“Oh, I see,” Mr. Clark said. “Yes, of course I’ll go in.” He put a pair of sneakers on and opened the door again, letting Ted go through first. They didn’t speak as they walked down the hall side by side.
Ted saw the worn carpet and faded wallpaper. “I never noticed how badly this place needs updating.”
“The board has been after the developer for two months now,” he replied.
They reached Ashton and Ted’s door, and Ted reached into his pocket to get his keys out. He put the key in the door, and his hands were shaking so badly he had to pause to get himself in control.
“I have a bad feeling about this,” he said. It was obvious, since he was asking a cop to come with him.
Mr. Clark put his hand on Ted’s shoulder. “Stay out here,” he said. He went in and got as far as the kitchen. He looked back down the hall at Ted standing in the open door and pointed into the kitchen. “He’s in here.”
Ted stayed outside of the apartment, not sure if he meant Ashton was standing at the kitchen sink washing dishes or laying on the floor in a pool of blood.
He disappeared back through the opening in the hallway, and Ted waited. He came out seconds later. “He’s dead,” he said, frowning.
Not moving from the doorway while Mr. Clark pulled out his cell and made a call, Ted had a quick walk down memory lane and remembered the first time he saw Ashton walking up to his aunt Dale’s apartment. It was Thanksgiving Day, and Ashton had ordered dinner delivered from Balducci’s so they could eat together. But Dale had died in the night, and Ted was coming to sort through her belongings before unwelcome family members arrived to scavenge. He had to tell Ashton the news about Aunt Dale and remembered how devastating it was to do so. A year later, Ashton let it slip that Dale was one of his last links to Jack. Unbeknownst to Ted, Dale, his seventy-something old maiden aunt, had been having a torrid affair of thirty or more years duration with the loathsome Jack Smith. Ted was appalled. If it was true, Dale was most certainly HIV positive. It appeared that everyone who’d come into contact with Jack was.
Ashton was unlike any of the men he’d dated. He was the same age as Ted and successful in his own right. The attraction was immediate. Ashton immediately set out to remake Ted, and he allowed it. None of the things he wanted to change were important anyway. Ashton brought order and a healthier diet to his life, but other than that, he was really rather benign. Ashton’s death was having the same effect on Ted as living with him had. It was annoying and inconvenient. His timing sucked, the selfishness of it grating on his nerves, like fingernails on a chalkboard.
Mr. Clark walked up to him, concerned. “Are you all right, buddy? Maybe you better sit down.”
Ted did as he suggested and sat on the floor with help, and once his ass made contact with the dirty carpet, he allowed himself to pass out cold.
~ ~ ~
Natalie and Deborah were staying at the cabin upstate that summer, and although Ted hated to do it, once he pulled himself together, he had to call them back to the city. Ashton managed to ruin everyone’s summer with his shenanigans. Deborah was waiting tables in town at the Summertime Café, and Natalie was sitting on the porch, drinking pink lemonade with vodka, reading a mystery when the call came.
“I’ve got bad news,” Ted said.
A hollow quality to his voice grabbed Natalie’s attention, and she put her book down on the coffee table as she sat up straight. “Is it Ashton?” She’d also tried contacting him since he left the city two days ago.
“Yes,” Ted whispered. “He did it himself, of course. It wasn’t going to be enough that he’d torture me through a divorce.” Detailing what had happened in the last hours to Natalie, the reality of dealing with all of Ashton’s real estate staging paraphernalia hit him. “Now I have to figure out what to do with four warehouses full of furniture and props.”
“Oh God, I forgot about that. I’m so sorry, Ted. We’ll get on the next bus home.”
“Okay, thank you. Or rent a car and charge it to me.”
After he hung up, Natalie looked at her watch and picked up her book again. She wasn’t rushing home for Ashton.
