I had the address from the phone book. And wouldn’t you know it? The mailbox was Myrtle Trimm’s.
My MG tiptoed over gravel, leaves, and cat shit to a dead end, a limestone wall veined with dark brown moss. Just before the wall was a slim break in the hedge. I made a hard left into a clearing.
In the clearing was a cottage. A pink cottage about the size of my bathroom. Left of this cottage was a marginally larger house, stubby and squat, pink with white shutters. The tall and tangled hedges hemmed in the house and cottage on three sides. The property was back-to-back with a three-story apartment building in tangerine orange.
No view. No luxury townhouse. No, I thought, it couldn’t be right. $4,800 a month could’ve had that cottage (rotten eaves and all) and the house (in need of new paint on the roof) and a piece of the apartment building (breathing down the necks of house and cottage like damnation).
But it was right. There was the mailbox. Nowhere to go but forward.
Google fingered eleven Doreen Trimms. Seven were dead, but that didn’t help much. Having knocked politely, I stood on the doorstep long enough to feel stupid. She wore a harassed look when she finally decided I was worth investigating.
Or maybe it was a “hurry-up-no-huddle offense” look. In other words the typical US-American look that says the world is theirs for the gobbling whether the rest of us like it or not. Bermudians who spend time over there don’t invariably adopt the local mannerisms, but it seemed this one had embraced them to the fullest.
I donned a captivating smile, nudged my accent toward Boston, and said, “Good afternoon. Ms. Trimm?”
Her eyes were like a lion’s. Built for seeing in the dark. Eyebrows like a couple of black scythes drew together as she looked at me. Stuck her hand on her hip.
“I’m sorry to intrude on you in this difficult time. Kenji Okada-Caines, Caines Asset Management. Your late mom did business with us.”
This should not have worked.
But the jungle-palm lashes shifted as with a wind-change; deadly eyebrows relaxed. She looked me up and down. She liked what she saw. That’s only reasonable.
I kept the smile on and said, “I tried to call ahead. The line was busy.”
“Off the hook.” She talked American too. Didn’t say good afternoon. And the dash of dare and hint of joke in the tone. A little “well I’ll be hornswoggled” in the way she said my name.
“Kenji Okada-Caines.”
“It’s Doreen, right?”
“Yeah.” Beginnings of a smile, rather thoughtful. This too was predictable, considering what stood before her.
But something about that smile ramped up my deflector shields. Call it a smile-overtone.
“What did you say you wanted?”
Now, with one painful exception (and only on one complicated point), fine women like it when I ask them to do things. Doreen Trimm was one fine woman. She had on a T-shirt that tumbled off her shoulder, and with just a glance I knew her breasts were phenomenal. Her legs in skimpy denim shorts were such that many a man would’ve offered up his life for them. She was almost as tall as I am and a hundred percent muscle, could’ve decked Javon with a single well-placed punch. Skin like coffee, close-cropped raven hair, catastrophic long-fingered hands. Must’ve been at least in her forties, given Myrtle’s age, but she didn’t look it. She could’ve passed for twenty-five.
But that overtone. It faded in and out so I could almost imagine I’d imagined it. Nevertheless, for a flicker of a moment, I thought of Desperate Remedies and the jilted blackmailer I call Aphrodite Former-Conquest: lady of the manor who envies the captivating Cytherea Graye and lusts for her in worshipful, passionate hatred. In the next flicker I was getting the scornful vibe of That Day At The Post Office. I’m told I’m oversensitive to vibes like that, and perhaps it’s true, but still. The whiff of sneer in Doreen’s complicated smile put my hackles up. I went ahead as planned, emanating impenetrable irresistibility, but at the same time galvanized my store of sharp retorts.
I expressed my condolences. Doreen thanked me, dry-eyed, and said she didn’t know her mom had money. I forestalled questioning by saying I wasn’t in charge of Myrtle’s portfolio (which, for all I knew, she never had); however, CAM considered her a VIP client (unlikely), so my parents had insisted that our entire family be at St. John’s that day. I’d received a pressing phone call and had to leave early. That just wasn’t done, I said, sneaking out of a funeral. I was sent to apologize.
