Without a Word (19 page)

“Where's JoAnn?” I asked when Charles opened the door.

But he just stepped aside to let me pass. I did, walking over and sitting on the sofa, waiting for him to sit down and tell me more.

For a moment, he just stood in the doorway, his face pale, his hands shaking. I went into the kitchen and got some water for him. When I came back into the living room, he was sitting on one of the chairs that faced the couch, his mouth moving as if he might be biting the inside of his cheek.

“They said she was despondent over Bechman's death,” talking too loud. “They said that's why she did it, that she couldn't cope. That's not Celia.” Shaking his head, his hands curled into fists now. “If there was one thing Celia could do, she could cope.”

“How did it happen?”

“She went out the window.”

“And where was JoAnn?”

“Asleep in her bed.” Shaking his head again. “Even supposing it were true, that she just couldn't live without that bastard, she never would have left JoAnn unprotected like that. Never.”

“When did it happen, Charles?”

“Thursday night.”

The night I left for Florida.

“Eleven forty-five,” he said.

“How do they know the exact time? Broken watch?” Thinking unless there was a witness, they wouldn't know. There'd be a range of time during which it probably had happened.

“The woman on the ground floor in the back, Ida Berman, she actually heard Celia land. Can you imagine?” He squeezed his eyes shut. “It seems she hit the outdoor table. Ida looked out the window, then called the police right away.”

“So JoAnn, she was taken care of, she didn't wake up to find herself alone?”

He shook his head. “No. She was still asleep when the detectives got there.”

“When did you hear?”

“Around two. Ida told the police that JoAnn was with me a lot. The ex, she called me. She didn't know my name but they found it in Celia's address book and called. They didn't tell me what had happened at first. They asked me to come down to the precinct. I had no idea what it was about. ‘At this hour?' I asked the detective, and he said, ‘It's important, sir, it's about JoAnn.'”

“So you did, you went?”

“They said there was an open bottle of wine on the coffee table and one glass but the glass was unused, and they didn't find any alcohol in her system. That's what they said. ‘Her system.'”

“So she hadn't had too much to drink?”

“She hadn't had anything to drink.”

“And they don't think it was an accident, that she fell?”

“No, they said it was deliberate, not an accident.”

“Was there a note?”

He nodded.

Why hadn't he mentioned it right away? “What did it say?” I asked, leaning closer, talking softly.

He shook his head.

“They didn't show it to you?” Wondering how I might get to see it.

“No, they did. It was addressed to me.”

I waited, watching his face.

“It said ‘
Dear Charles, Please take care of JoAnn. Celia
.'”

“So they're sure, because of the note? It was definitely her handwriting?”

He looked surprised at my question, then he nodded. “It's her handwriting. There's no doubt about it. And the door was double-locked.”

“I guess she took it pretty hard.”

“Bechman's death?”

I nodded.

“She…” But then Charles just shook his head. “They asked me a bunch of questions and then they gave me JoAnn,” he said.

“Because of the note?”

“No. She didn't tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“They weren't married, of course, so it would have been awkward for Eric to have his name on the birth certificate.”

“You're saying that
your
name is there?”

He nodded. “I'm the father of record. As far as the law is concerned, she's my daughter. As far as I'm concerned, that's true as well.”

He stood and walked over to the windows, his back to me. “She wouldn't have written it like that.”

“Like what?” Trying to keep up as he leaped from one thing to another.

“I had this nickname for her, you know, something just between the two of us. She would have used it. She never called herself Celia to me. I hated the name and so did she.”

“Even after everything? Even after Bechman, the split, JoAnn, even so?”

He turned and walked over to his desk, opening the top right-hand drawer, prime space being used for whatever it was he wanted to show me. He picked up a sheaf of notes held together by a paper clip, came over to the couch and handed it to me. I read the top one.

“Betty?”

“It was from when we decided to get married. I'd told her I'd always wanted to marry a Betty and she'd said, ‘Then that's what you should do.'”

I began to look through the rest of the notes, some on pale cream notepaper, some on scraps of paper torn off a paper bag or written in the white space around a crossword puzzle. She always called him Charlie. She always signed the notes Betty.

