While I Was Gone (13 page)

“Okay. Okay, so you hear her. And then what do you do?”

“I came to the doorway and saw her.”

“You came here.” He moved to the open doorway and gestured.

“Yes.”

“I’d like you to come here now. I know it’s hard, but she’s not there now. Just come over here. I want you to show me where she was.” His hand made a beckoning motion, drawing me toward him.

I came to the doorway. One of the men working looked up quickly, but the others didn’t pause.

“There.” I pointed past the smaller smear of pooled blood, about a third of the way from the couch to the doorway, to the larger pool, staining the floor by the couch.

Detective Connor put his hand at the back of my waist and pushed me gently forward.

“Where? Exactly.”

We stepped past the smaller mess. I pointed to the bloody smear on the couch and started to cry.

“Here. Her head was sort of wedged here, by this blood. Her feet were toward me. I saw them first.

They were bloody on the bottom. She was just Lying here, on her side.”

“And you came to her.”

“Yes.”

“Did you realize she was dead?”

“No,” I whispered.

“Because I had heard her.” I wiped at my eyes and nose with my hand.

“So you thought she was alive.”

“Yes. I thought so. It wasn’t logical.”

“I understand. Here,” he said. He held out a cellophane package of tissues.

I took it, tore at it.

“I thought… She was zoarm still. When I touched her. That was it, I think. Her blood, even, was warm. I guess I thought if I could get her to breathe again, then maybe I could get help. It wasn’t logical.”

“No, but that’s how it goes,” he said.

“So you tried to give her artificial respiration.”

“Yes, I guess so.” I blew my nose.

“I turned her. I tried to blow air into her lungs.”

“And then you heard the noise.”

“Yes.” I didn’t mention, I hadn’t mentioned, the other noise, the noise of my breath escaping from Dana’s wound.

“Now, what kind of noise was it, exactly? From where?”

“I don’t know. It was from the kitchen, I think. It could have been just some old-house noise, something the wind was doing, or the refrigerator or something. I don’t remember it, really.”

“But it panicked you.”

“Yes. That’s when I started to run. And then I realized I couldn’t-that I shouldn’t—leave her, and I came back. But I couldn’t move her.”

“But you said you did move her.”

“I mean, I couldn’t liJi her. I was trying to take her with me. I started to. I kind of slid her a little, I guess. But she was heavy, and I was really scared. So I left her.” And now something almost like a wail escaped me, my chest squeezed painfully.

“Okay, okay, okay. C’mon,” he said. He put his arm around my shoulders. He guided me into the kitchen.

“C’mon.” He pulled a chair out. There were several men in here, too, and he signaled them somehow and they left. He put a glass of water down in front of me.

I drank a little, and choked. This set me off even more.

Detective Connor was patting me, hard, on the back, when Larry and Sara came in the kitchen door from outside, walking behind one of the uniformed cops. They looked terrified. Sara recoiled from me as I got up and went to them, but Larry reached out and held me, and I leaned against his chest awkwardly—he was shorter than I was-coughing and weeping.

SOMETIME SHORTLY AFTER THAT, THEY DECIDED IT WOULD

be easier, better, to take us all to the police station. They’d be in the house four or five hours longer, they said, so it made more sense to ask the questions they had for us there. And they’d have to get all our fingerprints anyway, to check against whatever prints they were able to pick up in the house.

I asked if I could change my bloody clothes, and they said they would get a change for me from my room, that they would need the clothes I was wearing. I told them what I wanted, where to find things.

One of the policemen was talking to Larry now, and he must have mentioned the kitty—the money can—because someone else went outside and produced it, an empty coffee can in a plastic bag.

They’d found it in the yard. Asked how much was in it, Larry and I each offered a different guess, but Sara had checked it that afternoon—she was due to cook tomorrow—and so she was certain, there was seventeen dollars and change.

“Gone now,” the cop said.

“Even the change.”

They drove us to the station in an unmarked car. We had started with Larry toward his, parked at the curb down in front of the house, but one of the policemen gestured us away from it and toward one of theirs, and it was then that it occurred to me for the first time that we were all suspects, in some sense. As we drove to Central Square, they asked for and we gave them Duncan’s and Eli’s names and places of work, and John’s, too, even though he’d been gone for almost a month. As though triggered by the mention of his name, Sara began to weep now.

