Scott Spencer

by Man in the Woods (v5)

  “He’s starting to listen to me,” Ruby says. When the dog is close enough she takes his collar, pulls him the last couple of inches. “You must obey me,” she says, her voice deep and tremulous, like a hypnotist up to no good. Shep turns his body so that the middle of his torso presses against Ruby’s knees.

  “He’s guarding you,” Paul says. It renders her speechless for a moment—that a beast, a wild thing of nature, would do such a thing.

  “Thank you, Shep,” she says, in the softest voice Paul has ever heard her speak in. She strokes the dog’s ears and he moves even closer, almost toppling her.

  “Do you know what I wish?” Ruby says. “I wish we could see him from the beginning. I wish we could rewind him.”

  Paul laughs, putting his hand lightly on her shoulder. “So do you see a tree you might want? We’ll cut it down and then we’ll plant a new one where the old one used to be, and we can make you a bookcase.”

  She cocks her head. “Is this the secret you wanted to say?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Why is it a secret? Because they’re Mom’s trees?”

  “I guess it’s not really a secret,” Paul says. “Except you’re going to build it with me.”

  “I don’t know how to do that,” Ruby says insistently.

  “Well, I’m going to teach you. I’m going to teach you how to cut things straight and true. We’re going to be very careful and you’re going to be good at it, that’s what I think. You’re going to be really good at it.”

  “Okay,” Ruby says. She looks suddenly worried.

  “Are you all right?” Paul asks. She nods uncertainly and Paul lets it pass.

  “Come here,” he says, “I’ll show you something.”

  He touches her elbow, guides her toward a couple of old wild cherry trees. Their bark is the color of bright ash, speckled, bent, at the end of their cycle. He places his hand on one of the trees, like holding someone by the back of the neck. “These are probably about forty years old. All the hemlock block out the light so the cherry trees don’t get enough sun. Pretty soon they’re just going to fall over. But they have nice wood, sort of reddish. It ages well and if we made you a bookcase it would be something you always had. You could take it to college with you, if you wanted.”

  “I don’t think I will go to college,” Ruby says.

  “Well that’ll be up to you,” Paul says. “I went for a year and I wish I went longer. It’s good to learn things and when I talk to my friends about their college years it sounds like a lot of fun.”

  “My mother’s roommate committed suicide in college,” Ruby says.

  “That’s a terrible thing,” Paul says. He pats the tree. “So what do you think? We’ll build it together. That way, it will be partly you. It will have the oil from your fingers in it. And even the mistakes you make, because we all make mistakes, even the best carpenters.”

  Paul sits on a lichen-laced boulder near the cherry trees and Ruby scrambles up to sit next to him. It’s nearly four in the afternoon. The moon is already high, small and pale and lacking in dimension. “You know what makes me laugh sometimes,” he says to Ruby. He has never known her to be so calm and quiet; she looks searchingly into his face.

  “What?” she all but whispers.

  “These people, the well-off ones, who take their friends around and show them their new kitchen or their porch and they say Oh I built this last year, but they didn’t build it, they just paid for it. But to them, writing a check and bringing the carpenter a pitcher of ice water is the same as building it.”

  “That’s funny,” Ruby says. “Mom can’t even cook rice.”

  “Rice can be a real bear to make,” Paul says.

  “But you can, you cook the best rice.”

  “Rice is one of my specialties,” Paul says. “I’ve eaten a lot of rice in my day.” He taps his finger on the child’s knee. “You have a fantastic mother. I think you know that. Talk about making things! The stuff I make, the tree does half the work, the tree and its roots and the leaves and the water and the sun, and the people who cut the tree down, and the people who bring it to the mill, and the people who work in the mill, and I even have an assistant. But your mother is all by herself making something out of absolutely nothing. She takes a piece of paper, there’s nothing there, and she fills it with words, and then one day there’s a book. It blows my mind. She’s like a gladiator, it’s all up to her, every step of the way, and if she makes a mistake everyone can see it. One day when you read her books you’ll be so amazed and proud.”

