The Man on the Washing Machine

by Susan Cox

  I walked past the window of Aromas to my front door. I was careful, as always, to have the keys in my hand, to avoid making myself a dithering target for any would-be assassin who might be lurking in the shadows. The ex-policeman who ran my defensive violence class taught us things like that. Because of him, I was in the habit of gripping my keys with the points protruding through the fingers of my hand, like a set of brass knuckles. Even so, I wasn’t sure I could work up the nerve to gouge out someone’s eyes with my house keys. He also suggested we carry a three-inch length of galvanized pipe in our dominant hand to add some strength to our punches. I suppose I could wear body armor and a helmet, too, but you have to draw a line somewhere, even in a country where it’s legal to carry loaded rifles into Walmart. I’d made peace with the keys but they were as far as I was willing to go along that road. I ran up the stairs calling to Lucy after locking and chaining the front door carefully behind me. Lucy jumped off the mattress (I heard her rotund little body hit the bedroom floor with a squishy thump) and swaggered down the hallway to greet me, yawning hugely. Having waited for me to scratch under her chin, she turned around and went back to bed.

  I made myself a cup of tangerine spice tea and ate a chunk of cheese with some bread to help dilute the gin and listened to my jazz playlist as I leaned against my kitchen counter. The kitchen was nearly completed, but it was littered with open-topped cartons of dishes and kitchen tools, left over from when I’d emptied the old green-painted cabinets to replace them with the pale maple ones Nicole had chosen for me.

  I folded a load of towels in the utility room and moved to a perch on a stepladder in the living room to drink my rapidly cooling tea. The flat, mostly empty and somehow starkly beautiful, seemed enormous. Accustomed to the tight quarters in the downstairs studio, I watched the watery shadows on my wall from the streetlight outside my window and felt as if Lucy were sleeping somewhere on the next block.

  I exchanged contact lenses for a pair of glasses and whistled for Lucy and then, because she ignored me as she always does, I went to get her. She snarled at me automatically as I plucked her off the mattress. She was still grumbling as we headed down the back stairs. The wooden steps were bare and it was difficult to be quiet. Haruto and Bramwell Turlough would have to lump it, if they were home.

  Stupidly, I left the utility room door open when I went down. I don’t know why I always do that when I’m so careful about the front door. I think it’s because the garden is so private and there’s no other access to the building at the back. The buildings in Fabian Gardens are shoulder to shoulder from the street side, but they have outside staircases about halfway back to give us all a second way out, in case of a fire or other emergency (for which, read: “earthquake”).

  The back-door landings are nothing much, but big enough for a trash can and a few potted plants for those of us who are so inclined. I have some dispirited herbs, their leaves curling and protesting at the fog they’re expected to deal with when they long for Mediterranean sunshine. The buildings have a variety of dressy facades at the front, but they’re plain and flat-roofed, like shoe boxes, from the garden side. Because of the hill and the staircase effect, the buildings step down gradually so my back landing is level with next door’s rooftop. If I wanted to, I could step past my pots of oregano and parsley onto my neighbors’ flat gravel roof. In a sunnier climate, we’d use the roofs as sundecks; here we abandon them to the seagulls and an occasional laundry line.

  Lucy and I spent ten minutes in the darkened garden; me hissing at her to hurry up and she, furtive and uncooperative, taking exactly the same amount of time as usual. I could hear occasional muffled noises. Sabina’s grandfather, known as Professor D’Allessio, although he’d been retired for a decade or more, goes out after dark to crush snails and slugs. Around the time of the Open Garden, he redoubles his efforts and spends half the night out there, creeping up on unsuspecting gastropods. As if to confirm it, I heard the faint metallic ringing of his hoe.

