The Man on the Washing Machine

by Susan Cox

  Ben wasn’t all over me. And she didn’t know about my family. And if she thought she didn’t have friends, she wasn’t looking closely enough. But it seemed kinder not to argue.

  “I’ll guarantee you, no one thought the compost turnings would be our most popular event,” Haruto said with a grin as I passed him on his way to the compost pile.

  “What’s the temperature up to?” I asked, because he was hoping I would and I didn’t have the heart to disappoint him. The heat generated by the compost pile was a source of wonder during his demonstrations. Haruto was its custodian, but we all contributed our vegetable scraps and the gardeners added their weeds and trimmings, so it was a communal effort and an impressive size.

  He flushed with pleasure. “One hundred forty-two degrees. It’s cooking.” He hesitated, then added: “Those women from the shelter who came by this morning to help me have been great.”

  “What women?”

  “Bella and AnaZee came out here at eight. Said they saw me working from the window and did I need any help. I put them to work finishing up dead-heading roses and raking the paths.”

  He nodded in the direction of two young women near the toolshed. One of them had a rake in her hand, and the other was returning a pair of garden shears to the toolshed. The taller woman had aged bronze skin and hair like a wedge of chocolate cake; her companion’s skin was like uncooked pastry, with lank brown hair tied back in thin ribbon like a piece of string. I remembered Ben Turlough’s brief histories of his residents and wondered, inevitably, which story went with which woman. Ben appeared beside them with two mugs of hot chocolate, which they took with shy smiles.

  “Nice work, Haruto,” I said. He threw me a wink and strode off in the direction of the compost pile, looking even more eager than usual to show off his pride and joy. I saw Davie over there, his black eye blooming. He gave me a big grin, which made me smile back. I turned as I heard a faint musical chime behind me.

  “Cold?” Nat said. One of his pale blue cashmere-clad arms came gently up around my shoulders.

  “Not now,” I said cheerfully. “This reminds me of the fairy tale about belling the cat,” I said, picking up the pendant and letting the tiny chimes run through my fingers.

  “A fairy tale, huh?” He smiled down at me, his eyes sparkling with amusement.

  “Where’s Derek?” I said.

  “Waitin’ for me in the car. I only came by to say a quick hi. He wants to get over to the workshop and I get to watch adorin’ly.”

  “You love being needed,” I said.

  “True. I’d be pissed if he hadn’t asked.”

  “You guys made up?”

  He waggled his head from side to side. “I’d say we’re mostly good. He’s worried about gettin’ this job finished for Professor D’Allessio.”

  “Oh?”

  “It’s a surprise,” he whispered. “For Mrs. D for their fiftieth anniversary.”

  “It may be more of a surprise than he thinks; I think Ruth is hoping for an anniversary cruise.”

  He grinned and looked around brightly. “So what’s the latest with Sabina and Kurt? I couldn’t overhear a damn thing last night.”

  “Sabina seems to be having a hard time dealing with his exes.” He gave me big eyes. “Not me, you idiot, mostly Nicole, who he’s apparently cozy with, and Helga, who isn’t an ex—is she?” He shook his head. “—but who has that thing for him. Look, have you seen Nicole? I haven’t seen her for a couple of days and I think she’s avoiding me.”

  His grip loosened as he looked in the direction of her apartment. “Not since I basically threw her out of the apartment the other night.” He looked a little ashamed of himself, then he leaned down and sniffed ostentatiously. “Pretty perfume,” he said after a few seconds.

  “Thank you,” I said, mistrusting his innocent tone.

  “Makeup too?”

  “A little blush.”

  “And mascara. And a teeny touch of eye shadow. Very tasteful.”

  I heard the women from the shelter laughing and then Ben left them and came in our direction across the garden. Added to the scar over his eyebrow, his earring made him look like an Elizabethan rogue.

  “Everything looks beautiful out here,” Ben said with that smile as he reached us. It made him look years younger. He wasn’t coiled tight today; he seemed relaxed for the first time since we’d met.

  “You’re probably seeing it in daylight for the first time,” I said, and blushed. Damn!

