by Andrew Lanh
But I was talking into the drone of a dial tone.
Her Dutch Colonial on a side street off Route 44 was the faded beauty on a quiet street of modest homes with well-shoveled sidewalks and splendid Christmas lights cascading off roofs. Reindeer on lawns glistened under blankets of snow. Plastic blow-up Santas dotted the landscape like a redundant circus parade. Crisp Cape Cods and Colonials sparkled and shimmered with the season. Jingle bell music tinkled from a corner house where guests flowed onto the driveway. Except for the Winslow homestead. Peeling paint, a lopsided black shutter, untrimmed evergreen bushes blocking the front windows. The only house without decoration and illumination. At twilight it was dark except for the hint of light peeking out the front plate-glass window. The outside light was not switched on, which caused me to calculate the house number by the process of elimination. The one to the left—the one with the rocking Santa with the pervert’s grin—was number 110. The one on the right—the Cape Cod with the illuminated sleigh on the roof, Frosty the Snowman in Santa’s seat—was 114. So Charlotte Winslow lived at 112.
I was always good at math.
Charlotte answered the doorbell, stepping back, her eyes narrowed. “I’m sorry. I forgot the light. I have no manners.”
“It’s all right.”
She turned to walk into the living room. Although she hadn’t invited me, I followed.
She swung her head back to look into my face. “I don’t know why I’m doing this. My son Martin tells me I’m crazy.” She pointed to a sofa. “All my life I’ve been crazy.”
A remark I had no response to, of course, but thought that maybe she was. She plopped down into a chair, her body hunched over, and suddenly faced me.
“Mrs. Winslow.”
“Charlotte, for God’s sake.” A slight laugh. “And I’m not really crazy, Mr. Lam.”
“Rick.”
She rocked in her seat. “Ah, old friends already. How easy it is to make friends.”
Again, stupefied, I watched her, uncertain what to say.
“You know why I’m here.”
She waved a hand in my face. “Let’s get his over, okay? The last few days have been—unpleasant. I can’t believe someone shot—I mean, shot—Ben. He was a lot of things, but a man who would get himself shot was not one of them.”
“Agreed. His murder was a shock.”
She rushed her words. “More than a shock. A—a horror show. My children will live with the idea that their father was murdered.” She sighed deeply. “How do you talk to people you meet after that?”
“Mrs.—Charlotte…”
“Coffee? It’s ready.”
She rushed into the kitchen, returning with a tray of coffee, cups and saucers. Sugar bowl, milk pitcher. She’d gotten everything ready, waiting for me. Rushing, she nearly dropped the tray, the milk slopping over the edges of the pitcher, the cups rattling—fidgety, like a woman unable to settle herself.
Ben’s ex-wife surprised me: sixtyish, a little plump with wide chipmunk cheeks, a short woman, a drab face with a hint of pink lipstick. But her hair was styled in some sort of pin-curl chestnut-burr cut, all tight corkscrew and curly fries. Mixed metaphors here, to be sure, but the dyed blond configuration was out of sync with the baggy pantsuit she wore.
She poured coffee, her hand trembling. “This has all been so horrible. Horrible. My children…Melody locked herself in her room.”
“May I speak with her, Charlotte?”
“That’s why you’re here, right?” Then she seemed to regret her abruptness. “Melody,” she rang out, turning toward the staircase. “Melody. Come down.”
“I do appreciate…”
A hand up in my face. “The Vietnamese kid. I saw him on the news. Such a skinny little…man. A killer?”
“Or not.”
“Everyone says he did it.” She held my eye. “But why would he do that? Ben lived for his students.” A tilt of her head. “That’s all he lived for. Students and his books. Marriage was a secondary major in his college career. They voted him the most popular teacher year after year. Try bringing that factoid up in divorce court.”
“When did you divorce?”
“Oh, fifteen or so years back.” For a second her eyes got moist. “A mistake, you know. My mistake. Ben stepped out of heaven for a moment, tempted by that snake of a girl. A nameless flirt who bedded him and then moved on. It must have surprised Ben himself, that stay-at-home play-with-the-kids dad. He confessed the indiscretion to me almost immediately, but I…I went mad. Threw him out of the house, demanded a divorce. I burned with fury.” She laughed lightly. “I was one of those maddened women you hope never to meet.”
