Murder Never Forgets

by Diana O'Hehir

  She and I regard each other. I debate arguing and decide against it. In the first place, she has an abraded throat and can’t argue back, and, second and more important, she’s feeling rebellious and frightened. She doesn’t want to be hassled.

  I’m pleased. I really want to meet this Dr. Kittredge, who appears in the literature as “. . . our eminent resident physician, one of the three Resident Directors of the Manor.” As a resident director and as the Manor doctor, Dr. Kittredge will certainly have a say on whether my father continues living in Victorian luxury or gets exiled to Hope House, which I imagine as more pink formica. And my opinion on the rights and wrongs of this has gotten inexorable. The man has paid high for Victorian kitsch; he should have it. I turn to meet the doctor.

  But the doctor who blusters through the door is handsome, bulky, and tousled-looking. Somewhere in his forties and with no beard of any kind. “Well, now,” he pushes past me without acknowledgment and heads for Mrs. Dexter, “So here you are. Louise, my old darlin’, what a scare you’ve been givin’ us. You’re better this morning, Mona says? Thanks be to God. Now, let’s see, can you open wide for me? There we go, old sweet.”

  This doctor takes up a lot of room. And he has an Irish accent. I’m not sure how I feel about that combination. I want to lecture him about his treatment of Mrs. Dexter, “For God’s sake, quit calling her by her first name; give her some respect; she’s old enough to be your grandmother.”

  “Hello,” I announce loudly to his back, “I am Carla Day.”

  “I know all about you.” He’s still bent over Mrs. Dexter’s open mouth. “You’re the girl who does the Heimlich maneuver.”

  Well, great, I decide. Now I’m the girl who. Here’s a man with no manners and no p.c. on top of that. Living in Berkeley gives you extra radar for negative p.c.

  But the next minute he turns around and announces in a carrying baritone, “This is a tremendously brave lady,” and holds Mrs. Dexter’s hand up in that successful boxer’s gesture. He cocks his head and looks so silly and hopeful that I get a different set of messages, straight out of an old Bing Crosby movie. While the voice keeps on announcing he’s Irish. Or at least part Irish. Enough to lengthen the vowels and put a J in tremenJously. Irish voices do something basic to my sentiment glands; my Habitat boyfriend once put it that the Irish can make you nostalgic for something you never had. That boyfriend was perceptive and bright; his personality problem lay in his being also a neurotic mess.

  Dr. Kittredge grins, one of those lopsided Irish things with an eyebrow going up toward the hairline. “You did great the other night.”

  “Yeah, okay,” I continue being ungracious.

  “And, Jaysus.” That Irish accent now. It comes and goes, waxes and wanes. He puts Mrs. Dexter’s hand back on the bedspread. “What an awful thing. The palate abraded. Some of the other clients are saying it was glass; can you imagine that, glass in an oyster?”

  I say, “Oh?” And no response. I wonder how that glass rumor got out. Not from me. I haven’t talked to anybody.

  “Ah,” says Dr. Kittredge, “such a dreadful idea, really dreadful.” He sits down heavily on Mrs. Dexter’s bed, slumping his shoulders as if I’ve agreed, but then he gets right up again; probably he’s remembered the doctor isn’t supposed to sit on the patient’s bed.

  Mrs. Dexter is making convulsive Greek-tragedy faces.

  “An accident in the kitchen, I guess?” the doctor says, still as if I’ve confirmed the glass theory. “God almighty, we’ll have to investigate.” He thinks about this for a minute, massaging his chin. And scowls and appears to change his mind. “Probably just oyster shell, don’t you think? That’s bad enough. Careless, terribly careless.” Suddenly he gets very sincere. “There is entirely too much peculiar stuff going on around here these days.”

  I don’t get it, I tell myself; what’s he up to?

  He bends toward Mrs. Dexter. “Sweetheart, we’ll send you home tomorrow, but stay on the clindamycin four more days and don’t forget to swish out with the chlorexadine. Feelin’ a little better now, are we darlin’?”

  Mrs. Dexter says, “Mmmf.” She rolls her eyes at me. She wishes I would go away and shut up.

