Love Nest

by Andrew Coburn

  “When I was young, people said I broke balls. That I broke Biff’s. Not true. He didn’t have any.”

  Rollins colored more.

  She said, “When they buried Melody we were all standing within fifty yards of his headstone. Do you know, I didn’t even think of him. It didn’t cross my mind he was there.”

  The mention of Melody’s name affected him, as she knew it would. He finished off his liqueur.

  “Poor kid,” she said. “A girl in her line should’ve been hard as nails. She wasn’t.” A pause. “Did Bauer’s son kill her? What’s your guess, William?”

  “I don’t have one.”

  “Now we’ll never know for sure, I suppose.” She eyed his empty glass. “Do you want another?”

  “Too sweet,” he murmured.

  “Do you want something more manly?”

  He shook his head almost imperceptibly.

  “Good boy,” she said. “Shall we get back to business?”

  They stayed standing, facing each other, she with sudden force in her posture and a change in her voice. “Are you with me on this?” she asked, referring to her proposal to buy the Silver Bell. Earlier she had shared with him the secret behind the proposal.

  He said, “I wish you hadn’t confided in me.”

  “You’re my lawyer.”

  “Not on this. I’m theirs.”

  “That’s the point. All I want you to do is push the sale through fast. Expedite the paperwork. Time’s important. If Rita O’Dea still has doubts, remind her the place has never made the money Bauer bragged it would.” She drew him into her eyes, liquid-bright at the moment. “I need you, William. It will be well worth your while.”

  “They’re not the sort you should fool with, Mrs. Gately.”

  “For Christ’s sake, call me Paige.”

  “They’re dangerous.”

  “The danger’s mine, not yours.”

  “But why put yourself at risk?”

  “That’s simple,” she said with steel in her voice. “I don’t ever want to be broke again.”

  • • •

  Alfred Bauer rang the doorbell, and the large baggy face of Ralph Roselli looked out at him through a narrow glass panel. Then Roselli opened the door and let him in, but not all the way. “Rita expecting you?”

  “It’s all right,” Rita O’Dea called from the distance. She was in the airy kitchen, seated at the gleaming wooden table in the light of a large window overlooking weather-bent birch and towering pine. On the table was an open box of Italian pastries and a trail of crisp powdered crumbs. “Ralph brings me these from the North End. Only place you can get them this good.” She offered Bauer one. He declined. He took a seat at the opposite side of the table, near where Roselli had been sitting.

  Roselli stayed on his feet. “Sorry about your son.”

  Bauer nodded.

  Rita O’Dea said, “How’s Harriet doing?”

  He shook his head, and for a while nobody said anything, Rita O’Dea a large humid presence under her caftan, eyes brown enough to seem black. Her abundant hair covered her shoulders as it had when she was a young woman and Bauer was worming his way into her and her brother’s good graces.

  “Somebody should ask how I’m doing,” she said. “The kid used to make the Christmas cards he sent me, I still got them all. You want, I’ll show them to you.”

  Bauer, as if a slug were dragging itself across his heart, said, “I want the cop.”

  She bit into a pastry and got a lot of it on her mouth. “You don’t do cops.”

  “Wally’s gone. Somebody has to pay.”

  “Somebody is,” she said. “You.” She wiped her lips with the back of her hand. “And Harriet.”

  Bauer’s blue eyes shifted slightly. “I thought maybe Ralph — ”

  “I’m retired,” Roselli said in a dull tone.

  “You guys never retire,” Bauer said.

  “I don’t hit anymore.”

  “If Rita asked, you would.”

  “Rita ain’t asking.”

  She regarded Bauer in a manner more sympathetic on the one hand and tougher on the other. “You want to count the people I’ve lost? You got a scorecard? I’ll win. You know what I learned, Alfred? Revenge doesn’t bring them back — except in a way you don’t want. I see my brother’s face every night. You know where I see it? In the casket. All these years I still hear my father’s voice. You know where it’s coming from? The fucking grave.”

  Bauer closed his eyes and let dark seconds pass.

  She said, “I’ve a husband hiding somewhere, don’t know where he is. Feds have given him a new name. What should I do, have Ralph hunt him down, bash his brains in? What will that do for me? Can I be a young bride again? Can I start fresh, hundred pounds lighter than I am?”

