Little Bird of Heaven (16 page)

In the dark he stumbled undressing. Cursing under his breath, panting and winded like a great wounded beast: bison, bear. Wounded, and dangerous. Pulling back the covers and falling into bed, his side of the
bed, of course he’d been drinking—Eddy Diehl was beyond drunk. In a terse voice Lucille dared to ask where he’d been? and he said nowhere, go back to sleep, and Lucille protested she hadn’t been asleep! She’d been lying there waiting for him and he said fuck Lucille, nobody’d asked her to lay there waiting for him, had they?

He was rude, dismissive. He was not apologetic as sometimes, at such drunk-times, out of a memory of the logic of guilt, he was. Too drunk to get completely undressed, in soiled T-shirt and shorts, light wool socks, it had been an enormous effort for him to pull off his damn boots, kick them aside and now on his back on his side of the bed unable to remain still, his leg-muscles beginning to twitch, a sensation as of swarming red ants in his armpits, in his groin, in the sweaty pelt of hair on his chest and his stubbled jaws were clenched tight and his panting breath so labored and erratic it was like trying to sleep with someone whose insides were being torn out. And so Lucille dared to ask again where he’d been? Was something wrong at work?—had there been an accident at a construction site? Was that it?—someone had been hurt, someone had died, at a construction site?

Lucille understood,
someone had died.
In that instant she knew.

He would not reply. He lay with his back to her, the sweat-soaked T-shirt through which tufts of animal-hair protruded, repulsive to the woman who felt at such moments that she was confronting the male body, the very body of
male otherness,
for the first time.

And so, Lucille recoiled in hurt. In resentment, and the beginning of fear. Knowing that what had happened, it was an event that would come between them. For when she turned aside, moving as far from his overheated body in the queen-sized bed as she could, when she recoiled in hurt, and said nothing more, he took no heed, scarcely was he aware of her, she knew
There is nothing in this man’s heart for me. I am not even in his thoughts.

Twenty-two years he’d worked at Sparta Construction, Inc. A single-storey redwood-shingled building on Garrison Road, sprawling lumberyard/brickyard beyond. Here he was known—“Ed Diehl”—the man you talked to when the owner wasn’t around or wasn’t answering his phone—
a man much liked by other men, and trusted. And he had his own office now, accessible from the parking lot. By 7 A.M. unlocking this door taking note—objectively, like a scientist—how his God-damn hands shook, a bad sign. Yet with a modicum of calm telling himself
Maybe it won’t happen. Or it will happen to someone else. Has happened.

He’d had a rough night. He’d given up trying to sleep, gone downstairs at about 3 A.M. and sat in the darkened kitchen smoking the last of his Camels and drinking the last of his Molson’s ales out of the refrigerator and his throat shut with the wish to sob, there was Zoe Kruller before him smiling her teasing-sweet smile
Well—say! This is a real pretty kitchen you built for your wife, in’t it? What’ve I got to do, Ed-dy darlin, to get you to build such a pretty kitchen for me? Just tell me, dear friend, and I’ll do it.

He’d told her. Laughing he’d told her. And there in Lucille’s pretty-pretty kitchen, she’d done it.

Several times he’d brought her to the house on the Huron Pike Road. Knowing that Lucille would be away, and the children at school. Wanting to show the woman his fine-carpentry touches, maple wood cabinets, the high-quality linoleum tile, redwood deck at the rear. Wanting her to see this side of him: husband, father. And the house he’d built for his family a damn sight nicer house than the one Delray Kruller provided for her.

Just tell me Ed-dy what’ve I got to do, and I’ll do it.

Every time.

This was Zoe in her bluegrass mode. Maybe she meant such words as she uttered them, but only at the moment of utterance.

That day, Jesus!—Krista had walked in.

Krista, home from school at noon, unexpected. And there was Zoe at the kitchen sink rinsing cups, singing to herself, whistling, and he’d been on the stairs, and he’d heard voices in the kitchen and entered in astonishment seeing his young daughter staring at him with a pleading smile—
Daddy? Am I home at the wrong time?

This was what she’d said, that Eddy recalled. He had no idea how he’d replied.

In his office, he had calls to make. Every day, calls to suppliers, cli
ents, workmen on the payroll. Every day and today would be no different from any other day, he wanted to think.

Except: a quick swallow from the quart of Jim Beam he kept in the lower drawer of his desk—“Just to clear my head.”

