20 (2 page)

David Bosworth

1

A house on the northern coast of Maine. One story high, its rectangular sections extend in three directions, fitting through the abrupt rise and fall of the promontory rock: prosthetic limbs, mechanical fingers, angle-jointed, clinging there against the wind like the roots of a scrub pine. Easy to frame, and in fact frames itself with an encircling metallic railing, a futuristic boardwalk which flirts with the cliff's uneven edge and overlooks the cove. Two materials dominate—steel and glass. One color—orange. Five hundred feet below, the North Atlantic, a white-capped winter ocean, its dull green brine squeezing like a spittle-tipped tongue into this gouge in the highlands, and interrupted only by jutting thumbs of tide-sculpted rock. Clouds, gray-bellied, blur the gulls. No other life. A few pine trunks, polished of their bark, tucked at gravity-defying angles into the cliffside notches, wait for the next nor'easter to be washed away.

Fact: it is January.

A transparency over the frame: the Detective's first impression. Dissonance. A place out of place. Eliminate the setting, brush out the neighboring houses, the acid-cold pinch of the air, the perpetually overcast sky, keeping just the house framed by its orange railing, and he's not in New England but Southern California, a town with a two-word name, the second of which is always “Beach”; the home of a neon sign artist, a binary theorist, a Utopian behaviorist, some Brave New World advocate, riding on the tide of tomorrow's ideas or today's vulgar and inconsequential fads—who can tell, trapped in the present tense? Not the Detective; not anymore. Possible subtitle: “The Motive.” Neighbors would not like this house, or the man who built it. Difference is conflict always, if sometimes beneath the surface, and it's conflict that moves us from one frame to another.

A transparency over the frame: the eyewitness account. The time of day is dusk; the angle of vision, from within the cove; the distance, about a thousand yards. Behind the wheel of his boat, returning from a rather fruitless day of fishing, the eyewitness sees this: a figure, its limbs flailing the air midway between cliff top and water—a falling body. Shock freeze-frames the image for him; then, in a series of frozen frames approximating motion, the body jerks downward toward the inevitable ocean. A pause, then the angle changes, the eyewitness drawing a straight line of vision from where the body enters the water to the promontory top. And there, leaning against the orange railing, he sees someone; too far away to identify, or even to distinguish sex or size, but a person nevertheless, and staring, he thinks, down to where the body fell. Another pause and the figure disappears as the eyewitness recovers from the initial shock and steers his boat carefully toward the walls of the cove—as close as he can come without risking the rocks. The search is futile, though, and the witness, a realist; after a half hour, he heads for home.

Fact: one does not survive a thirty-minute immersion in the January North Atlantic.

A transparency over the frame: the corrected image. Every view of a crime, the Detective has learned, is through tinted glass. The first rule: always doubt the witness; check his view before accepting the image. Note that dusk affords the poorest visibility of the day and the most deceptive. Note that dramatic and unexpected events cause selective amnesia, time
distortion, astigmatic errors. And the witness himself—sober, respectable enough, no known connection to the house's occupants, but a local man, a stubborn downeaster; for him, all of reality is a frozen frame. The provincial mind, it has no doubt. “I saw what I saw,” he says over and over again.

Fact: no one else has reported the “accident.”

————

When the phone rang, the Detective was sitting in his study's easy chair, eyes closed, reading glasses at the tip of his nose, a book folded on his barreled belly. His feet were resting on a cracked leather ottoman, a concession to old age and poor circulation which failed to match the otherwise flawlessly crafted decor of the room. He made the transition from sleep to consciousness without moving his body or opening his eyes; remained that way, a disembodied mind, free of pain. Perhaps this is what death will be like, he thought, as through the study's walls, he heard his daughter's voice, an intentionally soft murmuring on the phone meant not to disturb his sleep. Strange, the Detective thought, how without understanding a word we can recognize someone's voice; how to this day he could still hear his father's cough, as distinctive as a fingerprint; how he could replay in his mind each subtle modulation in Sadie's breathing, although Sadie hadn't drawn a breath in nearly two years now. A concept occurred to the Detective then, a phrase appearing in its entirety as if by magic (he was new to this sort of thinking, this stretching the mind horizontally instead of focusing it into a bright, fine, penetrating beam)—“Identity is more than just content”—but it slipped away from him like an early morning dream whose connection to reality was not obvious. And he didn't follow it. Too sleepy from his postlunch nap, diverted by his indigestion, he forgot it, and instead, thought about forgetfulness itself. Perhaps that was the true cause of senility—a loss of will, of energy, a growing inability to force the connections. Mental tenacity, he had lectured his classes in criminology, was the primary qualification of a good detective.

