“Did your mom have a rough childhood?”
“Oh yeah. That’s the other thing I wanted to tell you. She never talked about it, she’s very ashamed, but her own mom was batshit.”
We’d almost reached the midpoint on the Walkway—below us a tugboat was pulling a barge downriver.
“Your grandmother?”
“Yes, I mean she was really crazy, schizophrenic. When Sally was about five she was institutionalized.” She pointed to the east bank, “Right over there, at Hudson River State Hospital.”
Hudson River State was notorious in psychiatric circles. A massive gothic complex that first opened in the late nineteenth century, it’s original good intentions gradually gave way to warehousing, neglect, and even abuse of its patients, the foreboding red brick buildings a perfect symbol for the horrors within. It was finally closed for good in 2003.
“And when did she die?”
“She killed herself when Sally was fifteen. Like I said, none of this has ever been discussed.”
“But you and Natasha talked about it?”
“Oh sure. And we’d ask Sally questions but she’d always brush us off. She has this weird ability to just shut out things she can’t handle. Wish I’d inherited that.”
“Does your mom have any relatives still in the area?”
“Her brother, crazy ass Uncle Bob; he still lives in Poughkeepsie. I’ve only met him once, she keeps him hidden but good. But I’m sick of talking about my mother. She’s a stone-cold bitch and I hate her.”
She reached into her bag, took out a simple metal box and opened it. It was filled with Natasha’s grainy gray remains. She reached her hand in and raked her fingers through the ashes, like she was trying to connect with her sister one last time.
“Thanks for looking out for Natasha,” she said.
It meant a lot to me that she said that. “Hey, we’re all in this together.”
“You know when I was really little, me and Natasha were close, she was my big sister, we’d play hide and seek, watch TV, do each other’s hair. But we were sent to different schools, even in grade school, and we never got close again. But in the last few months we were starting to. We were both scared. But we realized that when it came to family, all we had was each other.”
She grew very still and her eyes filled with tears. Then she reached out over the railing and tipped the box—Natasha’s remains, picked up by the breeze, billowed through the air and down to the river below.
FORTY-SEVEN
When I got back to my car, I called Josie, “Can you see if you can find me an address for a Robert Cleary in Poughkeepsie?”
“Sure thing. Let me get to the computer … here we go, there’s a Robert Cleary at 218 Henderson Street.”
I punched the address into my map app. “Thanks.”
“Listen, Janet’s Planet is a little disorganized. How would you feel about me taking an inventory of your stock?”
“Grateful and beholden.”
“I’ll accept both.”
I headed over the Mid-Hudson Bridge and into Poughkeepsie. Po’town is the biggest city in the mid-Hudson area, and it’s a pretty interesting place, struggling but with lots of cool archi-
tecture, a multi-everything population, home to Vassar and its bucolic campus. Like a lot of the valley, you feel it has turned a corner and its worst days are behind it.
Henderson Street was just outside of downtown in a semi-rundown neighborhood of small single-family houses. Robert Cleary’s house was only partially visible because the front yard and driveway were piled with mounds of stuff—rotting furniture, cardboard boxes filled with who-knows-what, old appliances; some of the mounds were covered with orange or blue tarps, others just sat there moldering. The house itself had gutters hanging loose, torn window screens, bent siding. I made my way up to the front door and knocked. No answer. I knocked again. Then again.
Finally a man’s voice called, “Go away!”
“Can I talk to you a minute?”
“Get your ass off my property!”
“I want to talk to you about your mom, Rose Cleary.”
Silence.
Then, in a much smaller voice, “What about her?”
“I’m just interested in her, in what she was like.”
More silence, then the sounds of about a dozen locks being opened, finally the door opened a crack—a sickening moldy smell poured out. Then a sliver of face, one half-mad eye that looked at me with great wary curiosity.
“You from social services?”
“No, I’m not.”
The sliver of face pressed closer to the crack, the eye looked me up and down.
