Man in The Woods (23 page)

“All set, Kate?” Tony’s voice, booming as it is over the speakers, nevertheless holds within it a tremor of uncertainty. And without another moment’s contemplation, Kate not only nods but gives him a double thumbs-up, as if the cool box of Studio 2 were a module inside of which she is about to be launched into space. Too much is on the line. She has mouths to feed, a mortgage to pay. And who knows? Faith, like some errant demon lover, might decide to come back as suddenly as it departed. In the meanwhile, the show must go on.

Kate is in the back of Sonny’s car and her phone rings from the muffling depths of her pocketbook. Chewing gum, lipstick, compact, keys, notebook, wallet, coin from her second anniversary, and, finally, the phone. “Hello?” she says.

“Mom!”

“Ruby, what’s going on?”

“Mom, come home, please.”

“I’m in the car right now. Tell me what’s going on.”

“Paul’s sister.” She says something after that but it is buried beneath an avalanche of sobs.

“Ruby, please. Take a breath. Okay? Can you do that?”

Sonny recklessly passes a station wagon and starts to drive faster.

Ruby takes a deep breath; something in the back of her throat creaks like a door.

“Tell me what happened, baby. Can you do that? Tell me—Paul’s sister.”

“I gave her the cross,” Ruby says. “The most beautiful cross.”

“I know you did.”

“A car hit her, Mom.”

“Hit her? A car hit her?”

“When she was putting the mail.”

“Did she get hit, or did her car get hit?”

“She was IN her car, Mom!”

“Okay, baby, please, please try to stay calm. Can you put Paul on the phone for me?”

“He’s not here. He’s going to the hospital.”

“You’re alone?” Annoyance whirrs within Kate.

“Hello? Kate?” It’s Evangeline’s voice now at the other end of the line. Apparently, Ruby has just handed the phone over to her. “Paul just left for Northern Windsor Hospital. Annabelle’s car got hit while she was making her deliveries. And I’m here, I’m staying with Ruby.”

“Is Annabelle…”

“She’s alive. We don’t know how bad, but it looks like she’s going to make it. Cheryl called her brother. He’s at Mount Sinai in New York but he’s getting in touch with the doctors up here, so we’re sort of waiting on that.”

This makes very little sense to Kate, though she has noticed that people in Leyden feel better when they can personalize their experiences with the outside world, feeling that knowing somebody’s name, or knowing somebody who knows somebody else, will somehow guarantee them better treatment, whether it’s at the bank or the post office or the farmer’s market or the emergency room. If anyone thinks that any good will come from having someone’s brother call the ER—a brother who is basically
a med student
—Kate doesn’t know why she begrudges them their little networking fantasy, but she does, she can’t help herself: she does. And the irritation generalizes itself to instantly include all the other people in Leyden who refer to the bank tellers by name, who bring something from Buttercrust Bakery and insist on saying
The poppy seed muffins were baked by Charles
, who say their morning eggs come from Bill’s farm, and that George, who turns out to be a UPS driver, delivered their new lamp with a dent in the shade. Everything so fucking personal.

Kate takes a deep breath; she is aware of her soul’s sudden sourness. Where is the grace, the pity, where is the warmth? They have all fled, along with God…Were they all just the tail tied to the kite that was her faith, and now that the string has snapped, have they all disappeared into the wild blue?

“Um…Kate?” Evangeline’s voice is low, confidential. “I’m out on the patio. Ruby keeps on talking about how she gave Annabelle her cross and it was supposed to be good luck.”

Kate hears Ruby’s voice calling for Evangeline in the background.

“I’m out here,” she calls back.

“Evangeline?” Ruby shrieks. It is the voice of a terrified child in a universe where nothing is guaranteed and nothing can stop bad things from happening, not prayers, not candles, not sermons, not holy water, not songs, nor dances, not crosses.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Sergeant Lee Tarwater stands in front of Jerry Caltagirone, wringing his long white hands as he speaks. Caltagirone used to think Tarwater was a very worried man, maybe too worried to be police, until he learned Tarwater had eczema and was rubbing lotion into his skin. “We got two people up front,” Tarwater says, “father-daughter, and they want to talk to someone about that homicide in Martingham last November. That’s you, right?”

And with no more preparation than that, a nice break in the case, which might seem like luck to some but Caltagirone believes you make your own luck when you are police, you make it by working the case, stirring the pot until stuff starts to surface.

