Threats (11 page)

Stylists picked their tools from painted vintage tables as clients regarded themselves in a trio of heavy gilt mirrors installed over each station. The walls and concrete floor were stained a mahogany red. David watched the clients receiving scalp massages. Their bodies were wrapped in thin black robes. They smiled fatuously under the stroking of expert fingers.

He saw that one of these smiling women was Marie Walls, the woman who had sat at his table and completed a portion of his crossword puzzle while telling him about how he should feel. A girl was massaging her hands with a thick cream.

“Marie,” David said. “How are you?”

At the first sign of a third-party conversation, Aileen turned without further remark and made a circle of the salon floor, observing the stylists with her hands on her hips.

“Hang on, I can't see you too well,” Marie said. “Come closer.”

He approached her chair, leaned in. “Hello, David. I'm perfect at the moment. There's nothing like a rub, you know?”

“It looks nice.”

Marie narrowed her eyes to look at Aileen, who was plucking at a foil wrap. “Are you here for a haircut?” she asked David.

“I'm getting the tour. My wife worked here.”

“And how are you feeling?” she asked, examining her hand.

David tried to focus on the history of his emotions. All he remembered was the feeling of standing in the other room, the chandelier's crystals against his forehead. “Fancy,” he said.

“You should come to my office and have a talk with me sometime. I'd be willing to meet with you free of charge. That's a rare privilege I've extended to you.”

“That is kind.”

The girl moved from Marie's hands and went to work massaging her scalp. Marie groaned. “Well,” she said, gripping the arms of the chair and closing her eyes. “We do what we can.”

Aileen returned with a pair of scissors. “These young girls,” she said.

 

34.

PHOTOGRAPHS of photographs tend to take on a strange quality of their own, independent of the subject they try to capture. The glass of the photo's frame and the glass of the camera lens together offer an extra layer between the item and the capturing device, giving the air between them a darker quality. Of course, any dust on the picture frame or intruding natural light can further degrade the image. The resulting picture represents the murky edges, facial expressions blurred and unclear. The individuals in the frame are difficult to separate from the elements of scenery.

Detective Chico enjoyed the imperfections of the images in front of him. He had taken pictures of a few of the snapshots he found in frames on the kitchen counter while David was busy digging the threat out of its sugar bag. He didn't want to bother the man or go to the unnecessary trouble of confiscating the pictures themselves.

It was a quiet town, and Chico's area of expertise rarely extended past the boundaries of underage drinking and traffic stops. The last time the office had gotten worked up, it was because a semi driver rolled over the boot of one of the sheriff's patrol. The steel-toed reinforcement had bent but not broken over the man's foot and the driver stopped, expressed his regret, and later sent an unnecessary but appreciated formal letter of apology to the entire office. “I am a Respecter of our Nation's legal enforcement,” the letter began.

Such a mystery as David's was nearly new ground for Chico, who had enjoyed forty years without so much as a crossing guard fatality. He had stood at the scene of the potential crime, watching a man pull a threatening note from a bag of sugar, and felt the importance of his surroundings.

The detective had observed his surroundings with the interest of a man who had never truly been asked to do his job in years. He recalled his training. He took photographs and memorized the layout of the space in the event that he would have to reenter under duress.

Chico saw himself as a helpful spirit. He tried to give people what they needed, within the guidelines of legality. When the woman arrived asking for a random selection of old clothes from his evidence lockup, he was happy to oblige. There were clothes in there thirty or forty years old, the cases closed. The clothes would have been incinerated otherwise. The woman was doing him a favor, in a way. When she returned to ask him to give her nephew some work he obliged her, even when he learned that the boy was too young for a traditional internship.

It was important to give people what they needed. Sometimes, a woman needed to go to jail, or a man needed to be chased in a parking garage. In his years of service Chico had learned that people tended to know what they needed, even if they didn't know how to ask for it.

The pictures were exactly the kind that Chico would expect to find on a kitchen countertop. There was a shot of the man and his wife in front of the town's embarrassingly nondescript city hall, each experiencing formal wear in individually awkward ways, the woman wilting over her husband, a bouquet of flowers spread over her fist like stained lace. Another picture featured an older couple, presumably a set of parents, posing on the Great Wall of China. The detective looked closer and saw that it was only a representation of the Great Wall blown up to cover a concrete slab behind them. A child in the corner of the frame crouched to collect peanuts from a quarter candy machine. The woman in the picture looked familiar, and Chico, who never could forget a face, spent some time frowning at the image before he remembered her from the trial.

It was six long months' worth of trial, her lawyer flown in from Chicago. He was a broad-shouldered man who managed to physically intimidate the judge from across the chamber. The lawyer spoke of the disastrous effects of the powerful and powerfully in-vogue teratogen the grieving mother had ingested while innocently pregnant. Pregnancy was one of the world's most innocent conditions, the lawyer claimed, resting his hand on the mother's shoulder while she sobbed. It all added up to six months of trial delays and jury recasts and that city lawyer's patient explanation and re-explanation of what a mother could and couldn't do under duress, what the psychological texts stated, what that might prove, his expert witnesses consulting their years of knowledge to bolster the fact that a mother who had the power to end a child she had viewed as a living defect was not a mother at all, but rather a creature acting under the influence of insanity. Chico took the stand again and again to perform his dull role of explaining the scene as he saw it, the medics not bothering with the heavier equipment once they saw the child's bloat in the water, the absence of a pulse. Chico sometimes sat in the gallery during his lunch break and watched how easy it was for the court's hands to be tied by procedure. He thought of how he had been offered a position in Columbus, how glad he was in hindsight that he hadn't taken it, watching how the system stuttered. He imagined the broad-shouldered lawyer carrying the judge like a child in his arms.