  “Advance plannin’,” Nat said solemnly. “The gardeners give a little tweak here, a tweak there. Like makeup on a pretty woman. Gotta run.” He blew me a kiss and darted off. Jackass.

  My cheeks still felt warm in spite of the cold morning. Ben frowned around the garden, much as the professor had done earlier. Fortunately, the old man was nowhere in sight.

  “It was good of you to let Bella and AnaZee lend a hand. They said everyone’s been friendly,” he said.

  “That was Haruto’s doing.”

  He raised a surprised eyebrow. “The same Haruto who leapt down my throat the other night?”

  I made a gurgle of laughter. “He’s a bit whimsical,” I said.

  “Bella and AnaZee are smitten. He must be schizophrenic.”

  We found them near the swings and he introduced us, by first names only. The women were guarded, with watchful eyes. Bella pointed out her daughter playing on the swings. The child had long blond hair and purple shadows under her eyes. I asked the women if they’d seen a machete while they were working around the garden, but they hadn’t.

  “This is a nice place for kids,” AnaZee said, looking around at the enclosing buildings. “A safe place.”

  I heard what she meant; I know how necessary it is for a terrified woman to feel safe.

  “Come and show me around, Theo,” Ben said next to me, and we left the two women to whatever comfort the garden gave them.

  “Tell me about the fuzzy, snaky-looking red plant over there,” he pointed. “Don’t think I’ve ever seen it before.”

  He was making conversation. Nice. “It’s an amaranth, which sounds sort of boring, but it’s got a great common name.”

  He smiled at me. “What is it?”

  “Love-lies-bleeding.” I walked blindly into one of the rosemary topiaries. I needed to stop looking at his face and pay attention to where I was walking.

  He took cigarettes from his jacket pocket, and offered me the pack. I shook my head. He lit one for himself, inhaling the smoke as if he’d been waiting a week. “Trying to quit,” he said.

  “How’s that going?”

  He chuckled. “Not great. I notice Californians don’t smoke much.”

  “It’s pretty unusual. Once you’ve been here a while the universal condemnation will get to you.”

  “I doubt it,” he said, and I thought he was probably right.

  I walked him through the main areas of the garden, most of the time watching his face more than where I was going. Lesson not learned apparently. He took my arm a few minutes later to prevent me from walking through a rosebush. As we finished our circular tour I pointed out the compost pile and its custodian. Haruto was checking his thermometer again.

  “That’s Haruto?” Ben said. “It was dark the other night but I could have sworn the guy I saw out here was bigger. I don’t remember the ponytail, either.”

  “When Haruto’s defending his compost pile, he’s nine feet tall,” I assured him.

  Ben hesitated.

  “Why?” I asked. “Do you see anyone else it could be? Almost everyone is here.”

  “No.” He thanked me for the tour and left me to talk to another one of his residents who had come down to join in the festivities. By now there were about forty people in the garden, several of them taking tours led by Gardens residents and others waiting expectantly near the compost pile for Haruto’s demonstration. I sipped a hot chocolate, all plans to leave forgotten because Ben was still there. It had been a while since I took pleas
ure in simply watching a man move.

  At exactly ten twenty-five, Grandfather planted his Swaine Adeney shooting stick firmly in the ground a few feet in front of the compost pile and sat on its leather seat. The rest of the audience used him as their polestar and gathered around him. Every now and again he waved an imperious hand at anyone arrogant enough to get in his line of sight and they respectfully fell back. We’d have the same performance at the bonsai demonstration if he was up to his usual form. I tried not to watch.

  Ben walked over to join the audience and I hovered on the outskirts on a slight rise of ground that gave me a good view of Ben in the compost audience and of Helga serving hot chocolate and Mrs. Jupp enjoying herself at the sale table. Two young men walked away wearing sun visors; one of them was carrying a bud vase.

  Haruto began the show; he was in his element, giving his little speech about aerating the compost to jog all the little microorganisms into doing their duty. He showed them the thermometer, the kind that looks like a metal lollypop, stuck into one side of the pile, neatly shaped like a square, a good five feet on each side, and over four feet tall. I heard his voice, fading in and out with each turn of his head.

