Black Teeth (25 page)

I sighed at him, more remorse, was about to speak when a screech came from behind:

‘
No! Get off!
'

It was Beth's voice. I knew that before I turned around.

What I saw was an eagle-faced, white-haired oldie pulling on the hem of Beth's jacket. With terrible force Beth's left hand cut through the woman's grip and she pulled herself out of range; it almost knocked Grandma to the floor and her jumper and jacket and stockings would have done nothing to prevent her skinny body from shattering into pieces. But she kept her balance, madness in her sunken eyes, turned on Beth with two raised claws that might have been attack or defence.

‘Gemma!' she wailed.

‘Susie!' was the whip-crack response, not from Beth but from the beige cardigan who moved through the foyer with enough dominion to paralyse the residents and compel within me a geyser of relief. She didn't look twice at Susie, simply ushered Beth and me into the corridor. Not so much as a roll of the eyes or a query as to whether we were okay. We followed in silent comprehension that visitors' identities were confused on so regular a basis that the staff no longer noticed.

Silent, that is, until we reach a closed door holding up a poster that reads:
Old Bananas are the Sweetest.
The woman stops and knocks and I'm compelled to ask:

‘Why is it a blessing that he keeps the room dark?'

She doesn't wait for the knock to be answered, just turns the handle like it's her very own home.

‘Let's hope you don't find out, hmmm?'

It's a tiny space, no more than a bedroom. I make out rudimentary furniture, a single bed, finally a man seated on it. Shrunken. Wears just a robe and holds a tobacco pipe in his hand. The room stinks of it. Like Tyan's house, but sweeter.

The beige cardigan coughs against the air.

‘Door stays open, Ken. You know the rules.'

And off she goes, leaving us to the darkness and the smell.

‘Good afternoon,' says the familiar voice, even more remarkable in person, as if he has no larynx at all but rather forms words using the rattle of his uvula against the roof of his mouth.

A lamp comes on, draped in thick silk cloth. It barely illuminates one side of the man on the bed, emphasises his desiccation, the thinness of his features and all those contours. Time has drawn a pile of lower-case
m
s on his forehead, pulled the bags under his eyes down to give them a hanging kind of sadness. The nose begins as gaunt as the rest of his face but blossoms into a bulb at its tip. Beneath the red robe there's hardly a frame to speak of.

‘Sit down.'

I find a wooden chair a few steps from the door, rotate it slightly to best position myself to flee if the need arrives.

Sharing my reservations, Beth perches directly beside the door on something small and wooden. She tries to appear relaxed but fidgets with the sleeves of her jumper. We each waver, at a loss, two pupils in the headmaster's office.

‘I hope my fellow geriatrics gave you no difficulty on your way in.'

‘They're intense,' I say, try to appear conversational but can't stop fidgeting either.

Ken Penn's mouth barely moves as he speaks.

‘I've often said that young visitors are our cherubs and our Cerberus. It confuses the softer ones.'

He sucks back on his tobacco, pleased with himself. Then studies Beth with enough overt lechery that I sense her discomfort like I would sense a desperate pounding from behind these thin unit walls.

Penn says, ‘I can't help but notice a dearth of anything resembling a nineteenth-century soup tureen.' A patient observation, like people lie their way in to see him all the time. ‘Unless she has it stowed away in some particularly expansive body cavity.'

‘Umm…' I say. By Beth's silence I assume she no longer wishes
to pretend I'm her assistant. ‘Actually, we're here to see you about a different matter.'

‘Oh?'

Beth suddenly bursts: ‘Why does the door have to be open?'

It must be the adrenaline, the remoteness of where we are. Me, I'm
thankful
the door is open. The poor girl had no idea, when she sipped cappuccino in familiar surrounds and agreed to help me today, that our endgame was to withstand odious commentary from a pervert.

‘I am sorry, dear,' Penn says. ‘It is company policy. Can't have the three of us fornicating, you see. Strictly prohibited in the facility, even within the discretion of a guest's room. We Claireborne folk practise nothing if not self-denial.'

He follows this up with a lip-lick and an eyebrow-raise, so suggestive I almost laugh.

