Man in The Woods (6 page)

Something must be done about this. Paul drives out of the parking lot with his left hand on the steering wheel and his right arm slung over the dog’s shoulders. He has owned a dog only once before in his life and that was King Richard, a golden retriever Paul’s mother bought from a local breeder the first Christmas after Matthew left Connecticut for New York. Paul and his sister were electrified with joy when their mother came home with the fat, honey-colored pup.

“Oh my God, oh my God,” Annabelle said, over and over, her hands clasped.

The puppy seemed happy to be with children; it romped and panted and licked their hands—and bit their fingers, too, it couldn’t help itself, all that exuberance and passion to connect. But there was something wrong with the dog. When it rested it was unnervingly still and its eyes went dull, like some life-of-the-party drunk who, after regaling the table with his hilarious anecdotes, slumps into a melancholy stupor. Soon, the puppy was coughing, deep, wracking coughs, Paul couldn’t believe such an ominous sound could come out of something so soft and small. Like a bicycle horn bleating inside a bowl of oatmeal. By week’s end, the dog was dead, its eyes like smashed fuses, the tip of its little pickled tongue protruding from its mouth.

“King!” Paul had called out, as if to rouse the puppy back to life.

“Well that didn’t take very long,” his mother said, her voice flat, affectless; she had already entered that phase of her life in which misfortune was the norm.

About fifteen miles from Kate’s house, Paul makes a series of turns and takes first a two-lane blacktop that leads to Victory Hill, a convalescent home for the aged, and a place Paul knows will suit his purposes. The nursing home, once the summer residence of a spice broker down in the city, who summered there with a series of short-lived wives in the early nineteenth century, is on a perch with a partial view of the river. But Paul’s destination is the employee parking lot, which is nearly empty and sheltered from view.

“Okay, Shep, time to get out.” The dog has curled up on the seat, with his nose close to his hindquarters, and doesn’t wish to be disturbed. When Paul touches his mahogany-colored ear to roust him up, the dog doesn’t open his eyes but growls softly. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Paul says. This for some reason makes Shep’s eyes open—they are round as marbles and rimmed with red.

“Wait right there,” Paul says and slides out of the driver’s side. The night air is dry, blade-sharp. Withered oak leaves, desiccated and crisp, blown by the wind, scurry across the parking lot like rats.
Is anybody looking? Can anybody see?
Paul turns up the collar of his leather jacket and opens the passenger side of the truck. Shep does not seem very interested in getting out but when Paul calls to him, the dog laboriously gets up, section by section, and when he is standing at last he gazes at Paul, as if hoping for some last-minute reprieve. “This is going to be fast,” Paul says, and there is something reassuring enough in his voice to induce the dog to hop down out of the truck’s warmth and onto the cold asphalt.

Paul leads the dog, with his finger crooked around the dog’s metal choke collar. He doesn’t want to pull too hard on it and yank back sense memories of the rough treatment this dog has had to endure, but he wants Shep to mind him. He walks with him to where an old abandoned Comet is sitting, its tires flat, its windshield cracked, and commands the dog to sit. “You stay here.”

He points at Shep and looks sternly at him, hoping to convey the importance of the order. Shep tilts his head to the left and opens his mouth, letting his long tongue unfurl and giving himself an unaccountably happy-go-lucky expression. Paul backs away, continuing to motion for the dog to stay put, and when he is halfway between the dog and the truck he turns and quickly walks over to his truck, opens the door, gets in, disengages the parking brake, puts it into gear, and runs it with some vigor into the closest large tree, which happens to be a red maple, judging by the diameter of its trunk. “Sorry,” Paul whispers to the tree as the front end of his truck strikes it. He braces himself and, in fact, is barely jostled by the impact, though he forgot to fasten his seat belt. He throws the truck into reverse; his headlights reveal a couple of gouges in the tree’s hide, but the red maple is a hardy tree, and Paul is sure it will barely be affected by the sudden laceration of its bark.

What worries him more is if he has done enough damage to his truck to explain the bruises on his face and hands. He climbs out of the cab and checks the damage. Perfect. His spirits lift, unreasonably so, as if he has just solved every one of his problems. There is a large, deep dent along the left side of the front bumper, and the left headlight has a spiderweb of cracks over its entirety. Shep is at his side, leaning his weight against Paul’s leg. Paul reaches down and scratches behind the dog’s ears. “You see why I wanted you to get out of the truck,” Paul says to the dog, opening the passenger door for him.

