The Man on the Washing Machine

by Susan Cox

  Nicole’s killer had no fear of blood.

  He half opened his eyes. He looked almost sleepy. I saw his eyes shift, and he made a weak, uncoordinated gesture with one hand. I followed it and unzipped his black Windbreaker. It was warm and damp. My head swam as I pulled the jacket aside. There was barely enough light for me to see the big seeping dark patch nearly covering the front of his yellow cashmere sweater. The sweater I liked. The one that made him look so handsome. Dear God.

  I looked up frantically and shouted at random. “Somebody! Somebody call 911!”

  “They’re already on their way,” Sabina’s voice said from somewhere in the gloom. And suddenly, the electric lights in the trees sprang on looking horribly festive and giving me enough light to see everyone, looking like a chorus in a semicircle around the pietà at center stage.

  “Call them again! For God’s sake, he’s dying!” My voice cracked. She came over cautiously, took one look, and her eyes met mine in horror.

  “I’ll call again. Put pressure on the wound.” She wriggled out of her own jacket, bundled it into a makeshift pad, and pressed it more or less in the middle of the seeping, expanding red stain. “I’ll tell them to hurry.” She got off her knees and turned away with her phone already at her ear.

  “It’s okay, Nat. It’ll be okay,” I whispered. He smiled at me faintly and said something I couldn’t hear. I bent my head lower.

  “Love you,” he said faintly.

  “I love you, too. Don’t die, Nat, please don’t die.”

  “No.” He looked thoughtful, as if he was deciding whether further speech was worth the effort. “Nicole and Derek … partners. Yes?” He paused for my nod of understanding. “Rhino horn … for medicine … help people … make a fortune. I didn’t know.”

  “I understand. Don’t talk, okay?”

  His eyes slowly closed and he was quiet for more than half a minute. I looked around anxiously, and was startled to see Helga, drooping and apparently unconscious, being held up between Ben and Haruto. I started to ask them what the hell had happened to her, but I turned back when Nat groaned softly. He licked his lips. “Thirsty,” he said.

  My eyes filled with tears. “Don’t talk, Nat. Don’t say any more.”

  He moved his head from side to side and his unfocussed eyes wandered, perhaps searching for something. “Sabina stole your gun … I took it from her.” Another long pause. “When it disappeared … I thought it was Derek. He thought I … killed Nicole in a jealous fit.” He made a wheezy laugh, which turned into a painful cough and he was silent for a moment.

  “Derek said maybe drug dealers killed Nicole. Told me about the horn … Not illegal he said … p-politically incorrect … I helped him move it.” He closed his eyes again and lay quiet.

  “I heard you,” I said brokenly. I couldn’t finish. Couldn’t tell him I’d heard the faint musical tinkle of his pendant in my garage, just before he—or someone—knocked me unconscious.

  I heard a siren coming closer, and red flashing lights bounced off the shapes in the garden. Nat opened his eyes again. “It sucks,” he said clearly. He closed his eyes. I angrily shook him. His head jerked flaccidly. I called his name. “Nat! Nat! Don’t go!”

  Hurried footsteps, and then a stranger’s hand reached for the pulse point in his neck and rested listening fingers there for the space of a few long seconds. Someone unlocked my rigid arm from around his head. Derek came running out of the darkness, shoved aside someone who grabbed at his arm, and skidded to his knees at Nat’s side.

  I was helped to a bench and I sat numbly and tried to breathe while competent hands felt me all over impersonally, pressed a couple of ribs, which yielded in a curiously inappropriate way, and fixed an oxygen mask around my face. I was aware of a jumble of voices explaining the general carnage to a mixed crowd of police and firefighters and paramedics. More police were on their way. Inspector Lichlyter. And the coroner. I looked over to where Nat lay with his face half in shadow and his eyes closed. He was so handsome. And I loved him.

  I heard a snarl and looked toward the sound. Helga was now tied at the wrists and ankles with straps of some kind. Belts, I thought wisely, and felt dissociated from everything. She was still groggy, fighting against the restraints, glaring around her with hatred. She shouted at me, her mouth uncontrolled, lips flecked with saliva. “I hate you!” I shrank from her frenzy and the lack of reason in her eyes.