She can't look at Penn, just watches out the open door, one big anxiety emoji.

‘Mister Penn,' I say. ‘We're here to talk to you about Cheryl Alamein.'

A stillness descends upon the room as I try to discern Penn's reaction through the darkness. I hear a sigh. His eyes float up to a spot near the ceiling.

‘Cheryl Alamein.' His voice is softer. ‘Now, that is a name I've not heard in quite some years.'

I find myself scanning the lit space, the bedclothes and the small bamboo table where the lamp sits. There's a bronze clamshell ashtray and a telephone. I don't spot scissors, anything else he might weaponise.

Penn watches me in silence.

‘We're wondering…' I start, only to realise I don't know how to start. ‘We're wondering if you can throw any light on…what happened.'

‘What happened?'

‘Her death. On Grand Street.'

He seems surprised but not uncomfortable. His demeanour is that of someone gently inebriated.

Let's not rule that out.

‘I have wondered,' Penn rasps, face darkening, ‘if and when the day would come that someone should find me here and ask that question…'

No light in his eyes now. Perhaps they're shut.

Penn says, ‘You know her husband went to prison?'

‘Yes.'

He shifts his legs slightly, in such a fashion as to demonstrate that he's naked beneath the satin robe. This must be what the beige cardigan hoped we would not find out.

Beth launches to her feet.

‘I'm going to wait in the car.'

She fiercely rubs the underside of her wrists against her hips.

I only say, ‘What?'

‘I just…' She looks nervously to Penn. ‘I want to leave. Can I have the keys?'

Her face melts into such wounded despair that I can only nod, look to Penn as if she needs his permission, but Penn doesn't seem to have heard, focuses dreamily on the walls and says, ‘Murdered. She was murdered. That's what happened.'

Man, the fear on Beth's face. Frightened eyes begging for safety. You can't blame her: the only thing that could have made this wax dummy more creepy was if he started talking about the murder of women. I produce the car keys and Beth snatches them from my hand.

‘She was a wife of Bluebeard,' says Penn, almost to himself. ‘Locked away in a castle. Too guileless to understand how guileless she was. But I taught her. I
injected
her with guile, if you take my meaning.'

When I glance back, Beth is gone.

Penn chuckles, waits to see if I will chuckle too. I don't, but I say, ‘You had a relationship with Cheryl Alamein at the time of her death, is that correct?'

As I speak I stand and move to the open door, hoping for a glimpse of Beth, for an indication she's okay.

‘At first she was reluctant even to remove her wedding ring. By
the end she was a spring lamb, discovering the world anew. Open to all experiences.'

I peer down the corridor and she is gone. Just green-white walls and an empty whiteboard labelled
Activities
.

‘I'll tell you this,' Penn says, oblivious to my thumping heart. ‘I know who did it. Who murdered her. If that's what you want to know.'

I turn to him, step back into the shadow of his room, oblivious myself to my thumping heart.

‘It wasn't her husband. Piers. It wasn't him.'

I edge forward. Penn can see that I'm listening.

‘It was the boy. Rudyard Alamein.'

42

I feel my blood surge, try to calm it with slow steps back to the wooden chair, want to encourage Penn but my throat's too tight. He lights his pipe.

I manage, ‘What makes you say that?'

Penn squeals gently through the wooden mouthpiece, gets his breath back. ‘Abductive reasoning. I knew him back then. Saw in him what people here see in me.'

‘What's that?'

Penn drops his lighter onto the bamboo table.

‘Sin.'

And he drags back on the pipe, red coals radiating on his face.

‘He understood, innately, that by doing away with moral concerns a man might become a god.'

I'm trying to develop a response to that when an outraged bird screeches past the window. I jump. Penn does not.

‘The boy was a murderer
before
he killed his mother.'

I have to dwell on that, too. For a moment.

‘Who did he murder?'

Thick ribbons of smoke ooze from Penn's mouth, momentarily obscuring his eyes.

‘Whom.'

‘I'm sorry?'

‘Mister Jinx.'

