by Andrew Lanh
Now I watched as she strolled through the parking lot adjacent to the arcade. She’d asked to meet at one o’clock—she’d get someone to cover the shop—and it was already fifteen past. She moved quickly, her body half turned away as she tried to shake off an old woman who trailed her, touching her elbow, pointing back to the shop. Karen looked harried, yet her strides were deliberate, purposeful. Her phone voice echoed—hesitant yet determined. A curious combination. But whispered, too.
I stood up as she approached my table. I smiled but she didn’t, which made me feel foolish. She was sizing me up—I recalled her stance at that party, her arms folded, that judgmental look in her eyes—and she nodded formally with a slight wave of her hand. Then she reached across the table to shake my hand. Her nails were painted a dark red.
“Hello, Rick.”
At that moment the waitress hurried over, but Karen, sitting down and adjusting the sweater she wore, ignored her.
“Two espressos,” I told the young girl. Karen nodded.
“Do you want to hear the special of the day?” the waitress asked, hovering. Young, chubby, with cobalt-blue lipstick and matching eyebrows, her hair streaked with blue and gold, she probably was a college girl, maybe even at Farmington College, its stately brick and pilloried buildings standing just down Main Street across from the town green. I didn’t recognize her, though. I teach there part-time, but most of my charges are beefy ex-Marine crew-cut guys planning careers in Criminal Justice. When she moved her arm, pointing at a chalk-covered blackboard over the counter, I spotted a run of red and green tattoos down her arm. I told her we’d wait to order.
“I know I sounded odd on the phone last night,” Karen began, smiling slightly. “It’s just that I had to work myself up to call. At midnight—well, I had to then. Or never.”
“I was awake.”
A pause. “I didn’t care. Sorry, but I’d been planning it for days and I kept wondering if I was losing my mind and…”
I broke in. “You said murder.”
As I said the word, evenly, stressing it, she started, a small sound escaping her throat. For a second she closed her eyes. I expected her to cry. But when she opened her eyes, I saw hot anger in those pale blue eyes, now grown steely.
“My aunt would never commit suicide.”
“You sound so sure.”
“I am.”
“But the police…”
“I don’t give a damn.” She breathed in. “I just don’t.”
Marta Kowalski’s bizarre death three weeks back had surprised everyone in Farmington, the affluent town outside of Hartford, Connecticut. It was the story everyone talked of for days. Marta was a woman people knew but scarcely thought about. A sensible woman in her sixties, a meticulously neat woman who wore too much makeup when she scoured your bathroom. Moral as all get out—she’d tell you so in case you missed her stellar character. Well, I never considered her as someone who, in the awesome grip of despair or depression, would hurl herself off the old stone bridge that arched over the Farmington River. A widow, Marta had been a housekeeper at Farmington College, retiring a few years back and living on her husband’s pension, eventually taking a few cleaning jobs here and there.
“To keep the old hand in,” she once told me.
One of the places she cleaned was my apartment.
She certainly didn’t need the money. Unsolicited, she’d shared that information more than once with me—and to perfect strangers at Walmart. She carried her elastic-bound weathered bank books with her, tucked into a huge black patent-leather purse, the kind women carry to bingo games at church halls—and she would produce evidence of her modest but comfortable wealth at the slightest provocation. She wore her shallowness like a badge of honor. I rarely thought about her, even as I wrote a check and left it on the hall stand. Like everyone else, I was startled by her sudden death. She left no suicide note. Hearing of her death, I’d felt guilty because I didn’t think she had an interior life worth considering. I wasn’t happy with my own moral lapse.
I looked into Karen’s face. “Is there any evidence of foul play?”
She paused, drew her lips into a thin line. “No.”
“Then how…?”
She threw back her head, defiant. “The coroner said she died from injuries from her fall. To her head. Neck. A shoulder broken.”
“So you’re saying she was deliberately pushed?”
“Well, something like that.” She stared over my shoulder.