“You told the police this?”

“I did.”

“You showed them these?”

He nodded.

“And?”

“One of the detectives put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Mr. Abele,' he said, ‘no one wants to believe that someone they,'
he hesitated, you know, because we were divorced. Then he said, ‘someone they were fond of would do a thing like this.'”

“So they don't think this means anything?”

Charles shrugged. “The detective said that people don't act like themselves at a time like this, when they're so desperate. They act out of character. He said I should understand that when someone is this despondent, enough to want to end their life, they do things to cut off their feelings for the people they're leaving behind. If they didn't do that, he told me, they wouldn't be able to…” He just lifted one hand, twisting it so that the palm faced up, then dropped it again. “They said she had no plans.”

“No plans?”

“‘No investment in the future,' one detective said. He had her appointment calendar in his hand. He said there were no dates with friends, no dental appointments, no theater tickets. They said there wasn't much food in the house, that the yogurt was out of date, that the hamper was full. The detective said these were signs of depression. But there could be reasonable explanations for all those things, couldn't there?”

“Then you don't agree with the detective? You think she was coerced,” wondering who but not how. How someone had gotten her to write the note, probably dictated, with JoAnn asleep in the next room was a no-brainer.

He nodded. “What I want, the reason I called, I want to hire you. I have to know who did this to Celia.”

“Me, too,” I said, “because whoever did this to her also murdered Eric Bechman.”

I could hear Dashiell barking as I climbed the stairs to Madison's apartment, and then the door opened and he came barreling out at me, his whole body wiggling with delight. Madison and Leon were both standing in the doorway waiting. Something about it was like coming home after being away a long, long time. Except that it wasn't home and what I'd come to tell them was going to break their hearts.

And then something happened. I followed Dashiell into the apartment. Leon asked me to sit and asked if I wanted anything to eat. I heard myself telling him no, that I hadn't slept at all, that I needed to take Dashiell and go right home, my voice sounding as if it were coming not from me but from someone else, someone standing across the room.

Madison took a step back, a step away from me. Was it because I wasn't staying or because Dashiell would be leaving? I opened my bag, gave her back the heart-shaped glasses, telling her I wore them all the time, thanking her, but she just put them down on the coffee table.

“We've had a great time with Dashiell,” Leon said, as if that was all there'd been to it. He looked at Madison, then back at me. Was he waiting for her to tell me more?
“We were at the dog run yesterday and the day before,” he said, picking up a pile of contact sheets from his desk and handing them to me. “Take these with you,” he said. “After you sleep, or whenever, see if there are any you'd like to have.”

I slipped the contact sheets into the open tote bag, slipping them in next to the folded copy of the picture that had been found on Bechman's desk the day he was killed.

Leon was still talking about their adventures with Dashiell, me only half listening, Madison, I thought, not listening at all. “We walked along the river,” he said, “all the way down to the tip of Manhattan. Every time we passed those metal grates dogs hate to walk on, Dashiell pulled to go that way. He's fearless and he likes to prove it, doesn't he?” The question addressed to Madison, as if she'd answer him, nod and react in some way. Then back to me. “We'll be sad to see him go.”

Madison went to her room and came back with a rawhide bone, one knot chewed off. She put it into my open bag and then leaned back against the table.

“How did your trip go?” Leon finally asked, as if it were a vacation he was asking about, a trip to Disney World, a week in Paris, a cruise to the Galápagos.

I caught his eye and shook my head. I wanted to check my watch, to say I had an appointment, or just to break and run. I needed time to think without Madison staring at me, without Leon's unspoken hopes.

Leon didn't ask anything further. He must have understood that if he wanted to know more, it wasn't going to happen with Madison in the room. That conversation, the one I was dreading, would have to wait until later because I didn't want to tell him what had happened and just leave it at that. I wanted to offer him something more, something hopeful. And in order to do that, I had to get out of there.

