Love Nest (12 page)

“He used the sash of his bathrobe.”

“Don’t tell me details.”

“They were in the paper.”

“I wouldn’t read it.” She pushed the hair from her cheek, a softly shaped face coming into play, troubled around the mouth. She was perhaps thirty-five, no older, with no children and with no husband two weeks out of three. He was a sales rep, with much of his time spent aboard airplanes. “Why did he do it? No, don’t tell me.” She shook her head. “I don’t want to know any of it.”

Dawson placed his hands on the armrests of the chair and watched her shift her feet and cross them at the ankles. Her gaze wandered.

“I was always so careful. Women teachers have to be. We’re careful of what we say and do, what we wear, otherwise the boys pick up on you. They read something into everything, never a letup. If you have to write low on the blackboard you’re afraid to stoop. You know they’ll stuff their eyes. Everything’s a sexual snicker, though there was never any of that business from Walter. That’s what’s so strange.” Her voice trailed, then forged back. “I have large breasts, I can’t help that, but I’m not the prettiest teacher there. Why did he single me out to make those calls.”

Dawson, remaining quiet, inclined his head as if to listen better.

“Maybe I seemed vulnerable to him. I don’t know. Or maybe I did something I wasn’t even aware of, that he built up in his mind.” There was a telephone in the room. She looked at it as if expecting it to ring. “Sometimes I pity boys, do you know what I mean?”

Dawson’s head drifted back, the smallest beginning of a headache evident. She shifted her legs again, reversing the cross of her ankles.

“No questions. You’re just letting me talk.” He nodded, and she smiled weakly. “In some way we seem to be comforting each other. Why did I say that, Sergeant? Is there a reason?”

He said, “You must have been kind to him.”

“I may have been. He was shy about speaking in front of the class, so I didn’t call on him often. I don’t know if that was kindness or a mistake. What do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

“I knew he had no friends, and there were times I wanted to reach out, pat his head, tell him friends aren’t everything, though of course they are at his age.”

“But you didn’t.”

“What?”

“Pat his head.”

“No, of course not. I knew better than that. The only time we ever really talked was after class, after the bell. He’d stay in his seat, wait till we were alone, and ask me unnecessary questions about assignments. I think now he liked having me to himself. He told me he had an older sister. But he didn’t, did he?”

“In a way he did.”

The telephone rang. She did not move. It rang three times and then stopped.

“It’s all right. It’s my husband telling me he’s arrived safely in Cincinnati.” She gave out the same weak smile as before. “My husband and I bumped into him once in the supermarket. He seemed so surprised, upset, seeing me with a man. But he must’ve known I was married. How could he not have? Everybody calls me Mrs. Medwick.”

“Is that when the calls began?”

“I don’t remember. Doesn’t matter now, does it?”

“The calls terrified you.”

“Of course. I was alone. And the voice was distorted, the language so ugly, so dirty. I thought it was a man pretending to be a child. But of course it was a child pretending to be a man. Perhaps there’s no great difference.” She picked at the sleeve of her blouse, straightening the long cuff. “It was easy for you to catch him, wasn’t it? Just a simple trace.”

“Very easy. Too easy. That’s why I didn’t think he was dangerous. That was my mistake.”

“No, Sergeant. The last few days I’ve thought about that a great deal. In my heart I know he wouldn’t have hurt me. He wouldn’t have hurt anybody … except himself.”

A muscle contracted inside Dawson’s face. He found himself staring at her but not entirely seeing her.

“That’s only my opinion, but I feel it’s not what you wanted to hear.”

He hoisted himself from the chair, buttoned his coat, and, aware of a coldness inside him, hiked the collar.

“I haven’t comforted you, have I?” she said.

“No,” he said and quietly took his leave.

• • •

“You’ll freeze your arse,” Paige Gately said from the center of her living room, which had been grandly redecorated a few years ago. Attorney William Rollins did not stir. He was sitting at a window on a low, wide sill that from November into March was never warm, no matter what the room temperature was. She had given him a liqueur, and he took a small sip, letting the flavor linger on his lips.

“Who’s minding the motel?” he asked.

“It minds itself. I pick good workers.” Crisp and cool in a dark blazer and white turtleneck, she skinned gold foil from a square of Swiss chocolate. She allowed herself one square a day, which did not disturb her weight. Her metabolism kept her trim. “Sitting there,” she said, “you remind me of Biff.”

