Without a Word

by Carol Lea Benjamin

  I put the sheets away and slipped the strap of the bag over my shoulder. I could see Ms. Peach through the window, on the phone. And then I saw the next patient coming down the block. The mother was tugging her along, as if it might be the child’s fault that they were fifteen minutes late. The little girl was crying, even before getting her booster shots or whatever other scary thing she was there for. As I got up to leave, I saw the mother pull the child closer and take her by the shoulders in a not so benign way. “Do you have to always make a scene, Sylvia?” she asked. Then, without waiting for an answer, she opened the gate and pulled the little girl along behind her.

  CHAPTER 33

  I’d just gotten home when it occurred to me that even on a day without rain in the forecast, Ms. Peach would have had a difficult time getting up the steps to Celia’s apartment. Too difficult, I thought. Even if she made it, I’d be hard pressed to imagine her a serious threat to anyone but herself.

  The more I thought about it, the more ridiculous the image became. It’s not that older women were not credible as murderers. Even after I figured out that Ms. Peach could have self-medicated her pain, rested on the stairs, brandished a gun when she got to Celia’s apartment, there was something still off.

  I could see her as the go-between. I could even imagine how it might have started, Bechman giving her something really strong on a day her pain seemed unbearable, Ms. Peach commenting, in an offhand way, that the stuff was so good, that it helped so much, she bet people would buy it by the truckload, if only they could. Or perhaps she’d said the stuff was so good she could sell it by the truckload. Perhaps he’d said, “If only.” Perhaps they’d had a heart-to-heart about his particular financial need, not that he didn’t make enough money, if one could imagine such a thing in this day and age as enough money, but that he needed money from an untraceable source, money he could funnel to Celia without his wife having a way to catch on. He loved his wife, he might have said. But then there was Celia, and JoAnn, his precious JoAnn, Ms. Peach listening, paying good attention, her mind at work.

  And maybe that sat in the air between them, his need, her willingness and interest, both of them smart enough to put two and two together.

  Maybe he brought it up next. Maybe not. Maybe someone else, someone who could sit on a bench in the park, his persona all the advertising his drug business needed. After all, who in his right mind would think to approach Ms. Peach to buy illegal drugs?

  No, there had to be someone else, even to keep Ms. Peach squeaky clean enough to keep her job. She was only the facilitator, because even a doctor with two families, for God’s sake, wouldn’t keep a drug pusher as his office nurse, would he?

  Someone else. Someone who would fit in at the park. But who?

  That’s when I took the contact sheets back up to the office, turned on the light, moved it low over the sheets and took out the loupe. There was that homeless man standing on the corner, perhaps not the focus of Leon’s picture, just a part of it, a part of the scene. A homeless man would fit in at the park. He’d blend in. He’d be invisible. Unless he sat behind the chess players, signaling he had something for sale.

  The park was full of homeless men, men most people went out of their way not to notice. But what could any of them have to do with Ms. Peach?

  I picked up the contact sheets again, holding the loupe over each picture, the ones taken outside Bechman’s office, the ones at the dog run, hoping something would jump out at me, an insight, an answer, something that would tell me who Peach passed the prescriptions to.

  But then I put the sheets down. What was I thinking? No way would Bechman have agreed to have the prescriptions sold in the park, to have his name right there in black and white in case of an arrest. In order to sell the drugs in the park, or anywhere else for that matter, someone would have to actually fill the prescriptions first. Someone would have had to take them to a drugstore, probably a different one each time, to pay for them, to sign for them.

  Someone dressed well could have done that, filled a prescription for a child. Easy, since under no circumstances would the kid be doing it herself. And anyone could sign for the drugs, scribble a name down, any name. Even if the druggist asked for ID, not a problem in today’s world. All you needed was a computer and a few minutes.

  Not a homeless man.

  Perhaps someone dressed like a homeless man. Someone pretending to be a homeless man. Someone pretending to be some kid’s father, poor kid’s croaking with pain, a kid who needs Oxycontin, Percocet, Tylenol with codeine, God knows what else. Someone dressed well enough to meet the doctor, unless he only met Ms. Peach, my mind spinning now, seeing how this could work, trying one way, then another.

  I went back to the contact sheets again, sitting now, the lamp low over the thumbnail pictures, not looking at Dashiell, looking behind him, remembering the homeless men hanging over the fence, reaching out to the dogs. One brought a bag of biscuits once and came into the run, met by four of us when he opened the bag, told him that no food was allowed in the run because some dogs found the presence of food and competing predators inflammatory. But that wasn’t all. No one who loved a dog enough to sit in the dog run every day so that the dog could get a little R & R beyond his walk was going to bet his dog’s life on food from a stranger, especially a stranger who looked like a bum or worse, especially not in New York City, where paranoia was the norm.

  I started from the top again, the man standing on the corner, the view beyond him toward Sixth Avenue. There was something familiar about him. Was it just that I’d looked at his picture so many times, or was it something else, something more important, something that was visible beyond the outfit?