  If I’d been paying attention to what I was doing, maybe I wouldn’t have been blindsided by what happened next. But as I made my way back up three flights of wooden stairs, wondering if I should soundproof them with sisal matting or something, my mind was dealing with Nicole’s promise to get her act together, and the new group home, and Bramwell Turlough, and, peripherally, whether I thought him as good-looking as Nat did. I was carrying a little plastic bag containing the result of Lucy’s expedition and remembering an argument I once had with a neighbor, who hates animals and what he calls their “leavings,” and trying to recall if it was the oregano or the parsley I’d poured a mug of water on the day before. Lucy’s self-important little white bottom led me up the stairs in the pitch dark. I picked up the pot of oregano, at the same time pushing the door wide open. The unshaded bulb in the utility room ceiling flashed at me like the beam of a lighthouse.

  An overweight man in a business suit was standing on my washing machine.

  Every cell in my body lurched to a standstill. My eyeballs refused to recognize what I was apparently seeing; my synapses vaporized; my muscles locked. My heart stopped beating, and then started beating so fast somewhere up in my throat I thought my body would explode.

  He was about fifty, with pitted skin the color of dust. His forehead was glistening with sweat and he was opening and closing his mouth like a sea anemone. Like me, he was paralyzed, wide-eyed and apparently frozen in place. He had a short red strap in his hand; it was ragged and torn at the ends. Tacky. Time suddenly wound down with an almost audible whine and I had time to think “tacky red strap” twice.

  Everything about him stood out like neon. The navy blue suit. The pale blue handkerchief peeking coyly from his breast pocket. The shamrock lapel pin. The stylish inch of French cuff showing at the sleeve of his jacket. The malachite cuff link. I looked down at his feet for some reason. He had trampled and jumbled my pile of neatly folded towels. I felt a surge of panic, as if a towel trampler could be capable of anything. He took a step toward me and stumbled on another towel. I instinctively swept back my arm, flung the pot of oregano at him, and produced a loud, terrified scream that hurt my throat. The ex-policeman had told us to make as much noise as possible, so I kept screaming as I tripped in my panicked exit out the door, collided with the trash can, and fell crashing into the pots of herbs. I landed on my side, with half my body extended onto my neighbors’ roof. Horribly, the image of the falling Tim Callahan blocked out lucid thought.

  “For Christ’s sake, shut up!” the man shouted. I heard him jump off the washing machine and stumble into the trash can. I shut up, but not voluntarily. The screaming turned of its own accord into hysterical hiccupping. I rolled over clumsily, preparing to sweep him off his feet with a scissor action of my legs. But he was down beside me on one knee, with a grimy mixture of potting soil and blood streaked down the side of his face. It didn’t improve him. I groped for another pot to hit him with and came up with Lucy’s plastic bag. Out of options, I froze in terror. The small part remaining of my rational mind told me that my last sight on earth might be the filthy face of my killer as he bent over me again to hurl me to my death. I would plunge through the air like Tim Callahan and land in the garden. Dead.

  He lurched away from me into the wall and slid down into a squat, clutching his head. “Jesus! All right. Don’t get up.”

  Of course I immediately sat up and then my muscles tightened into mean little knots. My field of vision narrowed and I could only see one thing at a time. First was the lapel pin. It was a green enamel shamrock. He waved the red strap aimlessly at me and I memorized how that looked. It was red nylon webbing. He jabbed it carelessly into his pocket as if he didn’t know what to do with it and pulled it out again. If he had a gun in that pocket I was going to have to jump off the damn roof to avoid getting shot. Which was worse—bleeding to death from a bullet or being squashed by a headfirst landing onto a garden bench three floors below?

  Lucy snarled and made a lunge at his shoes, an
d he raised a threatening fist at her. I grabbed Lucy—her ego is the toughest part of her—and tried to contain her furious squirming little body in my arms.

  “Where the hell did you come from?” the man groaned, waving the strap again. Sweat was shining on his bald head like a layer of oil. His glance roamed vaguely past me and he mumbled: “The place is empty for months. Jesus. The luck of the Irish.”

  The flowerpot to the head must have dazed him; he was muttering to himself, not to me. His behavior so far was frightening, but unthreatening. Suppose he was a harmless nut, climbing on people’s washing machines all over the city? Dealing with the public has given me unique life skills; a nut I can always handle. I opened my mouth to humor him, when he froze me rigid by reaching into his jacket pocket.