Natalie supported Ted as he suffered through the funeral, making small talk with Ashton’s parents, who’d arrived from Florida, and later seeing to their needs. They asked to stay at the apartment, and although it seemed like an inconvenience at first, later Ted was glad. It gave him the opportunity to start sorting through Ashton’s belongings with his mother to guide him. Ted’s own parents didn’t come up; he gave them the option of not attending if it would be too much for his father, who was past eighty and frail. As long as he had Deborah and Natalie with him, he decided he’d get through it.
When it came to culling his personal belongings down to a bare minimum, Ashton was self-regulating. There wasn’t much to go through. Ted was afraid he’d come across something embarrassing as he and his mother picked through the boxes stashed in the spare bedroom closet. Then they started sorting the dining room. Hidden under boxes of china and linens, Ted discovered Ashton’s ephemera: mementos of every function he’d attended with Jack. There were matchbook favors from weddings, greeting cards addressed to them both, and photos of him and Jack over the years: dressed in diapers for a New Year’s Eve Party back in ’82, and in tuxes at Jack and Pam’s wedding. It made Ted sick. In a drunken confessional, Ashton admitted that he’d had sex with Jack right after the wedding while Pam waited for him to leave for their Hawaiian honeymoon.
“Do you want these, Mrs. Hageman?” Ted asked, disgusted Ashton had saved all of it.
She turned the photos over in her hands, looking from one to another. “I don’t know if I do or not. I knew Jack as a young boy,” she said. “Ashton was his only confidant throughout school. He said no one else knew the truth about what was going on in that house.”
Ted had heard about it, but often wondered if they weren’t stories a drunk had fabricated. She looked up at Ted. June Hageman was still beautiful, her eyes clear and face relatively unlined. And she was as sharp as a tack.
“I knew, but I didn’t do anything about it. My boy told me what was happening to his friend, yet I averted my eyes. It was too depraved for me to even consider; I’d have been too embarrassed to call the police and repeat what Ashton told me. No one would’ve believed it anyway. Harold Smith had a reputation in town. My own husband was afraid of him.”
“There’s nothing you can do about it now anyway,” Ted said. “Everyone’s dead.”
“Bernice Smith isn’t,” she replied sharply. “Ashton told me she’s still formidable. And Jack’s wife. She should surely know what the life of her husband had been as a child.”
“I think she knows,” Ted said softly. “You don’t have to worry about her. Evidently, Jack’s past was catching up with him right before he died. Ashton himself confronted her several times.”
“Oh, how awful. To go to his mother is one thing, but to see the wife? That must have been brutal.”
“I think it was,” Ted replied. “Ashton died jealous of Pam Smith.”
June Hageman turned from the box of junk she was sorting. “Ashton wasn’t jealous of her,” she said, her nose in the air. “He wanted to be her. There’s a huge difference.”
Ted wasn’t convinced that Ashton’s jealousy was really longing to imitate her. But he was too tired to argue. And it hurt him, realizing there was a large chunk of the man’s personality he was not in touch with. Ashton had an audience of sorts with Pam after Jack died. It was a paradox, and whether he was to be believed regarding what they said to each other was another matter.
“What am I going to do with all of this stuff?”
The two of them gazed at the piles of ephemera. Its value lie only in the memories attached to it.
“Burn it,” she answered.
The quality Ashton had of ridding himself of unnecessary personal items in the apartment didn’t carry over to his warehouse contents. The day after June and Frank Hageman returned to Flori
da, Natalie and Deborah accompanied Ted to the first storage facility, this one located in the Bronx. Deborah was going to be the recorder, and she’d brought a pen and notebook to start taking inventory. But when they walked in through the side door, the enormity of what they were faced with hit them.
“Oh, my God. Are you fucking kidding me?” Natalie’s arms dropped at her side, mouth agape.
“Remember, this is one of four,” Ted said.
“We need to furnish homes for poor people,” Deborah said.
“To hell with that,” Ted replied. “After everyone takes what they want, we’re having an auction. We might all be able to retire on the proceeds. Ashton said he owned hundreds of items stashed away, representing every style period in American history from Colonial to retro to space age to current.”
