Murder Never Forgets

by Diana O'Hehir

  I sigh and sit down on the couch. “Please tell me exactly what you’re talking about.”

  “Mona wasn’t what she looked like.” Mrs. Dexter punctuates by squeaking her machinery some more. “Mona was a person of power.”

  I say, “Power, you can’t mean, power?” and Mrs. Dexter says, “She had means,” and I say, “Come on, please speak English,” and Mrs. Dexter says, “Well, not power exactly, they say blackmailers are weak people,” and I ask, “Mona was a blackmailer?” And Mrs. Dexter says, “Sometimes,” And then she adds, “Mona had the key to the drug cupboard.”

  “The drug cupboard,” I say, and then dawn breaks for me, and I say, “Drugs? Mona was selling drugs? Who’d she sell them to?”

  Mrs. Dexter tips up her chin. She’s feeling better; she smirks. She says, “Oh, child,” in the tone you’d use for a four-year-old. “To us, of course. Do you think old people can’t be addicts?”

  I guess I hadn’t thought about it, exactly. Sell drugs around the Manor? When you tell me drugs, I get a picture of a Santa Cruz student flipped out under a redwood tree, or else of a homeless Tenderloin guy in a holey overcoat. Not an old lady with color-enhanced hair.

  Drugs, I think, reviewing that confusing interview with Mona. “I was just trying to help,” and all that emotive blather. Oh, that idiot girl. Oh, good God.

  “So. Learn about how life really is,” Mrs. Dexter says, smirking some more, but only partly being mean, getting into another of her Disney roles, this time the Red Queen one. “Anybody can get to need drugs. Old people, especially. They start out, they have to take something, and then after a while they can’t not. Mona was good at finding out who. She loved that whole finding-out process. She loved spying and finding out and selling. She was an evil woman.

  “And, I’ve told you this, she blackmailed. Her drug customers, that’s who she preyed on. She didn’t blackmail me, because I never did anything she could use . . . She preyed on other people. On my friends. My good friends.” Mrs. Dexter stops here and screws up her face. “I hate talking about it.

  “I was scared to death in the hospital,” she adds after a minute. “She had drugs, and she had needles. I didn’t know what she would do.” She hoists herself upright, “I’m getting you a cuppa, child.”

  So I’ve gotten to be child now, I think. So much for my plan of standing Mrs. Dexter against a wall and being firm with her.

  I feel an upwelling of something totally unexpected. Hope. Liberation. If Mona is the guilty party, then this whole train of events has really nothing to do with my father, nothing to do with me. We’re just bystanders, viewers of the drama. All that stuff about the numbers the sheriff found is accidental. Peripheral. I get a wonderful feeling of release for about a third of a minute, and then common sense floods back in. There’s a hole in this theory; it smells funny.

  “But you see what I think,” Mrs. D. is talking over her shoulder, bumping her way into her kitchen, “I’m afraid . . . I think one of my friends killed her.” A pot clashes against the sink board.

  This idea has just crossed my mind, and I’ve rejected it because I don’t want it to be true. I like it a lot better than the theory that puts me and my father in the center of things, but I still don’t like it. “That doesn’t work,” I say, hopefully.

  “Oh, yes, it works,” and she makes kitchen noises and offers a list of reasons: There is motive, she says, and opportunity, and how cheap life seems to most people in the Manor, who are old anyway. She adds, “It’s easier to say all this with my back to you.” Bump from the refrigerator door.

  That unexpectedly gets to me and makes me sad. That she needs to say it with her back to me.

  “Listen,” I tell her when she returns with a tray balanced on the front of the walker, “I don’t believe it about the accidents. Your throat? Why is that part of Mona’s drug dealing; it doesn’t make sense.”

  Mrs. Dexter and I argue, or discuss, for half an hour. At first, she really wants Mona to be responsible for the dirty tricks. “She was mean. She would have done it just for meanness. And about my throat—she knew I was investigating. That glass in the oyster was a warning. I was scared to death the whole time I was in the hospital. I kept whispering at her, ‘I won’t talk. I promise I won’t talk.’”