Feeling the need to explain. To Lucille, or whoever.

Strange need to speak aloud, give himself instructions. Was he drunk?—not hungover but still drunk?—hadn’t slept off the drunk, puked or pissed off yesterday’s long haul of a drunk.

And so he was having a basic problem: comprehension.

For what did it mean
Zoe Kruller is dead, has died, has been killed.

Yet more baffling
Zoe Kruller is gone, you will never see her again.

It was fucking him up having to think of Zoe Kruller dead who’d been so alive in her life, and in his arms. No more thrumming-warm
livingness
than Zoe Kruller. It wasn’t just his kitchen she’d be haunting but his very bed upstairs. His bed he’d had to sleep in, or try to, with his wife. Shut his eyes and he’d see the woman’s hungry damp mouth, the bared gums when she smiled her happy wide smile, a sight he’d sometimes look away from it seemed too intimate, exposed. The warm freckled arms around his neck, snaky arms pulling him down to her, laughing, tongue-kissing, her hot little belly pressed against his belly, groin against his groin, he could not bear it.
Did you miss fucking me? Did you? How much did you miss fucking me? Show me.

Or pushing him from her sulky and pouty and he’d had a moment’s panic not knowing if she was sincere or teasing
Well say! You don’t love me go back to your smug fat wife you bastard.

He was on the phone, talking with the roofing supplier. Clumsily lighting a cigarette—had to be his second, there was a butt already smoldering in the black plastic ash tray with the red letters S
PARTA
C
ONSTRUCTION,
I
NC.
To his horror like a man in a film when the music comes up jagged and percussive he broke off the conversation seeing through his window two vehicles turn into the cinder-lot: a Sparta PD cruiser and a heavy new-model Olds the color of steel filings, had to be an unmarked police car.

Quickly then kicking the desk drawer closed. He’d had only a small swallow of the whiskey, nothing they could detect.

His hands trembling. Sick-gut sensation. Frankly he didn’t know, could not in that instant have claimed, that he had not been the one to strangle the woman. Him, or the other guy—the husband Delray. Could not have said.

Don’t tempt me Zoe! Just don’t go too far.

In the outer office the receptionist Myrtle who’d only just arrived breathless and carrying a cardboard container bearing two large Styrofoam cups of coffee—one for her, one for Eddy Diehl—would be the first to greet the police officers. No time to alert Eddy, damn cops opened the door to his office and walked right in.

Four men: two youngish uniformed officers, two plainclothed detectives. In that instant it came to him
They expect me to resist. They expect to kill me. They’d sent four of them!

“Edward Diehl? We need to speak with you.”

Need.
He caught that, not
want.
And not asking.

Sitting at his desk, staring at them. How would an innocent man behave?—unsmiling, taken by surprise? Polite but—unyielding? He’d hung up the phone, his hands were flat on the desktop before him. No sudden moves, he knew better. He was feeling some relief, the cops they’d sent were not men he knew. In the Sparta PD and in the Herkimer County sheriff’s department there were men he knew, and it would have been embarrassing if one of them had come for him. But these men were strangers.

“Yes? Why?”

In a flash it came to him, maybe Delray hadn’t confessed. Maybe that was just a rumor. On the 6
A.M.
local news there’d been no mention of the husband confessing.

“No idea why, Mr. Diehl?” The older of the detectives spoke casually, with a little fishhook of a smile.

“It’s maybe—about—”

His voice faltered, he fell silent. In his face was a heat-flush from the whiskey, he was sure the detectives could see.

And the whiskey felt, in his gut, like a plug of searing-hot phlegm, indigestible, horrible. He could not think why he’d done something so impulsive at 7 A.M. of a Monday morning.

The senior detective introduced himself and his partner—“Martineau”—“Brescia”—but not the younger uniformed officers. He was saying how it “might be a good idea” for Mr. Diehl to accompany them to police headquarters, downtown; they had a few questions for him in their investigation into the homicide of Zoe Kruller early Sunday morning. This, Eddy heard through a roaring in his ears like an earthmover in the near-distance. Martineau assured him that the interview wouldn’t take long and in his desperation Eddy clung to these words
won’t take long
as if this were a promise made to a frightened child
won’t take long, won’t take long!
the most blatant and transparent of falsehoods yet Eddy Diehl would cling to the words
won’t take long Mr. Diehl
as shakily he arose from the swivel chair behind his desk, fumbled for his heavy down sheepskin jacket he’d tossed onto a nearby table, his leather gloves. He could not help but see in even his agitated state how the two younger police officers were poised to rush at him, to overpower him, if he “resisted” if he made a sudden unwise movement yanking open a desk drawer to grab a weapon, or shoving his hand into a pocket of the down jacket. He’d been a soldier at one time: he’d been an excitable young man in uniform, armed, trained and poised for action. Especially, poised for action when he believed himself in the presence of danger. It was sobering to think how within seconds these young men would have grabbed his arms, yanked them behind his back and forced him onto the floor, on his face, all the while shouting at him loudly, furiously.
On the floor! On the floor! Face down, on the floor!

