Return to Dust (8 page)

“But then Marta fought with Joshua?”

He nodded. “Joshua heard how she talked to me. How she called the cops. When I came back to mow the lawns, he told me she would not be coming back. He said—well, never such a way to treat a man…in his house. I mean, he turned red in the face. They had fights, he said.”

Willie's comment surprised me. So that skirmish in the kitchen was perhaps only a small part of the reason for Marta's exile and her movement into depression. Another fight with Joshua?

“He never saw her again?” Hank asked.

“I don't know. Maybe. But I think the fights with her made him decide to move away. One day he tells me the house is sold. He gives me a pile of money. Over five hundred dollars and says, ‘For you. Take it.' He laughs and tells me to have a good life.”

Willie sat back, finished. He lit another cigarette.

“You ever see Marta again?” I asked.

He grunted. “Once in the aisles of Walmart. She walks by and said I should go back to where they eat dogs.”

Hank was readying to say something, but choked, rolled to the side.

“It wasn't funny.”

Willie folded his arms over his chest, the cigarette tight in the corner of his mouth. He dipped his head down, and I realized he was through talking. Everything he'd told me had been thought through, planned, out of some sense of obligation. Something he had to do—and now it was done.

Hank said what I hadn't planned on saying. “Marta's niece thinks someone murdered her.”

A long silence, as I watched Willie's face harden. Even his eyes got dull. His lips were drawn into a thin line. He glanced through the kitchen door and I followed his gaze to the religious icons resting on a shelf. Once again that curious melding of Jesus Christ and Buddha. A Catholic wife and a Buddhist husband. The joss sticks and the blood-red tangerines. The dried Sunday Mass palms. He looked back at me. “It doesn't matter now. The minute you are born you begin your journey to death. She got there ahead of the rest of us.”

The door opened, and Tony Do stormed in. A rough-looking man, short as his parents but thick, barrel-chested, a thin whisper of a moustache above his lip. A narrow head with a high flat forehead. Tony worked in a body shop in town, and he'd once ignored me when I'd stopped in to check on some repairs. Spotting another Vietnamese there, greasy in overalls and watching me from a doorway, a wrench in his hand, he turned away at my friendly nod. Now, glaring at me and then at Hank, he positioned himself behind his father. A curious tableau, I thought—mother and son as guardians of the wounded old man.

“Hey, Tony,” Hank began, standing. “We were just leaving.”

Tony looked at his mother. “Everything okay?”

She nodded. “Your father has answered all the questions.”

Tony breathed in, but he still didn't look happy.

“Did you ever meet Marta?” I asked him.

For a moment he stared at me, unfocused, but finally he answered, though he looked at Hank, whose head was bobbing up and down. “Yeah, once or twice. Maybe more. I don't know. Around town. Sometimes I helped out at Jennings' place. When Pop needed another hand for something. Like to move the lawn tractor onto a rack. She'd be there, looking out the window, frowning.”

“Tony…” His mother began. “We are through here.”

Tony wasn't listening. “She treated Pop like a piece of shit.”

His mother shuddered. “Tony, please.”

“And calling the cops. Christ Almighty.”

Tony had a raspy, cigarette smoker's voice, and he started to cough, gagged. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

I spoke up. “Your father handled her the best way, Tony. He ignored her.”

Snidely, not looking at me. “And still the goddamn cops knock on his door.” He swung around to look into his father's face. God knows what he saw there, but it gave him pause. He backed up. “Enough.”

I headed to the door. “Thank you.”

Tony interrupted. “Old man Jennings respected my father because Pop understood how a job was supposed to be done. Pop took pride in that yard, and Jennings understood that. He valued—order. When he moved away, up to Amherst, he thanked my father.”

Willie struggled from the chair and faced his son. “No more.”

Tony faltered. “I just want them to understand that you have pride…yes, pride.”

