Return to Dust

by Andrew Lanh

  “How so?”

  He tapped the table with his index finger. “At first she’d be quiet, sitting at one of the tables against the wall, sipping some dumb lady drink, and you’d think she was in the wrong place. Always on a Saturday when it was packed with”—again he lowered his voice—“the usual lowlifes. But after four or five belts, she’d order straight vodkas, and then the voice got louder, she and the other bat, and their bodies start to shake and sometimes they even danced around like hotsy-totsy girls on TV or something.” He grinned. “A sight and a half. Takes a lot to create a scene in this place—to make someone notice you—but they could do it. I’ll tell you she was harmless. Let an old sleaze try to pick her up or say something sexy to her, and she’d haul off and slug him. Or, once, start to cry even. ‘I’m a lady,’ she’d scream.”

  “But she came here.” Hank sounded baffled.

  “Hey,” he shrugged his bony shoulders, “it’s a local bar. Ain’t a crime, you know. We got a license. Maybe she lived in the neighborhood.”

  And suddenly I realized she actually did—three or four streets over in Unionville, so the place was really local for her, a gin mill round the corner from her house. It was probably the closest bar to her home.

  “You ever see her with anybody besides that woman?”

  “Nope. Most times by herself, in fact.” He whistled, as though the news just arrived. “So she offed herself. Didn’t seem the type.”

  “Why?”

  “She was such a good Catholic.”

  Now that surprised me. “You picked that up from her behavior here?”

  He laughed. “Yeah, I did. She never really talked me up, you know—just one time when I was rude or something, and then she hollered at me. After that she ignored me. Pushed up her shoulders as she strolled by. Like I’m gonna be a wreck because a grandma ain’t taken with me. But sometimes when she got drunk—and she always did, sooner or later—she’d get this rigid look, jaw thrust out, eyes set, and she’d survey the room looking for lapses in moral conduct. And let me tell you, this place on Saturday is wall-to-wall moral lapse.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like she’d see some mixed-race couple, like black and white, and she’d yell at them. Sometimes she’d get on this real Catholic kick—about the Virgin Mary loving her and us and living in all of us—Amen!—and she’d kiss this cross she wore around her neck. Not the best floor show for a bad-boy bar. ‘Tomorrow is Sunday and you and I will all go to Mass.’ That kind of thing. After a while people ignored her.”

  “So she was a racist?” Hank asked.

  “She was everything. One time she accused some young guy of being a faggot and lit into him. ‘You queers will burn in hell.’ That sort of thing. He ran the hell outta here, followed—would you believe—by the guy’s crying girlfriend, and we had to ask her to leave because she kept going on and on about queers.”

  He returned to the bar and brought back a couple of beers.

  “She ever pick up anybody?”

  He smirked. “I told you—she was a virtuous lady.”

  “So she never left with anyone?”

  He looked around. “Like I said, man, would the Virgin Mary do a one-night stand?”

  ***

  Back at my apartment I leafed through a folder Gracie had slipped under the door. She always spelled my name wrong: Rik van Lam, from Gracie. Info you asked for. Inside was a pamphlet I’d asked her to pick up at Mass on Sunday, a brochure disseminated by the Brown Bonnets. It was similar to the one I’d found at Marta’s home, a poorly printed rag, cheap tabloid paper and bleeding, smudged ink. Not exactly state-of-the-art desktop publication, it looked like some old PTA mimeographed bulletin. But I’d seen this sort of strident rag before—leaflets in Oklahoma City protesting the Vietnamese refugees there, anti-black propaganda on street corners. Down with ’Ricans. It grew out of the same world of frightened farm boys in their battered pickups who checked their gun-racks before the KKK rally in a dying Connecticut mill town.

  “What do you know about the Brown Bonnets?” I asked Hank, waving the pamphlet at him.

  “Well, we discussed them in my Social Problems class. One of the students did a research project for the class. They protested an exhibit at the Athenaeum—I mean, Jesus on the cross submerged in urine, I guess that’s art I don’t understand. You had to walk past their signs and their jeers to get in.” He smiled innocently.

  “Big group?”

