Love Nest (13 page)

“Sure I did,” Officer Lord said. “Every inch. You saw me.”

“That means the person who wiped the place down was cool-headed, calculating, meticulous. In full control, Billy, bloodless. Yet the kid, Wally Bauer, tore away in a panic, nearly running old Chick down in the front lot. You see, one doesn’t follow the other. It’s a contradiction.”

“I don’t know, Sonny,” Officer Lord said, his flat eyes giving out a moist stare over his coffee cup. They were in Lem’s, a window table. Outside was bustling and noisy, the sidewalk thronged with Thanksgiving shoppers. “Maybe you’re cutting too fine an edge. Inside the room nobody could see the kid. He must’ve felt safe. Outside he didn’t. Could be as simple as that. ’Course I always try to make things simple.”

“I shouldn’t have been so sure. So quick.”

“Maybe you’re being too hard on yourself. Bet you are, Sonny. You tend to do that.”

“He was
there
, I know that. Because he made the phone call later, it’s on tape. His voice, no doubt about it, despite the distortion. He made a lot of calls, Billy, going back some. Last summer he made one, anonymous like all of them. That’s how I met her. She was in that same damn unit. Forty-six.”

“Don’t tell me too much, Sonny. Probably stuff I shouldn’t know.”

“What if I had busted her, which is what I should’ve done, would she still be alive? The kid too?”

“We all make judgments. Even me, every day. Kids raising hell at the bowling alley or McDonald’s doesn’t mean I’m going to pull them in. Guy gets drunk, disturbs the peace, doesn’t mean I got to pinch him. Tell you the truth, Sonny, I never like to lock up anybody. Put a guy in a cell and right away he’s less of a man. I mean, something goes out of him soon as you shut the door on him. Same with a woman, but worse. And worse for me, I got to go hunt up a matron to look after her, to take her to the toilet, stuff like that.”

Dawson looked out at the traffic, cars backed up at the lights, people scuttling between them. “I wish I’d done better.”

“Maybe you should try to take your mind off it. That’s what I’d do.” Officer Lord clinked his cup in the saucer. “Been meaning to tell you, I like your jacket. New, huh? Real nice threads. You ought to walk slow past Phillips Academy, let people think you teach there. But don’t open your mouth, they’ll know better.” A slight pause. “See, I made you smile. Goddammit, I knew I could.”

A radio was playing from somewhere behind the counter, tuned to a memory station, a soft melody, sadly ironic lyrics. Billy Lord cocked an ear.

“You know who that is singing?” he asked and got a nod. “Forty years at least — nobody knows it, not even my wife — I’ve been in love with Peggy Lee. She sings, I get chills running up my legs. Every so often, you know, I see her on some special thing on television, and she’s painted and fat, with this big moon face and funny clothes that make her look like a fortune teller, but, Christ, to me she’s still beautiful. I see her with my heart, not my eyes. Listen to her, Sonny, isn’t she good?”

Dawson finished his coffee, including some grounds, and wondered whether Billy Lord’s words were reverberating meanings he was failing to catch. His headache, though still small, persisted.

“Something else,” Billy Lord went on. “I’m still kind of in love with Doris Day. I remember thinking, back then, wasn’t possible she could do stuff like you and me. You know, bodily functions. And no way I could imagine that sweet thing ever in heat. Peggy, I sure could — but not Doris.”

Dawson scraped his chair back. “Excuse me, Billy.”

“Sure I’ll excuse you. I’m always excusing somebody, so why the hell shouldn’t I excuse you? Where you going?”

Dawson answered without looking back.

“What’d he say?” Billy Lord asked the waitress who was approaching the table with a pencil stuck in her hair.

“The cemetery,” she said.

Walking to his car, Dawson did not realize it was raining until he felt the wet against his face. It was a mist turning into a thin drizzle, and he drove with the wipers working at half speed to Spring Grove Cemetery, where headstones seemed to float up in the gray gloom, as if from trickery of the restless dead, Melody among them. The keeper of the cemetery, moving toward his pickup truck, stopped in his tracks when Dawson gave a tap to the horn.

“How you doing, Mr. Wholley,” Dawson said from his open window, pulling up close.

“Fine,” said Mr. Wholley, an amorphous figure in a visored cap and heavy jacket, the face rough-hewn, with a nose wrongly shaped by an old fracture. “I’ve got lots of people underfoot but no sass from any of ’em. Nice quiet bunch, some dead ‘fore I was born. So any talkin’ you might hear, that’s me to myself. What can I do for you, Sonny?”

