Return to Dust

by Andrew Lanh

  His condo was a sad fifties apartment-complex-turned-condo—tiny rooms with no moldings or sills. Square, institutional windows overlooked Dumpster-lined parking lots. I was surprised to find an old retired professor there, but perhaps he had no money. I knew the pension he’d get from the college was minimal, but still…Well, no matter. He’d lined the narrow walls with deep bookcases and the effect was pleasant, if claustrophobic. Scanning the walls told me he’d been an economics professor in his glory days. After all, how many other people maintain a shelf—near the living room door and in my sight line—containing at least ten different editions of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, paperback to hardcover?

  He was rushed. “Sit down, sit down. Make this fast. The taxi is coming shortly. This is all foolishness.”

  I sat across from him at the card table as though getting into position to deal a hand of bridge. A nervous, birdlike man, pale jaundiced flesh on tiny bones, a speckle of a man, someone near seventy or older. It was hard to tell his age because he seemed so frail, anxious, jittery, constantly looking toward the door.

  “You okay?”

  He ran his tongue over his upper lip. “At my age when I go into the hospital I fear I’ll never come out. This is overnight, but I fear it’s the cancer coming at me.”

  “I’m sorry. You have cancer?”

  He gave me a slight, bitter smile. “We’ll find out, won’t we? I am tired, tired all the time. Tired. Weak. And sometimes, lying in my hot sweaty bed, I know it’s cancer. Sometimes you don’t need a doctor to tell you what the soul already knows. You wake up feeling hollowness in your bones, emptiness in your blood vessels. You know it.”

  Through most of this he didn’t look at me, but at the end of the declaration—for that’s how it came across—he stared directly into my face. “I’ve seen you around. At the college. One of the new people.” He glanced toward the door.

  “I’ll hear the taxi,” I said helpfully, but he glared at me. “If you want, I can drive you to the hospital.”

  He shook his head back and forth. “Oh, no. They know me.” Again he checked the doorway. “It’s amazing that I think of nothing but dying since my doctor suggested I go into the hospital for this battery of tests. I’ve always fought against negative notions.” He chuckled. “You probably find that amusing coming from an economist. We live our lives sugarcoating depression and recession and…” He stopped. “Talk quickly about Marta.”

  I told him what I was doing, but he got impatient halfway through my explanation, causing me to stop, wave my hand emptily in the air, and wait for him to say something.

  He rolled his eyes. “I’ll tell you what I know so you can put an end to this madcap adventure of yours, young man. First of all, people like us do not commit murder—nor do we know people who do so. Marta once told me that Karen—a niece she dearly loved, I tell you, and constantly did for—was given to fantasy, imaginings, the preposterous gesture. Marta was not murdered. Her suicide was, if anything, unfortunate.”

  “Unfortunate?”

  “I’ve given this a lot of thought. Obviously. We were very close, she and I. We talked like old and cherished friends. I say unfortunate because, well, I think she didn’t plan it. I think it came upon her almost as a whim, although whim is an—unfortunate word here.”

  “But she was depressed, possibly clinically.”

  He waved away my comment. “We all are when we get past sixty, young man. Some at fifty. I started at forty.” He chuckled. “We’ve just gone emphatically over the top of the roller coaster. Dame Fortune’s wheel.” He started to rise, thought better of it, but his eyes fixed on the front door.

  I pushed. “But we’re talking extreme depression here, maybe so severe that…”

  That wave again. “She was deeply depressed because of the death of another friend of ours, Joshua Jennings. They were extremely close. He got really old fast—he’d fallen in his big old house, feared his staircase—and he moved away. She had trouble with that. They hadn’t been talking for some stupid reason—she never would tell me what it was—and then he up and died. A great-niece tended to his last days. Death is something old people do.” He smiled. “I may indulge myself shortly.”

  “Any idea why they had a falling out?”

  “No, but it must have been a lulu.”

  “Why?”

  “Marta gabbed about everything. If she refused to talk, you knew it was something really serious.”

