20

by John Edgar Wideman

  Fact: one does not survive a thirty-minute immersion in the January North Atlantic.

  A transparency over the frame: the corrected image. Every view of a crime, the Detective has learned, is through tinted glass. The first rule: always doubt the witness; check his view before accepting the image. Note that dusk affords the poorest visibility of the day and the most deceptive. Note that dramatic and unexpected events cause selective amnesia, time distortion, astigmatic errors. And the witness himself—sober, respectable enough, no known connection to the house's occupants, but a local man, a stubborn downeaster; for him, all of reality is a frozen frame. The provincial mind, it has no doubt. “I saw what I saw,” he says over and over again.

  Fact: no one else has reported the “accident.”

  ————

  When the phone rang, the Detective was sitting in his study's easy chair, eyes closed, reading glasses at the tip of his nose, a book folded on his barreled belly. His feet were resting on a cracked leather ottoman, a concession to old age and poor circulation which failed to match the otherwise flawlessly crafted decor of the room. He made the transition from sleep to consciousness without moving his body or opening his eyes; remained that way, a disembodied mind, free of pain. Perhaps this is what death will be like, he thought, as through the study's walls, he heard his daughter's voice, an intentionally soft murmuring on the phone meant not to disturb his sleep. Strange, the Detective thought, how without understanding a word we can recognize someone's voice; how to this day he could still hear his father's cough, as distinctive as a fingerprint; how he could replay in his mind each subtle modulation in Sadie's breathing, although Sadie hadn't drawn a breath in nearly two years now. A concept occurred to the Detective then, a phrase appearing in its entirety as if by magic (he was new to this sort of thinking, this stretching the mind horizontally instead of focusing it into a bright, fine, penetrating beam)—“Identity is more than just content”—but it slipped away from him like an early morning dream whose connection to reality was not obvious. And he didn't follow it. Too sleepy from his postlunch nap, diverted by his indigestion, he forgot it, and instead, thought about forgetfulness itself. Perhaps that was the true cause of senility—a loss of will, of energy, a growing inability to force the connections. Mental tenacity, he had lectured his classes in criminology, was the primary qualification of a good detective.

  The Detective heard his daughter's voice rising in the next room, sensing in it excitement, trouble, incipient hysteria (for her, they were all the same), and he suddenly felt a wash of pity for her. Perhaps one of her special projects was foundering, her save-the-beach, save-the-sea-gull, save-the-old-lighthouse campaigns. The locals hated her, Charlie Wriggins had confided in him, this rich alien bitch who had lived here just five years and thought herself a native, self-crowned as Earth Mother and Defender of the Land. Sea Gull Sally, they called her. Poor famous-detective's daughter; people had always made fun of her, even when she had been a girl. She made people nervous. She had no…patience—that was it. And no faith. Anyone or anything she loved that wasn't within her sight was dying; she was absolutely sure of it. Her husband lying in the gutter, a mugger's knife in his back; her daughter, Nan, crushed and bleeding under the wheels of a car; her father, dead of a coronary in this very study—better check on them all to make certain they were still breathing. And now, at the onset of middle age, she had adopted the state of Maine, just as she had adopted her widowed father, certain that unless she kept a steady eye on its coastline, the shore would, in a moment's time, be swimming in oil spills and pesticide-poisoned egg shells; appeared on the beaches, just as she appeared unexpectedly in her father's study, afraid that her emotional universe would collapse without her omnipresent vigilance.

  Perhaps it was his own fault. What kind of father had he been to her, involved in case after case, often away from home, and then, even when he returned, his mind preoccupied, the crime scene frame-frozen in his inner eye, the list of crisp facts clicking in his head as he searched for the solution? Preoccupied not because it was his duty, not because he was the best detective they could call on, the best they could ever call on, but because he loved it. It was a sin to love too much, the Detective was beginning to learn. A man was a finite vessel; emotions, energy, attention were finite gifts to be dispensed with care like the resources of his daughter's environmental plans. Love your work too much and something, someone, was bound to suffer, the vessel empty when his turn came. In the past, when he had thought about it, which wasn't often, he had believed himself to be a good husband, a good father. Now he wondered. Now he did think about it often, too often. Now the inspections were self-inspections; the framed scenes not bars and motels, but the rooms of his own home; the violations subtle, unannounced, shades of the distant past. Now there were no bleeding corpses, just memories—his wife and daughter. He had thought himself a good husband, a good father, but then he had found the letters.