Just this absurdity is enough to sink my heart. I've come to visit a man so addled by drugs or booze or just
life
that he speaks in nonsense.
He hasn't even asked my name, for fuck's sake. I'm preparing to run. Penn continues:

‘Just a matter of days before Cheryl was killed. It was the Tuesday, I think. She was visiting with me. We'd spent most of the morning in the bedroom. We were like that, you know. Only emerging for food and ablutions. I came downstairs to prepare some chicken liver for lunch and there was an odour. Let me tell you, despite the full spectrum of hospitals to which I've been admitted, despite the many shameless souls I've known intimately, I've smelled nothing like it in my lifetime. Concentrated death. I believe I retched in the kitchen recess.'

A momentary tapping on the unit roof. Either the rain has restarted, then hesitated, or else the wind brought down a sprinkling of water from the treetops. I sit forward to hear better.

‘At this stage, Mister Jinx had been missing for several days. I'd taken it that he'd run off with some neighbourhood jackal and was screwing her mercilessly. I was grief-stricken, but I expected him to return.'

‘Mister Jinx was a pet?'

‘A Maine Coon. Old, but not so old. I enticed him home again with open tins of tuna on the back stairs, to no avail. Then came that day, when I smelled that smell, and I knew.'

Smoke lingers but the pipe is out. He lays it on the bamboo table.

‘We searched, Cheryl and I. We searched the ground floor, under the couch, under the stairs. I remember I even looked in the crawlspace beneath the house. We found nothing. Then Rudy came with his dog. I forget what pretence he had for visiting, but soon he was searching too. Had some laughable idea about his dog getting the scent, but of course that animal could no more track a missing cat than dance the fucking Nutcracker. It were as if the little prick was mocking me. That's when I got the idea that he knew. That this was his doing.'

I rock back on my hands.

‘You think Rudy killed your cat?'

‘I'm sure of it.'

‘Why would he?'

‘Because I made his mother moan like a grizzly bear and weep with gratitude. And did so on a regular basis. In that sense, I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised. I tried to develop a rapport with the child, oh how I tried. But he was a spiteful shit. Just a shit. Had a hatred for me that was…oedipal.'

‘Did you find Mister Jinx?'

‘Yes. Only by a stroke of luck. There was a pest-control fellow spraying for termites next door. I asked him for advice and he popped in and tracked the smell to my bookshelf.'

Penn edges off the bed and leans to his feet, frail, shapeless. His shoulder blades squeeze together for balance and he manages timid steps towards the bare wall and points.

‘The house had built-in shelving, all the way to the ceiling. High ceilings. Filled with books, of course. We found Mister Jinx behind the encyclopaedias. The very top shelf.'

He shakes his finger at the wall.

‘That little cunt broke his…' Glaring, Penn is crying. Tears backlit by the lamp. He sniffs away as much as he can. ‘…broke his little neck. His tail had gone rock hard and his fur had faded…the colour. Rudy dumped him there like he were human faeces. We weren't ever meant to find him. Just smell him. Smell every minute of his decomposition.'

A ragged handkerchief appears from his sleeve and he blows, uninhibited.

‘I put it to him, directly. Demanded the truth. He denied it of course. Because he was nothing if not an inveterate liar, and then he ran away home. Cheryl knew it was him, she said as much. And went home that afternoon to speak with Rudy but returned that evening, said they'd fought. Rudy had confessed to hiding Mister Jinx in the bookshelf, claimed to have found him dead on the street. When she'd insisted how obvious it was that Rudy had killed him, circumstances deteriorated. She'd
fled
. My lord, the state of her. Hair a mess, face bloated. The least attractive I'd ever seen her. She said that Rudy had threatened to kill her. His own mother.'

Penn lowers his face to the floor.

‘Three days later she was dead.'

He holds there like a freeze frame. A barefoot statue. The way his chin cleaves to his chest, silhouetted by the dim orange lamp, he's like a hanged man waiting to be discovered.

The corpse says, ‘Cheryl Alamein was as much a blessing to me as her death was a curse. That was the beginning of the end.'

A long moan from Penn, like he's expressing grief. But actually it's the effort to seat himself back on the bed.

‘Rudy says you killed his mother.'

He wipes at the bags beneath his eyes. ‘Does he think I had a reason to?'