It's a Crime (15 page)

Virginia didn’t believe him for a second. But Pat laid her hand on his forearm and let it linger there. “I should have known!” she said. Evidently she had transferred her affection for Lemuel to him.

A two-note door chime sounded, and she jumped up as if electrocuted. “Finally!” she cried.

She was gone in a flash. Virginia stood up to follow her, expecting Will to do the same. Instead he untangled his sapling limbs and warily approached the little table, shifting his weight from foot to foot for a moment before pouring himself more water amid a pop and a hiss.

“How old are you, Will?” asked Virginia.

“Twenty,” he said stiffly.

When she didn’t respond, he looked at her out of the corners of his eyes. “You’re not very much like Pat,” he said.

“No,” said Virginia.

“What was it like when you were twenty?” he asked.

“I don’t remember,” she said.

“Oh,” he said. “I didn’t mean—”

Now they were both embarrassed. They seemed to carom off each other in their hurry to get out of the room.

CHAPTER
15

W
hen Virginia woke the next day, her thoughts as they surfaced were still so dark that she had to hit herself on the forehead with the heel of her hand to beat them back where they belonged. She couldn’t believe she was in Pat Foy’s house. The shift in the tectonic plates must have been enormous to have thrown the two of them together after all these years.

Often in English mysteries a murderer has to be discovered amid a variety of guests in a large country house. The addition of Will Samuel to the Foy household suggested a similar assortment here. But the crime was not one discrete element of this establishment; it was not hiding; it encompassed the whole building. And here was Virginia Howley smack inside, where her ruin had been hatched.

She was surprised to learn that she and Pat were going to visit a victim of Frank’s fraud that day. Pat’s plan had had a trumped-up air at the Dock. But they were on their way to Orange by noon. Frank’s former secretary had asked Pat to check on another former employee, Simone Massey, who used to be head of LGT food services.

“I never dreamed you’d be working as a waitress,” Pat said to Virginia as she fooled with the car window. “Was that because of LinkAge?”

“Sort of,” said Virginia.

“Not that there’s anything wrong with being a waitress,” said Pat. “Look at
Shoot the Piano Player.
”

“She dies at the end,” said Virginia.

“Are you sure? I don’t think so,” said Pat, clearly lying. She closed up the window at last.

Orange was only a few miles from Hart Ridge, but was the kind of decrepit, unglamorous small city that only the grittier of the police procedurals ventured into. Originally a suburb of Newark, Orange was now just another dilapidated part of the greater metropolitan patchwork, sliced up and stitched back together by a crisscrossing mesh of major thoroughfares. Simone’s street was in a pocket of two-story houses packed together behind chain-link fences. Gable-fronted, each house looked at first as if it were turned the wrong way. But all the glassed-in porches were clearly supposed to be facing forward, no matter how high and awkward they were, or how overfull with tables and chairs and odd plastic containers. Simone’s house was one of the smallest, and it had not been painted any more recently than the others, but it possessed an exceptional alertness. Although the general desolation of winter had fallen upon it as it had upon the whole shabby street, nothing was broken at the Massey house, no step, no balustrade, no panel, no front light. The windows were clean. There was a welcome mat.

Simone Massey stood maybe four foot eight. She appeared young to have already retired. She was broad and thick and strong-looking. Her skin was caramel-colored. Her hair, still black, was short and flat. When she offered to take Pat’s and Virginia’s coats, Pat accepted and Virginia did not. She grew hot in her padded jacket, but this struck her as more appropriate than Pat’s light and carefree appearance. Pat wore high-heeled black boots and a thick white ribbed turtleneck, and she carried a glossy black open-ended square of a purse with straps of a length Virginia had never seen before. The bag was meant to be carried over the shoulder, but snugly.

Virginia also declined Simone’s offer of tea, but she began to suspect that this was a mistake as she watched the older woman retrieve cups and tea bags in a routinely homey manner, waiting for the kettle to boil. Hospitality for Simone was clearly the norm. She may not have seemed poor to herself, despite the difficult neighborhood and despite whatever LinkAge had done to her. The three women sat at an old-fashioned cabriole-legged table covered with a pure white eyelet cotton tablecloth—and a thick sheet of clear vinyl.

“I was sorry to hear about your husband’s troubles,” said Simone. “He was a very friendly man. Some people get so important they can’t see past the ends of their noses, and Mister Foy wasn’t like that. He always had a nice hello, how are you, how is your grandson.”

