Return to Dust (25 page)

Chapter Thirty-three

Vinnie and Marcie rang my doorbell the next afternoon, but I was waiting for them, dressed, jacket over my arm, a weak smile on my face. They'd called earlier that morning because Liz had called them about Davey. I insisted I was fine.

“Leave me alone.”

“No,” Vinnie had said, “we'll come for you, walk with you to the party.”

“Liz is worried about you,” Marcie told me now.

“Psychologists worry about everyone.” Too glib, smartmouthed.

“That's not fair. She thinks you'll blame yourself.”

“I do.”

“She was right.” Marcie tapped my shoulder. “Davey was a man who was already doomed.”

Vinnie clicked his tongue. “Troubled.”

But within minutes, tucked between Vinnie and Marcie like an invalid parent, I knew my going to the cocktail party at Peter and Selena's was a mistake. The party would be short—barely two hours before the art show opening—but I knew I'd be unable to lighten up. I'd spent the morning in bed or puttering around the apartment, my head fuzzy. Now, watching me, Marcie hovered like a mother hen, her eyes wary, watching.

We talked about the suicide, and that conversation led to Marta and her death.

“I feel sorry for Karen,” Marcie whispered.

I got quiet.

“Liz might show up,” Marcie told me.

“No,” I said. “She doesn't want to be there.”

“She's concerned about you, Rick.”

“You did your job, Rick,” Vinnie stressed.

“Yes, you did.” From Marcie.

They exchanged glances.

I stopped walking. “Did I hound him into this?” My feet kicked fallen leaves.

Marcie touched my sleeve. “Stop this, Rick. Davey was consumed by his own self-loathing. God and sex—a collision course. You know that.”

“You got a lead.” Vinnie faced me. “You followed it. You didn't step over any bounds.”

They kept talking, but I barely listened.

At the party, I expected someone to mention Davey, but no one did. Most of the faculty and staff, of course, didn't know him, but it was a small New England town. People gossiped. The circumstances would intrigue—Marta and Davey, two suicides? A matter of weeks apart. I wandered from small group to group, a tepid scotch-and-soda in my hand, avoiding conversation but listening to the grandfather clock count out fifteen-minute Westminster intervals. After an accumulation of such intervals, I could go home.

Charlie Safako was there, but he avoided me. He was with one of the junior faculty members, a young woman in the Fine Arts Department who was always in everybody's business. She had a lot to say about the art show we'd be experiencing shortly—it didn't compare to what she'd seen elsewhere. Widely disliked, she was cultivating all the wrong professors. She held onto Charlie's arm, intent on monopolizing him. One time, the two of them strutting by, I caught his eye, though I didn't want to talk to him.

He nodded toward an inexpensive Dali etching by the doorway. “Look how they've cheapened it. I bet Joshua's rolling in his grave now.”

I waited to see how Charlie would act around Selena, but they avoided each other. Once I caught Selena frowning in his direction. Another time they walked near each other and I noticed two faculty members glance over at them. They, too, had probably heard Charlie's lurid and melodramatic version of Selena's visit to his apartment.

“Nobody here.” Vinnie came from behind me and touched my shoulder. I looked around. He was right. The spacious living room area was sparsely filled. A few faculty members had already left. Selena was busy with drinks and platters of paté and crackers, but she looked anxious, a scowl on her face. This was not a successful evening. It was a dull cocktail party, the music—I swear it was a dreary, plodding Slavonic Mass—long and dull, inducing sleepiness.

Gazing out the front windows, I could see early snowflakes, wispy and faint, illuminated by the porch light, and I wanted to be out there. I wanted to be running again, my body hurled against the snow. Inside, people were looking at watches surreptitiously, waiting for signals to flee. Static filled the room. Selena moved faster, served more drinks, downed many of them herself. When he walked from the library, Peter looked ready for bed, eyes half-shut. Had he been dressed in pajamas, I wouldn't have been surprised.

I wanted to leave. Meekly, I followed Vinnie and Marcie into the renovated library. Marcie punched Vinnie in the side as I leaned on the old piano. I read her mind. She was remembering the room the way it had once been occupied by Joshua. The walls of leather-bound books, the bust of Charles Dickens on the mantel, the Victorian keyhole desk, Joshua's hanging green-tinted lights—all gone. This colorless room stunned. Folding chairs for guests who never arrived, an easel holding a painting Peter had executed in a college class—I remembered it from their old apartment downtown. Vases of rust-colored chrysanthemums only made the space seem funereal.

Idly I sat in an overstuffed chair tucked into a corner and fiddled with an ornate Elizabethan recorder.

“Play something.” Vinnie grinning widely.

Peter came from behind me. “You shouldn't touch that. It's an antique. Selena brought it back from London. Late Victorian. A shopping expedition. She was going to sell it in the shop but it was too beautiful, she said.”

Then he darted out of the room.

“Elizabethan,” I mumbled. “I took a course…”

“Snob.” From Marcie. “Peter's a law professor. What does he know about the Elizabethans? They were a lawless sort.”

