Middle Age (68 page)

“Meaning the victim was dead before the head was severed from the body.” (Yes, but what did this
mean?
The anxious husband wondered.) There were “deep, bloody welts” on both her wrists and ankles, meaning she’d been bound, by wire, but the wire had been removed when the body had been dumped, or before, and was nowhere in the vicinity of the body.

There were indications that the victim had been wearing several rings, but no jewelry was found on the body, as all clothing was missing. It was repeated that the victim was about fifty years old and in “good, ample physical condition” prior to the trauma; she’d had a baby, or babies . . . Though Owen was listening intently, he’d become physically anxious, and at last asked if they might please stop at the next gas station or rest area where he might use a lavatory. When he reappeared, his face was clammy-pale and there was a smell about him of panic, vomit. The Hendry County deputies and Elias West, who’d been talking quietly together in the vehicle while Owen was absent, fell silent as soon as he returned.

Owen was carrying with him a briefcase filled with personal items, including photographs of Augusta should these be requested, and a paperback anthology titled
The Ethical Life
. Owen had not been a friend of Adam Berendt’s (he would admit) and he’d rejoiced (to his shame!) when first he’d heard of Adam’s death, but during the months of Augusta’s disappearance he’d become interested in philosophy, remembering Berendt’s interest, and was particularly drawn to the ancient Greek teachings of Epicurus (“the removal of all pain is the limit of pleasure’s magnitude”—

“cultivate your garden!”) and the Stoics (“nothing that falls outside the human mind is ‘good’ or bad’ ”). He believed that he was leading, at last, a

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philosophical life; a rational life; Gussie would admire him, now; all of Salthill would admire him, if they could but know. Now, he would overcome the terrible weakness that suffused his body by asking the deputies intelligent questions about their work, and by evincing sympathy for their lives which he tried, so far as he was capable, to imagine. “What horror you must see! Most people couldn’t bear it.” The deputies, for whom such lurid adventures as the headless female corpse, possibly the remains of the wife of a rich businessman from suburban New York City, were welcome diversions from the tedium of routine policework, accepted Owen’s praise with murmured thanks.

“Just doin our job, Mr. Cutler. We’ll see how this turns out.”

The vehicle sped onward into blinding sunshine. Augusta’s accusing voice was never far from Owen’s thoughts. How she’d mocked him, uttering unforgettable—unforgivable!—words.
Lost all mystery for each other
.

Corpses embalmed together
. Had he struck her, silenced her, then? Had he strangled her? (But how had he transported her body to Hendry County, Florida? His brain collapsed, confronted with such a puzzle.)

“They say, in such cases, a disappeared wife, a possibly dead wife, the husband is always the prime suspect,” Owen meekly offered, “but I would guess, in this case, you’re probably looking—elsewhere?”

The driver of the vehicle regarded Owen in his rearview mirror, and the deputy beside him turned to Owen, with a look of some surprise. Elias West said quickly, “These officers aren’t investigating Augusta’s disappearance, Mr. Cutler. That’s an entirely different case. I should have explained more carefully, I guess. This case, it’s an unidentified body, and missing persons fitting the description are being investigated, but not necessarily your wife, Mr. Cutler, d’you see?” West, a former U.S. marshal who’d been urged to take a premature retirement in his late forties, was a lanky slope-shouldered man now in his late fifties with thick grizzled hair around a bald pate, the hair long and curly as in a caricature of a Western lawman.

He was humble, and vain; conspicuously well-mannered, and deeply cynical; he wore good white shirts with string ties, vests, and black coats; his belts were studded with metal and rode low on his hips. His face was dark clay brick and his eyes were pale and jumpy. He gave the impression of being “armed”—and willing to use his weapon. He was costing Owen Cutler a small fortune and this fact Owen Cutler supposed to be a sign of the private investigator’s expertise. It was clear that West and the Hendry County deputies understood one another; they were of the same species.

