Dead Crazy

by Nancy Pickard

  I waited, hoping he was at home, listening, and that he would pick up the receiver when he heard my voice. When he didn’t, I hung up.

  “Well, shit,” I said again. “Now what do we do?”

  I wasn’t really that upset. Although this rebellion of his was going to cause me some inconvenience, a part of me rejoiced that he’d shown some spunk: “You can’t fire me, Jenny, I quit.”

  It was then that I noticed that he’d left his “Recreation Hall” file folder on my desk, on top of several of his other records. I reached for it and opened it. Inside were his typed notes from his interviews with the neighbors from the night before. I glanced through them and saw that they confirmed his verbal report—most of the neighbors sounded amenable at best, persuadable at worst. Derek’s handwritten notes that he had taken during the interviews, or maybe jotted down immediately afterward, were clipped to the typed copy. The ten pages of stenopad notes in his big, boyish, circling handwriting had turned into one and a half pages of single-spaced typing. I thought back to the evening before: Derek had called me about ten-thirty. Considering the pace at which he usually typed, it had probably taken him about an hour to decipher and to transcribe his own notes. Taking into consideration any breaks he might have taken for coffee, beer, food, other phone calls, or the eleven o’clock news, he probably hadn’t ended his workday until midnight or later. If, that is, he had typed the notes at home. It was possible, I supposed, that he had done that job when he came back to the office either last night or very early this morning to clean up and clear out.

  While glancing through his handwritten notes, I happened to see that on the last page he’d scribbled with uncharacteristic eagerness: “Good idea, good vibes! Let’s go for it, Jenny!” I looked back at the typed version, but didn’t find the message there.

  Instead of going for it, he’d gone.

  I had a sudden image of Derek putting on his ski jacket, getting into his old red Toyota, and driving to the office. It must have still been snowing hard then, visibility must have been terrible, the streets nearly impassable. And yet he had left his warm condominium to come back here, unlock the door to a dark office building, ride up in a cold elevator, enter an empty office, and clear out his desk. I wished the building had a night security guard, so that I might check a log to see what time Derek had signed in and out—as if that knowledge would give me some clue as to the degree and intensity of his perturbation. Had he come over here in the middle of the night, or had he slept on it, dreamed of it, tossed and turned on it, and then resolved at dawn’s light to abandon ship?

  I didn’t get it, and, suddenly, I didn’t much like it, either. I resolved to locate Derek, to sit him down and make him tell me what had happened overnight to change him from an eager beaver into a fleeing rat.

  I was running out of clichés. Plus, I had other unpleasant news to face.

  But before calling MaryDell Paine, I put in a call to Geof at the police station. I wanted to be able to supply MaryDell with as many confirmed facts as possible.

  “Hello,” I said, when he answered.

  “Hi, hon. I guess this is the day the bear eats you.”

  “I watched them bring out the body.”

  He sighed. “So I heard. Well, sure. Don’t you always?”

  I ignored that gratuitous dig. “What do you know?”

  “The victim was a man named Rodney Gardner, thirty-one years old. He lived in a house that’s for sale across from the church. Do you know which one I mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is he the ‘fuckin’ charmer’ you told me about?”

  “Yes. He was a jerk, rest in peace.”

  “He was also self-employed as a carpenter and handyman. He was thirty-one years old and he lived with a twenty-one-year-old woman named Samantha who—”

  “Really? She doesn’t look over sixteen.”

  “—who says Gardner saw lights on in the church last night, around one o’clock, and that he put on a coat and went over to see what was going on.”

  “In a snowstorm? Why didn’t he just call the cops?”

  “I don’t know, Jenny. Maybe he was a dumb jerk. She says she went to bed and that she didn’t notice that he didn’t come home again. When she got up, she thought he’d gone to a job he was working on. I guess you heard he was slashed and stabbed to death. I hear it was a mess. I’ve got to tell you, Jenny, they say it looks like somebody went crazy in there. That’s the word the detectives are using, crazy.”

  “I know. Suspects?”

  “Did you see the blackboard?”

