The Havana Room

by Colin Harrison

  All this transpired in the ten days after I started work, long zombified hours during which time I was simultaneously aghast and relieved that the world remained unknowing of what was probably four murders in the private room of a Manhattan steakhouse one night the previous month, plus a possibly related death the next day, somewhere on the road to Philadelphia. Where were the bodies of Poppy, Gabriel, Denny, Lamont? Where was Jay Rainey? Then, one morning, while I was shaving, looking in the mirror, my phone rang. I'd given my new, unlisted number to the people at the office but to no one else.

  "William Wyeth?"

  "Speaking."

  It was a detective in Brooklyn, a man named McComber.

  "You know a man called Jay Rainey?"

  "Yes," I said, knowing I couldn't lie about this, what with witnesses, phone records, and my name on Rainey's documents. "I served as his lawyer for a recent real estate transaction."

  "When was that?"

  "About three weeks ago."

  "When was the last time you saw Mr. Rainey?"

  "It's been a little while, two weeks, I'd say."

  "Mr. Rainey is deceased."

  Was I surprised? I don't know. "What happened?"

  His body had been found in the waters off Coney Island, McComber said, badly decomposed. Some kids on jet skis in wet suits found him floating, a swollen figure in sodden pants and shirt, and this being the world that it is, one of the kids had a waterproof cell phone and called the police. Jay's wallet was in the breast pocket of his coat, and my cell phone number was in it.

  "But you called my new apartment line," I said.

  "Yes."

  "Oh."

  "We like to know where people are," noted McComber. "Can you identify any immediate family members for us?" he went on.

  "His father died a year or two ago, and he hasn't spoken to or seen his mother in more than a decade. I'm pretty sure there were no siblings."

  "Was he married?"

  "No."

  "Children?"

  "No," I said without hesitation.

  "A girlfriend?"

  "He didn't really discuss that part of his life with me."

  "I see." The detective paused. "Well, we have a problem."

  "Yes?"

  "We need someone to identify and claim the body. We had to go ahead and do the autopsy, but we need to release the body."

  "I don't know of any family members."

  "Could you identify and claim?"

  "Uh, I guess. I mean, I've never done it—"

  "We need to release the body."

  "Where do I go?"

  He gave me the directions. I said I had some office business but could be there in three hours.

  "Can I give you some advice?" asked the detective.

  "Yes," I said, anxious that he meant some legal precaution.

  "Don't eat lunch."

  "Oh."

  "I mean it."

  "Okay. Thanks."

  * * *

  On the way to the medical examiner's office in Brooklyn I made a side stop at Jay's apartment, keeping my gloves on. This would be my last chance, I suspected, and I would take it. Inside I closed the door softly and turned on the light. Everything was as before. I had a plastic bag with me and removed sixteen unsent letters from Jay to Sally Cowles, including a few more I found in the oxygen chamber. But I knew there was more I should find. I took my time, I opened drawers, and the trunks under the bed. I found thirty-six different pieces of paper with references to his daughter. Plus some photos. Plus some more school schedules. Plus the handout from the recital. Plus his camera, which had exposed film in it that I removed. I also found a spare set of keys, both to Jay's truck and to the Reade Street property. The truck was gone now into bureaucratic infinity, eventually to be sold at auction. I slipped the Reade Street keys off their chain, checked around the apartment once more, set the door to lock, and pulled it shut behind me. Then I locked it from the outside as well. The whole operation took an extra twenty-five minutes. On the subway I stepped off at the Atlantic Avenue station, found a trash can that needed emptying, dropped everything but Jay's letters to Sally Cowles into it, then boarded the next train. I didn't want to have the letters on me in the presence of a police officer, so I stopped in a post office, bought an envelope, and mailed them to myself at home.

  I met McComber in the hallway of the medical examiner's office. He was a small, tidy man. I shook his hand.

  "You were his lawyer?"

  "For one real estate transaction."

  "How'd you meet?"

  "We met and got to talking," I said, wanting to keep Allison out of it, if only for my sake. "I needed the work, so I said yes."

  "Why'd he buy the building?"

  I said it was a standard commercial investment but that the question was still a good one.

  "Why is it a good question?" the detective responded.

  "Because he was pretty sick."

  "He was?"

  "He had terrible breathing problems. Very bad."

  McComber sucked at his cheeks, held my gaze. Of course, he had seen the autopsy report, which, I supposed, revealed the damaged lung tissue. "What do you mean?"

  "He grew up on a potato farm on the North Fork of Long Island and was nearly killed in a herbicide accident."

  "When was this?"

  "I'm guessing fifteen years ago. It was degenerative. It caused a slow fibrosis in his lungs."

