by Andrew Lanh
…like a Buddha in a dying lotus blossom
…like honey blanketed by swarms of bees…
I’d always hunger for order and balance. For calm, serenity.
I glared at the storekeeper. He kept fighting with the strings of lights.
I lingered in a deli over pastrami on rye and a Sam Adams ale.
Back on the street I found myself exhilarated. Yale students streamed through upper Chapel Street, bumping into one another, laughing, their faces bright against the cold. I recalled nights back at Columbia, jostling with buddies down Broadway toward Tom’s Restaurant. We didn’t give a damn about anything. So I wandered now. By the time I decided to head back to Hartford, it was after ten o’clock. My car sat on a side street, a ticket slapped on the windshield.
I fumbled for my keys, my fingers numb against the cold lock. Across the street I heard forced laughter, a man’s reedy high-pitched warble in counterpoint to another man’s deeper, more aggressive boom, and I suddenly realized that the laughter was familiar. Turning, I stared through the darkness, past the faltering neon of a kosher Chinese restaurant, past the art-deco neon of a corner bar. There were two men standing in front of the bar, and they were laughing.
I watched quietly as they moved off the sidewalk, coming closer to where I stood. The man nearest me, I realized, was Davey Corcoran. And he was gripping the sleeve of Ken Rodman, my upstairs neighbor.
I looked past them, back toward the bar, and through the half-lit window, I saw the press of dancing men. I may be slow when it comes to such things, but I did live in New York. I know a gay bar when I stumble onto one.
Davey and Ken were crossing the street. The laughter had stopped but not the intimacy. I wrestled with the scene—there was no way I could have connected Ken with Davey. Ken, freshly divorced and finding his way alone in the apartment above mine, seemed a placid insurance executive. Marta, Davey’s aunt, had cleaned his apartment.
And Davey, that bitter isolato—or so I thought—locked away in that messy, littered apartment, dressed in his Mayberry RFD flannels and hayseed mentality, was just a guy with a smart-alecky mouth. He was a lonely reader of books. Here he was, still dressed in flannel, with a camouflage vest over it, and jeans and boots. The way he always dressed, I guess. But now he was far from home—and in the company of men, as they said in Victorian novels. Sort of.
“Davey,” I yelled. I regretted it immediately, but I knew he’d spot me within seconds.
He stopped in his tracks, literally locked in place, and stared across the street. When he saw me, his smile faded, his laughter ended.
Worse, he shuddered as though chilled, and looked left and right. He threw his large head back, almost melodramatically, as a character would in an old tearjerker, then bolted. That’s the only word to describe his actions—he bolted. He ran, bouncing off the dark walls, careening around a couple of late-night partygoers leaving the Chinese restaurant, and then disappeared around the corner.
“Davey,” I yelled to the empty black corner.
When I looked back at Ken, he was standing with his arms by his side, staring at me. But even across the street, under the purple haze of streetlight and November wind and neon garishness, even under that artificial light, I could see he was grinning.
***
The next evening, unplanned, my friends showed up at my apartment. First Liz stopped in. I’d spoken to her earlier about Marta because she was wondering what was going on, and she told me she was a few streets over.
“Come on up,” I told her.
Though she hesitated, she agreed, and promised to bring take-out from Triple Star. We’d finished our moo shu pork and sesame chicken when Jimmy dropped in, and Gracie soon followed. Jimmy was dressed in a bright sky-blue sweater with giant white cobwebs covering it. He looked ready for a ski slope. He made a grumpy sound when I told him this, and Gracie giggled, saying that Jimmy’s only exercise was carrying a box of cigars from the car into his house. He beamed at her. She was, of course, the only person he ever grinned at. I mean, he smiled and charmed, and he laughed. But when Gracie was around—tonight she’d dipped herself into some potent hyacinth perfume and decked herself out in a go-to-bingo pants suit with sequins and sparkles—the two of them acted out their light and innocent romance, if that was what it was.
Liz and I served drinks—for a moment I experienced déjà vu, the two of us in our Manhattan apartment entertaining friends. We relaxed. Within minutes there was a knock and Hank wandered in. He’d shaved his head. He long sported a close-cropped haircut, but now he looked…bald.
“Christ, a skinhead,” Jimmy sang out.
“This is how guys look now,” Hank protested.
“I like it,” Liz told him.
Then, just as I was remembering I had a batch of term papers I had to grade, my Criminal Justice students stumbling through their case-study reports, Vinnie and Marcie dropped in. They were coming home from dinner, driving by, saw Hank parking his car, and spotted the lights on in my apartment. Everyone was talking at once, everyone was laughing. I smiled at everyone, overjoyed, but I was tired.
Jimmy said he missed the days when he could have a cigarette with his beer—and I remembered Willie Do’s declaration in his own apartment. Gracie teased Hank. She’d taken a real shine to him—“Such a cute boy, and quick”—and loved goofing on him. Liz gave him a bear hug. Hank always looked embarrassed by the attention, but I could tell he was pleased. Since Hank and I became buddies, he’d slowly worked his way into all my friends’ affections. Now, with all my friends around me, Gracie kidded Hank about his shaved head (“a skinny Buddha”) and his shadowing of my investigation.