“Who’re you?”
“My name is Janet, I’m a friend of your niece, Natasha. She was murdered.”
“Hope they got her mother, too.”
“I want to talk about your mother.”
Something softened in the eye. “She’s dead.”
“I know she is. And I know she had a hard life.”
“You got that right. Wasn’t fair.”
“I know it wasn’t. It was sad. Sad for her and sad for you.”
The eyeball looked me right in the eye, a challenge. I met the look.
The door opened halfway. Bob Cleary looked like he could be anywhere from forty to ninety, as skinny as a cadaver, all bones and angles, the palest skin, enormous cheekbones jutting out, full head of dirty—really dirty—blonde hair.
He scrutinized me one last time, then opened the door all the way, turned and walked down the hallway—correction, the tiny path that wound through the detritus that was piled almost to the ceiling. Out of the corner of my eye I caught sight of a mouse running over the debris, then another. The smell was almost overpowering—animal excrement and mold and rotting food and I’ll stop there.
I followed Bob down the pathway and into a room near the back of the house. Again, stuff was piled almost to the ceiling—newspapers, clothes, plastic bags filled with who-knows-what, old lamps and clocks and appliances. There was one tiny circle that was semi-clear, it held a recliner, a TV—Bob was watching QVC on mute—a microwave and a half-fridge.
Bob Cleary wasn’t the first hoarder I’d met, and the condition definitely has varying degrees of severity (on a scale of 1–10, I’d peg Cleary at 11).
Although the room looked like an undifferentiated mass of junk to me, Bob—in classic hoarder behavior—went right to one of the piles, rummaged around for just a second and then pulled out a photo album. He looked down at it for a moment, intently, ran his hand over it, sort of reverentially, then he handed it to me. Cutout letters across the front read MOMMY.
He sat down in the recliner and watched me. I leafed through the album—there were black-and-white shots of Rose Cleary as a little girl, a pretty girl with a bright smile, dressed for church, playing at a lake, posing outside her house with her parents. I’d seen a thousand pictures just like these during my career as a collector—hopeful records of hopeful moments, I found them evocative and touching.
Rose was a teenager in the later shots—which had that unmistakable 1950s look—laughing with friends, working behind a soda-fountain, on the arms of a young man I assumed was her husband-to-be, but there was a hint of wildness in her eyes, of the madness that would later claim her. There were wedding pictures, heartbreaking shots of Rose in a long white dress that she looked uncomfortable in. In one shot she was looking off to the side, distracted, troubled—had she begun to hear voices, to hallucinate, was she hiding a terrible secret from her groom, from the world, from herself ?
Then came the Sears-Roebuck shots of Rose with little Sally and Robert. Sally was a few years older and was already filled with determination, looking straight into the camera. Robert seemed a little dazed, and Rose is starting to look crazy, her mouth twisted slightly and covered in too much red lipstick.
There were only a few more pictures and they were obviously taken on the grounds of Hudson River State. In them she’s wearing a thin hou
sedress and is either smiling like a madwoman—manic, teeth bared—or looking dazed and heavily medicated, barely there. In one shot she just looked like the saddest person in the world, a woman who knew that she was sick beyond repair and had lost her children, her life. In these last shots, little Robert is protective of his mother, either hugging her leg or standing in front of her, tall, chest out. Sally, on the other hand, stands away from her mother, embarrassed and angry.
I closed the album and when I looked up, Bob Cleary was crying.
I had found what I was looking for and there really wasn’t much more to say.
“Thank you for showing me this.”
“Can you give me some money?”
I handed him forty dollars and left.
FORTY-EIGHT
I headed back across the river, trying to piece it all together. It was impossible not to feel for the poor guy. And for all the Wolfsons—the father, Sally, Julia, Natasha. And, of course, for the original victim: Rose Cleary. Struck down by a terrible, incurable disease. The legacy of her madness was still being played out.