I waited, but she offered nothing else.
“But Karen…”
The waitress returned with the coffee, determined to take our orders, and we chose quickly. Only designer food was available. I ordered homemade rye topped with oriental-style free-range chicken marinated in sesame oil. Karen pointed to beef drenched in oyster sauce served on watercress from the community garden across town. The chef had too many spices to work with. Everything on the menu was described in long paragraphs with too many adjectives—succulent, refreshing, inquisitive, innovative, startling, exotic, beguiling. Beguiling? I opted for that dish—the running-wild chicken. Few things beguile me. Women, I suppose, and Billie Holiday music. Not food.
“No, listen to me.” Karen’s voice was hard, metallic. “You gotta investigate her murder, Rick Van Lam.” She stared into my face. “What are your rates?”
I sat back, watched her closely. I was most likely the only PI she knew of. After all, there weren’t many in Farmington Center, and I was probably the only one whose apartment had been cleaned by the allegedly murdered woman. Talk about your job referrals.
“Slow down, Karen,” I told her. But the look on her face gave me pause. Humorless, deadly serious, a pinched tightness around the eyes.
“I guess I have to convince you.”
“I’m listening.”
“I can’t convince you.” She took a sip of the espresso. “I don’t have a shred of evidence that it wasn’t suicide. I can’t prove anything. I can’t. But I have the money, and you, well, do this for a living, right?”
I shook my head, grinned. “Sort of. Actually I do insurance investigations out of Hartford. But I do get to turn down jobs, you know.”
She sat back in the seat, breathed in, sighed. “I’m sorry. I know I’m coming on like a speeding truck here, but, you see, I can’t sleep at night.”
I tapped the table. “Look, Karen, suicide is difficult to deal with.” I knew I sounded a little patronizing, though I was trying not to. “It’s shattering, it’s…I remember there wasn’t a note.”
“Yes, no note,” she echoed.
I shrugged. “True, not everyone leaves a note—last thoughts to a world they’re leaving behind.” I stared into her face. “Especially if you hate that world.”
Karen’s fingers tightened around the small espresso cup. I thought it might crack. “I hate hearing you say it that way. My aunt didn’t hate the world. She loved life.” She looked around the room. “She—that sounds simple but it’s true. That’s my point.”
“What?”
“That’s my evidence.”
I bit my lip. “That she loved life?”
I panicked. How could I get out of this sad scene diplomatically? I wasn’t about to take money from a woman who was hurting, whose dark grief made her suspect foul play. Loved ones left behind, of course, have a lot of trouble with suicide, I’ve learned—they are being told that death is more beautiful than they are. Not always welcome news.
Karen saw something in my face. “I’m not crazy.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way.”
She was wearing a light blue sweater, a little baggy in the elbows. I watched her body twist under it. She had an appealing way of flicking her head back whenever she finished saying something. I hadn’t had a serious romance for a year or more, just bittersweet moments with faculty secretaries that
drifted into silence and indifference. I tried to keep romance separate from business, but I sometimes faltered. Now I wanted to avoid looking at that sweater. Her skinny hands with the prominent blue veins, nervous hands—focus on them. Her nails were long, manicured, but painted that shrill red. There were traces of dried paint on her knuckles. An artist’s weathered hands, dull with flecks of burnt sienna and white titanium. Out of nowhere I suddenly entertained an image of those fingers around her aunt’s neck.
She spotted me looking at her hands and suddenly dropped them into her lap.
“Like everyone else,” she went on, “I resigned myself to Aunt Marta’s suicide. Not that it made any sense, mind you. Marta was a devout Catholic, you know. But who was I to say? The police report and all…”
“The autopsy?” I assumed there was one.
She didn’t answer me.
“What about her state of mind? Was she unhappy?”
“Aunt Marta was really depressed lately. I knew that. You could see it in her face. She never smiled anymore.”
“When did you last see her?”
