Marine Corpse (13 page)

She pulled her face back and looked into my eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I guess you’re not into PDA’s, huh?”

“What’s a PDA?”

“Public display of affection, dummy.” She sat back. “I still need a hug.”

“Soon,” I said. “After they finish this set. Then, in private.”

“A deal,” she replied. After a moment, she said, “Okay. His name is David Lee. He teaches at Lincoln Prep, which is, surprise, in Lincoln, just outside what passes for the center of town there, not far from the Audubon place. If you feel you have to talk to him, please be sure to tell him that it was me who told you about him, because otherwise he’d be paranoid as hell about it. If you can make it so that he understands why I told you, without scaring the wee-wee out of him, I’d really appreciate it.”

I nodded. “I’ll be sure to do that.”

“I feel rotten for telling you.”

“I hope you feel you can trust me,” I said. “By the way, I did try to do you a favor the other day.”

“Yeah? What?”

“I went to see Altoona.”

“Who? Oh, yeah. The guy in Stu’s notebooks. What’d he have to say? Did he know anything about the diary?”

“He didn’t have anything to say. He’s had some kind of schizophrenic episode, and I couldn’t get through to him. Very sad. When I saw him before—as I did weekly for a couple of months—he was very sharp and smart and good company. Now he’s off in his own world somewhere. If Stu kept a diary, or if there were other notebooks, I couldn’t learn it from Altoona. But I did try for you.”

“Appreciate it. Too bad about the old guy. From what Stu wrote, he was really close to him.”

“What else did you find in the notebooks?”

“Oh, you know Stu. Trying to be a sociologist. He was really fascinated with the types of people he met, those poor street people. He seemed quite taken with the fact that so many of them were young. A lot of women, too. And he really got into the way they grouped themselves. Almost exclusively by their ethnic identity. Puerto Ricans and blacks and Arabs. The stereotyped old winos—maybe like your Altoona man—they stuck to themselves, too. From what Stu wrote in the notebooks, there were little clusters of Greeks and Poles and Lithuanians, and just about anything else you can imagine, and they all liked to talk their own language and keep to themselves. It’d be fun to try to photograph them, to capture their differences, their poor old pride, to see if you couldn’t get a feel for the sadness and hopelessness of it.” She shook her head. “It would beat the hell out of doing portraits of snotty suburban toddlers and high school graduates, I can tell you that.”

The sax player announced that the group was going to take a short break. I lifted my eyebrows at Heather. “Let’s get out of here,” she said.

It was about a twenty-minute ride back to her condominium. Heather rested her hand lightly against the back of my neck as we drove, and we didn’t talk much. Neither of us had said anything about it, but we both knew that we were heading back to go to bed together, and I sensed a kind of distance between us, a mutual shyness, and an apprehension, too.

When we got inside, she bustled about, turning on lights, moving pillows around on the sofa, lining up the edges on a stack of magazines. “Oh, the place is a mess,” she muttered. “Do you want to put on some music? Help yourself. Listen. Just make yourself comfortable, okay? I just want to—”

“Heather,” I said.

She turned to look at me. “What?”

I held out a hand. “Come here.”

She smiled. “What for?”

“That hug.”

She regarded me solemnly. “Yes. All right, then.”

She came to me slowly and put her arms around my waist. I held her carefully, standing there in the middle of her livingroom, my face in her hair, breathing in her good clean smell. After a moment she shuddered and adjusted herself against me. “Thanks,” she mumbled into my chest. “I needed that.”

“Me, too,” I said.

She stepped away from me. “At the risk of committing a cliché, I think I’d like to slip into something more comfortable. Want to find something to drink?”

“Sure,” I said.

She was back downstairs in a few minutes, barefoot and wearing jeans and a man’s shirt with its tails flapping. “Oh, that’s better,” she sighed. “I still can’t get used to pantyhose.”

I had found two bottles of beer in her refrigerator. I handed her one. “I haven’t seen any of your work,” I said. “Don’t you do anything except department store portraits? Most photographers hang their stuff on their walls.”

“My photographs are kind of like music to me,” she said. “I’m not always in the mood for them. When I am, I take them out. Wanna see?”

“Very much.”

She went over to her desk and came back with a stack of matted, unframed eight-by-ten glossy black-and-white photos. “These are my favorites,” she said, handing them to me.