“I want to learn from the master,” Hank declared grandly.
Jimmy interrupted, “I’m not taking on any pupils, Hank.”
We laughed.
There was a sudden rapping at the door, and we all jumped, guilty of something. It gave me pause. After all, my closest friends were at that moment huddled in the room with me, and the hour was late. Who? The police? I thought of Karen, but I knew she’d never drop in. Nobody came to the door around midnight. Everyone must have been thinking the same thing because we became quiet, very quiet.
I opened it. Ken Rodman looked sheepish and uncomfortable. He had on an overcoat, so I assumed he was coming home from somewhere. His face looked stiff with cold.
He looked over my shoulder at the crowd, all of them staring back with expressions ranging from accusation to curiosity.
“I didn’t know you had company,” he said.
That surprised me. We were raucous enough to warrant eviction—had the landlady herself not been a major culprit in the noise.
“Come in.”
“Oh, no.” He backed off. “I wanted to talk to you about last night.”
“I want to talk to you.”
“I have something to tell you.” He mouthed the word Davey silently. “I should have told you before.” But he was already backing off, fast now. “Later on. I’ll catch you later.” He backed off, headed up the stairwell.
I stared at my friends. An obligatory moment of silence, then the frantic Babel of insistent voices rose in awesome crescendo.
“I have nothing to say.” I relished the moment.
They pushed into me, trapping me, all of them believing they’d seen a pivotal moment in the Case.
“I have nothing to say,” I repeated.
No one believed me. Then, smiling, I quoted Buddha: “‘Look for sand in your rice. Look for rice in your sand.’”
Everyone groaned.
Chapter Twenty-five
The next afternoon, after classes, I swam for an hour at the college, then headed to the shopping arcade to visit Karen. She had an hour till closing, she said, though she was restless and ready to leave. When I’d called, she told me to stop in.
“I’m bored,” s
he’d said, “and we gotta talk.”
I got there early, so I wandered down the sidewalk, window shopping. Lingering outside Farmington Books and Things, staring at a display of New England travel books, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned.
“Did you see Peter at the college today?” Selena asked.
“No. Why?”
She stood there, waiting.
“Does he have a late afternoon class?” I asked.
She shrugged her shoulders. “It doesn’t matter.” She smiled. “You shopping?”
I didn’t answer. I looked over her shoulder, and her face tightened.
“You’re here to see Karen.” Her voice was flat.
“Yes.”
“Wasn’t I neurotic enough for you?”
I smiled. “You did a good job of it.”
“All women get neurotic around men. You men train us to be that way. It’s a form of slavery. Men want us off balance.”
I kept my mouth shut. Karen, glancing out the doorway of her shop, spotted me, and waved. I nodded toward her. Selena followed my eye and frowned. She drew her fingernail down my lapel, applying pressure, and then without a word turned away. She disappeared into her shop.
“She still got it for you?” Karen said when I entered her store.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“She and I have this little thing—this tension—for a while now. I don’t know where it came from, but the fact that you dated her adds to the fire.”
I didn’t say anything.
“She has no friends here.” She waved her hand across the line of shops. Then, smiling, “Oh well. Some folks rub others the wrong way.”
Her smugness bothered me, prompting me to defend Selena, whose childhood was as lost as my own. “You gotta remember where she came from, Karen. She never really fit in, you know, growing up with a crazy mother, a rotten father never around, Radcliffe on a scholarship, then meeting Peter who…”
Karen cut me off, angry. “I know the resumé. The whole goddamn town has heard it. The poor All-American girl meets the poor All-American boy. Fireworks. The pretty people. I need a rest from it.”
“Sorry.”
Almost closing time, we talked very little while she tended to the store, eyeing a young mother who kept frowning at a piece of art on the wall. When we were alone, she told me that she’d found another box of Marta’s papers tucked into a clothes drawer that she was emptying out. Mostly old bills, but she wanted me to look through it. “Telephone receipts, that sort of thing. I don’t know why she kept them.”
“I’ll check them out.”
“Come for dinner. You can go through them.”
I nodded.
“Look, it’s just an excuse to see you.”
I nodded again.
As we drove to her place—I’d walked to the arcade so I rode with her—I asked her when she planned on selling Marta’s house.
“I hate that house. Way out there—so—well, so like Marta herself. Those fifties windows and that fifties kitchen with the black-and-white tile and the…” She stopped, waving her hand. “I don’t want to live there because she once lived there. I’m going to sell it, but not right away. I want to take my time.”
While she tossed a salad for dinner, I leafed through the cardboard box of papers. Elastic bands bound receipts from years back—household bills from the Connecticut Light and Power, Connecticut Gas, the sort of stuff anyone would have thrown out long ago. At one point Karen walked in. She’d changed her clothes, slipping out of her work outfit of a casual gray wool suit and into a pair of billowing fawn-colored slacks and that light yellow cashmere sweater I liked. She’d let her hair down and looked like a young girl, the autumn colors masking the stress in her face.
