Little Bird of Heaven (35 page)

DeLucca said, breathless from the stairs like a zestful girl athlete,
“There’s some surprises here, I think! Some of Zoe’s dresses are really glamorous. Classy! This weekend she was in New York—with a friend—around Christmastime—he bought her some really nice things—except back here where’d you wear them?—out on the Strip?—‘cast your pearls before swine’—Zoe said you grew up having to do that, being female.”

Though she’d never been in the house before—Krull was sure—yet DeLucca made her unerring way to the bedroom at the end of the hall where she shook items out of the shopping bags onto a bed: a black silk dress with thin straps, that resembled a slip or was in fact a slip; a cranberry-colored velvet sheath with a deep V-neck studded with tiny pearls; a shimmering gold dress that looked as if it would fit a woman’s body tight as a glove; a bronze-colored dress of some crinkly fabric with stains beneath the arms. And high-heeled shoes, and jewelry. Purple silk brassiere, matching cobweb panties. Krull stared feeling hot blood beating in his face.

DeLucca lifted the black silk garment to her face, to smell. Wordless then she held it out to Krull who shuddered at the talcumy scent and pushed her hand away.

“What’s wrong, Aaron? This is a mission of sorrow, have you no respect for the dead?”

Primly now DeLucca meant to take her time smoothing wrinkled garments with the edge of her hand, against the bed. There was a sly druggy glisten in her damp eyes, Krull saw. The bed, that had once belonged to Krull’s parents, was now unused by Delray, who slept elsewhere in the house; it had been carelessly covered in a faded gold brocade spread waterstained from drips in the overhead ceiling. Beneath this spread, the mattress was bare. Viola had stripped it months ago. Delray slept on a sofa downstairs when he slept at home; after Zoe’s death, he’d been avoiding this room. He’d instructed Viola to pack up Zoe’s things in boxes and take them to Goodwill but Viola had not done this. Each time Krull entered the room he had no idea why except something drew him, a sensation of anxiety and fatigue and wanting to cry for sometimes crying felt good and you had to be alone. He’d gone through Zoe’s bureau
drawers numerous times as if looking for something she’d left behind but had not found anything except a stray button, a near-empty tube of lipstick. Once in a box in another part of the house he’d discovered a cache of old snapshots, he hadn’t wanted to see, yes but he’d looked, there was Delray Kruller seated on his Harley-Davidson looking young as Krull had never seen him, long straggly dark hair and dark-tinted glasses and a cigarette in his mouth and in the crook of his arm a blond girl, had to be Zoe looking young as a high school girl which was possibly what she’d been in that long-ago time before Krull was born. And how beautiful Zoe was, smiling her dazzling smile. In a little halter top and short-shorts, bare legs and bare feet.

Damn he didn’t want to
care.
Too fucking late for him to
care.

“C’n you give me a hand, hon?”

DeLucca was chiding him as you’d chide someone you knew well, with both exasperation and affection. Hanging Zoe’s dresses in the closet with an air of fussy ceremony. “Zoe would like this, I think. Her spirit can settle here and not be so drifting and lonely. Oh she was flighty! Last thing she told me, ‘If I don’t make it back, Jacky, you can come visit me in Vegas, and bring Aaron. Maybe I’ll have a suite at Caesar’s Palace.’

“She was thinking of you, see? What I trust now is the inner spirit. Zoe speaks to me in a whisper. I wish you weren’t so angry, Aaron, and would trust me. ‘We are here on earth to love one another, that is all.’”

Krull wondered if that was the Bible? It didn’t sound like the Bible.

Badly Krull wanted to run from the room but couldn’t seem to make his legs move. Knew he should get out of there but could not. Could not look away from the moist crimson wound in the woman’s face.

Now in a lowered voice DeLucca said, “I guess it was you, Aaron?—the talcum powder.”

At first Krull didn’t know what DeLucca meant. Talcum powder?

Then it came to him. The shock of it.

“It was a loving gesture, Aaron. To ‘purify.’”

Krull had been told by the detectives months ago that this information—how, panicked, he’d reacted to having discovered his mother’s
body—would be kept confidential and not be released to the public. Yet somehow, Jacky DeLucca knew.

He’d been Aaron, then. Not Krull. Climbing the stairs to the second floor of that row house smelling of death. And what awaited him, in that room he’d never seen before….

“Poor Aar-on! You loved her.”

Jacky DeLucca spoke warmly and would have embraced him except quickly he stepped away lifting his elbows. It was panic he felt now: Don’t touch! Get away from me! He could not bear it, if this woman touched him.

He was fifteen: his birthday had been the previous week, unheralded. Delray had no awareness of birthdays and no interest in birthdays nor could he have said his son’s exact age, as Delray in his indifference might not have recalled the name of the president of the United States, nor of the governor of New York State. It was enough that some people knew these things, why the hell would
he?
Zoe had never forgotten Aaron’s birthday but Zoe was gone now.

