Paper Doll (7 page)

When I rang the bell, it chimed deep inside the house. A number of dogs barked at the sound, though not as if they meant much. I waited. The dogs continued to bark without enthusiasm, as if they were merely doing their job, and didn’t really care if the doorbell rang.

A small breeze moved across the tops of the taller flowers along the front of the house and made them sway gently. The bees swayed with them, unconcerned with the breeze, focused on the nectar.

I didn’t hear footsteps. The door simply opened. Slowly. A huge hallway beyond the door was dark. A slow old Southern male black voice said slowly, “Yessir.”

“My name is Spenser,” I said and handed a card into the darkness. “I’m here to see Mr. Nelson.”

I smiled into the dark hallway. Friendly as a guy selling sewing machines. A black hand, nearly invisible in the dark hallway, took my card.

“Step in,” the old voice said.

Inside the hallway, my eyes began to adjust. There was an odd fresh smell in the house. It was a smell I knew, but I couldn’t place it. I felt something brush against my leg and looked down at an old hunting dog that was leaning against my knee. It was too dark to see him clearly, but the way he held his head, and the way his back swayed, was enough to know he was old. I reached down and let him smell the back of my hand. As my pupils continued to dilate I could see that there were three or four other dogs standing around, none of them hostile. They were all hunting dogs.

The black man said, “You wait here, sir. I’ll see Mr. Nelson, can he see you.”

His voice was soft, and he was very old. As tall as I was, but narrow; and stooped as if he were embarrassed to be tall and wanted to conceal it. He had on a worn black suit of some kind and a white shirt with one collar point bent upward, and a narrow ratty black bow tie, like a movie gambler, tied with the ends hanging long. The hand that held my card was surprisingly thick, with strong fingers. His hands were graceful, like he might play the harp, or deal cards.

“Sure,” I said.

“Don’t pay the dogs no mind, sir,” he said. “They won’t harm you.”

“I know,” I said. “I like dogs.”

“Yessir,” he said and moved away, his feet a whisper on the dark oak floor. He was wearing slippers.

The room was entirely dark oak, panels on the walls, panels and beams on the ceiling. There were no windows in the hall. The stairwell curved up toward the back half of the entry hall, and must have been windowed, because some light wafted dimly down from beyond the turn.

The fresh smell I’d noticed when I came in had lessened when the black man left, and as I heard his soft, whispering shuffle coming back from somewhere under the stairs it got strong again. I realized what I was sniffing. The house smelled of booze, and the black man smelled of it more so. No wonder it was familiar.

“Mr. Nelson say why you want to see him, sir?”

“It’s about his daughter,” I said.

“Yessir.”

He shuffled away, and this time he was gone awhile. I scratched the old hound behind his ear and he leaned his head a little harder against me. The other dogs sat, respectfully, nearby, in a semicircle that probably had some dog order to it. The old one was obviously in charge: I could see well enough now to see how gray the dog’s muzzle was. And around his eyes, sort of like a raccoon. His front paws turned in slightly, the way they did on a bear, and he moved stiffly.

Around the entry hall there were gilt-framed paintings of racehorses, most, apparently, from the nineteenth century, when they were painted with long bodies and small heads. On the other hand, maybe in the nineteenth century they did have long bodies and small heads.

The dog nudged my knee with his head, and I reached down to pat him some more. The other dogs watched. Under the fresh booze smell was a more enduring smell of dog. I liked both smells, though there were people who liked neither.

There was no sound in the house, not even the sounds that houses make: air-conditioning, or furnace, or the stairwell creaking, or the refrigerator cycling on; nothing but a silence that seemed to have been thickening since Appomattox.

“You guys have much fun?” I said.

The dogs made no reply. One of them, I didn’t see which one, thumped his tail once when I spoke.

The black man scuffed quietly back into the huge entry.

“Mr. Nelson say to come this way, sir.”

We went to the end of the entry hall and under the stairs and through a door into a bright gallery along the back of the house that was full of sunlight through the long bank of French windows. At the end of the gallery we turned right into a huge octagonal conservatory with a glass roof shaped like a minaret. Sitting in a wicker chaise on a dark green rug in the middle of the bluestone floor, with the sun streaming in on him, was an old man in a white suit who looked like Mark Twain gone to hell. He had long white hair and a big white moustache. He probably weighed three hundred pounds, most of it in his belly. There was some in his jowls, and plenty in the folds of his neck that spilled out over his wilted collar. But there were hints, still, as he sat there, of strength that had once existed. And in the red sagging face, the vestiges of the same profile his daughter showed in her portrait.