  Bauer opened his eyes, and she tore off a hunk of pastry and rammed it into her unlikely small mouth.

  “We making good money, Alfred? We got things going our way?” Explosive questions uttered in a moderate tone. Her black eyes flashed. “You take out the cop, all that could go. I don’t let anybody threaten my livelihood.”

  “Maybe,” he persisted, “there’s a way to take him out that wouldn’t hurt us.” His voice drifted, as if he did not want Roselli to hear. “I promised Harriet.”

  She said, “Who’s the heavy? You or her? I always wondered, didn’t want to ask. Didn’t want to embarrass you.”

  “Please,” he said. “Don’t say no. Think about it.”

  “Get out of here, Alfred. You’re making me morbid. I don’t like to be morbid.”

  Roselli walked him to the door, where, briefly, each man stood stolid. Bauer’s arms were slack, his naked face full of fatigue. “What would you do if it had been your kid, Ralph?”

  Roselli, whose thoughts always seemed sour, said. “I don’t have a kid.” He reached past Bauer and opened the door. “What I wouldn’t do is cross Rita.”

  When Roselli returned to her, she was still at the table, the pastry box closed and shoved far to one side, almost off the edge. She loosened the wide top of her caftan, drooped her shoulders, flopped her mass of hair forward, and shut her eyes. “Do my neck,” she said, and Roselli’s fingers pressed into her flesh, rippled cords, kneaded a muscle. “Go harder,” she said in a tone saved for such moments, as if she were a girl again, family fussing over her, boyfriends afraid to touch her because of who she was. Always she had had to make the first move.

  Roselli said, “Bauer worry you?”

  “It’s not him that worries me. It’s her.” She leaned lower over the table, letting her head loll on what looked like the moist neck of a seal. Roselli rotated his thumbs. She said, “Alfred’s always sucked up to me, Harriet never has.”

  “Years ago, asking you to be the godmother, that was sucking up.”

  “That was smart. Political. Young as she was, she knew Alfred was nothing without my brother. And nobody was closer to Tony than me.” She worked the caftan away from the round slope of her shoulders, and Roselli did more of her, using the heel of his hand, pressuring color into the skin. “Yes,” she said, eyes still shut, “Jesus, yes.”

  Roselli, the front of his trousers swollen, said, “No question now, I guess, the kid did the girl.” The back of her bra was embedded into her flesh. He undid the hooks, and the straps flew up like two whips. His hands slid around her, barging into substantial breasts. She lifted her head, eyes fluttering open.

  “That’s not what I want, Ralph. If I wanted it, I’d tell you.”

  His silence was his apology. He brought the ends together and refastened the hooks with surprising swiftness for fingers so thick. She sat erect, swished her hair back, and made herself decent, then looked up.

  “It could’ve been Harriet.”

  Roselli said, “Or Bauer himself.”

  “Don’t think that hasn’t crossed my mind.” Elbows winged out, she flattened her hands on the table and wrenched herself up. “You didn’t know her all that well, did you?” />
  “Who?”

  “The girl. Melody. She did my back better than you.”

  • • •

  “Something should have bothered me right away, Billy, I don’t know why it didn’t. Maybe I was too sure of myself. There wasn’t a single print in the motel room. You dusted everywhere, right?”

  “Sure I did,” Officer Lord said. “Every inch. You saw me.”

  “That means the person who wiped the place down was cool-headed, calculating, meticulous. In full control, Billy, bloodless. Yet the kid, Wally Bauer, tore away in a panic, nearly running old Chick down in the front lot. You see, one doesn’t follow the other. It’s a contradiction.”

  “I don’t know, Sonny,” Officer Lord said, his flat eyes giving out a moist stare over his coffee cup. They were in Lem’s, a window table. Outside was bustling and noisy, the sidewalk thronged with Thanksgiving shoppers. “Maybe you’re cutting too fine an edge. Inside the room nobody could see the kid. He must’ve felt safe. Outside he didn’t. Could be as simple as that. ’Course I always try to make things simple.”

  “I shouldn’t have been so sure. So quick.”

  “Maybe you’re being too hard on yourself. Bet you are, Sonny. You tend to do that.”