“Why do you look so angry? Or—are you
afraid?
”

DeLucca laughed softly. She was teasing him: she’d backed him against the bed. He had a choice of sitting down heavily on the bed or pushing past her, escaping. But he had a dread of touching her. Seeing that the dark red polish on her fingernails was chipped and her nails were uneven and it came to him in a sudden flash of memory that when he’d discovered Zoe in that bloodied bed smelling of her body Zoe’s fingernails in which she’d taken such pride had been chipped too and broken as if she’d fought desperately with her assailant to save her life.

“To ‘purify’ what was fouled. To ease that poor woman’s shame. I understand, Aaron.”

Krull wanted to ask
But how do you know? Who told you?

“It’s a secret, Aaron. I know. Shouldn’t have said anything to you but wanted you to know—‘Jacky DeLucca is your friend.’ In Zoe’s place, I can watch out for you. So many nasty secrets, Aaron, and this is a beautiful secret we will keep between us. Yes?”

DeLucca was fumbling in a pocket of the salmon-colored slacks. On the palm of her hand she held three pills—darkly shiny as the shells of beetles—she seemed to be offering to Krull? He shook his head,
no.
Whatever these were—speed? Quaaludes?—wasn’t for him. Not at this time of day, and not with this woman. “No? You sure? Well—I don’t want to crash, Aar-on. Nooo not yet.”

She released him. She’d been standing very close to him, breathing into his face. As if accidentally she drew the back of her hand across his belly and groin where he’d become hard and all his senses clamored like a struck bell.

“Excuse me, please. I will be right back.”

DeLucca went to use the bathroom just outside the bedroom door. Again as if she’d been in this house on some previous occasion and was an invited guest now. Krull flushed with indignation. He wasn’t a child, to be manipulated. He was incensed, DeLucca was using the bathroom without troubling to shut the door all the way—he could hear her inside, on the toilet—pressed his hands against his ears and ran from the room and down the stairs thinking he would run out of the house and hide in the barn or better yet in the woods at the rear of the property where frequently he’d hidden as a child for no reason, for the hell of it. Yet on the first floor he paused. Hearing the sound of faucets and plumbing in the old house, the woman’s footsteps overhead, a female’s footsteps that were not his mother’s. Almost calmly he thought
She is waiting for me. She is naked up there.

His heart beat with excitement. His cock had stiffened with blood so that he felt impaled upon it like a creature that has been stabbed and gutted with a sharp blade. Hesitantly he ascended the stairs he had just descended in a panic and there was Jacky DeLucca emerging from the bathroom smiling at him—“Oh! Aar-on there you
are.”
Her voice was teasing and sing-song, her manner was meant to be girlish and shy. She was not fully naked but part-naked: she’d removed the dark V-neck top, and must have removed her brassiere, for her breasts were bare enormous and drooping with prominent nipples like berries or eyes. He could not
look at those breasts and yet he could not look away. Gently DeLucca cupped her breasts in her hands, lifting them. Krull wondered if her breasts were filled with milk—warm sweet milk, to bursting. DeLucca smiled at Krull liking the way he stared at her and in a whispery voice she said, “He isn’t at the garage. He isn’t anywhere. I tried to call him. I looked for him first. He wants to know, you can tell him.” Krull made no sense of this. He had not approached the woman, she had approached him; he saw that her feet were bare. She’d kicked off the open-toed shoes. Still she wore the salmon-colored slacks, that fitted her hips and belly so tightly. She pulled Krull’s head down to her, he was so much taller than she was. She kissed his mouth, the damp crimson mouth enveloping his mouth. There came her tongue into his mouth sudden and darting.

She was pressing against him—her bare, spilling breasts, against Krull. She laughed at him, and led him back into the bedroom. Led him as you’d lead a drunken man, or a blind man. The gold-brocade cover that had been one of Zoe’s purchases was already rumpled and stained as if strenuous couplings had been enacted upon it numerous times. The last thing Krull saw clearly was the gold-glinting cross between the pendulous breasts swinging above him.

Zoe would bless me, where she dwells now.

In her place, I love you!

F
EBRUARY
11, 1984

W
AKING HE HAD NOT KNOWN
what day this was.

Downstairs there was the Sparta
Journal
on the kitchen table left for him, opened and askew—he’d heard Delray slam out of the house a few minutes before—also he’d heard Delray on the phone, his voice raised—seeing now what had upset his father for there on the front page of the paper was the prominent headline—

SPARTA PD: NO NEW “LEADS” IN KRULLER HOMICIDE

—and there was
Zoe Kruller, Victim of Unsolved ’83 Slaying
beneath the photograph the
Journal
had printed how many times Krull could not bear seeing it again!—yet stood hunched over the table, staring.