  “Oyster shell. Glass,” the doctor says, half to himself. “Holy Jay. Out of our own kitchen! Or maybe someone put something there, in her oyster. Somebody consciously set out to slit this little lady’s throat.” He holds Mrs. Dexter’s hand; he flexes it up and down; he looks as if he’s posing for a TV commercial: The Caring Doctor.

  “Carla,” he calls over at me, “wait a minute till I sign these forms, and I’ll walk back to the main building with you.”

  I don’t much like getting to be Carla so fast for this doctor, but yes, fine, I’ll walk over to the main building with him; I want to hear what else he’s going to say. He’s certainly going for the opposite of Mrs. Sisal’s aluminum pill-card theory.

  “Tomorrow,” I tell Mrs. Dexter, who receives the suggestion stonily, and then Dr. Kittredge and I start out into the sunshine. I’ll let him do the talking. He’s a word-spinner; I’ll just mutter uh-huh and oh.

  He’s also one of those bulky men who wants to lean at you when he talks. “Dreadful business,” he says lugubriously, and cants a shoulder into my personal space.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Poor woman. Painful, of course. But, thanks be to God, the palate heals fast. That was one of the wonders in med school. How fast the mouth and throat area heal. Lots of blood vessels.

  “Yep.” He’s certainly spending a lot of broadcast time on this. “But scary,” he goes on. “Tremenjously scary. Far too much of this sort of thing here lately.”

  “Ah,” he goes, looking at my face, “you’ve not heard? Maybe partly rumor. But also, maybe not. Other accidents. Bad for the Manor.” He waves an arm here. “No good at all.”

  I say encouragingly, “Oh?” and he grins and puts his head back; he likes it that I want to hear him. “Accidents. You know, and we can’t pretend; that gets you even worse lawsuits. I’m a director of the Manor, you know.”

  “I heard.”

  He hasn’t forgotten his duty as an alpha male, and we’re jittering a little dance along the path with him moving toward me and me pulling away, but curiously I don’t feel much of the focused irritation I’d usually get, maybe because Dr. Kittredge so successfully projects the image of puppy dog, bouncing and panting along like a large, friendly hound that doesn’t know it shouldn’t slobber.

  “Ah, I’m worried about the Manor, Carla. Am I gettin’ too personal too fast? It’s been that kind of a day, pileup of troubles; it’s a help to walk in the sunshine with a pretty girl. Too personal, is it? I guess so.” He pronounces personal as pairsonal.

  “Um,” I say.

  “Did I hear right?” he asks, “You’re goin’ to be workin’ here?”

  “Just an aide.” I look sideways at him. News certainly travels fast in the Manor.

  And he goes, “Ah, girl, you’re daft.”

  At least half of that Irish accent must be fake. And anyhow, how, with a name like Kittredge does he get to sound Irish at all?

  “But, ah,” he says, “I feel strongly about the Manor. We do good; we get a lot accomplished. I work here because I think it’s a force for good. Ah, it’s a cause close to my heart. . . . Now, some of the directors, they think we should try to . . . how is it? Obfuscate? Fib a little bit? About all these accidents we been havin’. But I, now, ah, well. I don’t think you ever get away with that stuff. A fact is a fact. And the fact is, some pretty peculiar things been happenin’ around here. Before this. You heard about it?”

  A leading question. I say, “Some.”

  “Well, sweetheart, believe it, you will.” He manages to sag his shoulders while keeping on walking and to send along a new and different story about puppy dog with master gone. “Carla, I just can’t tellya . . .” A pause here. During which I think, Okay, organ music, please. “It makes me sad, dear girl, to see people tryin’ to h
ide the truth . . . however bad, it’s the truth.”

  I guess I have to say something now. “Ummm,” I try.

  We’ve arrived at one of the Manor buildings now, all brick and wainscoting and ivy; Dr. Kittredge leans against a corner, dislodging some ivy leaves. “Plenty to think about, huh? Listen, dear girl, I’ll call you, and we’ll go for a walk some evenin’. Am I right?”

  I say, “Yeah, okay,” and watch him dodge into a handsome side door of the Administration building, one with a cutout of a seabird nailed on it. He still hasn’t buttoned his lab coat, which flaps out behind him.

  Chapter 4

  A woman named Belle is going to teach me my Manor job.

