Nerve Damage

by Peter Abrahams

  Westie looked puzzled. “We’ve got no one named Lenore here.”

  “A tall black woman,” Roy said. “Very striking.”

  Westie screwed up his face. “Are you maybe thinking of the Wine Emporium in Washington Circle?”

  Roy took a good look at Westie: smooth, unlined skin; shaving cut under his chin; so young. “That must be it,” he said. “Thanks for the wine.”

  “My pleasure.”

  Roy took his glass of Priorat from old vines and wandered toward the back of Wine, Inc., just like any customer at a tasting. A man at the second table swirled his wine around and gave it a hard look, like it was trying to fool him. Roy kept going, past a bin of South African Sauvignon Blanc, toward the door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY.

  He glanced around—no one watching—and pushed the door. One of those doors with an insulation strip on one side and no knob, the kind that just swung open, designed for lots of burden-bearing traffic, and also a door he’d pushed through three days ago: but this time it didn’t budge. Roy leaned into it. No result.

  “Excuse me?”

  Roy turned. Westie.

  “Looking for the rest room?” he said. “It’s over there.” He pointed to a door in the corner. “Unisex,” Westie added with a smile. “Just knock.”

  Roy knocked and went in, an ordinary little bathroom with no way out but the way he’d entered. He stood there, not knowing what to think. The face in the mirror—so thin?—had a new line on it, a shallow vertical groove between the eyes: a marred and frailer version of himself, like a bad copy.

  Roy must have lost track of time. After a while, there was a knock on the door and Westie called, “Everything all right, sir?”

  There was an intensity, too, about the face in the mirror, as though something enormously complex and demanding was going on beneath the surface.

  A second knock, much heavier. “Sir?”

  “I’m fine,” Roy said.

  Twelve

  Roy stood behind a very fat man at a fast-food place, ordered what he ordered. Reaching into his pocket for money, he felt something silky. Roy pulled it out: the skullcap from Gold’s funeral. Not silk, but nylon—a cheap little scrap with prominent seams and stitching, and as a hat, completely useless. He folded it into a neat triangle and transferred it to the chest pocket of his shirt.

  Roy ate his greasy meal as he drove, chewing up the burgers, fries and wings, swallowing every morsel, packing it in. For drink, he had another huge milk shake—this one strawberry vanilla—which he finished downing as he turned off Connecticut and parked in front of Jerry’s house. The lights were on and Jerry’s Volvo sat in the driveway.

  Roy went to the door, a black door with a silver knocker. He raised it, could tell from the look, feel, heft, that it really was silver, or mostly. Also a pretty object, shaped like a sunflower. Roy hesitated. He’d never felt like trouble for anyone before; and for his own good, wouldn’t it be better to go home, rest, eat, exercise, get back to work—if not on Silence, then on something else—so he could be in top shape for his next treatment? Roy banged the lovely knocker against the door, hard.

  Five or ten seconds later came the sound of footsteps on the other side. And Jerry’s voice: “Who is it?”

  “Roy Valois.”

  “What do you want?”

  “To talk.”

  The door opened. Jerry didn’t look good—red-eyed and unshaven, somehow even smaller than before. “About what? That obituary of yours?”

  “That’s part of it,” Roy said.

  “Why do you care so much?”

  “There’s more to it than the obituary.”

  “Such as?” said Jerry.

  “It will take a few minutes,” Roy said.

  Jerry closed his eyes, as though composing himself, and stepped back. Roy went in. The house was filled with the smell of flowers; they were everywhere—in vases, glasses, bottles, even a tennis-ball can—and at the base of every vessel lay the signed accompanying card. All those flowers gave Roy a bad feeling. He remembered the flow of bouquets after Delia’s funeral, their gaudy oppression weighing on him till he’d tossed them all in the trash.

  “Aren’t they beautiful?” Jerry said. “People keep sending and sending them.”

  Jerry led him into the kitchen. A big sheet of poster board lay on the table, and on it dozens of photographs—Gold with Jerry, Gold alone, the two of them with others. “I’m making a collage,” Jerry said. “For permanent framing.” He shifted the photos around. “It’s not easy, placing them right.” He glanced at Roy. “You’re probably good at things like that.”