  “I don’t like reading,” Ruby says. “I like music.”

  “Music is wonderful,” Paul agrees. “Where would we be without music?”

  It’s less than three weeks until the solstice. The sky is suddenly bereft of light, it just drops it like something too heavy to hold, and what remains is a dark, troubling green, like the light flung across the treetops in Tarrytown. Paul slides off the boulder, lifts Ruby up, and sets her on the ground.

  “I have to tell you something,” she says.

  “Talk while we walk,” Paul says, taking her hand. “Come on, Shep, whatever it is you’re digging for, it’s already escaped.”

  “That thing I said about rewinding Shep?” Her voice is befogged, uncertain. “I didn’t make that up,” she says. Like someone learning to walk, she watches her feet traverse the forest floor. “This kid in my class? Noah? He said it and I was just copying it.”

  “It’s fine,” Paul says. “Noah could have heard it from someone else, too.”

  The woods are behind them. Now there are just ferns and vines, a little trickle of stream, and the beginnings of the lawn in back of Kate’s house. Shep’s muzzle touches the moving water as he drinks. When he sees the house it reminds him it is time to eat. He takes a last few excited laps at the stream and begins his rocking-horse lope across the grass. Each time his front paws hit the grass he steals a glance over his shoulder to make sure Paul and Ruby are following. Kate is home and the windows are ablaze with light and the long, low house looks like a ship sailing through the uncertain seas of night.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  No thanks to anyone but himself, things are starting to fall into place on the William Claff case, and Detective Jerry Caltagirone is starting to get that old feeling, the sense he once had, maybe ten years and seventy-five pounds ago, that not only is he doing a job that made a difference in this world, but that he is good at it. He sees his job as holy housekeeping—he straightens out the world’s mess, he brings the world slowly back to order even as it totters on the edge of chaos, because you would have to be half-crazy to want to live in a world in which things happened for no particular reason, a world without predictability, without justice. Piece by piece he is making sense of the case. He is sure of the dead man’s name, and all the other forms of identification can be ignored. The last place he lived before coming to New York was Philadelphia, where he shacked up with a woman named Dinah Maloney—her business card was in his wallet. He left her all of a sudden and stole her dog for good measure, which might be reason for Maloney to beat him to death, except she weighs about the same as a suit of clothes, can account for every second of her time the day of the killing, and is still looking for the dog.

  More than that, Caltagirone knows Claff was exactly forty-one years and nineteen weeks old when he died. He knows he was born in a town called Phillips, California, a snowy, mountainous place. When Caltagirone poked around to see if there might be a few Claff relatives still around he came up empty, but he didn’t mind, that meant he wouldn’t have to tell Claff’s mother or father or anyone else that their loved one was found beaten to death in the woods. When you are on an investigation, mostly things don’t work out. You need to trust the method, you have to believe the evidence will lead you out of the dark and into the light. And you must be patient. Patience is Caltagirone’s strong suit. He doesn’t get discouraged and he doesn’t jump to conclusions.

  He has written what
he knows for sure in a three-by-five root-beer-colored notebook, name, age, height, weight, distinguishing marks, and he adds every day to the list of known things, until, at last, Caltagirone finds where Claff was last living in LA, the change of address he failed to give to the DMV, and that missing piece is a beauty, because not only does it lead Caltagirone to where Claff had been working (Bank of America, in the accounting department) but it gives him sudden access to another accountant at BOA, Madeline Powers, with whom Claff had had a relationship, and who, though she had her own apartment, shared with him a four-room rental off Ventura Boulevard. Going over his notes with his wife, Caltagirone poked his finger at this line of his notations, and said, “Now all I got to do is figure out a way to talk to her without going out there myself,” which reminded Stephanie that the two of them had had a nice time in Fort Myers with a vacationing LA homicide detective named Rudolf Sanchez, and furthermore she never threw anything away and she was sure she could get her hands on Sanchez’s card, which he had handed to her while the Caltagirones sunned themselves by the swimming pool, hot and wet in their snow-white chaises while Sanchez stood between them in his dark suit, already checked out of the hotel and on his way to the airport. “Go get the card if you can find it,” Caltagirone said, “but first things first.” He opened his arms wide for her, though she is small and wiry and with her hair cut short and that eager, sort of hopped-up look she gets when they talk about his career, she looks like a very cute jockey. “Jerry loves Stephanie,” he said, careful not to squeeze too hard.