  “But then he died.”

  “I must say, his death seemed to really haunt her, because they hadn’t stayed friends. He died out of state, and she never, well, she never said good-bye. Sad.”

  “Did she tell you this?”

  “In so many words.” He looked to the door, looked down to check on the tidy overnight bag. He touched it possessively, and then looked at me. “We talked of his death and she was sad. So was I. He’d been my friend, too.”

  “But depressed enough to kill herself?”

  He pressed both hands together, closed his eyes and sighed. When he spoke again, his voice was less affected. “That’s the strange part. I didn’t think so. That’s why I say it was whim. Whim.”

  I echoed his word. “Whim?”

  “Yes. She was walking to my home that night—we’d spoken over the phone earlier—and I think it all came together as she crossed the bridge over the river.”

  “What came together?”

  “The death of Joshua, my increasing weakness—I could do less and less—her own aging, her unhappiness with her pathetic nephew, her reservations about her niece—two ungrateful children, really—and the first chill of autumn. The approach of winter. That would make me kill myself. And she’d been drinking a little too much as the result of all of this. I could barely understand her on the phone. I think she approached that final bridge and caught her breath, looked over to my apartment in the distance, and just let herself fall.”

  “But she’d told you she was coming over. She wanted to see you.”

  Richard scratched his neck. I noticed loose dangling flesh, a chicken’s jowls, flapping back and forth.

  “That’s the strange part. We talked on the phone, but briefly, unexpectedly. It was a Sunday, and Sundays are bleak, unreal days for people like us. Killer days. I said come over, she said no, and then, later on, she called and said she would walk over. But she was panicky, her voice so low I could hardly hear her. She was drunk—never a very attractive side of her, I must say, but she also seemed scared.”

  “Scared that someone was going to kill her?”

  Richard started laughing, then stopped, coughing and choking. He composed himself. “My Lord, you young people watch too many TV shows. No, I just think she was afraid of being alone that afternoon.”

  “But you said she was scared.”

  “My interpretation. That’s all.”

  He seemed so frozen, sitting still, packaged for the road, that I needed to move. As I wandered to his bookshelves, he watched me closely. There were no personal photographs in the room. Book-lined shelves, regimented and ordered, and heavy, unattractive furniture hugged the corners of the room. Without the books there would be no personality here. But no popular books, no novels, no magazines. No flashy dust jackets. No, everything had the utter seriousness of an old-time college professor’s office and library.

  Wilcox followed my movements, my fingers on a dusty book jacket.

  “My books miss Marta’s adroit cleaning touch. I’m forced to employ an agency that has no love for books. Marta loved the old volumes. She loved my old books.”

  “That’s right,” I said, “she was your cleaning lady.”

  He bristled. “Young man, Marta was hardly anyone’s cleaning lady in any conventional sense. True, she cleaned houses, but she chose her clientele carefully after her retirement. She didn’t need the money, you see. And so she cleaned fri
ends’ houses….”

  “She cleaned mine,” I interrupted, sitting back down.

  Wilcox looked angry, whether at the idea of her helping me or at my interruption, I couldn’t tell.

  “She liked to keep her hand at it, she told me. Cleaning, for Marta, was really part of the social life she maintained with three or four of us. Marta was a serious, careful woman, true, a woman given to inexplicable biases and hardheaded attitudes. Some so childlike—maybe I should say childish—that she came off as charmingly…primitive. Straightlaced, as it were. But, you see, I find myself smiling when I think about it. She was a woman who liked the company of sparkling, intelligent men. I say this selfishly, because I was one of the chosen.”

  His long reverie had a dreaminess about it that made me fidget. I recalled a junior faculty member referring to Wilcox as a sterile little man. At the time I thought it a cruel, unnecessary remark.

