Man in The Woods (9 page)

CHAPTER NINE

“Don’t touch nothing more in the apartment,” Jerry Caltagirone says to Frank Mazzerelli. “I’m going to send someone over there and matter of fact I’m going over myself. As far as I’m concerned, you touch anything in there you’re tampering with evidence. But you know what? I still don’t understand why you waited this long to come in.”

On Mazzerelli’s request, they have left the station and are sitting across from each other at a sticky little table at a nearby Wendy’s. “Some reason for that?” Caltagirone persists. “You’d think you’d know better.” He is recovering from the walk over, having gained nearly fifty pounds in the past couple of years. His heart is still not used to the increased work, and it is always a bit exhausted and a little bit behind, or so it seems to Caltagirone: there is always some part of his body where the heart has failed to send the proper amount of blood and he feels cold and clammy either around his feet or his hands, and sometimes between his shoulder blades, assuming they are still in there, somewhere.

Mazzerelli shakes his head, extends his lower lip. He feels monstrously unlucky. True, he chose this place because he didn’t want to talk to Caltagirone or anyone else at the station—just smelling that cop smell of aftershave and shoe polish and onions and tobacco-tinged collars, seeing that bleak cop light falling from the fluorescents, those metal desks with the family pictures four years out of date, just five minutes in that place was more than he could take. But what were the odds, what were the
fucking odds
against walking away from Depot Plaza and ending up in this Wendy’s and the first thing he sees is the one man he’s been with in the past year and a half? The guy’s name is Lester Ortiz, at least that’s the name he gave, and he doesn’t give the slightest flicker when Frank walks in. Maybe he feels shitty being seen working behind the counter in this place like some kid. As Frank remembers it, Ortiz said he taught in the high school. Frank looks at his watch. It’s after four, so maybe this is Ortiz’s after-school gig, though even thinking this way is dumb since what reason is there to believe a thing Ortiz said, up to and including his name, even though Frank himself had been more or less honest, saying his right name, his right first name anyhow, he didn’t say his family name, and also saying Yonkers when Ortiz asked him, though Frank wasn’t living in Yonkers anymore, and probably never would again, in fact he more or less held his breath when he passed the sign for the Yonkers exit when he drove into the city, but still it was where he was from, it was the place he worked, spent all those years, it was, as a friend used to say, the place where the deal was done.

“I don’t follow the news except in baseball season,” Frank says. He can feel Ortiz’s eyes on him. “But I saw the picture, and here I am.”

“And you say this guy, you knew him to be Alfred Krane, with a K.”

“That’s right,” Frank says. “Which I gather is not his real name.”

“Who the fuck knows at this point,” says Caltagirone. “We ran his prints, we got no hits. And we got three different kinds of ID, with another name on each one. We figured our best bet is the driver’s license, but the address on it doesn’t exist and the California DMV doesn’t even have him in their system, which is not too unusual from what I can tell. And now you—what’d you call him?”

“Klein,” Frank says. “Alfred Klein.”

“Klein or Krane?” Caltagirone says.

“Krane,” says Frank.

“Yeah, but you said Klein,” Caltagirone presses.

“It was just a mistake. I meant Krane.”

Caltagirone looks at Frank for an extra couple of moments and then lets it go. “Yeah, well whatever name he gave you—” Caltagirone waves his fingers through the air, indicating nothingness, powerlessness, a world of false leads and blind alleys, the tedium of things not adding up. “Did you ask him for any proof when you rented to him?”

“What kind of proof?” Frank says.

“Of identity,” Caltagirone says. His tray holds a milkshake, three hamburgers, a large order of fries, and some sort of pie. He had ordered freely, but now, suddenly, he is doing his best to resist what appetite has put before him. “Proof of employment, bank account, references. This guy comes to you, you don’t know him, he could be wanted in six states. I think you’d want a little reassurance.”