Pat was pleased. And somewhere deep inside Virginia was, too. She was glad that Frank had been courteous to this decent and dignified woman. But maybe mere pleasantness of manner shouldn’t excuse so much. It seemed unfair to the more socially awkward people who hadn’t stolen a dime—Virginia, for instance.

“Frank can’t bear to have his old colleagues suffer because of something he was part of,” said Pat, spooning sugar into her tea. “And it seems that you lost an unusually large amount.”

“I saved more than those whiz kids?” said Simone, surprised.

“Some of them,” said Pat, smiling. “But I don’t count them. They were part of the problem.”

“I see,” said Simone, stirring her tea. “You ever hear of Fripp College?”

Pat frowned in concentration, but shook her head.

“When I was younger I was not a saving type of person,” said Simone. “My daughter felt neglected. That’s probably why she got into drugs. I don’t know where she is now, and I don’t want to know.” She ignored Pat’s cries of sympathy. “Luster’s father…” She dismissed him with a little dip of her hand. “Doesn’t matter what happened to him. My grandson came to live with me, and I switched jobs so I could be there when he came home from school. I started out serving at LGT. Once you were finished with lunch your day was pretty much over. The cafeteria stays open later now, but back then it closed up at three. I was a lot better grandmother than I was a mother. Maybe I was better with boys. All I ever wanted was to make my grandson feel loved and secure. Sometimes even now that he’s grown when he’s sleeping I will go in and kiss his forehead.”

“I know what you mean!” cried Pat. “I used to watch my daughters breathe when they were asleep.”

“I don’t need anything for myself,” said Simone. “I have Social Security. I’m healthy. And if I get sick, well, I’ve already had my day. But Luster is very, very smart. When he first made the honor roll back in the fourth grade, I told him if he made it every year after that, I would send him to college. It wasn’t easy, but he did it. The kids in the high school here fight all the time. It is not a good school. One Spanish boy teased him so dirty Luster finally had to hit him in the mouth. But he did it off school property.”

Pat nodded as if this made all the difference in the world, and who knows, maybe it did.

“Luster has never given any trouble. He was in the National Honor Society last year. He was on the debating team, and one of his teachers, a white man, said he had never heard anyone who could speak so well. He said he was better than any politician on TV. He told him he could be a senator someday.

“Luster! Come here and talk to the ladies.”

The boy on the stairs seemed especially tall because you saw his feet first and then a long unwinding of the rest of him. His feet were too big for the steps, too fast and irrepressible. Even on the thin blurred carpeting of the stairs the rapid scuffing sounded joyful. He was dressed like anyone—running shoes, jeans, sweatshirt. As soon as he entered the room and extended his hand, though, you could feel the flash of his charm. He was the baby. Beloved, he still sported tenderness. He smiled, and you believed in something again.

“Luster wanted to know why he had to go to such a bad high school, and I told him, life isn’t fair.”

As Simone spoke, Virginia was looking directly into Luster’s face, and she could see the animation drain out of it.

“Isn’t that true?” asked Simone.

“Yes, Mier,” said the boy, automatically using what must have been a term of affection and respect, but his tone was inert.

“These ladies want to know about the 401(k),” she said.

Luster looked at the floor while Virginia murmured something vaguely negative, pressing her thumbnail deeply into her thigh.

“Mister Howard at the company, that is, the LGT personnel advisor, showed me how it was better to save through the 401(k) than at the bank because you didn’t pay taxes on the money you put in. He bought company stock for me, which I was proud to have. I couldn’t take any money out until I was sixty-five, but that was okay. I knew I wasn’t going to want to touch it for ten years, not until Luster turned eighteen. All the time I got statements saying how much money was in there. At the end it was a whole lot. One day I put the paper on the refrigerator just to look at, but then I took it down because I didn’t want to excite envy.”

“Your grandson was planning to attend Fripp College?” asked Pat.

“No,” said Simone, recoiling before politeness, or maybe a simple dogged hope, stopped her. “He was accepted to a real college.”

“Oh,” said Pat. She sensed that she’d gone wrong somewhere, but she’d never known much about schools.

“He was going to go to Villanova University.”

“How nice,” said Pat.