On the wicker table beside him was a blue pattern china bowl of melting ice, a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, partly gone, and a pitcher of water. He had a thick lowball glass in his hand. A blackthorn walking stick leaned on the arm of the chaise. Across the room was a wicker chair. Next to it a wicker side table held a big color television set. On the screen stock cars, gaudily painted, buzzed endlessly around a track. There was no other furniture. The room had the feel of an empty gym.

There were three or four more dogs in here, all hunters, long-eared, black-and-white, or blueticked, looking somewhat like Pearl the wonder dog. Except their tails were long. And the color. And they were bigger. And calmer. One of them thumped a tail on the floor when she saw me. The others watched me but did nothing. Sprawled on the floor, they moved only their eyes to look at me. Air-conditioning buzzed unseen somewhere above us. Despite the sunlight the room was cold.

The old black man gestured me to the other seat with one gnarled, still graceful hand. I sat. Jumper Jack stared at the car race. Sweat beaded on his forehead.

“Care for some whiskey and branch water, sir?” the black man said.

I thought about it. It might keep my teeth from chattering. On the other hand, it was ten-thirty in the morning. I shook my head.

The black man nodded and shuffled a little ways off, near the door, and stood. Nelson continued to gaze at the stock car race.

I waited.

Nobody did anything. It was as if immobility were the natural order of things here, and movement was aberrant.

Jumper Jack drank some more whiskey. The race announcer was frantic with excitement as the cars went round and round. The excitement seemed contrived in this room where time was suspended and movement was an oddity. The huge television set itself was inappropriate, a blatting, contemporary intrusion into this motionless antebellum room full of dogs, and old men, and me.

I sat. The black man stood. The dogs sprawled. And Jumper Jack stared at the race and drank whiskey. I waited. I had nowhere to go.

Finally someone won the car race. Jumper Jack picked up the remote from the table beside him and pressed the mute button. The television went silent. He turned and looked at me, and when he spoke his clotted voice rumbled up out of his belly like the effortful grumble of a whale.

“Got no daughter,” he said.

“None?”

“No daughter,” he said and finished his whiskey and fumbled at the fixings to make another one. The old black man was there. He made the drink with no wasted movement and handed it to Nelson and returned to his motionless post near the door.

“You know a woman named Olivia Nelson?”

He shook his head, heavily, as if there were hornets around it.

“No,” he said.

“Did you ever?” I said.

“No more.”

“But you did once.”

He looked at me for the first time, raising his head slowly from his chest and staring at me with his rheumy, unfocused gaze.

“Yes.”

I waited again. Nelson drank. One of the dogs got up suddenly and walked over and put his head on Nelson’s lap. Nelson automatically patted the dog’s head with a thick, clumsy hand. There were liver spots on his hands and the fingernails were ragged, as if he chewed them.

“Married a African nigger,” he said. “I…” He seemed overcome, as much by forgetfulness as by memory. He lost track of what he’d begun to say, and dropped his head and buried his nose in the lowball glass and drank.

“And?” I said.

He looked up as if he were surprised to see me there.

“And?”

“And what happened after she married?” I said.

Again his head dropped. “Jefferson tell you,” he rumbled.

I looked at the black man. He nodded.

“Jefferson,” Nelson said, “you tell.”

He drank again and turned the sound back on, and faced back into the car races, as if I’d vanished. His chin sank to his chest. Jefferson came over and took the whiskey glass from his hand and put it on the table. From an inside pocket he produced a big red bandanna and wiped Nelson’s forehead with it. Nelson started to snore. The dog withdrew his head from Nelson’s lap and went back and lay down with a sigh in the bright sun splash on the bluestone floor.

“Mr. Nelson will sleep now, sir,” Jefferson said. “You and I can talk in the kitchen.”

I followed Jefferson out of the cold room where Nelson lay sweating in his sleep, with his dogs, in front of the aimless car race. Despite what Ferguson said, Jumper Jack no longer seemed a danger to virgins.

“Mr. Nelson has got old,” Jefferson said.

“Lot of that going around,” I said. Jefferson smiled.

“Yessir,” he said, “there is.”

He gazed absently at the old hound lying by the stove.

“He something to see, when he younger,” Jefferson said. “Ride a horse. Shoot. Handle dogs. Not afraid of any man. People step aside when he come.”