  "How do you know all this?"

  "He told me, but also I could see it. He had real difficulty sometimes."

  "You guys got to know each other pretty well, I see."

  "He told me a few things."

  "But how well did you get to know each other, is what I'm really asking," pressed McComber.

  "Not like that," I said.

  "You're not married."

  "Divorced."

  "Children?"

  "I have a son, yeah."

  This relaxed him. "All right, so go on."

  "He just had trouble breathing."

  "You know where he lived?"

  All the oxygen equipment, the black-market steroids and inhalers and bottles of pills were there, to be found by the police. "Here it is," I said, giving him the address. Seem to be helpful, I told myself, be the good citizen. "Can I also give you my work number in case anything turns up?"

  "Yeah, yeah."

  "Anything else?" I asked.

  "Did he go to a doctor?"

  "I don't think so, never mentioned it."

  "He was sick but didn't go to the doctor?"

  I said nothing, appearing reticent.

  "Come on," McComber prompted. "We got a dead guy here, we're trying to figure it out."

  "Okay," I said. "I got the impression Jay sort of experimented with his medications. He said his condition was only getting worse. He used to measure his lung capacity a lot. He was very worried about it. He always had pills and medicines for his lungs with him. Basically I think he treated himself."

  The detective nodded, and I sensed a tick of judgment and dismissal. Lonely guy, sick, played with his drugs, knew he was going to die.

  Ten minutes later an assistant medical examiner pulled out the long refrigerated drawer three feet, and there was Jay Rainey, his head and wide chest, his skin a pearled gray, looking shrunken into the drawer, a long suture-tightened incision running from the bottom of his neck to his belly button. The medical examiner had cut him open, gutted him. It was goddamn sickening. I caught the bile in my throat, took a moment to swallow. As I slid closer I could see that his hair lay salt-thickened by the ocean, more salt dried in starry spots across his cheeks. His eyes were open but the eyes themselves were gone and I found myself remembering the heroic Roman sculptures in which the marble eyes are darkly hollowed, creating the strange sense of visionary blindness. Jay seemed similarly afflicted. You could look at him but he didn't see you. The attendant had stuffed some cotton wadding in his nostrils. Jay's mouth had fallen open, as if getting one last great brea
th, and I noticed that he was missing a number of back teeth, the effect, I supposed, of not having money for proper dentistry during all his lean years. His face was stubbled and he looked both younger and ancient.

  "That him?"

  I nodded. "Yes."

  "You're sure."

  "Positive."

  "You'll sign the form?"

  "Yes."

  "No doubt?"

  "None."

  "You happen to know if he had a dentist?"

  "I think he did, yes. But I'm positive this is Jay."

  "Occasionally people make mistakes."

  Yes, of course that was true. "Pull him all the way out," I said.

  "Why?"

  "Look at his calves."

  "Why? He have a tattoo?"

  "No."

  "What?"

  "Immensely muscled. Enormous calves."

  The attendant pulled the drawer all the way out. It rolled smoothly, though I could see that the weight of Jay Rainey made the long drawer tilt ever so slightly. He was naked. Laid out, he looked larger, his true size. His chest hair was thick and tapered into an arrow toward his groin. His penis fell to one side. Jay Rainey's thick calves bulged inward toward each other from the pressure of the drawer bottom. The attendant nodded. Then he pulled out a tape measure. "Hmm."

  "Yes, right?"

  "Twenty-one inches. You usually maybe see that on someone who is grotesquely obese, but not someone with low body fat."

  "Can I have a minute more?" I asked. "He was a friend of mine."

  "That's fine. Just a minute."

  Then I moved up to Jay Rainey's head and touched his ear, the left one, the one that matched Sally Cowles's. The distinct horn of cartilage was there, as before, except cold this time. Somehow it made me think of my son, how much I missed him, how I was still bound to him.

  I let the palm of my hand rest on Jay's forehead for a moment, but of course that was for me, not for him.

  "Okay," came the attendant's voice.

  I stepped away from the drawer. The attendant handed me a clipboard. It was a declaration of identification. Under penalty of perjury, I swore that the human remains shown to me by the… yes. I signed.

  "That's it," the attendant said. "You're free to go, thanks."

  "No, he's not," came the detective's voice.

  "No?"

  "Don't you want somebody to claim the remains?" the detective asked the attendant.

  "Sooner the better."

  "You," McComber said. "You're going to claim the remains here. I got no family. But I got a lawyer."

  "Wait, wait—"

  "Nothing to it." McComber handed me a business card of a funeral home. "These guys are three blocks away, they'll take the body and keep it or embalm it or whatever. We need to clear the space. This is Brooklyn. People keep dying around here."