  “He was there, I know that. Because he made the phone call later, it’s on tape. His voice, no doubt about it, despite the distortion. He made a lot of calls, Billy, going back some. Last summer he made one, anonymous like all of them. That’s how I met her. She was in that same damn unit. Forty-six.”

  “Don’t tell me too much, Sonny. Probably stuff I shouldn’t know.”

  “What if I had busted her, which is what I should’ve done, would she still be alive? The kid too?”

  “We all make judgments. Even me, every day. Kids raising hell at the bowling alley or McDonald’s doesn’t mean I’m going to pull them in. Guy gets drunk, disturbs the peace, doesn’t mean I got to pinch him. Tell you the truth, Sonny, I never like to lock up anybody. Put a guy in a cell and right away he’s less of a man. I mean, something goes out of him soon as you shut the door on him. Same with a woman, but worse. And worse for me, I got to go hunt up a matron to look after her, to take her to the toilet, stuff like that.”

  Dawson looked out at the traffic, cars backed up at the lights, people scuttling between them. “I wish I’d done better.”

  “Maybe you should try to take your mind off it. That’s what I’d do.” Officer Lord clinked his cup in the saucer. “Been meaning to tell you, I like your jacket. New, huh? Real nice threads. You ought to walk slow past Phillips Academy, let people think you teach there. But don’t open your mouth, they’ll know better.” A slight pause. “See, I made you smile. Goddammit, I knew I could.”

  A radio was playing from somewhere behind the counter, tuned to a memory station, a soft melody, sadly ironic lyrics. Billy Lord cocked an ear.

  “You know who that is singing?” he asked and got a nod. “Forty years at least — nobody knows it, not even my wife — I’ve been in love with Peggy Lee. She sings, I get chills running up my legs. Every so often, you know, I see her on some special thing on television, and she’s painted and fat, with this big moon face and funny clothes that make her look like a fortune teller, but, Christ, to me she’s still beautiful. I see her with my heart, not my eyes. Listen to her, Sonny, isn’t she good?”

  Dawson finished his coffee, including some grounds, and wondered whether Billy Lord’s words were reverberating meanings he was failing to catch. His headache, though still small, persisted.

  “Something else,” Billy Lord went on. “I’m still kind of in love with Doris Day. I remember thinking, back then, wasn’t possible she could do stuff like you and me. You know, bodily functions. And no way I could imagine that sweet thing ever in heat. Peggy, I sure could — but not Doris.”

  Dawson scraped his chair back. “Excuse me, Billy.”

  “Sure I’ll excuse you. I’m always excusing somebody, so why the hell shouldn’t I excuse you? Where you going?”

  Dawson answered without looking back.

  “What’d he say?” Billy Lord asked the waitress who was approaching the table with a pencil stuck in her hair.

  “The cemetery,” she said.

  Walking to his car, Dawson did not realize it was raining until he felt the wet against his face. It was a mist turning into a thin drizzle, and he drove with the wipers working at half speed to Spring Grove Cemetery, where headstones seemed to float up in the gray gloom, as if from trickery of the restless dead, Melody among them. The keeper of the cemetery, moving toward his pickup truck, stopped in his tracks when Dawson gave a tap to the horn.

  “How you doing, Mr. Wholley,” Dawson said from his open window, pulling up close.

  “Fine,” said Mr. Wholley, an amorphous figure in a visored cap and heavy jacket, the face rough-hewn, with a nose wrongly shaped by an old fracture. “I’ve got lots of people underfoot but no sass from any of ’em. Nice quiet bunch, some dead ‘fore I was born. So any talkin’ you might hear, that’s me to myself. What can I do for you, Sonny?”

  “The Haines grave.”

  “Girl that was murdered? What about it?”

  “Anybody been visiting it?”

  “I don’t see everybody comes here.”

  “If you do see somebody, I’d appreciate a call. Maybe you’d note the license plate for me.”

  “I’m not good on numbers. Don’t even know my own.”

  “A description of the person will do.”

  “I’m not good at that either.” The rain had picked up and was soaking into Mr. Wholley’s wool cap. “Whatcha lookin’ for, Sonny? Or shouldn’t I ask?”