We sat side by side on the sofa. She lay her head against my shoulder as I flipped through the dozen photographs. Each was a study in contrast of line, shape, and texture—something soft, irregular, rounded, and natural juxtaposed with something sharp, angular, and manmade. There was an oak leaf caught on a sewer grate, a cloud formation shot into the sun through the struts of a suspension bridge, tall weeds with tiny round blossoms growing up through a rusting hunk of farm machinery. Each photo, at first glance, struck me as simply a snapshot. But each one compelled me to look twice, and when I did I discovered the composition and point of view that gave it a kind of completeness and unity. The pieces fit together.

“I showed these once,” she said. “I called the set ‘The Machine in the Garden.’ Not very original. A man offered me five hundred dollars for the set. I turned him down.”

“What were you asking?”

“Oh, I got what I wanted. I wanted someone to offer to buy them. I wanted someone to say that they were worth money, that these creations out of my own mind’s eye were actually of value. Five hundred dollars was probably a very generous price for a dozen photographs by a complete unknown. But right then, it was absolutely fulfilling to get the offer. It made me love these pictures too much to sell them. Do you understand?”

She looked up at me and I kissed her forehead. “I think so,” I said. “I like your pictures very much. There’s a tension in them, a war going on there between the forces of nature and progress, or civilization, or mankind. You can’t tell who’s winning, but they’re kind of ominous. That’s what you mean, I guess, by machines and gardens, huh?”

“Something like that, yes.”

She snuggled against me while I riffled through the stack of pictures again. I put the one of the bridge and clouds on top and studied it. “Like that one?” Heather said.

“Especially, yes. It’s my favorite.”

“It’s yours.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t want to break up the set. Hey, if you wouldn’t even sell it…”

“Don’t you want it?”

“I’d love to have it.”

“Take it, then. Please.”

“I accept.” She looked up at me and smiled, and I kissed her on the mouth. She moved against me for an instant, and then she touched my face with her fingertips and drew back.

“Hey, Brady,” she murmured.

“Yes?”

“Do you know how to play gin?”

I smiled. “I think I can remember the rudiments.”

She sat sideways on the sofa and folded her arms. “Penny a point. What do you say?”

“You’re on.”

She went looking for cards and sent me to the kitchen for more beer. When I returned to the livingroom she was seated crosslegged on the floor. She had put a Chuck Berry tape on, and we hummed and sang when we knew the words, and when we didn’t we made them up. Heather dealt the cards deftly, making them click as she flicked them out. She played fiercely, frowning a lot and chewing on her tongue and offering a running commentary on the progress of the game.

When we were done, she announced that I owed her four dollars and seventy-one cents. “Pay up,” she said.

“Sure,” I said. “I will.”

“Now.”

“Don’t you trust me?”

“That’s not the point,” she said.

I counted out the bills and change for her. “Where’d you learn to play like that?” I said.

“My Daddy taught me. He was a real
mavin
on cards, Daddy was.” She grinned at me. “He tried to teach me a lot of other stuff, too, but except for the cards, my Daddy wasn’t so smart, so I don’t pay that much attention to the other stuff.”

“What sort of other stuff?” I said.

“Aw,” she said, waving her hand vaguely around, “just his ideas about what was fun and what wasn’t. Know what I mean?”

“Nope. Haven’t the foggiest.”

She put her hands on her hips and sighed. “Well, come on, then. I suppose I’ll just have to show you.”

She took my hand and led me toward the stairs. She paid absolutely no attention to my cries of protest.

“
SO THIS IS GETTING
serious, huh?” remarked Julie a couple of days later.

She was seated beside me at my desk waiting for me to sign a stack of letters and documents she had typed up. She cupped her chin in her hand, her elbow propped up on the corner of the desk, and she was staring at me as if she could read secrets from my face.

“I like your hair that way,” I said, as I scanned one of the letters and then scrawled my name at the bottom.

“It’s the same way it’s been for months, and don’t try to change the subject.”

“It looks different. Sort of windblown.”

“All the blather around here, it’s no wonder. The Kriegel dame, is it?”

“No one says ‘dame’ anymore, Julie. You’ve been reading too much Mickey Spillane.”

“You’ve got a real thing for photographers.”

“You noticed my new picture, eh?”

“Yes. It’s swell. I suppose that’s why you’ve given it a position of such prominence. On the wall right across from my desk.”