“That’s not how I do it,” Frank says. He holds a French fry between his thumb and forefinger, shakes off some of the salt. Ortiz is working hard behind the counter; he seems to be managing the place, barking orders at the four teenagers running the counter and six more of them back in the kitchen, but he also seems to be doing the same work as everybody else. “I got my own method,” Frank adds, which he immediately regrets. Years on the job taught him that the road to hell is paved with extra words. People who know how the world works say as little as possible.

“Yeah,” Caltagirone says. “I got that. Well your
method
”—Caltagirone says the word as if it were in itself suspect—“is what maybe put this whole mess in my vestibule.” He hurriedly, angrily unwraps one of the hamburgers, pokes it with his forefinger, looks at it as if it were an uninvited guest. He starts to wrap it up again but reverses himself and picks it up, takes a large bite, and drops it back onto the tray.

Frank folds his arms over his chest. He wants to ask Caltagirone how renting out an apartment without running a credit check on the tenant has anything to do with anything, but he holds it back.

“This guy’s three days away from potter’s field, you know?” Caltagirone says. “I got prints going nowhere, I got no witnesses, and I got no motive because I don’t know who the fuck this guy even was so how am I supposed to know who wants to beat the shit out of him? And speaking of shit, someone took himself a dump about a hundred yards away from the crime. You know what they’re calling me down at the station? I come in it’s like Hey Bag of Shit, How you doin’, Bag of Shit, Good night, Bag of Shit.”

“Is everything okay here, gentlemen?” It’s Ortiz, he’s standing there like the table’s covered by a white tablecloth and he’s holding the cork from the wine bottle for them to sniff. “Is there anything else we can help you with?” He’s saying this with a straight face and mostly looking at Caltagirone. Frank feels like someone’s tossed a bucket of horse piss in his face.

“We’re good,” says Caltagirone, acting like there’s nothing out of the way about some guy in a Wendy’s coming to your table.

“Okay,” says Ortiz. “Just making sure. Customer satisfaction is job number one.”

But he just stands there, in his Wendy’s apron and a kind of shower cap, with the headset that connects him to all the important goings-on behind the counter and in the kitchen. Ortiz seems to have fallen into a trance and by now Frank has fixed his own gaze so powerfully on his own hands that his fingers look like they’re melding together. At last, Ortiz snaps out of it and comes to his senses. “Okay, enjoy,” he says, and heads back to the counter, where by now there’s got to be at least fifteen people waiting for their orders, which tells Frank that headset or no headset, Ortiz’s responsibility is no different from any seventeen-year-old kid’s working the counter, because if he was the manager his stepping away from the counter for a couple of minutes wouldn’t have caused a logjam.

“I’ll tell you another thing,” Frank says to Caltagirone, feeling suddenly expansive from the relief of Ortiz’s leaving. He takes a deep breath. “Another lie that guy told me.” He taps the side of his head, by which he means he is just now thinking of it. “He had a dog.”

“He had a dog,” Caltagirone repeats.

“Yeah, he had a dog,” says Frank.

“And what? He told you he didn’t have a dog?”

“No, he never said nothing about it. Nothing about a dog one way or the other. It was a lie of o-mission.”

“All right,” says Caltagirone, “he had a dog. That could be something.”

“He definitely had a dog,” Frank says. “I went into his apartment and there was a bag of dog food, and a bowl, plus dog hair on the floor, a lot of it.”

“I don’t want you going in that apartment,” Caltagirone says.

“Got it,” says Frank. “Next forty-eight hours it’s all yours. But after that…” Frank shrugs, as if his right to clean that place out and get it rented again is an immutable law of nature.

“So the dog ain’t there, right?” Caltagirone says.

“No, no dog.”