His father moved toward the kitchen. I could tell he was embarrassed by his son's declarations. A man does his job and does not need a son to declare how good he is at it.

“Yes,” I noted. Then, perhaps foolishly, I quoted Buddha. “A man is the leaf he touches.” Then I tried to remember the line in Vietnamese. “
Mot nguoi dan ong la anh cham vao la
.” I stammered, mumbled the last syllables.

A flicker in Willie's eye corner. A quick nod.

But Tony was rattling on. “Christ, even after he sold the place, before he left town, he called Pop and told him to work in the yard before the new owners—you know them, the Canterburys—arrived.”

His father shot him a look that I had trouble reading. He disappeared into the kitchen. Tony was oblivious.

“Did you ever see Marta again?” I asked Tony.

“As a matter of fact, I did. She was at the post office one afternoon when I walked in. She was telling someone that Joshua Jennings had died.”

“How did she act?”

“She was sobbing out of control.”

“That's sad,” Hank noted.

“I didn't think so,” Tony said. “I hated what she did to Pop.”

Hank and I said our good-byes, and left, Tony trailing behind us. On the first floor he turned toward his doorway, but then, rushing back, grasped Hank's elbow. “Come inside for a minute.”

We followed him into his apartment. “Pop'll be mad at me for what I said upstairs. He says I talk too much. I don't care. I had to say something.”

We stood in the doorway, looking in on a messy apartment. His wife was nowhere in sight, but a scraggly fifteen-year-old boy was stretched out on a ripped sofa, playing some video game off the TV. He glanced up and made no effort to lower the volume.

“Turn that goddamn noise down, Big Nose,” his father yelled.

The boy ignored him.

Tony motioned us to a desk near the kitchen. It was really an old maple table, cluttered with bills and magazines and folded plastic bags from a local Vietnamese market named Bo Kien. He reached under some Vietnamese newspapers and pulled out what looked like an old scrapbook. “Here.”

In a voice that was soft and gentle, removed from the brutal rasp he'd used upstairs, he flipped open the yellowing pages. He thumbed past slick color photos of his family in America. But at the back he slipped out a black-and-white photograph that was perhaps six inches long. I held it in my palm. Wrinkled, bent, one side water-stained, the other side faded and torn, it was a photograph of his family.

“My father carried this on the boat from Saigon. The only picture we got. Ruined, yes, but every week Pop comes downstairs and looks at it.”

A dim photograph of Vuong as a sharp-looking young man, standing next to his pretty wife, whose hand rested on the boy Tony's shoulder. Tony was maybe fourteen years old. But in the faded section on the right was the faint ghost of a young girl, nearly faded out of view. Her father's head was inclined down toward her neck, and his hand rested on her shoulder. A tattered, miserable remnant, this relic that had barely survived the rough waters of the South China Sea, but I noticed Tony lovingly replaced it in the scrapbook.

“Pop won't keep it in his place,” he told us. “Every time he holds it he mumbles the same words.” And then Tony chanted in Vietnamese
: Kinh cau sieu.

A prayer that the dead would find peace.

I closed my eyes, a little dizzy.

“He is waiting for her to come to him and say that she is at peace. Every day he waits for her ghost to move through him.”

Chapter Nine

Hank followed me into my apartment.

“That didn't go well.”

I shrugged. “I didn't expect it to.”

“Willie Do is not a cold-blooded killer.”

“I agree with you.” A pause. “But I was surprised by his son's anger—at Marta.”

Hank looked into my eyes. “Everyone's protective of Willie.”

I nodded. “Such a sad man.” I breathed in. “A frozen man.”

Hank eyed me closely. “You know, Rick, we believe our ancestors—our dead—are with us. A breeze, a butterfly, a smell of jasmine—all signs of being touched by a dead loved one. Ghosts wander.
Ma troi.
You look in Willie's eyes—blankness there. There's no energy to kill—no spirit. Nothing there. You know why? Because his daughter's ghost can't find him in America.”

