by Andrew Lanh
She looked familiar, though I’d never met her. I realized I’d seen—well, her prototype, writ large. Years back on an early Sunday morning in Las Vegas, walking through the glitter casino on the way to the checkout desk, I spotted so many women like her: silver-strapped heels, tight reddish-orange cocktail dresses holding in a little too much flesh, the hair too-many times blonde so that it looked washed out and vaguely like straw, the overly made-up face with the eyeliner too deep and too indigo, the lipstick too coral and too smeared. I realized that Hattie was, alarmingly, a type. I know, if you push it, we’re all types, but she was a cultivated type, hothouse variety.
“Marta was my best friend,” she was saying in a soupy voice. Without asking, she poured me coffee, handing me the cup. She already had her own, a trace of lipstick on the rim, and a burning cigarette in a Trump Casino tourist ashtray next to it. The coffee was hot and amazingly tasty.
I checked out her apartment. Filigreed lace on cascading, white curtains, on the oversized lamps, on walls. Frills, pink and white. Baby’s breath clusters in faux-Hopi pots. A fluffy carpet, periwinkle blue, with candy-cane pink-and-white stripes woven through it. It looked as if an errant child had skipped through the room trailing melting, sticky candy. There were dolls everywhere—in cradles, clustered around plants and books and magazines. All of them stared at me with blank, unmoving eyes—the waiting room of a drug clinic. We were not alone there, I told myself.
“More coffee?”
I nodded. She made good coffee.
She was talking in that same breathy whisper, pausing now and then to taste the cigarette. I said very little, but that didn’t seem to matter because she’d constructed an agenda, and she was hell-bent on running through it. She rattled on about their deep love for each other, their frequent vacations to gambling resorts—“How we did love those slot machines, we two old biddies on the bus tour”—their dinners together at Red Lobster, their lengthy late-night phone conversations. “Two women who refused to allow old people into our bodies.”
“You were supposed to go again.”
“What?”
“Vegas. You had tickets?”
She squinted. “Yes, as a matter of fact, we’d be flying out to Vegas right about now.”
The sudden realization startled her, though she had to have thought of it earlier. She stopped, and I noticed wetness in the corners of her eyes. Traces of mascara leaked down her wrinkled, powdered cheeks. Any more crying and this would not be pretty.
“I suppose my ticket is still somewhere in her house.”
She actually sobbed.
“I’m sorry.”
“Thank you.”
“Why would she kill herself?”
Silence. Her fingers trembled as she lit another cigarette. “There must have been something she didn’t tell me. We traveled together, we were friendly, but we really didn’t confide personal things to each other. Even if we did talk for hours. Our friendship was, well, not one where we talked about—real things. One of those friendships that old people fashion out of—loneliness. I could see she was depressed…”
“Joshua Jenning’s death?”
“Maybe. Probably.”
“You’re not sure?”
“Well, they were friends. Like all of us, though I was rarely invited to his home. Marta made sure of that. She didn’t talk about it—really. We all buzzed about his dumb move, the stroke, and dying in New York. I mean—New York? Really? But…” She trailed off, her hands in the air, cigarette smoke above her head. She looked so sprayed together I feared spontaneous combustion.
“Karen thinks murder.” I said it flat out—to get her reaction.
I expected her to gasp, but instead she laughed, long and uproariously.
“I know. That girl can—amuse. Come on, boy. I can accept a suicide because I have no other choice, but murder? Pull-ease.” She screamed the word out. “Why in the world? Marta? Really? She cheated at cards—her only vice.” She stopped laughing. “Ridiculous. Simply ridiculous. Karen is off in her own world. Always has been. She and that Davey. Loopy, she is. Spend any time with her and you’ll understand what I mean. Those poor kids have always been trouble.”
“Like what?”
“So much psychiatric care.”
“Even Davey?”
