buff envelope marked
M
. At his desk he emptied it of stock certificates bearing the name of Melody Haines, a few brief letters in her bold and youthful hand, and a number of hundred-dollar bills secured by a red band. Also falling out was a cassette tape. He played it.

He raced it forward, halted it near the middle, and heard her say:
I
can’t type
.

From him:
It doesn’t matter
.

Then a scratchy silence, the tapping of a pencil, finally his voice again.

Your name reminds me of my mother’s. Hers was Melissa
.

They start off the same, don’t they?

Hers ceases with a sigh, yours with a suddenness
.

You’re a little drunk, aren’t you, Mr. Rollins?

Just a little
. Static filled a pause.
You never have to be afraid of me. You can trust me
.

You’re not someone I normally would
.

Her voice was rich and smooth, quite clear, with a hint of vibrato. His had an ascetic quality.

Allow me to help you
.

Why? Why should you want to?

You’re worth it
.

You remind me of him
.

Him? Bauer? I hope not
.

Her laugh had an edge.
The cop. You’re both liars
.

He stopped the cassette player and ejected the tape. Adroitly, with fingers like a seamster’s, he ripped up the letters. His telephone shrilled five times and then went quiet, which meant his answering service was handling it. He returned the tape and certificates to the safe. The money, twenty bills totaling two thousand dollars, went into a small envelope, then into his pocket.

His secretary was back within the hour and entered his office with an air of agony. For the first time he observed what she was wearing, a knit dress magnifying the uneven distribution of her weight, a cheap bracelet embedded in her wrist, shoes meant for smaller feet.

“Did you know?’ His silence was his answer. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

He observed the high color in her face. He knew she had a problem with blood pressure. The pills were on her desk.

“It was on the noon news at Lem’s,” she said and coughed. The cough rattled, and a part of it stayed in her voice. “No name given, but Chick from the motel was there. He said the name loud so everybody could hear.”

“It has nothing to do with you. Or me.”

“Nothing to do with the town. That’s what Chick said. A stray from Boston, no business here.” Her voice shook. “The poor child.”

“Yes,” he said, “I agree.”

“She didn’t know anything about office work, wasn’t much help. Why’d you hire her? I never understood.”

“You weren’t meant to.”

“No concern of mine, is that what you’re saying?” Her color deepened, and her breath shortened. “Maybe I should tell the police I knew her.”

“Two weeks you knew her. But if you feel you should, by all means, talk to the police.” He picked up papers on a tentative residential sale and began to scan them. She stood rooted.

“You’re not afraid of me, are you, sir?”

He picked up a pen and made a notation on one of the papers. The ink was green.

“You’re not afraid of anything.”

He glanced up. “I fear old age. I fear receding gums and all that business. All right?”

She brought a nervous hand to her face. “I can’t believe I’m talking to you this way.”

“I can,” he said calmly. “I expected it. Now I trust you’re finished.”

She trembled. “Am I fired?”

Coolly, as if reminded of a small detail, one that never should have got by him, he said, “Now that you mention it.”

• • •

Harriet Bauer searched her son’s room. His closet smelled of sneakers that should have been thrown out and clothes that belonged in the wash. Fishing in pockets, she came up with lint, gum wrappers, and stubs from the Showcase Cinema in Lawrence. The boy went to the movies often, alone. She started to set aside a shoe box she thought empty until the lid slid off, revealing a robin’s nest still intact after several years’ of storage, the blue trace of a shell haunting the hollow.

The bottom drawers of his desk were stuffed with school papers preserved since kindergarten and report cards arranged not chronologically but scholastically, the best on top. None was bad. Ballpoint pens had been chewed, the plastic splintered. A package of cigarettes he had never opened lay hidden under a diary he had never written in. The pages of a pocket-size telephone book were blank. Numbers he needed or had needed were in his head, including Mrs. Medwick’s. She was the high school teacher whose classroom he was barred from entering and whose number he had promised Sergeant Dawson never again to ring.

Inside a dresser drawer, stashed under summer socks, were pictures of himself through babyhood, each exhibiting a cherubic face and beatific smile. The photographs had been unglued from the family album and, with obvious tenderness, placed in plastic windows of his own making, as if those early years had been his happiest, which did not surprise her. He was four when she finally broke him of the bottle and hid his blanket, and he was going on six when she stopped taking him into the tub with her.

She remembered how, picking at her sleeve, he would not leave her side, which got on his father’s nerves more than hers. In school he was drawn to girls he dared not speak to unless the bill of his baseball cap shaded his eyes. His only pal was a boy with a skin condition who told funny stories in a cynical way and soon moved away because the family could not afford the town.

At age ten, a pivotal year, he came home with a split lip and chipped tooth from a schoolyard fight in which he had not known enough to duck but had merely flailed his arms more in the manner of a girl than a boy. The only damage he had inflicted was with a bite, which he did not seem ashamed to admit. At her prompting, his father took him by the softness of his shoulder, bruised where he had been held down, and said, “I think it’s time you worked out.”

They each pushed him beyond his normal pitch, beginning with barbells, a pommel horse, and a medicine ball. She swam with him daily in the pool, lung-bursting laps, which was like a violent return to the tub for him, with a towel as big as a blanket to dry himself in. By the time he was twelve he was plated with what seemed the muscles of an athlete, his strength surpassing hers, which was considerable, except that his merely increased the force of his clumsiness, also considerable.

