Return to Dust (28 page)

“He did come back.”

“Really?”

“But he went away.”

“Everyone went away.”

“But not Marta.”

He winced. “Yeah, we'd spot her car on the street. That bothered us.”

They became obsessed. There was always something else to think of. A new expense. Letters that surprised. Keep going.

Peter, in disguise, established a life in Amherst, visible on occasional weekends, returning by bus to Hartford during the week. Back and forth. Luckily he was on summer break from the college. Selena played niece when she had to, dealing with the New Haven estate lawyer, the people in Clinton. Rental cars and highly-visible visits but rare stopovers. Joshua was a hermit. They wanted a trail that would end in sudden death in New York.

“Why New York? Why Mary Powell?”

Peter smirked. “A mistake.”

In New York one time for business, Peter had talked up a waitress in a West Side bar. Mary Powell, single and lonely, in a bad relationship she couldn't shut up about. He flirted with her, promised her a call, and she gave him her number and address.

“I was feeling low.” Peter avoided looking at Selena. “My ego needed stroking.”

“Ass,” Selena snarled.

“The name on the paper became the niece.” Peter sighed. “That was a mistake.”

“I told him to make up a New York name and address, something bogus. But, oh no—not my Peter with that slip of paper tucked into his wallet.” Selena shook her head.

“That was a stupid error,” Peter went on. “I got careless. My mind wasn't working. I just felt that—what if someone tried to call—at least they'd hear a real voice, a real Mary Powell. It would confuse people.” A sob escaped his throat. “I wanted everything to go away.”

“Weak.” Selena wagged a finger at him. “It would have worked. Joshua had moved away.”

“Except for Marta,” Peter said, his tone mournful.

“Yes, Marta,” Selena echoed. “Marta. That witch.”

They ended the Amherst rental on schedule, sublet the Clinton beach cottage—they actually made
that
into a vacation for themselves because they'd talked about a summer rental all winter—and then orchestrated his sudden death in New York.

“Everything like clockwork. A bogus death certificate sent to Joshua's lawyer was no problem.”

In his files Peter found the death certificate of a former client. Scanned, Photoshopped, cut and pasted by a diligent Selena, the document, printed, became an official declaration. Who would investigate? He was the lawyer involved—he'd talk his way through any questions. But there were none
.

Routine papers, a few phone calls, letting one part of New York's bureaucracy work against another part. Orchestrated with Peter's careful attention
,
the estate was probated without problem, the New Haven lawyer routinely signing off on it, without question. After all, he hadn't seen Joshua in years. An obit to the newspapers. The school got his millions. His rare Renaissance painting and the rare volume of incunabula, the items promised by him in that discovered letter, were already on display at the boys' school. Supposedly he'd moved with his rare Coopers. No one would wonder about those books. The Canterburys were already the owners of the house, which was, of course, no longer an asset.

“A mortgage paid in full on paper.”

Joshua had suggested he'd hold the mortgage, and now, conveniently, it was paid off. No questions asked.

Slowly they refurbished the rooms in their own way, covering up Joshua's life in the house. People knew they'd spent most of their money buying the house so no one expected much inside. They did that purposely—to make people forget Joshua's awesome presence in the vast house. They wanted it to look—poor. The piano stayed—they'd mentioned to friends that Joshua said they could have it.

“No problem. Clockwork.”

“We all knew about the piano,” I noted.

“Life went on,” Selena said matter-of-factly.

The body in the summer garden.

Yes, I thought—and the toll was your fragile marriage.

Peter sat back. “It was a game that got too easy. We owned the house. Legal. Fair and square. Paid for. We didn't kill him, Rick. He died of a heart attack.”

“Marta.” I waited. “Marta.”

“Marta,” Peter sighed. “Christ, we thought that she was out of the picture. But the day before Joshua—well, moved—she left a message at the house. And that letter to Amherst scared us. We knew she might go up there, so we prepared stories for the guard there to keep her away. So much of our planning had to do with her. But after that one letter—nothing. Silence. She gave up. The summer went by. We were free.”

“And then months later you asked her to clean your house.”

“Fools,” Selena spat out. Her eyes got bright, fiery. “Can you believe we never gave her a thought? She was a cleaning lady.”

