Love Nest

by Andrew Coburn

  “I’m not surprised. Is it personal or professional?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “If it’s a question of guilt, I charge a fee. I’m expensive.”

  “What time?”

  “It’ll have to be late,” Dr. Stickney said. “Make it five o’clock.”

  It was his day off, but he went into work anyway. Chief Chute spotted him, called him into his office, and said, “I’ve been talking to the district attorney. He’s satisfied the Haines case can be unofficially closed. The boy’s suicide is tantamount to a confession.”

  “I wish there’d been a note. There should’ve been.” He felt a palpitation and ignored it. “Then everything would be clear.”

  The chief regarded him with avuncular concern. “I know what’s going through your head, but you can’t let it get you. You had a job to do.”

  “Did I push him into that closet? That’s the question.”

  “He had too much on his conscience for someone his age, more than any kid could handle. Just looking at him was probably a push. Not your fault, Sonny.”

  “I went there to bring him in, but I couldn’t even cut him down. His mother’s arms were locked around him, she was holding him up. Bauer and I couldn’t get past her. I don’t think she even knew we were there. It was like the three of us were doing this dance around him, stepping on each other’s feet and not feeling a thing. It was like a dream.”

  “Sonny, this isn’t doing you any good.”

  “I knew he was dead. The eyes had hemorrhaged. Do you know who finally cut him down, Chief? She did. Calm as anything, she asked for the knife. I was afraid at first to give it to her, thought she might use it on me. Even Bauer looked scared. With one arm she held the kid up, all that dead weight, and with her other hand worked the knife. Then she told us to get out.”

  “Let me get you a cup of coffee.”

  He shook his head. “Amazing woman.”

  “Sonny.”

  “Yes?”

  “Reporters come around, you let me talk to them, especially the guy from the Herald.“

  He nodded.

  “The district attorney will quietly let it out, off the record, that we had the goods on the boy. I mean, we don’t want an unsolved homicide hanging over the town, or at least people thinking it’s unsolved. People who know anything at all about the case are already putting two and two together.” There was a sigh. “I’m glad it’s over. I’m more glad for you than for me.” The sigh was repeated. “No more personal involvements. I think that’s got to be a rule from now on. Sound sensible to you, Sonny?”

  He nodded while looking at items on the chief’s desk, as if each possessed a significance other than its obvious one.

  “One other thing, Sonny. Go home.”

  He consulted his watch. It was nearly eleven. He drove, without haste, to Dr. Stickney’s office. The woman in the outsize spectacles gazed at him from an aloof and cold persona. In her perfect hair was a tortoiseshell comb that seemed as authoritative as the badge clipped to his wallet or the weapon hidden on his hip. “I have you down for five.” He picked up a magazine. “The doctor has a client.”

  “I’ll wait.”

  “Not there,” she said when he started to seat himself. She escorted him into a small private room of soothing colors, the pastel artwork on the walls meant to please children. On a table was a sketch pad and crayons.

  “Should I draw something?”

  “Suit yourself.”

  He braced himself in a chair like a child who knew exactly how long he must sit. It was twenty minutes but seemed a solid hour. Dr. Stickney appeared quietly and closed the door behind him. When Dawson started to rise, he stayed him with a gesture. “We’ll talk here.” He drew a chair, and they faced each other across the small table. Stickney’s small teeth glittered inside his neat beard. “What haunts you the most, Sergeant? Melody’s death or the boy’s?”

  Dawson’s hand trembled. “He didn’t leave a note.”

  “That disturbs you?”

  “You usually don’t go out that way, not without saying anything.”

  “Suicide is a message in itself.”

  “That’s what I wanted to hear you say. Do you still think he didn’t kill her, Doctor?”

  “Sorry, I haven’t changed my mind.”

  “Then why’d he hang himself?”

  “A few explanations are possible.” Stickney picked up a blue crayon and drew a careful circle on the pad. “One is he was full of fears, some he doubtless came out of the womb with. A warm place the womb. We all want to return to it. You, I, even the chairmen of our biggest corporations. Why not him?”

