Salvation Boulevard (6 page)

“No, the original report, back when they thought it was a suicide.”

“Maybe I could find that.”

“And the university, the campus police must've made a report.”

“You figure that'll get you off the hook?”

“That, plus interview a couple of witnesses, maybe find some alternate suspects he can throw at the jury.”

“I'll see what I can find,” he said.

“Thank you.”

Nathaniel MacLeod's widow, Teresa, said, “You should really talk to his girlfriend.”

She said it more cheerfully than you expect a wife to refer to a late husband's girlfriend. I wasn't sure, but it felt like there were tight coils of tension beneath the surface.

“His girlfriend? What's her name?”

“Um, Emma? Emmy? . . . short for something else? I'm sorry, I'm really not sure, mostly he liked to call her his ‘own special angel.'”

Teresa was slender, about forty. She wore no makeup, or so little that my eye couldn't pick up on it. Her hair was styled, spiky and short, and it made her look a little bit dramatic. There were fine spider lines around her eyes, and you could see where the lines that would someday appear above her upper lip would be.

Her full name was listed in the university course catalog as Teresa Mansfield-Pellita, which I took to be her maiden name. She had a PhD and was an assistant professor of geography. She taught urban commercial geography, business and environmental geography, and introduction to feminist geography.

The house was relatively small, built in a southwestern style and done up that way inside too. What you call mission furniture, or something like it, sparse with lots of wood showing. A rug with the colors of desert sand.

“Aside from that,” she said. “I don't know what else I can tell you.” It was dismissive, conversation ending, putting up defenses, yet something in her tone said the opposite, but suggesting, somehow, that there were secret doors, hidden here and there along the walls.

There were several photographic prints on the wall and two small paintings. To keep the interview alive, and maybe find one of those openings, I walked over for a closer look at the most striking of the photos, a desolate landscape, glossy black stones in the foreground leading to a field of sand, dark gray mixed with brown, with an orangered river of fire running through the center and off into the distance.

“A volcano?” I asked. “Lava flowing?”

“No,” she said. “It's a river.”

“Oh. The photographer manipulated the color,” I said, guessing.

“That's the color, the real color. It's waste. It's the runoff from a nickel mine, and that's what it did to the river and the land.”

On the opposite wall there was a set of five photographs framed together on a single panel. All had been taken from the same high angle, looking down at a McDonald's. I said, “May I?” and went to look at those more closely. The series went from morning through night. Each was a multiple exposure over a fifteen-minute period, the aperture set so that the cumulative shots of the restaurant combined to make it seem solid and bright, the way a McDonald's always does. But the figures that passed in front of it had only been given a fractional exposure, so they appeared like specters, dim and semitransparent. The dusk and night shots were even more dramatic, full of bursts of light from passing cars, their headlights leaving washes on the building and illuminating some of the people, as if they were flash attachments that let you catch ghosts on film.

She followed me, and from close behind me she said, “It's from one of my studies.”

“Did you shoot it?” I asked.

“No. I had it done. The hottest application of geography these days, so there's grant money for it, is commercial traffic patterns. But the photos turned out to have their own aesthetic.”

I turned toward her as she spoke. Her gaze was on me, and our eyes met.

There was a whistling noise from the kitchen.

“Would you like some tea?” she asked. “Green tea or some other kind? Or water? Or a drink?”

“Tea would be fine, and I'll have whatever kind you're having.”

“Green tea,” she said. “It purifies the blood.”

“You think that's true?” I asked as she moved toward the kitchen.

“There was a study,” she said. “It proved that if you're a Japanese fisherperson and you drink six cups a day, you'll live longer than a fisherperson who only drinks one cup a day.”

I followed her and, when she went in, watched her from the doorway as she busied herself. She took out a Japanese tea set, glazed the color of iron, the pot with flat sides and curved edges, the cups without handles. Her gestures were neat and tidy. Precise and very concentrated.