  Roy had never been interested in collages, didn’t like the implication—if it was one—that they bore any relationship to what he did. But he said, “I can give it a try.”

  He sat down with Jerry at the kitchen table arranging photos. There actually did turn out to be an art to it, an art Jerry lacked, despite a lot of effort, and that Roy understood, without a second thought.

  “Try cutting these into ovals,” Roy said.

  Jerry picked up the scissors.

  “No,” Roy said. “Sideways ovals.”

  Jerry cut some photos into sideways ovals. Roy arranged them on the poster board. “Hey, that’s kind of witty,” said Jerry. “But you don’t even know these people.”

  Roy said nothing.

  Jerry started gluing the photos on the board. The expression on his face grew less miserable: not happy, but at least absorbed.

  “How’s the investigation going?” Roy said.

  Jerry’s hand paused, just for an instant. “They called this morning,” he said. “No progress.” Jerry dabbed glue on the back of a photo of Gold standing beside a cactus.

  “The credit cards…”

  “Haven’t been used,” Jerry said. He laid the photo on the board, pressed the corners down. “The laptop, BlackBerry, none of that’s turned up. The fingerprints they took ended up matching an electrician who did some work last month.”

  “But they still think it was a robbery?” Roy said.

  “Of course, with all the missing stuff,” Jerry said. “What else could it be?” His hand, holding another photo by the edge—Richard and Jerry in straw hats—began to shake.

  “I don’t know,” Roy said, taking the photo from him and sliding it in place. “Something’s going on.”

  Jerry turned to him. “Something about Richard?”

  “I don’t know that either,” Roy said. “Who’s in charge of the case?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Jerry. “The person I talk to is Sergeant Bettis. Did he say his first name? I can’t remember.”

  “I’d like to talk to him.”

  “Why?”

  Where to begin? “It’s—” Roy felt a sudden sharp pain in the right hand side of his chest, up high.

  Jerry was watching him. “What?”

  The pain vanished, just like that, leaving behind nothing but a few drops of sweat on his forehead; almost not an event at all. “Nothing,” Roy said. He took a deep breath, felt like the lower parts of his lungs had been tied off. “It’s about Tom Parish—the guy on Richard’s phone. He used to be my wife’s boss. But when I tracked him down he claimed to be someone else and didn’t seem to know me.”

  “I don’t get it,” Jerry said.

  Roy tried again from a different angle, bringing in the Hobbes Institute, Consulate of Greece, Venezuela.

  “So what are you saying?” Jerry said.

  “That picture on Richard’s phone,” Roy said. “Suppose it’s a connection.”

  “A connection to what?” Jerry said, his voice rising in pitch, growing querulous. “What could all this Hobbes business have to do with Richard?”

  Roy had no idea, but he also had no other place to go. “I’d like to see what Sergeant Bettis thinks.”

  Jerry gazed down at the collage, touched a sailboat in the background of one of the photos. “I’ll call him,” he said.

  Sergeant Bettis arrived in twenty mi
nutes: a man of Roy’s height, but broader, broader even than the way Roy had been before…before all this. He wore jeans and a windbreaker; his face sagged a little, as though he needed sleep. The kitchen chair creaked under him when he sat down.

  Roy told his story, didn’t organize it any better than he’d done with Jerry. Sergeant Bettis took notes and said nothing till Roy finished, not really coming to an end, more just falling silent.

  Sergeant Bettis leafed back through his notebook. A minute went by, maybe more. He looked at Roy, his eyes dark, intelligent, impartial. “How old are you?” he said.

  Roy told him.

  “What got you interested in your obituary?”

  Roy hadn’t expected that. “A buddy of mine and I were talking,” he said.

  “Yeah?” said Sergeant Bettis. “’Bout what?”

  “Hockey.”

  “Ice hockey?”

  “Yes, but—”

  Sergeant Bettis wrote something in his notebook. A brief entry, brief enough to have been ice hockey. “Go on,” he said.

  “We were just wondering whether…”

  “Yes?”