“No reconciliation?”
Her lips trembled. “I always thought we’d end up back together. Yes, I was cruel at first, turned the kids against him. Martin was around fifteen, Melody thirteen or so. Vulnerable, horrible ages for parents to run amok like that. I bad-mouthed him. I made them hate their father. Horrible of me. Yes, I know that. A casebook study of what not to do.” She shivered. “Today on Dr. Phil. The spurned housewife and the children who listened to her. I made them hate him, but they didn’t—finally. Slowly they crept away to see him, never telling me. But even that didn’t go well.”
“Why not?”
A strange look in her eyes. “I filled them up with anger so that even his kindness to them translated into bile.”
“But you hoped to get back…”
“Together,” she finished. “A secret. I loved him.” A sob escaped her throat. “No matter.”
“But…”
“But then five years ago my daughter comes back and whispers that he discovered this…this…Sophia, brazen, loud, flashy, his bedmate.” She shuddered. “I hated him all over again.”
“I know Sophia,” I told her. “A friend.”
“Hah!” The word flew out of her mouth. “Oh, I know that. I can’t believe I even allow you in this house. His crowd. I know a lot of things. Spies in the house of love. My children as spies. Isn’t that a kicker? Good parenting on my part. But at that dreadful moment I knew there was no future, no reconciliation, no nothing. He’d lost himself to that woman.”
“What about his celebrity? His attacks on local religion?”
She raised her eyebrows. “That lunatic preacher over in Bristol? A carnival show. You know, I think Ben secretly enjoyed the attention, the notoriety, the denunciation on TV by a God-smitten crackpot preacher. A scholar like Ben slumming in the tabloids.”
A rush of steps down the staircase. Melody Winslow stopped at the bottom step and looked back upstairs, as if contemplating flight.
A woman in her late twenties, she seemed younger because her face was so childlike—small, oval with a tiny mouth and large, blue, watery eyes. Her hand fluttered to her chin, dropped back down to her side, like a little girl surprised at a birthday party. She wore her thick, yellowish hair straight, clipped at the shoulders, a slight bang over her forehead. A woman who was never pretty but probably was considered cute. They’d be calling her that when she was in her sixties.
“Mr. Lam, I presume. My father talked about you.”
“Hi, Melody, thanks for…”
She moved rapidly across the room and dropped into a chair. Immediately she drew her knees up to her chest, and stared at me. “I’m not used to the police.”
“I’m not the police.”
She shook her head. “That’s not what I mean. I mean, yesterday, the interviews.”
“That’s why I’m here.”
“I know. My mother told me.” She glanced at her mother who was frowning at her, eyes nearly shut. “And I listened from upstairs. My mother telling you the family history.”
Charlotte started to say something but changed her mind.
“I’m sorry about your father,” I told Melody.
Her
eyes got moist and she brushed at them with the back of her wrist. “We were getting close again. He’d come into the library to look for me.”
Charlotte explained. “Melody works three or four hours a day over at the Avon Public Library, shelving books.” She rolled her eyes as if Melody were involved in illicit drug sales.
Melody, I knew from her father, had led a drifting, unhappy life. The divorce shattered her, a teenaged girl caught in the marital wars of her parents. After high school she’d taken community college courses, then skedaddled to California where she knew no one. “An actress,” Ben told us one night. “A goddamn actress. I always told my kids to express themselves but…an actress?” Four or so years in a donut shop on Santa Monica Boulevard, then she drifted back home where she hid in her mother’s home, unmarried, refusing her high schools friends’ phone calls, her nights locked in her bedroom.
“My fault,” Ben always said.
Melody went on. “Years ago I was so mad at him I wouldn’t talk to him. Then”—a furtive glance at her mother—“I would sneak out to visit him, take two or three buses down the mountain to his apartment—and never tell Mom.” Another glance at her mother. “Rebellion long after the years when you’re supposed to do it. The last two years we started to be father and daughter again.”
