Man With a Squirrel (2 page)

In the evening, and until they went to bed, Fred looked out the front windows from time to time. After that it was harder, because Molly's bedroom was in the back of the house, overlooking the backyard, with its now-dormant wasps and lilacs hunkered down waiting for spring. The kids had their bedrooms in the front and he would disturb Terry or Sam by going in after they were supposed to be asleep.

Fred made himself wake up at three-thirty, roamed through the dark house, and looked out the windows of the living room. The street was dark and empty. He went out to the sidewalk and looked up and down the quiet, mildly prosperous street of single-family houses with small yards showing black grass and shaped bushes.

2

Fred didn't tell Molly, but he began looking out the front windows every morning at around three; and in a week or so it paid off: he saw the man watching from across the street, bent over, moving from one foot to the other, stepping down toe-first, as if both the earth and loss of contact with it gave equal torment. It was as if his feet had been skinned, or the earth burned, or both. The man wore a long dark coat, and a cloth cap with a brim. He was a dark shape under the pine tree that decorated the front of the house across the way, and he would have been hard to see in the shadow there except that he wouldn't keep still.

Fred had slipped on a pair of khakis when he got up, and he ran barefoot out the kitchen door, through the yard and the side gate.

The man made no attempt to run, or even to dodge, when he saw Fred coming. Fred, filled with anxiety for Molly, and with the wrath that accompanies sudden action, had to stop short before he ran the old man down. He stood there moving his feet in place.

Fred took hold of the sleeve of his coat. It was a herringbone, threadbare, through which he could perceive the thinness of the old man's arm.

“What do you want?” Fred asked.

The old man looked at him with a vacant, watery stare. He gulped as if there were speech somewhere in his past, which he hoped to find again. “Taxi waiting,” he said.

Fred looked up and down the quiet suburban street, seeing nothing of the kind. “You were here last week. Why?”

“I don't sleep,” the old man said. “Are you arresting me?”

Fred still held the man's arm. He let go of it, embarrassed. When the man turned and started walking toward the corner Fred stayed beside him. The sidewalk was cold on his feet.

“You are not Jeff,” the old man said.

“My name is Fred,” Fred said.

“I thought my daughter lived in that house,” the man said. His voice was thin and discouraged. It had very little of the tremble or modulation of a living voice. It was a voice on its last legs.

They turned the corner. A Cambridge taxi idled under a naked maple tree, its meter on, its radio quietly feeding an all-night talk show to the dozing driver. The inside of the glass was fogged with his breath.

“The woman who lives here, her father passed away years ago,” Fred said. The old man was deluded. He had seen Molly in the library, saw a resemblance to his daughter, got her address from the library—they shouldn't give it to anyone—and, driven by a senile hope, came out to find her.

“You are the person who reads so much about murders,” Fred said. “Yes?”

The old man's face was narrow, rather horselike, with large bones in the nose and chin, and a notable upper lip. He had, coming from under the cap, weak strands of long gray hair. He ventured, “She talks about me?”

“She is not your daughter,” Fred said gently. “She mentioned you had been in the library. What's your name?”

“Martin.”

“And you live?”

“For now,” the old man said. Then he hesitated and fumbled, realizing that Fred was wondering not if, but where, he lived.

“In Cambridge. Cambridge,” the man said. “Cambridge is where I am living.”

The taxi driver, wakened by the mumble of conversation, had rolled the window down and was listening. He was a man in his mid-forties, with a cherubic face, wearing a brown leather jacket and a Miami Heat cap. He nodded his large, square head and gave Fred an intelligent look, summing up the situation. “He's going back to Harvard Square,” the driver said, the heavy lilt of his speech showing him to be not long out of Haiti. “He say wait, I take him back to Harvard Square there. You ready, Mister?”

“You made a mistake,” Fred told the old man, putting him into the backseat. “She's not your daughter. Don't come back now, Mr. Martin.”

“She's someone else.”

“Right,” Fred agreed.

Warm air rushed out of the backseat of the taxi. The sidewalk under Fred's feet was about forty degrees. “You'll be all right?” Fred asked the driver, who nodded once, accepting Fred's money. “Make sure he gets back into his house.” Fred watched the taxi drive off. Depending on how long the taxi had been waiting, the old man had invested about fifty dollars on the fare from Cambridge.