  I sought out the comfort of familiar faces in the crowd. Staring with open mouths at Helga. At me. I could see the questions, the accusations, forming in their eyes. Ben stood off to one side. He didn’t look as if he had any questions at all.

  “Not Nat, not Derek,” I said brokenly.

  He shook his head.

  Not Nat, I thought with relief. Before I came down to the garden I’d almost worked everything out. Derek was the man Professor D’Allessio meant he’d seen at the compost pile the night Nicole was buried; it was Derek he had telephoned to demand an explanation. It was Derek who had taken the offensive and shouted at Ben when he, too, stumbled across his desperate attempt to hide Nicole’s body. Because, love apparently being stupid and blind, he thought Nat had killed Nicole. And Nat thought Derek had shot at me with my gun. Their attempts to protect each other had caused most of the subsequent confusion.

  But my on-line search had finally given me the key. It was Helga who had pushed Tim Callahan from a window; cut Nicole’s throat with the lost machete; who had stabbed Professor D’Allessio; and tried to kill me.

  A sob forced its way out of my throat. I had been afraid, so afraid it was Nat. Helga’s guilt came as a terrible relief, mixed with a sort of stunned incredulity that so many of us were apparently the objects of her hatred. What the hell had I ever done?

  Inspector Lichlyter’s red jacket appeared in front of me. I heard her say: “How is she?”

  I didn’t look up.

  She crouched in front of me. “Okay?” she said gently. My eyes filled involuntarily with tears. I nodded. She stood up and squeezed my shoulder then dug around in her shoulder bag and closed my fingers around a lace-trimmed handkerchief. Time passed. I heard Sabina telling how she had heard me scream and come running out. I didn’t remember screaming. And Ben was explaining to someone that he was too far away to stop the attack. He had heard it, and tackled Helga as she ran away.

  “And I helped him,” Haruto said, “and we managed to knock her out—my God, she fought like a tiger—and, well, I guess that’s it.”

  “You’ll feel better out of that crowd,” one of the paramedics said as he helped me over to a pull-down seat at the back of the fire truck that had arrived, somehow, without me noticing. The paramedic had bright blue eyes. I concentrated on breathing, and the oxygen did help. But it didn’t help everything. I couldn’t help crying for the man I had been afraid would be my murderer. My best friend. My rescuer. And then I noticed paramedics still working urgently over Nat. Very urgently. They wouldn’t do that if he was dead—I stood up and saw them shift him onto a stretcher and put him in the back of the ambulance.

  Okay then.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  I spent two weeks at Grandfather’s home on a secretive lane on Telegraph Hill. I slept for most of three days under the influence of serious painkillers. Late one night I opened my eyes groggily and thought I saw Ben sitting in a pool of light on the other side of the room. He put a book down and came round the bed, and I fell asleep again, dreaming I felt his hand on my face.

  As soon as I was able, I telephoned Haruto and Davie to let them know I was again among the living. I asked Haruto to reopen Aromas. He laughed and told me he couldn’t wait to get back to work; he didn’t even mention his Japanese gardens. I asked him why he and Nicole had been at each other’s throats.

  “She owed me money, Theo.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said helplessly. “When I’ve had the accounts audited, I’ll try to pay you back.”

  “Thanks,” he said gruffly. “It can wait.”
/>   Davie asked me when I was coming back. A week or two, I told him.

  “Don’t worry about the butterflies,” he said, as if I’d asked. “Your grandad came over with the keys and gave them to Ben and he lets me in to feed them.”

  “Good,” I said faintly. “Is—er—everyone else okay?”

  “Oh, sure. Everyone’s fine. Sabina and Kurt are having a baby and getting married next month, I think. Professor D’Allessio is going to a nursing home for a while, but he’s gonna be okay. Nat’s still in the hospital. Ben’s fine. I’m helping out at the shelter.”

  “Good,” I repeated feebly. “Take care of yourself and I’ll see you in a few days, okay?”

  “Okay. Bye,” he said cheerfully.