“A week before…maybe. She was bothered by something, but she wouldn’t talk about it.” She lowered her voice when a couple of older women were seated at the next table. She strained her neck, trying to see them. “I thought that was someone I knew,” she said. “I’m a little nervous talking in such a public place about something like—like murder.” She whispered the last word, but it still must have startled her. For a second her mouth trembled.
“Karen, depressed people kill themselves.”
She leaned into me, her fingers almost touching mine. “I know she didn’t kill herself. In my bones, Rick. I was going through some of her papers—you wouldn’t believe the boxes of letters and coupons and newspaper clippings she left behind—and there was a packet from her travel agent. Two tickets to Las Vegas. Right there. For three weeks after the day she died.” She rushed her words. “She’d be leaving this week.”
“So what’re you saying?”
“I’m saying that she had planned this super vacation to Las Vegas with her friend Hattie. They had tickets and an itinerary and hotel accommodations—all in this little packet from Argosy Travel in Hartford. Coupons for free slot-machine money. That sort of thing. She dies on Friday night, the middle of October. At home there’s a ticket to Vegas the first week of November. She was going on a damn vacation. Come on. You see?”
She sat back, triumphant, satisfied. The look on her face saddened me—expansive and smug, the face of a brilliant child who feels she has won an irrefutable argument. Absently I rubbed my palms together. When I’d been on the police force, I’d witnessed so many times when the people who killed themselves—or even killed others—had made elaborate plans for the next day or even the next year—sometimes with the very people they ultimately confessed to murdering. “Karen…”
The food arrived and we delved into understuffed sandwiches and more espresso, which was making me wired. I had never eaten there. I purposely avoided the fashionable luncheonettes—all retro Victorian tinplate advertisement and spit-clean chrome polish—that had become trendy in this part of swanky Farmington, along with exotic crafts boutiques, avant-garde art galleries, gourmet food shops, and fern bars with Peruvian wicker and bitter local wine. Book shops with coffee table books on New England covered bridges and rediscovered Connecticut Indian trails. Surprised as I was that the food was delicious, I noticed that Karen stopped eating after a few bites. I’d already finished half a sandwich, gobbling it down, licking my lips like a comic-strip character, and I got embarrassed. I always ate too fast—the result of being a little boy in a Saigon orphanage. Or so says the beautiful psychologist who used to be my wife.
“Buying a ticket for a vacation doesn’t mean much for someone who is really unhappy.”
“It’s more than that.” Karen pushed her plate away so she could fold her arms on the table. “She was gloomy, yes, but she said something that convinced me—when I remembered it later.” Karen’s eyes got wide, demanding. “She said in three more years she would be seventy and…and…she smiled and said she wanted to travel somewhere—like Europe or California. She’d promised herself. At seventy. Because both of her parents had died in their early sixties. Her husband died in his early fifties. Her brother—my father—died young. Forty-seven. We don’t live long—all of us. You see, Rick, she saw seventy as a badge…of survival.”
I scratched my head. “Okay, I see that. But what about the depression?”
“Yes, she was depressed. A few weeks before, we learned that Joshua Jennings passed away in New York.”
“They were friends?”
“She was real close, but…well, I always thought a lot of it was in her head, you know. She cleaned his house, but they liked each other.”
A strange coupling, I thought. The gaudy woman and the severely conservative old Yankee.
“I knew Joshua a little.”
She wasn’t listening. “Sort of close.” She hesitated. “For years, I guess. You know, this is a small town. Joshua and Marta got friendly when they went on the same tour of Russia a few years back. The college sponsored it.”