  “Yes.”

  “Read what was written there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think it was a confession?”

  “I don’t know. Probably. Maybe.”

  “You’re so opinionated. Well, we’re looking for this Mob person. Do you think that’s short for something, Jenny? Moberbly? Moby Dick?”

  “Mobster?”

  He laughed briefly. “We should ask God. If this Mob gets a reply to his letter, this will be a more important case than it seems. We can build a shrine around the blackboard. Sell bits of the wood to true believers.” The amusement left his voice, and seriousness descended again. “We’re also looking for the landlord to ask him if the blackboard was clean yesterday. Did you see it, Jenny? Do you remember any writing on it?”

  “The side I saw was clean, Geof.”

  “You do come in handy sometimes.”

  “You might consider putting me on retainer.”

  “Or a restrainer?”

  “Very funny, cop. What else?”

  “Well, so this Mob person is probably the one who was in the building and turned on the lights and killed Rodney Gardner.” Without pausing, he then said, “Jenny, I have this feeling that other cops don’t discuss their cases in such detail with the Little Woman. I suspect they talk about Little League games and mowing the grass and what’s for dinner. Do you think we could try that sometime?”

  “Chili.”

  “What?”

  “It’s my turn to cook. That’s what’s for dinner, and it’s in a can in the cupboard, so all you’ll have to do is warm it in the microwave and find the crackers.”

  He laughed.

  As he had explained the facts of the case to me, an uneasiness had tickled across the back of my skull, but I couldn’t identify the source. Instead, I started to say goodbye to him. He stopped me, however, by saying, “Jenny?”

  “Yes?”

  “You’re being calm to the point of blasé. Do you realize that? It makes me feel kind of … sad … to think my wife has that much experience with homicide.”

  “I’m all right, Geof.” I spoke, not blithely, but gently and seriously, as he had just spoken to me. “Really, I am. I’m only a very minor witness. To paraphrase a cop we used to know, I’m not the one who’s dead. I think that’s a very handy perspective. I’m okay, honestly.”

  After that, I called Mrs. Paine at her home.

  But it turned out that MaryDell had already learned of the murder from an in-your-face phone call from Mr. Perry, The Walking Cigar, Yates.

  She didn’t, however, know about the letter to God that had been scrawled across the blackboard.

  “… written by somebody named Mob,” I finished.

  “What?” She said it harshly, as if she hadn’t really been listening until that moment.

  “Mob.” I spelled it for her. “Now MaryDell, I don’t think we have to give up the idea of putting the recreation hall in that basement. Let’s give this a couple of days, see if they arrest anybody. Maybe it will be somebody completely unconnected to mental health.” I laughed, cynically, when I heard my own words. “You know what I mean. Anyway, let’s see how the neighbors take this, and let’s not just assume it’s all down the tubes. I’ll go ahead and get my proposal ready for the trustees’ meeting, and—”

  “No.” She interrupted in the same harsh tone. “No.”

  “But-”

 
“No!”

  I would have argued with her, but she hung up on me. I would have been surprised at her reaction, if I hadn’t already formed an idea about why she had capitulated so easily.

  “Faye?”

  I heard her chair wheeling toward the doorway, and then her face appeared, a small, sheepish smile on it.

  I smiled back. “I know it’s a lot to ask in this weather, but would you let me borrow your car for a couple of hours?”

  “That’s what my boys say, and then I don’t see it again until Sunday,” she said, in a chattering way, as if she were nervous or self-conscious. “Sure, Jenny. You know you can borrow anything of mine. Also … you can have my apology.”

  “Thanks, but I only need the car.”

  I walked into the outer office, stood beside her desk, and took the keys she fished out of her purse and handed to me. When she gave me another smile, along with the keys, I said, “Faye, it’s a good thing you’re sitting down, because I need to tell you about my morning….”

  13

  Our parking lot looked as if a strong wind had blown through and swung the vehicles every which way. The neat white parking lanes were obscured by messy white snow, so the drivers had abandoned their cars wherever they slid to a safe stop. Faye’s car wasn’t hard to find—it was an old gray Volvo station wagon, a heavy tank that tracked well in any weather, and the only car pointed neatly into the curb.