  The Detective opened his eyes, superimposed the visual surface of reality over his unwanted thoughts. It was as if he were glancing at a vellum scrapbook or the indexed contents of a museum exhibit, his career laid out there before him on the study's paneled walls: the medals for service, the honorary degrees and newspaper clippings, the Sherlock Holmes cap resting on the fireplace…all so “arranged,” so dustless and dead, the room embalmed with furniture wax. And he always felt, when he first awoke here from his daily nap—eyes blinking open, body still inert—like some wax figurine, a carved prop for this historical scene: “The Famous Detective's Study,” doll-house perfect. Strange, the Detective thought, how Sally hadn't changed. As a child she had played “house” with a kind of grim self-seriousness, and now, some thirty years later, the game still continued, her performance unimproved. Time was on her side, of course. Her adulthood, his old age were inevitable, the doll house a real house now, the doll a flesh-and-blood girl. But Sally wasn't satisfied with simple equality, or with just one daughter; she was intent, instead, on adopting her father, a second child to play mother to: the way she treated him since Sadie's death, the coddling, the solicitude. He had tried to resist it, but because he lacked his old tenacity, because time was on her side, he often gave in. Like this study, its decorations; her idea, done at her insistence: “every growing boy needs his own private room, a place to forge his identity.” She always knocked now before entering the study as if afraid she would catch him masturbating.

  Perhaps it's revenge, the Detective thought, some sort of emotional revenge, reversing the rage of helplessness she'd felt as a child, still felt, and inflicting it back on her father. “Revenge”—the Detective shook his head at his choice of words. All of this psychology, this self-inspection was new to him, but the words he chose remained the same. He was still the Detective; that was the tint to his glass: his frame of reference, crime; his point of view, the criminal's.

  “I will not,” he heard his daughter say into the phone. A pause. She dropped to a strained whisper, but latched onto her voice, he understood her now. “He's sleeping.”

  The Detective straightened up, lifted his left leg by the thigh and lowered it to the floor slowly—a rush of blood, pain, life. “Sally!” he called out; closing the book on his lap, he threw it onto the roll-top desk beside him. “Sally—I'm coming!”

  Sally's hurried footsteps approached the study; then (he heard them in his mind just before they began), three evenly spaced knocks on his door, exclamation points for his anger, and in a moment, she was standing above him.

  “Dad, you're supposed to be sleeping.”

  “Never you mind that. Who's on the phone for me?”

  “You're supposed to take an afternoon nap every day. I didn't make that up, you know. I'm not the Bangor heart specialist who told you to start taking it easy.”

  “Sally…”

  “You have to take care of yourself, Dad. You have to…”

  “Sally,” he said with emphasis. She stopped, waited, the unwilling but still obedient daugh
ter. “It's Charlie Wriggins, isn't it?”

  She pursed her lips. The Detective smiled; he lived now for these small triumphs, these feats of detection, minor victories over her insulating secrecy.

  “We have to talk, Dad. You can't keep ignoring the fact that you're over seventy and have a heart condition. You have to adjust. You have to come to grips with reality.”

  That last phrase brought a sneer onto the Detective's face. He had heard it again and again, that almost hysterical voice pleading with her father, with her husband and daughter, with her fellow kitchen environmentalists, to come to grips with reality.

  “Yes,” he said, rising unsteadily, “but I suppose reality can wait till I get off the phone.”

  “I…” Sally began, then faltered; he turned around. “I hung up.”