Joshua Jennings had been an ancient man, as pale and dry as starched laundry, in his late seventies, maybe early eighties, a long-time Farmington resident, a wizened little man, stooped over, always appearing in town with a neat Van Dyke beard, a lion’s head cane, and Dapper Dan suits years out of style. He’d been a fixture at the college for a few years after his retirement from teaching at the exclusive boys’ academy in the town center. After years spent drumming history and Latin into boys in neat blazers and caps, he’d retired and crossed the street to the college. I’d seen him at college functions. A man who missed the classroom and believed his money made him wanted. He created a lecture series no one attended. Once, dragged to one, I heard him ramble on about a minor Latin poet whose name meant nothing to me then—or now. In recent years he’d become a hermit.
Karen grew quiet. Outside, I noticed, it had started to rain. Light, early November rain, a brisk wind rustling the last dead leaves of the hawthorn trees that dotted the sidewalk. Farmington is a town of old people, I thought, many with tons of old money. Quietly I watched the sloppy end of autumn.
“My aunt had a special place for Joshua. They were friends. Good friends. They had some stupid, mean fight, she told me, and they stopped speaking. He refused to reconcile. He moved away, and then the next thing she knew he dies in New York. She was depressed.”
“They never patched up their differences?”
She shrugged. “No, that’s why she was so down.”
I waited a heartbeat. “What did they fight about?”
She looked away. “Aunt Marta thought they should have a life together. You know, two old people…traveling, laughing…”
“But Joshua was a crusty old bachelor.”
Again the shrug. “Marta was a foolish romantic, Rick.”
“And he said no.”
“Worse—he said to leave him alone. It knocked her for a loop. Then he died.”
“You’re not persuading me she wasn’t suicidal.”
“You don’t understand. You don’t kill yourself because your friends die around you.”
“It happens. He died weeks before she did.”
“Yeah, so what? You get sad when friends die. Other friends died and she got sad.” She looked pleadingly at me. “It’s worse when you’re older. She was an old lady. You read the obits and remember when you were young. And Aunt Marta liked her little quarrels, her feuds. A hard woman. But you don’t kill yourself.”
“Nothing else bothering her?”
“No,” Karen answered too quickly.
“You sure?”
“I can’t be sure, you know.” She locked eyes with mine. “We had a good relationship, Rick, but we didn’t talk about
serious topics. She didn’t approve of my life—unmarried, living alone, in my thirties. Sometimes we fought, like families do. But once a week we met like clockwork, usually for lunch.”
“You don’t sound like you welcomed it.”
She smiled. “It was a routine she demanded. She could be, well—imperious. My brother, Davey, and I were her only relatives, you know.”
“Davey?”
“Do you know Davey? Works at the Farmington Garden Center.”
I did, vaguely, in the way I knew all these people. For some reason I’d never connected Davey Corcoran with Karen Corcoran—brother and sister. Her brother was an irritating man who sometimes parked in the handicapped-only designated spots around town. Or, at least, I’d seen him do it once. That was enough to make me dislike him.
“I know who he is.”
Karen ran her tongue over her lips. “My aunt didn’t like him, had nothing to do with him. They didn’t even talk. I have to tell you that.”
“Why not?”
“She wouldn’t tell me.”
“But you have an idea, no?”
“He isn’t doing anything with his life. They used to go to Mass together. He could be like her—passionate about Jesus. Then he stopped. They had some fierce fights, I know.” She deliberated, as if considering where her words were going. Her eyes darted nervously, trying to avoid eye contact. “But that doesn’t mean Davey would hurt her. I didn’t mean that.”
The waitress asked if we wanted dessert. Karen, I noticed, didn’t even look up because she was staring intently into my face. I waved the waitress away.
“Why are you so sure he’s not involved?”
She didn’t answer for a while. Finally, a rush of words. “I think I should tell you that Davey was left nothing in my aunt’s will. A couple of bucks, I think. Something to make it legal.”
“And you?”
Sheepishly, her head dipped into her chest. “I was left over a hundred grand.”
“Nice.”
“It didn’t make me happy. This is the money she got from her husband’s insurance. I didn’t know she had it. I knew she had some savings because she always waved those damn bank books in everyone’s face, but I never thought it was that much.”