Requiem for Ashes

by David Crossman

  "Dr. Williams told me all about him," the inspector continued. "Rough life. Makes you wonder about people."

  Did it? Maybe so. Albert always wondered about people.

  The inspector gently pulled Albert into the elevator and pressed the second-floor button. "I see your face is getting better," he said, stroking his own and prefacing the longest elevator ride of Albert's life.

  "You know, Professor, I haven't been able to figure it out. I mean, I can't imagine how you could burn yourself like that. I really can't; especially since you were in bed the whole time, or the bathroom, was it? But, you know what? I like puzzles, Professor. I'll help you remember. You'll see."

  Albert had pressed himself against the elevator doors in an effort to be as inconspicuous as possible. They opened, spilling him into the hallway. The inspector caught him by the arm. He turned his hands over, revealing the matching stripes on Albert's palms. "The hands are better, too. I wonder where else are you burned, Professor? Why won't you tell me how it happened?"

  Albert pulled his hands free and started toward his old room. "I'd rather not," he said. "It's embarrassing."

  Naples seized Albert by the shoulder and spun him against the wall. "Where's Tewksbury, Professor?" There was no smugness in his voice. No trace of playful conviviality in his glaring eyes.

  Albert knew the look of frustration and anger.

  "I don't have him," said Albert. His head was beginning to hurt. He'd been beat up often as a boy. He closed his eyes in anticipation of the blow.

  Naples loosened his grip. "I know he's not at your place. We searched."

  "I know."

  "Of course, you could've called him. Warned him."

  "Where would he go?" Albert slid free of Naples' hold. "Did you look at his house?"

  Naples smiled with half his mouth. "I said he wasn't at your place. His fingerprints were."

  "Maybe he went there after he escaped," said Albert. Did it sound as rehearsed to Naples as it did to him? "He knows where I keep the key." Thoughtful pause. "Maybe he thought you'd find him if he went home. So he went to my house," he concluded. "I was here."

  "Then explain this," said Naples. He held up a grocery receipt. "Somebody bought groceries four days ago," he said.

  "Who do you suppose it was, Professor?"

  "Tewksbury?"

  "I doubt it. A wanted man isn't likely to go shopping in broad daylight." Albert filed the possibility for future reference. "I checked, Professor. You signed yourself out that day. Why?"

  "I bought the groceries," Albert confessed. "You gave me the idea."

  "I did?"

  "You said Tewksbury had escaped. I wondered where he'd go. He could go home, but you might find him there. He could go to the school . . . but the school would tell the police. He could go to Vermont, where his father lives, but they said there were roadblocks everywhere. He could go to my house," said Albert. "There was no food there."

  "So, you bought some . . . just in case?"

  "Is that against the law?" asked Albert, sure that it was.

  Naples ignored the question. "Then you came back here and checked yourself in."

  "Yes."

  Detective Naples looked long and hard at Albert whose guilty puppy eyes avoided his gaze. "I'd be very careful if I was you, Professor," he said. "You're on thin ice as it is."

  Albert looked down at his feet involuntarily. When he looked up, the inspector was walking down the hall.

  "Inspector?"

  Naples was drawn up like a junkyard dog at the end of his chain. "Professor?"

  "Was the food eaten?"

  The inspector's stare brought salty beads of sweat to the corners of Albert's eyes. When the stare finally broke, Albert collapsed against the wall.

  Chapter Eleven

  “Hey, Professor!" Jeremy Ash's face lit up when Albert stumbled into the room. "Lookit that haircut!"

  A black women, somewhat beyond middle age, was sleeping in Albert's bed.

  "Who's that?" he said softly.

  "Mrs. Gibson," said Jeremy Ash. "They hadda put her in here 'cause there's no room. She's got gallstones." Albert was at the bedside. "You can talk normal. She's deaf as a brick when she don't have her hearing aid on."

  "How are you?"

  Jeremy Ash smiled. "Great!" he said. "Never better!"

  Albert wished he'd brought something. "I forgot to bring something."