“It was a shock to me when the stock fell apart. At first I thought only the earnings in the 401(k) were gone. I was disappointed, because I had been counting on them for Luster’s college. But I had saved plenty to put in the plan. And he was bound to get a scholarship. There was one given by a real estate man for three thousand dollars that his teacher recommended him for. And we could have taken out more loans. Then I learned that all the money was gone, not just the earnings, you know, the extra that it made, but everything—all the money that I had saved over the years. I wasn’t even going to get a pension. College was out of the question. It was very hard for me, because I had promised him.”

Simone seemed to be talking more to Luster at this point, although she wasn’t looking at him or directing her attention toward him in any way, and he must have already heard this explanation dozens of times. She had to have tried to add up her zeroes in every different way possible, just as Virginia had, to make sure that all there was in the end was another zero.

“Then he got some mail from Fripp College. There was a photo in it of three nice-looking kids, one boy and two girls. Black kids with nice neat clothes. The boy reminded me of Luster a little.” Except maybe not the Luster sitting before them. His face had contracted.

“I drove over there and spoke to the admissions officer, and he explained about all the jobs graduates were eligible for. Good jobs. In banking. And legal administration.”

Virginia wondered what “legal administration” could refer to. Nothing real, of course.

“So I sold the car and told Luster I had enough to send him to Fripp. Now he tells me that the people there are the same ones he was trying to escape from at Orange High, but I say, that can’t be true. Someone is paying for those courses. They have to want to learn.”

“The government pays,” he said unexpectedly, his lip curling.

“And what’s wrong with that?” cried Simone, suddenly old. “Haven’t I paid plenty to the government?”

But Luster had sunk back into silence, his chin dropping toward his chest.

“Isn’t it good to learn data processing?” she said.

“You can never learn too much!” said Pat with exaggerated enthusiasm. “I didn’t realize this when I was young. I thought my ninth-grade biology teacher was so boring I could scream. But that’s when I first heard about Darwin, and now I get such a kick out of recommending the stately Darwin tulips to my meanest clients. My biology teacher loved talking about the survival of the fittest. I can still hear her saying it over and over in that squeaky voice of hers, ‘survival of the fittest, survival of the fittest,’ though she was so sick all the time that it was amazing she survived to the end of the year. Do you remember Mrs. Stutz, Ginny?”

Virginia was speechless. Did Pat have any idea of what she was saying?

“I guess your friend doesn’t feel like talking,” said Simone.

“That’s okay,” said Pat. “I’ve always talked enough for two.”

Simone chuckled a little as Pat proffered a check. It was, grotesquely, one of those customized types that pop up as a sales pitch among other perfectly reasonable-looking checks. It was printed with the image of a skier on a slope.

“What’s that?” asked Simone. Virginia, quite frankly, wondered the same.

“To help with your losses,” said Pat.

Virginia’s eyes were drawn to Luster. The struggle between his loyalty to his grandmother and his need to distance himself from her gullibility was terrible to see. Pat’s babble must have sent him over the edge. He carefully lowered his head into his hands as if it were precious china and then spoke to no one in particular. “She has almost nothing left,” he said slowly. “Why did she waste it on Fripp?”

CHAPTER
16

V
irginia tossed and turned that night. As usual, the shell of her, the outside part, the skin and muscle, was exhausted, but the inside part, her mind and nerves and will, were racing around and around on a single track. The check that Pat had given the Masseys could screw up Luster’s chance of getting a full scholarship next year at Villanova. If they’d already applied for aid, and the college found out about the check, they might be accused of fraud. But if word got out in town, there would be problems sooner than that. The daughter could come back to get some of it. She might rob or terrorize them.

Virginia was used to not sleeping. Sometimes she thought of these nighttime hours as constituting a second, hidden life. It wasn’t the moonlight, or the shadows, that truly characterized the night. It was the fluidity. She could not always distinguish among her wakeful cogitations, the quick flashes of her dreams, and the snatches of the mysteries she read in the interstices. She was reminded of the library on the third floor—a room right out of a whodunit. She would look for the new Lydia Bunting.

Earlier she’d had only a general impression of bookshelves. This time when she switched on the overhead lighting she felt the full force of the three walls of books. The upper shelves were accessible because of a library ladder on a hidden track. In the center of the room, wands of full-spectrum lighting were suspended above a cluster of leather club chairs and matching hassocks. The mysteries looked as if they were arranged aesthetically rather than alphabetically, with uniformly sized vintage paperbacks grouped together, as were the slim old hardbacks and the Detective Book Club threesomes.