Tarwater comes back from the front with the father and daughter in tow. They are both on the small side and Tarwater looms over them. He dumps them on Caltagirone, but not before giving the daughter a look-over, bottom to top, and back to bottom. She’s sixteen years old and she may as well be holding a sign that says
I AM HERE AGAINST MY WILL
. She’s maybe five feet tall, tan, dark hair, skinny enough to race at Belmont, with a stubborn expression that Caltagirone knows is mainly bluff—if she really knew how to get her own way she wouldn’t be here. Her father is dressed to look rich, which Caltagirone is willing to grant him. He’s not much taller than his daughter, but with a
D
and a
G
on his sunglasses, a sporty little sweater, and a Rolex. His name is Alan Slouka and her name is Marmont.

Caltagirone gets them a couple of chairs and the father looks at the daughter, telling her with his eyes that he wants her to speak up. She looks right back at him; she might be afraid of some things, but her father isn’t one of them. “All right,” Slouka says, “I’ll start the ball rolling. My daughter here—I’m single-parenting—”

“Right,” Marmont says.

“Well, I am,” he says. “You may not like it, but I am. Anyhow, Marmont and I moved to Purchase a little over two years ago, and, without my being aware of it, Marmont developed an attachment to one of the young men who work on our property.”

Caltagirone shifts his weight on his new ergonomic chair, paid for by himself, with a thickly padded back and inflatable lumbar support. “And this is about the homicide last November,” he says, raising his pneumatic contour coccyx-cut seat an inch or two. He’s already so much larger than the Sloukas, he figures he may as well go all the way.

“Yes, it is,” the father says. He looks at his daughter. “You want me to go on?”

“You like telling it,” she says.

“No,” he says, the anger coming up through his voice, “I like telling the truth. In fact, I am addicted to telling the truth.” Turning to Caltagirone, he smiles, shrugs. “My daughter and this individual were in the park”—he says the word
park
as if it were the moral equivalent of a by-the-hour motel—“and they were hiding, and…” He takes a breath. “Let’s say they were not in their Sunday best, when they saw a man being attacked.”

Caltagirone looks at the girl. Suddenly, Marmont is all he is interested in. As far as he is concerned, the father has ceased to exist, and he wants her to feel it, too, feel her own importance.

“You saw this?”

She nods.

“And now…” He looks at his watch. It’s June 3. “Seven months later, you’re here?”

She shrugs. And then says, “Sorry,” in a whisper.

Even this modicum of mental anguish is hard for her father to witness and he puts a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “She had reasons to remain silent. They were afraid I would be angry about the fact that one of my employees was committing an act of statutory rape against my daughter. They were afraid I would fire him, or perhaps call the police, and because he is an illegal, they were afraid he would be deported, even without the sex charges.”

“Fear’s a bitch,” Caltagirone says to Marmont. She smiles distantly, and she’s as far from believing he is sympathetic to her as she is from finding him attractive, and he knows it. It might be best to work her through the father, after all.

“Look here,” Caltagirone says. “Withholding material information from the police during the investigation of a felony is a crime. I’m sure your father has already explained that to you.”

“I was going to come down here with my lawyer,” Slouka says. “Maybe I should have.”

The daughter gives him a look; she thinks maybe he should have, too.

Caltagirone opens the bottom drawer of his desk, which squeals like an anguished pig. “Jesus, Jerry, grease that thing!” one of the cops shouts from across the room. Caltagirone rifles through thirty or forty hanging folders, all of them unlabeled. “Here we go,” he says, breathing audibly. He opens the folder and pulls out a photograph of a man and a woman on a pier, taken in the evening, with a Ferris wheel in the background, bejeweled like a crown with red, yellow, white, and blue lights. The woman is blond, with broad, masculine shoulders, a wide smile, dressed as if to go sailing, and the man, dark-haired, barrel-chested, is pointing at the camera with his mouth half-open, maybe clowning around and pretending to sing, maybe telling whoever was taking the picture to stop.

“That’s William Claff, beaten to death, and you saw it happen,” Caltagirone says, tapping his finger on Will’s face. “Nobody deserves that. You understand?”

“Sure,” Marmont says. “I’m here aren’t I?”

“No one, not on my watch.” Caltagirone realizes the girl has already agreed it shouldn’t happen and there’s no need to continue emphasizing the fact. “And this lady here? It’s killing her, too. She had to fly across the country to identify the body, all by herself. She’s got no family. This man was all she had in the whole world. You understand me? You need to tell me what you saw.”

“It was pretty hard to see,” Marmont says.

“You told me you saw,” her father says.

“All right,” Caltagirone says. “Let’s start with the easy stuff. When you pulled into the parking lot, did you see another car? Do you remember that?”

“The person I was with doesn’t own a car,
he doesn’t make enough money
. And my car was in the shop. We rode our bikes and just stowed them in the woods and walked it.”

“So you were never in the parking lot?”

“No. But it doesn’t matter. I saw him.”

“Who?”

“Him.” Marmont juts her chin toward the photo in Caltagirone’s hand. “He was in a track suit.”