  And then I saw it. It was something about his posture, his stance. I took the grease pencil and marked the other shots where there were people in the background, this time looking only at the way they stood, the position of the head, the articulation of the limbs, something nagging at me, about the way they looked. And that’s when I remembered another picture I’d seen, another man who seemed to have more flexibility than the rest of us, more grace, too. Or should I say not another man, the same man?

  I turned on the computer and Googled his name. I was sure it would be there, even if it was only part of a cast list, hoping for more, scrolling down past the Web sites for the movies he’d been in, the cast list of a play, then finding one that had actors’ bios and clicking on that, and there it was.

  There was a list of the films he’d been in. It turns out I’d seen more than a few of them without ever registering his name or his face. And the list of Broadway shows, his agent’s name and contact number, a couple of pictures, pictures where his posture was more familiar than the face because his face had been altered, disguised, to put him in character. And then I hit the jackpot, the personal information, the dance school where he’d trained, the fact that his mother had had a short career as a dancer and then taught dance when he was growing up. And finally, more than I had hoped for.

  “Theo Fowler, born Franklin Theodore Peach in Zanesville, Ohio, in 1952, moved to New York City in 1971 where he began his career with small dance parts in Broadway and Off Broadway productions as well as character parts on stage, screen and television.”

  I looked back at the contact sheets. The makeup was so good he could have been all of the men, the one on the corner, the one outside the run, the one who appeared to be bumming a cigarette from Ms. Peach earlier that day. Or none of them. But whatever role he needed to play, he would have played it with everything he had, including his ability to disguise himself from head to toe, everything except the tell, a dancer’s carriage, the precise way he moved and stood still as if he were posing. And those feet, as if he’d gotten so used to first position, it had become his default mode.

  Ted, of all people. He’d been Sally’s savior for a time, the person who offered her respite from her brooding husband and her demanding child. Now, it seemed, he was willing to let Sally’s kid go down for a crime he com
mitted. The cooperative neighbor, chatting me up to see what I knew, to find out if he was in danger, not once but twice.

  I sat back and rethought the whole thing. Ms. Peach’s younger brother. Or an older brother’s son? His idea or hers?

  His. Sally had told him Celia was leaving what seemed like the perfect job. Isn’t that what Ted told me the first time we’d met? What was it Sally had said? Something about access to the doctor’s drug samples, something about never having to feel your pain.

  Where had Peach been working, I wondered, or had she been between jobs when Ted called her with his great idea, a good job for her, Oxycontin samples for him? And then what?

  Had they hatched the rest together one night over drinks, Ted complaining about the diminishing roles available to an over-fifty second-rate dancer, Peach saying, you think you’ve got problems, wait until you hear what the doctor has gotten himself into, the woman who had the job before me, pregnant with his kid and having it, too. He not only needs money, she might have told him, going on about how it was worse than that, saying the money had to be cash, go solve that one. And so they did.

  A perfect role for Ted. He could sell drugs on the set when he had a small part or a role in a commercial. He could sell in the park when he wasn’t working. And when he showed up at this drugstore or that to fill a prescription for his daughter or his sister’s kid or his niece or nephew, dressed for the part and playing the part, no problem. He might have told a story as he slid a prescription across the counter. “Poor kid, migraines,” he could have said. “I didn’t even know kids got them.” Shaking his head at the unfairness of it all. The man loved to talk. You had to give him that. And expressing sympathy so believably would make him seem more like family. Who would question him, tears in his eyes, his voice breaking?

  I could just picture the pharmacist leaning over the counter and saying, “Do you want to come back for this?” And Ted dipping his head, “No, I’ll wait. Kid needs it ASAP.” He might have worn a mustache and glasses one time, a wig with male-pattern balding the next. He might have dressed as a woman sometimes, carried a cane and limped at others. A different person each time, his singular talent.

  But then a hard question came to mind. Why kill the goose that was laying the golden egg?

  There was only one way to find out. I pulled out my cell phone. The doctor answered on the second ring.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Rachel. Mission accomplished?”

  “Thanks to you.”

  “Now I need a favor,” I told her. “I need you to make a phone call for me.”

  I told her what I needed, then went upstairs to get ready for my own next role, grabbed Dashiell’s leash and headed out.

  CHAPTER 34

  There was no answer when I rang the bell. Even better. I waited for someone to come out, pretending to be searching for my key and having the door held open for me, security be damned. When I was inside, I walked down the hall to the right, to Ted’s apartment, rang the bell on his door just to make sure, then proceeded to pick his lock, discovering that he was much less paranoid than most. Only one out of two had actually been locked. What arrogance. Did he think he was the only felon in town?

  When I got inside, I let Dashiell off leash and went straight for the bedroom closets to see if I could find any of the outfits I thought he might have been wearing in Washington Square Park, finding nothing, then checking his makeup kit, a huge double-layered box. There were several beards and wigs in the bottom part of the box, but not the ones I’d seen him in, not the ones on the contact sheets. I found lots of hats on the shelf in the hall closet, gloves, too, but no fingerless ones, no beat-up boots, no hunter’s orange jacket either. He probably never wore the same thing twice, dumped most of it on the way home. He surely wouldn’t want to be seen here, where he lived, dressed like that.