  A week later, Caltagirone has one more day to find someone to claim Claff’s body. Most of the graves in potter’s field are filled with nameless men and women, but there are a few whom they’ve managed to get a positive ID on and William Claff is on his way to being one of them. Sitting at his desk at the precinct, his head down, his hand cupped over the phone, and talking low, like a man who desperately does not want to be overheard, which is what he is, Caltagirone has Madeline Powers on the line, and he is giving her a minute to collect herself after she hears he is calling about Claff’s death, even though Sanchez has already broken the news to her. Caltagirone knows how that can happen, how you can hear about something from one person and then when you hear it from someone else it’s like a confirmation that the terrible thing is really true, or maybe your mind just turns its back on the terrible thing the first time through and the information comes again from a different direction and it’s a kill shot, right through your mind’s heart.

  When she gathers herself again, Caltagirone asks the standard question. “Do you know of anyone who might want to harm Mr. Claff, Ms. Powers?” What you usually hear is Oh no, he was the nicest person, people loved him, he didn’t have an enemy in the world. Caltagirone thinks Albert Anastasia’s old lady would have said as much: such a nice man—and so clean-shaven.

  But Madeline Powers surprises him. “I just didn’t take it overly serious,” she says, her voice racked with sorrow and self-recrimination. Caltagirone sits a bit straighter in his creaking swivel chair. This much he knows from years on the job: people often know a lot less than they want you to think they know, and people often know a lot more, and the art of the job is playing your hunches about which is which.

  “What was it you didn’t take serious?” Caltagirone says, as casually as possible but in a voice he calls Cop Casual, which means that the question sounds like there’s not too much behind it but you’ve got to answer it anyhow.

  “Why do you think he was running around the whole country like a crazy person?” she says, a hint of accusation in her voice. “For his health?”

  Caltagirone doesn’t take it personally. He knows unhappiness burns like a candle in people and a whiff of it’s always in the air.

  “What I need is for you to tell me what you know,” Caltagirone says, as if he’s got a long list of facts he wants to cross-reference. “And we’ll take it from there.”

  “Will was a gambler,” Madeline says. “I mean he had gambling issues. He never told me about it, but I sort of got the idea anyhow. My father was really into betting. We lived in Bakersfield and Dad ran a very successful dry-cleaning business. He worked hard, really hard, but sometimes he’d get up from the dinner table and say, ‘I gotta get going,’ and that meant he was going to get back in his car and drive all the way to Vegas. It’s a pretty straight shot and you can really book it, but, still and all, it is over two hundred miles, each way. But when he was jonesing to gamble there was nothing he could do about it. His game was blackjack, but he wasn’t above a bit of keno, and sometimes when he snapped out of it and realized he better get back on the interstate if he was ever going to be on time to open up the shop, he’d get hung up on the slots. You had to walk through a million slot machines between the blackjack tables and the exit doors, and sometimes he just couldn’t make it…”

  She is drifting far away now, but Caltagirone lets her tiptoe through the tulips. He makes little sounds, like it is all valuable information and he is writing it down, and before long she is talking about Claff again. “I don’t think Will knew who he was dealing with,” Powers says.

  “Who was he dealing with?” Caltagirone asks.

