Return to Dust (19 page)

Chapter Twenty-four

I scheduled an appointment with Joshua Jennings' lawyer in New Haven late the next afternoon. Off Chapel Street, near the Yale Art Gallery, the nineteenth-century brownstone was a curious anachronism nestled in among a fast food restaurant, a frame-it-yourself art store, a faded luncheonette, a discount furniture store, and the milling hordes of laughing hip-hop kids who were hanging out on the bus benches under the high leaded-glass windows. Winslow, Winslow, Winslow, and Clay, Inc. I felt sorry for Clay.

I didn't need to feel sorry for Clay. William Clay, Esq., I discovered, was the only surviving senior partner. Clay, I realized, would soon be joining them. An old, leathery man, small and wiry, creaky as old wood, sort of like Joshua Jennings himself, but in an expensive suit, with a calculated haircut for the four strands that insisted on inhabiting his crusty scalp.

He was granting me ten-to-fifteen off-the-clock minutes, which must have cost him in the range of two thousand in billing time. So I calculated. He was doing it because he'd once liked Joshua. Those were his words: “I once liked him.”

He nudged a file toward me. I took it.

“I met the niece once,” he informed me. “A looker.”

I tried to imagine the Mary Powell I spoke to in New York as a looker, but the only images I created were of a scared young woman. To the ninety-year-old Clay, with his Coke-glass eyeglasses, halitosis breath, and liver spots on his wrists as big as silver dollars—who knows what constituted a looker?

“A nervous woman,” he told me. “But smiling. But jittery.”

“Why was she here?”

“She said she had friends in New Haven. I had spoken with her by phone—she called from New York about Joshua—and then she was in Clinton with him. Then he was sick and in New York. It was hard to follow her movements.”

“Did you see her again?”

“I spoke with her once on the phone. Then she sent a copy of the death certificate and a brief note he'd written to me before his death. It's there. A copy.”

I leafed through the thin folder and read the death certificate. Fairly standard, dated September 15 in New York City. I started to jot down the doctor's signature.

“The folder is yours.” He looked annoyed. I thanked him. Inside was a photocopy of the note Joshua wrote, a few painfully written, scribbled sentences saying hello, dated a week before his death. There was also a three-line typed note from Mary Powell that listed the legal documents enclosed.

“Nothing funny about the will?”

“Funny?” He didn't like the word. “It was years old, of course. I reviewed it, I remember, but an associate handled it. I spoke with him, and it was
pro forma
, actually. Old will on file, no codicils of any sort, fairly standard, no bequests other than to the school and college. All charity. A comfortable man. No property other than bank assets.”

“But he left nothing to his niece.”

“Nothing unusual there. I was told that he had only known her a short time. He'd located her online. That bothered him, of course. Some genealogical site. A distant relative. Who knows? She wasn't happy he found her—wanted to write an end to the whole business, she said.” He locked eyes with mine. “She admitted that he gave her ten thousand dollars, a gift.”

“I didn't know that.”

“If she told me that, I imagine the amount was higher. But the will was ironclad. She'd have an uphill battle contesting, a point I made to her—in case she harbored such an idea.”

“Had she mentioned the will?”

“She told me on the phone that she didn't want money from him—didn't expect it, in fact. I gather she found him a nuisance.” The old man smiled. “She did say something amusing, I thought. ‘Lovers take care of me,' she said, and I thought that a most frank and unnecessary admission.”

“She didn't mention any lovers' names?”

He seemed surprised. “How would one respond to such a line, Mr. Lam?”

I could think of a dozen, but maybe I come out of a different time and place.

He raised his hand. The conference was over. We shook hands. “Intriguing,” he said to my back.

“What is?” I looked back.

“Alive, Joshua was an uneventful man. Joshua has only become interesting after his death. It's what I hope for my own life.”

I walked out. How would you respond to such a line?

***

Leaving his office, I walked into darkness and bitter cold. The New Haven streets were filled with people headed home, huddled against the chill wind. I enjoyed being in the city, loving the aimless wandering, watching a storekeeper fighting with some resistant Christmas lights that refused to stay put. It wasn't even Thanksgiving yet. Americans, I discovered, like to rush the holidays, frantic to get them over with. Although I celebrated no holidays myself, Liz and I—in our fairy-tale honeymoon period in New York—had celebrated Christmas with a little real tree we bought on Carmine Street in the village, and Hanukkah candles. A mish-mash. She was (not is) Jewish. I was (not am) Buddhist. Somehow, though, we both remain Jewish and Buddhist. And oddly Christian. Happy holidays. Shalom. Feliz Navidad.