“What about the brother who lived?”

“Tony?” His look was sharp. “You think he'd kill Marta?”

“He hated what she did to his father.”

“C'mon, Rick.”

I said nothing. I took off my coat and sank into a chair.

I thought of something. “What about the wild grandson? Big Nose. You told me he was a boy headed for trouble—shoplifting, thrills, craziness.”

Hank thought a second. “
Song voi
, as we'd say.”

“Meaning?” I didn't know the Vietnamese.

“You live fast—rush your life.”

“That's a house of pain.”

He smiled. “Except for the chubby baby on the third floor.”

“Another fat American.”

Hank looked around my rooms as he sat down. “Dragging more junk off the street?” He pointed to a tattered oriental.

“A church rummage sale.”

He frowned at the old sofa, the Victorian magazine rack with too many scratches, a garish lamp with ruby tassels. “Your apartment will never be featured on the…I don't know—Home and Garden Channel.”

Hank preferred a sleeker look—chrome and glass. Or, frankly, a room with one huge plasma TV dominating one wall, and a sofa from IKEA in front of it. Bags of potato chips. A six-pack. Girls.

While he rifled through my CD collection, I organized my notes in my laptop, then added material. I worked under a bronze-and-green-glass lamp that might have occupied a storekeeper's desk a half-century back, illuminating someone who might be recording sales figures in a leather-bound country-store ledger.

I ignored the sudden rapping on the door, but then I heard the raised, humorous voice. “I know you're in there. I own the goddamn building.”

Grinning, I opened the door to let in my landlady, Gracie Patroni.

“I'm not bringing food this time.” She waved empty hands at me. “So you don't have to lie and say you already ate at a restaurant.”

“Come in, Gracie.” I motioned her to the sofa. “Hank's here.”

“I know. I see who walks into the building.”

She sank into the deepest end of the old sofa. Gracie is probably in her early eighties, a tall woman, rail thin, her hair pulled back and secured with an elastic band.

“I know I'm interrupting.” Yet she wasn't apologetic.

Gracie often stops in, lingering, gabbing, running her fingers over the windowsills to check for dust. Her visits never bother me because she's one of the people I adore. She likes me, too. Gracie's a flamboyant woman, though she can be a serious moralist at times. She'd been a Rockette at Radio City Music Hall, had entertained the troops with Bob Hope in Korea, and then followed a husband to Connecticut. She lives on the first floor, rents out an apartment on the second to me and one on the third to a new guy, recently divorced, a man I'd only talked to a few times. The last tenant upstairs had been an old, retired mechanic who tuned the old car she never drove. He had a heart attack changing the oil. I liked him, too. The new man upstairs was—well, a mystery so far.

“Busy?” she asked.

“Grab yourself a beer,” I told her.

I went back to finishing my note-taking on the laptop. Gracie wandered around, made small talk with Hank, spotted my new possession—I caught her eyeing the new oriental with disapproval. Sitting next to Hank, she leafed through a magazine and frowned. It was an industry trade,
Criminal Justice Monthly
. She obviously thought it a waste of a good tree.

Bored, she walked behind me and looked over my shoulder. “Marta Kowalski?”

I closed the top, smiling. “Confidential information.”

“Yeah, sure.”

I expected her to make a flip comment because she found my role as PI hilarious. Sometimes when she left me a scribbled note pinned to the door, it was addressed to Hercule Poirot or, worse, Miss Marple. Yet whenever Jimmy visited she came knocking on the door with some lame excuse. They baited each other out of some love ritual I could never grasp. Sometimes, I knew, he visited with the hopes of seeing her. If she didn't interrupt us, he'd be disappointed. He's old—she's a lot older. They share war stories that seem some sort of foreplay.

“Yes, Marta Kowalski.” I looked at her. “You knew her.”