She was working very hard at being in control and self-possessed, at making everything seem casual and normal.

But it was taking so much focus to do so—first on the pot, then on finding the tin with tea leaves, then opening it—that she blocked out the sound and had even forgotten that it was the whistle that had summoned her until it rose in volume and pitch to a shriek that pierced right through her wall of concentration. Then she yelled, “Dammit! Dammit all!” and threw the tea set to the tiled floor, where it smashed and shattered.

She grabbed the kettle by the handle, yanked it off the burner, and put it on the one behind, banging it down. I was afraid she was going to scorch herself on the flame or splatter herself with the boiling water. I reached over and turned off the range.

“Damn, damn, damn, and fuck and fucking hell, and all of it,” she said, kicking at the bits and pieces of cups and teapot on the floor. Then she stood still, standing in front of me, looking helpless and lost, her arms held at her sides. Her mouth was tight, and she was holding back the tears.

“I'm sorry,” I said, automatically taking a step toward her.

“Are you?” she asked.

“Yes, I'm sorry for your . . . pain,” I said.

We were less than two feet apart. She was looking up at me, into my eyes. So many things were going on inside her.

There was a connection.

It gets tricky. As an investigator, like when I was a cop, I wander in and out of people's lives. I meet women at vulnerable moments, or merely at moments when I'm an unexpected presence, and they don't have their standard controls over their emotional and sexual impulses up and in place. If I tune into that, communication opens up. Back in the day, I would fall into those waters, way past any excuses that it helped with the job, taking advantage, sometimes doing damage. Now, I don't want that kind of trouble, but I do want information, so I let the doors open, knock gently to get them to open, but if it's a bedroom door, I remember that I'm just there to look, from the entrance way, not to go in and participate.

I found myself reaching toward her to put a reassuring hand on her shoulder.

At the moment that I touched her, the feeling in the air drew all together and flowed out of her shoulder and up my arm and back down again. Her tension—one kind of tension, at any rate—released with a slight sigh, and I felt her almost imperceptibly soften and move toward me.

I dropped my hand. There was more there than I had anticipated or understood, and I froze, feeling awkward. Teresa kept her eyes on mine, her face tilted up, the emotions she was feeling as visible as clouds drifting across the sky: now one, then another and another, some far apart, some so close they overlapped in their passing.

I'm not sure which of us moved, or if both of us did, but our bodies were touching. Then our lips touched. Just a touch.

“I'm married,” I stuttered, moving back. Immediately after I heard the sound of my own voice, I worried that I was presuming too much, that maybe what I thought I saw in those drifting clouds was
the devil's whispers in my own mind. I know that he's always around, waiting for my return.

“I saw the ring,” she said calmly, the connections closing down and her emotions going back behind the hiding place of the face that's proper to wear in public.

“I didn't mean to imply that you . . . ”

She shook her head, that she wasn't offended and maybe that she wasn't denying that my defensive reaction had cause. “I'm . . . in something of a state . . . , ” she said in her own confusion, “. . . emotionally. I didn't mean to embarrass you.”

“No,” I said. “Your husband just died.”

We hadn't moved. We were still so close that with the slightest gesture we could fall into each other, arms around each other, body pressed against body, and her hands, like mine, seemed poised at her sides as if they knew where they wanted to go but didn't know how to get there.

“We better . . . , ” I said, stepping back, “um . . . sweep this up. I'll help you.”

I bent down and started picking up the pieces, the bigger ones. I still had to ask her questions. I threw ceramic chunks in the trash and retreated back to the living room. I sat and busied myself with my notes but wrote down nothing about how her eyes looked gazing into mine or her lips had been full and moist.

 

Teresa and Nate had been married five years. Her first, his second. They'd been separated for six months. It was, she claimed, by mutual and satisfactory agreement. Her attitude declaimed that she was a very modern woman who knew that such things happened, and she could cope very well.