Molly was in the kitchen, looking worried, standing by the table, her hands clasped. “What's going on, Fred?”

Both suspicion and accusation were in her voice, mixed with a mother's proprietary fear.

“It was your mass murderer,” Fred said. “Out in the street, looking at the house. The one from the library. His name is Martin and he lives in Cambridge. He seems inoffensive.”

“He came to my house?” Molly exclaimed. “To my house? What does he want? What is he?”

“Something deluded him into thinking you are his daughter. I told the cabbie to see he got back home, and gave him twenty bucks.”

Molly said, “The poor old guy is senile. No mass murderer, then. It gives me the willies he was on my street.”

It was almost four o'clock. They sat in the kitchen, debating whether to condemn sleep and make coffee. Fred said, “The normal mass murderer is pretty well groomed; has nice clothes and a new haircut and lovely manners. Mr. Martin presents himself more like the underneath of a yard-sale sofa. I don't think you have to be afraid of him.”

“You were the one upset,” Molly said. “You should have brought him inside, so we could call his family.”

Fred, having already classified the guy as a potential menace, and knowing Molly was afraid of him, wasn't going to bring the old boy into Molly's house.

Molly said, “Poor fellow. I'll see tomorrow if I can locate anyone in his family: the daughter he's lost, or a wife, son—something.” Fred had looked in the Cambridge phone book and found too many listings under Martin. “I'll check our cardholders to see if we have somebody in his family. Common name, though.”

Fred shouldn't have let him go. He didn't like to leave such things unexplained. “Rats,” Fred said, and they went back to bed.

Next day Molly spent some time on the telephone, but failed to find a Martin that fit their visitor. Molly had a wide acquaintance in Cambridge, which stretched even into the police force. No one could place him.

“Could be his first name,” Molly said. “That would broaden the field.”

3

“Look at this,” Fred said to Molly, pointing at the front page of the
Globe.

“I've seen them before,” Molly said. “I believe you'll find those are lighter than air.” Molly was barely sitting at the kitchen table, where Fred was drinking coffee. She dunked a piece of dry toast in her coffee, and looked at it with displeasure. Her idea of a healthy breakfast conflicted with anyone's idea of a good breakfast.

“I don't mean the picture,” Fred said. The
Globe
had gotten Blanche Maybelle Stardust to re-create her acrobatic start of alarm, on the bank of the Charles River, beneath the cherry trees still looking like winter, showing how she had responded to the realization that her dogs had struck a corpse, which was described as dead and white and male.

Blanche Maybelle Stardust's start of alarm had a flavor of well-rehearsed rah-rah to it. But it showed energy and goodwill, and the eagerness to please that encourages photographers.

On this rainy March morning, her dogs had ruined the run for Blanche Maybelle Stardust, who was seeking to maintain a figure that left little to be imagined in the way of unrealized perfection. It ruined the morning's run, but it got her in the paper, wearing a jogging outfit that also left little to the imagination.

According to the article, her matched set of golden retrievers had discovered the corpse, naked and wearing a cinder-block necklace, on the bank of the Charles River, on the Cambridge side, where he'd been washed up by the passage of the spring's first pleasure boats. The body's former occupant had not yet been identified. But the
Globe
appeared more than satisfied to discover Blanche Maybelle Stardust, who was as alive as she was photogenic. The John Doe, in the water for several months, was presumed to be a derelict.

Blanche Maybelle Stardust, it was revealed, had come from Arkansas a couple of years ago, semiattached to a test pilot stationed at the Hanscom Air Force Base. Her real name was not Stardust, she told everyone. She had recently become detached from the pilot in the interest of furthering a career in entertainment, the same reason her morning run regularly took her in front of WBZ-TV's offices.

“My idea,” she told the reporter, “is that the weather could use a Vanna White. Which could be me.”

“Even stark naked and chewed by bottom feeders,” Fred said, “the old boy can't compete with youth and beauty. But that isn't what I was pointing out, Molly.”

“If it isn't Blanche Maybelle's matched dogs or breasts, what are you showing me?”