I shrugged elaborately. “It was a place that needed something.”

“One of the shots Gloria did of your boys would have looked just fine there. This one is so depressing.”

“It
is
powerful, isn’t it?”

“I said depressing, not powerful. Look, Brady. If you’re so hung up on women who can take pictures, why don’t you just go back to Gloria?”

I put down my pen. “Because she won’t have me, for one reason. Now why don’t you lay off my private life, huh?”

“You know why.”

“Hey. I’ve been hurt before, I’ll be hurt again. That’s part of the fun of it. I like this girl.”

“Next thing, you’ll be saying you’re in love with her.”

“I would never say that.”

“Already I can see it. You’ve become a quivering mass of chocolate pudding. No. Vanilla. Vanilla pudding has less character than chocolate.”

“Yeah, I know, and my practice is suffering and you’re doing all my work for me. We’ve talked about that before.”

She didn’t smile. “We talk about that all the time. Look. I’m not complaining.” She knitted her brows and turned down the corners of her mouth.

“You could have fooled me.” I patted her hand in what I hoped was an avuncular manner. “You’re beautiful when you pout,” I said, which produced the desired effect. She stuck her tongue out at me. “I’m headed out to Lincoln this afternoon,” I said. “Don’t wait for me.”

“Gonna stop off in Sudbury afterwards?”

“No, smartass, I’m not. I’m going to come back and catch up on my paperwork in peace, without people distracting me with dire predictions and suffocating concern. Besides,” I smiled, “Heather is tied up all evening.”

Julie gathered the stack of letters together, tapping the edges even before she picked them up. Then she stood and frowned down at me. “It’s just that you’re such a baby. You’re so easily hurt.”

“Oh,” I said with a wave of my hand, “I guess I can take care of myself.”

“That,” she said, pivoting toward the door, “is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”

Lincoln Prep was a cluster of old brick buildings tucked against a piney hillside on one of the winding country roads in Lincoln, near the DeCordova Museum. Across the street endless acres of meadow and woodland rolled downhill toward a low horizon. The Lincoln town mothers and fathers, with excellent foresight and apparently limitless funds, had purchased and preserved all of this beautiful New England countryside as conservation land. It has always seemed to me that most of Lincoln consisted of conservation land. They conserved meadows and marshes, bogs and fens, hills and dales, to the delight of cross-country skiers, cyclists, hikers, picnickers, and wildflower pickers—out-of-towners, most of them, whose presence, I suspected, was barely tolerated by the residents of Lincoln, who, if the truth were known, wanted it all to themselves. It wasn’t the ecology they wanted to conserve, so much as it was the buffer between themselves and the hoi polloi surrounding them.

As I strolled from the parking lot toward the nearest school building, I half expected to see deer grazing on the brown grass that stuck up here and there through the crusty snow that sheeted the meadow. I saw no deer, but as I watched, a wedge of geese cruised over on its way to the open water at the Great Meadow in Concord.

A blond boy in a designer jogging suit directed me to David Lee’s room. Classes had evidently ended for the day, because the campus was virtually deserted. Inside the classroom building, the corridors echoed my footsteps. Down the hall I heard voices. I stopped outside the open doorway and peered in. Seated side by side at two student desks were a dark-haired boy with a bad case of acne and a dumpy middle-aged man wearing thick glasses and thinning gray-blond hair.

I stood there uncertainly for a moment, and then the man looked up. “Help you, sir?” he said.

“I’m looking for Mr. Lee.”

“I am he. What can I do for you?”

“I’d like to talk with you.”

He nodded, as if that was what he assumed. “On what subject?”

“Private,” I said. “I can wait.”

He frowned for a moment, then shrugged. “Okay. We’ll only be a few minutes.”

He returned his attention to the boy with the unfortunate complexion, and I wandered up and down the corridor. I tried to match up my first impression of David Lee with the suspicion that had been nagging at me since Heather had mentioned him to me. Given their relationship, I had no trouble abstracting the teacher as Stu’s killer. I supposed there was a twisted sort of motive in there somewhere. But try as I might, I could not visualize this David Lee slipping an icepick into Stu Carver’s ear, and even though I also knew that appearances made a most unreliable basis for judging character, I still felt vaguely disappointed that Lee had not turned out to be a hulking, sneering, drooling monster.