A half hour later, Paul takes the turn onto Kate’s long driveway. Locust trees, tall and bare, many of them dead but still standing, line either side of the curving quarter-mile. The house is an old Colonial farmhouse, built simply and in sections, the earliest part from 1766, with a subsequent addition from 1810, and another from 1890—the Victorian section, with dark pine built-ins, a carved marble mantel, and a wedding-cake ceiling.

When Paul first came to this house he was looking for work. Kate had said, “I hear you’re the man to talk to about windows,” and ushered him in with a wave of her fingers. An electrical charge passed between them; it was a moment they relived together, months later. “The old owners put these crummy aluminum frames in and I want nice new windows,” Kate had said. “Maybe…” When she paused for a moment, Paul lowered his eyes, telling himself not to look quite so intently at her. She mentioned a brand of window often advertised in lifestyle magazines, usually with an illustration of a family sprawled out in a living room, husband, wife, daughter, Dalmatian, cozy and carefree, with a view of a winter wonderland through the double-paned glass.

“This is a beautiful house,” Paul had said, “and it would be nice to have really great old windows. Those mass-manufactured ones? They’re okay, but not like the old ones. The old ones…” He closed his eyes, shook his head: there were no words with which he could describe the poignancy of the old glass.

“So old glass,” she said. “Where do you find such a thing?”

“Lady, I’ve got a truckload of just what you’re looking for. The problem is you’ve got new frames and sashes—the people before you didn’t care what they put up.” Paul had made this aside in a low voice, as if the previous owners might still be within earshot. “What I have to do is make all new frames and put the old glass in them. It’ll end up looking as if they’re the original windows, here forever, and if you want to save on your heating I could double-pane them, but I have to tell you it’s not going to be cheap. You might want to go with whatever they’ve got at Home Depot.”

“No, no, I’d rather go with what you’re recommending,” Kate said.

Paul smiled. He had a handsome man’s absence of vanity—he didn’t take very good care of himself. His bottom teeth were crossed, his fingernails were caked with dirt. “I have to tell you,” he said, “I’m very glad you’re going to do this. I happen to love this building.” He walked to the front of the house, patted the plaster near one of the windows he would now replace, as if to reassure the muted white walls that better days were ahead, and these offensive windows were going to be plucked out like thorns from the paw of a mighty lion.

Now, Ruby stands at one of those shimmering windows as Paul swings his truck around the circular parking area in front of the house. She shields her eyes with her little starfish of a hand. The sight of a child disturbs his fragile equilibrium of remembering and not remembering. Her face, her smallness, her newness, triggers in Paul a sudden chaos of remorse. He begins to talk to the dog because it makes him feel better. “All right, here’s the drill. I’m going to go inside for a minute, I’m going to talk to Ruby, and then we’re both going to come out here. Okay? Shep?” The dog does not seem to be listening. Something on his paw has captured his full attention and he is alternately licking and nibbling at the webbing between his blunt, black claws.

Paul turns off the truck’s engine. Even this small change in reality is upsetting—the engine’s hum gone, the headlights extinguished. Everything must be just so for him to tolerate the memory of this afternoon. He is like a man carrying a load that is far heavier than he can manage but who has nevertheless found a way to hoist it up and stagger forward a few steps. If his balance is at all disturbed, the true weight of what he is carrying will assert itself, and the task will prove impossible. He slides out of the truck, feels the familiar crunch of the driveway’s stones. When he looks again at the window, Ruby is no longer standing there. A wedge of light falls onto the gravel. Ruby has opened the front door. She is in jeans and a lavender turtleneck.

“Hi Paul,” she says. “Your truck looks beat up.”

“And you look like a girl who might do very well with a surprise.” Paul is calmed by the jolly boom of his own voice. The role of father is a comfort to him, the powerful encompassing mask of it.

“Do you have one?” Ruby says. The cold breeze whips her hair around. The light from the house illuminates the back of her; moonlight glistens on her teeth.
Children should not be in the dark
, Paul thinks. He sees her shiver and he hoists her up, brings her close. Her finger hovers above the bruise on the right side of his forehead. Her knees grip his rib cage.

“All right,” he says, “I’ll show you.” He carries her back to the truck. Shep has come to the window. He has lifted his snout to the little crack of opening Paul has left, and his tail is going around and around. His eyes bulge, but he has stopped drooling.

Ruby’s first response is to shrink back. “No, no, it’s okay,” Paul says. “He’s friendly.”

“Whose dog is that?” Ruby asks.

“It’s a lost dog, is what it is,” Paul says. “I found him and I thought this good old dog needs himself a home.”

Ruby, still in Paul’s arms, leans forward, takes a closer look at Shep, who seems to understand that this is some sort of audition and has pressed his nose through the crack in the window. His nostrils expand and contract. “Where’d you find him?” Ruby asks.