  It’s funny how, in a crisis, you will suddenly remember something that you knew all along was important and that you ought to have thought of earlier. “Mrs. D.,” I say, “Mona wasn’t here when you ate your oyster. She was in Provo, Utah, visiting her sister.”

  She at first doesn’t want to believe me and claims that Mona lied saying she was out of town, and when I tell her I’ll check it with the doctor, she says that wouldn’t mean anything. She really likes this Mona theory. And so would I, if only I could.

  “There’s something else,” I say finally. “There’s a reason why this is more complicated than just Mona. There was another . . . murder.”

  I haven’t really spoken to anybody seriously about Daddy’s woman-in-the-net. The old ladies know about the pastel he did in Ms. Chaundy’s class, of course; they’ve seen it and admired it, but they didn’t take it as evidence of anything real. It was just a picture, an imaginary exercise, the way Ms. Chaundy said. And now I start telling Mrs. Dexter that I take his drawing seriously. My poor father saw something. And ever since he saw it, the world has been getting worse for him and for me. And I’m scared. I need to share. “It was a murder,” I say again. “Another murder. Or, rather, the first one.”

  Mrs. Dexter doesn’t want to believe this, but at the same time she’s very interested. She keeps telling me that I am being ridiculous, as usual, and then, in the next minute asking me why I think so. I must have evidence, she says, what evidence do I have. What does my father remember? “Well, Carla, if he’s that vague, it doesn’t amount to anything, does it?” At first, she’s almost completely resistant. She thumps the walker on the floor. She tells me all the sensible things about how my father misses his Egyptian past and wants to recapture it with this fantasy, and “everybody does this sort of thing about wanting the past back,” and I agree that yes, that’s just what I was thinking, but now he’s repeated the story again and again, always just the same, always with the same feeling that it matters. It matters terribly. And that it’s real. He repeats it over and over . . . “And,” I say, “when he drew the picture. The picture was so clear. The picture was what convinced me.”

  “Oh,” she says. “The picture. Yes, quite frightening.”

  “And he acts guilty about it,” I add.

  For some reason this silences her. She stares at me, no longer looking like the Red Queen. “Poor Carla.”

  So now Mrs. Dexter is sorry for me. And how do I feel about that? I have to admit to myself, I hate being felt sorry for.

  “Well, where are we?” I ask after a brief silence.

  We aren’t much of anywhere.

  There’s still a possibility that Mona did the tricks, or most of the tricks except for Mrs. Dexter’s throat. Or something. Mrs. Dexter still likes this theory. And Mona, I guess, was one of those peculiar cases, a split or divided personality, neurotic and jumbled; you can’t tell what she was really like. Someone certainly disliked or feared her enough to kill her.

  Maybe there’s the possibility that the events are not related, just happening simultaneously. Fat chance, I tell myself. Life’s not like that.

  Finally, there’s the possibility, a probability according to my Santa Cruz logic teacher, who believed firmly in the pattern that underlies all randomness, that everything’s related. A leads to B leads to C. Accidents lead to net-woman lead to Mona. Our spiderweb blossoms again, with my poor befuddled father in the middle, developing his talent for observing murders.

  Mrs. Dexter trundles me to the door. “We’ll find out what it is; I was good at watching when I did it before. You know, Carla, you’ve convinced me that things are worse than I thought, and I feel better for knowing they’re worse. It gives me a handle, and he
lps me understand a little bit better.”

  She stops, staring at something on the door, sucking in a corner of her mouth. “You know, the strangest thing . . .”

  The pause lengthens; I have to help her out, “Yes?”

  “I grew up here.”

  I suppress a sigh. Mrs. Dexter is talking in metaphors, and they aren’t her language. I don’t want to have to ask those helpful leading questions, “What do you mean, ‘grew up’?” or, “How did you grow up?”

  She reads my face. “No, I mean literally, I grew up here. I was a child around here.”

  “In the Manor?”

  “Out there.” She gestures at the scenery beyond the window. “It was all ranches. Big ranches. This house belonged to my uncle. I used to come here to play.”

  There’s a brief silence while I think that I always imagined Mrs. Dexter coming from the East, some place in New England.