“Let’s not get defeated already, folks,” Deborah said, interested. “This is a viable business.”
“You’re going to have to hire someone to come in and inventory all this crap,” Natalie said.
“Wait,” Deborah said. “It’s barcoded.” She pointed to a grouping of items, and sure enough, everything had a label.
They went from aisle to aisle as Ted gained a new respect for Ashton the businessman and experienced his first regret; he wished he could compliment Ashton on the organization of such a vast collection of stuff.
“Okay, well, if he’s got everything inventoried, where’s the paper?”
“He must have an office in here somewhere,” Ted said.
Confused, Natalie wondered what was going on. How could Ted be married to someone and have no idea how he conducted his business? “Did he go off to work every day?” she asked.
“No, not really. He had appointments. He’d go to look at a space, determine what would compliment it and then have pickers go through the warehouses to gather the items. I guess they must have had barcode readers.”
“Wow, I’m so sorry I didn’t spend some time doing this with him. It’s pretty fascinating,” Deborah said.
“He kept his business pretty close to the cuff,” Ted said. “I don’t think he wanted me to know how much stuff he had. When he said four warehouses, I was thinking storage units. Not four 10,000-square-foot buildings.”
“Come over here for a minute,” Deborah called. She stepped out into the aisle again so they could see her. She’d discovered a file cabinet loaded with papers and receipts. “I think I hit pay dirt. It looks like his inventory records.”
They each took a file folder and started leafing through it.
“He was very organized,” Natalie said. “At the top of each receipt, he has a stock number. It looks like he used a simple system with the item type, a number for the building it’s in, and if it’s out in a project or housed in the warehouse.
“We’ll have to figure out what projects he’s working on. Ted, did he use a computer for this? If it’s all paper, he must have a current jobs folder somewhere, and I don’t see one here.”
“Maybe in your office at home?” Deborah asked gently.
Ted didn’t know. He wasn’t interested in Ashton’s work and zoned out when he tried talking about it. Getting a glimmer of why having Natalie and Deborah in his life had become so important to him, Ted slipped further into depression.
“Let’s go back to his apartment,” Ted replied. “I’ll go on the computer and hopefully find what we need there.”
“Wait one second,” Natalie said. She’d found a stack of transparent shoeboxes with lids that appeared to be filled with videotapes, the old-fashioned VHS kind. “I bet this is Ashton’s version of Home and Garden TV.”
“Bring them along,” Ted said. He was anxious to leave, the atmosphere oppressive in the extreme. He had so much regret. Maybe the things Ashton said about not respecting him were true. Ted didn’t really know Ashton; that was the problem. And of course, now it was too late.
The women each picked up several shoeboxes, he grabbed what looked like one of the primary file folders, and they left the building. Ted didn’t know how many people had keys, but he planned to have the locks changed right away.
“Are we going to the next warehouse? He has another here in the Bronx and two in Queens,” Deborah said.
“No, do you mind if we stop for now? I’ve had enough for one day.”
They would go back to Ashton’s Upper East Side apartment and, in relative splendor, discover that the shoeboxes contained not interior design videos, but raunchy pornographic films. Some of it shot through a window screen, in a slit in a drape, or from a parked car window, a zoom lens got closer and closer until it breached the privacy of the room. The male was never identified, but Ted had a pretty good idea it was Jack. The victims were always women who appeared to be unaware they were being videotaped.
Although they didn’t watch more than a few seconds of the films in one box, it was enough to know that Ashton was either into some sick voyeurism or he was stashing the tape away for Jack. It angered Ted and made him lose what little reasoning he’d garnered since the funeral. But mostly, he was embarrassed in front of his daughter and Natalie.
“Well, I guess that about sums it up,” he said.
“I don’t think it had anything to do with Ashton. I mean, we don’t need to go through all the film, but I’m willing to bet he isn’t in any of it,” Natalie said. She was trying so hard to be the voice of reason, but she wasn’t convinced.
“Why? He was in a relationship with Jack for all his life, until the man died. It feels like something he’d take part in.”