  “Bunch of tired old ladies. Only in Connecticut. Even the Catholic Church steers clear of them. Too fruitcake. They scare the parish priests. They publish this ad in the Hartford Courant each Saturday—a verbatim conversation with the Virgin Mary. Word for word. The Virgin appears in some tree in Albany or some place like that. Upstate New York.”

  I slipped off my shoes, put my feet on the coffee table. I’d seen their ads and was always mildly amused by them. But I never read them closely.

  “What does the Virgin Mary have to say?”

  “She makes a lot of grammatical errors, I hate to say. In need of a refresher course.”

  “New York accent?”

  He smiled. “No accent that’s detectable.”

  “What’s her story?”

  “She’s on gays this week, last week abortion. ‘Don’t rip.’ That’s one of her favorite lines. She does have a way with words. Good image, no?”

  “Hank, you sound like a faithful reader.”

  “Not really. After the class presentation, I found myself paying attention. They scare me.”

  The pamphlet I showed him was crammed with tightly printed columns of unabashed encomia to the Virgin—personal prayers of thanksgiving interspersed with pure unChristian venom against patsy liberal Democrats, the satanic pro-choice movement, and some local bogeymen whose names meant nothing to me. One article wept about the possibility of altar girls—“The ruination the church.” Another told how, in China, baby-girl fetuses were bottled and sold for soup. I stopped reading. I didn’t need another nightmare.

  “I don’t know if Marta was a member, but she had an interest in them.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  “The pamphlet says they number in the hundreds.”

  “Probably twenty-five hysterical women. That’s what the professor said when we discussed them.”

  I tossed the pamphlet on the table.

  “But I got a problem here—no, a question,” I told him. I yawned, ready for bed. “It’s been coming up in lots of my interviews. Something that keeps coming back at me. If she was such a good Catholic, devout and observant, would she kill herself? Suicide is a mortal sin in the Church. Marta would not willingly condemn her soul to eternal damnation.”

  “You kill yourself when this place is no longer beautiful and that place—death—is.” Hank looked very solemn.

  “But we know that Marta was never a weak woman. You don’t walk into Louie’s by your lonesome and take swipes at biracial couples or suspected sissies. The woman had mettle.”

  Hank stood up. “I’m tired.” He grabbed his coat. “You settle this yourself. Good night, Rick.”

  I followed him to the door. “And that mettle wouldn’t let her kill herself—drunk or not. The Virgin Mary, looking down from that tree in Albany or wherever, would frown her into submission.”

  He tapped me on the shoulder. “Tomorrow.”

  “But what have we concluded?”

  Hank flicked a finger at me. “Seems to me we just concluded that she was murdered.”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Early the next morning I jogged. Last night’s bottles of beer had jumbled my thinking, slowed down my body. Stomach sick, I woke feeling the way I used to when I chain-smoked cigarettes or indulged in party weed at Columbia College, late night on the campus quad, sitting on the steps in the shadow of Low Library. The next morning I would stu
mble from my dorm room to class, hoping for rain to wake me up. So now I suited up, and jogged. Sweat suit, hood up against the fierce November day. The morning was clean and whole and crisp. It diminished the dark corners of Louie’s and the slimy beer ache in my stomach.

  Showered, refreshed, I fixed myself a light breakfast of scrambled eggs and whole-wheat toast, fresh-squeezed orange juice, and settled into the garage-sale leather armchair. Outside the wind blew. This was a morning for phone calls.

  I was in search of Mary Powell, that Johnny-come-lately niece who provided such anonymity and possibility. I’d tried her number at various times since my morning in Clinton, but it rang and rang. Or was busy. Had she also moved? The old address, I knew, was a curious one. I knew New York streets. Her building was east of Broadway in the midst of a dense, noisy Spanish neighborhood. Bodegas busy with playful children and old women sitting outside in the cold on beat-up kitchen chairs. I couldn’t imagine a relative of the aristocratic Joshua Jennings living there. But who knew? I might have to take a trip to New York.

  I dialed the number and let the phone ring for a long time. Then, just when I was ready to hang up, a tentative, almost whispered voice said, “Hello.”