“His cherished books.” Peter glanced toward the staircase. “I didn't want to get rid of them. So wonderful. A pristine collection. Lovely. In an unused closet.”

“Upstairs.” Selena bit her lip. “Peter was supposed to lock the closet.”

“So you had to kill her?”

“The look on her face when she opened that door,” Peter mumbled.

Selena watched me closely. “Marta was a silly old woman, but Richard Wilcox isn't. Too dangerous. We couldn't risk it.”

Selena waited by the sheltered stone bridge, standing in the shadows, knowing it was the route Marta would take from her home.

“All I wanted to do was talk to her, get some sense of…” Her voice trailed off. “Nothing more, I swear. Just convince her that Joshua had moved. I didn't go there to harm her.”

But Marta, spotting her, turned, backed off. Selena ran at her, grabbed her shoulder, and the older woman, already tipsy, struggled.

“She fell.” Selena raised her voice.

“No,” I insisted. “She couldn't fall like that. The wall was too high.”

“Well, we fought.”

“You pushed her.”

Selena got quiet. “It was so simple. She was a little plastered, but I had to fight her, lift her…” She sighed.

“Everything got out of hand. It was crazy.” Peter was crying. “We're not that kind of people. You know us, Rick. You're our friend. We're not that kind of people.”

Buddha talks.
Abstain from taking the life of everything that lives.

Epilogue

Buddha, Lord, he says: What must be completely known, I have completely known.

When I called Karen about the arrests of Peter and Selena, she mumbled a thank-you and hung up. That was it. She sent me a generous check. She'd forgotten that she'd already paid me, so I sent it back with a note. She sent it again. Both times there was no note to me. The second time I tore it in half. I called her every day, leaving messages. Dinner, I suggested. Let's talk about what happened. When I finally stopped at her store, she refused to speak to me. Embarrassed, I left.

I avoided her shop. Marcie told me the rumors floating around. Karen was increasingly cranky and miserable some days, happy and spirited others. She started attending Mass, she cut her hair, she wore glasses now, and she handed out pamphlets in her store. Leaflets about God and man. Not Brown Bonnet stuff, thank God, but little New Age sermons on life. People were staying away.

One day, shopping, Marcie watched movers emptying out Selena's gift shop. Karen stood outside, a smile on her face. Thanksgiving arrived, a holiday from classes, but little else. I never ran anymore. I ate too much, drank too much, hung out with Jimmy and Gracie too much. Ken moved out one night and said no good-byes. Marcie still insisted he was involved. Vinnie said that Marcie had to indulge conspiracy theories that could never be proven—like the Kennedy assassination, like the disappearance of Judge Crater, like Amelia Earhart and Jimmy Hoffa. Somehow she connected Ken to Selena and Peter. Ken moved out of state, I heard.

For a while everyone at the college talked of Selena and Peter, but then they were talking about Charlie Safako whose pug died suddenly. He fell apart in class and wept.

I received a short note from Richard Wilcox, a card really, and in it he wrote this sentence: “I'm sorry for the way I spoke to you. I treated you shabbily.”

That was all. It was a decent gesture. When I called to thank him, I learned he'd died the day before.

Jimmy and I finally had to move our office out of the South End of Hartford. Though he grumbled and fumed, he finally agreed to a space I located. “About time.” The second floor of a converted three-family Victorian home on Farmington Avenue, tiny rooms that looked out on an all-night Shell station, fast food restaurants, and a Hair Today beauty parlor. Jimmy could walk to work—his studio apartment was down the street. The first floor held law offices of an old Hartford stalwart, a feisty lawyer named Praleen Johnson, though I doubted anyone mocked that first name when confronted by the bulldog in court. The third floor held a helter-skelter video production office run by Praleen's bohemian and unfocused son, Marcus, a haven for off-the-wall characters. The only money they made was from taping court depositions for Daddy—and most likely drug sales, along with the offbeat avant-garde short films they showed at film festivals.

Jimmy, sizing up the house situation, remarked, “I'm afraid there's gonna be at least one murder in this building. Have you seen the characters?”

But he acquiesced to the move when he realized that Pizza Parlor next door delivered at all hours. Not only pizza but also Buffalo wings with hot sauce.

“A new chapter for us,” he summarized. “You better like it here.”