“I’m thinking that sometimes dogs get microchipped,” Caltagirone says. “We get the dog, we check out the microchip, that could be the thing. If he put a microchip in that dog it’s because he don’t want it going lost, in which case I’ll bet you anything he gives the vet his real information, name, telephone number. Some guy going to the trouble plus expense having his dog microchipped, it would pretty much defeat the whole purpose if he puts down a bunch of bullshit on the forms.”

“Yeah, but I don’t have the dog,” Frank says.

“I’m saying if you did,” says Caltagirone.

Suddenly, practically tearing the tissue paper, Caltagirone unwraps another of his hamburgers and eats it. He chews the bun and the meat, moving it around his mouth in a circle; Frank imagines the food tumbling around like laundry in a dryer. Barely giving himself time to swallow, Caltagirone begins on the third hamburger. It’s as if he knows he has perhaps a minute in which he can slip the collar of cause and effect, a minute of waking dream in which he can eat the way he bitterly imagines other people eating—freely, lustily, and without consequence. He believes that the massive coat of calories he wears is a special curse he bears, a piece of metabolic misfortune. He has several ways of consuming food that come down to magical eating—eating very very quickly is one way, breaking the food into pieces is another, as are eating while standing up, eating after midnight, and eating in the car. Yet, for the most part, he knows he will one day collapse at his desk or keel over in the street face-first and end up with a mouth full of blood and porcelain or black out dead in the car and run it right through a plate-glass window and every last person who knows him—even his own wife and kids—will think,
What the fuck, Jerry? What did you think was going to happen?

“My thing is,” Caltagirone says to Frank, “someone’s waiting for this guy.” As he speaks, he rewraps what is left of his third hamburger, and then his hand suddenly manages to dump the order of fries onto the tray. “Maybe he was a piece of shit,” Caltagirone says, staring at the oily heap of fried potatoes, “and maybe at the end of the day we’re going to figure this for a misdemeanor homicide, but right now there’s someone out there waiting for him and maybe worrying themselves sick, maybe his mother, or his sister, maybe he’s married, and I’m going to put it to rest for them because knowing someone is dead is better than just not knowing and waiting and waiting for something that don’t ever happen.”

“Nothing in Missing Persons?” Frank asks. A little tremor of nostalgia for the job goes through him. The thing about the job, whatever bad you could say about it—and Frank hated it, hated the way people looked at him, hated the way people hated him, he hated the precinct and just about every last person in it—but the thing about the job was you were always up to something, you were always doing or maybe you were about to do or you just got through doing something that mattered.

“I keep checking,” Caltagirone says. “Maybe someone’s waiting for a little more time to pass. Or maybe they haven’t figured out he’s missing yet.” Detective Caltagirone pries the plastic cover off his cup of Coke and tips it a little, spilling soda on all his fries and the remains of his hamburgers, like he’s putting out a fire.

CHAPTER TEN

Kate has been invited to speak before a group in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania—a gathering that she calls The Convocation of Extremely Liberal Ministers and Their Life Partners, by which Paul takes her to mean they are either gay or offbeat in some other way that makes them worthy of Kate’s barbed, teasing affection. The ministers have sent a driver from a nearby car service, and at eight forty-five on a cold Tuesday morning Shep is barking urgently at the window as a blue Ford Taurus pulls in. The back bumper bears a silver-and-purple bumper sticker that reads
ALL MEN ARE IDIOTS AND MY HUSBAND IS THEIR KING
, but the person driving the car is a man with a Nashville pompadour and black-framed glasses, the collar of his peacoat turned up against the wind. He is looking skeptically at the house and then goes back to the car and consults a piece of paper.

“They didn’t send a limo or even a town car,” Kate says, turning away from the window. “My career’s in free fall!” She puts her arms around Paul and whispers into his ear, “I feel you dripping out of me.”

