Death Before Facebook (2 page)

“It happened Thursday.” Skip sighed. “And today’s Monday. I hate to think about the crime scene.”

“Well, what the heck—what else have you got to do?”

A macabre joke that drew a snort from Skip. The city’s homicide rate was sky-high and climbing.

“Thirty-one’s too young to die.”

“But too old to live with your parents.”

Yet Geoffrey Kavanagh, the victim, had lived with his, in a rambling old house on Octavia Street. From the outside, it looked like the sort of place the neighborhood kids would call “the haunted house”—the one with its yard overgrown, the one that hadn’t been painted in a couple of decades. The occupants must not be particularly friendly people, must not want much contact with the outside world, to live behind such an urban forest. Skip approached with trepidation.

Inside the house, a dog barked. What sort of people were like that? Antisocial people by definition. Crazy people, probably. Neglectful people.

Depressed people.

Alcoholics.

But as she entered the jungle, she saw that there was a certain pattern to its wildness, an artfulness, a cultivation of the inherent drama of the thing. Deadwood had been cleared and so had paths; leaves had been raked—in fact, the jungle was an illusion, only a tangle at the front of the yard. Past that was a neatly mowed lawn and some beautifully tended beds. Three or four sleek cats sunned themselves in what patches of light they could find. Those who lived here weren’t neglectful, despite the desperate paint situation.

Just as Skip had decided that, a woman who belied it answered the door. She wore baggy, faded sweats. Her face was drawn, without makeup, her cheeks sunken, the half-moons under her eyes purplish. Her hair was drawn back in a loose ponytail, but it lacked body and shine. She could have been sixty, judging by her ravaged face, but her hair was black; she had some fight left in her.

“Mrs. Kavanagh?”

“Terry. Marguerite Terry.”

Skip identified herself. “I wonder if I could ask you some questions about your son?”

Immediately, her eyes filled. “My son? But he’s… I don’t understand.”

“About his death.”

She seemed relieved. “I’m sorry. I guess I’m still half asleep; I’ve been sleeping so
much
.”

Skip nodded slightly but said nothing, hoping Marguerite Terry would remember her manners, but she only looked expectant. At her heels, a white dog with brown ears wagged its tail in a vague sort of way. “I wonder if I could come in?”

“Oh. Of course.” She glanced at the dog. “Okay, Toots?’ The dog gave another vague wave, apparently acquiescing.

Skip stepped into a room as gloomy as is appropriate in a house where there’s been a death. The curtains were drawn, making it cave-like. Newspapers were piled on the floor, as if no one could be bothered to remove them. There was a glass or two on a coffee table and a rumpled blanket on the couch; otherwise the room was dusty and looked seldom used. The rug was threadbare and the floor was bare wood, its finish long since worn away. The upholstery was frayed. The ancient wallpaper had never been replaced.

Yet once someone had cared; there were good quality pieces here, a look of severely reduced circumstances, poverty that might be genteel if anyone could be bothered to vacuum and dust. Skip was back to neglectful.

Obviously embarrassed, Marguerite opened the heavy, dusty drapes. They looked as if they’d been chosen forty years ago and hadn’t been disturbed since, had simply hung here collecting dust, outlasting the fashions of nearly half a century, creating a pall of gloom.

The room was better with a little light.

“We don’t spend much time in here,” said Marguerite. “Everybody’s so busy.”

“Everybody?”

“My husband, Coleman, a self-described and self-taught computer nerd, as he likes to say. He has his office here, but he’s off at a meeting today. And Neetsie, our daughter. Well, she moved out a while ago—she has a studio of her own, can you imagine? Eighteen years old. And Geoff”—her voice caught—“I was so used to him. You know how you get used to a person?”

Skip thought it an odd thing to say about a son.

“Like a dog or something, I don’t know. Won’t you sit down?”

“Actually, I’d like to see where the accident happened if I could, please.”

“You want to see—” She stared, as if trying to understand.

“Where you found him,” Skip finished. “I’m sorry. I know this must be hard.”

“Oh,” said Marguerite, and Skip thought she meant not so much that it was hard as that she understood. “Come through here.”