  This was going to sound a little lame. “Whether a goal I once scored would make it into my obituary,” Roy said.

  “Must have been a big goal,” said Sergeant Bettis.

  “Not really.”

  “Was this in the pros?”

  Roy was conscious of Jerry’s eyes going back and forth, and the look in them: trying to follow some game he didn’t know. “College,” Roy said.

  “Where?”

  “University of Maine,” Roy said.

  Sergeant Bettis wrote it down. “And this buddy of yours,” he said. “Would he have a name?”

  “I don’t think that matters,” Roy said. “The important thing is this…” Other than a few speeding tickets, Roy had no experience with cops. He searched for the right cop word, maybe not finding it. “…this discrepancy between my wife’s—”

  Sergeant Bettis interrupted. “Curiosity, then,” he said. “Fair to say that was the motive?”

  “Motive?” said Roy. “Motive for what?”

  “Breaking into the files of the New York Times,” said Sergeant Bettis.

  Roy sat back. “I’m not sure where you’re going with this.”

  Sergeant Bettis spread his hands, surprisingly small hands for a man his size. Roy had a crazy thought—more than that, abnormal, at least for him, almost disturbed—that he, or more accurately the Roy before all this, not long ago and maybe again, please, Dr. Chu, could take Sergeant Bettis in a fight. “Just collecting facts at this stage,” Sergeant Bettis said. “How did you go about it?”

  “Go about what?”

  “Hacking into the paper.”

  “Sergeant Bettis? I think you’re missing—”

  “Study some programming up at the University of Maine?”

  “Programming?”

  “Writing code, that kind of thing,” said Sergeant Bettis.

  “No,” Roy said.

  “So you had some help?”

  “Help?”

  “In breaking into the site.”

  “No,” Roy said. “I had no help. But—”

  “How did you do it?” said Sergeant Bettis.

  Roy held up his hand. “Whoa.”

  “Whoa?”

  “I think you’ve gone off on a tangent,” Roy said.

  Sergeant Bettis smiled, as though he’d had an amusing thought. “What do you do for a living?” he said.

  “He’s a sculptor,” said Jerry.

  “Sculptor,” said Sergeant Bettis.

  “Famous,” Jerry said.

  Roy shook his head.

  “How would you react”—Sergeant Bettis glanced at his notes—“Roy, if I tried to tell you how to mold your clay?”

  All at once Roy remembered what third grade had been like, specifically the day Mrs. LeClaire caught him with matches, and the scene that had followed. Now, as then, he said nothing.

  “You wouldn’t like it, would you?” said Sergeant Bettis. “Same with me, when someone tells me how to do my job.”

  Roy said: “If it helped with the final result, I’d want to know.” Proving he’d learned at least something since third grade.

  Sergeant Bettis gazed at him. He nodded. “Fair enough.”

  “I’m just saying there might be some connection,” Roy said.

  “And I’m just saying fair enough,” said Sergeant Bettis. He went back through his notes. “Let’s see this guy’s picture on the cell phone,” he said. Jerry went upstairs.

  “Vermont,” said Sergeant Bettis.

  “Yes.”

  “Never been myself. Cold.”

  “Can be,” Roy said.

  Jerry came back down. “It’s not there.”

  They turned to him. “What’s not there?” said Sergeant Bettis.

  “Richard’s phone,” Jerry said. “The one with the pictures. I’m sure I left it on his desk. Now it’s gone.”

  “Did you look in the drawer?” Roy said.

  “Of course I looked in the drawer,” Jerry said. “I looked everywhere.”

  “Maybe you took it someplace, to another room,” Roy said.

  “I didn’t take it anywhere,” Jerry said.

  Sergeant Bettis’s eyebrows rose. “I hear a suggestion of some nature,” he said.

  Jerry darted a quick glance at Roy.

  “So do I,” Roy said.

  Jerry said, “The last time I saw Richard’s phone it was in your hand.” He couldn’t meet Roy’s gaze.

  “I left it on the desk,” Roy said.

  Sergeant Bettis had no trouble meeting Roy’s gaze; in fact, his eyes had brightened up and he didn’t look so tired anymore.