I had only seen pictures of Nathaniel MacLeod as a corpse. Dying had not made him happy. Living, apparently had. Alive, he had thrived in front of the camera. He was smiling, exuberant, clowning, involved. He talked, he hosted barbecues, he hiked, waved, and liked to put an arm around one person or both arms around two,
three, or four people. He had a big mustache, most of his hair, and a fair-sized belly on a large frame.

“Was he always happy?” I asked.

“Nobody is always happy,” she said, cool and adult, then added, with feeling, “but he was alive.”

“But lately, being separated and all, was he happy?”

“Oh yes, happier than ever.”

“Oh?” I said.

“Listen, I met Nate eighteen years ago. We had a brief thing. It was fun, but we both moved on. No hard feelings. Then I came out here. The geography department is growing. There are a lot of issues in the Southwest: rapid development, suburban sprawl, water usage, the border.

“He was already here and we ran into each other, and bam, it was off to bed. We were pretty fabulous. Better even than when we were younger. I'd learned a lot, a
lot,
in the intervening years . . . but it was great.” That was all said in a very straight and informative way, as if she were simply trying to explain their relationship. But even in her circles, however liberal and liberated they were, those were not the sort of things a woman says to a man unless she has reasons to want him to know how sexual she can be. “And we loved each other. One of us mentioned marriage, I don't remember who, and then it was like . . . like Kinky Friedman running for governor of Texas: ‘How hard can it be?' and ‘Why the hell not?'”

“It was good,” she said, “but, you know, maybe good's not enough. It wasn't . . . fate. And we didn't have children. Frankly, it's hard to tell the difference between married, living together, or boyfriend and girlfriend if you don't have children. It's just an agreement.

“But to do what?” she asked.

She had taken out a second teapot, a more pedestrian one, simple and round with a smooth fiestaware glaze, a southwestern green. The leaves had been steeping while we spoke, and now she decided it had been long enough and poured out cups for each of us.

“If we'd had children . . . , ” she said. “But we didn't, and things can only burn at white heat for a few years. Even with tricks and toys and . . . exploring the boundaries, like everyone does nowadays. Then the stupid things that don't matter eventually begin to matter. I like tennis. He liked hiking and long, long bike trips. He liked to bait dinner guests and get them into arguments, and he was very sharp, very quick, and he could decimate them. But it embarrassed me. And it got confusing. If I slept with someone, was it because I really wanted to, or was I being competitive? What if I felt emotional? What if he did? And all of that.”

I sipped at the hot tea. Of course the marriage had failed. I could hear the sermon in my ears: this is what atheistic, secular humanism led to. Where had the sacred gone? Without it, there was nothing. She was explaining it all quite clearly, but she was unable to hear what she herself was saying.

“So, it was over,” she said.

“He moved out?”

“Yes. He got an apartment.”

“Listen, I've been divorced,” I said. “A couple of times. And I have to tell you, it was difficult. Lot of anger. Lot of depression, confusion. I felt lost.”

“No,” she said. “Our marriage wasn't like clinging onto a life preserver. I mean, I had lunch with him, two days before . . . before he died.

“He was so happy. He'd just finished his book. He was really excited about it. He said that with the jihadists on one side and the Republican Party as the party of the Christian God on the other side, the world was ready to hear something that explained the madness. People were ready to hear what he had to say. He even thought he could get a popular publisher, not just a university press.”

“I'm going to . . . I want to see to it that it's published,” she said. “I want to do that for him. He had good ideas. They deserve to be heard.”

“Maybe he got turned down. Maybe he couldn't get a publisher.”

“No, it was too soon. I don't think he'd even sent it out yet,” she said. “Plus, he had that new girlfriend. He was having a good time. He was
not
suicidal. Not at all. That's why I raised such a fuss. I demanded an independent investigation. The university even agreed to hire an outside expert, an independent crime scene analyst. CSI, like on TV. They were just doing it to placate me, but it was going to be done. He was not suicidal.”