Paul has already rehearsed the answer to any question that anyone is likely to ask about this dog. The commission of his crime may have been completely spontaneous, but the aftermath is already full of intricacy and cunning. “I met a trucker at a rest stop, the one your mom likes to stop at when we go to the city, and he came up to me and he said he found a dog in North Carolina and he was going to bring him home but when he talked to his wife she said if he came home with a dog she would be really really mad at him.”

“Why?” Ruby asks.

“Not everyone likes dogs.”

Ruby nods, taking in this sad fact of life. “Do we get to keep him?” she asks, her voice vigilant.

“I don’t know. I want to talk it over with your mom. A dog’s a lot of work. It might not be the best idea. But I wanted you two guys to meet.”

Ruby wriggles free of him. Once on the ground, she opens the truck and Shep, used to bounding out of a front seat not quite so high as this one, hesitates for a moment, panting and gathering his courage. Finally, he lowers his head, raises his rump, and jumps out of the truck. He seems interested in neither Ruby nor Paul; rather it is the gravel that commands his attention, and he sniffs at it greedily, snorting, his mahogany cheeks puffing out, his tail revving faster and faster. He half-lifts his leg and marks his spot.
Welcome home
, Paul thinks.

“Can I pet him?” Ruby asks.

“Why don’t you put out your hand and see if he comes over and gives it a sniff.” Ruby does as she is told and Shep, seeing her hand, makes his peculiar, mincing gait over to her, sniffs her fingertips. Ruby’s lips stretch, her eyes widen, she looks like a kid on a roller coaster.

“You see?” Paul says. “He’s getting to know you.”

Kate emerges from the house, buttoning her heavy coat and looking at them curiously. “I thought I saw a dog,” she says. She’s still fifty feet away, and she is silhouetted before the steady deep yellow lights of the house, but Paul is sure he can see her smiling. “Did you really bring a dog for us?” Kate asks.

Shep’s tongue shyly engages Ruby’s hand. “He likes me!” she cries. The sudden sound of her delight makes the dog cower, as if he is going to be beaten.

“What the hell happened to your truck?” Kate asks.

CHAPTER SIX

Four days after his death, a picture of William Robert Claff runs in the weekly Tarrytown newspaper. When he first sees it, Frank Mazzerelli doesn’t realize the man pictured is someone he knows, but when he happens to glance at the picture again while having a solitary meal and hoping to occupy his mind with something other than stale thoughts about the past, it becomes clear to Mazzerelli that this is a picture of his tenant, the man he knows as Alfred Krane. The question is: what ought he to do about it? Having contact with local law enforcement is just about the last thing he wants.

Frank Mazzerelli is a former Yonkers police officer whose entire career in the YPD was shadowed by the fear that one day his secret and infrequent homosexual love life would become public knowledge. In his thirty years on the job, no one with whom he worked ever asked him why he wasn’t married or at least with a girlfriend, but Frank did not fail to note that no one ever offered to fix him up, either. His last day at work, at the obligatory retirement party at Bennigan’s, after all the tepid toasts and forced joviality from people whom after all these years he felt he barely knew, custom dictated that Frank himself make a toast, preferably one that mixed nostalgia and hard kidding. To his horror, Frank teared up in the middle of it, though he decided later the sentiment was not about saying good-bye to any of the faces in that room but an expression of sheer relief, such as he had felt only once before in his entire life, when he’d been shot at by two teenage bank robbers he was pursuing from a Washington Mutual branch to the southbound Sprain Parkway.

Frank’s retirement plan originally had been to move west and buy income properties, maybe in California, or possibly even Hawaii, where his sister and his nephews lived. But somehow he ended up just a few miles from Yonkers, in Tarrytown, because in the end it made sense to him to do business in a place he knew. Muscular, olive-skinned, his salt-and-pepper hair cut Caesar-style, with a taciturn manner and sharp, unfriendly eyes, Mazzerelli now owns two apartment buildings, one with four units, the other with six residential units plus retail space at street level, all of which combine with his YPD pension to make for a comfortable retirement. He’s scrupulous in the upkeep of his property. His tenants find him fair if not friendly, and they appreciate the clean hallways, the ample heat and hot water, the shoveled sidewalks, the monthly pest control—the fact is, he
loves
his property—and the renters know not to be late with the rent. Mazzerelli’s motto is
The first of the month means the first of the month
, and he has been known to park his black hand-waxed Infiniti across the street from one or the other of his buildings and to eat his lunch slouched behind the steering wheel.