  Inspector Lichlyter visited one morning. She sat in an armchair at the side of my bed and didn’t take off the red jacket. My grandfather’s housekeeper brought her a cup of tea. She drank it thirstily. I said I couldn’t talk much because I was having difficulty breathing.

  “Ribs are like that,” she said, as if she knew from personal experience. “Your official statement can wait a few days. Helga Lindstrom’s made a full confession.”

  “It was somehow connected to her history with the Adelphi Club,” I said simply. “I’ve had plenty of time to think,” I added at her startled expression.

  She nodded. “It goes back a long time. Tim Callahan, Nicole Bartholomew, and Damiano D’Allessio were all involved in a student demonstration fifteen years ago. A busload of students and professors drove over to the Adelphi Club golf course and held a sort of sit-in—a throwback to the sixties—to demand that the club open their membership to people of color. The club had fended off legal challenges to its policies for years and wasn’t about to bend to a crowd of riffraff. The president of the board mishandled it. There was destruction to some of the club’s property, the police were called, and it made a huge splash in the local news. The news coverage went on for weeks and shone a spotlight on the club’s policies and its members—”

  “I Googled the riot—”

  She gave me a repressive look. “It gets better. Several members were asked to resign in the wake of the mess, including the board president, who also lost his hedge fund investors because of the publicity and declared bankruptcy within a year. His business was skating on pretty thin ice anyway, but as long as no one looked too closely or stopped the merry-go-round, he hoped to come out of it okay. When the publicity put him under a spotlight, he and his family went from a highly leveraged mansion in Pacific Heights to near-homeless paupers almost overnight. Their kids—a son and a daughter—went from ski weekends in Tahoe with a personal chef to lunches at McDonald’s. The parents divorced. They all struggled from then on. The boy turned to drugs eventually and died on the streets. It’s an ugly story.”

  “The club president was Helga’s father.”

  “Mmmm. He died a couple of weeks ago in an SRO a few blocks from Fabian Gardens and Helga snapped. She knew Nicole had been involved in the demonstration, but she found out she wasn’t the only one—the Internet search is still on her home computer. The combination of her old enemies being here, and hearing the story of her father’s ruin over and over as a sort of cocktail party joke, apparently tipped her over the edge.”

  “But why me? Why did she hate me?”

  “She’s in love with Kurt Talbot. You and he had been lovers; it was enough. She’d already made an attempt on Sabina D’Allessio and planned to try again.”

  “How? When?” I said stupidly.

  “She said something about a skateboard. She tore it off some kind of artwork in her coffee shop—that doesn’t sound right,” she said, referring to her notes with a frown.

  “I know what she meant,” I said. “There are some big art pieces in the coffee shop with skateboards on them.”

  “Huh.” Lichlyter looked genuinely nonplussed. “That’s what she said. Apparently she put the thing on Sabina’s stairway. That was her first attempt to right the wrongs she felt she’d been dealt and she was determined to rid herself of everyone who ever hurt her. She was actually very careless—she didn’t care if she was caught. She pushed the painter, Tim Callahan, out of the window after following him into the building early one morning. It was sheer good fortune the building was empty and no one saw her enter or leave. She interrupted Callahan breaking into one of the crates of rhino horn, but that had nothing to do with his death.” She frowned again. “I was too close to that to see things clearly.

  “Nicole Bartholomew was in partnership with Derek Linton over the rhino horn shipments,” she went on. “She went to see him and they went out into the garden when his lover was absent for an hour on Friday night. They argued, and he left her there. Ms. Lindstrom was in the garden. She took advantage of the proximity of the toolshed with the machete and the sudden appearance of her old enemy and slit Nicole’s throat.”

  I took a painful breath and spoke rapidly before I had to take another. “Nat came to see me that night, after Charlie O’Brien broke into my flat,” I managed to explain. I could still see him dabbing at his sweater with a sponge and laughing; could still feel the comfort his visit had given me. Hateful to think that Nicole was dying then.

  “She stabbed Professor D’Allessio with that meat skewer when they met in the garden to discuss planting a memorial tree in her father’s memory. Apparently the skewer belonged to Nat and Derek—it sounds as if it had been left behind after some sort of neighborhood picnic.” I thought of the stainless steel skewers Nat had been fooling with and the lamb brochette recipe from Gourmet magazine and felt slightly sick.