  He stared at her, wordless, shocked beyond anger, waiting though for anger to come. This was new, this insulting presumption of authority, and he waited for the righteous rage of his helplessness to flood him, giving him the strength to fight her back. But his rage never came; instead, he had that old sensation, a dispossession, a time suspension (if only he knew what brought on these moments, if only he could have transferred the gift to his students—the real difference between a great detective and a merely competent one): those moments when the confusion clarified, when the answer suddenly materialized, whole and inviolable. Not logic, but something like instinct which solved the mystery and yet was a mystery in itself.

  “He has a case for me,” the Detective said softly, half to himself.

  Sally sighed; she wasn't surprised. After forty years, she was accustomed to her father's abilities, although perhaps envious of them: she had to burst through locked doors to keep informed; he merely peered through the walls.

  “Look, Dad, I'm sorry, but I didn't think that you should…” Her apology unraveled, but he brushed it out, just as he had always brushed her and Sadie out when a case had preoccupied his mind—the absent father, the empty vessel. No, he wasn't angry with her; he was beyond emotion, disengaged and moving on another plane as Sally's voice changed, grew soft with resignation.

  “He isn't home, but he did leave a number for you to call. I wrote it down on the pad by the phone.” Then, one last protest, not out of hope for success, but duty-inspired. “You shouldn't, you know. You're not strong enough.”

  He limped quickly toward the phone. Her voice followed him there, accusatory and frightened. “He says it's murder.”

  The Detective dialed the number, steadying his right hand with his left by grabbing it around the wrist. He was magnanimous; he was sympathetic; he was in a forgiving mood. It had been the mentioning of murder that had frightened Sally into hanging up. Not her fault—she couldn't help seeing that knife in her husband's back, that car striking her daughter's body, that oil slick drifting inexorably toward her favorite beach. She was a worrier by nature, so he would forgive her, forgive anyone: he had a case, the first since Sadie's death.

  Someone identifying himself as Officer Truax answered the phone, resisting the Detective's questions with officious inflexibility until there was an interruption from an extension.

  “Hey, Sherlock, that you?”

  It was Charlie Wriggins's voice, and the Detective visualized him in his mind's eye: a seventy-five-year-old, ornery and energetic ex-newspaper man who loved his profession's image and cultivated all its clichés, full of piss and vinegar and newsroom profanity. He was one of the few transplanted residents who got along with the locals (Charlie's term) because, although he was as irascible as they were, he was a reporter and not a reformer by nature; he didn't try to change their lives. The Detective waited until Officer Truax hung up.

  “Where are you, Charlie?”

  “The Klein place on the shore highway.”

  “Which one's that?”

  “You've been up here two years and you don't know the Klein place? Frankly, Sherlock, you amaze me. You know, the orange erector set overlooking the cove. The one they tried to revoke the building permit on; lost in court.

  “Oh yeah, the Klein place,” the Detective said, but he didn't know it. A city man all his life, he had barely stepped outside since moving in with Sally, as lost in the New England countryside as a Kansas runaway in New York City. For him, Maine was a jumbled montage of sea gulls and rock and agitated ocean, a place you sent postcards from, returning home before they arrived. But now the Detective wouldn't return. Maine was his home; he would remain there until he died.

  “Well, what's this all about? What happened?”

  “It seems that someone—maybe Mr. Klein himself—took a walk last night.” Charlie paused and the Detective sensed him savoring the drama, the headline potential of the story. “A very strange kind of walk: three feet toward Nova Scotia, and five hundred feet down into the Atlantic Ocean.”

  “What do you mean, ‘someone’?”

  “Well, the Coast Guard hasn't found the body yet. We do have a witness, but he was too far away to see who it was. And too far away to see who pushed him.”

  “He saw someone being pushed?”

  “Not exactly. Couldn't print that, though I'd bet my next three social security checks on it.”

  The Detective sees desks, rows of desks, gleaming under the fluorescence of institutional lighting; he sees faces, young and attentive, propped by pencils, above open notebooks; and then, before him, a hand, his hand, chalk-smeared and gesturing, clipped with authority; his voice emerging as if from a distance, words in amber, preserved in time, to be summoned and repeated for the appropriate crimes…

  “What's that you said?” Charlie asked him.

  “I said: ‘No corpse, no crime.’”