  "Hey! Don't worry about it. The nurses give me more stuff . . . I think they clean out people's rooms when they leave, y'know? I get flowers, boxes of candy. Toys, too. Sometimes. Not many. I guess people are so glad to get out, you know, they just, forget." His smile slipped behind the clouds for a moment.

  "I won't forget. When will you get out?" Albert asked. His thoughts had gone off chasing foxes in different directions; he was stumbling along to catch up.

  The boy shrugged his whole body. "Who knows? I think they like me too much, y'know? I think when they go in to fix the carburetor, they grease the points. They want to keep me here."

  "Where will you go . . . when you get out?" said Albert. "You can't go home."

  The boy's demeanor changed. "I dunno. Foster home? I've got this social worker . . . " The remote control revolved in his slender fingers. "I never been to school."

  They both stared at the darkened television screen. Albert didn't think he'd missed much. He didn't remember learning anything useful in school. "You know a lot," said Albert. "You knew about the lock."

  "TV. I learned some stuff, I guess," said the boy. "There was a crack in the door of my room. TV was always on loud.''

  He looked at Albert; his eyes spoke volumes, and Albert didn't need a library card. "It ain't much of an education, I guess, but it's like a little of everything."

  Albert hadn't had many notions. One occurred to him now, and he didn't know what to do with it. Experience hadn't taught him to take these rare gems of exiguous inspiration and store them away for closer examination at a later date . . . to hold them to the light and study them with a critical eye from every conceivable angle. Albert had nowhere to put a notion. So, like an unexpected burp, it was suddenly out in the open. "Why don't you come to my house?" he said.

  Jeremy Ash was always in motion. Albert supposed the energy that would otherwise have been expended through his missing leg was redirected to his arms and fingers. For once, though, all activity ceased. The boy looked as if he'd been dowsed with ice water. Albert knew the feeling. "You could live there."

  The boy finally worked his tongue free. "You mean, with you?"

  That was just one of the many angles from which Albert hadn't looked at the proposal. He'd always lived alone, even growing up with his mother and sister. "With me?" he said. It was supposed to be a reply, but he couldn't keep the question mark out of it. "You never know," he added, not sure how it applied. But it had a hopeful ring.

  "I'd like that, Professor." They shook hands to seal the bargain. "When I get out. Hey! Mrs. Gibson!"

  Mrs. Gibson had awakened. The tiny hearing aid was lost in her pudgy, sleep-numbed fingers as she fumbled to insert it.

  "Just a minute, I'll be right . . . dern thing," she declaimed. "Cussed thing's no bigger than Mr. Gibson's pride an’ joy. There! There we go." She put on her silver-rimmed glasses and focused on Albert. "Have mercy. What happened to you?" she said as if the words were startled from her.

  "That's the professor I told you 'bout, Mrs. G."

  Mrs. Gibson was laboring to pull her substantial self to a sitting position. "Who?" She held out a hand to Albert. "Lemme hol' that pillow, young man," she said. "Who is he? My ears haven't woke up yet."

  "The Professor!" Jeremy Ash shouted. "He was my roommate before you. I told you about him."

  "Oh, yes . . . " said Mrs. Gibson. She wedged the pillow between the devil and the deep blue sea. "The Professor. Thank you, young man," she said in an aside, as if they'd been talking about somebody else. "Well, he looks like a road kill."

  Mrs. Gibson spok
e as if the rest of the world was as deaf as she was. It never occurred to her that anyone would hear her comments but the intended hearer. "He's skinnier than you, Jeremy. And bluer than a newborn white baby."

  Jeremy Ash was too busy not laughing to respond.

  "He takes fits sometimes." Mrs. Gibson confided. "Leave him be a minute. Here, you take some candy." She held out a box of Whitman's Samplers. Albert declined in sign language. "Take one!" she commanded. Albert took one.

  "I'll have it later," Albert said. He forced his blue face into a lopsided smile that revealed too many teeth.

  "What?" said Mrs. Gibson.

  "I'll have it later." Albert said a little louder.

  "You eat it now," Mrs. Gibson insisted. "You look more like a road kill than any man I ever seen. You eat that candy before you keel over and die on me. Look at you. A spring breeze would blow you into next week."