  "All right," I said. "Fine."

  "You'll call today?"

  "Sure."

  "Good. Then I can release the effects now."

  He nodded at the attendant, who went to a separate drawer. He pulled out a cardboard box. "Here."

  I looked inside. Clothes.

  "Plus this," said the detective, and handed me a clear Ziploc bag. "Wallet and watch, book of soggy matches."

  I looked at the clear bag. The matchbook was from the steakhouse, the watch ruined by seawater. Then the clothes. "These things kind of smell," I said.

  "Yes, they do. That's why we like to get rid of them."

  I remembered the last piece of sushi on the plate in front of Jay Rainey. "By the way, what did he actually die of?"

  The detective handed me his clipboard, flipped over two pages, and stuck a finger at a long paragraph:

  Decedent's lungs and stomach were filled with seawater but autopsy and further sectioning revealed severe and progressed disease of the lungs and airways. Diffuse, symmetrical alveolar disease noted. Indications of pulmonary collapse and consolidation. Probable bronchiectasis, although these tissue slides were not prepared. Obliterative or constrictive bronchiolitis noted, with characteristic plugs of organizing fibrous tissue accompanying similar changes in the alveoli. No indication of bronchial carcinoma. Reduced lung distensibility noted by digital examination. Airway was scarred, indicating multiple instances of mechanical ventilation. Indications of chronic arterial hypoxemia. Secondary breathing muscles in chest showed unusual compensatory development. Pedal discoloration was also noted, as is typical. Cause of death: asphyxiation secondary to chronic, degenerative airway disorder with diffuse pulmonary alveolitis or fibrosis of unknown etiology.

  I handed back the clipboard.

  "That means he couldn't breathe," said the detective.

  I nodded.

  "You'll call the funeral home?" he asked.

  "Yes."

  "Free to go then."

  * * *

  Free to go, perhaps, but not free. Not at all. I carried the box to the pocket park a block away and found a bench. I put the bag with the wallet and watch and matchbook in my coat, then examined the clothes in the sunlight. They looked familiar, and included the same tie Jay had been wearing the night I'd last seen him in the Havana Room. They had been thrown in a dryer and were stiff yet unwashed. Three homeless men watched me from across the park. First the shoes, size 12, larger than mine. These I set on the bench. Then the socks. I shot my hand into each one. Empty. I rolled them up as my mother had taught me when I was a boy and put them into one of the shoes. Next came the pants. They'd been scissored off of him and were useless. I slipped my fingers into every pocket. Nothing. These I set on the other side of me. Then the underwear. These had also been cut off. I noted the waist size, 38. Un-stained, almost new. Then the shirt, also cut off. I checked the size. A 48 long, Brooks Brothers. Nothing in the breast pocket. I stood up and dropped the slit underwear, pants, and shirt into the municipal garbage can and returned to my bench.

  The tie I kept. It was silk and quite nice and could be cleaned. I tucked it into my coat. Next came the jacket. It was discolored by salt and other liquids but intact. I slipped two fingers into the front breast pocket. The HAVANA ROOM napkin that Allison had handed him was still there, still folded into a tight square. I slipped it into my pocket. Next I checked the inside breast pocket and the side pockets. Nothing. I folded the jacket and set it by the shoes. Last was the heavy overcoat, a beauty. The label read Brentridge of London. I checked the side pockets. Nothing. I checked the inside breast pocket. Nothing.

  "Hey," I called to the homeless guys. Then I pointed at the pile of clothes. "You want these?"

  One of the men stood up, shambled over, poked disinterestedly at the pile, then picked up the whole bundle and shuffled away.

  Now I drew the HAVANA ROOM napkin from my pocket, daring myself to unfold it. The marks on it, made in red lipstick, had nearly been bleached by the cold Atlantic. Nonetheless, unlike before, I could examine what had been drawn there. It was a small map, with the three X's and the box marked KROWLA.

  * * *

  Yes, a simple map. Of a small section of Jay Rainey's family farm, now owned by Marceno and his Chilean wine company. The scale was a little off, but the three X's probably corresponded to the three ancient trees next to the driveway with the rectangle indicating that something might be found directly off from the third tree: KROWLA, in Allison's block letters.

  * * *

  I called Marceno that afternoon.

  "This is William Wy-eth?"

  "It's me. I have something for you," I said. "What you wanted."

  "You are perhaps hoping to resolve the lawsuit, Mr. Wy-eth?"

  "Why didn't you come to the restaurant that day?" I asked. "After I called you?"

  "Simple."

  "Simple?"

  "I called Martha Hallock to see if you were telling the truth, that Poppy was her nephew."