  “Mary Powell?”

  Silence. I waited.

  “Who’s this?” she asked, keeping her voice barely above a whisper.

  I told her my name, that I was a PI, that I was calling from Connecticut, trying to get information on someone recently dead. All matter of fact.

  “I don’t know…”

  I thought I detected a slight accent in her voice.

  She sounded ready to hang up. “Wait.”

  “I gotta go…”

  “I got your name from a real estate agent in Clinton.”

  I could hear another voice behind her, a man’s voice, sharp and edgy, but I couldn’t make out the words. I sensed Mary Powell tightening up, breathing heavier.

  “What did you say?” she whispered into the phone.

  I explained again that I was looking for Mary Powell, blood relative of Joshua Jennings, now dead, and that I’d gotten her address from the realtor in Clinton. I might as well have spoken Farsi to her because I heard her mumbling to someone nearby, her hand covering the receiver.

  “No, you got the wrong person.”

  But her words had something wrong with them. I didn’t know whether she was lying because something else was there: wariness, uncertainty. I was scaring her. I also realized she sounded young.

  A man’s voice nearby. “Hang up.”

  “Wait, please. You are…”

  “No, I don’t…never been in Connecticut. Never.” She whispered. “And I moved so…”

  “Maybe someone else. Your mother? Is she Mary Powell?”

  Hesitation. “Yes, but…”

  “Maybe she…”

  “Ma is in a home on Staten Island.”

  It was wrong, I knew. The manner, the voice, the carelessness, the confusion. The call caught her by surprise—and alarmed her. And that man with her—who?

  “Joshua Jennings,” I repeated.

  “I never heard of him,” she said, her voice shaky.

  “Hang up now.” The angry voice behind her.

  “But…”

  Somehow I believed her. She was never a part of Joshua’s world. Not this Mary Powell.

  “You got the wrong girl.”

  The voice behind her. “Now, baby.”

  “I gotta go.” She hung up.

  It made no sense.

  Money.

  All along I’d thought someone was in it for the money—someone Joshua contacted, perhaps by error, someone who saw a chance to cash in on the old man’s loneliness. Maybe. It was still a possibility.

  But was it money? I brought up the files on my laptop: Joshua’s money—at least the money everyone knew about—had gone to the boys’ school. All of it, and lots of it. Stock portfolios, money markets, bonds, even his simple savings account. All of it. But maybe there was other money that no one knew of. After all, Joshua was an old man, eccentric, a man willful and stubborn, a flirt and deceiver, a pain in the ass. Maybe there were assets removed from the security of a bank vault or a lawyer’s office. Maybe Mary Powell had discovered—how?—something that Joshua owned that made it all worthwhile. Maybe that man with the gruff voice was somehow behind a scheme. Joshua and Mary. Maybe it was something she could steal away from him. Maybe they’d met somewhere. Joshua used to go into New York for museums, for theater. Of course, these excursions happened before he toppled over that last time. Maybe this Mary Powell, meeting him, was part of an elaborate rip-off scheme. A cagey waitress and her slimebag boyfriend, some con artists…

  Maybe.

  Who was Mary Powell?

  I reread the local obit. My frayed photocopy of the obit mentioned that he’d died in New York City while visiting his niece. I couldn’t imagine the venerable Joshua squirreled away in an apartment in a borderline neighborhood, the bam bam boom street noise wafting into his solitude, the aroma of burnt bacon and cheesy fries permeating the bland diet of his bland life.

  I made myself a note to get hold of a death certificate. Perhaps there was information there to lead me to the lost and mysterious Mary Powell.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  I scheduled an appointment with Joshua Jennings’ lawyer in New Haven late the next afternoon. Off Chapel Street, near the Yale Art Gallery, the nineteenth-century brownstone was a curious anachronism nestled in among a fast food restaurant, a frame-it-yourself art store, a faded luncheonette, a discount furniture store, and the milling hordes of laughing hip-hop kids who were hanging out on the bus benches under the high leaded-glass windows. Winslow, Winslow, Winslow, and Clay, Inc. I felt sorry for Clay.