I changed in the oldfashioned ladies’ room at the station, handing each article of clothing over the door to a silent policewoman standing outside the stall. I never saw those clothes again.

WE WERE THERE FOR HOURS, MUCH OF THE TIME SPENT WAITing for one another to be questioned. Duncan came in after about the first half hour, but they had greater trouble finding Eli—getting into the building and then locating him in his lab. It was several hours before they led him into the room where all of us but Larry—he was being questioned then—were sitting around a big table. When I saw Eli, I stood up. As soon as I touched him, his mouth dropped open, as though he would cry out. But no noise came. Instead his face crumpled and his eyes filled. His head swayed slowly, weakly, on his neck.

“It isn’t true,” he whispered to me after a moment, and the tears spilled down his cheeks.

The cops were nice to us. They brought us coffee and, as the night wore on, doughnuts and Danish. Sometimes a couple of them sat in the room while another of us was being questioned. They talked to us.

It was probably just a robbery gone bad, several of them offered, as if this were consolation. Dana had been upstairs, heard something, came down, and interrupted the guy looking for something to steal.

Once, when they’d left us alone for a while, we started talking together about a party the summer before to which the cops had been called by neighbors. Several guests—Dana among them, we thought—had pulled them inside, tried to get them to dance. A kind of numbed exhaustion had overtaken us by now, and we were laughing, remembering this, when one of the detectives came in. He looked quickly from one of us to another, and we stopped, instantly.

It was almost dawn when they brought us home. There were still some plainclothes policemen working in the house—perhaps lab guys, they were wearing plastic gloves—so Larry offered us all beds on Marlborough Street. Duncan said he had friends he’d go to, and Eli thought he’d better get back to the lab—he’d left in the middle of procedure. But Sara and I, after getting our toilet Ties under the watchful eyes of one of the detectives, got into Larry’s car and sat silently with him as we drove into Boston. The river was frozen solid again after the thaw of the weekend, and the sky was lightening to a chilly pearly gray above the city. Larry’s heater blew loudly over us and dried my throat and eyes.

We entered his house from a parking area at the back, coming into a cavernous oldfashioned kitchen and then a tiled basement hallway.

Upstairs, the carpeting was so plush that we made no noise. The house was enormous, and deeply dark. Larry showed us to a room on the third floor with twin canopied beds and its own bathroom. Light leaked in weakly through the layers of curtain at the windows, but he unhooked the tiebacks for us, and we were in gloom again. His room was directly across the hall, he said. He’d warn his parents we were here. We should sleep as late as we could.

Sara and I talked only briefly while we shed our clothes.

As we were drifting off in the muffled dark, she said softly, “It’s so hard to believe.

At ten o’clock Larry and I were laughing our heads of fat W. C. Fields.

Now I can’t believe I’ll ever laugh again.”

THE NEXT DAY THE POLICE WERE NOT AS NICE. THEY HAD

talked to Cappy, my boss, about what time I’d left the night before, and found out he knew me under a different name from the one I’d given them. They had an arrest record on Larry, for various acts of civil disobedience. They’d learned from Duncan and from Eli that Dana had been “sexually involved,” as they put it, with both of them.

They’d found dope in Sara’s room and in Duncan’s, they’d discovered Sara’s various illegal pills. They’d found the loose cash in my room, which they saw as connected to the drugs.

All this information loomed larger, became more important, because they hadn’t found much of anything else. The ground was too frozen for footprints, the smear of Dana’s blood on the back door was from a gloved hand, and there were no fingerprints on the knife they had concluded was the murder weapon, one of our own dull kitchen knives the killer had left lying on the floor.

They kept questioning all of us off and on for several days. They made it clear what they thought of our “lifestyle.” They asked about other sexual activities and attractions in the house, they hinted at their belief in the possibility of orgies, of drugged sexual exchanges.

They telephoned both my mother and Ted, checking out my identity.