Middle Age: A Romance

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When West had remarked to the deputies that he’d started out as a U.S.

marshal, the deputies were impressed, and asked where he’d been stationed, and why he’d quit, and West said briefly that he’d “stopped some bullets in my gut.” Unknown to Owen, the deputies had quizzed West about his employer and West had said respectfully that Mr. Cutler was a man of integrity and honesty who was searching for a wife who had left him, possibly with a lover though there were no “living” candidates of which West was aware. She’d sold some property that was in her name, for a half-million dollars, and vanished. Her handbag had been found in Miami Beach the previous April. He, West, had made extensive inquiries and had come up with no leads. “I don’t believe this woman, who is no common housewife, was abducted. Augusta Cutler left home voluntarily. But she may have met with trouble by now, you’ve seen these photos, she was a damned good-looking, sexy woman. And rich.”

O  , in a wondering voice, “A strange prophetic remark Augusta made, the last time she spoke with me—‘We’re embalmed corpses together, this is our mausoleum.’ ” He laughed, with a sound like something being crushed beneath the wheels of a speeding vehicle. The Hendry County deputies and the private investigator Elias West listened in what might have been shocked silence.

For this nightmare journey to central Florida, Owen Cutler wore a smart but somewhat rumpled seersucker suit that Augusta had selected for him, for their elder son’s wedding years ago. (Was the desperate husband imagining that if the mutilated female corpse was not Augusta’s, and Augusta was somehow close by, she would take note of the seersucker suit and recognize it and be moved?) He wore a white sports shirt, open at the throat. He’d shaved hastily and had several times nicked himself, thinking with satisfaction
At least I am alive, here’s proof: blood
. Yet his facial skin was pale as soapstone and appeared to be finely pitted. He’d become, over the past eight months, a man of stone. His head, now nearly bald, had a noble, Roman stoniness about it; the bones of his face were jutting. There were curious calligraphic indentations and striations in his skull, like rivulets caused by erosion. His eyes were naked, blinking, exposed. He gave an impression of being severely myopic, and having misplaced his glasses. Of the men traveling in the police vehicle to Cropsey, Florida, Owen was the only one not wearing sunglasses, as he was the only one sitting with

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his mouth slightly open, as if he were lost, not in thought, but in the humming-buzzing heat of central Florida in June. This mouth, which no woman had kissed in a very long time, had shrunken to the size of a slug.

A dead man
.
Posthumous
. This was how Salthill had come to think of Owen Cutler as they’d come to think of the voluptuous, unpredictable Augusta. To have vanished from Salthill was to have vanished from the earth’s face. To some observers, Owen was a figure of pathos, an emblem of their own possible (but not probable!) disgrace whom they avoided when they saw publicly; to others, who’d known the man for years, and admired him more readily than they’d loved him, Owen had attained the stature of suburban tragedy, and they avoided him publicly. Though he made a heroic effort to be well groomed, at those social events to which he was still invited, he let himself go on those slack days when he stayed at home, unshaven, in soiled gardener’s clothes and much-worn bedroom slippers. He was seen to be walking now with a slight drag to his left foot, like a regional drawl. It was noted that Owen seemed not to hear most of what was being said to him; at other times, he seemed to hear, very keenly, what wasn’t being said to him. The Cutler children, with that acute sense of personal advantage couched in terms of a concern for their elders that has come to characterize their generation, coming of age in the rapacious Wall Street eighties, expressed concern that their father was becoming

“clinically depressed”; there was a history of dementia (Alzheimer’s?) in the Cutler family, though it hadn’t yet manifested itself in any individual younger than eighty-five. Still they worried, Owen Cutler’s heirs, that he might do something “reckless”—like give away his money. Already Owen had alarmed the family by shifting his financial responsibilities onto younger associates, and by gradually losing interest in finances. He no longer perused the
Wall Street Journal!
He’d offered a reward of $,

for information leading to the recovery of Augusta, which perhaps wasn’t excessive, for (of course) the Cutler children wanted their mother returned to them, too, but he was talking of establishing the Augusta Cutler Foundation to give grants to worthy local arts organizations and charities. And there was his entirely new, unprecedented fanaticism about growing orchids, and gardening, and reading philosophy. Owen was uneasily aware of his children’s disapproval; his elder son in particular, an aggressive young graduate of the Wharton Business School, expressed “concern”

about Owen’s health; much was made of the physical and mental collapse of Owen’s friend and neighbor Lionel Hoffmann, who’d returned to the
Middle Age: A Romance

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house on Old Mill Way as a broken man, an invalid, having relinquished his executive position in his family-owned publishing business.
That’s the
beginning of the end: a loss of interest in money
-
making
.

