Return to Dust

by Andrew Lanh

  “Well, well, Professor Safako of the history department, waiting on the heir apparent.”

  He half-turned away, as though to ignore me, but Charlie Safako liked to assail people. He’d practiced on generations of hapless students at the college.

  “Rick Van Lam, PI. Please Irritate. Intimidate. Or is it Irrigate?” He chuckled, amused at himself. “Or Pesky Immigrant.”

  “You weren’t invited to the Canterburys’ party?”

  “Oh please, that tiresome serial? The Bitch and the Beaten. Selena and I have a brief history. She wanted—well, never mind.”

  His smile was creepy. I waited. I couldn’t imagine Selena wanting him. “Sounds like you’re dying to tell me something.”

  “Are you still playing Jessica Fletcher for Murder, She Wrote? Or uploading a video onto You Tube—Mr. Lam’s interviews? America’s funniest videos—or some such crap. Little boy, what does your daddy say to your mommy at night? Giggle, giggle from America’s TV living rooms.”

  “Doing my job.”

  He laughed, mimicking my voice in a deep growl. “Doing my job. Oh, Duke Wayne now. Lord, you do have those lines down pat. Thank God my charity dollars buy TVs for orphanages and resettlement camps in Guam. I consider it part of the Americanization process.”

  I cut in, not wanting to let him get the better of me this time. “I was wondering. What exactly was your relationship with Richard Wilcox and Joshua Jennings? I know what you said about Marta but…”

  He bristled. “You just don’t understand relationships, my young man.”

  Sarcastically, “Well, fill me in, Teacher.”

  “If you must know—and obviously you must—I was not part of that equation. I was there as bored Greek chorus. Those two pitiful men played out their game with each other. Richard, quite frankly, was jealous of Joshua and his money and name.”

  “And?”

  “Well, Richard hated Joshua. Lied about him to Marta. Acting like pouting children. I watched it from Mount Olympus, imperious and cynical. For a while it was a good show. And then it got trivial and boring.”

  “Why was that?”

  “Because neither Joshua nor Richard wanted resolution. Denouement. They wanted the game to keep going. A pleasant diversion for lonely old celibate men. Marta was, indeed, an attractive woman.”

  I nodded. “So I hear over and over. I still can’t understand her appeal to such men.”

  “Do you mean because she wasn’t an academic? Like them, covered in diplomas from Ivy League gin mills?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “You know, she talked and talked, dreadful really, but in the end she always ended up listening to us. She had that…talent.”

  “But you guys all have such negative things to say about her now.”

  “Well, we’re just not nice people, after all.”

  “She was a friend.”

  “Yes, she was fun, most of the time.”

  “Patronizing?”

  “So be it.”

  “But she wanted more from the little play she was acting in. She wanted that resolution you mention. She wanted conclusion.”

  “She wanted climax.” He grinned, showing stained teeth. “It was all meandering complication. There was no turning point in this Elizabethan farce.”

  “But there was.”

  For a moment he seemed out of focus, confused, on the verge of saying something. Then he started to walk away. Finally, he turned back, raising his voice against the wind. “But someone substituted a different script, Mr. Lam. Different play, new ending.”

  I yelled back to him. “Did you have a part in this play?”

  “My boy, they didn’t even invite me to the rehearsals.”

  ***

  I phoned Richard Wilcox the next morning. “How are you doing, sir?” I began. “How was your trip to the hospital?”

  A pause. I could hear short, quick breathing.

  “If you must know, things have changed. Now I know the horrible truth. As Brecht said, ‘Those who are still laughing have yet to hear the terrible news.’ You see, I have months left, I’m told. Months. Not years. Months. Months are things you don’t think about, things you throw away. We think about years—years are solid and long and in the future. Months end tomorrow. So I will end tomorrow.”

  “I’m so sorry, Mr. Wilcox.” I waited. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

  He wasn’t listening to me. “I didn’t think I’d be this frightened.” Then, after a pause, “You’re calling because of Marta.”

  “Yes.”

  “That all seems so far away now. Like I knew her and Joshua in another life. Not a better life, but another life.”

  “I still have found nothing.”

  “Nor will you, I’m afraid.”

  “I don’t mean to bother you now.”

  “Oh, but you obviously do.”

  “I’ll call back….”

  “It was my fault,” he blurted out. Another deep intake of breath.

  “What?” Startled.

  A sardonic chuckle. “Old, old people playing the youthful game of love and kisses. Old foolish men.” I waited as he suffered through a coughing spell. “You see,” he went on slowly, “I was a jealous man. Neither Joshua nor I had any sense when it came to Marta. I was jealous of the attention she gave him because I was so taken with her. I had a little infatuation. She was attractive, flirtatious, a deeply sensual woman, remarkably stupid, a woman whose dogmatic and shrill personality added to the…allure, and gave her, well, plebeian crispiness.”

  He chuckled, darkly.

  “But she was taken with Joshua, and he with her. Somewhat. Of course, he had no intention of marrying at his age. Let’s be realistic. He’d never married. Neither had I—no stomach for it. She was a diversion. He was so patrician in the awfulest sense, and she was pleasant company. Lord, I almost said—peasant company.”