Fifteen minutes earlier, sitting on someone's stoop after I'd left Charles's apartment, I'd gone over what he'd told me, that Celia wouldn't have written the note that way, which meant she'd been murdered, and that it had happened late on the day Leon had asked for Madison's records. I didn't think that could be a coincidence. I'd taken out the records again, and this time what seemed to jump off the pages were those white spaces, spaces not indicating the passage of time as I'd previously thought, but showing that information had been removed, whited out on the first Xerox and then copied once more, information that Leon and I were not supposed to see. It had to be something Celia could explain, that Celia knew about, everything now pointing in the same direction. Even the locked door could be explained. After all, Bechman had the keys to Celia's apartment, and he wouldn't have kept them on his key ring. He would have kept them at his office.

The keys wouldn't be there anymore. Not now. But I still needed to get into Bechman's office again. I needed to see the originals of Madison's records, to see what was written where the copy I had only showed blank space.

But not before I tried to clarify something urgent. For that I needed Madison, Madison who was now standing a foot away from me with her arms folded across her chest, her lips a tight little line. Who did I think I was fooling with my research trip? Not Madison. That much was clear.

“I need to talk to Madison for a minute, if that's okay,” I said to Leon, not the way I usually did things, but the way I thought I might get what I needed this time. Without asking Madison, without waiting for anyone's approval, I grabbed my tote bag and headed for Madison's room. I put the tote on the end of her bed and pulled out the copy of the drawing that had been found on Eric Bechman's desk the day he was killed.

When I turned around, Madison and Dashiell were standing in front of me, the door closed.

“I need your help again,” I said.

Madison looked down at Dashiell.

“No, not with Dashiell this time. It's about what happened to Dr. Bechman. It's about what people think you did.”

There was a little flicker in one cheek, the one under the droopy eyelid, the same kind her father had when he got tense.

“There was a drawing found on his desk. The police were told you did it and that it was a threat, that the meaning of the drawing was that you wanted to stab Dr. Bechman in the heart for what he did to you.”

She seemed to notice the folded piece of paper now. She looked back at me and waited.

“I need to know two things. I need to know if you drew this picture. I need to know what you meant to say when you drew it. And I need to know if you left this drawing on Dr. Bechman's desk the day he was killed.”

For what seemed like forever, Madison stood staring up at me. Then she took the drawing from my hand, unfolded it and studied it for another eon. Finally she held up one hand, the thumb, pointer and middle fingers pointing toward the ceiling, the ring finger and pinkie folded against her palm.

“You're right,” I said. “Three things. My mistake.”

While some stars died and new ones were born, Madison Spector stood in front of me just staring. Then she turned and walked over to her desk, picked up a pencil and wrote something on the sheet of paper I'd given her, folding it carefully when she had finished, walking back to the bed and slipping it into my tote.

Standing at the foot of her bed, I looked at the walls Sally had painted, the gigantic fish, the turtle, the coral, rocks, sea
grasses, and wondered, when the time came, how much I'd tell Madison and what she would do when I did.

I zipped the tote bag and sat on the end of the bed for a moment.

“This is temporary,” I said, “my not talking. There are a couple more things I need to check out and then I'll be back.”

She came and sat next to me.

“So you figure that when I get home and look at what you wrote, I'll have the answers I was after?”

Madison just slid one of her hands into one of mine. She looked so much like her mother that it was almost spooky, but it was her father's hand she'd put in mine, wide, almost square, the fingers blunt, the nails, with most of the black polish chipped off by now, flat with tiny ridges running from side to side, giving them the delicate texture of a seashell. We sat there for a minute or two, neither of us speaking. Then I thanked her for taking care of Dashiell. And for her faith in me.

“Back at you, kid,” I told her. “I trust you completely.” I meant it, too.

I didn't tell her anything about my trip, about seeing Roy waiting on the beach, about my talk with Sally. I never mentioned a word about the death of Celia Abele nor the evening I spent sitting on the cool sand in Coney Island talking to her genetic father. Even before I thanked Leon and Madison again and told them I'd call him very soon, I was already thinking about another little girl, one who slept peacefully in her bed while in the next room her mother did what she had to in order to save her baby's life.