20 (4 page)

2

The Detective sat in what he assumed to be the Kleins' living room, although it was like no living room he had ever seen: tubular, stainless steel chairs twisted into geometric shapes, with glittering, curved lucite backs as smooth as polished marble; bright orange wall-to-wall carpeting as luxuriant as a field of ripening wheat, the pile hiding the furniture's feet so that the chairs seemed rooted there, sprung flowers of extraterrestrial origin, the science fiction garden of a World's Fair exhibit; three of its walls a flat and spotless white, and bare except for a series of evenly spaced paintings which in an ordered progression grew from the size of a postage stamp on the first wall to a three-foot square on the third. The paintings were formless swatches and splashes of color, reds and oranges, and they reminded the Detective of his own mind, an eruption of thoughts, boiling and swirling like lava, seeking the bottom ground, the cooling ocean, inert and settled form. A stainless steel mobile hung from the center of the ceiling; in constant chaotic motion, its individual parts, shiny metallic propellers, spun against each other—a separate mechanical universe with its own complex of rules and conflicts whose unfolding gave the Detective a headache.

But more disconcerting to him, the strangest aspect of all, was the room's shape. A triangle whose top had been sliced off, its walls joined at oblique angles, each chair situated so that it had at least a three-quarter frontal view of the triangle's wide base, the fourth wall, that wall made of a single sheet of glass—not a picture window, but a full wall of glass. And stretching behind it, as if some vacationer's snapshot, a mammoth color slide flashed upon the wall, were the cliff, the promontory rock, the cove,
the orange metal walkway leading to them all, and beyond, as far as the eye could see, the ocean. The scene of the crime, frozen there before their eyes. Only the gulls and terns seemed alive, arching, swooping, diving into the funneled depths of the cove, then rising effortlessly on invisible thrusts of wind, arrogant and free. Toy-sized in the distance, a Coast Guard cutter rocked in the cove's mouth, searching for the body.

“Let's go through it one more time, all right, Mrs. Klein?”

The police chief spoke slowly; he was exhausted and on the edge of exasperation, yet still polite. The Detective tried to brush out the others from his sight—Charlie Wriggins, Officer Truax, the eyewitness called Dexter—and concentrated on the Chief and Mrs. Klein. This review was for his sake, he knew, and he was conscious of intruding into another man's case, a feeling difficult to erase with Officer Truax glaring at him from the corner.

“All right,” the police chief said again, the Detective noting his heavy-lidded and expressionless face, “let's start from the top then. Last night, at about five o'clock, Dexter here, coming back into dock, saw a body fall into the cove. He also saw someone else standing at the top of the cliff, near to the point from where—he assumed—the body must have fallen.” The Chief paused, breathed deeply as if the sentence had been too complex and mentally exhausting for him. “Unfortunately, though, due to the distance and poor light, he couldn't recognize either of the two people. Have I got that right, Dexter?”

Dexter, rail-thin, stood in the center of the room, his feet buried in the rug pile like a pier post at low tide. His hair was a salt-bleached gray, his face a parched red; his eyes, tiny and black, clung above his cheeks like barnacle shells. A crucifix of defiance, he stared straight ahead as he spoke.

“I saw what I saw,” he said.

“All right. So what we have, then, are two nameless people, one presumably dead and one who presumably saw him die but for some unknown reason failed to report it to the Coast Guard or the police. Now the logical thing to do would be to try to identify who those two people were, starting with the presumed deceased. Dexter couldn't find the body last night and, as of this moment anyway, the Coast Guard hasn't had any luck either. So, what we're left with, then, is the process of elimination. Now Officer Truax and myself know all the full-time residents of this area and it didn't take
long to ascertain that none were missing. That left the part-time residents such as Mr. and Mrs. Klein. Now Officer Truax and myself keep a list of phone numbers where those part-time residents can be reached in case of theft or damage to their property up here. So we called those numbers, last night and all this morning, and as of right now, the only person not accounted for is Mr. Klein. Am I right on that, Officer Truax?”

A clipped nod. “Right.”