  “I’d like to look myself,” Roy said.

  “You don’t trust me,” Jerry said.

  Sergeant Bettis rose. “Let’s all take a look,” he said.

  They went up the stairs—Jerry, Roy, Sergeant Bettis—and into the study. Sergeant Bettis looked around. A photo of Michelangelo’s David hung on the far wall. “It was your wife,” he said, “who worked for this institute?”

  “Correct,” said Roy. “Delia.”

  Sergeant Bettis rubbed his face. “Let’s see about this phone.”

  Jerry gestured toward the desk. Sergeant Bettis went over. “This is where they got the laptop?”

  “Yes,” Jerry said.

  Sergeant Bettis shifted some cables aside. A dust ball drifted off the desk. “And the phone?”

  “Jerry took it out of the top drawer,” Roy said. “I left it right there.” He pointed to the blotter.

  Sergeant Bettis opened the top drawer. Empty.

  “Where’s the daybook?” Roy said.

  “Daybook?” said Sergeant Bettis.

  “Where Gold took notes for his stories,” Roy said. “There were pages torn out. Pages that had to do with me.”

  “You saw them?” said Sergeant Bettis.

  “Saw what?” Roy said.

  “The missing pages.”

  “No,” said Roy. “How could I?”

  “Then how do you know they were about you?” Sergeant Bettis said. “These missing pages.”

  “I”—what was the word?—“deduced it.”

  “You deduced it.”

  “Not that pages were missing,” Roy said. “That was obvious. But the entries before—”

  “Did he show you?” said Sergeant Bettis, turning to Jerry.

  “Show me what?” said Jerry.

  “Where the pages got torn out,” said Sergeant Bettis. “From this daybook or notebook or whatever.”

  “I don’t think so,” Jerry said. “What’s going on, anyway? I don’t want to be doing this right now.”

  “Did he mention them?” said Sergeant Bettis. “The missing pages?”

  “I just don’t understand,” Jerry said.

  “No,” Roy said, his voice rising. “I didn’t mention them—that’s when Jerry brought out th
e cell phone. But all we have to do is find the goddamn thing and I’ll show you.” He faced Jerry. “You must have taken them somewhere, the phone and the daybook.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Think, Jerry.”

  “I’m trying,” Jerry said. He scrunched up his eyes for a moment, then opened them. “It’s no use. You had them. That’s all I remember.”

  Roy bent down, peered under the desk.

  “Search the whole house if you want,” Jerry said. “I don’t care.”

  Sergeant Bettis turned toward the door. “Call me if you happen to find anything.”

  “Wait,” Roy said.

  Sergeant Bettis paused in the doorway.

  “One other thing,” Roy said. “When Tom Parish left—ran away from me, really—he vanished into this strange room behind the wineshop.”

  “What kind of strange room?” said Sergeant Bettis.

  Roy described it: cubicles, workers in headsets, monitors everywhere, big maps on the walls.

  “Yeah?” said Sergeant Bettis.

  Roy rode to Wine, Inc. in Sergeant Bettis’s unmarked car. They went inside. No one was there except Westie, coming toward the door. “I was just closing up,” he said. He noticed Roy. “Oh, hi—did you want one of those Priorats after all?”

  Sergeant Bettis showed his badge. “This won’t take a minute.”

  Westie’s eyes widened. “What won’t? Is there some problem?”

  “Not involving you,” said Sergeant Bettis. “I’d just like a peek at your storage room.”

  Westie glanced at Roy. “But why?”

  “Part of an ongoing investigation,” Sergeant Bettis said.

  “Gee,” said Westie, “I don’t know. Maybe I should call the owner?”

  “Is that Lenore?” said Roy.

  “I told you, sir,” said Westie, sounding a little aggrieved. “There’s no one here by that name.”

  Sergeant Bettis gave Roy a quick glance, then turned to Westie. “No need to go to any trouble,” he said, now moving toward the rear of the store. Westie trailed after him, biting his lip; Roy followed.

  Sergeant Bettis put his hand on the employees-only door and gave a slight push. Now it swung smoothly open. They went into the storage room.