  I went to check the medicine cabinet next, thinking only a fool would keep a stash of illegally procured drugs at home, and while I could call Ted a lot of things by now, a long list of things, fool wouldn’t have made the list. Most of the drug dealers in Washington Square Park kept their stash nearby, but not on them. Some of them had runners to fetch the drugs when they made a sale. I wasn’t sure how Ted operated, but since he’d been doing it without getting arrested for several years as far as I could tell, I was sure he’d figured out a secure place for his merchandise as well as the safest possible way to make the sale. What I hadn’t counted on was his own need for drugs, a guy in his fifties, dancing professionally his whole adult life, he would have had a long history of injuries and pain, arthritis by now as well. He might have started out with Advil, some Celebrex now and then, or whatever the drug of choice for pain had been when it had started. There would have been something stronger when he was working, when he had to work despite his pain. He would have done what he had to, taken whatever was available, legal or not. And the need would have grown, more and more help needed to get the job done. Judging by the looks of his medicine cabinet, Theo Fowler was one of his own best customers.

  I picked up the first orange container. Oxycontin. Patient’s name, Lucy Grubman. And then another and another, Percodan for Matthew Tannen, Valium for Stacy Sussman, Oxycontin for Mark Redmond, each prescription from a different pharmacy, one all the way uptown. There were those little samples, too, the inspiration that started it all—pills to lift you up, pills to calm you down, better living through chemistry.

  I remembered the first time I’d met Ted, how sleepy he’d looked when he answered the door, how absolutely perky a few moments later.

  I opened the cabinet under the sink, Dashiell’s big head poking in there before I got the chance to look. Rubber gloves, the thin kind that doctors use when they take blood or give a shot. My guess is that Ted wore those when he went to do business with Bechman, smart enough not to want to leave anything of himself behind, even long before the “accident.”

  I could have stayed in the apartment. I could have taken Ted up on his kind invitation to come back, make myself at home, relax, read a book. But relaxing was the last thing I had on my mind. So I hooked Dashiell’s leash back onto his collar, took a quick look around to make sure everything was as I’d found it, and went out the way I’d come in, locking the door behind me. Instead of leaving the building, I walked back to where the stairs were, sitting on the bottom step, signaling Dash to lie down. Then I checked my watch, hoping it wouldn’t be a long wait. After all, it was starting to get dark outside, and Ted had no reason to wait for Ms. Peach this afternoon. He’d already seen her in the park, bumming a cigarette in his old man costume, a nice touch, just in case anyone was looking.

  He was at the glass door now, beardless and wearing an expensive white turtleneck sweater, black woolen trousers, a short black leather jacket, Armani or perhaps Valentino, probably the things he was carrying in the old sack he had with him when he’d stopped to talk to Ms. Peach. He had on loafers now, polished, new-looking, and a scarf tossed around his neck, his signature.

  He saw me as soon as he entered the lobby, surprised, then smiling, a little too big for my money, but maybe he was in the habit of projecting to the cheap seats.

  “No one home?” he asked, glancing up toward the second floor.

  “Actually, I was waiting for you.”

  “Ah. I was hoping you’d take me up on my offer not to be a stranger.”

  He turned and headed for his door, unlocking it and holding the door open for me, following me in, slipping off the scarf and draping it over the carousel horse’s neck.

  “Come. Sit down. Make yourself at home. How about a glass of wine? I have a lovely Riesling chilling.”

  He disappeared into the kitchen. I sat on the white couch, Dashiell sitting next to my leg.

  “Any news?” he asked.

  “As a matter of fact, there is.” Waiting to see if that would reel him back into the room, if he’d finished whatever it was he was doing in the kitchen.

  I heard the refrigerator door
close and then he poked his head back into the room.

  “About Sally?” he asked. “Don’t tell me you found her.”

  For the moment, I didn’t think he was acting. I thought his curiosity was completely sincere.

  “Actually, I did.”

  He came toward me and sat on the closest chair.

  “After all these years. I can hardly believe it.” Had he gotten paler, or was it all that white around us making it seem so?

  “The wine, love.” Nodding toward the kitchen. “We need to celebrate.”

  “Yes, of course,” getting up, walking backwards for the first two steps, watching me the way Dashiell was watching him. I heard the pop of the cork. I heard him pouring the wine. I heard the floor in the hall creak once, the medicine cabinet open, then nothing for a moment. And then he was back, the bottle in the crook of an arm, a glass of wine in each hand, that million-dollar grin on his face. He must have been a waiter at some point, the way he juggled the open bottle, the full glasses, not spilling a drop. He put one glass in front of me, one in front of him, the bottle off to the side, everything done as precisely as if he were onstage, everything choreographed and just so.

  I picked up my glass and held it toward him, waiting for him to lift his and make a toast. “To Sally,” I said, my smile as big as his and twice as phony.

  “To Sally,” he repeated, taking a small sip. Then, “Tell me everything. Don’t leave out a word.”

  I leaned forward to put down my glass, not paying attention to what I was doing, spilling some of my wine onto the coffee table.

  I got up. “Oh, I’m so sorry. Let me get a paper towel…”