  Albert swallowed the anchor whole.

  Two candies, one apple, and a cookie later Albert—his head abuzz with sugar—was on his way to Miss Bjork's, sufficiently weighted against the wind. He stopped to buy a newspaper for Tewksbury and was on his way out of the store when he recognized Inspector Naples in a car across the street. He went out the back door.

  "You should come back to my place," Albert suggested. A few days earlier "gaunt" was the only expression in Tewksbury's facial repertoire. Now he looked crestfallen. Aghast. Taken aback. He must be getting better. "Miss Bjork will be back soon." He looked around the room. Tewksbury's flotsam had washed up everywhere, indicating an erratic high-water mark.

  "We'll have to clean up."

  "Then what?" said Tewksbury. "Am I supposed to stay there the rest of my life?"

  Tewksbury wouldn't get along with Jeremy Ash. Albert's head hurt for the first time in hours.

  "It's no good, Albert. I can't go on like this forever. I'm innocent. Somebody out there's guilty, we've got to find him." He looked mournfully at Albert. "You've got to find him . . . you and Bjork."

  Albert hung his head. He held a pair of Tewksbury's trousers in one hand, a newspaper and a glass in the other. This is where his concept of "picking up" always fell apart. If he had a big bag . . .

  "How?"

  "I don't know," said Tewksbury impatiently. "I can't do anything. You and Bjork . . . you can circulate. You can ask questions."

  "We have," said Albert.

  "And? Haven't you found anything?"

  Albert mentioned the evidence incriminating Terry Alter.

  "Alter's daughter!" Tewksbury exclaimed with a whistle.

  As Albert detailed the evidence, Tewksbury punctuated the commentary with asides. Edges had formed on his face during imprisonment. His ready wink had become a nervous twitch. His eyes never settled, but seemed to be constantly searching for a way out.

  Albert placed a pillow strategically over a beer stain in the middle of the sofa. He put the leg of an end table over a cigarette burn in the soft beige carpet. He'd never realized the importance of furniture placement in housekeeping.

  Music and Archaeology stepped back to survey their handiwork.

  Albert smiled.

  "Looks like Troy after Schliemann," Tewksbury said.

  Albert's face fell. That could be good or bad, depending on who Schliemann was and what he had done to Troy. It sounded bad.

  They picked up their few wrinkled paper bags of possessions and leftovers.

  Despite Albert's newly formed theory of conspicuous anonymity and the descending darkness, they took a circuitous route back to his apartment building. Once there, Albert deposited Tewksbury in the shadows while he went to see if the coast was clear.

  The light was off on the landing outside Albert's door, but enough residual illumination oozed up from the first floor to reveal someone standing there in the shadows. Thinking it was Naples, Albert was overwhelmed by a compulsion to turn and run. Nevertheless his feet, like twin Judas goats, carried him one step at a time up the stairs.

  "Inspector?" said Albert. The figure at the top of the stairs started and stepped back against the wall. It wasn't Inspector Naples. Instantly Albert was seized with an exquisite terror. This shadow matched the one in the school in every particular.

  He stopped, anchored to inaction by his white-knuckled grip on the banister. His mouth went dry, its customary moisture apparently redirected to his eyes, which welled with tears of shock. His brain automatically played the first four bars of Beethoven's Ninth, full orchestra.

  After a breathless silence, the figure made a hesitant step forward. Albert, correspondingly, took one step back. This process repeated four more times until Albert was back on the first floor and the figure was at the edge of the landing.

  "Professor?"

  It was a woman's voice;

  “Professor?"

  She took a step or two down the stairs, coming just enough into the light so that Albert could begin to make out her features. She wore a big black cape with the hood up over her long red hair. High black boots completed her visible wardrobe.

  "Who are you?" Albert asked, as if he were talking to the Angel of Death. "What do you want?"

  The girl retreated to the landing. "Come up here, Professor. I don't want him to see."

  Albert hadn't finished deliberating before he was halfway up the stairs, one unsure step at a time, not once blinking or taking his eyes from the apparition. "Who?"

  "Come up here," said the girl, stepping back to make room for him on the landing. "How are you? Your head . . . it looks . . . I'm so sorry."