“This man here’s with God,” Caltagirone says. “But we’re here, we’re here right now, right now. It’s the other guy that matters.”

Marmont looks as if she’s trying to find a way to disagree, but she nods yes. “The other guy was wearing a leather jacket.”

“Here we go,” says Caltagirone.

“He was younger,” she says. “I sort of suck at telling how old adults are. I think everybody’s sort of forty.”

Her father smiles, and says to Caltagirone, “I’m forty,” as if there might be something just a little bit endearing about that.

“What else?” Caltagirone asks. “Clothes? Anything at all.”

“He had brown hair, cut sort of long, like folk rock. And boots.”

“Boots? Cowboy boots?”

“No. Work shoes. Athletic. No beard, no mustache, nothing to stand out. He just seemed regular, until the fight.”

“What did he seem like?”

“Really mad. Hey, I gotta go to the bathroom.”

“Can it wait?” Caltagirone asks.

“I’ve been waiting.”

Caltagirone sends her back to the waiting room and when she’s gone her father suddenly starts acting as if he regrets ever bringing her to the station in the first place. Caltagirone’s guess is that for whatever reason she finally told him what she had seen and told him about the guy she was screwing and Dad blew up and threw her in the Lexus and brought her in to teach her a lesson. Now he wants to tell him what a good kid Marmont is, and what a tough time the both of them have had since her mother died. The way he puts it it seems as if the mother’s body isn’t cold yet but it turns out she’s been dead since Marmont was four years old. Then Slouka announces he’s in the rock business, which Caltagirone first takes to mean he builds driveways or has a masonry contracting company, but what it really means is he does concert promotion and he’s letting Caltagirone know that if he ever wants tickets to, say, a Neil Diamond show at the Garden or maybe Springsteen at the Meadowlands, Slouka would be more than glad to hook him up. Leaning halfway across the desk, he asks Caltagirone, “How do you think we ought to handle the boy? Of course he’s fired, but I don’t know if we need to make any more trouble for him than that.” As if this was something the two of them were going to decide together.

“We gotta bring him in, too.”

“Easier said than done,” Slouka says.

Just then Marmont returns, flicking tap water off her fingertips as she walks. “There was some lady crying in there,” she announces, as if she had seen a woodpecker.

“I want you to look at another picture for me,” Caltagirone tells her. He reaches into his folder, produces a five-by-seven color photo of a round-faced, jowly guy with swept-back hair and sunken eyes. He’s wearing a colorful Hawaiian shirt, a riot of pineapples and parrots. His expression is blank but somehow menacing—you’d know that if you knew anything about menace, if you knew that when a man puts on a blank mask it usually means there’s going to be hell to pay.

Marmont reaches for the picture but stops herself. “Can I hold it?”

“Be my guest,” Caltagirone says.

The overheads put a glare on the glossy finish and Marmont tilts the photograph to get a better look. “Is this the guy?” she asks.

“You tell me.”

“His hair’s different.”

“Hair’ll do that.”

“Not the eyes though,” she says.

“Be careful here, honey,” Slouka says.

“You don’t need to worry about this guy,” Caltagirone says.

“Well it’s totally him,” Marmont says.

“Totally who?” Caltagirone says, narrowing his eyes.

“The guy we saw.” She puts up her fists. Her father must have told her to go easy on the jewelry; there are pale circles on her fingers where the rings used to be.

“You sure?” Caltagirone says. Marmont nods and then Caltagirone says, “You’re positive.”

“Yeah,” Marmont says.

“Who is this man?” Slouka asks.

Caltagirone turns slowly toward him, as if he’s momentarily forgotten his existence. “He collects for bookies out in Los Angeles.” Caltagirone opens the middle drawer of his desk and pulls out his tape recorder. He peers through the smudgy, postage-stamp-size window on the recorder’s side, to make sure there is a microcassette loaded in, and then presses the play button to make sure there is still juice in the triple A’s.

“What about the dog?” Marmont says.

“The dog?” Caltagirone asks.

“They were fighting about a dog,” Marmont says. “The runner guy was kicking the dog and…” Marmont flutters the picture; it looks for a moment as if the Hawaiian is nodding his head in agreement. “This guy was trying to stop him. That’s why we were for him. I mean, before we knew how far it was going to go.”

Caltagirone writes the word
dog
on the corner of his desk pad, and circles it. Then he remembers talking to the landlord about the dog and the lady from Philadelphia who knew Claff as Robert King, who said that Claff stole her dog, and he’s already deduced that the dog leads nowhere, the dog, wherever it is, is collateral damage, and Caltagirone crosses the word out, first with a line, then with another line, and then he rubs the point of his Rollerball over and over the word until it is invisible.