Owen had promised his children that he’d share with them any significant developments in the search for Augusta. But he’d told them nothing of Elias West’s call, for there seemed no purpose in their accompanying him on this nightmare trip. If the mutilated female was Augusta, they would be spared a hideous last vision of their mother; if the mutilated female wasn’t Augusta, better for them not to have known.

He’d long ago memorized, with a lover’s devotion, the constellation of small freckles on Augusta’s upper back; the single mole beneath her left breast (unless the mole was beneath the right breast); the mole in her cheek she’d enlarged, in imitation of Marilyn Mouroe, with pencil, as a beauty mark; the warm brown aureole of her nipples, and their flushed stubbiness when aroused. And there was Augusta’s unmistakable fair soft-creamy skin; a rosiness beneath the skin; the surging warmth, the irre-sistible energy, that made Augusta so supremely Augusta. Though (he knew!) it was possible that Augusta was dead, and the corpse he was going to view “was” Augusta, yet he couldn’t believe (he would not believe!) that, in a more essential way, Augusta was dead.

Even if, somehow, this was her body. Even if . . .

Owen had been chagrined to learn that Augusta had secretly sold several properties she’d inherited, and taken with her, into hiding, the relatively modest sum of a half-million dollars. This transaction she’d obviously made into a new personal bank account, but where? Under what name? No one knew. Elias West had come up with only dead ends . . .

Just once he’d inquired, was it possible that Mrs. Cutler had
run off
with a man, a lover; and Owen laughed angrily and said not likely, her lover was a dead man.

(Though in fact, now that Owen thought of it:
was
Adam Berendt dead? Owen himself had seen no corpse. There’d been no viewing, no funeral. The “body” was bone chunks and grit raked into the soil of Adam’s garden, but these remains might have belonged to anyone. A brilliant scheme might have been concocted between Augusta and her lover . . .

But the thought of it, the ingenuity of it, was too much for Owen’s brain to consider.)

The outskirts of Cropsey, Florida, appeared to Owen’s watery squinting vision as a rapid sequence of facades like playing cards interspersed

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with glaring plate-glass windows. Were they here, so quickly? He’d only left Salthill that morning . . . The elder of the deputies was addressing him in a neutral but kindly voice. “Mr. Cutler? Are you ready? This won’t be easy.”

A wall of—was it heat? shimmering, radiant heat?—struck Owen as he climbed out of the vehicle, with the force of a blow. Elias West gripped his arm. “Steady, Mr. Cutler.” The younger of the deputies held open a door for him, and warned him of steps. Now refrigerated air wafted about him, but it wasn’t fresh air; there was an undercurrent of chemicals and something foul beneath it, and Owen’s nostrils pinched, in panic. “More steps here, sir. The railing—” (Why the hell were these strangers treating him, Owen Cutler, like an elderly man? He was only fifty-six. In the Cutler family, fifty-six was young. Owen had yet to have his first heart attack, his first problematic prostate, or colon, diagnosis,
all
that lay before him!
) Voices murmured. A female voice among them. You could tell you were in a foreign region of the United States: the southern accent. He resented these uniformed strangers escorting him along a corridor. Where?
A froth of bubbles floating upon a void, always you’d known
.

You must not be surprised, now
. The Stoics had taught (but had they believed?) that the human mind is the measure of all things: “good”—

“evil”—“pleasure”—“pain.” We create our experiences, our experiences don’t “exist.” If a man’s wife has been taken from him, and his love has been destroyed, he must examine the phenomena of “wife”—“love”—

“loss” and not succumb to mere emotion. “Mr. Cutler? Come a little closer, sir.” A sheet was being lifted. It was their strategy to reveal to this individual who might well be the victim’s next-of-kin only portions of the body. The neck area, and beyond, was not revealed. The stub of the neck, from which the beautiful head had been removed.
For of course this was
Augusta, Owen knew at once
. And the pelvic area too was shielded from his gaze, for which he was grateful. The torso was badly discolored, hardly recognizable as human. Large flaccid bruised breasts, a slack rounded belly, fatty thighs. Ugly!
This was not Augusta Cutler, of course
. He was staring at—something wrong?—the hands. The fingers were too short. No fingernails! And Augusta had been fastidious about her hands.