She sat down, finished the beer quickly, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

Gracie obviously saw Marta entering my apartment to clean, and for the previous tenant of my rooms, an old professor who'd died. I inherited the apartment—and Marta.

“Yes.” A cold tone that surprised me.

“Do you think someone would murder her?”

Silence.

“Were you surprised at the suicide?”

“Yes, I suppose so.” She stood up, turned away. “I didn't like the woman.”

It dawned on me that we'd never discussed Marta. Gracie and I chatted about so many folks in town—she was filled with anecdotes and salacious gossip. But never about Marta, lumbering up the stairs with her cleaning kit. One time Gracie admitted that Marta did an expert, efficient job. Of course, there was no reason to have any conversation because Marta was hired to do a job. Maybe I assumed the two old women, both long-time residents of Farmington, sat down with coffee for a chat. Most times I wasn't there. I left a check in an envelope on the hall table.

“Weren't you and Marta members of the same church?”

“Yes. St. Augustine's. The Catholic church.” She stammered, “I don't sound too charitable here, saying I didn't like her, but you asked me.”

“Why?” I was watching Gracie, uncomfortable now.

“When she first started coming to the house to clean the apartments—you guys
are
a dirty, lazy bunch, if you don't mind my saying so—I invited her in for coffee. You know, something simple. We saw each other at the church but never spoke to each other. But she was downright rude to me. ‘No time for socializing,' she said. Like I was insulting her. That was horse manure, Rick. Horse shit, in plain English.”

I went over to the refrigerator and took out two more bottles of beer, silently handed one to her. She took a couple of sips.

“Maybe she just wanted to get her work done.”

“Sounds weird to me,” Hank contributed.

Gracie shook her head vigorously, looking at me as though I were a dim-witted child. “Not likely.” She nodded at Hank. “She
was
weird. Stupidly, I tried a couple times. I'll tell you, she was not a nice woman. Then I overheard her talking at the church hall once—about me. She mentioned that I'd been an entertainer, like it was something dirty. Real mocking-like.
Entertaaaainer
. Dragging it out like that. ‘Lah-di-dah,' she said. Me living in a canary-yellow house I slept my way into. She whispered that I had been a whore. She knew I was nearby, so she did it on purpose. She did me dirt, Rick.”

Gracie's words stopped me dead. This portrait clashed with my own image of the old woman, always smiling at me, always a little too prying, that was true, but—harmless. Even sweet. That was the word for it—sweet. Sometimes a little too sweet, little girl coy and cute, a cultivated sugary surface. But I never gave the woman much thought. She dusted my books. She vacuumed the carpets.

“She was always nice to me.”

But I recalled the words of Buddha.
She who is born with an axe in her mouth cuts herself when her words are cruel.

Gracie drained the last of the beer.

“Women didn't like her,” she stressed. “Marta wore more than one face in the world. I saw two or three of them.”

“So she had enemies?”

“None I knew of. I didn't belong to her world, you know. But generally speaking, if someone murdered her, I'd lay you odds it was a decent woman.”

Gracie was in a hurry to leave, especially when she saw me typing some of her reluctant remarks into my laptop. Okay, I was probably less tactful than I should have been. She gave me a withering look reserved for pushy salesmen and religious zealots.

“That's the sum total of my knowledge of that evil woman.” But it wasn't her real final comment. Over her shoulder, “And she called herself a Catholic. At least I didn't become one of those
other
Catholics. Like her.”

Hurriedly I jotted down that last comment. I'd have to follow that up later. What other Catholics? I made a notation—the Brown Bonnets? Those merry mariological happy campers, the right-wing, anti-porn, anti-choice Catholics whose propaganda I found in Marta's house. What role did they play in her life?

After she left, blowing Hank a kiss from across the room, he looked up from his iPhone where he was happily texting someone. “That was interesting.”

I nodded. “A complicated woman.”

“Gracie?”

I laughed. “That's a given. But I was thinking of Marta.”