“You look happy,” I told her, but she said nothing, returning to the kitchen. A cabinet door slammed. I’d just made her more uncomfortable. Davey’s voice, again: Karen runs from everything while she actually thinks she’s running to it. Why did that line stay with me?
Idly I sifted through another box she’d carried from Marta’s home.
“Marta’s attempt to mimic Joshua’s collecting,” she yelled to me.
I scanned some of the titles. A Thomas Hardy novel, a Robert W. Chambers romance, some faded and chipped leather volumes, odd genteel romances with embossed gilt covers. They were lined up in the bottom of a cardboard box.
“They remind me of her.” Karen appeared behind me, looking over my shoulder.
“I like old books.”
“I don’t,” Karen said. “Neither did Marta. She complained that she had to dust his walls of books. And every other professor’s. Like Wilcox and Safako. Books and books and books. She hated books.”
“You’re hard on her, Karen.”
“Am I?”
“I find it strange that this woman men wanted as a friend has such bad stuff said about her—after her death. Even Hattie.”
“She wasn’t a saint, you know.”
I stared at her.
Throughout dinner we barely spoke, a faraway look in her eyes despite my attempts to generate conversation. I gabbed monotonously about Gracie and Jimmy, but she kept looking away.
“Your aunt saved a lot of junk.” I struggled for a topic.
“You want to talk about the case?”
“I guess so. Is that why I’m here?”
“Yes. I mean, yes, but I also wanted to, you know, relax.”
“But you want to discuss the case.”
“You don’t call me about it.”
“I don’t have much to tell you yet.”
“But you will?”
I shrugged my shoulders. I noticed she barely touched her salad. For a few minutes, mechanically, I outlined what I’d done, everything chronological and matter of fact, ending with the Mary Powell question and my side trip to New Haven and Joshua’s lawyer. I left out seeing her panicky brother outside that bar in New Haven. That was none of my business—at this point, at least.
“So,” she concluded, “we are still nowhere.”
I apologized, but she held up her hand. “It’s okay. You’re onto something.”
That comment startled me. “What?”
“Joshua Jennings and Mary Powell. They hold some important answer. That Mary—she’s hiding something. I can sense it.”
As she spoke, her words so emphatic, without qualification, it suddenly rang true. Not so much the Mary Powell part—most likely that was a dead end—but Joshua held a key to this puzzle. The story of Joshua would lead me back to Marta’s fateful night on that final stone-cold bridge.
Over coffee we relaxed, her easy-going mood returned. We sat together on the sofa, the box of Marta’s papers between us, and she tossed canceled checks and useless papers into the wastebasket. Unused church collection envelopes. United Way appeals. Girl Scout cookie receipts. Marta’s tight, constipated script appeared on lists of dollars and cents spent on little things: chewing gum, hair dye, a Sue Grafton paperback from an airport kiosk. What for? Tax deduction? I doubted that. Canceled airline receipts from many years back. Not the important Russian trip—I looked for that—but quick jaunts to Las Vegas, to the Mall of America, to New Orleans, to Atlantic City. US Airlines. American Airlines. Delta. Standard domestic carriers. We tossed it all away.
But I looked through it all first, every envelope, every receipt, and in one of the last airline packets, folded neatly in half, was a scribbled note definitely not in Marta’s handwriting, dated two years back.
“Look at this.” I handed it to Karen.
“That’s Hattie’s handwriting. I’d recognize it anywhere.”
It was a short note, handwritten, torn from a school-style notepad, signed by Hattie Cozzins, acknowledging the loan of twenty-thousand dollars, some two years back, to be repaid in installments d
etermined at a later time.
“Now that doesn’t sound like my aunt at all,” Karen insisted.
“Why not?”
“Generosity was not one of her strong points. And Hattie was a travel companion, not a bosom buddy. With me, she spent more time ranking on the poor woman than—well, celebrating their friendship.”
I took the piece of paper. “I’ll visit Hattie and see what she has to say about this.”
Antsy now, she wandered the rooms, folding and unfolding her arms, leafing through papers, stopping, sniping at me.
“You’re bothered by the note,” I commented.
She glared. “It’s my money that woman has.”
I shut up. Money, Jimmy always told me. Most murders came down to money.
I suggested a ride to the 880 Club in Hartford to listen to some local jazz, a venue she knew nothing about.
“I don’t know jazz.”
“You don’t have to.”
When we got there, it was still early and the place was nearly empty. A few tables of veterans and regulars nodded and tapped feet to a small lively combo. But after a half hour Karen stood up and touched my shoulder.
“Could we leave now?”
She walked away. I followed her out, rushing to catch up with her.
“Everybody in there is too happy.”
That amazed me because the combo was slinking around a downbeat improv of “St. James Infirmary.” A mournful, low rider kind of night. The rent hadn’t been paid and the band hadn’t been laid. Nobody was happy.
“Rick. My God.”
I heard a voice from the parking lot. Liz was stepping out of a car. She was with a woman I didn’t know. Both were muffled in scarves and pullover hats. I smiled. Her silky voice gave her away.