  “And now,” she moves the walker to indicate an encompassing gesture, “now I live here. A weird environment. Where all these unmanageable things are happening. I hate unmanageable things.

  “My uncle that owned this place would have had a fit.”

  “That is interesting,” I agree.

  “It’s strange. I don’t like things to be strange.”

  “No.”

  “It upsets me. I don’t like to be upset.”

  I agree, “Yes.”

  She sighs and extends her face, maybe for a kiss, maybe not. “You should get out of here for a while. Go someplace and have a fling. Learn the karaoke.”

  She’s confused about the current entertainments, but the idea’s okay. I debate whether to kiss her and finally do. Feels good, funny little papery cheek with an overlay of weird-smelling powder. Coty’s Emeraude, I think it’s called, or some name like that.

  Some day I’ll get her to talk about her childhood in Del Oro County, but right now I have to get back to my number-one troubled client, my father.

  Chapter 11

  I have a spiel of meaningful questions to ask my father, a pileup of meaningful inquiries about the woman in the net.

  I arrive at his apartment just as Belle is returning him from the hospital. “Clean bill of health,” she says triumphantly. “No aftereffects from tumbling around in the meadow. He can go out and do it again tonight. Quite a guy, right?” She hits him, an affectionate thump on the shoulder.

  He looks okay, I decide, perky and just-hatched. I kiss him on the cheek. “So they examined you.”

  He watches me solemnly, “There are dangers so close to the sunset. Did you know that?”

  I think, oh, phooey; sunset, dangers, not a good framework for being questioned; we’d better slow the process here. So I tell him, “Coffee,” in my most phony, kindergarten voice, and sit him down with a cup and his special spoon from Istanbul and the brown sugar cubes he always asks for, and I even produce a peppermint-flavored Jelly Belly that I’ve been saving for a special occasion, and snuggle it next to his coffee cup. “Now,” I say, “let’s sit back and take things easy.”

  So we do. He drinks coffee, and we talk about the Antiques Roadshow television program; he’s pleased with the estimate of seven thousand pounds for a Regency chair. “Because it had nice dark green upholstery,” he tells me seriously, “that shade of dark green is very good luck.”

  “Now,” I ask, after he has dispatched the Jelly Belly, “how are you feeling?”

  “I’m feeling good. Why do you ask?”

  “It wasn’t too bad at the hospital?”

  “It was okay.” He sounds slightly irritated. “Perfectly okay. That doctor is an interesting man.”

  I fluff up his hair, which is flyaway textured, like an angora sweater. “You’re tougher than you look.”

  “Of course I am,” he says complacently.

  I take this as a go-ahead sign and climb up after his pastel picture of the beach, which I’ve stored flat behind some archaeology books. First I stand it up against a chair back and admire it. Really, it’s a fine picture—beach, light-washed with setting evening sun, three architectural rocks in the background, figure angled on the beach, tied with gold bindings. Eye of Horus down there in the corner. “Sweetie, let’s talk about this picture.”

  “I can do better,” he announces solemnly, examining as if he’s passing judgment on someone else’s work of art. “I have done better. In Egypt everyone complimented me on my drawing. Even your mother, and she was discriminating.”

  Great, I think, he remembers Constancia; he’s tracking. That little bit earlier about the sunset didn’t amount to anything.

  “Daddy,” I say, “for this picture, where is the viewer?”

  I almost expect him to go art-historian on me and tell me I’m the viewer and I’m here in his bedroom, but he doesn’t do that; he points to the picture’s foreground, “There’s a culvert somewhere.”

  I get one of those cold chills of recognition that my philosophy teacher at Santa Cruz liked; she called it a frisson. “And you were in the culvert?” I ask, careful to keep the frisson out of my voice, because any sign of excitement may shut him down.

  “I didn’t tell anybody,” he says. “I thought I better not.”

  I announce neutrally that caution is always good, and he says, “I like to trust people. I think I can trust you.”

  “Of course you can.” I hear myself being especially phony.

