Mortal Memory (7 page)

I never asked him what that force was, and after a while, he finished his drink, took a long draw on his last cigarette, then got to his feet and walked away, giving my arm a quick, comradely squeeze as he headed for the door.

There was a small hotel a few blocks from Harbor Lights. It had a neat mid-Atlantic design, all wood and white paint, with bright red shutters. The door had panes of inlaid glass and the sign which hung beside it showed a teenage boy in Colonial dress, red vest and tri-corner hat, a snare drum hanging at his side.

At 11:15
A.M.
the following day, Marty checked into room 304 of that hotel. Twenty minutes later, he shot himself.

Marty was buried a few days later, and only a month after that, LeAnn returned to Richmond with her two blond children. I never saw any of them again.

“Yolanda Dawes,” Wally said again, shaking his head, as he sat on the bench beside me. “Doesn't look like the black widow, does she?”

I glanced toward her again, my eyes lingering on the wistful, beguiling grace her body had assumed as she made her way along the water's edge.

Wally smiled. “That's the trouble with black widows, buddy,” he said, “they never do.” He grunted as he stood up, adding nothing else as the two of us walked back to work.

For the rest of the afternoon, I concentrated on the little library in Massachusetts, then left for home at around five-thirty.

When I arrived, Peter was shooting hoops into the basket I'd nailed to the garage door years before. He hardly noticed as I walked by, merely nodded briefly, fired a quick “Hi, Dad,” and continued with the game. I could hear the ball thudding like an irregular pulse as I went on past the garage and up the stairway that led to the side entrance of the house, the one that opened onto the kitchen.

Marie was in her office down the hall, working at her computer and listening to Brahms' violin concerto, the only one he ever wrote, a work that Marie liked more than any other, obsessively buying each new rendition as soon as it was released.

“How'd it go today?” I asked.

She barely looked up from her keyboard. “Okay,” she said idly. “You?”

“Fine,” I told her, paused a moment, then added, “Nothing new.”

In that brief pause, I'd thought of Rebecca, considered mentioning her visit to Marie, then decided not to. It had all been done in an instant, a choice made in favor of concealment, even though there'd been nothing to conceal. I realize now that it was a choice made out of a subtle yearning to have a secret in my life, something hidden, tucked away, a compartment where I could keep one treasure for myself alone. The fact that this “treasure” was a woman meant less to me at the time than that it was clandestine and mysterious, a secluded back street I wanted to walk down.

“Go change, then,” Marie said, her eyes still fixed on the monitor. “We need to start dinner.”

I headed upstairs to the bedroom, pulled off my suit and tie, and returned downstairs. Marie and Peter were already in the kitchen.

“Okay, let's get started,” she said, handing me a wooden salad bowl.

Making dinner together was a ritual Marie had long ago established, a “family time” that was busy and productive, a moment when we had to “face” each other, as she said, without the distraction of a game or television. Over the years it had become routine, something I neither looked forward to nor dreaded, a fact of life like any other, open, aboveboard, beyond the allure of the unrevealed.

FOUR

T
HE LIGHT IN
the bedroom was dark gray when I woke up the next morning. Marie had already gotten out of bed. I could see a little sliver of light under the door of the adjoining bathroom. I closed my eyes, heard the toilet flush, then, a few seconds later, the soft scrape of the bathroom door as she opened it.

“It's time, Steve,” she said firmly.

I didn't open my eyes. I didn't want to open them. I wanted to sink back into my sleep, but a heaviness in my chest nudged me awake. It was as if someone were sitting on me, looking down.

“Steve, it's time.”

Her voice was more insistent, and I knew that she'd keep at it until she saw me climb out of bed. I opened my eyes and glanced toward her. She stood at the bedroom window, a figure in silhouette, the curtains flung open behind her.

“Get up, Steve.”

I pushed the covers aside and got to my feet.

Marie looked satisfied and headed for the door. On the way she said, “It's raining. Can you drive Peter to school this morning? I have to see a client in Bridgeport.”

I waved my hand. “Yeah, okay, I'll drop him off on my way to work.”

Marie turned and left the room as I staggered toward the bathroom, then disappeared inside. I could hear her as she moved spiritedly along the corridor, then trotted down the short flight of stairs that led to the first floor.

My own pace was slower. The heaviness I'd felt in my chest had managed to creep into my arms and legs, drawing me downward like metal weights.

Peter was already at the table when I finally came downstairs a few minutes later. He'd poured himself a bowl of cereal and was staring at it without interest.

“Mom's already gone,” he told me.

“She had to go to Bridgeport.”

“So you're taking me?”

“Yeah.”

Peter ate the rest of his cereal while I drank a quick cup of coffee, then went back upstairs. I finished dressing, carefully knotted my tie, gathered up the office materials I'd brought home the night before, and returned to the kitchen.

Peter was standing at the door that led from the kitchen to the driveway, tall for his age, and slender, as I had been, but with his mother's straight, determinedly erect posture. Behind him, I could see the rain as it drove down through the trees that bordered the driveway, and against its gray veil he appeared almost ghostly, his large round eyes blinking slowly, like an owl's.

It was a floating, disembodied look that reminded me suddenly of Jamie, of the strange vacancy that had sometimes come into his face, lingered a moment, then dissolved into the pinched and irritated expression that was more usual with him. I remembered that during the last months of his life, those oddly resentful features had hardened into a mask of teenage hostility and sullenness, a face my father had finally aimed at directly, then reduced to a pulpy, glistening mass.

I glanced away from Peter, as if expecting to see his face explode as Jamie's had, then motioned him out the door, following along behind at a cautious distance, my shoulders hunched against the rain.