The dog at her heels, she led Skip through a dining room as drab as the living room, as dark and dusty, but clearly used—if only as a catchall. The table was piled high with stacks of mail, more old newspapers, magazines, the sort of everyday debris that accumulates somewhere in every house—but that usually gets cleaned up every few days. This looked like months’ worth. They went through a kitchen that seemed more lived in, was quite messy, in fact, in a homey sort of way, and finally through a mudroom. Three steps led down to a flagstone patio. “Up there,” said Marguerite. “That’s where Mosey was.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You don’t know what happened?’

“I just know your son fell from a ladder.”

“Well, I woke up about ten o’clock and when I came in the kitchen I heard the most piteous meowing. So I went out and there was Geoff, lying on the patio with the ladder on top of him. Mosey, our little gray cat, had gotten up on the roof and Geoff fell trying to get him down.” She paused, remembering, her face drawing tight as she fought to control it. “It was like a story that told itself with one glance.”

“What was he wearing?”

“A T-shirt and a pair of old sweats, as if he’d gotten out of bed and thrown something on to come outside. No shoes. His feet—”

“What?”

She looked miserable. “His feet must have been cold.”

Skip didn’t want to think about it either. “What did you do?”

“I don’t know. I think I must have screamed or something.”

“And then?”

“I pulled the ladder off and put his head in my lap; and stroked him. But his head didn’t feel right.”

“How did it feel?”

She winced. “Not right. Soft.”

“Was anyone else home?”

“No. Cole was in Baton Rouge. I had to call 911 myself. I knew he was dead; I was hysterical.”

“How did you know?”

“He felt so cold. And his head.”

“How long did you sit there with his head in your lap?”

“Maybe a few seconds. Not long.”

“When you got up did you let his head come down hard on the flagstones?’

“He was my son!”

Skip waited.

“I put him down very gently.”

Skip looked up at the roof. “Had Mosey gotten up there before?”

“Oh, that cat. He goes everywhere.”

“But there?”

“I don’t know. Not that I know of.”

“I’m just wondering—did you hear the ladder fall? Or Geoff yell or anything?”

“No, I’m on the other side of the house. And besides, I could sleep through a hurricane. I take these pills to sleep and they put me so far out I wouldn’t know if a bomb fell.”

Skip thought that might explain why she seemed so out of it. “Did you take one today?”

“Last night, but I got up with Cole and then went back to bed. I’m okay to talk. Shall we go back in? Maybe I could make some coffee.”

Skip liked it better outside and she didn’t want more coffee. But she said, “That would be nice,” thinking Marguerite might drink some herself. She seemed so dull and listless, her voice so devoid of expression, it might help, she thought. Back in the kitchen, she said, “Let me do it.”

“That’s okay. I can manage.” Marguerite seemed very thin as she moved about her messy kitchen, pathetic and lonely in her baggy sweats. Skip thought it odd that she was alone so soon after her son’s death, that the house had not been touched, as if visitors had not come. When Marguerite opened the refrigerator, Skip saw that it was nearly empty, not filled with food the way it should have been—with casserole dishes and hams, cakes and pies from friends and relatives.

“Do you think you should be alone?” she said. “Could I call someone to stay with you?”

Marguerite said, “We’re always alone.” She looked off in the distance. “Neetsie’s friends used to come over now and then. I don’t know—I guess Cole and I aren’t very social. We don’t… belong to a church, or clubs or anything. Neither of us goes out to a job.”

She sounded as if she were wondering aloud how she had come to this friendless state.

“Do you have relatives?”

“Cole doesn’t. My dad died a long time ago. My mother’s in a nursing home.

“All the same…” She stared into space again. “We’re having a memorial service. People might come over afterward—is that what they do?”

Skip shook her head—working in Homicide didn’t make her a funeral consultant.

Marguerite looked panicked. Two cats, a tortoiseshell and a black-and-white one, rubbed against her ankles. “I guess I should clean the house.”

That was a job Skip didn’t envy.

“Hello, pretties. Hello—should Mommy feed you? Mommy’s so bad. Such a bad mommy that can’t even feed the kitties.” She tapped some cat chow into a bowl. At the sound, another cat glided in, a black one. Skip had now seen half a dozen cats, none of whom was Mosey, and one dog.

“Does your dog bark when strangers come around?”

“Sometimes—she barked at you. But sometimes not—she’s a lousy watchdog. Why?”

“I just wondered about the day Geoff was killed. Did you hear her then?”

She frowned. “I don’t think so. But the pills. She could have barked two feet away and I wouldn’t have known it.”

