by JJ Partridge
* * *
A phone call to Marcie confirmed there was nothing pending that couldn’t wait until tomorrow as I followed a group of male students shuffling along in their hightops toward the main campus. I crossed Brook Street in front of a Security Office patrol car and became acutely conscious of my shamus appearance—overcoat with turned up collar and fedora fixed at a rakish angle—something Richard Widmark or Victor Mature or Robert Ryan might have worn in a fifties-ish film noir. All I needed was a blond on my arm and a revolver strapped to my chest. A Security Office van rolled by, followed by two campus buses, on their way to the Refectory. At the rear of the Computer Center, two security officers, a man and a woman, stood in conversation under an entryway light; they glanced in my direction before they split up, with the man heading up the mall to the main campus while the woman let me go by and then traced my steps through a parking lot and out into the brightness and hubbub of Thayer Street. Was I being shadowed? I stopped at a window of the Gap to see if she would pass me, which she did without even a squint in my direction. So much for fantasy.
I continued down the crowded sidewalk, head down in the swirling wind, intending to cross Thayer Street and take a left at Bowen Street toward home. I was on auto-pilot, considering Tuttle’s comments about Anne Sullivan, as I maneuvered around a bike frame chained to a utility pole, stepped off the curb, and barely missed becoming a hood ornament on a red Cadillac Escalade. I retreated to the sidewalk as the SUV sped away and realized I was at Veasey Street. The scene of the crime was down that gloomy block, in one of the nondescript triple-deckers I had walked by a hundred times with hardly a glance. I had to take a closer look.
Seventy-two Veasey Street met my expectations. It was three floors of peeling brown shingles, probably divided into four or five apartments, three in front and one or two in back; picket fences with broken and missing slats separated it from its equally dilapidated neighbors. No driveway. Utility wires extended from its second floor out to the street. A half-dozen trash cans, overloaded cardboard cartons, and several bulging green plastic bags lined the sidewalk in front of a crumbling retaining wall which held back a skimpy front yard. Four concrete steps, without railings, ran up to a few feet of asphalt leading to rickety-looking stairs and a front stoop. A dull glow shone through an oval glass set in the front door; more lights were visible from behind misshapen blinds on the first floor right and in the single, shadeless window on the third floor.
I had a shoe on the first concrete step as I tried to picture last Friday night—the rain, or maybe it had been fog, the single streetlight maybe fifty feet away barely penetrating the gloom, The Stalker, or whomever, following his victim into the tenement or spotting her by a window, somehow gaining entry into her apartment—when the front door opened and a woman wrapped in a bulky coat, head covered by a babushka, and arms around two brown trash bags, appeared. One of the trash bags left her grasp and bounced to the asphalt with enough momentum to keep rolling to the steps where its twisty-tie must have come undone and tubes, jars, and boxes cascaded to my feet.
It happened so quickly that I barely avoided being ankle deep in trash. I could have, should have, skulked away right then, but I didn’t and instead called out loudly, “Let me help you” as I went to my knees to pick up the debris.
There was no acknowledgment of my offer, only low mutterings as she waddled her way to pick up the errant bag and stand over me. She found its opening, shook it, and in a voice that combined the gruffness of Ma Kettle with the accent of Eastern Europe, commanded, “Put that stuff in here!”
I did as I was told as she began a stream of righteous indignation about cops not protecting women, swilling coffee, interfering with her life, and never around when you need them while I collected and deposited the “stuff”—Band-Aids, shampoo, aspirin, face creams, toothpaste and other items that had to be from a bathroom cabinet—into the bag she jiggled impatiently.
“That’s her stuff, ya know,” she grunted. “I can’t keep the place empty so that you can come back here whenever you want. It’s been two days! I’ve gotta make a living, too. Hard enough to rent that place now. And I got a party in back who tells me she’s moving out!” I deposited the last piece of “stuff,” a Kleenex box, into the bag which she closed up, spun around to make an end, and tied off. “Throw it in one of them cans by the curb. Tomorrow’s pickup day.”