  I already know Belle. She’s Daddy’s own aide, and I saw a lot of her the times before this when I came down here to visit him. She’s the one who hands him his morning pills, checks he doesn’t have his shirt on wrong side out, gets him out into the hall and pointed in the general direction of the breakfast lounge. Belle is a tall angular woman with faded hair who looks like that painting of the lady poised in front of the New England-type church-cum-barn and peering through the rake—the one that gets onto all the T-shirts these days. But she’s not like that, really. I like her okay. She’s nice to my father, straightforward and respectful, not unctuous the way the Manor literature is, and she has a wry, direct way of talking right at you that’s reassuring.

  I meet her in the hall underneath a fake Renoir of a woman with one pink breast hanging out.

  Belle has a cartful of bottles that she’s rocking squeakily back and forth. She stares at me in an irked manner. “Well, hi, I guess.”

  “Hi, yourself, Belle.” I’d expected more of a big hello than this.

  “So yer working here?”

  I tell her yes, and she asks me why as if she’s caught me out in a minor crime, and when I say, “Well, I needed a job,” she snorts. Hmmff. A juicy throat-clear. “You don’t need a job, sweet pea. You’re rich.”

  I’m amazed. I take a minute to digest this. “Rich? Why’m I rich? What gave you that idea?”

  Belle turns and tries to stare a hole through me. She has the kind of watery see-right-through-you blue eyes that go with that T-shirt image. “Lissen. Yer dad lives here. If you got a dad that lives here, yer rich. You don’t got any need to work here.”

  I say, “Oh.” Then I try to explain. Yes, there used to be some money, but no, not any more, it all went to buy him in here. I’m poor. Poorer than anybody. Not that it’s any of Belle’s business, but I hate to have people misjudging me. As a matter of fact, I need Belle to like me, if I’m going to be around here. “I’m poor,” I reiterate. “I need this job.”

  She stares at me some more. “So. You got no other job?”

  “Other job? No.”

  “Oh, yeah? Well. Okay, then. I guess.” She snorts again and points at her cartful of bottles. “See all that stuff there? Now every morning you knock on all these doors—you got fifteen, not such a bad load—and you check up, do they look okay, an’ does the room smell funny, an’ does it look like they slept all right, are they able to stand up and not teeter, and you give ’em their pills—each set of pills is in a little plastic doohickey, see, all except the antibiotics; they’re down on the lower shelf—gottit?”

  I’m bent over, looking at the antibiotic shelf. “The antibiotics have red lids.”

  “Yeah, right, right.” Belle still hasn’t moved the cart, she’s kept on rocking it back and forth; it squeaks, one of those help, help sounds. “Why, exactly, you want this job?”

  “I told you. I need to work. I’m broke.”

  “Yeah? What about your other job?”

  I put my hand on the cart to stop the squeaking. “What other job?”

  She stares me up and down. This part of the hall has flocked wallpaper—that stuff where one busy design has been pasted on top of another busy design—and the whole tangled mess seems to be leaning at me. Which Belle is doing, too. I think her stare is supposed to be scary. “You’re here observing. I knew it the minute I heard. About you bein’ here. A spy, I said. Watchin’ us.”

  “What in hell are you talking about?”

  I’m sufficiently amazed that I apparently connect; she examines me some more, and then scratches up under her blue-striped smock. She says, “No?” and I say, “No,” with force, and after another minute she agrees, “Yer not,” more to herself that to me.

  “What would I be spying for?” I ask.

  “You kiddin’, baby? There’s plenty stuff around here to spy about.” She gestures in the direction of the half-exposed Renoir matron. Her voice gets ruminative. “Well, maybe not. Okay, kid, I apologize; yer just a innocent wage slave like the rest of us. You want to be near yer dad, too, I guess?”

  “I do.”

  “That’s a dumb idea, too. Don’t be near him here; get a good job with money, call him up, come in an’ see him a lot, send him stuff; he likes those chocolates with a cherry in the middle, you noticed? Be his rich daughter that comes to see him. This is stupid.”

  “They want to send him to Hope House,” I say.

  “Oh, uh.” Belle frowns a little extra. “Well . . . takes time that. Gettin’ somebody into Hope House. Doesn’t happen right away. Don’t worry about it.”

  “I thought maybe I could help. Calm him down.”