His smile has a frozen quality. Ordinarily, he enjoys this benignly smutty side of Kate, and has even, with an inward boastfulness, taken some credit for it himself, believing her when she tells him that she used to be entirely circumspect in her conjugal utterances, and that if the Old Her would somehow be able to overhear the New Her, the Old Her’s face would scald with embarrassment. But today does not feel ordinary, and Kate’s dirty talk seems oddly lacking in its usual charm—it may come down to this: he does not wish to be reminded of this morning’s pleasure. It is not as if all the rituals and joys of his former life have come to a halt, but it seems as if his self, this inchoate “I” whom he pictured as the initiator and the judge of his daily actions, has now been joined by its long-lost, never-before-acknowledged, heretofore-lingering-in-the-shadows twin, a twin whose very existence is dependent on its negative capacity, who will say no to every yes.

“Hey,” Kate says, touching his face. She wonders for a moment if she should stay home.

“Don’t forget to tip the driver,” he says.

“Don’t you worry your pretty little head about it,” Kate says. She rises on her toes and kisses his forehead.

Paul watches out the window, while filling the kettle at the kitchen sink. The driver opens the door for her and glances at her ass as she climbs into the backseat. The water drums into the kettle. Shep is sitting close to him now, his tail swishing back and forth on the kitchen floor. Shep is looking particularly jolly. He seems to be thinking, Oh good, she’s gone, let’s grill a couple of steaks and take naps, side by side. The Taurus backs up, begins its three-point turn. Paul sees his own reflection in the tarnished convex of the teakettle, and he thinks,
He will never watch anyone from the window, he won’t ever hear the sound of water. He doesn’t exist
.

Paul follows the dog onto the flagstone patio, off the kitchen. The sound of the band saw is coming from the workshop, where Evangeline has been since eight o’clock. She always brings a thermos filled with espresso generously sweetened with raw sugar; it’s a pleasure to drink coffee with her in the morning, maybe bum an American Spirit off her. But he has promised Kate—and Ruby—that he will go to Windsor Day School this morning to see the school assembly, the theme of which is “Countdown to the New Millennium,” in which Ruby has an undisclosed role. He must shower, but first he goes back to his computer and rather than typing Recent Deaths Westchester he types Murder Westchester and when he can find nothing like that he types in Dead Body Martingham State Park, though it feels almost as if he is confessing to the police by doing so. Yet even with so forward a question he comes up with nothing and he wonders how this man’s death can go unnoted. He tries to tell himself this is good news, he even wonders for a moment, piercingly, punishingly, if the man actually died. Maybe. Maybe he had just lost consciousness and Paul, overwhelmed by adrenaline, had missed the pulse, assumed the worst, and fifteen minutes later the man had crawled out of the woods. Yet what is far more likely, Paul thinks, is that he is phrasing the question wrong. He searches the Internet for the names of the local newspapers in or near Tarrytown but he comes up with none and can’t imagine what they’d be called—the
Tarrytown Tribune
? The
Westchester Times
?—and of course there is no one he can ask. He wanders the Internet feeling not only lost but
followed
, remembering that everything you type and everywhere you “go” is retrievable, that the disk inside of the computer keeps an indelible record of your activities, and sometimes the police can simply yank the disk out of its casing and use it as evidence.

His time at the computer is brought to a sudden conclusion by someone calling his name. It takes him a moment to realize it’s Evangeline, calling out from downstairs. Every surprise feels as if the bottom has just dropped out of life.

“I’m up here,” Paul says, his voice sounding far too intense.

There is a moment’s silence before he hears Evangeline’s footsteps coming up the stairs, rising up toward him with an ever-increasing sound—she has a heavy gait; her slender legs are not made to move the freight of her steel-toed work boots.

She has a mild, open face, with dark eyebrows and preternaturally blue eyes, and wears her hair pulled back in a Jeffersonian ponytail. Today she’s wearing wide-wale corduroy pants and a fleece vest over a brown-and-red Carhartt shirt, with pearl studs in her ears. The studs are new, probably a gift from her parents in New Orleans, who are trying to lure her back to the kind of life they had once envisioned for her by sending her jewelry, cashmere sweaters, gift certificates to Leisure Time, Leyden’s day spa, things they hope might lead her away from her life of lesbianism and carpentry.