“This doctor. Eunice Cover-Hoover is in the news. Isn't she the woman who's been leaving messages on the machine?”

Molly jerked the paper out of Fred's hands to see the paragraph pointing toward an article inside: “Cover-Hoover To Give Talk Outside Boston.” Molly dropped her toast onto the white Formica and slipped the Metro section out of the paper.

“I've heard the name, but wasn't paying attention. What's this woman's game?” Fred asked.

Molly looked up. “Division and destruction,” she said, “in the name of healing. Ophelia wants me to talk with her, get the inside dope on what she's like: the person behind the science. According to what I've picked up, Cover-Hoover's coming out of feminism, and wants to change the patriarchal foundation of our thinking about the human mind and social institutions.”

“That's fair.”

“Except what was theory once has turned into a goddamn crusade,” Molly said. “Therefore it can't be either fair or right, much less reasonable or intelligent. Also, in the new book she adds religion to the mix. She's a practicing shrink, going for tenure at Holmes College, and has two books out, both based on the simple, catchy theme that civilization is designed to prey upon women and/or children, but mostly women, and her proof is, ‘Just look at civilization!'”

Fred said, “
Power of Darkness.
That's her new book, yes? I saw the
Times
review a couple weeks back, but failed to take it seriously enough to read.”

“
Power of Darkness,
but don't forget the subtitle:
The Myth of Satan in Twentieth-Century America.
She looks academic and scientific and balanced,” Molly said. “The first book,
Culture of Abuse,
gathered five years' worth of serious discussion from professional journals. In every one of them you find the line—I don't care whether the article is pro or con—‘No one denies that this abuse is widespread and common.'”

Molly dropped the paper on the table and stood up, about to charge into her routine of waking and dressing the kids. She and Fred had risen early in order to have time together. “The new book says that the revived myth of Satan is a flagrant gesture by the culture of the male, designed to offset feminism's gains by asserting male dominance of the female psyche.”

“
Is
there a revival of interest in Satan?” Fred asked.

“Better to call it the power of darkness,” Molly said. “It's more acceptable in PC terms, and leaves room for the discussion of the age-old struggle between the powers of darkness and of light. Cover-Hoover's interested in power. She's ambitious enough to be looking for popular support now that she's got establishment backing. If she's willing to move toward the talk-show circuit, the theme of satanic cults would come in handy. Cover-Hoover is building a movement to go with her reputation. That's where Ophelia comes in, because Ophelia knows the medium, and Cover-Hoover is thinking in terms of a TV presence. Ophelia's stuck out west for the time being, but she's talked to the Doctor on the phone. ‘Just see what she's like,' Ophelia says, ‘before we start talking ways and means.' I'm leery of the whole business, so I've been dodging the Doctor's calls. Whenever my sister asks my opinion she has some hidden agenda.”

Molly went upstairs to get the day moving.

*   *   *

Fred left his car at the Alewife subway station and took the Red Line toward Boston. He got off at Kendall, across the river. There was a sting in the air as he came up from underground, surrounded by the new wilderness of tall office buildings. He stepped out onto the ratty old bridge called the Pepper Pot. The slouched low skyline of the “real,” old Boston on its hill, complete with gilded State House dome, stood out in silhouette against the new Boston.

The river was broad and dirty above the dam. The body had been discovered several miles farther upstream, not far from Harvard University, probably not that far from where it had taken its last dive. It would be a nasty body of water for the dead white male to lie down in. The Charles is a small river. Fred, if asked, would have advised a person wishing to dispose of a corpse to choose another place.

Fred watched the river, where a few intrepid sailors strove to keep their little boats erect. Red Line trains clattered behind him. He wasn't in the mood for Clayton's nervous puttering, which became more trying the less there was to do. This was a good morning, therefore, to check Charles Street. For about four blocks, Charles Street, running parallel to the river on the Boston side, supported a sequence of antique shops where paintings occasionally arrived. Works of obvious quality tended to surface first on Newbury Street, at which point Clayton Reed normally lost interest in them; but occasionally something of not-obvious quality turned up on Charles Street, mixed in with the Bavarian glass, armchairs made of horn, and stereopticon photographs of dead families.