  “… up to … and sixty degrees … steams on a cold day.”

  There were murmurs from the crowd and Haruto looked gratified. He indicated his watering can (a Haws, naturally) with which he sprinkled the compost after he lifted it, forkful by forkful, and replaced it in neat layers, like a cake. He uses a hose normally, but the watering can looks better for the demonstration.

  “… careful not to … too wet. Like a squeezed-out sponge is…”

  Haruto loves it when he gets questions from the audience so I knew he’d be delighted with the opener from a young guy with his arm around a girl: “Can you put dog and cat poo in it?”

  Grandfather says Americans are euphemistically inclined.

  “… glad you asked … the answer … no … harbor bacteria … don’t want to hear about…” The crowd laughed.

  Everyone watched intently as Haruto’s face grew a few degrees pinker with each heavy forkful. A few people, I knew from experience, would be startled by the smell. Grandfather, accustomed to the perfume of the stable yard, wouldn’t flinch.

  Then three things happened more or less simultaneously. Haruto flung aside a particularly large forkful of compost, Grandfather did flinch, and someone produced a high, thin scream. A man with a mug of hot chocolate stood between me and whatever was happening. His cup slowly tipped and the cocoa dribbled unnoticed onto his trousers. Next to him a woman in gray and black sweats relaxed her grip on the string of a yellow helium balloon. It floated lazily away above her head.

  What the hell was happening? Was Haruto injured? I stood on my toes to see over the crowd, but Grandfather was sitting rigidly on his shooting stick, blocking my view. And then he stood up abruptly and I could see all too clearly.

  A woman’s body lay partially exposed in the crumbly brown compost. Her throat was cut through to the spine, her head bent backward so that the wound was an enormous gaping smile above her abbreviated neck. Haruto’s grip on the pitchfork wavered and he collapsed in a graceless faint.

  The dead woman’s hair was plastered with blood to her bare shoulders, so at first I thought she was naked. But then I saw that the rivulets of burgundy-brown stain only partially covered the glimmer of sequins. Blue and gold sequins. My stomach heaved and the ground felt watery beneath my feet. Someone gripped my arm to keep me from falling.

  In awful slow motion, Nicole’s bloody head flopped forward and a tiny avalanche of half-rotted vegetables fell out of her mouth.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The garden stopped looking like a children’s book and started to look like a painting by Hieronymus Bosch. Oddly mismatched groups stared blank-eyed at the tableau around the compost pile. A teenager with a blond Mohawk solemnly handed his can of Coke to an elderly woman who sat on one of the children’s swings, her face sagging with shock.

  “Oh, God, the children!” I said, suddenly defrosting and looking wildly around.

  “They’re fine,” Ben said, and touched my arm as if he thought I planned to take flight. He pointed at Sabina, holding a toddler in her arms, leading a cluster of young children farther down the garden, away from the horror. She was being trailed by an assortment of distraught parents like the tail on a comet.

  The murmuring people closest to the compost pile were prevented from approaching it by my grandfather. He stood at parade rest with his back to her. No one, his uncompromising expression said, should even want to see her.

  And then everyone, including Grandfather, was shooed away by uniformed police officers who materialized out of nowhere. An enormous, lurching fire engine crept slowly through the narrow entrance into the garden. With its red lights flashing and Klaxon blaring, it drove ponderously through the rose garden, crushing the bushes. Petals scattered, and the canes broke and splintered and lay slowly down under the wheels.

  A sob caught in my throat.

  “Theo?” Ben said.

  I cleared my throat and wiped tears off my cheek with the flat of my hand. “The roses,” I whispered. “Nicole loved them.”

  He frowned. “Wait here,” he said, and left. He came back with a mug of hot chocolate and wrapped one of my hands around the mug. When the warmth reached my fingers I inspected the chocolate in the mug carefully, but didn’t drink it until he raised it to my lips. I couldn’t taste it.

  God, Nicole!