“Are you being unkind?”

“He had his moments,” she said. Her face no longer went ugly when she thought of her husband. Her feelings for him had long ago calcified and lay hidden like a dog’s buried bone. In her most nostalgic mood he was no more than a faint twinge. “Charming, but an idiot with money.”

“Yes, he was,” Rollins agreed.

“Speculated away every cent the old man left him. What’s the answer when strong men produce weak sons? Genetic irony?”

“People tried to stop him. I was one of them. But Biff wasn’t the sort to listen.”

“You should have come to me.”

“You were unapproachable in those days,” he gently reminded her. “Business was beneath you.”

She let the chocolate melt in her mouth and stopped herself from taking another. Rollins rose from the windowsill with a shiver. “I warned you,” she said sharply and watched him approach slowly with a pale hand wound around the crystal liqueur glass.

“Why don’t you sell this house?”

“Never.”

“What does it symbolize for you?”

“Everything that’s me,” she said and, staring at him, could not pick out what had reminded her of her husband. They were so obviously dissimilar that she searched strenuously for a likeness. “You’d be more attractive,” she said, “if you cut the hair in your nose. Biff’s barber did his.”

He colored slightly.

“When I was young, people said I broke balls. That I broke Biff’s. Not true. He didn’t have any.”

Rollins colored more.

She said, “When they buried Melody we were all standing within fifty yards of his headstone. Do you know, I didn’t even think of him. It didn’t cross my mind he was there.”

The mention of Melody’s name affected him, as she knew it would. He finished off his liqueur.

“Poor kid,” she said. “A girl in her line should’ve been hard as nails. She wasn’t.” A pause. “Did Bauer’s son kill her? What’s your guess, William?”

“I don’t have one.”

“Now we’ll never know for sure, I suppose.” She eyed his empty glass. “Do you want another?”

“Too sweet,” he murmured.

“Do you want something more manly?”

He shook his head almost imperceptibly.

“Good boy,” she said. “Shall we get back to business?”

They stayed standing, facing each other, she with sudden force in her posture and a change in her voice. “Are you with me on this?” she asked, referring to her proposal to buy the Silver Bell. Earlier she had shared with him the secret behind the proposal.

He said, “I wish you hadn’t confided in me.”

“You’re my lawyer.”

“Not on this. I’m theirs.”

“That’s the point. All I want you to do is push the sale through fast. Expedite the paperwork. Time’s important. If Rita O’Dea still has doubts, remind her the place has never made the money Bauer bragged it would.” She drew him into her eyes, liquid-bright at the moment. “I need you, William. It will be well worth your while.”

“They’re not the sort you should fool with, Mrs. Gately.”

“For Christ’s sake, call me Paige.”

“They’re dangerous.”

“The danger’s mine, not yours.”

“But why put yourself at risk?”

“That’s simple,” she said with steel in her voice. “I don’t ever want to be broke again.”

• • •

Alfred Bauer rang the doorbell, and the large baggy face of Ralph Roselli looked out at him through a narrow glass panel. Then Roselli opened the door and let him in, but not all the way. “Rita expecting you?”

“It’s all right,” Rita O’Dea called from the distance. She was in the airy kitchen, seated at the gleaming wooden table in the light of a large window overlooking weather-bent birch and towering pine. On the table was an open box of Italian pastries and a trail of crisp powdered crumbs. “Ralph brings me these from the North End. Only place you can get them this good.” She offered Bauer one. He declined. He took a seat at the opposite side of the table, near where Roselli had been sitting.

Roselli stayed on his feet. “Sorry about your son.”

Bauer nodded.

Rita O’Dea said, “How’s Harriet doing?”

He shook his head, and for a while nobody said anything, Rita O’Dea a large humid presence under her caftan, eyes brown enough to seem black. Her abundant hair covered her shoulders as it had when she was a young woman and Bauer was worming his way into her and her brother’s good graces.

“Somebody should ask how I’m doing,” she said. “The kid used to make the Christmas cards he sent me, I still got them all. You want, I’ll show them to you.”

Bauer, as if a slug were dragging itself across his heart, said, “I want the cop.”

She bit into a pastry and got a lot of it on her mouth. “You don’t do cops.”

