If Walls Could Talk (3 page)

“I was a
cultural
anthropologist, not an archaeologist. I dealt with live people. And anyway, I relinquished my badge when I became a contractor, remember?”

“Once an anthropologist, always an anthropologist. You guys are like musicians. You can’t shake it.”

He was more right than he knew.

To me, old houses might as well be ancient pyramids. They hold secrets and messages from the past; I feel them whispering to me as I walk the hallways. Walls, attics, basements . . . over the past five years I had found newspapers from the thirties, liquor bottles, old coins, address books, even the occasional stash of money or stocks. I once unearthed a button-up baby’s shoe and a dress pattern book from 1916. I even liked the smell: the distinctive, musty aroma of history, reminding me of used bookstores . . . promising the serendipitous discovery of the perfect novel or family relic or beloved treasure.

I dug through my satchel for my key ring, on which hung a miniflashlight. Holding the light with my teeth, I crouched, grabbed onto a stud with one hand for balance, leaned in through the hole in the wall, and reached.

It was frustratingly close, but my arm wasn’t quite long enough. I stretched just a little more, managing to knock at the item with my fingertips. Unfortunately that just pushed it farther until it fell into a well between the floor joists. I couldn’t see anything anymore, even with the flashlight.

“Darn it!” I swore under my breath. “I almost had it. . . .”

Behind me, Matt screamed.

I swung around to see Matt’s business partner lurching through the bedroom doorway, his chest, stomach, and arm soaked with blood.

Kenneth held a bright green pneumatic nail gun in one hand. The other arm was wrapped tight around his abdomen. His normally sleek blond hair was sticking out every which way, and bits of sawdust and white powder clung to one side of his body. But scariest of all were his eyes—they were wild and unfocused.

Kenneth lifted the nail gun and pointed it toward us.

I grabbed Matt from behind and shoved him to the side just as Kenneth managed to squeeze off a single nail. It sailed halfway across the room before lodging its tip in the window frame. Our would-be nailer then fell over onto the floor, moaning, rolling in the dust and debris.

I scrambled over to him, wrenched the nail gun from his flailing hand, and passed it to Matt. Stripping off my jacket, I balled it up and put it under his head.

“Matt, call nine-one-one,” I commanded in a calm but urgent whisper. His eyes looked dull when they met mine, but after a beat he pulled out a cell phone and dialed.

I turned back to the injured man.

“Kenneth, talk to me,” I said in a loud, authoritative voice, holding his face, trying to get him to meet my eyes. Shock takes away reason and focus. “Where are you hurt?”

He mumbled, but the words were nearly unintelligible and mostly consisted of “Damn, Matt . . .” Kenneth’s wild eyes held mine for a moment, telegraphing his terror. I tried to lift his arm off his body, but he held it pressed to his side with surprising strength. There was too much blood to see the extent of his injuries, so I started feeling, gingerly, around his abdomen. Was there a bullet wound? Then I felt something small, flat, and hard. Lifting his soaked shirt and gently wiping away the blood, I peered at it.

It was the head of a nail. I searched further. Kenneth had been shot with the nail gun. . . . repeatedly.

Continuing with my tactile exploration, I came to a terrible realization: Kenneth still held his arm to his abdomen, but that was all there was—an arm. At the wrist was a tightly drawn leather belt serving as a tourniquet.

There was no hand.

I swallowed, hard, took a deep breath, and listened to Matt giving our address to the 911 operator. When he finished, I told him, “Run and get the cooler from downstairs, and then go find Kenneth’s severed hand.”

“Severed
hand
?” he whispered weakly.

“Just do it. Don’t think about it.” I remembered seeing an object that looked like an inflated latex glove lying in the hall near the door of the den, at the other end of the hall. I now suspected it might not be a glove. “Look in the hallway, or wherever he might have come from—the den, maybe?”

Construction was among the most dangerous jobs in the world. My father was nearly fanatical about job site safety, and he had enrolled me and my sisters in annual emergency first-aid courses starting at the age of twelve. But all the care in the world couldn’t stave off the occasional sliced fingertip or tumble off a ladder. Fatigue, stress, shortcuts, alcohol . . . any of these, combined with the tools of the trade, could lead to tragic mistakes in the blink of an eye. One of my dad’s best friends, after twenty years on the job without incident, had gotten sloppy one day and slid off a roof, fracturing two vertebrae. He had never walked again.