“Maybe now isn’t the time to bring this up,” Natalie said. “But Ash told me Jack did it to keep his women in line. Those were the words he used. If anyone threatened him or tried to engage Pam, the photos were pulled out.”
“But those aren’t photos,” Ted said. “I think he just got off doing it.”
“Maybe,” Natalie said. “What difference does it make why he did it? The guy was a sick fuck.”
“Yes, he certainly was, and the love of my life was involved with him for forty years. What does that say about Ashton?”
There was no answer to his question. Natalie had seen Ashton in action; she knew what he was capable of.
“What are you going to do with this stuff?” Deborah said.
“I’m not sure,” Ted answered. “I still have all that crap June Hageman told me to burn. I just couldn’t do it. It’s history of the man, whether it’s vile or not.”
Natalie got up to stretch. “Well, I am going downtown to my apartment. I won’t be going back up to the cabin, I guess. What do you think, Deb?”
“No, it’s definitely lost something, but maybe just temporarily.”
Ted shook his head. “He’s ruined that for us, too. I am so goddamned mad.”
They nodded their heads.
“Yes, let’s go,” Natalie said, reaching for his hand. “You have too many decisions to make to sit around here moping all afternoon.”
The three of them went back to Natalie’s apartment to try to help Ted sort out his life.
Ted and Natalie would stay downtown for the rest of the summer, and Natalie would go back and forth to the cabin upstate to be closer to her boyfriend, Zach. In September, they made the decision that they would live together as a family, and so far, it was working out wonderfully.
Chapter 8
It took Pam and Sandra twenty minutes to figure out how to pull the third row of seats up in the back of Pam’s SUV. They had just enough places for all of them to travel to Lisa’s together. Bernice sat in front with Pam, Nelda and Miranda sat in the next row, and Sandra and baby Brent in the back. Pam looked in the rearview mirror at Sandra perched up in the seat, checking the baby’s car seat, the contraption a nightmare to secure.
Pam knew she would be doing some mental work in the coming days. Once again, she’d had no inkling that Brent was having an affair with Sandra. Nothing. Not a hint of it. Trying to remember what Sandra’s response had been when Pam told her the news about Brent’s mu
rder, she was sure Sandra went into shock, as any close friend would upon hearing such horrible news.
Chatting amicably during the ride, Pam pulled up to the front of Lisa’s house. There was an unfamiliar car in the driveway, and her heart did a little bounce when she saw it, the urge to pull away from the curb and keep driving strong. Stop being so selfish, she thought.
“Here we are,” she announced.
Sandra strained forward to see out the window; the house was fabulous, elegant and expansive. She wondered if Pam had paid for it. Turning to get the baby out of his seat, she realized she was nervous. Did Pam tell Lisa about baby Brent’s paternity? She’d ask as soon as she got out of the car.
They made an interesting procession up the slate walkway to the front door, with Bernice and Nelda leading, Sandra holding onto Miranda’s hand, and Pam carrying the baby. Gladys waited at the open door, with Megan on her hip as usual.
“Lisa and the baby are sleeping, but they should be up soon. Come in,” she said. “I have coffee and a snack in the kitchen.”
They trailed behind her into the spacious kitchen. It took several minutes to get the children secure in their seats and the baby propped up on the counter before they could focus on each other.
“Well congratulations, all of you,” Gladys said. “Two new babies. It’s so exciting.”
Pam thought how generous she was being and decided to just swallow her anger at Dan and return the kindness. Before long, the bitterness and pain fell away, and she was sincerely enjoying talking to Gladys again.
When she had a chance, Sandra whispered to Pam, “Did you tell Lisa about the baby?” She nodded her head toward Brent.
But Pam shook her head. “No, I thought I’d let you tell her.”
Sandra frowned. She hated drama, yet seemed to be the creator of much of it. It would have been so much easier if Pam had just told Lisa when they were on the phone together.
In Memoriam: Pam of Babylon Book #7 Page 6