“All right. So what we have is this. Either the person who fell last night from the cliff into the cove was Mr. Klein or it was someone who had no business being up here. Now this
is
Mr. Klein's property; he
does
have business being up here.”

The Chief inhaled laboriously. He leaned forward in his stainless steel chair, focusing on Mrs. Klein, and the Detective sensed in him then something of the law itself—plodding, implacable, relentlessly inhumanly patient.

“Mrs. Klein,” he said, “where is your husband?”

Mrs. Klein sat in one of the room's obliquely angled corners beside the wall of glass, dwarfed by the dimensions of the coastal setting. And for a moment, the Detective's mind seemed to expand, embracing that contrast between the size of the woman and the immensity of the world she had been born into; it seemed to stretch, groping toward some concept bigger than the person and the scene inspiring it, a concept tagged with words like “folly,” “awe,” “futility.” But now no longer alone in his study, no longer merely biding time, the Detective resisted the philosophizing which had begun to dominate his mental life, those drifting, irrational sequences he secretly found compelling but feared were a sign of encroaching senility and death. Instead, he shrunk the borders of his vision, focusing not on what this woman meant, but on who she was—this could-be widow, this suspect.

He guessed that she was in her fifties, her hair cropped short and fully gray, her clothing—dark stockings, short plaid skirt, a fisherman's turtleneck sweater—campus style. Her eyes were white-rimmed and protuberant, hyperthyroidal; they cast about the room in an endless, jittery search of the floor as if she had lost her wedding ring there. Perhaps she had. The Detective saw no ring on either hand, but found little significance in that fact.
Traditions, the old symbols, meant nothing anymore, especially to the sort of people who built stainless steel and glass living rooms. Sadie, the Detective remembered, immediately trying to squelch the memory, had never removed her wedding ring, that thin gold band melding with her skin; she'd been buried with it on. And he sees her now, framed in mahogany, a plush silken background, the scent of flowers so overwhelmingly sweet that he feels he may vomit from it, her cheeks so pale that the mortician's rouge can't cover their lifelessness—as he bends, now and forever slowly bending, and removing his ring, drops it on her chest. The Detective stared at his left hand; the ring finger, freckled, swollen, showed no sign of the band he had worn there for nearly fifty years. No, the old symbols meant nothing anymore—maybe they never had—but he'd ask Mrs. Klein about it later anyway. “A case,” he hears himself lecture over and over, words in amber, “is solved with details.”

“Mrs. Klein,” the Chief repeated after receiving no answer. “
Where
is your husband?”

“I, I don't know. I just don't know.” She frowned, surprised at herself, as if she were perplexed by her own lack of knowledge.

“Were you here at the house last night?”

“Yes. Here.”

“Well, was your husband with you then?”

Mrs. Klein said nothing; refused even to lift her head, her eyes still involved in their frantic searching, like…like REMs, the Detective suddenly thought, rapid eye movements that signified dreaming during sleep, as if although awake, she were still living in last night's dream.

“Mrs. Klein,” the police chief said. He sighed. “Mrs. Klein, now that's a simple question. Your husband—was he or was he not with you last night?”

“I…I don't know. He might have been. It seems to me that, that…” She picked at short, silver strands of hair that covered her ear; her voice dropped: “He might have been.”

There was an uneasy pause. Then, Dexter, the eyewitness, his gaze directed at no one in particular, broke in, reminding them that he considered the entire procedure an attack on his honor.

“I saw what I saw,” he said again.

Mrs. Klein looked up quickly. “I don't doubt that,” she said. “I don't doubt that at all. You saw what you saw; see what you see; will see what you will see—when you see it. I don't doubt that at all.”

She stared at Dexter for a moment, her eyes finally focused, steady, but when he refused to acknowledge her, she panicked, glancing quickly around the room far confirmation. Out of the corner of his eye, the Detective noticed Charlie Wriggins gesturing to him, an I-told-you-so expression on his face.

“Yes,” the Chief said at last. “Well.” He stood up. “Why don't you freshen yourself up a bit, Mrs. Klein? I realize all of this has been quite a trial for you.”