Gingerly, I took the bag, picked up the other one that lay at her sneakers, and squeezed both into a battered can. As I pushed down its lid, she added, “How about cartin’ down a load for me? I got a box or two left. It’s better’n standing out here in the rain and cold. Oy!” Her hand went heavenward as she turned, not waiting for me to answer.
It was my chance to leave. Plainly, she thought I was a cop on some sort of surveillance of the murder scene! It took only a couple of seconds for the shamus in me to overcome caution, and at her cry of “C’mon! Can’t wait all night!”, I followed her inside the tenement and up a dark, musty-smelling staircase. On the second floor landing, where a greasy food odor took over and the only light was cast by a low-wattage bulb on a pull-chain fixture, I was ambushed by a recycling bin full of bottles, cans, and bags of newspapers. My clumsiness engendered more mutterings as we climbed another flight of bannister-less stairs. At the top of the stairs, with a scrape of floor and a creak of the doorknob, the door opened into her. She backed away from its arc, tottered for a moment, and took the last stair into the apartment. I followed, pausing to push away strands of yellow plastic tape, curled like flypaper, on the door-frame. There was enough light to read “CRIME SCENE DO NOT REMOVE PPD.”
What struck me first was a chemical odor. Even though it had been years since I had encountered the smell, you don’t forget the odor of formaldehyde and chloral hydrate or their association with a crime scene. Her apartment turned out to be what University Housing would have prissily described as a “studio”, a converted attic with a kitchen area demarcated by a waist-high counter and a small bathroom crammed in the corner. Although it probably didn’t come close to housing code standards, it was commodious, with a pine board ceiling following the pitch of the roof. The sparse furniture was straight out of the Salvation Army store: two uncomfortable-looking overstuffed chairs with sagging cushions, a floor lamp with a bulb-burned shade, a round table with two folded chairs leaning on it, an empty bookcase, a bureau emptied of drawers, a flimsy coffee table and lamp, and seemingly out of place, a wardrobe, at least six feet in height, with full-length doors and inlays of various woods in triangle designs. One door of the wardrobe was open, revealing a clutch of empty wire hangers and garment bags on a single pipe. One bag read “Saks,” another said “Chicos.” The only wall decorations were two faded concert posters for Eminem and The White Stripes attached with thumbtacks. Against one wall rested a steel bed frame with a stained yellowish mattress laying flat against it.
The doyenne, who had started making odd sucking noises as though she was admonishing a dog, caught her breath. From the center of the room, with both hands on her ample hips, she grumbled a “let’s get a move on” and went into the kitchen area while I crossed over to the room’s only window and looked down to where I had been standing moments ago: it was clear that anyone in the apartment who crossed within a few feet of the window would be visible from the street. I turned and found her glaring at me—an obvious slacker—and pointing at a wicker laundry hamper next to the bed frame. “See them magazines?” she directed, shifting her aim to a pile of magazines scattered about on the rugless floor. “Stuff ’em in that hamper. I’ll get this other stuff and we can close up. The furniture goes tomorrow.”
I obeyed as my one attempt at conversation failed. “It must have been a shock to discover her,” I said. She didn’t answer because, I thought, she was deaf or uninterested and I gathered up the magazines as directed. Their variety surprised me: TIME, Atlantic Monthly, Rolling Stone, New Yorker, Newsweek, and a bunch of Sunday Times Magazines. One or two were fairly current
and some were months, even years old, with covers barely stapled on, maybe the leavings of more than one occupant. As I stacked them on the coffee table for better handling, I noticed the subscriber label on the top magazine: “Shea Library, Carter University, Carter Station, Providence, RI 02905.” The same for most of the others. Strange, I thought but couldn’t put it in any context. Students are always ripping off non-essentials from the library, but why so many? For what purpose? I thought of returning them to the library until I considered the explanation I’d have to give its staff and dumped them into the hamper.
The light in the kitchen area went off and she deposited a cardboard box, containing what sounded like glass containers at my shoes. “Her family cleared out the big stuff, the good stuff, all the clothes, books, all her electronic stuff ..., that girl had all kinds of stuff ..., and left me her ratty furniture and all this crap!”