Marguerite asked what Skip took in her coffee, handed her a steaming mug, and picked up a mug of her own. “Shall we go in the living room?”

At least, thought Skip, there was some sun in there.

“I don’t have much time to clean,” said Marguerite. “I have so many projects.”

“Do you keep the garden yourself?” She looked out the window, more appreciative than ever now that she’d seen the inside of the house.

“Why, yes. Do you like it?”

“Very much.”

“I can do creative projects; I just don’t seem to be able to handle the daily maintenance stuff. Neetsie’s just like me.”

“I know what you mean.” Skip noticed that Marguerite smiled when she spoke of Neetsie, almost for the first time. She picked up on it: “What does Neetsie do?”

“She’s a very fine actress, actually. She’s going to be good. I really think she’s going to make it. She goes to UNO at night, just a couple of classes, and supports herself with little jobs she gets.” She smiled again, the indulgent mother.

“She must be very talented.”

“Oh, she is.”

“And Geoff?”

“Geoff?”

Skip smiled, tried to make herself as nonthreatening as possible. “What did he do?”

“He was into computers. Like his dad.”

“His dad? But he and your husband have different names.”

“His stepdad. They were very close. Cole taught him about computers and it brought him right out of himself; he blossomed into a new person.”

Skip thought a thirty-one-year-old man who lived with his parents hadn’t come that far out of himself. She said: “He had a job in computers?”

A shadow crossed Marguerite’s face. “No. Geoff was a very, very bright young man. Exceptional. But we couldn’t afford the good schools—we had to teach him ourselves. He didn’t adjust to other kids very well. He wasn’t socialized.”

Skip nodded and smiled, absolutely in the dark as to what she meant.

“He was brilliant, really. But he read comic books as a kid. You know how some kids do that? He never seemed to outgrow it.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“That kind of mentality. Kind of withdrawn. He was a very quiet, very inward-looking boy. He had a girlfriend, though. Things were looking better for him. I don’t think he’d really had one before.”

“How about other friends?”

“Well, he did have a male friend.” Her nose wrinkled, as if he stank. “Layne something, I think.”

“Maybe we could look in Geoff’s address book if he had one. Did you say he had a job?” Skip knew perfectly well she hadn’t.

“Well, yes. He—uh—worked at a video store. Mondo Video, down by the Riverbend.”

Skip wondered if it was a porno place—judging by Marguerite’s embarrassment, that didn’t seem out of the question. Impulsively, she said, “Do you have a picture of Geoff?”

“What for?”

“I’m just trying to imagine him.”

“Could I ask why?”

“I’m curious, that’s all.”

“I don’t think you said why you’re here.”

“Something came up that we needed to investigate; just covering bases. You know how it is.” Again, she smiled, using her smile as a shield:
No more questions, Mrs. Terry. Okay?

Marguerite looked uncomfortable. “I don’t really know where the old photos are.”

“That’s okay, it was just a thought. I wonder if I could see Geoff’s room.”

Marguerite looked at her quizzically. “Of course.”

His room was just to the right of the mudroom, his window almost directly beneath the section of roof where Marguerite said the cat had been. “Excuse the mess,” Marguerite said.

This would have struck Skip as funny, considering the condition of the rest of the house, if it hadn’t been so sad looking at the prized possessions of someone who no longer existed, piecing together the story they told.

The story itself was sad, Skip thought, of a piece with the cracked plaster of the house, its icy dormancy. A gray cat, Mosey perhaps, slept in a hollow of the bed, the saggy spot that indicated Geoff had been overweight, or that no one ever bothered to turn the mattress, or both. She wondered briefly if they had been close, the man and the cat, or if in some feline way, it sensed that he had died coming to its rescue, or even if it was somehow attuned to his spirit.

Skip didn’t believe in spirits, or anyway, didn’t tend to dwell on them.

This place
, she thought.
It’s creeping me out.

Yet other than the ghostly cat and the sagging bed, the room was perfectly ordinary. But it was a boy’s room, not a man’s, so obviously the room of a boy who still lived with his parents. Makeshift bookshelves lined the walls. A desk had been made from an old door and on it rested some sophisticated computer equipment. There was also a television, VCR, and shelves of videos along with the books. A lot of them were science fiction, and so, she saw, were most of the books. But there was lots of nonfiction, too—computer books, some quasi-science and actual science, history, all volumes that dealt in facts except for two or three on self-hypnosis.