“Sent by?” said Doreen.
No whipping out of tissues. No poor Momma or such a lovely sendoff. The complicated smile was no less a smile. And in my next-to-nonexistent hesitation, the woman answered for me.
“Your mother, wasn’t it.”
This was so thoroughly beside the point I found myself just a little bit nonplussed. Doreen chuckled like a lion too. Spoke in a heavy alto that never rose above mezzo amplitude. “Moms are all the same, that’s all. People who make people without thinking it through. But don’t rush off. I’m curious.”
Any mention of Masami without due preparation would set anyone off balance. Doreen couldn’t have known that. Yet she looked back at me as she went into the house, leaving the door open. And I knew this woman, whom bereavement had either driven crazy or just overlooked, wanted to play femme fatale with me. This annoyed me given that flicker of Post Office. And the thought of doing anything at Masami’s bidding, which I hadn’t done for years. That drove me right up to the line of scrimmage. I marched into Myrtle’s house determined to get the better of Doreen. Whatever that meant and however ridiculous it was.
Even at the time, this seemed pathetic. Also marginally exciting. I mean, normally I’m the one being dangerously luscious. But there was more to it than that.
The house itself, for one. Small and close with low ceilings and stale air. Hardly befitting a single lady with $4,800 a month.
“Sit. I’ll make coffee. Ignore the clutter. I’m going through Momma’s stuff.”
Lonely, I thought. And bored. Convenient, I thought, as I watched Doreen’s cataclysmic legs take her to the kitchen. I assessed the seating options while considering whether she mightn’t be a bit cracked in the head. That’s when I saw the cats.
They were everywhere. Curled up in every corner. Lounging on all the furniture. There was a little one on the TV stand, another on the windowsill, a couple underneath the coffee table. When I looked down at my feet, there was a big old orange one peering at me. One more step and I’d have tripped over that bugger.
I was still staring at it when Doreen stuck her head out of the kitchen.
“I don’t know,” she said.
I counted fourteen cats. All dead. Fourteen taxidermied cats.
“She never had cats when I was growing up,” Doreen said.
Not in any manner of distress. Not the ill-managed shock which childhood-me kept thinking I’d grown used to every time I thought, What from the firepits of inferno is this creature that secreted me? Doreen said it like go figure.
Now, my strategy relied on improvisation. Improvisation requires equilibrium. Fourteen corpses threw off my equilibrium. When Doreen came with coffee, I had yet to say another word. That shouldn’t have worked either.
She sat down and sipped. I edged around the orange petrified feline zombie and joined her.
“I’ve heard of Caines Asset Management. Not from Momma. We’re estranged. But you know. In the news. You’re what, the COO?”
I said, “Actually—” and stopped. Thinking whatever brushed my leg was surely undead cat. It turned out to be my pants.
“I’m just imagining, you know, her. Her and VIP-level money.” Doreen waved her hand as though this cobweb-choked room smelling of swamp and stale cat fairly summarized poor Myrtle. “Like I said, I’m curious.”
Not even high-end shades could’ve sifted the mercenary gleam out of her eye.
>
“Must be nice. Having it all handed to you. CFO, then. Right?”
If I hadn’t known better, I’d have thought she was trying to mount a charge with as many inappropriate remarks as possible. But see, I did know better. Or thought I did. I knew this particular inappropriate remark was nothing out of the ordinary. When you’re the spawn of a big-business baroness (even one who landed on this island with naught but a black husband that on her account had to campaign his way out of ostracism), the accusation of the silver spoon tarnishes all your endeavors. Experience and time have taught me to rise above it.
So you’d think, anyway. The truth is if you want me to despise you instantly and forevermore, all you have to do is hit me with that tired jibe, the gist of which is it’s categorically impossible for me to attain anything myself. So yeah, I took the bait. I said, ever-smiling, “I wasn’t handed anything. I’m not an executive, just—” Did I mean to say one of the clan? Sounds nauseating now, as I imagine it did then. But Doreen interrupted.