  “That’s glib.”

  Stickney endowed the circle with scribbled hair, female eyes, and a mouth. “Or maybe he simply wanted to join her, a romantic notion he was quite capable of following through on.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  “I’m merely tossing things out for you.”

  Dawson shivered, more from frustration than from anything else. “I think you’re blowing smoke up my ass.”

  “Vulgar talk, Sergeant. For some reason I wouldn’t have expected it from you.” His smile was slight, with the barest hint of sympathy. “But at the moment your mind must be a horror show. You feel responsible. So you want reassurance. More than that, you want absolution.”

  “The truth is all I want.”

  “All I have are opinions, and I’ve given them to you, gratis.”

  Dawson stared at the pad. For a number of seconds the drawing absorbed him. Then he lifted his chin, his face a crag. “Their relationship wasn’t sexual, but the kid’s jealousy was.”

  “She told you that?”

  “Yes.”

  “She told you the truth. He was impotent — except with himself. Only in his imagination was he her lover.”

  “But his jealousy was real.”

  “Yes.” Stickney raised a hang. He had dainty fingers and traced them over his beard. “The jealousy went deep.”

  “It could be hateful.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Uncontrollable.”

  “Possibly, given the right circumstances.”

  “Then why are you fighting me over his guilt?”

  “If you’re satisfied, Sergeant, that’s all that matters.”

  “I don’t like doubts.”

  “I do.” Stickney leaned back. “You see, I deal in them every day.”

  After a soft knock and a silent turn of the knob, the door sprang open, and the woman in the outsize spectacles peered in. “You have a client waiting, Doctor.”

  “Yes, thank you. The sergeant has finished his business.”

  Stickney left the room, and the woman stepped deeper into it. Dawson remained seated, an odd look in his eye, voices eddying inside his head. The woman approached the table and stared at the pad.

  “That’s very good, Sergeant.”

  • • •

  After Ed Fellows finished talking with Paige Gately on the telephone, Fran Lovell came into his office with a blue file folder, her handwritten notes attached to it, her name imprinted on the notepaper. “Here’s the appraisal and the financial statement on the Silver Bell.”

  “Let’s go over it together,” Fellows said.

  She wound her way to his side of the mahogany desk, detached her notes, opened the folder, laid everything out before him, and then moved back a pace, one hand stuffed in the jacket pocket of her drab skirt suit. The hemline of the skirt was uneven, a thread trailing. Fellows gazed up over his half glasses.

  “You were late getting in this morning.”

  “A little.”

  “You overslept.”

  “Yes,” she said, and he seemed pleased, then not.

  “You don’t wear lipstick anymore.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Not often.” His tone was wistful. “I remember the day you came to work here, a young married woman. Years fly, don’t they, Fran?”

  S
he pointed at the papers, the polish on her fingernail partly chipped off. “Everything should be there, except Mrs. Gately’s credit history. You apparently have it.”

  “Do I? Yes, I’m sure I do, somewhere.” He busied himself with the material she had delivered, scanning figures, peeling thin pages, knitting his brow. Then, deliberately, he shifted his attention to her notes. Though her handwriting was large and bold, quite legible, he said with a squint, “I can’t make out this word.” Her hair drifted forward as she leaned over him. He shortened his voice. “You didn’t take a bath this morning, did you?”

  “The word,” she said, “is chattel.“

  “Don’t move, please. You smell as if you just got out of bed.” His voice was little more than a whisper, all his thoughts inside her suit.

  “Does my tired body interest you again?” Her expression was glum. She drew herself erect. “It was never healthy what we had. It wasn’t even happy.”

  He turned a faint shade of pink through the faded remains of his tropical tan and, hunching his pinstriped shoulders, commenced reading her notes again. In a voice that was all business, he said, “I gather you don’t think much of Mrs. Gately’s proposal.”