“Secrets.” From Charlotte.
“War maneuvers,” Melody corrected.
Charlotte was clenching and unclenching her fists.
“I’m here,” I started, “because you told the detective that your father mentioned a decision.”
Her lips quivered. “I didn’t think it was important at the time. Maybe I should have asked more questions.”
“But what exactly did he say?”
She looked over my shoulder, gazing toward the outside. “You know, with Dad his students always came first. Them, us, Mom. Then them, not us, not Mom. Them. He loved to talk about his students. The applause at the end the semesters, unheard of.”
“Melody,” her mother prompted.
She shot a look at her mother. “The last time he said that he had to make the toughest decision of his life. A student had told him something but exacted a promise for silence. Some boy scout pledge of trust. Nonsense.” She laughed and turned her head to the side. “I was barely listening to him. ‘What?’ I asked him. “This is a horrible thing I’m going through, Melody. Someone’s life in my hands.’ He kept talking but I stopped listening. Then he stopped. Just like that. ‘I’ll deal with it.’ That’s what he said.”
A door at the back of the house opened. Footsteps moved around the kitchen. A cabinet door slammed. Charlotte jumped, jerked her head toward the kitchen and seemed ready to say something. Melody, momentarily startled, shut up.
I went on, sensing the conversation was ending. “A student? He didn’t mention a name?”
“No.”
“Dustin Trang?”
Her voice clipped. “I said—no. He never mentioned that name. I never heard it until the TV coverage. Him being dragged off to jail.”
“For questioning,” I corrected.
“Whatever.”
“Whatever!” A booming voice exploded from the kitchen doorway. A fist pounded the doorjamb.
“Martin,” his mother screamed. “Do you have to barge in like you’re a bull?”
He was frowning. “I told you this was foolhardy. Why are you talking to this man?”
Charlotte took the question literally. “Because he asked me if he could.”
Martin stepped closer, his hands folded over his chest. Dressed in a ski jacket, unzipped over an Eddie Bauer T-shirt, he was the outdoorsy version of his hothouse sister: similar blond coloring, oversized blue eyes in a long oval face, but with his father’s squat physique. Martin’s cheeks were ruddy, as though he’d walked into fierce wind, his hair tousled, his swagger across the room an athlete’s practiced gait.
“I told you not to come,” his mother said, resigned.
“And miss this show?”
Charlotte surprised me. “Mr. Lam was just leaving.”
On cue I stood, leaned toward Melody. “Thank you.”
But Martin wasn’t finished. “Dad mentioned you.”
“We were casual friends.”
“Good for you. The only person he couldn’t be friends with was his kids.”
“Stop, Martin.” From Charlotte.
“I mean, I tried to see him.” He tossed a bitter look at his mother. “I mean, after years of hatred and exile in this penal colony called home, I’d reach out, he’d reach out, lovey-dovey, dumb friends on Facebook, would you believe—and then we’d do battle.”
I waited a second. “You saw him just before he died. He mentioned that. Right?”
The question threw him off as he considered his answer. “Yeah, we fought over my divorce coming up”—a throaty rasp—“strike two for the family heir. My goddamn job at the high school. He called me a loser.”
“Martin.” From Charlotte.
“Words that hurt! He coddled his students. Spanish Inquisition for his little boy and girl.”
“You’re not a little boy,” I said, perhaps unwisely.
For a moment he sputtered, “He was not a complex man, this man everyone loved.”
“What do you mean?”
He debated what to tell me. “He made snap judgments and you had no way to get him to change his mind.”
“About you?”
But he was through. “Are you my analyst, Mr. Lam?”
“You seem to be feeding me material.”
His mouth went slack as he swiveled on his heels. “Love hate. Love hate. The yin and yang of Ben Winslow. Which one will we experience today? I’m sure you never saw the real man, Lam. His students flocked to him and unloaded their five-and-dime problems on him. A sympathetic ear.”
“Which was the problem,” Charlotte noted, her head nodding vigorously.