“The Haines grave.”

“Girl that was murdered? What about it?”

“Anybody been visiting it?”

“I don’t see everybody comes here.”

“If you do see somebody, I’d appreciate a call. Maybe you’d note the license plate for me.”

“I’m not good on numbers. Don’t even know my own.”

“A description of the person will do.”

“I’m not good at that either.” The rain had picked up and was soaking into Mr. Wholley’s wool cap. “Whatcha lookin’ for, Sonny? Or shouldn’t I ask?”

“That’s a question I haven’t entirely asked myself yet, Mr. Wholley. I’m just letting it kind of lie there in my mind. But I’d appreciate your help.”

“I suppose you want me to keep this to myself.”

“That would be best.”

Mr. Wholley dug out a handkerchief from the deep pocket of his jacket and blew his battered nose, a honk that would have called to attention a company of soldiers. His rheumy eyes gazed off into the wet gloom, over the rising stones and ranks of shrubs. “I’ll be lyin’ here myself one of these days. You too, Sonny. Peaceful thought, isn’t it?”

Dawson slid the gearshift into drive. “You’re getting wet. I won’t keep you.”

“I’ll tell her you called.”

Dawson knew what he meant.

Mr. Wholley explained anyway. “The girl in the ground.”

• • •

Harriet Bauer did not answer the door, so Dr. Stickney let himself in and made his way on cat’s feet to the study, where he had been told she would be. He found her sitting in a chair near the fire, her shoes kicked off, one foot flung toward the flames. “Hello,” he said quietly, and she drew the foot back and looked up at him with a dull lack of surprise.

“I said I didn’t need you.”

“Your husband thought you might.”

“He was wrong.”

She spoke calmly, too calmly, and he suspected a roaring inside her handsome skull, around which she had bound her hair tightly, severely. He said, “If you haven’t slept, I can prescribe something.”

“I’ve slept a little. I haven’t dreamed of Wally yet. Why not?”

He kept his coat on, moved closer to the fire, and chafed his hands, quite sure she was not expecting an answer, though he had a couple of logical ones to give her.

“Did Wally love me? I want to know. I want proof. Tapes. I want to hear his voice saying it.”

Dr. Stickney stroked his beard. Nothing in the room seemed friendly, not even the fire. She crossed her legs, the paint on her toenails showing through her stockings.

“Or was I too much for him? Too much mother?”

“We were all too much for him,” Dr. Stickney said.

“Did he come out of the womb wrong? Was that it?” Her face was heated, but her voice was cool, as if certain thoughts had to be exorcised with eerie detachment. “Or didn’t I wean him right? At sixteen, did he still want tit? Mine? That teacher’s?” Her face stretched. “His age, he should’ve wanted ass. Melody’s. You and I talked about it. I was right, wasn’t I?”

“We were both right.”

“Instead she mothered him.”

“Sistered him,” he corrected.

“That wasn’t the deal.”

“Maybe she had no choice.”

“Then she wasn’t much of a hooker.”

He stood fixed by the swelling heat of the fire, his arms tight at his sides, and she rose from the chair. Even without shoes, she was taller than he, a heroic blond presence. She hovered close enough for him to feel the breath of her words.

“Maybe it’s good you came,” she said. As if to confirm his existence, her hand traced over his beard, her fingers played idly with his mouth; the little finger almost went in. “You’re such a neat little fellow. With a head full of other people’s secrets. Do you have any of your own?”

He brushed her hand away and for the first time looked at her sharply, censoriously. “Why are we pretending?”

Her face closed.

He said, “We both know it wasn’t suicide.”

• • •

As a rare treat and a way to unwind, Paige Gately made herself a suicidal drink, nearly all gin, and drew a bath that would have been too hot for most people. She added scented soap crystals and oil and disrobed leisurely, exhibiting to wall mirrors a pink bottom that had forfeited nothing to the years. From all angles she was stark geometry, understated, honed, scaled to size, her body never subjected to the throes of surgery or childbearing. Quick glances rendered casual assurance that her essential self remained unconquered. For reassurance, she manipulated a hand mirror and let nothing of her flesh elude her.