I talked to both of them, too, the second evening—tense, strained conversations. I told them both I’d be back soon. That I had to see through all that was connected with Dana’s death, but when it was over I’d come home. I said that—“I’ll come home”—to each of them, each time not sure what I meant, where home was. Ted’s voice in response was like that of a stranger, polite, incurious.

“Do what you feel you have to do,” he said.

“Thank you,” I said, pretending I heard something more generous than I had.

We slept in the house that second night, all but Duncan.

He had come home in the afternoon to get some of his stuff, and he told us he thought he’d stay with friends for a while. The police were being hardest on him because they thought they saw some possible motivation for his killing Dana in his having slept with her while he had girlfriend elsewhere. In Dana’s perhaps dangerous or threatening preoccupation with him.

We couldn’t figure that out, he had an alibi, after all.

At the moment Dana lay dying, he was playing the guitar at Sebastian’s in front of thirty or forty people, several of whom had already been called upon to place him there. We were all sitting around the kitchen after he’d left, talking about it.

“Maybe they think he hired a hit man,” Sara said, her wide eyes rounded behind her smudged glasses. I burst into a kind of loose, hysterical laughter, and she stared at me, offended, think. She’d been serious.

I was fragile and on edge because we’d had to clean up Dana’s blood earlier. This was a surprise to me. I don’t know what I’d thought—that the police provided some service? In any case, I was the one who did it.

Eli and I had arrived home at the same time, and we stood together silently in the living room doorway, just staring at the terrible mess. I looked at him. He was white, his mouth hung open.

“Eli?” I said He turned and went back into the kitchen. He stood there, looking out the door, as I gathered the cleaning things. Just as I was going back into the living room, he said something.

“What?” I said.

Without turning around, he whispered, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I just can’t.”

While I scrubbed, I cried loudly, utterly careless of the tears and mucus flowing freely down into the pinked soapy bubbles on the floor.

Eli came back in while I was still kneeling in the mess, and he stood watching wordlessly for a minute before he went upstairs. I could hear him a few moments later in the bathroom, throwing up.

I slept with Larry that second night, for comfort. In my own room, I had been unable to drop off. For one thing, I could hear Sara crying, little whimpers that opened up to whoops of sorrow from time to time. I got Up and knocked on her door, but she called back, “No!

Please don’t… don’t come in.”

“Sara?” I called. I leaned my forehead against her door.

“It’s me.”

“I really need to be alone, Licia,” she said in a raw voice.

“I just need to cry. You can’t help me.”

“You’ll get me if you want me?”

“If I want you. Yes.”

I stepped away from her door and stood in the open square hallway.

The door to Dana’s room was ajar. I’d looked in there only once.

the police had taken various things of hers—the photo of Duncan’s girlfriend, a few of her small, strange bronzes, clothing, personal items.

All the paperS from her desktop were gone. They’d left the bed unmade.

I knocked lightly on Larry’s door. No answer. I opened it and stepped carefully over the weights to his bed.

“Larry,” I whispered.

“I’m awake.”

“Can I sleep with you?” I asked.

In answer, he shifted over.

“Here,” he said.

“Here.” And he reached up and took my hand.

IN THE THREE OR FOUR DAYS FOLLOWING DANA’s DEATH, WE all behaved differently. Duncan pulled away, essentially moving out.

(He would be the first to say he was, in fact, going to leave.) Sara talked and talked during the day, and then she shut herself away at night and could be heard weeping—a noise that, as it drifted through the walls and closed door, sounded not unlike the cries she’d emitted regularly in her life of more or less constant sex with John. Eli disappeared for, longer and longer periods to the lab, seeking comfort, suppose, in the unvarying routines of work. When he was around, he seemed silenced, stunned, uncomfortable in any room in the house but his own. Once, on my way to the bathroom, I passed his open door and saw him lying, fully clothe , across the tidy bed. The light fell on him and his eyes were open, but he didn’t see me or hear me, and he didn’t move.

Larry’s way was to take charge. He did the shopping, the bulk of the cooking. He drove people where they needed to go—to the police station, to work, to class. He helped Duncan move his belongings out.