She leaned in, confidential. “You know, it’s real weird. Marta didn’t care for Karen, but was close to Davey—he was her favorite when he was a teenager. She doted on him. They were a pair, very religious together, the two trooping off to church. Devout Catholics. And then he goes from nice to nuts, if you know what I mean. And then they have a real blowout.”
“About what?”
“She wouldn’t say. It was so bad she actually fainted on my sofa.” She pointed to the blue velvet monstrosity nearby, covered with spider-web antimacassars, and we both were quiet, as though Marta lay there still, fainting, gasping for breath, a nosegay held to her nostrils.
“No idea?”
“None whatsoever.”
“Tell me about the Brown Bonnets,” I said.
“The Brown Bonnets? That dreadful group of Catholic nuts. How’d you know about them?”
“I found their pamphlets in her house.”
“Nothing, really.”
“Marta supported them?”
“I don’t think so. I know she mentioned them now and then. It was a recent thing, her interest in them. She was a devout Catholic, as I’ve said, a regular churchgoer. I mean, the woman liked her good times, don’t we all, baby, but she was a prudish woman. A puritan in her own life, let me tell you. She liked to drink with the guys, dance the night away, especially the cruises we took on Carnival. But this was one proper lady.” She paused and took a huge drag on her cigarette.
“Like you,” I said.
She stared into my eyes—to see if I were mocking her. “Yes, exactly. Like me.”
“But she did have an interest in them?”
“About a half year ago she came upon this article in a newspaper about the Brown Bonnets, and she got their literature in the mail. She went to a couple meetings, but she knew I had little patience with that kind of fanaticism, so we never talked about it because I’d yell at her. They’re the ones you see picketing Planned Parenthood in Hartford. They lined up with those placards with pictures of aborted fetuses. Just when you’re driving by, headed for breakfast at McDonald’s. Good God! Talk about losing your goddamn appetite! They tried to block the Robert Maplethorpe retrospective at Real Art Ways last year. Marta thought they were dedicated. That was her word. They wear these unattractive brown bonnets and carry Bibles, and scream at bishops about queers in the Mother Church. You know. Supposedly the Virgin Mary inspired them—talked to them from a tree in Albany, New York, or somewhere. Incredible.” She stared at me, wide-eyed, unblinking.
“A tree in Albany?”
“Maybe Buffalo. You know how the Virgin always appears in a tree—never at eye level. And always in Catholic neighborhoods. Like UFOs always landing in trailer parks. God’s sense of humor, I guess. But I don’t know if Marta joined them.”
“I don’t know either. You didn’t know? You were her friend.”
“I don’t think so. She’d never confide that. Believe me. She couldn’t like such people very long.”
“Tell me about Joshua Jennings.”
A shift in her expression, her eyes got smaller, her lips razor thin.
“Karen says Marta may have wanted to marry him.”
Hattie yelled at me. “They were just friends. I told you that. That’s all. Marriage? Ridiculous.”
“Karen was guessing.”
“Nuts.”
I folded my hands in my lap, closed my eyes. “Karen thought Marta wanted the life he had. She wanted to be Mrs. Joshua Jennings.”
She spoke rapidly, all humor gone now, her spin
e rigid in the chair. “What life? An old and dying man. Years older. Sickly. Marta—well, she flirted with him—lord, she flirted with all the old coots—but he was just a friend and employer. We were all friends. Nothing more.”
Her voice was rising, and she stood up, turned away. Bothered now, alarmed at the idea that Marta and Joshua might have married, she gripped the back of the chair. Her oversized rhinestone ring caught the light. The fingers trembled.
“She wrote him in Amherst.”
Hattie turned to face me. Her chin quivered, her eyes flashed anger. “I know. Well, maybe there was something going on that I didn’t know about. But Marta and I—we had an agreement about things. We didn’t push over the line…”
“What line?”
“Into romance. Frankly, romance. A confession, Rick. The one line we drew in the sand. We knew it would damage all of us. You see, we all met on that college trip to Russia in 2003.”
“Who else?”
“Well, the two of us, and Joshua, and Richard Wilcox and Charlie Safako. We bonded together.”