It was terrible to think—a full year had passed. A full year Zoe had been dead. And the smiling blond woman in the photo continued to smile as if in defiance of her fate, though surely her fate was a mockery of that smile.

Beautiful thick-lashed eyes widened in an expression of naive surrender to whatever was being promised, by way of the camera eye—

Yes! Here I am. Love me.

Further down were photos, seemingly matching, as of brothers, of
Delray Kruller, Edward Diehl.
These photos too had been printed numer
ous times in this paper and had appeared elsewhere, for Sparta police had interviewed these men as
persons of interest
in the case.

Not
suspects
exactly for neither man had ever been arrested.

Must’ve been in disgust that Delray had left this for him. Just as easily, Delray might have torn the God-damned paper into shreds and tossed it away but maybe he’d thought that his son should see. The son of the
murder victim,
and the son of a
person of interest.

Frowning Krull scanned the article, that covered three lengthy columns on the front page and spilled over into page eight. The point of the article seemed to be that on the “first anniversary” of the “unsolved local murder” Sparta police investigators, though working now with state investigators, apparently had “no new evidence, no new information, no new leads, and no new ‘persons of interest’ or ‘suspects’ in the case.”

Krull tore the paper. Krull in a sudden rage.

Wishing he could tear at whoever had written this, printed it. Using his mother’s face to sell papers. A dead woman’s smiling face.

“Fuckers.”

T
HAT EVENING
his aunt Viola called.

“Just checking in, Aaron. Seeing how you are.”

Viola spoke in a hesitant voice. Krull mumbled a vague reply.

“Is my brother home?”

No. Delray was not home.

“You know when he’s coming back?”

No. Krull did not know when Delray was coming back.

“I suppose you saw…”

Yes. He’d seen.

“…damn them why don’t they leave us alone! Why don’t they leave your father alone, he has endured enough.”

Viola was breathing harshly. Possibly, she was sobbing. That kind of quick-breathing sobbing indiscernible from anger.

“Those pictures in the paper! Always the same pictures! Poor Zoe, and poor Delray! You never think what these things must be like for people until they happen to you…. Jesus.”

Delray’s family was a large one and there were relatives scattered across three counties in the southern Adirondacks and along the Black River and the Mohawk River and Krull supposed that they’d all been on the phone that day upset and indignant and resentful at the unexpected news story. And perhaps there were similar stories on local TV, Krull didn’t know and would not investigate.
One-year anniversary of the unsolved murder of Sparta resident thirty-four-year-old Zoe Kruller.

Viola spoke at length, bitterly. Viola said why didn’t the God-damned journalists do a “human interest” story about an innocent man who’d been hounded by police and reporters and his auto repair business near-bankruptcy as a result. Why didn’t they do a story on the family of the
murder victim
whose wounds could never heal, being clawed open by such stories.

Viola asked Krull what he was doing. Krull mumbled what sounded like
Nothing.

In fact Krull had been scrubbing the kitchen floor. At last disgusted at the sticky linoleum underfoot. Using Dutch Cleanser and hot water and a wooden-handled toilet brush to push into those narrow cracks between the counters and the refrigerator and stove where months of filth had accumulated.

“So—what are you having for dinner tonight, Aaron?”

Trying to sound cheery, chatty. Like she really cared for him, her brother’s son.

Krull mumbled he was O.K. He had some things here, Delray had left for him.

“Yes? Like what?”

Krull mumbled inaudibly. Wished to hell his aunt would hang up the phone, this conversation was making him nervous.

“Delray needs to watch over you more, Aaron. He’s going to pieces which isn’t fair for you. He knows this, I’ve talked to him. But where the
hell is he. At the garage they’re always saying ‘Del stepped out for a few minutes.’”

Krull said well, he couldn’t help that. His dad did what his dad wanted to do, he guessed.

“Yes. Right. Your dad always has. That’s the trouble.”

Krull could think of nothing to say. In the background at Viola’s there came a sudden swelling of sound, like a radio. Or a man’s voice, and someone responding. Laughing.

“Aaron, hon—I have to hang up now. I hate to just leave you. It sounds to me like—well, it doesn’t sound good. On this day of all days. ‘One-year anniversary.’ Del should be with you, damn him. You’re not a little kid but still he should take more care with you.” Viola paused. Krull was waiting for her to hang up. He was feeling anxious, resentful. Why’d his aunt call him, if she was just going to hang up? If she wasn’t going to ask if he was hungry, if he was alone and might want to have supper with her that night? In the background a clatter as of bowling pins—was that what that noise meant? Might mean the Ten Pin out on the highway next to B & B Barbeque…. As if she’d just now thought of it Viola said, “Aaron? If you’re alone there and hungry, I could swing around and pick you up. I’m with some people after work, it wouldn’t be any trouble. We could have pizza, or barbecue, O.K.?”

Krull dropped the receiver onto the phone and broke the connection.

Viola didn’t call back.