  I thought: “Godammit, I can’t jump off the roof,” and frantically tried to remember some of the self-defense moves the ex-policeman had taught me. None of the examples we practiced began with the victim clutching a twelve-pound terrier in her arms, while the attacker squatted on the floor clutching his head. I heard a tiny grunt, and risked a quick look at his face. He was dabbing at the dirty mess oozing down his cheek with his immaculate, neatly folded handkerchief. He looked at the results and said, “Jesus,” again. Then he heaved himself to his feet and stepped over me onto the roof next door.

  He was several strides away when I blurted: “Wait, where are you going?” When he turned back with narrowed eyes I could have bitten off my tongue.

  “Shut up, lady. Don’t push it. Shut up!” His voice rose higher with every word until the last was a near squeak. Incredibly, he looked as if he might burst into tears any second. His jowls quivered.

  It gave me another spark of courage: “Hey! Who the hell do you think you are? And what were you doing on my washing machine?” Dammit. I sounded unhinged, even to myself.

  He made a ferociously crude gesture involving a clutched arm and a fist and trudged away across the roof. I watched him, openmouthed until good sense made a comeback. I grabbed Lucy even tighter in my arms, dived back inside my own back door, and slammed it shut behind us. If I’d had a drawbridge I would have pulled it up. Instead, in unconscious imitation of the man on the washing machine, I slid down inside the door, squatted on the floor, and shook.

  CHAPTER NINE

  My hand shook even more as I began to call 911. It shook so much I hesitated and then I snapped the phone off. I told myself nothing much had happened. And having cops in the house, with their thick-soled shoes and their creaking leather belts and buckles and their ton of attitude, was more than I could stomach. I waited for the trembles to pass and called Nat instead. Like the good friend he was, he heard me out in silence—I didn’t give him much of a chance to talk—and then he said: “I’ll be right over,” in a muzzy, sleep-filled mumble. I heard something fall with a thump off his bedside table.

  I felt consoled immediately. “It’s okay. I just wanted to talk to you.”

  “Theo, I’m comin’ over; I’ll be there in ten minutes,” he said more sharply.

  While I was still pacing through the apartment trying to figure out what my burglar had been doing, Nat came up the back stairs three at a time and after asking me permission with his eyes, nearly crushed the breath out of me in a bear hug.

  “Are you okay? What did the guy do?”

  I had to mumble into his cashmere sweater. He felt warm and smelled of woodsmoke. “Nothing. He didn’t do anything.”

  He loosened his hold a little. I was still going to have bruises on my arms. “Are you sure you’re okay?” he said more gently.

  I felt tears start into my eyes and it made my reply harsher than he deserved. “The stupid bastard dug around in my fireplace, trailed soot all over the house, climbed up on my washing machine, and scared the life out of me when I came upstairs,” I said.

  “Sounds like he’s a coupla sandwiches short.” He held me at arm’s length and watched me carefully.

  “That’s what I thought. Just a crazy. Do you want coffee?” But I felt a wave of relief and anticlimax that was almost like a blow in the face and the kettle trembled against the kitchen faucet like castanets.

  Nat took over the coffee making and all he said was: “This looks like the French almondine I gave you six months ago.”

  “You’re the only one who drinks it.”

  “Hmmm. What did Lucy think?”

  “She tried to eat him.” I watched him grind the coffee and fuss with the press he’d bought me in a (futile) attempt to change my preference for tea. “Do you honestly think he was only a nut?” I asked him as the water boiled.

  “What else?”

  I swallowed hard and felt slightly sick. Aftershock, I thought, like the trembles that follow an earthquake. He walked with me into the utility room.

  “I’ll start the telephone tree tomorrow and post it on the Facebook page,” he said thoughtfully. “Did you get dirt all over or was that him?”

  “Me. I threw a flowerpot at him.”

  Nat’s eyes lit up. “Good for you.”

  I bit my lip. “I guess everyone ought to be warned. Don’t make too much of it though.” He gave me an understanding grimace and I knew we were both thinking of the same thing. I was able to get away from a knife-wielding robber last year because Nat came into Aromas through the back door, heard my screams, and hit him in the back of the head with a gallon jug of shampoo. It dazed him, we made our escape, and the guy bolted.