  She’s too old to say, “Duh,” the way somebody my age would, but she stares and makes a noise that means the same thing and then goes on, “Lissen. This place is peculiar. I mean, nothin’ adds up lately, gettit? Could take ’em a long time to get anything organized. Gettit?”

  All I’m getting is an uncomfortable feeling. “Uh-uh.”

  “So you don’t gettit. You sure yer not investigating?”

  We’re far enough into this peculiar conversation that I decide this is a flattering thing for Belle to think. Investigator /observer/spy equals professional. It’s a new way of looking at me. But I turn down the honor. “No, Belle. Absolutely not.”

  She takes another minute to analyze me and then switches focus at last. “Okay, then. We gotta get these pills out. Come on along with it, now.”

  The cart is activated; we squeak down the hall past Renoirs, Chagalls, dog pictures, and swirling red-and-gold flocked wallpaper; finally she knocks on a door that has an elf in a yellow jumpsuit hanging from the nameplate. “Good morning, little lady, you won a sweepstake, four kinds of pills. My God, are you lucky. Howya feelin’ this morning?”

  The woman at the door wears a flowered housecoat and peers at us through powder-spattered glasses. “Belle,” she says, “I’m so glad to see you, I always feel better after I have my morning dose of Belle. Belle is my morning fun package.” She turns to me, and when we’re introduced, says, “Why, you’re Edward’s daughter. A young aide; how good, so nice to have a young face, helps us, know what I mean?” Mrs. Cohen is another person here whom I’ve met before; she’s one of Daddy’s special group of three old-lady admirers.

  Belle watches the door close on this lady and tells me, “Now that is Mrs. Cohen. Like you can see, she is nice an’ won’t give you any trouble, which is not what I’d say for all of them.”

  And she goes through my client list: another of my father’s special trio: this one is named Mrs. La Salle, a Mr. Rice, a Mr. Taylor (“an they’re a coupla hellers”). A bunch of others. Mrs. Dexter is on my list. “It’s not exactly hard work, but it’s hard on you, if you gettit. You gotta watch, and sometimes they’re scared, and then they take it out on you. There’s Mrs. Cartwright has Parkinson’s, shakes so bad I have to hold the pill cup for her, and Mrs. Krech with arthritis, some days so bad she’s in a wheelchair and has to have a bag for going to the bathroom. You really wanna know, it’s a lousy job an’ I think yer crazy, and that’s my candid opinion.”

  We trundle farther on down the hall. Halfway through our pill delivery, I have my mouth open to ask Belle about the Manor accidents—“Hey, what do you think about the woman who fell out the window? What
about Mrs. Dexter and the oyster?” And then I decide not to ask these questions. Those are just the sort of questions an observer (or a company spy, or whatever else it is Belle thinks I might be) would be asking. I’m flattered by Belle thinking that of me, but I don’t want her to fix on that opinion and never have any other.

  Instead, I ask her about my father. “Mrs. Sisal says he yells around in the hall.”

  Belle shrugs. “So. A little vocalization don’t hurt anybody.”

  I smile, acknowledging the big word, but keep right on. “And that he wanders up into the forest. What’s that about?”

  “Dunno. Don’t hassle it.” She looks at my face and says, “Some kinda favorite place he’s got up there. I think it’s a well or something. He calls it ‘Dark Lake.’ ”

  “Dark Lake,” I repeat. I don’t much like the sound.

  I start to ask her about my father’s visits to the beach and then decide not to. I don’t want to investigate that beach too much with Belle. Instead, I try some ordinary character-assassination gossip. “What do you think of the doctor?”

  “Kittredge? Old mega-testosterone?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Big blowhard,” she adds.

  I think, Yeah, that, too. “He took me for a walk,” I volunteer.

  “Excitement.” Belle looks cynical.

  I stress, “Not especially.”

  “How about him and Mrs. Sisal?” I ask. “Do they get along?”

  “Maybe just great when they’re in bed together.” She stalls and examines me. “Hey, you are an Observer.”

  “No, I’m not. Just ordinary curiosity.”

  She makes a face and reminds me what happened to the cat. “Pussycat hamburger. Don’t get too damn curious.”

  “Okay,” she tells me at the end of the corridor. “You gottit, I guess, the routine. You pick up quick. The rest is just common sense, and don’t scream if you find somebody passed out on the floor. They’re old, and they do that. There’s a string with a red button . . .”