…
like a Buddha in a dying lotus blossom

…like honey blanketed by swarms of bees
…

I'd always hunger for order and balance. For calm, serenity.

I glared at the storekeeper. He kept fighting with the strings of lights.

I lingered in a deli over pastrami on rye and a Sam Adams ale.

Back on the street I found myself exhilarated. Yale students streamed through upper Chapel Street, bumping into one another, laughing, their faces bright against the cold. I recalled nights back at Columbia, jostling with buddies down Broadway toward Tom's Restaurant. We didn't give a damn about anything. So I wandered now. By the time I decided to head back to Hartford, it was after ten o'clock. My car sat on a side street, a ticket slapped on the windshield.

I fumbled for my keys, my fingers numb against the cold lock. Across the street I heard forced laughter, a man's reedy high-pitched warble in counterpoint to another man's deeper, more aggressive boom, and I suddenly realized that the laughter was familiar. Turning, I stared through the darkness, past the faltering neon of a kosher Chinese restaurant, past the art-deco neon of a corner bar. There were two men standing in front of the bar, and they were laughing.

I watched quietly as they moved off the sidewalk, coming closer to where I stood. The man nearest me, I realized, was Davey Corcoran. And he was gripping the sleeve of Ken Rodman, my upstairs neighbor.

I looked past them, back toward the bar, and through the half-lit window, I saw the press of dancing men. I may be slow when it comes to such things, but I did live in New York. I know a gay bar when I stumble onto one.

Davey and Ken were crossing the street. The laughter had stopped but not the intimacy. I wrestled with the scene—there was no way I could have connected Ken with Davey. Ken, freshly divorced and finding his way alone in the apartment above mine, seemed a placid insurance executive. Marta, Davey's aunt, had cleaned his apartment.

And Davey, that bitter isolato—or so I thought—locked away in that messy, littered apartment, dressed in his Mayberry RFD flannels and hayseed mentality, was just a guy with a smart-alecky mouth. He was a lonely reader of books. Here he was, still dressed in flannel, with a camouflage vest over it, and jeans and boots. The way he always dressed, I guess. But now he was far from home—and in the company of men, as they said in Victorian novels. Sort of.

“Davey,” I yelled. I regretted it immediately, but I knew he'd spot me within seconds.

He stopped in his tracks, literally locked in place, and stared across the street. When he saw me, his smile faded, his laughter ended.

Worse, he shuddered as though chilled, and looked left and right. He threw his large head back, almost melodramatically, as a character would in an old tearjerker, then bolted. That's the only word to describe his actions—he bolted. He ran, bouncing off the dark walls, careening around a couple of late-night partygoers leaving the Chinese restaurant, and then disappeared around the corner.

“Davey,” I yelled to the empty black corner.

When I looked back at Ken, he was standing with his arms by his side, staring at me. But even across the street, under the purple haze of streetlight and November wind and neon garishness, even under that artificial light, I could see he was grinning.

***

The next evening, unplanned, my friends showed up at my apartment. First Liz stopped in. I'd spoken to her earlier about Marta because she was wondering what was going on, and she told me she was a few streets over.

“Come on up,” I told her.

Though she hesitated, she agreed, and promised to bring take-out from Triple Star. We'd finished our moo shu pork and sesame chicken when Jimmy dropped in, and Gracie soon followed. Jimmy was dressed in a bright sky-blue sweater with giant white cobwebs covering it. He looked ready for a ski slope. He made a grumpy sound when I told him this, and Gracie giggled, saying that Jimmy's only exercise was carrying a box of cigars from the car into his house. He beamed at her. She was, of course, the only person he ever grinned at. I mean, he smiled and charmed, and he laughed. But when Gracie was around—tonight she'd dipped herself into some potent hyacinth perfume and decked herself out in a go-to-bingo pants suit with sequins and sparkles—the two of them acted out their light and innocent romance, if that was what it was.

Liz and I served drinks—for a moment I experienced
déjà vu
, the two of us in our Manhattan apartment entertaining friends. We relaxed. Within minutes there was a knock and Hank wandered in. He'd shaved his head. He long sported a close-cropped haircut, but now he looked…bald.

“Christ, a skinhead,” Jimmy sang out.

“This is how guys look now,” Hank protested.