Matt seemed frozen, swaying slightly on his feet, his skin an unnatural shade of green associated with the bottoms of birdcages.

“
Matt
, listen to what I’m saying. We might not have much time. You need to move,
now
. There’ll be plenty of time to be sick later. Is there a first-aid kit anywhere?”

Matt shook his head, and I felt a surge of rage. What had been absurd, even laughable, before—a drunken celebrity do-it-yourself demo party—now seemed criminal. What business did these dilettantes have playing around with deadly tools?

“Go,
now
!”

Matt finally shifted into gear and loped out of the room. I wrapped Kenneth’s stump as best I could, then just held his head in my lap and murmured to him. He had a small birthmark on his neck, a Port-colored splotch that moved slightly with his pulse. I watched it, synchronizing my breathing to his, willing him to continue as I did. There was no love lost between Kenneth and me; but now, in my arms, he was just a man, terrifyingly vulnerable. Like the rest of us, nothing but soft, yielding flesh and blood: human. Fallible and prone to injury. He was someone’s son, maybe someone’s brother, or uncle. I had never thought to ask.

A lifetime passed before I finally heard the shrill, escalating whine of emergency vehicles heralding the arrival of the paramedics.

 

“It was a do-it-yourself demo party
.
”
I yelled to be heard over the sound of the retreating siren.

Sunlight glinted off the chrome of the ambulance as it disappeared down the street. Matt was accompanying Kenneth and the paramedics to the California Pacific Medical Center; I stayed behind to close the place up.

“A
what
?” asked the cop. He was a middle-aged, jowly man whose paunch strained at the buttons of his SFPD uniform. His watery blue eyes kept wandering from the notepad in his hands to my overexposed chest. It had become a warm, sunny February day, so my sleeveless dress was equal to the weather, but perhaps not to the company.

After the paramedics swooped in and took over with Kenneth, I had washed up in the powder room sink as best I could, scrubbing my hands and arms raw, trying to pull myself together. I smoothed my dark curly hair and did my best to ignore the wan, hollow look in my eyes. Amazingly my dress had emerged from the ordeal dusty but unbloodied, but my father’s jacket wasn’t so lucky—I would have to take it in for professional cleaning before he discovered it was gone. At the moment it hung, grimy and stained with blood, over my arm. Without the jacket on, I really did look like the last gal left after a wild party.

“The idea is to do part of the demolition and beginning remodel with the help of a lot of friends.” I straightened my spine, tried to rally my spirits, and continued. “Unfortunately, there was alcohol involved. But that was last night—those injuries must have been recent. Kenneth couldn’t have survived—”

“You’re saying it was a construction accident,” the officer said with finality, as though he were filling out a form with only a certain number of choices.

“A single nail might have been an accident,” I protested. “Maybe two. But he’s been shot repeatedly.”

“According to the victim himself, it was an accident. First with the . . . uh . . . table saw and then with the nail gun.”

“Kenneth’s able to talk?” I asked.

“Like I said, he told me it was an accident.”

“But that doesn’t make any sense—”

“Listen, sweetheart, you’d be surprised what these power tools can do, all right? I once saw a guy got shot in the head with a nail gun and he was standing clear across the room. And this other time . . . Well, look, I don’t want to upset you, okay? But it’s like they say—accidents are stranger than fiction.”

“I’m in the construction business myself,
sweetheart
. And I’m telling you: This doesn’t seem like an accident.” I reached into my jacket pocket for my business card and realized I still had the bullets. “Oh, I found these in the master bedroom. Sorry I touched them. I guess they could be evidence.”

He held out his hand, and I relinquished the cartridges. A flicker of interest sparked in those bland eyes.

“Was the victim shot? I mean, with a gun?” the cop asked me, as though I would know.

“As far as I could see, only with the nail gun, but it was pretty hard to tell. I’m sure the hospital will discover more.”