  Using her key, which was attached to a ring with a Boy Scout emblem on it, I opened the door on the driver’s side. I tucked my coat underneath me, and slid onto the hard, cold front seat alongside a Spiderman comic book, a couple of loose C-cell batteries, an ice scraper, a cassette tape, a quart can of 10-40 weight oil, a metal spout, and a clear plastic box of nails in mixed sizes. To the left of the steering wheel, there was a hand-lettered sign: “Turn off your lights, Mom!” Near the floor, there was a pull-out beverage holder with a Big Slurp soda cup in one hole and a Phillips screwdriver in the other. A Louis L’Amour paperback Western lay on the rim of the cup; I picked up the book and looked in the cup, just to make sure it was empty. It was, save for some small plastic screws that looked stuck to the brown guck at the bottom. I was well equipped if I suddenly had to entertain any teenage boys.

  I picked up the cassette and looked at the label: “The Lettermen in Concert.” So Faye did get to drive it now and then. Or maybe one of the boys had discovered the magical effect of swoony love ballads on teenage girls.

  I turned the key in the ignition. The engine rolled right over. I switched on the defroster and by the time I drove onto the street, it had the windows cleared. I switched the heater to “Floor” and soon hot air was defrosting my toes. If only, I thought, the tanks the U.S. Army purchased worked half as reliably as this one. Somewhere in me, a Swedish gene swelled with pride.

  I drove with confidence. Anything that slid into me would have the bigger bruises to show for it.

  MaryDell Paine’s address was thirty blocks from the murder and on a far different sort of block from the one where the old church basement lay.

  As I drove out there, I measured the distance not only in miles but also in the increasing depths of the lawns from curb to porch, in the manicuring of those lawns, and in the increasing size and beauty of the residences. From Tenth Street to Forty-eighth Street, where she lived, the houses grew to brick and clapboard mansions, some antiques, some reproductions of antiques. It took the mailman much longer to walk from his truck to these mailboxes than it did for him to reach the mailboxes on Tenth Street. Beneath the snow, the grass and trees and shrubs on Forty-eighth Street were sucking up chemicals that Tenth Street couldn’t afford, perhaps to its ultimate good fortune. The driveways here had already been cleared by snowblowers and hired help, while it would take longer for the residents of Tenth to shovel their snow by hand. The cars in the driveways were different, too—changing from used and American on Tenth, to new and foreign on Forty-eighth.

  Let me make it clear that I was not snubbing Forty-eighth Street in my observations: for one thing, it is beautiful; for another, I grew up near it and will probably always live on blocks like it. I’m aware of the differences, that’s all; a fact that probably helped to land me in foundation work, which is one of capitalism’s safety valves, a seemingly innocuous way to redistribute wealth short of forcing the landholders off their coffee plantations at the point of a rifle butt. The fact that such a system also results in what is euphemistically called “social engineering,” has not escaped my notice, or that of Congress, but that, as they say, is another story, or maybe inherent in this one.

  I know, I’m doing it again—digressing. But consider the morning I’d had thus far!

  I located MaryDell’s address and spun my tires up the cleared but icy driveway to park in her small private parking lot. It was roomy enough for four or five cars to park side by side without denting each other’s doors. I stepped carefully over the shoveled brick walk that led to the house, which was a vast, three-story clapboard that rambled over a lot and a half. It was immaculately painted in colonial reds, whites, and blues; the flag of the thirteen original colonies fluttered from a brass pole that jutted from the roof. Red silk geraniums bloomed out of season in black cast-iron pots on either side of the double front door. The brass knocker on the door was shaped like an eagle and, when raised, it beat down upon the engraved brass monogram of the house. It was useless, of course; nobody could hear a knock through the solid oak of that front door.

  I rang the bell.

  It played “Yankee-Doodle.”