The Detective heard his daughter's voice rising in the next room, sensing in it excitement, trouble, incipient hysteria (for her, they were all the same), and he suddenly felt a wash of pity for her. Perhaps one of her special projects was foundering, her save-the-beach, save-the-sea-gull, save-the-old-lighthouse campaigns. The locals hated her, Charlie Wriggins had
confided in him, this rich alien bitch who had lived here just five years and thought herself a native, self-crowned as Earth Mother and Defender of the Land. Sea Gull Sally, they called her. Poor famous-detective's daughter; people had always made fun of her, even when she had been a girl. She made people nervous. She had no…patience—that was it. And no faith. Anyone or anything she loved that wasn't within her sight was dying; she was absolutely sure of it. Her husband lying in the gutter, a mugger's knife in his back; her daughter, Nan, crushed and bleeding under the wheels of a car; her father, dead of a coronary in this very study—better check on them all to make certain they were still breathing. And now, at the onset of middle age, she had adopted the state of Maine, just as she had adopted her widowed father, certain that unless she kept a steady eye on its coastline, the shore would, in a moment's time, be swimming in oil spills and pesticide-poisoned egg shells; appeared on the beaches, just as she appeared unexpectedly in her father's study, afraid that her emotional universe would collapse without her omnipresent vigilance.

Perhaps it was his own fault. What kind of father had he been to her, involved in case after case, often away from home, and then, even when he returned, his mind preoccupied, the crime scene frame-frozen in his inner eye, the list of crisp facts clicking in his head as he searched for the solution? Preoccupied not because it was his duty, not because he was the best detective they could call on, the best they could ever call on, but because he loved it. It
was
a sin to love too much, the Detective was beginning to learn. A man was a finite vessel; emotions, energy, attention were finite gifts to be dispensed with care like the resources of his daughter's environmental plans. Love your work too much and something, someone, was bound to suffer, the vessel empty when his turn came. In the past, when he had thought about it, which wasn't often, he had believed himself to be a good husband, a good father. Now he wondered. Now he did think about it often, too often. Now the inspections were self-inspections; the framed scenes not bars and motels, but the rooms of his own home; the violations subtle, unannounced, shades of the distant past. Now there were no bleeding corpses, just memories—his wife and daughter. He had thought himself a good husband, a good father, but then he had found the letters.

The Detective opened his eyes, superimposed the visual surface of reality over his unwanted thoughts. It was as if he were glancing at a vellum scrapbook or the indexed contents of a museum exhibit, his career laid out there before him on the study's paneled walls: the medals for service, the honorary degrees and newspaper clippings, the Sherlock Holmes cap resting on the fireplace…all so “arranged,” so dustless and dead, the room embalmed with furniture wax. And he always felt, when he first awoke here from his daily nap—eyes blinking open, body still inert—like some wax figurine, a carved prop for this historical scene: “The Famous Detective's Study,” doll-house perfect. Strange, the Detective thought, how Sally hadn't changed. As a child she had played “house” with a kind of grim self-seriousness, and now, some thirty years later, the game still continued, her performance unimproved. Time was on her side, of course. Her adulthood, his old age were inevitable, the doll house a real house now, the doll a flesh-and-blood girl. But Sally wasn't satisfied with simple equality, or with just one daughter; she was intent, instead, on adopting her father, a second child to play mother to: the way she treated him since Sadie's death, the coddling, the solicitude. He had tried to resist it, but because he lacked his old tenacity, because time
was
on her side, he often gave in. Like this study, its decorations;
her
idea, done at
her
insistence: “every growing boy needs his own private room, a place to forge his identity.” She always knocked now before entering the study as if afraid she would catch him masturbating.