  “That’s a question I haven’t entirely asked myself yet, Mr. Wholley. I’m just letting it kind of lie there in my mind. But I’d appreciate your help.”

  “I suppose you want me to keep this to myself.”

  “That would be best.”

  Mr. Wholley dug out a handkerchief from the deep pocket of his jacket and blew his battered nose, a honk that would have called to attention a company of soldiers. His rheumy eyes gazed off into the wet gloom, over the rising stones and ranks of shrubs. “I’ll be lyin’ here myself one of these days. You too, Sonny. Peaceful thought, isn’t it?”

  Dawson slid the gearshift into drive. “You’re getting wet. I won’t keep you.”

  “I’ll tell her you called.”

  Dawson knew what he meant.

  Mr. Wholley explained anyway. “The girl in the ground.”

  • • •

  Harriet Bauer did not answer the door, so Dr. Stickney let himself in and made his way on cat’s feet to the study, where he had been told she would be. He found her sitting in a chair near the fire, her shoes kicked off, one foot flung toward the flames. “Hello,” he said quietly, and she drew the foot back and looked up at him with a dull lack of surprise.

  “I said I didn’t need you.”

  “Your husband thought you might.”

  “He was wrong.”

  She spoke calmly, too calmly, and he suspected a roaring inside her handsome skull, around which she had bound her hair tightly, severely. He said, “If you haven’t slept, I can prescribe something.”

  “I’ve slept a little. I haven’t dreamed of Wally yet. Why not?”

  He kept his coat on, moved closer to the fire, and chafed his hands, quite sure she was not expecting an answer, though he had a couple of logical ones to give her.

  “Did Wally love me? I want to know. I want proof. Tapes. I want to hear his voice saying it.”

  Dr. Stickney stroked his beard. Nothing in the room seemed friendly, not even the fire. She crossed her legs, the paint on her toenails showing through her stockings.

  “Or was I too much for him? Too much mother?”

  “We were all too much for him,” Dr. Stickney said.

  “Did he come out of the womb wrong? Was that it?” Her face was heated, but her voice was cool, as if certain thoughts had to be exorcised with eeri
e detachment. “Or didn’t I wean him right? At sixteen, did he still want tit? Mine? That teacher’s?” Her face stretched. “His age, he should’ve wanted ass. Melody’s. You and I talked about it. I was right, wasn’t I?”

  “We were both right.”

  “Instead she mothered him.”

  “Sistered him,” he corrected.

  “That wasn’t the deal.”

  “Maybe she had no choice.”

  “Then she wasn’t much of a hooker.”

  He stood fixed by the swelling heat of the fire, his arms tight at his sides, and she rose from the chair. Even without shoes, she was taller than he, a heroic blond presence. She hovered close enough for him to feel the breath of her words.

  “Maybe it’s good you came,” she said. As if to confirm his existence, her hand traced over his beard, her fingers played idly with his mouth; the little finger almost went in. “You’re such a neat little fellow. With a head full of other people’s secrets. Do you have any of your own?”

  He brushed her hand away and for the first time looked at her sharply, censoriously. “Why are we pretending?”

  Her face closed.

  He said, “We both know it wasn’t suicide.”

  • • •

  As a rare treat and a way to unwind, Paige Gately made herself a suicidal drink, nearly all gin, and drew a bath that would have been too hot for most people. She added scented soap crystals and oil and disrobed leisurely, exhibiting to wall mirrors a pink bottom that had forfeited nothing to the years. From all angles she was stark geometry, understated, honed, scaled to size, her body never subjected to the throes of surgery or childbearing. Quick glances rendered casual assurance that her essential self remained unconquered. For reassurance, she manipulated a hand mirror and let nothing of her flesh elude her.

  She lowered herself into the tub, the water a burning kiss. With her drink within reach on the ledge and her legs pridefully extended, she glowed and swelled and in time let the gin get to her. One odd expression after another swept over her perspiring face as she thought of the Bauer boy, whom she had always considered beyond rescue, the fates pitted against him, and of Melody, for whom she had felt a disquieting and strangely exalting affinity, as if she could have slipped on the girl’s scant underpants and, despite the age difference, changed places with her. She remembered dropping a caring hand on Melody’s shoulder during a heart-to-heart talk and feeling that, in some measure, she was touching herself.