He stood over me as I was reviewing the names of people to be interviewed—Marta's short list of clients.

Hank read out loud, “Richard Wilcox, Charlie Safako. Farmington College professors who haven't had sex in years?”

I laughed. “Put me on that list.”

He hit me in the shoulder. “Yeah, sure.”

Hank always assumed I had more of a life than I did.

“I told you how I met her once, right?”

“Tell me.”

“I guess it was her. A cleaning lady. Once, when I came looking for you.”

“What happened?”

“She yelled at me—said you didn't entertain students at home.”

“How'd she know?”

Hank laughed. “Maybe she didn't. It's just the way she thought it should be.”

He read the names off the bright screen, along with my notations. “These guys are weak suspects. Wilcox and Safako.”

“Weak professors make strong suspects.” A little too glibly.

“Joshua Jennings?” he read out loud. “He's dead. You're listing men who are dead as suspects? He was a hundred years old, at least.”

I looked up. “You knew him?”

“When I had work study in the library, he'd hobble in, ask for books we didn't have.”

“Maybe you'd misplaced them.”

He laughed. “Such a list you have, Rick. People with dirty houses. Dead people.” He leaned over me and tapped the keyboard. Awkward spelling and spacing: “Rikl vamn Lamm.” He pointed. “She cleaned your apartment, too.” He grinned.

But then he watched as I made some notes about Karen's brother, Davey Corcoran, as well as Karen's holding back info about the insurance policy.

“Think she did it?”

I pressed the “save” key and stood up, stretched. My plans for a quiet evening at home—alone—were gone. The Jonathan Kellerman novel sat unread on the nightstand. I punched Hank to move him out of the way. I wanted to get away from the screen—and the Marta case. While his company was especially welcome when I did my tedious and methodical fraud or divorce investigations—he was great at those long, tedious stakeouts, scouting out bathrooms, sitting in a car with his phones and tablets and Twitter feeds, with stale tuna sandwiches on whole wheat and lots of juvenile humor—a young man who could sniff out a Dunkin' Donuts from a half-mile away—I had some reservations about drawing him into a murder case. Of course, I told myself, I'd already
done
that.

I was always afraid he might get hurt.

Fraud investigation could involve playful strategy, much like a board game. Hank, ever inventive and resourceful, was a pleasure to be with. But of necessity and legally he had to stay on the fringes of my investigations. I had the license—he didn't. I thought of Joshua Jennings' love of James Fenimore Cooper—I was Natty Bumppo and Hank was Chingachgook, the Indian sidekick. Or, as Mark Twain said, we should call him “Chicago.” If Marta was murdered, I didn't want Hank to be in the thick of it. This case was much more than people secreting ill-gained money in phony accounts, or people lying about debilitating injuries to get a measly couple thou from Aetna Insurance. This was murder. Maybe. I didn't want him to get too close to it.

“Let's go out for a walk,” I said.

We headed to Zeke's Olde Tavern a few blocks west of the town green, about a half-mile from my house. It was surprisingly windy, the hard night air heavy and wet against our faces. The streetlights sparkled brilliantly through the last of the translucent yellow and orange leaves stubbornly clinging to the maple trees. I pulled my jacket tighter around my neck. Winter was coming in. It was still early November but the smell and feel were there. Someone was burning wood in a fireplace. The acrid scent tantalized. I shivered.

Hank was dressed—as he would have said himself—for the Alaskan tundra by way of some trendy mall outlet. He'd gone to his car to retrieve a thick woolly parka, a ferocious wool scarf, and a Boston Red Sox baseball cap pulled tight and backwards, hip-hop style, over his forehead. He didn't look chilled at all. The slight boy inside was nowhere to be seen.

Tucked into an old mahogany booth, age-stained and jack-knife hewn, beer marinated, with lovers' initials and dates overlapping and disappearing into the grainy shellac, we quietly sipped long-necked Buds.