“I like it,” Liz told him.

Then, just as I was remembering I had a batch of term papers I had to grade, my Criminal Justice students stumbling through their case-study reports, Vinnie and Marcie dropped in. They were coming home from dinner, driving by, saw Hank parking his car, and spotted the lights on in my apartment. Everyone was talking at once, everyone was laughing. I smiled at everyone, overjoyed, but I was tired.

Jimmy said he missed the days when he could have a cigarette with his beer—and I remembered Willie Do's declaration in his own apartment. Gracie teased Hank. She'd taken a real shine to him—“Such a cute boy, and quick”—and loved goofing on him. Liz gave him a bear hug. Hank always looked embarrassed by the attention, but I could tell he was pleased. Since Hank and I became buddies, he'd slowly worked his way into all my friends' affections. Now, with all my friends around me, Gracie kidded Hank about his shaved head (“a skinny Buddha”) and his shadowing of my investigation.

“I want to learn from the master,” Hank declared grandly.

Jimmy interrupted, “I'm not taking on any pupils, Hank.”

We laughed.

There was a sudden rapping at the door, and we all jumped, guilty of something. It gave me pause. After all, my closest friends were at that moment huddled in the room with me, and the hour was late. Who? The police? I thought of Karen, but I knew she'd never drop in. Nobody came to the door around midnight. Everyone must have been thinking the same thing because we became quiet, very quiet.

I opened it. Ken Rodman looked sheepish and uncomfortable. He had on an overcoat, so I assumed he was coming home from somewhere. His face looked stiff with cold.

He looked over my shoulder at the crowd, all of them staring back with expressions ranging from accusation to curiosity.

“I didn't know you had company,” he said.

That surprised me. We were raucous enough to warrant eviction—had the landlady herself not been a major culprit in the noise.

“Come in.”

“Oh, no.” He backed off. “I wanted to talk to you about last night.”

“I want to talk to you.”

“I have something to tell you.” He mouthed the word
Davey
silently. “I should have told you before.” But he was already backing off, fast now. “Later on. I'll catch you later.” He backed off, headed up the stairwell.

I stared at my friends. An obligatory moment of silence, then the frantic Babel of insistent voices rose in awesome crescendo.

“I have nothing to say.” I relished the moment.

They pushed into me, trapping me, all of them believing they'd seen a pivotal moment in the Case.

“I have nothing to say,” I repeated.

No one believed me. Then, smiling, I quoted Buddha: “‘Look for sand in your rice. Look for rice in your sand.'”

Everyone groaned.

Chapter Twenty-five

The next afternoon, after classes, I swam for an hour at the college, then headed to the shopping arcade to visit Karen. She had an hour till closing, she said, though she was restless and ready to leave. When I'd called, she told me to stop in.

“I'm bored,” she'd said, “and we gotta talk.”

I got there early, so I wandered down the sidewalk, window shopping. Lingering outside Farmington Books and Things, staring at a display of New England travel books, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned.

“Did you see Peter at the college today?” Selena asked.

“No. Why?”

She stood there, waiting.

“Does he have a late afternoon class?” I asked.

She shrugged her shoulders. “It doesn't matter.” She smiled. “You shopping?”

I didn't answer. I looked over her shoulder, and her face tightened.

“You're here to see Karen.” Her voice was flat.

“Yes.”

“Wasn't I neurotic enough for you?”

I smiled. “You did a good job of it.”

“All women get neurotic around men. You men train us to be that way. It's a form of slavery. Men want us off balance.”

I kept my mouth shut. Karen, glancing out the doorway of her shop, spotted me, and waved. I nodded toward her. Selena followed my eye and frowned. She drew her fingernail down my lapel, applying pressure, and then without a word turned away. She disappeared into her shop.

“She still got it for you?” Karen said when I entered her store.

“I don't want to talk about it.”

“She and I have this little thing—this tension—for a while now. I don't know where it came from, but the fact that you dated her adds to the fire.”

I didn't say anything.

“She has no friends here.” She waved her hand across the line of shops. Then, smiling, “Oh well. Some folks rub others the wrong way.”

Her smugness bothered me, prompting me to defend Selena, whose childhood was as lost as my own. “You gotta remember where she came from, Karen. She never really fit in, you know, growing up with a crazy mother, a rotten father never around, Radcliffe on a scholarship, then meeting Peter who…”

Karen cut me off, angry. “I know the resumé. The whole goddamn town has heard it. The poor All-American girl meets the poor All-American boy. Fireworks. The pretty people. I need a rest from it.”