  “Unfair to her, no?”

  He chuckled again. “Oh, the facile judgments of the young. I can still make a snobbish joke. You know, she could make a lonely celibate feel like—well, like he was a handsome young man in a diet-soda commercial. Isn’t that an odd thought? That kind of young-at-heart world. It was all game play. When I talked, she stared into my face as though I were dispensing the most cherished wisdom.”

  “Did she pressure Joshua for marriage?”

  He laughed out loud. “It did come up. Joshua told me one time when we talked. She talked so openly about it—not to Joshua, but to me—and perhaps others. Joshua was getting sicker and sicker—he’s older than I—was older than I—and she got more desperate.”

  “And you poisoned the well?”

  His voice got stronger. “Smart man. It was easy. He had this elevated view of her—devout Catholic observant, you know, even though Joshua always held Catholics suspect, as we all do. My Lord, they eat wafers and think they’re tasting God. Delightful primitivism. But her fervor did suggest goodness—of sorts. Christian faith, hope, and charity. You know.”

  “And?”

  “And I took care of that.”

  “How?”

  “I learned somehow—it may have been through Marta herself—or maybe her fickle friend Hattie, that hag—that Marta liked to frequent a place called Louie’s in Unionville, a local bar or tavern, a little rough at the edges. Marta could bend the elbow if she wanted to. I’d never been there, of course, but Louie’s has sort of a sleazy reputation.”

  “I know the place. And so you told Joshua?”

  “And so I told Joshua. I couldn’t wait. I think it led to some words because directly afterwards there was a shooting there—some lowlife I should have sent a check to in gratitude—and it made the local paper. Louie’s on page one. Perfect timing. God must be a journalist—he so likes breaking news. And I think Joshua, always frightened of publ
icity and the world in general, backed off from her. He avoided her. Then that hissy fit with the gardener and a tracking of dirt or something. Then a bigger spat.”

  “About what?”

  “I never knew because she clammed up. She got more strident—her true colors emerging—and Joshua backed off more.”

  “Is that why he moved?”

  “Well, that surprised me. He talked about moving for years, of course. A real bore about it. But I suppose so. That big house was an albatross. Marta was huffing and puffing at the doorway, ready to blow the house down. Life elsewhere probably seemed desirable—and peaceful. She was smothering.”

  “Did Joshua understand your…sabotage?”

  “Of course. I told him before he moved.”

  “And?”

  “He shunned me after that.”

  “Were you bothered?”

  “Yes, because I didn’t expect silence. I expected—applause.”

  “Well, you can’t blame yourself for the way things went down.”

  “I can do whatever I want, young man. I even told him she went home with strangers. A complete lie. Oddly, Marta was a virtuous woman who just liked to wander around the edges of sensation. Gambling, but only slot machines. Bars, but only appropriate mixed drinks with various garden produce in them. Occasionally a late Saturday night, but home in time for early Mass. After all, the Blessed Virgin was watching her from some tree in Rochester or somewhere.”

  “Did she know about what you said to Joshua?”

  “Of course. None of us could keep a secret. We didn’t talk for some time. But she came back. We missed each other. We were, after all, friends.”

  “She was coming to see you the night she died?”

  His voice tightened. “Yes. That was weird, I must say.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ve already told you. She sounded…panicked. Frightened. I never heard that before. Sad, depressed, angry, annoyed—but this was different.” He seemed to be holding the phone further away, his voice fading.

  “If she was panicky or frightened, wouldn’t that suggest murder?”

  He made a tsking sound. “All it suggests, I think, is…panic. Fear of the god Pan—that’s the root of the word, you know. Fear of the unknown. She was frightened by loneliness.”

  “But…”

  “And she was drunk as a skunk.”

  “Did she say anything else?”

  “Well, she was babbling. Something about dying, but that was old stuff. She was always talking about her impending death. A fear of the grave. An old lady’s aches and pains. That’s why I wanted her to come visit—to calm her down. Do you know how I know it was suicide? Because she told me so. In all the babble she kept mumbling about me burying her. I just assumed she feared cremation, I don’t know. We’d talked about it once—I guess Karen advised her to be cremated.” A snicker. “Probably sooner than later. ‘Can you bury me?’ Me bury her! I had to step in. Imagine that. Slurring her words. Afraid her niece wouldn’t tend to her sacred Catholic burial rites. She wanted some guarantee. It was all preposterous. A drunken conversation. Was I supposed to storm St. Augustine’s—me, the old Protestant? A revisionist Martin Luther in a new Reformation?”

  “You didn’t tell me this before.”

  “Well, I…” Then nothing.

  “It does sound like a suicide cry,” I admitted, finally.

  “Well, haven’t we all been telling you that all along? Perhaps you should start listening.”

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Hank knew all about Louie’s Bar on South Road.

  “It’s a dump,” he stressed, “a real hellhole. Guys from the college hit it, usually when they’re already drunk and feeling daring. You know, wet T-shirt contests, spring-break stupors. St. Paddy’s Day green beer. Jello shots. That kind of stuff.”