Sally spent her childhood in the shadow of her mother’s schizophrenia and that helped me understand the root of her narcissism. How painful and confusing and enraging it must have been for her to watch Rose manifest the bizarre early symptoms of the disease, be institutionalized, slowly degenerate, and then die a terrifying and lonely death. Sally was just a kid trying to make sense of the world, and when a child isn’t receiving the love and attention she needs from her parents, she’ll often turn inward for that love, create a private Idaho where all the attention is on her, where she is loved and valued. My hunch was that little Sally Cleary did just that.
And although grown-up Sally may have wanted children for a lot of intellectual and social reasons—to solidify her marriage, meet the world’s expectations, prove how capable she was—my guess was that she was completely unprepared emotionally to surrender the spotlight to her new co-stars, to nurture them, to see Natasha and Julia as anything but extensions of herself. And, critically, to be deeply envious of her daughters. They, after all, had the affluent and seemingly secure childhood that she was denied. And—as children will—they took their own privilege for granted, with no understanding of their mom’s suffering.
There are a lot of myths about motherhood, chief among them that all women have the maternal instinct. The truth is that a fair number of mothers are ambivalent, and a small percentage actively hate their child pretty much from day one. Suddenly there’s a new and completely dependent life in her arms. Goodbye, freedom; hello, responsibility. Then there’s money—forget that Xmas trip to Cabo. And hubby is cooing over the kid and may be less interested in sex, at least with mom. Of course, the world now defines her just that way—as a mother. The kid sucks up all the attention—for a lot of women this can be unbearable, engendering envy and even rage.
Since motherhood is supposedly sacred, women feel guilty about these feelings and they play out in passive-aggressive ways. Sally never opening Natasha’s CD is a classic example. A lot of my most f’ed up clients had mothers who should never have taken on the job.
I headed east toward New Paltz. There was one more stop I wanted to make. I had this gnawing feeling that I was missing some vital connection in the puzzle, and that Pavel and Denton were the missing links.
I headed up over the Shawangunks as night descended over the valley. I drove past Mohonk Mountain House and down through the hip little hamlet of High Falls, home to offbeat restaurants, reclusive movie stars, and one mother of a waterfall. I continued on into Stone Ridge and parked in town near the start of Leggett Road. I sat for a moment gathering myself, then I grabbed a small flashlight and set off. Bumpland was about a mile down the road, and I tried to look like an ordinary soul out for a little nighttime hoof as I hustled in that direction.
I reached the western edge of the estate, where its stone walls began. I hopped over the wall and set off across the expansive, tree-dotted lawns toward the garage. The gnomes and elves that dotted the lawns were hardly a reassuring sight, in the darkness they all seemed to be moving toward me—like I was in a horror movie and they were going to tear me to shreds before gleefully devouring my internal organs.
I approached the garage. There were no lights on in Pavel’s apartment. Looking past it, I saw the glowing main house with a bunch of cars parked in front—maybe Lauren Parker-Lipschitz was over there finalizing the joie.
I reached the garage and ducked inside. It was dark but I could make out the hulking shape of the Bentley and the Rolls. I headed for the stairs at the back and went up. The door was unlocked and I went in. There was a little bit of ambient light pouring in the windows and I waited while my eyes adjusted. Slowly things came into focus. The place looked even sparser than before, lonely, abandoned, as if no one spent time here anymore. And why should Pavel hang in these humble quarters, now that he was weeks away from being lord of Bumpland, loaded to the gills? Although judging by Octavia’s amorous appetites he was going to be earning that dough.