  I didn’t need to feel sorry for Clay. William Clay, Esq., I discovered, was the only surviving senior partner. Clay, I realized, would soon be joining them. An old, leathery man, small and wiry, creaky as old wood, sort of like Joshua Jennings himself, but in an expensive suit, with a calculated haircut for the four strands that insisted on inhabiting his crusty scalp.

  He was granting me ten-to-fifteen off-the-clock minutes, which must have cost him in the range of two thousand in billing time. So I calculated. He was doing it because he’d once liked Joshua. Those were his words: “I once liked him.”

  He nudged a file toward me. I took it.

  “I met the niece once,” he informed me. “A looker.”

  I tried to imagine the Mary Powell I spoke to in New York as a looker, but the only images I created were of a scared young woman. To the ninety-year-old Clay, with his Coke-glass eyeglasses, halitosis breath, and liver spots on his wrists as big as silver dollars—who knows what constituted a looker?

  “A nervous woman,” he told me. “But smiling. But jittery.”

  “Why was she here?”

  “She said she had friends in New Haven. I had spoken with her by phone—she called from New York about Joshua—and then she was in Clinton with him. Then he was sick and in New York. It was hard to follow her movements.”

  “Did you see her again?”

  “I spoke with her once on the phone. Then she sent a copy of the death certificate and a brief note he’d written to me before his death. It’s there. A copy.”

  I leafed through the thin folder and read the death certificate. Fairly standard, dated September 15 in New York City. I started to jot down the doctor’s signature.

  “The folder is yours.” He looked annoyed. I thanked him. Inside was a photocopy of the note Joshua wrote, a few painfully written, scribbled sentences saying hello, dated a week before his death. There was also a three-line typed note from Mary Powell that listed the legal documents enclosed.

  “Nothing funny about the will?”

  “Funny?” He didn’t like the word. “It was years old, of c
ourse. I reviewed it, I remember, but an associate handled it. I spoke with him, and it was pro forma, actually. Old will on file, no codicils of any sort, fairly standard, no bequests other than to the school and college. All charity. A comfortable man. No property other than bank assets.”

  “But he left nothing to his niece.”

  “Nothing unusual there. I was told that he had only known her a short time. He’d located her online. That bothered him, of course. Some genealogical site. A distant relative. Who knows? She wasn’t happy he found her—wanted to write an end to the whole business, she said.” He locked eyes with mine. “She admitted that he gave her ten thousand dollars, a gift.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “If she told me that, I imagine the amount was higher. But the will was ironclad. She’d have an uphill battle contesting, a point I made to her—in case she harbored such an idea.”

  “Had she mentioned the will?”

  “She told me on the phone that she didn’t want money from him—didn’t expect it, in fact. I gather she found him a nuisance.” The old man smiled. “She did say something amusing, I thought. ‘Lovers take care of me,’ she said, and I thought that a most frank and unnecessary admission.”

  “She didn’t mention any lovers’ names?”

  He seemed surprised. “How would one respond to such a line, Mr. Lam?”

  I could think of a dozen, but maybe I come out of a different time and place.

  He raised his hand. The conference was over. We shook hands. “Intriguing,” he said to my back.

  “What is?” I looked back.

  “Alive, Joshua was an uneventful man. Joshua has only become interesting after his death. It’s what I hope for my own life.”

  I walked out. How would you respond to such a line?

  ***

  Leaving his office, I walked into darkness and bitter cold. The New Haven streets were filled with people headed home, huddled against the chill wind. I enjoyed being in the city, loving the aimless wandering, watching a storekeeper fighting with some resistant Christmas lights that refused to stay put. It wasn’t even Thanksgiving yet. Americans, I discovered, like to rush the holidays, frantic to get them over with. Although I celebrated no holidays myself, Liz and I—in our fairy-tale honeymoon period in New York—had celebrated Christmas with a little real tree we bought on Carmine Street in the village, and Hanukkah candles. A mish-mash. She was (not is) Jewish. I was (not am) Buddhist. Somehow, though, we both remain Jewish and Buddhist. And oddly Christian. Happy holidays. Shalom. Feliz Navidad.