In the car, Peter sat silently, staring straight ahead, his face no longer locked in that strange innocence and helpless doom I had suddenly associated with my murdered brother. I looked at him and smiled.

“Everything going okay at school?” I asked.

He nodded.

“Good,” I told him.

Glancing toward him from time to time as I drove toward his school, I could easily remember him as a little boy, warm and glowing, his hair even lighter, a silver sheen. In the mornings he'd had the habit of crawling into bed with Marie and me, inching his head under my arm, then glancing up with a bright, sometimes toothless, smile.

Strangely, that remembered smile brought Jamie back again, and I recalled the only bit of conversation I'd ever been able to recall between him and my father. We'd all been heading through an indistinct countryside, toward somewhere I don't remember. My father was at the wheel, I in the middle, and Jamie pressed up against the passenger door. We'd been riding together silently, as we usually did, when suddenly my father had turned to Jamie. “You don't smile much,” he said.

Jamie's eyes shot over to him resentfully. “What did you say?”

My father appeared to regret having brought the subject up. “Nothing,” he muttered, returning his eyes to the road.

But Jamie wouldn't let it go. “What did you say?” he repeated.

“Just that you don't smile much,” my father answered.

Jamie gave him that familiar pinched, irritated look. “I smile,” he said curtly, as if my father had accused him of something he felt obliged to deny.

“Good,” my father answered quickly, then let the subject drop.

But not before he'd briefly leveled his two light blue eyes on my brother, aiming them steadily at his face.

I shuddered, and my hands curled tightly around the steering wheel, as if to bring my body back to the present. It was a tactic that worked so well, I sensed that I'd used it before, but unconsciously, to prevent the emergence of such brief memories, rather than to return from them.

Once at the school, Peter got out quickly, with a child's enthusiasm, opening the door before I'd come to a full stop, then dashing through the rain to where a group of other boys huddled together beneath an aluminum awning. The bell was ringing as I pulled away.

I drove slowly toward my office. The rain grew somewhat lighter, but to the south I could see a line of clouds, low and heavy with rain. It struck me that the clouds lay between Old Salsbury and Bridgeport, and that Marie was probably driving under their low canopy at that very moment. It was then that I remembered that we'd not really said good-bye that morning. I'd heard the scrape of the bathroom door as it opened, then her voice telling me to get up, repeating it when I didn't. After that, nothing.

Marie Olivia Farris. Age, thirty-nine.

I'd met her during my last year in college. I was living in New York then, a small flat in the East Village. At night I worked as a waiter in a restaurant in Little Italy. It was frequented by a well-heeled assortment of mobsters and mid-level show people, whom the owner, Mr. Pinaldi, liked to identify. “You know who you're serving, don't you?” he'd sometimes ask fiercely as I passed with a full tray.

Often I did know, but that particular night I didn't have the slightest idea and told him so.

Mr. Pinaldi looked at me as if I'd just walked out of the Amazon, knew nothing of the civilized world. “The one with the bright red tie, that's Joey Santucci,” he said in a vehement whisper. “He's a button man for the Brendizzi gang. He whacks people, kid. He blows them away.”

My eyes had reflexively shot toward the customer.

Joey Santucci was sitting at a round table, with two women on either side, one middle-aged, like Joey, the other much younger, and a large man who was dressed in a dark suit. The older woman was overweight, with flabby arms, and had an enormous white flower in her hair. She had a smoker's voice, hard and gravelly, and I took her for some old whorehouse madam Santucci had met years before. The second woman sat directly across from Santucci. She was no more than a girl, really, with dark brown hair and an olive complexion. She did not laugh when the others did, and at times, she cast disdainful glances toward the older woman, though always reserving the fiercer and more contemptuous ones for the man with the bright red tie. She was already halfway through her shrimp cocktail when I heard her call him “Dad.”

There was nothing to distinguish any of them, and I probably would have forgotten them immediately if it hadn't happened.

It was very late, and the restaurant was nearly empty. I had just stepped up to take their dessert orders when he came through the door, a short, small-boned, wiry little man with a thin moustache. He had dark, gleaming eyes, quick and feral beneath the slouchy gray hat. He opened the door very wide as he came in, and a whirl of snow swept in behind him, then lay melting on the checkered tile floor as he moved smoothly to the bar.

I watched him as he propped his elbow up on the bar, then glanced back toward me.

“I'll just have a dish of chocolate ice cream,” the young one said.

I wrote the order on my pad, a quick squiggle of lines, then glanced back toward the bar.

The little man slid off the stool and now stood beside it, brushing snow from the shoulders of his overcoat as Sandy, the bartender that night, leaned toward him. I saw the little man's mouth twitch, then Sandy nod, turn around, and pull a bottle of scotch from the shelf.

A voice drew my attention from him.

“Just an espresso,” the older woman said.

The man pulled himself up on one of the barstools, but did not actually appear to be sitting on it. Rather, he seemed to be floating on a cushion of air, his body tilting right and left, while he drew his eyes over to the mirror behind the bar, then focused them with a dire intensity on the reflection of the man in the red tie.

“Bring me a brandy,” Joey Santucci said.

I glanced down at the pad, scribbled the order quickly, then looked back toward the bar. The little man had wheeled around on the stool, facing me silently, his hands deep in the pockets of the snow-flecked overcoat. His eyes moved from Santucci to the man in the dark suit, the one who had ordered nothing after dinner, and whom I took for Santucci's bodyguard.

I turned, walked around the table, and headed back toward the kitchen. I could see the man at the bar spin slowly around as I passed him, his eyes trained on the mirror again, the four seated figures he could see very clearly in the glass.