  I looked vaguely at the people nearest the compost pile. Helga was resting against Mrs. Jupp’s shoulder, staring unblinkingly at the compost pile. Haruto had come out of his faint in the care of a paramedic and was sitting on the ground holding a hand over his eyes. They were all going to need therapy. A woman in a familiar red jacket was speaking to the man in the cocoa-stained pants. He looked pale and shaken. He’d dropped the cup at his feet and he had his glasses in his hands. He was wiping them meaninglessly, over and over, on the tail of his shirt. Inspector Lichlyter came across the garden to where I was standing.

  “Miss Bogart.” The depressed lines at the corners of her mouth were deeper than ever. She consulted the notebook in her hand. She was brusque with barely contained anger. I didn’t get it and couldn’t force my brain to work; why was she mad?

  “The deceased was your business partner?” She didn’t look up from her notebook.

  “I think—I’m pretty sure—I mean I know it is because—Nicole.”

  “Does she have family?”

  I tried to get my brain to focus. “No. Yes. An uncle, but I don’t know his name. She only has—had a married sister in Wisconsin, or Minnesota I think.”

  She wrote that down in the notebook. “How are you doing? I have some more questions—”

  “Right now she’s going to sit down,” Ben said, and he was right; I needed to sit down before I fell down. I couldn’t remember the last time I took a breath and inhaled audibly. He took off his leather jacket and laid it over my shoulders without saying anything. It felt heavy. The satin lining was warm. I pressed it against me and absorbed the warmth. I hadn’t realized I was so cold.

  The inspector looked up from her note-taking and inspected him. “Try one of those benches,” she said. “We won’t be needing you for a few minutes yet,” she added to me.

  “I’ll wait,” I said vaguely, not very curious about why she might need me.

  Her glance shifted beyond my left shoulder and I became aware of Grandfather standing composedly by my side. He took hold of my elbow in a courtly gesture and we walked slowly away. I looked back over my shoulder. A uniformed police officer was videotaping the scene immediately around the compost pile while another was taking photos. Haruto’s pitchfork lay across Nicole’s partly excavated body like a fallen spear and Grandfather’s shooting stick was still planted firmly in the ground next to her.

  Ben and Grandfather sat on either side of me on a bench facing away from the compost pile. I hunched i
nside Ben’s jacket and thought of absolutely nothing. It felt as if my mind had simply shut down. I didn’t think with any clarity about Nicole, or our friendship, or the terrible sight I had just seen. I didn’t think about it, but I saw it as if through a telephoto lens. Every tiny detail was present in front of my eyes, even when I closed them. Shock and sorrow were warring with revulsion and seemed to be canceling each other out.

  After clearing his throat a couple of times and evidently thinking better of it and lapsing into silence, Grandfather said finally: “The police will want to know when you last saw your partner alive.”

  “On Friday,” I said. It helped to have something to concentrate on. “She came into the shop to borrow some money. She needed to pay her rent. I wish I hadn’t…”

  “Hadn’t what?” he said sharply when I didn’t go on.

  “I gave her fifty dollars and a ton of righteous disapproval.”

  Nearby, a knot of uniformed officers were talking in voices quiet enough to make individual words indistinct. For a few seconds, I tried to make sense of the murmurs, but the sounds remained confusing. I looked aimlessly back at my grandfather. His dark gray hair, impeccable as always, was slicked back with military precision by fifty strokes daily from a pair of oval, silver-backed brushes. A disobedient tuft of hair peeked coyly out over the top of his ear. His earlobes were very long. In early photographs of him, his earlobes were smaller. Age, I thought, makes strange changes.

  His long face grew even more disapproving than usual as I stared at him. “Theophania, pay attention,” he said. “Your partner was stealing from you?”

  “For about two months,” I said. “I told her it had to stop, or…”

  “Or what?” He aimed a worried look at Ben. The two men had unexpectedly developed a rapport that required no speech.

  I felt confined by their book-end presence and excluded from some exclusively male understanding. I considered standing up to make some sort of point and decided I felt too tired.

  “I don’t know. I hadn’t figured out what to do. We had another fight. Oh, hell.” I leaned forward onto my knees. Gradually becoming aware of a certain quality in the silence, I looked up. Ben was staring over my head to the compost pile; Grandfather was chewing the inside of one cheek and frowning ferociously.