  Albert stood one step shy of the landing, once again unable to loosen his hold on the railing. "You're the one," he stammered. His hand went to his head.

  There was a heavy silence upon which the woman's single word of reply fell like a penitent's confession on Christmas Eve.

  "I’m so sorry."

  Albert was close enough now, and his eyes enough accustomed to the dark, to see her clearly. She was crying. Or had been. He was close enough, too, to smell her unique perfume. The same, he remembered, from that night in the hallway at school. Sweet but musty. Old-fashioned.

  "Who are you?"

  "Daphne Knowlton."

  Bells and whistles went off in Albert's head as the mental baggage handlers ransacked his brain for all recent information on Daphne Knowlton. First, though, they had to throw out his mental picture of her, foggy and unclear as it was. Her features were full, but she wasn't fat. She was like a woman in a painting. Her eyes perpetually downcast. Walter Lane's tragic story of her was intensified by what could only be described as her melancholy beauty.

  "Why did you do it?"

  The girl turned her face to the wall. "I didn't mean to hurt you. I . . . you weren't supposed to be there. I was, I . . . " Her words resolved in sobs. Albert was speechless, not so uncommon an occurrence that he was uncomfortable with it.

  "Are you all right, now? Will you be?"

  "I'm all right," said Albert reassuringly. He was perplexed by the inexplicable feeling of guilt that bubbled up in his conscience. Tewksbury would be getting hysterical about this time.

  "I'm glad," said Daphne. "I just had to make sure you were all right. None of it was your fault." She started down the stairs. "You had nothing to do with it."

  Most of the time when Albert didn't understand something it was his own fault. Not that he cared. This time, though, it wasn't. The woman suddenly wasn't making sense. A skip in the record!

  As she brushed by him, he grabbed her arm. She collapsed to the steps like a punctured balloon. She buried her head in the encircling protection of her arms. "No, don't!"

  The reaction was so unexpected that Albert let her go. She thought he was going to hit her. He was appalled. He sank beside her and instinctively put a hand on her shoulder. At first her body stiffened in resistance. Albert didn't pull or prod or make comforting noises. Finally she burst into tears and, sinking against him, let herself be comforted.

  "You came to see me in the hospital," he said aft
er a while.

  She nodded against his chest. Her hood had fallen off and her hair was in his face. It smelled sweet and clean. He brushed his cheek lightly against it, almost reflexively. "You wanted to make sure I was all right?"

  Daphne raised her tear-filled eyes and looked earnestly at Albert. His heart responded of its own accord and he held her a little tighter so it wouldn't knock her off the stairs.

  "Oh, Professor!" she sobbed. "I felt so awful. I mean, I didn't know it was you . . . that night. But when I heard the next day and when they said how badly you were hurt, I didn't even . . . " She lowered her eyes again and Albert began to breathe. "I had the papers, so I couldn't tell anyone."

  Suddenly she stood up and ran through the fire door toward the back stairs, leaving Albert with an armful of Daphne-scented shadows. "I'm sorry, Professor!" she cried. By the time Albert got to his feet she was gone. He followed, nevertheless.

  "Albert? Albert!?" Tewksbury tore himself from the depthless patch of darkness behind the dumpster as Albert approached.

  "Where in hell have you been? Was he there? Is he gone? What happened? It's freezing out here."

  Albert had read something by F. Scott Fitzgerald once. Something about the South. Something about a war and women and men. He didn't remember the story. But he had noticed the language. Everyone talked so much, and everything was so well thought out. It made him feel deficient. Most things did. But people don't talk like that. They talked like Tewksbury just did. It was a wonder anybody made sense of anything at all.

  They went up the back stairs. As they walked Albert told Tewksbury where he'd been, who was there, what she'd said, and how she had left.

  "That's the strangest thing I've ever heard," said Tewksbury.

  Albert unlocked the door and, once they were both inside with the door closed, clicked on the light. "Merciful . . . !"

  The transition from Miss Bjork's apartment to Albert's had a profound effect on Tewksbury; culture shock.

  "What happened here?"

  "The police were looking for you."