When prospective tenants called looking to rent, Frank met them at the Fonz’s Corner, a diner out on South Broadway, where he used to eat occasionally when he was on the job. It is a red-and-silver place, a bastion of manufactured nostalgia for the American 1950s. The benches in the booths look like the backseats of old Impalas and the tables are grooved in bright aluminum. Frank would always be a few minutes early and he’d sit with a view of the parking area, so he could get a look at the applicant’s car and the way he walked, which Frank believed told him more than any payroll stub or copy of last year’s tax returns. After a brief interview they’d get into Frank’s car and drive over to the apartment and as they cruised the streets of Tarrytown Frank allowed his left pant leg to hike up just enough so the new tenant could get a peek at the Glock he carried in a black nylon ankle holster. Two things Frank needed to keep his operation clean and trouble-free: a month’s security paid in advance and giving tenants a glimpse of that gun.

Alfred Krane/Will Claff was late for that first meeting at Fonz’s Corner, and when he finally walked in Frank realized he had seen Krane/Claff ten minutes before, pacing the parking lot and then getting back into his white Honda, the behavior, surely, of a man on the lookout for enemies. And there was another thing that Frank had seen as a red flag: Claff came to the meeting looking like he’d spent the night in a doorway. His jacket was rumpled, he needed a shave, his hair was mussed, his fingernails were filthy. His tie seemed to have a ladybug tie tack, but it turned out to be an actual ladybug, and when Frank pointed it out Claff crushed it between his thumb and forefinger and flicked the husk to the floor. But Frank was sitting on two empty apartments at the time and was inclined to say yes. On the ride over to the apartment, when Frank hiked up his Dockers and let Claff see the piece, Claff did something none of the other tenants had dared—he mentioned it.

“I would fucking love to have a gun like that,” he’d said, pointing down at Frank’s left foot.

“You have any guns?” Frank asked him quickly.

Claff shook his head.

“I would need to know that,” Frank said. “I would need you to be very honest with me about that, right up front.”

“I never owned a gun, Mr. Landlord,” Claff said. “I’m a very good boy.” He made a small, surrendering smile, which Frank understood to mean
You got me now, but one day maybe it’ll be my turn
. Frank didn’t begrudge it; most men kept a tally sheet.

The photo in the Tarrytown weekly was taken off Claff’s driver’s license, which the cops found stuck between the driver’s seat and the center console in his car, in the west lot of Martingham State Park. Even with the driver’s license the cops couldn’t be sure about the dead man’s name. The wallet held a blue-and-white card showing a teddy bear holding a toothbrush reminding Alfred Krane about an upcoming dentist appointment in Sleepy Hollow, an Exxon credit card belonging to a Henry Lloyd, a library card from Evanston, Illinois, with the name Ivan Kline on it, a customer-reward card from The Running Emporium also bearing the name Ivan Kline. They found a business card from a place called Happy Valley Massage, with no address and no phone number, and another card from Elkins Park Gourmet, with a Philadelphia number. The police ran the dead man’s prints through the system and got no hits, and the state of California seemed to have lost track of William Claff; the last address Motor Vehicles had for him was in an apartment complex that burned to the ground three years ago.

When Frank Mazzerelli sees the picture of Claff in the local paper, his first impulse is to turn the page. He does not wish to have anything to do with the police, the local police, the state police, any police. He has an aversion to cops that would rival that of a career criminal. He is also on guard about having 2C involved in a possible homicide—just having police in there will delay renting it out again. But, finally, something so simple, corny, and dumb as
good citizenship
changes his mind and he decides to step forward.

Before going to the precinct, Mazzerelli goes to Will’s apartment and lets himself in. It is not his first time entering a dead man’s apartment, but here there is no scatter of mail on the floor, no accumulation of newspapers, no flies droning around a plate of rotting food, no throbbing red light on the answering machine indicating dozens of missed calls.

Frank stands in the front room for a few more moments; there is a quality to the silence, a heaviness, a completeness that feels fatal. He notices the front window is open a few inches. A spray of wet snow is coming into the apartment, flying this way and that like sparks off a grinder. Frank closes the window and walks into the bedroom, opens the closet. There are few things hanging there, and fifty empty hangers, as if in anticipation of better days ahead. The bed is unmade, there are socks on the floor, a bottle of Armani hand lotion on the bedside table, a stale smell in the air. And then the kitchen: fridge filled with water bottles, vitamins, a cooked chicken in its plastic dome. Next to the refrigerator is a bag of dog food, showing a picture of a golden retriever running through tall grass toward a perfect family of four.

That little cocksucker
, Frank thinks.
He had a dog. I could fucking kill him myself
.