With that, she squinted a farsighted stare into my face and I saw she was a crone: hatchet faced, long-nosed, with black sharp eyes and gray whiskers at the corners of her sagging mouth. She made her now familiar sucking sound and pointed to the floor.
“Spread-eagle. Right there. See them chalk marks? That’s where the bed was. Nothing on except that slip over her head. Terrible. I’ve never seen nothin’ so shameless.” She shook her head vigorously, causing a strand of dingy white hair to fall out of her kerchief. “I came up here Sunday night. Like to check up on these people when they leave the lights on at all hours. The door wasn’t locked. Place was a mess. One look at her and I called ya right away.” She jerked her face close to mine. “And I didn’t touch nothin’, neither!”
I stared at the faint chalk markings as she went on about how she was a good landlord, had to stay up all night with cops, and answer the same stupid questions over and over, while in my mind’s eye, I saw Anne Sullivan’s body, her head hidden under the slip, her breasts loose, her body flaccid and waxen as her blood followed gravity to her backside, until a poke from the crone’s elbow brought me back to reality. She said, “Why‘ya take my fingerprints? Do ya think I did it?”
She blinked at me, not caring if I responded, snapped off the floor lamp, picked up her carton, and started down the stairs. I grabbed the hamper by its handles and followed, scraping my knuckles on the staircase’s wainscoting as I honed in on the landing light. That beacon went off even before I had inched my way around the recycling bin. At the front door, she piled her carton on top of the hamper. “Just put ‘em by the trash cans. Hope it don’t get too cold out there,” she said, and opened, and almost pushed me through, the door.
On the stoop, I listened for the snap of a lock, but there wasn’t any—either there wasn’t a lock or she hadn’t bothered with it—and managed to maneuver to the sidewalk with my load without killing myself. I deposited the hamper and carton next to the trash cans as ordered, wiped my hands with a handkerchief, and faced the tenement. It had been as dark on Friday night and probably as wet. Likely, few to no passerbys, and who would notice anyone on the tenement’s walk or steps? It was a perfect place for an intruder. Anne Sullivan could have been randomly picked by her attacker when she passed by her apartment’s window or could have been followed inside and when she opened that awkward apartment door, she wouldn’t have been able to close it against any kind of resistance.
Her killer had it made.
CHAPTER TEN
Since the kitchen lights were on, I called “hello!” as I closed the front door and put away the fedora and my coat in the hall closet, expecting a suitable response from Nadie. None came. I pushed open the kitchen’s swinging door to find her sitting at the counter, an empty coffee mug beside her. She was wearing an Eileen Fisher-ish loose mauve sweater, black blouse, and grey wool skirt. The small screen television on the counter was turned to Jeopardy. She shut it off.
“So-ooo...?” she said—which meant ‘where have you been?’—and glanced at her watch. “It’s after seven.”
“Sorry.” I brushed a kiss on her forehead and got no reaction. “It’s been a long day. How about a drink?”
“No, thanks,” was the cool reply.
Okay, what was going on? I was late, but not that late. Or was I? Anyways, I wasn’t going to let her mood spoil my expectations for the evening. I left the kitchen for the drinks cabinet in the dining room, thinking that instead of wine or martinis, sherry would be appropriate. In a moment, I was back with sparkling Lismore glasses and a decanter of pale dry Jerez. She gave me “the look” when she saw two glasses.
“I said ‘no, thanks’, didn’t I?”
“C’mon,” I said, purposefully ignoring her sourness as I filled a glass for myself and began to pour a second, “it’ll warm you up.”
Her back stiffened. “Five-thirty,” she said tightly. Her chin came forward and she trained unnerving bottle-green eyes at me. “Remember?” She took her glass, gave me her fine-boned profile, and tossed the sherry down in a single draught that accentuated the arch of her long neck and the black hair sweeping over her shoulders. That image made me conciliatory, even when she placed the glass firmly on the counter and practically impaled me with her glare. Stubbornness on my part would lose the prize—her bubbling Mediterraneanism lies just beneath her professional calm—so the better part of valor would be an abject apology.