“Sorry.”

Almost closing time, we talked very little while she tended to the store, eyeing a young mother who kept frowning at a piece of art on the wall. When we were alone, she told me that she'd found another box of Marta's papers tucked into a clothes drawer that she was emptying out. Mostly old bills, but she wanted me to look through it. “Telephone receipts, that sort of thing. I don't know why she kept them.”

“I'll check them out.”

“Come for dinner. You can go through them.”

I nodded.

“Look, it's just an excuse to see you.”

I nodded again.

As we drove to her place—I'd walked to the arcade so I rode with her—I asked her when she planned on selling Marta's house.

“I hate that house. Way out there—so—well, so like Marta herself. Those fifties windows and that fifties kitchen with the black-and-white tile and the…” She stopped, waving her hand. “I don't want to live there because she once lived there. I'm going to sell it, but not right away. I want to take my time.”

While she tossed a salad for dinner, I leafed through the cardboard box of papers. Elastic bands bound receipts from years back—household bills from the Connecticut Light and Power, Connecticut Gas, the sort of stuff anyone would have thrown out long ago. At one point Karen walked in. She'd changed her clothes, slipping out of her work outfit of a casual gray wool suit and into a pair of billowing fawn-colored slacks and that light yellow cashmere sweater I liked. She'd let her hair down and looked like a young girl, the autumn colors masking the stress in her face.

“You look happy,” I told her, but she said nothing, returning to the kitchen. A cabinet door slammed. I'd just made her more uncomfortable. Davey's voice, again:
Karen runs from everything while she actually thinks she's running to it.
Why did that line stay with me?

Idly I sifted through another box she'd carried from Marta's home.

“Marta's attempt to mimic Joshua's collecting,” she yelled to me.

I scanned some of the titles. A Thomas Hardy novel, a Robert W. Chambers romance, some faded and chipped leather volumes, odd genteel romances with embossed gilt covers. They were lined up in the bottom of a cardboard box.

“They remind me of her.” Karen appeared behind me, looking over my shoulder.

“I like old books.”

“I don't,” Karen said. “Neither did Marta. She complained that she had to dust his walls of books. And every other professor's. Like Wilcox and Safako. Books and books and books. She hated books.”

“You're hard on her, Karen.”

“Am I?”

“I find it strange that this woman men wanted as a friend has such bad stuff said about her—after her death. Even Hattie.”

“She wasn't a saint, you know.”

I stared at her.

Throughout dinner we barely spoke, a faraway look in her eyes despite my attempts to generate conversation. I gabbed monotonously about Gracie and Jimmy, but she kept looking away.

“Your aunt saved a lot of junk.” I struggled for a topic.

“You want to talk about the case?”

“I guess so. Is that why I'm here?”

“Yes. I mean, yes, but I also wanted to, you know, relax.”

“But you want to discuss the case.”

“You don't call me about it.”

“I don't have much to tell you yet.”

“But you will?”

I shrugged my shoulders. I noticed she barely touched her salad. For a few minutes, mechanically, I outlined what I'd done, everything chronological and matter of fact, ending with the Mary Powell question and my side trip to New Haven and Joshua's lawyer. I left out seeing her panicky brother outside that bar in New Haven. That was none of my business—at this point, at least.

“So,” she concluded, “we are still nowhere.”

I apologized, but she held up her hand. “It's okay. You're onto something.”

That comment startled me. “What?”

“Joshua Jennings and Mary Powell. They hold some important answer. That Mary—she's hiding something. I can
sense
it.”

As she spoke, her words so emphatic, without qualification, it suddenly rang true. Not so much the Mary Powell part—most likely that was a dead end—but Joshua held a key to this puzzle. The story of Joshua would lead me back to Marta's fateful night on that final stone-cold bridge.

Over coffee we relaxed, her easy-going mood returned. We sat together on the sofa, the box of Marta's papers between us, and she tossed canceled checks and useless papers into the wastebasket. Unused church collection envelopes. United Way appeals. Girl Scout cookie receipts. Marta's tight, constipated script appeared on lists of dollars and cents spent on little things: chewing gum, hair dye, a Sue Grafton paperback from an airport kiosk. What for? Tax deduction? I doubted that. Canceled airline receipts from many years back. Not the important Russian trip—I looked for that—but quick jaunts to Las Vegas, to the Mall of America, to New Orleans, to Atlantic City. US Airlines. American Airlines. Delta. Standard domestic carriers. We tossed it all away.