  “When has my opinion ever mattered to you?” She backed away, her smile at variance with the hard set of her jaw. “You’re such a clown, Ed. Such a terrible clown.”

  • • •

  The assistant principal, his face equipped with the immutable hornrims, said, “Tragic. Simply tragic. We know each year some of our students will be highway statistics, but this … this, Sergeant, is shocking. We ask ourselves what didn’t we do, what didn’t we see to prevent it. We’re all taking it hard, Mrs. Medwick especially.”

  “It’s Mrs. Medwick I’d like to see.”

  “He wasn’t a popular boy, but at assembly, during the moment of silence, you could hear a pin drop. I’m probably repeating myself, excuse me, but it’s so hard to understand. It’s my first experience with a student suicide. I pray to God it’s not infectious. You know how impressionable and vulnerable adolescents are.”

  Dawson said, “If I could see Mrs. Medwick for a few minutes.”

  “She’s taking it the hardest. She feels she bears some of the responsibility because of the problem she had with him. I’ve told her she’s being silly, but that doesn’t stop the torment, does it?”

  “I’ll make it brief.”

  “She’s not here, Sergeant. She’s taking a couple of days’ sick time. Principal thought it best. I did too.”

  “Thank you.” Dawson started to move away.

  “You have some torment, too.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Your eyes, Sergeant.”

  Mrs. Medwick lived in the Shawsheen section, on a narrow back street of small neat houses built in the early years of the century when the town’s well-being was tied to textiles. Mill workers had lived in them. Now young lawyers, electrical engineers, electronic technicians did — and teachers. Mrs. Medwick’s house was halfway down the street, on the left, white with red trim, bordered by juniper, the bowl of the bird bath removed for the winter.

  “Yes, come in,” she said. She had been looking out the window and had opened the door before he had a chance to use the bell. She led him into the front room, showed him to a chair. “Is it about Walter Bauer?”

  “Yes,” he said, “if you don’t mind.”

  “Will it take long?”

  “No.”

  “Good.” She was dressed in a high-neck blouse and a full skirt, her lips lightly painted, as if she had been undecided about staying out of school. She sat squarely in an opposite chair, her skirt drawn well over her knees. “It was suicide, wasn’t it? I mean, there’s no doubt, is there?”

  “He used the sash of his bathrobe.”

  “Don’t tell me details.”

  “They were in the paper.”

  “I wouldn’t read it.” She pushed the hair from her cheek, a softly shaped face coming into play, troubled around the mouth. She was perhaps thirty-five, no older, with no children and with no husband two weeks out of three. He was a sales rep, with much of his time spent aboard airplanes. “Why did he do it? No, don’t tell me.” She shook her head. “I don’t want to know any of it.”

  Dawson placed his hands on the armrests of the chair and watched her shift her feet and cross them at the ankles. Her gaze wandered.

  “I was always so careful. Women teachers have to be. We’re careful of what we say and do, what we wear, otherwise the boys pick up on you. They read something into everything, never a letup. If you have to write low on the blackboard you’re afraid to stoop. You know they’ll stuff their eyes. Everything’s a sexual snicker, though there was never any of that business from Walter. That’s what’s so strange.” Her voice trailed, then forged back. “I have large breasts, I can’t help that, but I’m not the prettiest teacher there. Why did he single me out to make those calls.”

  Dawson, remaining quiet, inclined his head as if to listen better.

  “Maybe I seemed vulnerable to him. I don’t know. Or maybe I did something I wasn’t even aware of, that he built up in his mind.” There was a telephone in the room. She looked at it as if expecting it to ring. “Sometimes I pity boys, do you know what I mean?”

  Dawson’s head drifted back, the smallest beginning of a headache evident. She shifted her legs again, reversing the cross of her ankles.

  “No questions. You’re just letting me talk.” He nodded, and she smiled weakly. “In some way we seem to be comforting each other. Why did I say that, Sergeant? Is there a reason?”

  He said, “You must have been kind to him.”