“IT, VP, CPA, whatever. You know how hard it is for actual black people to get where you are?”
“And where’s that exactly?”
“A position of privilege in the white plutocracy.”
As titillating as all this was, purring from full lips of devastating perfection curled in a roguish grin, who was supposed to be the one doing the digging here? Who’s the sucker who’d driven to St. George’s to take the lead in a tango that was supposed to end up in Aetna Simmons’ cottage? The objective was not to wind up a punching bag for Myrtle Trimm’s disturbed, under-stimulated remainder, who couldn’t have been all that under-stimulated since only the educated talk about plutocracy. Moreover and furthermore, she was no blacker than I, pigmentarily speaking. Yet she wore upon her dark, smooth, round, calamitous shoulder the very chip that Barrington wears on his.
That would be Barrington Nolawi Caines, my progenitor. His us-versus-them rhetoric is turpentine on the fire of hatred between racial groups and damnation itself for mongrels who, excluded from every group, wind up as punching bags for all. Not that Barrington knows anybody like that personally.
I am no puppet of history, but reminding me of that man’s self-righteous treachery is another easy way to become my enemy. It made a ravishingly handsome lady almost as repulsive as dead cats. Yet could I get up and leave, leave with nothing but the misallocated burden of Doreen’s oppressors’ guilt? Though with each sound out of her mouth, it became clearer she and I had no more than stale vinegar to offer one another, I couldn’t let her have the final word. I had to find out what she was up to, trying to provoke me. For Aetna’s sake I had to. And I’d pay for it in flesh.
I said, “Look, you’ve got the wrong idea.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Well, take yourself, for example. What’s your line of work? It’s obvious you’re well-educated.”
“I’m between jobs right now. But no need to worry. Soon as everybody starts getting white people’s opportunities, I’m sure I’ll find something.”
“And lose all reason to feel sorry for yourself?”
“Do I look sorry?”
“Right. My mistake. Regret and entitlement are different kettles of fish.”
“Ever notice how many meanings entitlement has? All kinds of meanings that could mean nothing in the end. Like claim,” said Doreen. While I tried not to look as mystified as the deceased tabby on the TV stand. “A claim could be a question of entitlement. Or it could just be a lie. You want to know something strange?”
“Go ahead and try and shock me.”
“I’ve looked all over for her will. Momma’s will. Can’t find it anywhere.”
“Her lawyer?”
“Didn’t have a lawyer. No safety deposit box. I figure it’s around here somewhere, meaning it’s as good as buried. With my luck, she willed everything to Czarina.”
My smart-ass rejoinder died upon my lips.
“Czarina?”
“In the window.” Doreen pointed with her chin.
Everything in Mrs. Trimm’s living-dining room was brown, brownish-green, or brownish-yellow, from the loveseat to the crochet throw to the thinning carpet and the recliner where a strange old woman breathed her last. At the far end of the room, yellowish curtains filtered the light from the window down to its brownest tones. I peered through the noontime gloaming, dust motes heavy with cat hair, to a tall Siamese. Seated in the window as upon a throne. Dead eyes doomed to watch that window till the skin around them rotted.
“Heard from someone at the funeral. Czarina was her favorite.”
I followed Doreen to the window. We looked at the cat.
It was like viewing the actual handbag that gave birth to Wilde’s Jack Worthing. Or something like that. You see, “Czarina” made a cameo appearance in AS9. Now here she was in the flesh, sort of. Looking with glass eyes through a window. I looked too.
Beyond Czarina’s window was another window. Had I a glimmer of desire to risk brushing up against a taxidermied cat, I could’ve reached out and touched that other window. Beyond it I could see the top of a plastic chair, a little bit of plastic card table in front of it, and was that a printer? Dainty white shutters flanked the window. The outer walls were pink. It was Aetna’s cottage. Birthplace of the Ten.
The furniture wasn’t supposed to be plastic.