  Not merely the first line of it either, but a whole damn verse and chorus. The last note was dying out when a young black woman in a pink-and-white maid’s uniform opened the door, and said, “Yes?” through gritted teeth. I thought her expression of pained annoyance had less to do with me than with the doorbell.

  “You could rip out its wires,” I suggested.

  “I could rip it to spaghetti,” she snarled. “Yes?”

  “I’m Jenny Cain. To see Mrs. Paine.”

  The maid glared at me as if I’d made up the unfortunate rhyme on purpose, to torment her further. My serious mission to this house was turning giddy. I was reminded of a survey in which it was demonstrated that the absurd appeals more often to a woman’s sense of humor than to a man’s. Too true, I thought; it was real hard to imagine Philip Marlowe saying anything as absurd as “I’m Philip Marlowe to see Jean Harlow,” and then having to stifle his giggles because of it. The maid allowed me into the foyer, and then departed for the interior while I removed my coat, hat, and gloves and deposited them in a hall closet. The house smelled wonderful—yeasty, like baking rolls, with an underlay of lemony furniture polish. I gazed up the long central stairwell to the second floor and tried to compose myself for the serious interview that lay ahead.

  Soon MaryDell filled the hallway, covering the previous smells with the scent of Joy perfume. She wore a green velour jogging suit that made her look like an avocado, and matching clogs, with hose. It seemed a long and eventful time since breakfast; at the sight of her, I had a sudden craving for corn chips and guacamole dip.

  “Why, Jenny, what a nice surprise!” she lied.

  “I’m sorry to drop in on you like this without any warning, MaryDell,” I lied in return, “but we need to talk-”

  “If it’s about the recreation hall, I already said—”

  “It’s not, exactly.”

  “Well, I’m awfully busy this morning—”

  “It’ll only take a few minutes.”

  She sighed, resigning herself to the intrusion.

  “Come back to the sun porch, Jenny.”

  I followed her short, stout figure through a myriad of hallways, past assorted Americana. En route, she talked nonstop. It was like following a tour guide through a lesser museum.

  “Welcome to the ancestral home, Jenny,” she said smoothly. “Five generations of my husband’s family have lived in this old barn, and now I’m the lucky one who ge
ts to try to keep it from falling down around our heads. My husband was born here. His mother and her father were not only born here but also died here in their own beds, a fate that probably also awaits us. The central house is circa 1792. Three wings have been added in the last century; the newest wing includes the room to which we are going now. Almost all the furnishings, paintings, and other decorative objects are authentic originals, most of which have required refurbishing by the few remaining handcraftsmen who can still perform the old trades. If you think a plumber’s expensive these days, you ought to try calling a coppersmith! Only the furnishings in the sun room are new. You’ll have to forgive me that lapse.”

  Had I detected a note of irony amid the redundancies?

  “Anita!” My reluctant hostess called briskly into the kitchen as we passed it. Above the level of the swinging doors, the maid peered up with that same pained expression on her face. A perky little pink-and-white cap sat atop her hair; the cap alone would have been enough to give me a pained expression, but maybe the bobby pins were biting into her scalp as well. “Bring us some tea, will you? And a plate of those breakfast rolls—warm them up for us in the microwave, that’s a good girl. Here, Jenny …”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  That was the maid saying that, not I.

  We entered a yellow-and-white room with floor-to-ceiling louvered windows. I thought it was pretty optimistic of MaryDell to call it the “sun room,” considering the ratio of rain to sun in Poor Fred. Of course, MaryDell had a reputation as a “doer,” always trying to change the world into her vision of how it should be. Maybe she thought that if she threw enough sunny colors around, she could change Port Frederick into Port Everglades.

  She pointed me into a cushion wicker basket of a chair that put my rear end nearly on the floor and shoved my knees up around my chest. For herself, MaryDell chose a straight-backed wooden chair in which she looked efficient enough to call a meeting to order. I could have moved, but the situation appealed to my sense of the absurd, that renowned female trait I mentioned earlier. I pulled my skirt down over my knees and stayed where I was, gazing up at her from my basket like a baby in a wicker bassinet.