  “I may have been. He was shy about speaking in front of the class, so I didn’t call on him often. I don’t know if that was kindness or a mistake. What do you think?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I knew he had no friends, and there were times I wanted to reach out, pat his head, tell him friends aren’t everything, though of course they are at his age.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “What?”

  “Pat his head.”

  “No, of course not. I knew better than that. The only time we ever really talked was after class, after the bell. He’d stay in his seat, wait till we were alone, and ask me unnecessary questions about assignments. I think now he liked having me to himself. He told me he had an older sister. But he didn’t, did he?”

  “In a way he did.”

  The telephone rang. She did not move. It rang three times and then stopped.

  “It’s all right. It’s my husband telling me he’s arrived safely in Cincinnati.” She gave out the same weak smile as before. “My husband and I bumped into him once in the supermarket. He seemed so surprised, upset, seeing me with a man. But he must’ve known I was married. How could he not have? Everybody calls me Mrs. Medwick.”

  “Is that when the calls began?”

  “I don’t remember. Doesn’t matter now, does it?”

  “The calls terrified you.”

  “Of course. I was alone. And the voice was distorted, the language so ugly, so dirty. I thought it was a man pretending to be a child. But of course it was a child pretending to be a man. Perhaps there’s no great difference.” She picked at the sleeve of her blouse, straightening the long cuff. “It was easy for you to catch him, wasn’t it? Just a simple trace.”

  “Very easy. Too easy. That’s why I didn’t think he was dangerous. That was my mistake.”

  “No, Sergeant. The last few days I’ve thought about that a great deal. In my heart I know he wouldn’t have hurt me. He wouldn’t have hurt anybody … except himself.”

  A muscle contracted inside Dawson’s face. He found himself staring at her but not entirely seeing her.

  “That’s only my opinion, but I feel it’s not what you wanted to hear.”

  He hoisted himself from the chair, buttoned his coat, and, aware of a coldness inside him, hiked the collar.

 
; “I haven’t comforted you, have I?” she said.

  “No,” he said and quietly took his leave.

  • • •

  “You’ll freeze your arse,” Paige Gately said from the center of her living room, which had been grandly redecorated a few years ago. Attorney William Rollins did not stir. He was sitting at a window on a low, wide sill that from November into March was never warm, no matter what the room temperature was. She had given him a liqueur, and he took a small sip, letting the flavor linger on his lips.

  “Who’s minding the motel?” he asked.

  “It minds itself. I pick good workers.” Crisp and cool in a dark blazer and white turtleneck, she skinned gold foil from a square of Swiss chocolate. She allowed herself one square a day, which did not disturb her weight. Her metabolism kept her trim. “Sitting there,” she said, “you remind me of Biff.”

  “Are you being unkind?”

  “He had his moments,” she said. Her face no longer went ugly when she thought of her husband. Her feelings for him had long ago calcified and lay hidden like a dog’s buried bone. In her most nostalgic mood he was no more than a faint twinge. “Charming, but an idiot with money.”

  “Yes, he was,” Rollins agreed.

  “Speculated away every cent the old man left him. What’s the answer when strong men produce weak sons? Genetic irony?”

  “People tried to stop him. I was one of them. But Biff wasn’t the sort to listen.”

  “You should have come to me.”

  “You were unapproachable in those days,” he gently reminded her. “Business was beneath you.”

  She let the chocolate melt in her mouth and stopped herself from taking another. Rollins rose from the windowsill with a shiver. “I warned you,” she said sharply and watched him approach slowly with a pale hand wound around the crystal liqueur glass.

  “Why don’t you sell this house?”

  “Never.”

  “What does it symbolize for you?”

  “Everything that’s me,” she said and, staring at him, could not pick out what had reminded her of her husband. They were so obviously dissimilar that she searched strenuously for a likeness. “You’d be more attractive,” she said, “if you cut the hair in your nose. Biff’s barber did his.”

  He colored slightly.