I sighed. “Jimmy, I'm the one who found the place, no?”

“Believe what you want.”

***

A day later Hank and I visited Aunt Marie, who had trouble looking into my face. I thanked her, and we drove an hour down to Stamford. We had lunch with Dan Fowler, an old roommate of mine from Columbia, once an FBI specialist and now an archivist with the Smithsonian. I repeated what I'd told him on the phone.

“Tomorrow,” I told him.

He grinned. “You ask the impossible, Rick.”

“That's because I know you can do the impossible.”

He flicked his head toward Hank. “Do you believe this guy?”

Hank smiled back. “A man of surprises.”

We drove back home, but we had to return the following afternoon.

That night, nervous, I met Hank outside and we drove to Willie Do's apartment. We walked into his living room, and I caught my breath—everyone was there. Willie, Marie, Tony and his wife, even the fifteen-year-old boy called Big Nose. They stared at me, wary, tense.

I cleared my throat. “With great respect, Vuong Ky Do,” I began, looking into his face. “I want to thank you for helping to solve a murder.”

Willie raised his hand. “No, I want nothing.”

I glanced at Hank, who sputtered, “But Uncle Willie, Rick had an idea.”

Willie stood up, his face hardened, ready to leave the room, but his wife touched his sleeve. He looked down at her face and drew in his breath. She had tears in her eyes,

“What?” Nervous, twisting his body around.

I held out a manila envelope to him, but he didn't take it.

His wife touched his sleeve again, nodded at him. “Vuong.” Her voice a whisper.

Willie slipped an eight-by-ten photograph from the envelope and sank back into a seat. He gripped it in both hands. Frozen. His eyes never moved off the photograph. Beads of sweat on his brow, his lips quivered.

What I'd done—with Hank's and Aunt Marie's imprimatur—was to take the torn, faded, stained photograph Willie had carried with him as he fled Vietnam, the precious relic he looked at once a month in Tony's apartment—
that
photograph. The one with the faded hint of his dead little girl, the girl smiling under her father's touch. An image almost entirely disappeared. I delivered the photograph to my friend in Stamford with the proviso that I return to retrieve it the next day. With his state-of-the-art technology, Dan had performed a miracle. The reconstituted photograph was crisp and vibrant. But what mattered was that Willie and Marie's little girl was no longer washed out, a dim suggestion of a pretty child. No, that girl with her innocent smile, her father's loving hand on her shoulder—that girl was alive now.

Willie moved the photograph closer to his face. His fingers trembled on his dead daughter's lovely face.

He stood up, as if in a panic, his eyes darting from one member of his family to the next. A low groan came from the back of his throat. Finally he stared long and hard at me. Uncomfortable, I looked away.

“Rick Van Lam.”

The whole name.

I shivered.

He left the room, taking the photograph with him.

We sat still, all of us.

Suddenly we could hear Willie's difficult wailing, an awful keening for the dead, beautiful daughter whose ghost walked the earth and could not come home to her father.

Hank and I stood up, ready to leave.

Aunt Marie grabbed me and hugged me. She whispered in my ear:

“Toi la hoa binh.”

He is at peace.

***

One night, lying on the sofa, the phone rang and the machine picked up. It was Liz. We'd spoken right after the sensational arrests, rehashing the details. I'd thanked her for her help with roses and a dinner at an Italian restaurant in the South End of Hartford. A failed evening because she talked about a man pursuing her, an Aetna vice president who sounded dull as dry bread. I got angry and that made her angry. But tonight she left a message asking me to have dinner.

“It's almost Christmas. I'm alone again.”

I was going to call her back. In fact, I had the phone in my hand, but I changed my mind. Instead I went to bed early. The old radiators clanged and hissed and popped. Music to my ears. Outside the wind picked up, whistling through the naked limbs of the towering oaks that slammed against my windows. There would be snow that night. I wanted lots of snow. I wanted it as high as the windowsills.

In the morning I'd get back to the gym. It had been a while. I was out of shape. Yes, I'd see Jimmy and Gracie. Marcie and Vinnie. Hank. Yes, I finally smiled. Especially Liz. I wanted my old self back again. Somehow I'd lost it during the long and unhappy autumn.

I slept well.