He pulled in his cheeks. “I heard about what he said to little sister here. The biggest decision of his life. Bullshit. His biggest decision was turning his back on his family. But you know, he probably paid a price for his—openness. Give me your tired, your poor, your…foreign exchange students. God, he loved immigrants.” A sneer. “Probably why he liked you. Or that Dustin murderer.”
“We don’t know if…”
“Or maybe not him.” For a second his voice shook. “But it had to be a student who shot him.”
“Why?”
“Because I used to joke with him—those times we weren’t at each other’s throats—joke that someday a student would kill him.”
That surprised me. It made little sense. “You said that?”
“It was a dumb joke. ‘Dad, you get so involved in their lives that it could backfire. You don’t know how psychotic some of your students are…’”
“And he agreed with that?”
“It obviously happened. Tick tock. Tick tock. Destiny is a bitch.”
Chapter Ten
“He doesn’t want us to visit,” Hank said as I drove into Bristol.
“He has no choice, Hank,” I answered. “This case won’t disappear by hiding away.”
We were headed up Route 6 late morning, stalled behind clogged traffic, inching from one traffic light to the next. A congested avenue of cheap burger joints, drive-thru car washes, pizza restaurants, Chinese fast food, discount insurance agencies. A cluttered, helter-skelter world of Jiffy Lube, Pizza Hut, Hometown Buffet, Friendly’s Ice Cream Parlor, and a tiny, grimy-looking façade that called itself the Wok Inn. A Vietnamese storefront, Hank pointed out with glee—Simply Pho You!
“Pho crying out loud,” he roared. Then, shifting in his seat, “I don’t know this town. I love it. There,” he yelled out. “That sign.”
Up ahead was a massive billboard mounted on the roof of a sprawling lumberyard:
Gospel of Wealth Ministry NEXT RIGHT All Welcome. Blessed Are the Lost.
“Yeah,” Hank grumbled, “the loss of your weekly paycheck.”
“Let’s make a detour.”
I followed a hiccough of bigger and bigger signs, some with spotlights blazing in daylight, that finally led into an old industrial part of town. Abandoned nineteenth-century red-brick factories, windows smashed or boarded up. Rusted chain-link fences with warning signs to KEEP OUT. Junked cars, stripped, rusted, snow-covered. A sharp turn off the dead-end road and there it was: a gleaming amphitheater with white columns and a huge illuminated cross that pierced the clouds. Not a gigantic theater like those mega churches you see on TV, those superbowl coliseums of the saved, the ecstatic Southern preachers with their hands waving Bibles at the multitudes. But—big for Connecticut. Not big enough to eclipse Bristol’s other claim to fame—the sprawling sports complex of ESPN with its moonwalk satellite dishes dotting the landscape. But a far cry from the white-steepled Congregational Churches of the founding fathers. Cotton Mather wouldn’t be happy. But then he never was happy anyway. I could bet on that.
“A hymn to money,” Hank said.
A neon signboard, oversized letters, flickering brightly in the daytime sun: “God has a pot of gold for YOU! God gives you the key.”
The You capitalized. And flashing. With an exclamation point.
“I didn’t know it was so easy.”
“Buddha would have a lot to say about this,” Hank said.
“Buddha wasn’t against wealth, Hank. He just didn’t want it to cloud your real purpose in life. Suffering.”
“Thank God for America,” Hank laughed. “We reorganized man’s priorities. We believe in happy endings. No suffering—life is a TV Sunkist commercial.”
I cut across a side street, turned down another poorly plowed street, banks of dirty snow blocking unmoved cars, and found the entrance to the housing project on Jefferson Drive.
“You could walk to the church of money bags from here,” I noted. “Perfect placement.”
“Opiate,” Hank added.
The projects were stunned structures from the fifties: long, two-story white vinyl-sided homes that mimicked the garden apartments that popped up after World War Two. But decades later neglect gave them the patina of rock-bottom despair—sagging roofs, windows loosed from frames, the faded siding a crazy-quilt patchwork of brilliant graffiti, probably gang related. Keith Haring hieroglyphics. One generation of gang-bangers layering their new violent or ego-bloated messages over the scribbling of older gang-bangers most likely doing time. Though not for desecration of private property.