Virginia tried to remind herself of the financing behind this bonanza, but it was hard not to feel a mix of awe and envy.

When she’d started to write, she’d wanted to do everything in an entirely new way. She reread Cornell Woolrich, for the horror, and Jorge Luis Borges, for the form to put it into. Her main problem, she decided, was what to do with the boilerplate of the more typical mystery. Most authors simply copied it, throwing in a few variations on their own. Others stripped it away, or ignored it, with mixed results. Virginia decided to zoom in for a close-up, and she ended up with “The Red Door,” which was almost Dadaesque in its repetition. A man sought, over and over, to get in somewhere. He never gave up, just as men never give up trying to get inside women. “The Red Door” proved to be Virginia’s entrance into the publishing world.

Her next story, “The First Funeral,” zeroed in on the funeral of a postal clerk: The funeral was the only topic of conversation, and the motive for the murder turned out to be the funeral itself; the identity of the body was irrelevant. She also wrote about a killer’s attempts to pass a Rorschach test, a duel between expert witnesses about maggots, and the angry confession of a private eye’s “black widow” girlfriend. Virginia was elated when a small press offered her a contract for a collection. The press had previously published a book of morgue shots she actually owned, and she was happy to be associated with it.

She received two complimentary quotes for the book jacket. One came from a hot young story writer still in rabbinical school, the other from a no-longer bestselling author whose thrillers were set in carefully researched foreign lands. He referred to her “high-voltage” suspense. The best part of the book, though, was that it looked and felt real, with pages and a spine as well as a jacket. You could grab on to it, if you suddenly felt that you were in danger of falling backward through life.

For her next book, a novel, Virginia decided to reach deep into the innards of the boilerplate and pull it inside out so that all the flesh and blood and organs were protecting the skin. She called it
Hell Is a Mystery,
and the twist was that the detection itself caused the crime. The main characters were a pair of lesbian exterminators based on those who’d come to her apartment in Providence a few times. They careened through the book, laying rubber as they had in real life. But Virginia was not happy when she finished. The victims were lifeless even before they were actually killed. Her foreknowledge of their end suffused their very being. She went back to her stories and found them similarly static. When death marched in, it poisoned the past—before it happened. That was her greatest weakness as a writer, she decided. She could not grapple with death.

“So what’s keeping you up?”

Virginia jumped.

Pat was at the door. “I heard someone up here and figured it was you,” she said.

“Oh, I never sleep,” said Virginia. But she explained her misgivings over what might happen to the Masseys.

“The things you think of,” said Pat, shaking her head in disbelief.

“And who is this secretary of Frank’s?” asked Virginia, worried afresh. “Why did she give you their name?”

“Well,” said Pat. “Her name is Ellen Kloda. She told me she lost most of the deposit on a cabin, so I figured I’d replace it. But she didn’t cash the check. Finally I called her and got her, unlike anyone else, and she said she couldn’t take the money until I met with some other people who needed it more.”

“It doesn’t make any sense,” said Virginia.

“Oh, nothing makes any sense,” said Pat, starting to examine the spines on her books.

Virginia started to ask about the new Lydia Bunting, decided she was too tired, then rallied, and went ahead.

“I don’t know why anyone would kill herself when there are so many murder mysteries left to read,” said Pat. “I can always read about Nurse Pomeroy, no matter what state I’m in.”

“You can’t keep someone from killing herself by giving her mystery novels,” said Virginia dryly.

“Why not?” said Pat. “Even if a mystery is really, really bad, I always stick it out because I want to learn who did it.” She handed over the new Lydia Bunting, which was still in hardback. It had the usual innocuous cover: a plain white background, bold lettering, a disembodied hand with a red-stained knife. Then Pat fell heavily into one of the club chairs. “Not being able to sleep isn’t so bad when you have company,” she said. But she was blinking her eyes as she spoke, as if to blink away her fatigue. “Do you have, you know, a boyfriend or anything?”

Virginia shook her head dumbly and slumped into the chair opposite. Her current loneliness would make sense only in the grave.

“Sometimes all you need is company,” said Pat earnestly. “It’s funny that Will is Lemuel’s son.”

“Does he remind you of him?”

“I never thought about it,” said Pat. “Lemuel wanted to get him away from certain ‘bad influences’ in the country. Isn’t that sweet?”