“Wally’s gone. Somebody has to pay.”

“Somebody is,” she said. “You.” She wiped her lips with the back of her hand. “And Harriet.”

Bauer’s blue eyes shifted slightly. “I thought maybe Ralph — ”

“I’m retired,” Roselli said in a dull tone.

“You guys never retire,” Bauer said.

“I don’t hit anymore.”

“If Rita asked, you would.”

“Rita ain’t asking.”

She regarded Bauer in a manner more sympathetic on the one hand and tougher on the other. “You want to count the people I’ve lost? You got a scorecard? I’ll win. You know what I learned, Alfred? Revenge doesn’t bring them back — except in a way you don’t want. I see my brother’s face every night. You know where I see it? In the casket. All these years I still hear my father’s voice. You know where it’s coming from? The fucking grave.”

Bauer closed his eyes and let dark seconds pass.

She said, “I’ve a husband hiding somewhere, don’t know where he is. Feds have given him a new name. What should I do, have Ralph hunt him down, bash his brains in? What will that do for me? Can I be a young bride again? Can I start fresh, hundred pounds lighter than I am?”

Bauer opened his eyes, and she tore off a hunk of pastry and rammed it into her unlikely small mouth.

“We making good money, Alfred? We got things going our way?” Explosive questions uttered in a moderate tone. Her black eyes flashed. “You take out the cop, all that could go. I don’t let anybody threaten my livelihood.”

“Maybe,” he persisted, “there’s a way to take him out that wouldn’t hurt us.” His voice drifted, as if he did not want Roselli to hear. “I promised Harriet.”

She said, “Who’s the heavy? You or her? I always wondered, didn’t want to ask. Didn’t want to embarrass you.”

“Please,” he said. “Don’t say no. Think about it.”

“Get out of here, Alfred. You’re making me morbid. I don’t like to be morbid.”

Roselli walked him to the door, where, briefly, each man stood stolid. Bauer’s arms were slack, his naked face full of fatigue. “What would you do if it had been your kid, Ralph?”

Roselli, whose thoughts always seemed sour, said. “I don’t have a kid.” He reached past Bauer and opened the door. “What I wouldn’t do is cross Rita.”

When Roselli returned to her, she was still at the table, the pastry box closed and shoved far to one side, almost off the edge. She loosened the wide top of her caftan, drooped her shoulders, flopped her mass of hair forward, and shut her eyes. “Do my neck,” she said, and Roselli’s fingers pressed into her flesh, rippled cords, kneaded a muscle. “Go harder,” she said in a tone saved for such moments, as if she were a girl again, family fussing over her, boyfriends afraid to touch her because of who she was. Always she had had to make the first move.

Roselli said, “Bauer worry you?”

“It’s not him that worries me. It’s her.” She leaned lower over the table, letting her head loll on what looked like the moist neck of a seal. Roselli rotated his thumbs. She said, “Alfred’s always sucked up to me, Harriet never has.”

“Years ago, asking you to be the godmother, that was sucking up.”

“That was smart. Political. Young as she was, she knew Alfred was nothing without my brother. And nobody was closer to Tony than me.” She worked the caftan away from the round slope of her shoulders, and Roselli did more of her, using the heel of his hand, pressuring color into the skin. “Yes,” she said, eyes still shut, “Jesus, yes.”

Roselli, the front of his trousers swollen, said, “No question now, I guess, the kid did the girl.” The back of her bra was embedded into her flesh. He undid the hooks, and the straps flew up like two whips. His hands slid around her, barging into substantial breasts. She lifted her head, eyes fluttering open.

“That’s not what I want, Ralph. If I wanted it, I’d tell you.”

His silence was his apology. He brought the ends together and refastened the hooks with surprising swiftness for fingers so thick. She sat erect, swished her hair back, and made herself decent, then looked up.

“It could’ve been Harriet.”

Roselli said, “Or Bauer himself.”

“Don’t think that hasn’t crossed my mind.” Elbows winged out, she flattened her hands on the table and wrenched herself up. “You didn’t know her all that well, did you?”

“Who?”

“The girl. Melody. She did my back better than you.”

• • •

“Something should have bothered me right away, Billy, I don’t know why it didn’t. Maybe I was too sure of myself. There wasn’t a single print in the motel room. You dusted everywhere, right?”