“Are you okay?” she asks.

“Yeah, I’m good,” Paul says. “I’m sort of late.”

“Really? Late for what?”

“Oh, there’s a thing at Ruby’s school. Kate’s giving a talk so I’m going to go instead.”

Evangeline takes a deep breath, nods. “You’re so good,” she says. It sounds as if she might be poking a bit of fun at him, but her eyes radiate tenderness. “Anyhow,” she goes on, “we’re getting a delivery. George is here. I’m assuming it’s the teak, which is very exciting, yes?”

Paul thinks for a moment. George? Oh yes, George. The UPS driver. Evangeline knows everyone’s name, every trucker, every supplier, every parts salesman. She believes everyone is connected, and we’re all in it together. “Is he waiting for me to sign for it?” Paul asks.

“I can do it,” says Evangeline.

He watches as she turns, walks down the steps. She rolls her shoulders as she walks; she has a broad, flat bottom. Paul lowers his eyes, annoyed with himself for invading her privacy.

Suddenly, Evangeline stops, halfway down the stairs, and turns. “Do you want me to keep Sheppy with me?” she says. “He’s getting used to the noise.”

“Sure, that would be nice,” says Paul.

Shep is downstairs, near the steps. He has found a spot where he can have the heat of the radiator, see two and a half rooms of the first floor, and keep an eye on the staircase. Though he lies flat on the bare wood, his eyes are alert.

“You hear that, Sheppy?” Evangeline says. “You’re going to the shop with me. And mostly I’ll be checking the new wood and organizing stuff so you won’t even have to listen to that nasty old saw.”

Having heard his name again, Shep slowly rises—he seems headed for arthritis further down the road—and when Evangeline has descended the stairs he stands next to her, as if guarding her.

“What an awesome dog,” Evangeline says. “You were so lucky to find him. It’s so great how things can work out.” She locks her fingers together, illustrating a universe in which the pieces fit together beautifully.

Windsor Day School is housed in a nineteenth-century Georgian mansion, surrounded by locust trees. For a century and a half the house was the property of a stern mercantile family named Norris, and it was large enough to contain the school’s limited enrollment. But now that the number of people with money has increased in Windsor County, the eighteen-room house is no longer sufficient. A new, modern building is under construction, next to the old building, which will be, once construction is complete, demoted to administrative use.

Everyone involved in Windsor Day’s expansion is supposedly making an effort to preserve some of the school’s former grandeur, protecting as many trees as possible and roping off the locally famous peony garden from the backhoe’s blade. The faux-Roman statuary have been cordoned off with yellow tape, as if they were part of a crime scene, and the school’s governing body has agreed to absorb untold extra expense so that the new parking area will not disturb the grave of Caroline Norris, Windsor Day’s original benefactress and its first headmistress. Still, the nature of the place has been forever altered, and the presence of a huge excavation drains not only the beauty but the meaning from the property in a way that seems irrevocable to Paul. Now, those trees, the statuary, even the house itself are like animals in a zoo, silent testaments to their own subjugation.

Paul knows this property from when he first came to Windsor County as a twenty-year-old, after a summer working on a fishing boat in Alaska. He had come to Leyden ostensibly in pursuit of a girl named Roberta McNulty, whom he had met in Seward, where she was sunning herself on a warm Alaska afternoon on the shores of Resurrection Bay. She was a high school senior, traveling with her parents and her younger brother, but she and Paul managed to steal time and privacy, and Paul felt for her everything from admiration to lust.
Come see me
, she whispered in his ear during their final good-bye, with her entire family standing twenty feet away, her father’s foot resting on his suitcase, her mother with her oddly short arms folded over her fulsome chest.
I will
, he whispered back.
I promise
.