Afterward he would recall how, when Martineau had introduced himself and the other detective, neither had made any offer to shake Eddy Diehl’s hand. This hurt! This was insulting! He’d always been a man whom other men liked, on sight; a man whom others trusted. And now in these strangers’ coolly assessing eyes he was made to know how they distrusted him, and they disliked him; they were more than willing to
believe that he’d murdered a woman, in her bed; he was not a man whose hand they would wish to shake.

My punishment is beginning
he thought. A strange pained smile distorted his face, his lower jaw that was stinging from—what?—a shaving cut of hours ago, when he’d scraped his skin in the downstairs bathroom shaving with a drunk’s shaky hand.

This too—the sullen clot of blood beneath his lower lip, the fine-trembling fingers—he believed the detectives saw, and filed away as the symptoms of a guilty man.

In the outer office, Myrtle stared. She was fifty years old, divorced, and her ex-husband had died so she thought of herself as a widow, afflicted and aggrieved and for eight years in love with Eddy Diehl; dyed-black hair and white-bread skin, orangy-red lips never lacking a smile for good-looking Eddy Diehl except now, this Monday morning, Myrtle wasn’t smiling but staring, abashed and astonished as unmistakably Eddy was being led away by Sparta police officers, without explanation. And outside in the brisk cold air of a gray-wet February morning, there was blunt-baldheaded Paul Cassano, Eddy’s boss, just climbing out of his Scout pickup, staring and blinking at Eddy Diehl as if he’d never seen him before, and Eddy lifted his hand in a wan greeting: “Paul, something has come up. I’ll be back in maybe an hour.”

Men loading lumber onto a truck paused to watch in silence as Eddy Diehl was led to the unmarked Olds the color of steel filings, made to climb humbly, humiliated, into the backseat, behind a plastic partition.

Like an inmate in a holding cell, except he wasn’t handcuffed.

These were men who’d known Ed Diehl for years. Some of them had worked with him when he’d been a carpenter, one of the work-crew. Now he’d been promoted to an office job he was still one of them, his natural sympathies were with them and not with their boss Cassano. And these men liked Ed Diehl a hell of a lot better than they liked Paul Cassano who paid their wages.

They knew of Eddy’s “relationship” with Delray Kruller’s wife—maybe. Some of them knew. It was not a secret, exactly.

Eddy Diehl, Jesus!—he’s arrested?

He killed that woman Zoe? Him?

One hour! How mistaken he’d been.

They would keep Edward Diehl—“a person of interest”—for seven hours and forty minutes. That first day at Sparta police headquarters.

Like a man in a trance—neither fully awake, nor unconscious—he’d allowed himself to be led with uncharacteristic docility into a windowless fluorescent-lit room on the second floor of the shabby-brick building on South Main Street at Iroquois, adjacent to the Herkimer County Courthouse and the Herkimer County House of Detention. This part of Sparta was part municipal buildings and high-rise parking structures and conspicuously open “public spaces” and part inner-city slum: in the interstices of county buildings were pawnshops, bail bondsmen’s shops, liquor stores with iron grillwork over their windows like grimaces. There were stores with signs in their windows—CHECKS CASHED. There were store-front establishments—HERKIMER COUNTY CHRISTIAN FAMILY COUNSELING. On Iroquois were discount outlets, hairdressers’ salons, a Rite Aid pharmacy, small restaurants and pizzerias with scummy front windows, taverns. Of these Eddy Diehl knew only the Iroquois Bar & Grill where off-duty cops and courthouse workers hung out and where the bartender was a guy he’d gone to high school with: a loser back from Vietnam with a steel plate in his head whose greeting
Hey there Diehl how’s it going was welcoming
to Eddy Diehl like the greeting of some sick sad left-behind brother.