I looked a bit too long. Doreen said, “Did you know Momma’s tenant?”
“No. Did you?”
Doreen shook her head. “She died too, you know.”
“I heard.”
“I get to go through her stuff too.”
We watched the empty space that must’ve housed Aetna’s computer, now another absence. The left-hand corner, that very corner, where ten suicide notes awaited their new dawn.
I said, “Want some help going through dead people’s stuff? Looking for a will, I mean?”
“Now, why would you want to do that?”
Some conspiracy between Doreen’s eyelashes and cheekbones made her eyes seem half-lidded even when they weren’t. Things like that could agitate a brethren. Also her unhurried smile as it clashed with a voracious gleam, the mark of an unapologetic gold-digger. Revulsion notwithstanding, I bestowed an undefeated champion of a grin.
Doreen murmured, “All right, then.”
Why set up a dead cat to watch your tenant through her window? Dementia, perhaps? Or the rest of the world is even more demented than you are, and someone else turned your stuffed heiress-apparent into a spy?
Glassy eyeballs fitted with microscopic cameras in a lifeless feline head: crazy but not impossible. But for what? Only Clocktower would’ve known there was anything worth looking at through Aetna’s window. Did they have an inkling that she might betray them? Even if they did, any video of her would incriminate them too. Besides, if they were sane, they would’ve put the cameras in the cottage. Not in the dead body of her landlady’s cat.
Perhaps the landlady was the hinge on this whole thing. Maybe she played both teams. Clocktower’s jailer and FBI spy. The woman was eighty-one but, I thought, if the daughter’s demeanor said anything of the mother’s, Myrtle was capable of a great deal.
If it were true, it would mean the FBI was onto Clocktower for some time. Now, the Americans are treaty-bound to share details of relevant criminal investigations with Bermuda and vice versa (I make it my business to know stuff like that), so if they were interested, Javon would’ve known. If that idiot had any notion of what was good for him, he’d have said something. He hadn’t. Now Aetna’s file was missing.
Thankfully, a junkie’s word wasn’t all I had to go on. I had Aetna’s word too.
AS9 is the most enigmatic of the bunch. Frankly, it doesn’t make much sense. When I learned that it refers to a taxidermied cat, it got even weirder. You could read it as a warning or an invitation of some kind. Czarina’s name
follows what may or may not be the vague hint of a disputable notion that all will become clear.
If Czarina couldn’t watch Aetna through that window, Myrtle could. Even if she didn’t know what Aetna was up to, she saw it all happen. Maybe Aetna knew. A disagreeable old lady scowling daggers at you from two feet away is hard to miss.
Consider: Aetna’s on the verge of the decision to die. She knows Myrtle knows the mechanics of her bizarre lifestyle if not the rationale. So Aetna bequeaths her something that fills in the missing piece.
Why? Why would Aetna paint a comprehensive picture of the end of her life and leave it to Myrtle Trimm?
Maybe she hoped Myrtle would go to the police. Care of a senior citizen, Aetna left everything they’d need to unmask Clocktower’s agenda. Left without paying her rent, knowing once Myrtle hit the ceiling she’d unleash every detail on someone like the unsuspecting Saltus. Of course, that’s not what happened. Maybe because Myrtle kicked the bucket without any knowledge of Aetna’s bequest.
If such a thing existed, what form did it take? Was I looking for a thumb drive? Micro-SD card? Key to mysterious safety deposit box, wherein Aetna’s laptop lay undiscovered? Where in that clogged-up nest of hairballs could she have hidden it?
Look to her, Aetna wrote.
That night I wanted Nabi so much I thought I’d go crazy. But Friday meant she was with Martin and I should’ve been working. I was too depressed to think of going out. I took a bit of Zo to make sure I got to sleep and avoided the nightmares.
While I was at Harvard, Nabi saw a string of guys. I made a lot of women suffer for not being her. We shared stories of those people, both to hurt each other and to preserve our friendship. I told myself she married Martin for the same reasons.
Drafts of a Suicide Note Page 9