Without giving her a chance to respond, the Chief crossed the room and gently lifted her by the elbow from her seat. He led her to the door, the others watching her unsteady, bewildered, sleepwalk shuffle—all but the Detective who, taking advantage of that short moment of privacy, gradually straightened his left leg. (He mustn't let them see how lame he was.) By the time the Chief had returned to the living room, the Detective was standing, his secret concealed, the pain in his leg a dull and bearable ache, no longer visible on his face. Charlie Wriggins, notebook in hand, and Officer Truax had risen too, and the four of them huddled there in the center of the room beneath the twisting stainless steel propellers of the mobile. Only Dexter stood apart.

“Well,” the Chief said, his eyes neutral, conceding nothing, “what do you think?”

“Is she always like that?” the Detective asked.

“No one up here seems to know. Her husband did most of the errands around town. They didn't spend much time up here anyway—their second home. Mainly in the summer.”

“It could be from shock,” the Detective said. “But the question is, shock from what? From being informed that her husband might be dead? From having seen him die? From having killed him?—You don't have any physical evidence that Mr. Klein was up here last night?”

The Chief shook his head. “That's the strange thing. No food in the cabinets; no garbage. For Christsake, we even had to turn the water on. It's just as if the house had been closed up for the winter, as if neither of them
had been here in months. There's not even a car in the garage. Now how the hell did she get up here, I keep asking myself. I already checked the one taxi in the area—no fares to the Klein house since September, the driver says. One more thing for whatever it's worth. These drapes were open when we came in; it was the only sign that the house was occupied—besides Mrs. Klein herself, that is.”

“There's men's clothing in the closets,” Officer Truax said.

The Chief shook his head. “Means nothing. They're all summer clothes. When you're as rich as the Kleins, you don't bother carrying wardrobes around with you. You just keep full closets in all your houses.”

The Detective thought a moment and then said, “What's his size?”

Officer Truax, stung by the Chief's dismissal, laughed sarcastically. “What, you want his hand-me-downs?”

“Truax,” the Chief said. He sighed, then looked up to the ceiling, seemed to study the intricate motions of the mobile.

How patient he is, the Detective thought, how controlled. “Truax, he's talking about the man, not his clothes.” The Chief turned to the Detective. “He was a big one all right, bigger than you. But that doesn't eliminate Mrs. Klein as a suspect; she still could have pushed him, tiny as she is. Just take a look at that walkway out there; it was built with the view, not safety, in mind.”

The three of them, all but Dexter, followed the Chief's pointed hand and stared through the glass wall to the cove. The Coast Guard cutter was half blocked from view by the promontory rock; the sky, as gray as the cutter's hull, was so overcast that the time of day was indiscernible.

“The body,” the Detective said, “is there much chance of recovery?”

The Chief shook his head. “No, and that means, unfortunately, that even if she did do it…”

The Detective nodded, completing the thought for him. “No corpse, no crime,” he said.

Charlie Wriggins broke in: “But you've got a witness.”

The Chief glanced at Dexter. “Who witnessed a falling body, not someone pushing that body. We'd never even make it to court on his testimony. Not without a confession. Well, any suggestions?”

The Detective hesitated: the Chief's eyes still veiled his mood, his motives, but there was no time left for stalling. Tact, the Detective lectured himself, be tactful, courteous; no swaggering, no arrogance.

“It does occur to me that a woman in Mrs. Klein's condition…well, that she might be frightened, confused by so many people.”

He paused. The Chief stared at him—a cop's stare, suspicious, penetrating. “You want to speak to her alone?”

“It might be helpful. Someone out of uniform. Give her a chance to relax; a simple conversation instead of an interrogation.”

The Chief said nothing, and the Detective watched him as he made up his mind, sympathizing with him, knowing from experience the painful conflict he was going through: duty versus personal pride. To have invited the Detective in as a consultant was excusable, but to leave him alone with the major suspect was to concede his own failure and to permit the possibility of the crime being solved without his own participation.

The Chief sighed. “All right. It can't hurt. I'll leave Truax outside in the patrol car to guard the place and relay any messages. Charlie here will give Dexter and me a ride back to town. It's what, three o'clock now? I'll give you till six or so unless something comes up in the meantime.”