  Nat had rescued me. Nat who had somehow managed to do what needed to be done before he fainted at my feet seeing the small amount of blood on my arm. It was a debt he never mentioned, and one I’d never be able to repay.

  Even though I was a newcomer to the neighborhood, thanks to Nat I had been embraced as one of their own and for days after I came home from the ER I didn’t need to cook a meal or spend an evening without company. Very soon I’d felt suffocated and asked Nat to have everyone stand down. I couldn’t face that again.

  I pointed out the streaks of soot on the washing machine, and we followed the sooty trail backward through the kitchen and the dining room to the living room fireplace. There were handprints on a couple of the walls and footprints all over my refinished floors.

  We got back to the kitchen and he poured out two coffees, opened then closed the refrigerator door, and rustled in one of my stylish kitchen cabinets.

  “There’s some artistic, irregular lumps of brown sugar in there somewhere,” I said.

  He heaved a mock sigh. “I bought that for you, too. I don’t guess you have any half-and-half or hazelnut creamer?” I shrugged and he sighed. “No, of course not. What about the cops?”

  I hesitated. “My grandmother used to say worse things happen in a war. Nothing much happened I guess. Now I’m more pissed than anything.”

  He touched my shoulder lightly. “No cops. Okay. Here’s your borin’ black coffee. Only you could drink tea for breakfast and coffee at midnight.” He handed it to me and glanced around the kitchen. “You know, if you’d organize this kitchen … you’ve got a golden opportunity now everythin’s new and bright. I’ll even come over and do it for you. For example: always keep the dishes as close to the dishwasher as possible—makes emptyin’ it so much easier. Look—” He took half my plates and dishes out of a cabinet as he talked and stacked them neatly into an empty cabinet over the dishwasher. He kept working, finishing by organizing my paltry, mismatched collection of pots and pans, his expression that of a craftsman forced to work with substandard equipment. “See? Much better. Although you should buy some Le Creuset—enamel on cast-iron, lasts forever. The forest green would look good in here. No, maybe the cobalt. We can decide later. In the meantime, I can’t find the damn sugar.”

  “I think I ate it all. Nat, you don’t have to do this.”

  “Of course I do,” he said more seriously, and draped his spare arm loosely around my shoulders. “What did he look like? Maybe we could have a drawing of him done and e-mail it ’round. If You See This Ma
n Call The Cops,” he said in obvious capital letters. “Was he young? White? Asian? Black? What was he wearin’?”

  “He was fifty-ish. A white guy. Sort of fat and bald. In a suit and French cuffs for God’s sake.”

  Nat snorted into his mug and managed to splash coffee onto his sweater.

  “Shit!” he said, and dabbed at it frantically with a wet sponge. “Dammit, Theo, don’t make me laugh. Look at me!”

  I grunted in amusement; I couldn’t help it. He looked up ruefully. “All right. I’m shallow. But it’s cashmere! Besides, no one has burglars who look like insurance salesmen! What else do you remember?”

  I hesitated. “There was something about his pronunciation. He said ‘Jaysus,’ as if he might be Irish. And he seemed mad—not crazy, but angry or upset.”

  “A hot-tempered Irishman. He should be easy to find,” he said brightly.

  I punched him lightly in the arm and he pretended it hurt him.

  “What the hell could he have been doing? If he was after valuables, he came to the wrong place, the bastard,” I said.

  “You’re beginnin’ to sound more like yourself,” Nat drawled.

  I was beginning to feel more like myself, too. “Thanks to you,” I said.

  He shrugged it off and blotted his sweater again. “I forgot to tell you earlier, did you hear Sabina is havin’ collagen injections to make her lips fuller?” he asked innocently.

  It was my turn to choke on my coffee. “Who told you that?”

  “No one has to tell me; I’m very intuitive,” he said. “I’m thinkin’ of giving her a nickname—um—Collie? That would remind her we shared a secret without tellin’ everyone else.”