She lowered herself into the tub, the water a burning kiss. With her drink within reach on the ledge and her legs pridefully extended, she glowed and swelled and in time let the gin get to her. One odd expression after another swept over her perspiring face as she thought of the Bauer boy, whom she had always considered beyond rescue, the fates pitted against him, and of Melody, for whom she had felt a disquieting and strangely exalting affinity, as if she could have slipped on the girl’s scant underpants and, despite the age difference, changed places with her. She remembered dropping a caring hand on Melody’s shoulder during a heart-to-heart talk and feeling that, in some measure, she was touching herself.

She refused to brood over what could not be undone.

In overheated content, she sank deeper into the water, hot vapors coiling her hair into tight ringlets. A bead of sweat forged down a cheek, and another dithered at the end of her proud aquiline nose. Presently she closed her eyes, let suds overlap her chin, and contemplated her life without regard to the past, only to the future. Her only fear, a small one, was that she would not be able to rise out of the tub.

Twenty minutes later, slightly woozy on her feet, she plunged into an immense towel and dried herself slowly and surely. In her bedroom she gripped a brass bedpost to steady herself and then slipped on a becoming robe that warmly sheathed her from her throat to her toes. Her legs felt elongated and trembly, but each step she took down the stairs was light and exact, executed with an economy of effort. One hand clenched the banister, the other the gin glass. When the telephone rang, an ironlike jangle, her impulse was to rip the cord away by the roots. Little was left of her drink. She killed it, then put the phone to her ear. The caller was Ed Fellows.

“I thought I’d come over and discuss your proposal.”

Her voice was controlled. “Everything’s settled. What’s there to discuss?”

“Small points.”

“They would bore me. You handle them.”

“You don’t have an attorney. You can’t use William Rollins on this.”

“The bank attorney will do. That was decided.”

There was a lapse. Then: “Let me come over, Paige. Please.”

She was firm. “No.”

“I can’t handle everything myself.”

“Try,” she suggested while picturing his heavy hand clutching the receiver, the knuckles prominent and bony. She had never liked his hands because of the knuckles, gnawed on when he was nervous. “Don’t ask too much of me,” she said coolly.

“Why do you do this to me?”

“You do it to yourself.”

“I’m coming over,” he said.

She said, “I won’t let you in.”

But she did. He arrived with rain in his hair and on the dark shoulders of his coat, which he removed and draped over a chair. Clearly he had expected only to have his hand held, but at a glance he knew that she had been drinking. He trembled with emotion.

“Your lucky day,” she said dryly and was reminded that she did not care for the broad slope of his brow and the tendency of his pale eyes to hover outside the lids, as if a blow to the back of his head had jarred them loose. Only his pinstripes kept him in perspective, but he was taking them off. “My rules,” she said.

He struggled with his vest. “Where?” he asked. “Down here? Upstairs? Paige, I can’t believe it.”

“No stupid stuff,” she warned.

“I promise.”

Upstairs on the brass bed, a foam-rubber pillow under the small of her back, she suffered his weight, his kiss, and then his harsh entry into her, which required her help; otherwise he would have hurt her.

In his ear she whispered, “Where would you be without me?”

• • •

Sergeant Dawson drove home in the rain from the cemetery and backed his car into the garage for the night. In the house he raised the thermostat, heard the boiler rumble into being, and then stuck something frozen into the oven. Within the half hour he received two phone calls. The first was from Officer Lord, who said, “I forgot to ask you. You’re between women, right? I mean, you’re not seeing anybody special.”

“What’s it to you, Billy?”

“I mean, if you’re alone you got nobody to eat Thanksgiving dinner with. Wife thought you might want to come over here. We eat around two, you want to come.”

“Thanks, Billy. The chief already asked me.”

“Then you’re going there?”

“No, I thought I’d stay home tomorrow. I’ve things to think about.”

“Jeez, Sonny, that’s not good. Holiday, you shouldn’t be alone. I mean, you know.”

Dawson laughed. “What do you think I’m going to do? Eat my gun?” His voice sobered. “No, Billy.”

“I wasn’t thinking that, Sonny.”

“What were you thinking?”

“I was thinking it would be good to have you here.”

The second call came a few minutes later. His heart stopped as soon as he heard the female voice, pitiless to his ear and constricting to his chest. “Life’s so short,” she said, “almost doesn’t seem worth it.” The voice had the right rhythm, the proper cadence, even the familiar little catches, which hooked him hard. “You should’ve married me,” she said, “I gave you the chance.”