  “In terms of me, I mean. Like I’m going to judge him for putting down bets? Dynamite man like that, taking such good care of his body, good job—there’s going to be some dings, or else he’d already be with somebody else. Anyhow, I’d never in a million years criticize someone for putting some money down on a bet. It’s something I’m used to already, and anyhow I’m more like ‘If you’ve got something sure tell me and maybe I’ll put a couple of bucks down on it, too.’ But Will…” The mention of his name sends ripples through her voice. Caltagirone hears her swallow and breathe herself back into composure. “Maybe he was worried about me losing money. Whatever. He kept me in the dark. I knew he bet, but I didn’t know how often, or how much. I didn’t realize what it was doing to him.” The weight of this last remark is more than her already fragile voice can bear.

  “So he was on the run because of gambling debts, is that what you’re saying?”

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  This is all starting to make such perfect sense; Caltagirone can barely believe his own luck.

  “Any idea who he placed his bets with?” Caltagirone asks. “I mean, put it this way, what kind of bets? Sports?”

  “I don’t know. He liked sports. He watched a lot of sports on the TV. But he wasn’t jumping up and down or anything, he didn’t act like he was doing anything but chilling out and watching TV. Look, I want to get out there. I want to collect his body. He doesn’t have any family, and we weren’t officially married. But I don’t want him just dumped somewhere like he was nobody.”

  “We can make arrangements, don’t worry about that, Madeline.” Caltagirone forgets to keep his hand cupped over the phone’s mouthpiece and his voice has carried over to the next desk, where Joe Pierpont sits tilted back in his chair, with his size-thirteen shoes up on the desk. All Pierpont has heard is Caltagirone reassuring someone named Madeline and he gives Caltagirone a wink, as if he’s up to something, which is invariably Pierpont’s pleasure to imagine at the slightest provocation.

  “So the gambling thing,” Caltagirone says.

  “My father ended up broke, you know,” Madeline says. “We had to sell everything, the business, the house. I had to work two jobs to put myself through school and even with all that I ran up so many loans, I’m still paying them off.”

  “But you did it, you made it,” Caltagirone says.

  “Yeah, I guess. It just doesn’t feel like it.”

  “Never does, no matter what. Everybody thinks they’re coming up short.”

  “I guess.”

  “So names? He never mentioned anyone?”

  “Who we talking about here?”

  “Will,” Caltagirone says, going for the first name to make her feel it.

  “Shit. He ran all that way.”

  “So who�
�d he mention?”

  “One guy,” Madeline says. “I could tell Willy was afraid of him.”

  “One guy?”

  “Yeah, but he didn’t really have a name. Willy never called him anything, not that I remember.”

  Caltagirone stays on the phone with Madeline for a few more minutes, while she worries about getting out to New York and then goes off on a few more tangents about her father, whom it seems she can’t stop talking about for more than a minute. When he eventually allows himself to get her off the phone, he stands up, pats his pockets as if he’s about to go out for a smoke, though his intentions are to step outside and call his wife on his cell phone. She’s been curious about the man in the woods and he wants to give her an update.

  Stephanie teaches fourth grade and it would take an emergency for him to call her during class, but Caltagirone knows her schedule by heart and at twelve twenty on a Thursday she’s in the teachers’ lounge, and it’s her habit to reach in her big leather handbag and turn on her phone just in case anyone in her family needs to get hold of her.

  He tells her he’s gotten in touch with Claff’s girlfriend, and she’s flying out Saturday morning, to ID the body and to have it cremated so she can bring the ashes back to California. But what he mainly wants to talk to Stephanie about is this thing he’s noticed, the way people have of changing the subject when you give them bad news, as if one part of the mind needs to occupy itself while another part comes to terms with the information.

  “The thing she wanted to talk about was her father and his gambling, all this shit about him running off to Vegas. It’s like she was there, way back.” Caltagirone is in the precinct parking lot, leaning on his own car. It’s about ten degrees outside. The knit of his sports jacket stiffens and darkens from the cold air. He blows the exhaust out of his mouth as if it were smoke from a Parliament.