Jefferson smiled softly.

“He like the ladies all right,” he said.

I waited. It was a skill I was perfecting down here.

“Always took care of family,” Jefferson said.

The old refrigerator in the far corner lumbered noisily into life. Nobody paid it any mind.

“Been with him all my life,” Jefferson said. “He always took care of me too.”

“Now you take care of him.”

“All there is,” Jefferson said. “Mrs. Nelson gone. Miss Olivia gone.”

“Tell me about Olivia,” I said.

His voice was barely more than a whisper. His eyes were remote, his hands inert on the table looked sadly frail.

“She broke his heart,” he said.

“Married a black man?” Jefferson nodded.

“She shouldn’t have done that,” he said. “Broke his heart.”

“Doesn’t break everyone’s heart,” I said.

“He couldn’t change, he too old, he too…” Jefferson thought a minute. “He too much Mr. Jack. Wasn’t even one of our Nigras. Peace Corps. She marry an African Nigra.”

“Did you ever meet him?” I said.

“No, sir. They never come here. Mr. Jack say he never want to see her again. Say she dead, so far as he concerned.”

“And now she is,” I said.

Jefferson raised his head and stared at me. “No, sir,” he said.

“Yeah. I’m sorry, Jefferson. That’s why I’m looking into her past. I’ll let you decide how to tell him, or if.”

“When she die, sir?”

I counted in my head for a moment. “Ten weeks ago,” I said. “In Boston.”

Jefferson stared at me.

“No, sir,” he said.

“Sorry,” I said.

“I always kept in touch with her,” Jefferson said. “Mr. Jack pretends she’s dead, but she writes me letter and I write her. In Nairobi-that’s in Africa where she live.”

I nodded. The Blue Tick hound stretched, all four legs taut for a long moment on the floor, and then lapped his muzzle once and relaxed back into sleep.

“I got a letter from her yesterday,” Jefferson said.

His voice was still as ashes.

“She wrote it last week,” he said. “She ain’t dead, Mr. Spenser.”

Nothing moved. Anywhere. It was so still I could hear the old dog breathing gently as he slept.

“You have that letter?” I said.

“Yessir.”

Jefferson got up and went into a pantry and came back in a moment with a letter. It was written on that thin blue airmail stationery that folds into its own envelope and has to be slit the right way or you can’t keep track of the pages.

“May I read it?” I said.

“Yessir.”

The letter, addressed to Jefferson, Dear, was a compendium of recent activities at the medical clinic, which I gathered she and her husband operated in a Nairobi slum. AIDS was the leading killer of both men and women, she said. There were several references to Jefferson’s last letter. It was dated five days previous, and signed Love as always, Livvie. There was no reason to doubt it.

“You’d recognize her handwriting,” I said.

“Yessir. When she a little girl I help her with her homework. When she go away to college she write me every week. She been writing me every week ever since. More than twenty-five years. I know her handwriting, sir.”

I nodded. “I’m glad it wasn’t her, Jefferson.”

“Yessir.”

“But it was somebody.”

“Yessir.”

I had a copy of the portrait I’d found in the victim’s living room. I took it out of my inside pocket and showed it to Jefferson.

“Sure look like Miss Livvie,” Jefferson said. “This woman said she was Olivia Nelson. She was married to a prominent Boston white man, lived on Beacon Hill, and had two college-age children.”

“Can’t be Miss Livvie,” Jefferson said. His voice was matter-of-fact, the way you’d remark that the world was round.

“Do you know a woman named Cheryl Anne Rankin?” I said.

“No, sir,” Jefferson said.

He was lying. He said it too quickly and with too much resolve.

“Her picture’s on the wall at the track kitchen,” I said. “Woman there says she’s her daughter.”

“Don’t know nothing about that, sir.” I nodded again.

“Be all right with you, sir, you don’t tell Mr. Jack I writing to Miss Livvie?”

“No need to, Jefferson,” I said. “But I bet he knows anyway.”

“Sure he do, sir. But he wouldn’t want me to know he knows.”

“You sure you don’t know anything about Cheryl Anne Rankin?”

“Don’t know nothing about that, sir. Nothing at all.”

Jefferson stood and I stood, and we went upstairs to the front door. I put out my hand. Jefferson took it. His hand was slender and strong and dry as dust.

“Nelson is lucky to know you, Jefferson,” I said.

Jefferson smiled. “Yessir,” he said.