Perhaps it's revenge, the Detective thought, some sort of emotional revenge, reversing the rage of helplessness she'd felt as a child, still felt, and inflicting it back on her father. “Revenge”—the Detective shook his head at his choice of words. All of this psychology, this self-inspection was new to him, but the words he chose remained the same. He was still the Detective; that was the tint to his glass: his frame of reference, crime; his point of view, the criminal's.

“I will not,” he heard his daughter say into the phone. A pause. She dropped to a strained whisper, but latched onto her voice, he understood her now. “He's sleeping.”

The Detective straightened up, lifted his left leg by the thigh and lowered
it to the floor slowly—a rush of blood, pain, life. “Sally!” he called out; closing the book on his lap, he threw it onto the roll-top desk beside him. “Sally—I'm coming!”

Sally's hurried footsteps approached the study; then (he heard them in his mind just before they began), three evenly spaced knocks on his door, exclamation points for his anger, and in a moment, she was standing above him.

“Dad, you're supposed to be sleeping.”

“Never you mind that. Who's on the phone for me?”

“You're supposed to take an afternoon nap every day. I didn't make that up, you know. I'm not the Bangor heart specialist who told you to start taking it easy.”

“Sally…”

“You have to take care of yourself, Dad. You have to…”

“Sally,” he said with emphasis. She stopped, waited, the unwilling but still obedient daughter. “It's Charlie Wriggins, isn't it?”

She pursed her lips. The Detective smiled; he lived now for these small triumphs, these feats of detection, minor victories over her insulating secrecy.

“We have to talk, Dad. You can't keep ignoring the fact that you're over seventy and have a heart condition. You have to adjust. You have to come to grips with reality.”

That last phrase brought a sneer onto the Detective's face. He had heard it again and again, that almost hysterical voice pleading with her father, with her husband and daughter, with her fellow kitchen environmentalists, to come to grips with reality.

“Yes,” he said, rising unsteadily, “but I suppose reality can wait till I get off the phone.”

“I…” Sally began, then faltered; he turned around. “I hung up.”

He stared at her, wordless, shocked beyond anger, waiting though for anger to come. This was new, this insulting presumption of authority, and he waited for the righteous rage of his helplessness to flood him, giving him the strength to fight her back. But his rage never came; instead, he had that old sensation, a dispossession, a time suspension (if only he knew what brought on these moments, if only he could have transferred the gift to his
students—the real difference between a great detective and a merely competent one): those moments when the confusion clarified, when the answer suddenly materialized, whole and inviolable. Not logic, but something like instinct which solved the mystery and yet was a mystery in itself.

“He has a case for me,” the Detective said softly, half to himself.

Sally sighed; she wasn't surprised. After forty years, she was accustomed to her father's abilities, although perhaps envious of them: she had to burst through locked doors to keep informed; he merely peered through the walls.

“Look, Dad, I'm sorry, but I didn't think that you should…” Her apology unraveled, but he brushed it out, just as he had always brushed her and Sadie out when a case had preoccupied his mind—the absent father, the empty vessel. No, he wasn't angry with her; he was beyond emotion, disengaged and moving on another plane as Sally's voice changed, grew soft with resignation.

“He isn't home, but he did leave a number for you to call. I wrote it down on the pad by the phone.” Then, one last protest, not out of hope for success, but duty-inspired. “You shouldn't, you know. You're not strong enough.”

He limped quickly toward the phone. Her voice followed him there, accusatory and frightened. “He says it's murder.”

The Detective dialed the number, steadying his right hand with his left by grabbing it around the wrist. He was magnanimous; he was sympathetic; he was in a forgiving mood. It had been the mentioning of murder that had frightened Sally into hanging up. Not her fault—she couldn't help seeing that knife in her husband's back, that car striking her daughter's body, that oil slick drifting inexorably toward her favorite beach. She was a worrier by nature, so he would forgive her, forgive anyone: he had a case, the first since Sadie's death.