When Paul collected his final week’s check from his boss he immediately set off for her hometown of Leyden, New York. It was good to have someplace he needed to be, and good to think there was someone who might be waiting for him, someone to whom, however tangentially, he was obligated. He had never broken a promise, never, and he never intended to. He made his way, slowly, forwarded like a piece of mail with the minimum postage, traveling on boats, buses, trains, and in the backseats of those passing motorists he could entice with his thumb and good looks. He figured the journey would take, at most, two weeks, but certain distractions presented themselves on the way. He ran out of money, he helped to put out a forest fire, he joined in a frantic, futile search for an insurance claims adjustor who absconded with a neighbor’s five-year-old son, he dislocated his shoulder in a school-yard basketball game, he ended up staying three weeks in Colorado Springs with two brothers who picked him up on the highway one evening when he was running a fever of a hundred and two, he met a guy who made mandolins who patiently taught him a lot about woodworking and wood itself, he fell under the spell of a slender, sad-faced girl who worked in a bakery in Lima, Ohio, and spent a week kissing her and listening to her dream of becoming a songwriter, all the while trying to keep his heart fastened to the image of Roberta McNulty. The memory of her was starting to cloud over. He imagined arriving in Leyden, going to her high school as it was letting out for the afternoon, with the idea of surprising her, and then failing to pick her out from the rush of students leaving the building. It wasn’t as if he no longer remembered her, but there was no one thing he remembered about her as vividly as he remembered the barely audible gasp of breath she took before speaking, and the smell of chocolate on her fingers as she stroked the side of his face.

When he finally arrived in Leyden, it was winter. There was no snow, only sheets of cold rain. The village reminded him of Connecticut, the people in a stupor of comfort, the little shops, the penny-candy mentality of the place, nothing like the bare-knuckled beauty of Alaska. On his first night he went to a bar, with just enough money left for a beer, and met Walter Seifert, an elderly radio and TV repairman from Prague whose wife had died a few months ago, and Seifert told Paul he could stay at his house on Belmont Street for thirty dollars a week. Living next door to Seifert was a boisterous drunk named Dave Markay, who, with his longtime buddy named Butch Kirkwood, also a steady drinker but not nearly so boisterous, had a house-painting company called True Colors. Dave saw Paul scraping the ice off Seifert’s front walk and asked him if he wanted to work as a painter for seven dollars an hour, and Paul, who had always been in the habit of letting things happen to him, said it sounded like a fine idea, and the next day he was at the Norris house, which was already Windsor Day School, painting side by side on the second floor with Dave and Butch to the strains of the Allman Brothers while the teachers and the students did their best to work around them.

Weeks went by. There was always some reason to delay getting in touch with Roberta. He had lost her phone number, he couldn’t recall her address, he was dead tired at night, he was waiting to save a little money so he could come to her as a grown-up rather than just some pathetic kid—if she’d wanted a little boy there were plenty of those to chose from at her high school. But as bad luck would have it, Roberta’s father owned an office-supply shop, and he appeared one morning at Windsor Day, delivering an electric typewriter. McNulty took a moment to place Paul but once he did he wasted no time letting him know that the distant good manners he had shown Paul in Alaska would not prevail here on McNulty’s home ground.

“Would you mind telling me what in the hell you are doing here?” he asked, and when Paul, not trusting himself to give a calm, masterful answer, remained silent, McNulty muttered, shook his head, and walked away.

Now, whatever chance the reunion had of rekindling the attraction they’d felt for each other on the chilly, rocky shore of Resurrection Bay would be wrecked by misunderstanding and resentment. But by the time Paul went to bed he was, in truth, giving more thought to the recurring pain in his shoulder than to the botched reunion with Roberta. Dave had given him a book called
Heal It Yourself
, which had a whole section about shoulder injuries, and Paul had fallen asleep with that book on his chest and the interrogating glare of his bedside lamp not six inches from his face.