  “You’ve been there?”

  “Once.”

  “And?”

  “I didn’t look American enough to survive.”

  “I’m going there tonight.”

  “And I’m right by your side.”

  “You sure?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

  “I don’t know…”

  “Hey, I’ve been there. You haven’t. Who’s the babe in the woods here?”

  Hank insisted that underage college kids with phony IDs savored its seediness and its reputation for fistfights. The college kids assumed its tawdriness was calculated and cultivated. What they didn’t realize—those errant kids who found themselves sitting in a dean’s office with Mommy and Daddy flying in from Philadelphia or Atlanta—was that the place was a sewer, a real-life pit stop for hard drinkers. Mostly fringe people, ranging from lonely soggy sots who wandered in from the town’s rural farm lanes, to the nervous druggies buying crack or weed in the dirt parking lot, to the young farm girls flirting with the welfare prostitution that would ultimately swallow them up on needle-strewn Hartford streets.

  Louie’s was Farmington’s only real hellhole, tucked into sheltering trees far removed from the upper-crust sensibility of the Cotton Mather-seal-of-approval town center. Miss Porter’s was symbolically light years away. It was a dirt-bag bar where Harley hogs lined up in front of the barn-red clapboard exterior.

  “It sucks” was Hank’s rhapsodic description of the place.

  I couldn’t wait to get there. Marta in such a wonderland? Hank warned me about what he called the tacit dress code—no slacks and loafers, no J.Crew sweater, no…

  “Well, you get the idea,” Hank said. “Your usual look.”

  But no one at Louie’s cared, I discovered. It was too early, it was a slow weeknight and a workday, to boot, and only five or six mummified barflies drooped over the bar. Nobody even looked up at us.

  “Maybe we should have come later.” Hank sounded disappointed.

  “Why? You looking for a date?” I asked. “Or a fight?”

  The bartender was eyeing us, but then I saw him smile. With good reason—it turned out he was a former student from one of my night classes on Criminal Procedure, a part-time fireman with hopes of becoming a policeman. But his lack of serious motivation caused him to leave after one unsuccessful semester. Actually he left in the middle of a mid-term exam. That was how I remembered him. His phone went off loudly—appropriately, I thought—and he bellowed that there was a fire somewhere, startling everyone, and he was gone. He never returned to class. So here he was.

  “Hello, Jamie,” I began, stumbling on his name.

  “Jonah,” he corrected me. “Jonah Rivera.”

  “How Biblical,” Hank muttered, and Jonah obviously heard him because the grin disappeared.

  “You work here?” I said, displaying my usual acute insight.

  He looked over his shoulder. “Yeah, that’s why I’m behind the bar.” But he was smiling again, and he shook my hand vigorously. “Good to see you, Professor.”

  He was a skinny hayseed, a milk-fed farm boy, lots of moist fiery acne on his impressive high cheekbones. His small eyes looked watery and dim, as if he were watching me through a fog. He treated us to our first drink. He was happy to see me. He repeated that over and over. Happy, happy. “Your class was cool.”

  “You’re not coming back to the college?”

  He shook his head. “Naw. I’m gonna be a fireman full time ’cause I’m getting married. No time for classes. This here”—he pointed around the barroom—“is real good spare change.”

  “I’ve never been here before.”

  “No surprise,” he whispered. “Not exactly the Farmington Country Club. If you get my drift.”

  Hank and I sat at a rough-hewn table near the bar, and Hank, delighted as could be, leaned back, hands behind his head, and grinned at the ceiling. He was having a good time.

  Jonah nodded at Hank. “Prof here is a go
od guy.”

  “Of course,” Hank answered. “He’s my friend.”

  Jonah looked perplexed. “Why did you two come here?” A grin. “Of all places.”

  “Well,” I began, “I’m working on a case and I thought you—actually someone at this bar—might help me.”

  Jonah lit up, a trace of pink rising in the high cheeks, his eyes becoming less watery, more focused, pinpoints of pupil, hard as steel. “Wow.” He breathed in. “Man. Cool.”

  I didn’t know how cool it was, but I knew he’d be receptive to my questioning. He scooted from behind the bar, glancing for just a second at the barflies at the far end, and pulled up a chair. A spindly woman, eyes hidden behind owl eyeglasses, screamed for a drink, but Jonah ignored her. She shut up.

  I took a sip from my Bud. “Marta Kowalski.” And waited. Nothing. “She used to come in here—at least now and then. Or so we’ve heard. How long have you worked here?”

  “A long time. Last year—over a year. Marta who?” His brow furrowed as he tilted his head.

  I described her, but he interrupted me. “I always heard her name was Martha.”

  Hank jumped in, excited. “You knew her?”

  “Sure, not really a regular. Once a month maybe, maybe more, maybe less. Actually less. Sometimes with this other old bat with too much makeup. They were a pair.”

  “I’m looking into her death. She killed herself.”

  Jonah tried to look grief-stricken, but it didn’t work. I decided not to mention the possibility of murder. I didn’t want him to experience a forensic orgasm.

  “She didn’t come that much, but when she did she made herself a presence, let me tell you.”