But I looked through it all first, every envelope, every receipt, and in one of the last airline packets, folded neatly in half, was a scribbled note definitely not in Marta's handwriting, dated two years back.

“Look at this.” I handed it to Karen.

“That's Hattie's handwriting. I'd recognize it anywhere.”

It was a short note, handwritten, torn from a school-style notepad, signed by Hattie Cozzins, acknowledging the loan of twenty-thousand dollars, some two years back, to be repaid in installments determined at a later time.

“Now that doesn't sound like my aunt at all,” Karen insisted.

“Why not?”

“Generosity was not one of her strong points. And Hattie was a travel companion, not a bosom buddy. With me, she spent more time ranking on the poor woman than—well, celebrating their friendship.”

I took the piece of paper. “I'll visit Hattie and see what she has to say about this.”

Antsy now, she wandered the rooms, folding and unfolding her arms, leafing through papers, stopping, sniping at me.

“You're bothered by the note,” I commented.

She glared. “It's
my
money that woman has.”

I shut up. Money, Jimmy always told me. Most murders came down to money.

I suggested a ride to the 880 Club in Hartford to listen to some local jazz, a venue she knew nothing about.

“I don't know jazz.”

“You don't have to.”

When we got there, it was still early and the place was nearly empty. A few tables of veterans and regulars nodded and tapped feet to a small lively combo. But after a half hour Karen stood up and touched my shoulder.

“Could we leave now?”

She walked away. I followed her out, rushing to catch up with her.

“Everybody in there is too happy.”

That amazed me because the combo was slinking around a downbeat improv of “St. James Infirmary.” A mournful, low rider kind of night. The rent hadn't been paid and the band hadn't been laid. Nobody was happy.

“Rick. My God.”

I heard a voice from the parking lot. Liz was stepping out of a car. She was with a woman I didn't know. Both were muffled in scarves and pullover hats. I smiled. Her silky voice gave her away.

I stopped to say hello, but Karen, wired now, face set, plunged ahead, standing by her car, waiting for me to get there. I nodded in Karen's direction and Liz, looking back at her, widened her eyes, tilted her head. I read the look—
You seem to be in some trouble here, and it's all your own doing
. A quick peck on the cheek, and she disappeared into the 880 Club. I joined Karen.

“That was Liz.”

“I know who she is. Does your ex-wife follow you around, Rick?”

“A public place, Karen. Sometimes we bump into each other. Especially here. A favorite spot…” My voice trailed off.

Her voice dipped. “Like Selena today?”

“Selena found me—and her shop is right near yours.”

“Christ, Rick. Women and you. You're cruel to them. That's why they want you.”

Whatever that meant—I had no idea. The line came out of nowhere—and was preposterous. It had no basis in any fact I knew about. I might be a lot of things—a little vain sometimes, a whole lot insecure, a tad foolish at other times—but I don't really see myself as cruel. Not one of the deadly sins. I don't like it in others, so I don't want it in myself.

She refused to talk on the way back to Farmington. Sitting in the car outside my apartment, I started to say good night, but she turned her head away. For a moment I thought of Marta—the severe Puritan howling in the wilderness.

“Karen.”

“You're on the time clock.” Her voice broke at the end. “Tonight was business.”

***

I didn't feel like going into my apartment. So I went into the back, hopped into my car, and spun around for an hour, stopped in to see Jimmy, and eventually, late at night, walked into my apartment.

I had one blinking message. Liz, not surprisingly. The appropriate end to this evening's periodic sentence.

Her voice was jittery. “You two did not look happy tonight. Or—together. I'm sorry but it's true. And I hope she's not there listening to this message with you. If so, make me out to be the witch I am and call me a meddlesome ex-wife who doesn't know when the glow is over. Sorry I called but I can't take it back.”

Her words rambled on. I smiled. It was the kind of dumb message she and I would have ended up laughing hysterically over many years before, as we held onto each other and howled. When, indeed, we were in love. We could laugh for hours over little things.

I sat in the chair, my eyes closed, smiling. It was times like this that I really regretted the end of our marriage. So much of us was so good. Maybe we were just too young then. She brought out the best in me, and I wasn't embarrassed by it. She could always make me smile at the absurdity of things. Like now.

Leave it to Liz to end my day with laughter.