At age fourteen, with chest and arms bulging, he was still his mother’s little man, home-haunted every day he was away at summer camp and sullen when he returned, as if he had been betrayed both there and here, apparently worse there because he would not talk about it. In the dresser’s bottom drawer, stuffed behind a sweater he no longer wore, she found the letters she had written to him in care of the camp. Also she found what she was looking for.

It gave off a faint scent of something close to honeysuckle. It was of stretched lace, flimsy and white, sinuous in the silky way it lay, stretched as if maybe he had worn it, though she seriously doubted that. She felt that his darker secrets did not include dolling himself up in Melody Haines’s garter belt. The shrink would have told her.

She was on her way down the wide stairs, the garter belt dangling from her hand, when the telephone shrilled. She took the call in the study, with her eye on the grate, the fire reduced to smoldering embers. The voice of Rita O’Dea said, “Your kid’s here.”

“Christ. He’s supposed to be in school.”

“The school calls, say he’s sick.”

Harriet’s voice rose. “Tell him to come home.”

“He’s just leaving. Don’t get nervous.”

Harriet lifted the silken belt, its delicate tackle twitching, and tossed it underhand into the embers. Flames fluttered up.

Rita said, “I wanted to feed him, he couldn’t eat.”

“What did he tell you?”

“We didn’t talk about it.”

“What did he want?”

“Hugs.”

The flames glittered blue and shot up smoke, pitch black, a slender plume. “Hugs are my job.”

“He needs all he can get. I have to tell you that?”

Harriet hesitated. “What has Rollins told you?”

“His suspicions … and yours.”

“I didn’t tell him mine.”

“Maybe he guessed,” Rita said flatly. “The kid hasn’t been easy for you.”

“Please, if you don’t mind!” Harriet’s voice, seldom governed by extreme feeling, gave in to it. “He has a name. Walter Rolf Bauer. Walter or Wally will do.”

There was dead silence. Then: “I guess you forget who you’re talking to,” Rita said.

“Not for a second. I’m the one changed shitty diapers. You never did.”

“You never asked.”

“You never offered. I’m the one walked the fucking floor with him when he had croup; Alfred didn’t have time. I’m the one pulled him out of his moods, grabbed him by the hair to keep him from going under. All you did was send gifts.”

“Easy, Harriet. You’re reverting to form.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Means you’re under a strain, forgetting who you’re talking to. You’re lucky I’ve learned to be patient.”

Now the silence came from Harriet, who shuddered inwardly, as if she had needlessly exposed herself and foolishly placed herself in danger. From the grate drifted a faint chemical smell.

“Rita.”

“What?”

“I’m sorry.”

• • •

Chief Chute appeared in his busy white shirt, a miniature American flag stitched to one upper sleeve and a replica of the town seal to the other. A lanyard was looped from one shoulder. The wings of the collar and the epaulettes bore chunks of brass, and a gold shield bulged above the flap of the left breast pocket. Sergeant Dawson pushed aside the pad on which he had listed several names and had encircled them with meaningless designs.

“I don’t want to break your train of thought,” the chief said.

“It’s OK.”

The chief closed the door behind him. Despite the militancy of his shirt, he had a mild appearance: soft facial features, fuzzy hair he was losing, a pinkish complexion, and a small amount of neck fat overlapping his collar. He said, “DA hopes he’s doing the right thing listening to me. And I hope I’m doing right listening to you.”

“What can I say, Chief?”

“Something that will wipe away doubts.”

“I’ve given Bauer till five to get his act together. Then I talk to his kid.”

“Till five, huh. Why so generous?”

“Gives me time to get my own act together.”

The chief moved nearer to the desk, as if from a sense of something shadowy being left unresolved. “DA doesn’t know you, at least not well. He asked me if you ever turn your head on things.”

Dawson gave himself a second to react. “Was he talking little things or big things?”

“I don’t think he was differentiating. Asked me if you cut corners, said he was just curious. Also asked if you had a personal interest in the case. ‘Not to my knowledge.’ That’s how I answered everything.”

“Thank you, Chief.”

“Then that
Herald
reporter called back. He wanted to know when we’re going to give the victim a name. I couldn’t see any good reason to withhold it, so I made him happy. I also called the Lawrence paper to let them know. I’m covering your bases, Sonny.”

“Thank you.”

The chief drew back, a shadow running across his benign features. “I want to retire in my own time and on my own terms. I guess you know exactly what I’m saying.”

“I’d never hurt you, Chief.”

“See that you don’t,” he said in a quiet but unmistakable tone of authority.

Shortly later, lightheaded, Dawson cleared his desk. Nothing in his stomach except candy from a vending machine. On his way up the stairs he glimpsed Billy Lord talking with two other officers near the water cooler. He motioned, and Billy broke away. They mounted the stairs together, Billy with a small cigar fuming from his fingers.

“How did it go?” Dawson asked.

“Hit a lot of traffic, and I got nervous on Storrow Drive. Going off it, I almost got rear-ended. Far as I’m concerned, Boston’s for the birds.”

“I meant how did it go with them.”

Pausing at the top of the stairs, Billy rolled his flat eyes. “The one with the funny hair huddled herself in a corner and picked pills off her sweater. Didn’t say a word the whole way in.”