  Silence, long and deadly. He smiled mischievously. “You’ll discover that Marta loved the company of men. I’m sure you’ll discover this as you violate her life. She had little use for the cattiness and foolishness of women her age. One friend, a dreadful boor named Hattie. Doubtless you know that. But Marta, well, I guess you’d say she shone around men. She radiated. She simply liked our company. Now there’s nothing scandalous in this, I hope you realize, but simply affection—yes, that’s the word—affection, genuine and real and true, for the company of men. That, my young man, is why she cleaned apartments, as you call it. That’s probably why she cleaned yours.” He was grinning now.

  “So you were companions, social friends, or…?”

  “I looked forward to her visits. I’m alone most of the time. We’d chat and we’d walk for lunch, and she’d entertain me with her nonsensical stories of Atlantic City and slot machines and Don Rickles shows. It was all very amusing. I couldn’t stop her once she began.”

  “That sounds patronizing.”

  His eyes became steady. “You don’t understand.”

  “Help me.”

  “We liked each other.”

  There were sounds coming from the street. I talked faster. “You mentioned Marta’s problems with her nephew Davey Corcoran?”

  He grimaced. “A loser. But I never met him, to tell you the truth. Marta insisted he was charming and handsome in his early days. I told her we were all charming and handsome in our early days.” He chuckled. “But they were close back when. Years back. He wrestled with bouts of extreme Catholicism. In and out of church. Madness, really. A zealot, then one who lapsed. He drove her places, flattered her, you know, that sort of thing. But something happened. She wouldn’t tell me but I do know that she refused to mention his name. One time I mentioned him and she stormed away, didn’t even stay for lunch.”

  “How’d you meet her?”

  He smiled. “I’d seen her around, of course. A woman who liked to be looked at. This is a small town, you know, and I saw her at the college when she worked on the housekeeping staff. I came to know her when we all went on that trip the college sponsored to Russia in 2003.”

  “You went?” I was surprised. I’d spotted the brochure at Marta’s home.

  “So many of us from the college went. Joshua Jennings, in fact. That’s when he met her. It’s when all of us discovered Marta’s charming personality. Her gift of—vignette. We had a great time. A bunch of old professors—and Marta. Some students, of course, but God knows what they did.” He pointed to one of the cabinets across the room, an elaborate oriental lacquered chest. I walked up to it. One small, almost hidden shelf had a few items spread about, randomly: a black enamel box with a painting of peasants at a well, a white-gold pin shaped like a white-birch tree, a Russian Orthodox icon of Jesus on the cross. Even a tarnished school medal of Lenin. It was a tourist’s travel bag of goodies. I reached for the icon.

  “Don’t touch anything,” he yelled. “I saved those idiotic mementos because I am reminded of our beautiful trip, which was also my last one. At one time I traveled a lot.”

  “Was there any tension on that trip—I mean all you gentlemen and Marta?”

  He ignored me, so I shifted questions.

  “You mentioned that she and Joshua Jennings had a falling out.”

  His tongue licked the corner of his mouth and then disappeared. “I don’t know what about.” Said deliberately, harshly.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  The veins on the back of his skinny, speckled hands popped up. His eyes got darker, the craggy face murkier. “That’s rude, young man.”

  Persistent, I corrected, “You must have thought about it.”

  And then, his eyes closed tight, he talked quietly, circling and recircling his words, bobbing his head into his chest, swallowing his words. “I don’t know what happened but I often guessed and when I asked her—point-blankly one day—she got curt and left early. When I asked Joshua, he babbled about her cruelty to a Spanish gardener or something…or a garden man…I don’t know. Joshua Jennings was my friend but too—too what? Too manipulative. He flattered her as much as she him. I think she was dazzled by his old money and old New England name and his aristocratic background. He was a snob, but to her it seemed like polish. She was, after all, a little Irish girl who married a Polish nobody. I believe she pressured him for something and he got scared, inveterate old bachelor that he was…”

  “Do you think she wanted marriage?”