The third picture Chico had found in the house was of the woman from city hall, the wife, the decedent, standing with another woman. The decedent was holding an armful of flowers and wearing a cap and gown, a graduation photo. She was grinning, exposing a wide expanse of teeth. The other woman held up a fistful of black combs. Chico observed the images carefully. Understanding them each individually would help him gain a fuller understanding of the world he was intruding upon. He did feel like an intruder, looking at these other people's photographs. Still, he looked, taking in their details.

 

35.

DAVID SOMETIMES MISSED HIS PATIENTS. He thought of his old friend Samson's plaque layer, listening to his lies about brushing as the hygienist's floss nicked eruptions of rot-stenched blood. The gums had begun to loosen and peel from his teeth like pages in a book, and still Samson said yes, brushing every day, yes, flossing after meals, why there's floss in the truck, yes of course.

The behavior of each new patient could never be predicted. Some young children would come in and immediately relax in the big chair. Others clung to their mothers and screamed while David darted into their mouths with his periodontal probe. Some mothers would cry, working their children up even more. Children were usually sensitive enough that a parent unconsciously gripping them could put them off dentistry for the rest of their lives. He saw the impulse to squirm and cry in adults as well, though all but the very old tended to keep calm. David's knowledge and preferences of parenting techniques extended to the boundary of his examination room.

There were the older girls and boys, the teenagers. They arrived at the office without their mothers, holding their parents' insurance cards and blank checks. When there were two teenagers in the waiting room at once, the whole building could sense the tension. Nobody could handle it. His receptionist would close the glass partition and go out back for a smoke. In the examination room, David prodded their teenage mouths and tried to figure the age his baby sister would be at that moment, had she survived.

There were men and women who did care for their teeth well and nevertheless had problems. He coaxed weak enamel from talonid surfaces, the grinding flat of the tooth giving way to pre-cavity areas. David felt the problems in a tooth even before the tooth made its problems known to its owner, before the ache in a bite of ice cream, the stinging intake of winter air. He could graze the tooth and feel something lurking.

What had made David a good dentist—an excellent dentist, in his opinion—was his keen ability to sense weakness prior to its development. A patient would come in without tooth pain, talking about a football game, and be surprised to learn that a cavity needed to be drilled and filled. David would point to the darkening patches on the X-ray, still subtle even there, as if the damage was being viewed from under a rippling layer of fluid. A lesser dentist might not even be able to spot it. The patient would frown at the image but relent, knowing precisely as much as he did before but trusting David's professional opinion. The patient might wince through the Xylocaine but would hold as still as a sleeping dog while the dentin was breached and burred, Dycal installed to obliterate the possibility of a return, a white resin filler approximating the shape and texture of a tooth so closely it made David wish for his patients' sake that the entire procedure could be performed without their knowledge, that they could come in unknowing and leave unknowingly improved. It seemed a kindness to improve upon an individual without his knowledge. David didn't understand why anyone might see otherwise, particularly not the dental board of Ohio, composed as it was of former dentists and medical administrators who had presumably once felt the same protective urge for their patients, a nurturing urge they might feel for their families.

 

36.

DAVID once saw Franny apply five layers of makeup to her lips. She lined them first with a pencil and then applied lipstick, some kind of powder, lipstick again, and then another tube that also looked like lipstick but was perhaps not lipstick. He had tried to kiss her afterward but she held her hands over her mouth.

The salon's facial treatment room was dimly lit. Scented oils in bottles lined the wall. The room smelled so strongly of Franny that David had to take a seat on the rolling chair beside the bed. It felt better to be sitting on the chair. The room didn't spin so much as it rocked slightly, unevenly, a cradle guided by a distracted hand. David wondered if Aileen would notice if he put his face against the wall.

“Here's where she spent most of the day,” Aileen said. “Extractions, peels, facial massages, oil treatments, waxing.” She laid down her scissors and counted off the list on her fingers. “She was the best in the local business, besides me.”

“Ha,” David said. He rolled backward on the chair, away from her and toward the wall.

“David, I'm so glad you came to see us today. I've wanted to talk to you ever since it happened. I have so many questions. Could you answer some of my questions?”

“I'll try,” David said. He dispensed a small amount of lotion into his hand and rubbed his palms together. The lotion lathered, and he realized that it was soap. “I have some confusion,” he said. “It's been difficult to sort things out.”

“Is it true that the police have been by the house?”

Tea candles were burning in misshapen sand-colored bowls. David rested his wrists on his knees, his soapy hands palms up. He put his forehead against the wall and then the side of his face. He closed his eyes. “They want to talk about what I know,” he said. “I'm always disappointing them. I don't know anything.”

“You don't know what happened at all?” she asked. “Where did you put your water?”

“Did you send some women from the salon to my home?”

“Some girls?”

“Some women, some girls. A group of them arrived a few days ago and said they had been sent to cut my hair. They were very kind and helpful. One of them cut my toenails.”

“Some girls,” Aileen said. She took a deep breath in and looked at the door. She was silent for long enough that he thought she hadn't heard part of the question. “A group of girls. Yes, I sent over a group of girls from the salon. I thought it might make you feel better.”

“Thank you, it did.”

“I was worried you would find it too difficult.”

“Not at all,” he said. He wanted to rinse off his hands in the room's sink but didn't want to seem insensitive. “It was nice to see people, and they were such nice girls. I'd like to pay them for their services.”

Aileen waved off the suggestion. “Think nothing of it, David. It's the least we can do to help. We've all been so worried about you, and so curious.”

“I understand that.”

“Frances was one of my closest friends.”

“I know.”

“It's easy to be curious.”

“I know that.”

“I've gathered some of her personal effects.” She pulled a box out from under the treatment sink and handed it to David. “I thought you might like to have them.”