I went into the kitchen and started to open drawers and cupboards and shine the flashlight on the contents. It was all pretty barebones. I went into a nearby closet—nothing but broom, mop, trash bags. I slowly worked my way around the whole room, trying not to miss any potential hiding place. Cards, chewing gum, cigarettes, maps, a few books, old copies of Details, Maxim, and Men’s Health, a lot of dust, not much else. I went into the bathroom, just a few half-empty shampoo bottles and slivers of soap, no toothbrush even, the medicine chest had a bottle of Advil, a roll of dental floss, a pack of razors. I rummaged around under the mattress, then opened the closet. Most of the clothes were gone, there were a couple of pairs of shoes on the floor. I reached my hand inside them, nothing. I checked the pockets on the shirts, slipped my hand into the pocket of a leather windbreaker—and felt a prescription bottle. I took it out and shined the flashlight on the label.
The drug was oxycodone. The patient was Collier Denton. The prescribing doctor was Howard Wolfson.
FORTY-NINE
I pocketed the bottle and got the hell out of there as stealthily as I could, dashed across the grounds, and made my way up Leggett Road to my car. Driving back to Sawyerville, I felt strangely exhilarated: this was the missing link I was looking for. Howard Wolfson had supplied Pavel with the drugs that he had used to get Natasha hooked and send her into the downward spiral that ended in her death. But the prescription had been written to Collier Denton—how did Denton connect to Howard Wolfson? I needed to have a little one-on-one with Wolfson. Soon.
When I got home, Josie had a late dinner waiting—an amazing lasagna, Italian bread, and a salad. It felt pretty damn cozy to walk upstairs and smell garlic and herbs, to sit down to one of my favorite meals.
“This is dee-licious,” I said.
“Thanks.”
“Did you make it over to Sawyerville High today?”
“I did. We came to a mutual agreement that I would start in the spring semester.”
“A mutual agreement?”
“Yes. I had my school in Troy e-mail them my transcript and they agreed to my plan. I want to use the fall to get up to speed at Chow, and get Janet’s Planet inventoried—and up on the web, if you’ll let me.”
“Hey, fine with me. And did you make that appointment to see the orthopedist?”
“I did, yes. Thank you.”
I filled Josie in on the latest developments. “I’d appreciate any information you could find on Howard Wolfson.”
After dinner, Josie went over to Chow, I did the dishes and then called Julia Wolfson and got her dad’s cell number, which I called.
“This is Howard.”
“Hi, this is Janet Petrocelli, the friend of your daughter Natasha. We met at her memorial.”
“What can I do for you?”
“I’d like ten minutes of your time.”
“I can give you five right now.”
“Actually I’d rather meet in
person, if that’s at all possible.”
“Can you give me any idea of what this is about?”
“Did your wife tell you I think Natasha was murdered?”
There was a pause. When he spoke again, his voice was softer. “She mentioned something. I appreciate your concern for Natasha, but she was a troubled girl. I think she committed suicide.”
“That’s what I’d like to discuss with you. Just a few minutes of your time. That’s all I’m asking for. I’ll be happy to drive down to you.”
There was another pause.
“My wife is in Los Angeles, researching our book on Natasha; a lot of her friends live out there. She’ll be back the day after tomorrow.”
“It’s you that I want to talk to.”
He exhaled with a sigh.
“Where are you?” he asked.
“Up in Sawyerville.”
“I’m actually having dinner with a friend in Elka Park tomorrow night.”
“That’s just a few miles from where Natasha died. Have you seen the spot?”
There was a short pause. “I haven’t. Sally and I are planning on paying a visit—we may end the book there. It’s going to be very tough for my wife, so maybe seeing it myself first is a good idea.”
“Why don’t I meet you in Elka Park and drive you to the trail. Then I’ll bring you back. The whole thing shouldn’t take more than twenty minutes.”
“All right. Let’s do that.”
FIFTY
In the late nineteenth century, before cars were invented and travel became a breeze, a lot of fancy families in cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Boston packed up—servants and all—and went away for the whole summer. They liked to build rambling old summer places near each other so they’d have folks of their own class to hang out with. In the Catskills there are several “parks” that date from that era, enclaves created when groups of like-minded families got together and bought big chunks of land, then each took a piece and built a “cottage” on it.
Dead by Any Other Name Page 16