“Maybe he meant himself,” said Virginia. She thought she’d detected a desperation in Will Samuel that she sympathized with and had no desire to expose. Both of them were freeloaders, though probably not without good reason. Will’s presence made her own feel less singular. Her plight became less pitiable, somehow, if Pat had plucked her out of Maine because that was the sort of thing Pat did.

“People like Lemuel don’t get more virtuous when they get older,” said Pat. “Just more exhausted.”

“Not exactly ready for a roll in the hay,” said Virginia.

“It might have killed him,” said Pat.

“Maybe for him it would have been worth it.”

Pat frowned, but Virginia closed her eyes. She was so tired herself that there were pictures on her inner lids, pictures of inert foliage. She felt herself floating away, and she imagined Pat floating away in tandem, each of them leading separate lives behind their eyelids.

During Virginia’s brief romance with the Christmas tree farmer, he told one of the telecommuters, a young man from Boston, that he knew of an old woman who had a hand-sewn baby quilt for sale cheap. Without thinking, Virginia agreed to accompany them, regretting her decision only later, in the backseat of the car. It struck her that the men might be planning to exploit the woman’s ignorance of her wares. Virginia’s apprehensions grew when the car drew up in front of a shack that smelled even from the road. The Christmas tree farmer knocked on the door, and the other two followed him straight into the tiny front room as a doughy gray-faced woman was still struggling to her feet. She sank back, panting. In here the smell was nauseating, a combination of something like burnt sugar and a deep, deep rot. Beside the old woman’s sprung armchair was a cradle empty except for a dirty, badly sewn, and irregularly shaped baby quilt. She pointed to it without speaking.

“Beautiful,” said the Christmas tree farmer—a remark all the more astonishing because he didn’t seem to realize that it wasn’t remotely true. There were folds and bulges in the quilt where the pieces of fabric did not fit together.

The man from Boston was overwhelmed by the scene. He wiped his face with his hands, hard. “Yes, beautiful,” he said. “My friends would appreciate it, I’m sure, but they are strict about federal guidelines. You know, they are first-time parents, very young and concerned parents. I’m not sure that this—”

“Just throw it in the washing machine,” said the Christmas tree farmer. “It’ll be fine.” Except that the quilt couldn’t have withstood a single wash.

The fat woman’s sunken eyes and inexpressive mouth did not change. Virginia was afraid she was mute or even averbal. At least her state of mind seemed uncomplicated by hope of any sort.

“How much?” said the Christmas tree farmer. “Forty dollars, if I remember correctly?”

The woman moved her head in some ill-defined way.

“All right,” said the man from Boston, taking two twenties from his wallet with bad grace. Then he plucked the quilt from the cradle and hurried out to the car.

“Nice to see you again,” said the Christmas tree farmer to the old woman, whose face remained inanimate.

“I don’t get it,” he said to Virginia when he had closed the door, which was half plywood, behind them. “He didn’t have to take it if he didn’t want it.”

Virginia said nothing. The stink had followed them to the car: It was in the baby quilt.

Virginia kept on saying nothing. She wouldn’t have minded, really, if the Christmas tree farmer had been shaking the guy down, Robin Hood–style, but she didn’t think he had been. Or maybe not consciously? The pity and repugnance she felt for the old woman filled her with disgust. She went home and wrote a story called “The Empty Cradle” about the woman, the sale of the quilt, and a missing baby. Evil hovered, diffuse, until the end, when it was pinned down to an unholy and surprising alliance. Virginia sold the story to
Black Cat
magazine and never saw the Christmas tree farmer again—never spoke to him, either, except for that one late-night call.

She could not have said exactly why. Certainly the results of the visit were, in sum, good. The man from Boston was out some cash, but he could afford it. It might even be argued that he deserved to forfeit the forty dollars because it was less than the difference between what he’d expected to pay and what he’d expected the fair market value of his purchase to be. Either way the benefit to the old woman was presumably greater than any loss he could have sustained. The Christmas tree farmer may have sensed some small problem, but he wasn’t troubled by it. You couldn’t say he tricked the man from Boston, because he had no consciousness of doing so. And Virginia had benefited the most of all, through her first sale of a story in several years. The old woman remained a cipher. It was not clear whether she understood the true value of the quilt or the degradation of her circumstances. She may have endured their scrutiny simply in order to survive. She may no longer have been able to distinguish between humiliation and fraud.