  But my answer satisfies Daddy who gives me a sweet inclusive smile. “Not telling is important. But when the spirit is weighed, it’s asked if it has committed sins of omission or commission. The inability to trust is a sin of commission.

  “That is a bad kind of sin,” he adds solemnly.

  I pick up the cue. Maybe repetition is called for. “Well, you can trust me.”

  “She spoke to me, you know. She said I should be careful.”

  I warn myself to go very slow here. No frisson is allowed. Anyway, he’s probably talking about one of the aides. Or Mrs. Dexter. Or me. “Who spoke to you, Daddy?”

  He looks at me sideways, as if I’ve said something I shouldn’t. He says, “Oh, no.”

  “You said the woman spoke to you?”

  “Well, my dear, there are different points of view . . .”

  “But somebody spoke. You just told me.” I’m handling this badly.

  He’s feeling threatened; his shoulders go up, his chin goes down. He turns his back slightly. “Well, I believe there was something. A shadow. I have trouble. Trouble remembering, you know.

  “Carly,” he adds, “it’s quite complicated.”

  “That’s all right.”

  But it isn’t all right. He starts to fidget, the kind of moving around that involves swinging a foot and shifting shoulders. He won’t look at me. “The trouble is with the sunset.”

  He makes the kind of arm-motions you make when you recite, “‘He saw it in the place in which it was. Do not stay on the road until evening, thinking you are sure of the houses.’

  “Demotic Literature, British Museum,” he identifies.

  I want to shake him. We’re completely off the track now, quoting Demotic literature.

  I turn back to the picture, straightening it where it teeters against the scalloped mahogany chair back, “Now, Daddy, listen. Please. Where in this landscape were you?” I put a finger on the margin. “Here? Or here?”

  “‘Should you hide and then let yourself be found,’” he intones, his expression flat-faced. “‘Should you leave and then return to the place where it was.’”

  I think, oh, hell.

  And suddenly he bolts up and stands with his back to me, shoulders straight, head tilted. He looks as if he’s waiting to recite to the windowpane.

  “Father,” I try.

  No answer. Little stubborn figure with its back turned, shoulders in that position that looks as if they have a wire hanger inside them.

  I want to put my head in my hands, and then I want to swear interestingly and colorfully, and after that, if you can have t
hree such impulses so fast and connected, I want to tell an absent Mrs. Dexter, Okay, perhaps you were right: he just wants to recall his glory days of Egyptian archaeology. Of course he needs to do that, he’s an old man who knows he’s on his way out, his light is dimming. He’s failing, my own father is failing. Maybe it’s the word failing, which I’ve almost said aloud, but at this point I stop this mental keening and drama and ask myself, “Carla, have you been listening at all? Did you notice anything about these quotes? Do they make any kind of sense?”

  Well, they don’t make much sense.

  But there’s something there.

  Something about location, and words like, “in the place where it was,” and going back to the same place.

  I tell myself I’m an idiot.

  Those nights near the Valley of the Kings, waiting for the Coffin Lid Tomb to be reopened, we sat around a little fire in our Luxor trailer camp. It was cold after sunset, at Qena camp, we sat around the fire, cooking our imported American foods, hot dogs and marshmallows, and reciting poetry and playing a game. The game was to invent a situation to go with the Egyptian poems we’d been saying to each other. Daddy and Robbie were very good at this, but I was okay, too. I knew some poetry then. I fish around now in my memory.

  “‘Great man free of baseness,’” I start intoning; this bit is Demotic also, but later period, translated into English by some German lady. “‘Do justice, oh, praised one. When I speak may you hear.’”

  My father says, “Ah.” Then he turns away from the window and repeats, “Ah,” looking more or less at me, which is an improvement.

  “‘Rudder of Heaven beam of earth,’” I continue. At first you feel foolish sounding like this; it seems grandiloquent. And then the rhythms get you, and you decide everyone should speak that way all the time. “‘Guider to port of all who founder. Learn the Constitution of the Sky.’”

  Not a bad motto, learn. My father seems to think so, too. He half-smiles, one of those salutes with the eyes. He sits down on the window seat and says, “‘He is sad at the sorrow of your ka.’”