I handed him my business card:

The officer looked down at it, then back up at me with a doubtful don’t-that-beat-all look on his broad face.

“This your job site, then?” he asked.

“No, I wasn’t involved in the project. I just dropped by to check up on Matt. As a friend.”

“Okay, look, what we need here is for you to tell me what you saw. Period. You arrived a little before noon and found the first gentleman downstairs, asleep, and the second individual upstairs missing a hand and shot with nails. Okay? Is that about it?”

I nodded.

A large, rattling truck pulled up to the curb, air brakes wheezing. Three smiling men the size of Wisconsin were squeezed into the cab. Nico and his nephews.

“Matt Addax asked me to move a couple of things out of the garage and then to close up,” I told the police officer. “Is that a problem?”

“Nah, seems okay. That your dog?”

I turned around to see a medium-sized, long-haired brown dog with a red bandanna around its neck sniffing at the garbage. I shook my head.

“Off leash, no collar.” The police officer shook his head. “There’s an infraction right there.”

I studied him. He seemed as concerned about a dog without tags as he did about Kenneth’s grave injuries.

“Look, you might want to call a cleanup outfit; you got a real mess in there. Somethin’ like this happens out on the street, we could call the fire department to hose things down. But seein’ as how it’s on private property, you’re responsible for doin’ it yourself.” He scratched his head, consulted his notepad, and nodded with finality. “Anyways, we’ll take another look around, and then you can lock up. Cal-OSHA usually sends out an accident investigator to file a report in construction accidents such as this, but since it’s a private homeowner deal, I’m not sure if they’ll get involved. Depends on permits. We’ll call you if we need anything else.”

With that, the cop hustled back into the house.

Nico jumped down from the cab of the truck, a huge smile splitting his pleasant, smooth face. He gave me a bear hug and lifted me clear off the ground.

“Mel! You look gorgeous. How come you not remarried yet?”

“I learned my lesson the first time, remember?”

This exchange had become our ritual when we saw each other after a long separation, and despite Nico’s propensity for dousing himself with cheap aftershave I felt a surge of gratitude for the safe, familiar feel of his muscled arms.

I gave him and his nephews the short version of what had happened. After clucking their sympathy, they tromped up the stone stairs, tape measures in hand, to assess whether the piano would make it out the front door. If not, it would have to be maneuvered through the expansive living room window. Many of these old houses still have anchored hooks under the roofline that were used to winch large pieces of furniture up the three or four floors that make up the typical ritzy townhome.

The sight of a piano being hoisted two stories above the sidewalk always made me think of hapless cartoon characters getting squashed flat by falling pianos before reinflating like blow-up dolls.

If only real humans recovered so easily.

I lingered on the sidewalk, not yet willing to force myself back into Matt’s house of horrors. The views from the peak of Pacific Heights were unparalleled, and today the Tuscan red Golden Gate Bridge and the emerald green Marin headlands beyond were crystal clear, as were the vistas of Alcatraz, Angel Island, Sausalito, and Tiburon. Sailboats crowded the smooth, blue-green bay waters, vying with a handful of China-based container ships lumbering to and from the Port of Oakland.

Somewhere nearby a dog barked, a motor revved, neighbors chatted.

I felt removed from it all, altered by recent events. My mind cast back to the morning my mother died, when I couldn’t believe that the world refused to stop, even for a moment, to acknowledge its loss. I remembered watching people rush about in their everyday routines; I had despised them for their normality, for not recognizing that such an essential part of the world had just slipped away.

Tears pricked the backs of my eyes, and I felt that strange, otherworldly sensation of being hugged that came over me whenever I thought of my mother.

“Is everything all right, dear?”

I looked up to see that the neighbors had descended their front steps and come over to stand by me on the sidewalk. Preceded by a subtle fog of expensive perfume, the two women looked to be in their early sixties, blond, well coiffed, and attractive; one tall and lithe, the other petite but with torpedo-style surgically enhanced breasts. Both were dressed in chic pantsuits in understated tones of cream and beige. Both had that well-preserved, polished sheen of people willing and able to spend a considerable chunk of their time and fortunes on personal trainers, masseuses, and nutritional counselors.