“Tell me about the falling out with Joshua.”
“I know there was a doozie of a battle between the two of them.”
“About?”
“Not sure, darling.”
“Ideas?”
“I told you—we didn’t talk about things like that.”
“But you must have wondered.”
“He wanted to move. She’d go on and on about it—to utter boredom. I don’t know if that was the fight.”
“Maybe something else?”
“Maybe. But he wouldn’t write to her after he moved. No contact. I knew that.” She laughed hoarsely. “I’m not saying she got what she deserved, but she could get pushy.”
“Then he died.”
“How we cried when we read that obituary. Held onto each other like little schoolgirls.”
“She never saw him after he moved?”
She stopped. “I don’t know. She even followed him to Amherst to see him. This after he hadn’t answered her letter.”
I sat up. “What happened?”
“She came back furious. I’d never seen her so mad. She cursed him.” Hattie was trembling.
“So they fought?”
“She wouldn’t say what happened at all. Refused to talk about it. She kept calling him a bastard.”
“Did you ever find out…?”
She interrupted me. “It became one more taboo subject with Marta. Frankly, that list was getting a little too long for me.”
Hattie was in tears now, shaking. I got up to leave.
There was a photograph of Hattie and Marta by the door, framed and resting in an ivy planter. I picked it up and stared into the black-and-white graininess. It had been taken at Atlantic City, I assumed. There was a cheap T-shirt stand behind them, a child in a bathing suit standing on the corner. A boardwalk umbrella. Part of the marquee of a casino. But I noticed two other things. Marta was dressed up the way Hattie was now—gussied up with huge costume sequins and a silk dress slit up one side, oriental style. She wore a sequined comb of some sort in her hair, and her head was thrown back, as though she’d been caught in the middle of a once-in-a-lifetime laugh. Sunlight glinted off the sparkling rhinestones on her dress. She shone. Party girl. She looked happy. This wasn’t the cleaning woman I knew.
But the second thing was that there was another person in the picture. Standing off in back, turned halfway toward a hotdog stand, oblivious of the picture taking, was a figure I recognized as Richard Wilcox, dapper in a white linen suit.
“Who took this picture?”
She spoke matter-of-factly, dismissing me. “Joshua Jennings. The summer we all got back from Russia. We wanted the party to go on forever.”
Chapter Fifteen
Charlie Safako had a shadowy reputation. A full professor of history, a man in his early sixties, he was a man I didn’t like. Not that I’d ever spoken to him, other than to argue at faculty meetings when he screamed about the danger of faculty liberals—the “libs”—infiltrating the promotions committee. Charlie had agendas, to use another one of his words. Agendas, as in educational philosophies or personal mandates on living one’s life—and people were always getting in the way of his fulfilling them.
Charlie lived in a small red clapboard, center-chimney Colonial tucked into a tree-lined side street within walking distance of the college. Sometimes, late mornings, I’d see him sauntering to his first class, leisurely and unhurried. Unmarried, he was a bulky man who always looked as if he’d been unable to finish his daily grooming. There was usually a spot of dried shaving cream dappling a cheek, or a ragged spot of beard untouched by a razor, or excessive clumps of lint on a rumpled sport jacket. He’d once been described by a student as an unmade bed, and I liked the notion.
With his beet-red spotty cheeks, his small faraway brown eyes, his thinning tuffs of brown-gray hair, he looked like an incomplete animal. A hopeless snob, he viewed history as the blessed bastion of Anglo-Saxon reserve, fearful of the encroachment of Neo-Marxists in the study of history—to gather from his op-ed diatribes to the local press—and probably only took his clothing to the dry cleaners twice a year. Sometimes he smelled like old rags under a kitchen sink.
I rang the bell four or five times before he answered. His doorbell was one of those ersatz medieval chimes that clashed with the plastic, chipped mailbox and the Walmart all-season twigs-and-twine wreath on the door. I had called that morning so he expected my visit. Now, grinning, he waved me into the room, but didn’t suggest I take a seat.