  “Don't be so sure about that. Listen, Klein's missing. The only one up here is his wife and the police chief is having a hell of a time making any sense out of her. He's been here all morning and doesn't know much more than when he started. Klein was some sort of VIP scientist, and I mean the real thing—physics, the atomic bomb, a Nobel prize about ten years ago; he's practically a national asset, so we're talking about federal authorities and national press if this thing doesn't get cleared up real soon. The Chief doesn't want that, and frankly neither do I—I want this story all to myself. Now Mrs. Klein is some kind of egghead, too, so I talked the Chief into letting me call you in. He's a reasonable sort for a local; knows that these intellectuals speak a language of their own. I told him you might be able to break her down, get through to her.”

  The Detective cleared his throat, suddenly aware of his daughter's eavesdropping presence behind him. “Can you pick me up?”

  “I'll be there in fifteen minutes.”

  The Detective hung up, avoiding Sally as he walked back to the study. She followed him there, though, as he knew she would, and that enraged him—the predictability, the knee-jerk reflexiveness of her smothering, mothering instinct. What's the matter, he wanted to say to her sarcastically, you didn't knock this time. But he remained silent.

  “You're getting involved?”

  The Detective searched his desk for his pocket notebook. “I'm going to take a look around, that's all.”

  “You're getting involved.”

  The Detective turned to his daughter; searched her face for an excuse to strike out at her, for a hint of the resentment he was sure she still felt toward him. But instead, he found only a sad resignation, her eyes reflecting truths that he didn't want to see:

  Fact, they said: you are seventy-two, with a heart that's older.

  Fact, they said: your wife is dead and you're lost without her.

  Sally shook her head and then left the room, closing the door behind her. The Detective stared after her, ashamed of himself, ashamed that her pity was so well founded. He never should have moved to Maine in the first place. After Sadie's funeral, his first few weeks of absolute solitude had frightened him into accepting Sally's invitation, but now he understood that it had been a mistake. Better to have risked the loneliness, better to have risked
a sudden breakdown or better yet, the blocked or burst vessel that would eventually be his end, better anything real or dramatic or painful than this slow rotting in place, this forced self-inspection, this philosophizing.

  As his eyes scanned the desk, the Detective suddenly remembered the letters and he felt as if he were going to faint, heart fluttering, mouth gasping, sweat dampening his freckled forehead. He dropped into his easy chair and loosened his collar, closing his eyes. The letters. They were always there in the background of his mind like some vulgar jingle, popping into consciousness at the first vacant moment. And he couldn't brush them out, not the idea of them, not even their image—the white, feminine-fancy stationery, the elastic band surrounding them, the slanted curls of Sadie's script. And not the shock he had felt when, the week after the funeral, he had cleaned out her desk and found them; the suspicion. It hadn't been the sort of suspicion the Detective was accustomed to, not the professional curiosity, the teasing shadows of solutions, the pleasant, piquing mental play that directed his detection in case after case; but something more dominating and physical—nausea, paralysis, fear. And a fear that knew its object, for he had read the first two lines of the top-most letter and they had stopped him, sent him reeling. No, it hadn't been the sort of suspicion that the Detective was used to, but rather a suspicion that begged not to be confirmed: he had packed away the letters without reading another word.

  ————

  A bedroom: middle class, modest in all respects, but carefully decorated, color-coordinated, its curtains and bedspread a matching dark blue, its wallpaper print a floral cerulean. It is late, night, and only a small desk lamp lights the room, its corners, the edges of vision, blurred in shadows. At a writing table across from the bed, under the funneled glow of the lamp, spotlit, stage center, the woman sits, with paper and pen, a hand covering what she has written. In profile hers is a striking face, hard-planed and weathered, a middle-aged beauty, the grace of endurance, of suffering done well; but blushing now, too, as she looks to the door where the man stands, hat in his hand, shoes tracking water on the rug. Fact: it is raining outside. The room, the scene, their sudden meeting, is framed in words, her words; her eyes saying, “You should have knocked”; her refusal to avert his eyes, “I've earned my privacy.” “I'm keeping a diary,” she says aloud.