“I lost track of time. Things were so damned confused today. I—”
“Did you lose your cell phone, too?”
“Hey, I said I was ‘sorry.’ Why are you so upset?”
She slid her empty glass across the counter towards me. I wasn’t sure whether she wanted a refill or it was a gesture of rejection. “I’m not upset,” she said, much too evenly. “I’m goddamn mad! I switched off tonight at the Center despite the crowd signing up for counseling so that we could have some time together ...” and now, her voice rising, “... and you show up an hour and a half late!”
I ignored her exaggeration. “Na-die,” I said and sat across the counter from her, reaching for her reluctant hands. “I know I said ‘early’ but ...” and with a kind of nervous exhilaration, I recounted my ride with Faud and his clinical details of Ms. Sullivan’s death, Franks’s attempt to inveigle me into being his pipeline to Tramonti, Tuttle’s strong belief that the murderer was not The Stalker, and my excursion on Veasey Street. Early on, I knew I was coming off disjointed and confusing; like last night, there were too many facts to marshal and no time to digest any. Halfway through my spiel, she reached for the decanter, poured half a glass, and sipped the sherry as I continued. As I went on, her listening mode changed from sulky disinterest to professional to annoyed. As I wound down with speculations about Anne Sullivan’s relationship with Lavelle Williams, I braced myself.
“I can’t believe that you actually went into that apartment!”
“I didn’t plan it. And I was invited,” I retorted, maybe with more defensiveness than needed.
She stood up, her hands pushing back her open sweater. I imagined the ominous glare she was aiming at me and heard exasperation in her voice. “What is wrong with you?”
I looked up with a face feigning surprise.
“The women on this campus are scared for their lives, they’re leaving in droves, while the University Counsel is slinking around, hiding in the shadows like a voyeur, sneaking into a murdered woman’s apartment under false pretenses.” She stopped only for a deep breath. “While you were satisfying your morbid curiosity—”
“Whoa! Wait a second! It wasn’t morbid curiosity! It just happened.”
“Nothing like that just happens!” She turned her back to me in disgust. “And don’t you dare say ‘ugh’!”
Ugh! How did I screw this up? I had dinner and romance on my agenda, not an argument. With a sheepish expression, I went around the counter to face her. “Why are you so upset?” I said softly and reached for her hands which she released tentatively. “I didn’t ask to be everyone’s father-confessor today. Could we begin this all over again? Hello. I missed you. I love you.”
Her eyes lowered and I felt her tension ease. What the hell did I know, anyway? Maybe it was morbid curiosity. Tentatively, she let me draw her body close and I put my arms around her. A shiver ran under my fingers as I held her.
She was silent for at least half a minute before she raised her head; a forgiving smile crossed her lips. I ran my fingers through her hair, took her head in my hands, and kissed her forehead lightly; she responded with a kiss that was warm, longing, and passionate and we were again lovers, not quarrelers. “I’m really sorry,” I said and meant it. “I just didn’t think about the time. Let me make some dinner. I’ve got some nice sole and ....”
“Forget the sole,” she said, recovering her verve. She took my arm and pushed me toward the kitchen door. “I need some body ...!”
I love this woman!
* * *
She lay quietly next to me, her warmth, her perfume, and the covering of a sheet my only sensations. My right hand was enfolded over her left hand, at our sides. She turned her head and nuzzled my shoulder, nibbling at the base of my neck. Then, she rested a cheek on my shoulder. Her breath was sweet on my face.
I was content. We have been together for almost three years. No breaks, no excursions, no interruptions. After my divorce, there had been more than a few women and affairs without grand passion, all founded on lust, boredom, or natural needs, that ran their courses. Anyway, I didn’t fall in love and gradually, there were longer, drier spells between affairs, followed by indulgence and hangover. At fifty, I was on the verge of becoming someone incurably polite and unflappable, the proverbial “extra man” at dinner parties, a stiff who had come to guard his freedom to do what he liked when he liked and avoided the inconveniences of life impacted by someone close. In other words, I was socially constipated.