  “She seems to have had nothing but luck on her side; she wasn’t trying to hide anything. She said she didn’t bury Nicole—I’m not sure what to make of that.” She scowled at me and I returned the look blandly. A promise is a promise. She went on: “Professor D’Allessio was able to identify Helga as his assailant when he regained consciousness yesterday. She’s totally collapsed—” She sounded pleased, and I couldn’t blame her exactly. It wasn’t her fault that her triumph was my life in pieces.

  “We’re still trying to put all this together, but apparently Helga stole your gun from Nat the same night she tried to kill you. You and Sabina weren’t the last of those she saw as her enemies—”

  “I wasn’t her enemy! I tried to help her when her father died!”

  She shook her head. “She knew about your history with our doctor friend; she saw the two of you together that evening in your store and it tripped her trigger. Don’t try to make sense of it. The short form is: you had to be disposed of, too. She apparently saw the gun in Nat’s bedroom through the open door. She walked in and took it, with no particular victim in mind; she just thought it would be useful. As I said, luck was definitely on her side.”

  “My God,” I said blankly.

  “Derek Linton will find himself in court potentially for bribing customs officials, and if you want to press charges they’ll both find themselves up for battery for the episode in your garage. He’s also on the hook for knocking our officer unconscious and stealing her handcuffs. But his attorney is already insisting that Nicole handled the smuggling. To hear him tell it, Derek was an innocent trying to make a more-or-less honest buck.” She puffed out a breath. “A two-year-long investigation up in smoke.”

  “What about Charlie O’Brien?” I asked after a couple of minutes, because she hadn’t mentioned him.

  “Oh, he’s helping us quite a bit,” she said dryly. I assumed she meant that he had at last been apprehended. I felt tired suddenly. As long as he was finally in jail, Charlie O’Brien could wait.

  Two afternoons later I lay on a sofa with Lucy at my feet, overlooking a view so green and leafy I could imagine myself in the English countryside except for the looming presence of Coit Tower above the trees. Lucy growled happily in her sleep and rolled over, totally at ease with the new regime. Burnished mahogany and polished silver twinkled inside the room. There was a silver tea service—with the Cr
own Derby cups—on a low table next to my sofa. My grandfather’s cook-housekeeper had made a Victoria sponge cake and provided delicate edibles of the invalid-tempting variety. I felt like Elizabeth Barrett Browning. I also felt distinctly better, even if breathing was still a problem. I had, Grandfather informed me, broken two ribs, cracked another, and torn several muscles that were critical to the breathing process.

  “I never trusted them,” Grandfather said. We were discussing Derek and Nat. It still clutched at my heart to think of Nat.

  “Because they were gay,” I said resignedly.

  He pursed his lips and shook his head as he poured tea and handed me a cup. “Plenty of homosexuals in the military, m’dear. Good soldiers, most of ’em.” I spluttered in my tea, and he wordlessly handed me a linen napkin before continuing. “No, I didn’t trust those two. Saw you were fond of ’em, so kept my own counsel, but never felt quite comfortable. Weak, that Nat. Weak. A follower if ever I saw one. But I know I owe him a debt too large to pay,” he added in a different tone, and patted my hand. “And the jeweler chap,” he went on. “An ambitious type. Willing to do anything, I thought. I was right, too. How’re you feeling now? Any better?”

  “Hungry,” I admitted.

  “Here. Have one of these.” He efficiently shoveled two or three miniature pastries onto a plate for me. “Didn’t think you’d want anything heavy, but had Mrs. Warner make plenty of these little things.”

  The little things—whatever they were—were delicious. I ate five.

  Lucid thought continued to elude me much of the time; several friends telephoned, but I didn’t want to speak to them. Grandfather took messages and told them I’d be home soon. Ben didn’t call.

  “This looks like the view outside your house in Kent,” I said on another morning when I’d woken from a nap. I couldn’t seem to stay awake for long.

  “I thought so, too. Always liked that house. Sorry to leave it,” he said. “Leased it to an M.P.”