Nor did he offer me anything to drink, which pleased me. Inside everything smelled like old professor. Parchment pages, texts discoloring into yellow pulp, dress shirt starch, and dried funeral flowers. Everything was neat, I noticed. It’s just that everything looked flaky, decaying. Marta’s cleaning touch was sorely needed here.
Late afternoon, almost twilight, though there were no lights on. He was drinking a diet cola from a can. The room was chilly yet I noticed he was sweating. He was nervous.
“I know why you’re here,” he said suddenly. He was already shaking his head vigorously, dismissing me. “Nonsense, pure and simple.” He never once looked at me, and I wanted to leave because the closeness of the room made me dizzy and tired.
“I have nothing to say,” he said. “Nothing at all.”
“Don’t you have an opinion? You were a friend. You traveled to Russia and Atlantic City and…”
He cut me off so abruptly I felt as though he were standing over me, looking down at me. Yet we were both still standing, and I was taller. “Young man, what’s your trivial game?”
I didn’t answer.
He waited a moment. His eyebrows twitched. “I realize that you need to make a living. We continue to pay for that stupid war over and over and over and…”
I broke in, flummoxed. “What? Are you talking about the Vietnamese War like it has something to do with my visit here?”
He sighed. “I’m a professor of history. American history. I am endlessly fascinated by the place of evolving immigrant generations into the scheme of things. The boat people from that unfortunate war have insinuated themselves into the colleges and professions and the culture…”
“Bullshit.” I cut him off.
He smiled. “How characteristic! One generation to our shores and you acquire the language of the gutter.”
He was baiting me, pushing me away from my reason for being here.
I asked him, point-blankly, “Just what are you hiding?”
He opened his mouth but nothing came out.
“We’re here to discuss whether Marta was murdered.” I smiled disingenuously. “Did you do it?” A pause. “It stands to reason…”
I swear the man’s face went from beet-red to clammy white. The big-knuckled fingers crumpled the s
oda can.
“What are you hiding?” I asked again, enjoying this. He squirmed, something I’d never seen a human being do. Like a Disney cartoon character. Daffy Duck meets Viet Cong.
“Young man.” He took a deep breath. “I have nothing to hide. If you think I’d kill the only person who kept the dust from my coffee table, you must be crazy.”
“More than a cleaner, no? She was your friend.”
He wiped his brow with the back of his hand, then dried the hand on his shirt. Really attractive, very farm hand. “Yes, she was. Sort of. But I always felt she was closer to Joshua and Richard.” He frowned. “Much older men, you know. She and I were closer in age.”
“When did you last see her?”
“Do we really have to go through this?”
“Yes.”
He sighed. “If I answer, will you leave?”
“Yes.”
He nodded.
“When did you last see her?” I asked again.
“Two days before she died.” An edge to his voice.
“How did she seem?”
Silence.
“How did she seem?” I repeated.
He rolled his tongue over his upper lip, looking around the room as though for an exit, and said quietly, “All right, if I can get you out of here. She had just finished cleaning when I returned from classes. I asked her if she wanted coffee—we’d often sit and she’d talk and talk. She was very amusing in a way, a domineering woman whom I called my Dollar Store dominatrix as a joke, which she didn’t like. She said no. That was unusual. She was in a deep funk. I was in a deep funk—I was hoping she’d amuse me.”
“Why were you down?”
“What?”
“You said you were in a deep funk.”
He narrowed his eyes. “We’re not here to discuss—me.”
“It seems…”
He raised his voice. “Marta left, just like that. Walked out. She actually looked pale, like she was sick. I called after her and said, ‘Are you all right?’ She didn’t answer. Something was on her mind. Distracted—Marta was not a thoughtful woman. I don’t mean stupid—just someone who left life…unanswered.” Charlie paused, stuck out his tongue again. “I always regret that I didn’t pursue it. My mind was on something else.”