  “With that old bastard?” He looked up at me. “I don’t know and I don’t care what happened, but I know something happened and I bet she was the instigator. She probably envisioned herself the mistress of the manor. Foolish, no? She drove him out of state, I bet, because she could be forever at you, at you, pressuring you. She was a driven woman when she wanted something. She wouldn’t let go of something. Sometimes you wanted to shake her…” He stopped, stunned by his own words, and trembled.

  He stared into my face.

  “She liked me,” he said finally.

  “But she didn’t like you enough?”

  Now he looked at me, his glare hard. “I couldn’t understand it.” He sounded bewildered. “Not as much as I liked her. But that was true for all of us.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She started to withdraw,” he said. “I’d call and call, and she’d eventually show up. But”—now the words were spoken through tight lips—“she was into other things. Her words: ‘into other things.’ Things—like I was a thing.” His index finger curled around the arm of the chair, and the skin, already pasty white, became translucent.

  “What other things?”

  “I never found out.”

  I leaned in closer, bringing my face near his. I was fascinated that this man could move through such a range of attitudes toward Marta in such a small space of time—all the while slumped in that hardback chair, the heavy overcoat slung neatly over his shoulders. He was still talking. Marta had treated him cruelly in the final days. She’d been beautiful and loving and wonderful and funny and sweet. But all this anger was whispered now, his voice scarcely raised, the quiet in the room still there, the muffled street sounds wafting in, as I watched a man waffle back and forth between love and anger. Here, I thought, was an old man who’d been left, felt betrayed, who still loved and was still confused. But as I watched him I realized it would be impossible for this man, so weak, so tired and skinny, to have murdered the robust, lively Marta.

  At that moment, in the silence when neither of us spoke, a taxi blared its shrill horn, and we both jumped, startled out of the dim oppressive silence.

  “My taxi,” he roared. “Out.” He pointed. He jumped up, grabbed his overnight case, and pushed me out the door.

  As I watched him rush to the waiting taxi, striding ahead of me with sure steps, I revised my simplistic reading of him as feeble and delicate. Here was a man whose moves were deliberate and forceful. The taxi had
already pulled away by the time I made it to the sidewalk. Richard Wilcox only looked fragile seated in a gray room. When he had to move, he moved.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Karen and I met for lunch at a small Vietnamese eatery in the South End of Hartford, a tiny place tucked between an overstocked Asian grocery and a raucous karaoke club that specialized in top-forty American pop songs sung in Vietnamese. Slick-haired New Wave Vietnamese gang boys sang Lady Gaga and Robin Thicke to their pouting girlfriends. Hank first brought me to the restaurant, where he proceeded to “re-educate” my Vietnamese taste buds, as he termed it. I went there a lot. I suggested it to Karen when she told me she had to be in Hartford for an appointment later that afternoon.

  I arrived at twelve and she was already there. I spotted her standing outside the restaurant as I pulled into the lot. Above her head the flashing neon sign read Pho Saigon, and near the door a half dozen little Asian kids played leapfrog with one another, toppling over, bumping, blocking the doorway. Giddy teenaged Asian boys in hip-hop jeans and buzz cuts over blank mocking faces watched everyone. Karen looked nervous, standing there, the little kids brushing her dress, oblivious, weaving around her, their high-pitched mixture of English and Vietnamese jarring and shrill. When she saw me she smiled.

  “I’ve never eaten Vietnamese food.”

  “I’m your guide.” I bowed.

  Inside, under a garish overhead light, with the discount store streamers and the gaudy dragon-etched mirrors on stuccoed walls, we tucked ourselves into a booth, and she immediately started fiddling with chopsticks. She was nervous.

  “Relax. We’re no longer at war.”

  “I’m not nervous about being here,” she said, a little angry. “I’m just nervous about what you have to tell me.”

  Now I laughed. “Well, we can both relax. I have nothing to tell you yet.”

  “Nothing?”

  “At least nothing along the lines warranted by your generous retainer.”

  She looked disappointed. But she smiled, sipping the tea that the waiter placed before her. “Good tea.”