Marcie leaned into me, her back to a small cluster of folks in a corner. She mumbled in low, breathy tones about the room. I only heard part of it, but Marcie fashioned a satirical sketch of an army barracks, and, for sure, the room had a sharp-edged, clinical austerity about it. It was the way they'd painted the walls an institutional white, a sin against the natural beauty of the wood. I stayed by the books, lost in the titles, the floor-to-ceiling wall of bindings that looked out of place now in this echoey room.

Joshua's lovely rare books were now gone. Instead, the bookshelves displayed random collections of books. A vice of mine—I loved to examine other people's bookshelves. Running my fingers along the spines, I saw yard-sale collections of Book-of-the-Month volumes, and noticed names like Erle Stanley Gardner, Fannie Hurst, Taylor Caldwell, A. J. Cronin—names that always popped up when I rummaged through books at library or church sales. Walter Scott romances. More interesting were bound volumes of forgotten novelists like Mrs. E.D.E.N Southworth and Marie Corelli, worthless literature made graceful by pretty gilt bindings and dust-pocked age.

“Nice,” I said to myself.

But textbooks and law reviews dominated. Dreadful.

“Snob.” Vinnie stepped behind me, reading my thoughts.

Marcie was making light of the garish South American vases that held the flowers. I followed her gaze, but it wasn't funny because stark images of Davey and Karen surfaced. And suddenly, I didn't know why, I felt sorry for Selena and Peter who had struggled so hard and had failed so dismally. All the pain I had for Davey's aborted life—his battles with God and a sexuality he never understood, all culminating in a lonely, dark-night-of-the-soul suicide—haunted me now in this sad room. When Selena walked into the room, looking lost, her face worried and lined as she picked up an empty platter from a side table, I saw Davey's own haunted face. Somehow this dumb little party was thrusting me back to Davey's messy apartment and his final moments.

Davey's shadow covered this dreadful room.

I had to leave. I could only hide among books for so long. I said good-bye to Marcie and Vinnie, made a half-hearted excuse to Peter, and avoided Selena. Other than a quick nod of hello, I hadn't spent any time with her. But that seemed to suit her fine because she'd been skirting me, too.

On the sidewalk, bundled up, I looked to the sky for the snowflakes that had already stopped falling. I searched the dark blue sky, hungry for the taste of white flakes on my tongue. Nothing. Only the chill that went deep into my bones. I rushed home, pulling a scarf up across my face.

I knocked on Gracie's door, but she didn't answer. I thought of Ken upstairs, but he was the last person I needed to see now.

In my apartment I phoned Karen but the machine came on again. Nothing. “Call me, please.” I repeated the message. “Call me, please.”

I imagined her grieving, alone, in that apartment. The sound of the phone would jar her as she turned away from it.

I undressed and threw myself across the bed. I couldn't sleep at first, so bone weary that I was restless. I replayed images of pushing my way into Davey's apartment, rushing past him, ferreting out those pornographic magazines, holding up those glossy hardcore covers as though I'd unearthed gold.

I must have dozed off in spite of myself because I woke with a start, sat up on the bed. I was sweating. Something was bothering me. Something had happened. I knew something now, but I didn't know what it was. An answer, as hard and as clear as ice, lay somewhere in my unconsciousness. Grandma's comments—questions have answers. A hole in the universe, already filled
.
I already knew something. Suspected something. I rushed to the pegboard, stared at the index cards. Something had been said? Or done? Or seen? What? Charlie Safako, I told myself. Maybe. The look on his face? What?

I didn't know, except to know that I had the answer in me now. I thought of Ken yelling down the stairs about Davey's suicide. Karen's refusal to answer her phone. Willie Do and Marta back in April. Joshua leaving, Joshua dying. I turned on the computer, checked files again. The Mac hummed but yielded no answers. I started connecting unlikely people. I connected Ken with Charlie. Willie with Ken. Ken and Karen. Tony and Joshua. Selena and Tony. Maddening, all of it. But that led nowhere. Or did it?

For the next hour I made random, off-the-wall associations, hoping to trigger that kernel—that flickering dot—deep inside my head. I read Buddha. Tell me the answer. If I have a question, I have an answer. Grandma's humming words in my ear. Put the people and things together. Davey's suicide with Marta's death. With Joshua. With Richard Wilcox. Motive? Jimmy's voice came to me. Motive.

Nothing. Nothing at all. I sweated.

Missing. Space. Empty.

***

At quarter to midnight, snuggled into my covers, wrapped like a mummy, I was jarred from a half-dream world of wild panicky chases and deadly falls from stone bridges by the phone ringing. My cell phone—I scrambled to locate it on the floor.

At first I couldn't hear the thin, slight voice on the other end. “Hello?”

“It's Karen.”

I woke up.

“I'm Karen.”

A strange way to begin.

“I've been trying to reach you, Karen. I heard about Davey and I wanted to see if I could help.” I paused because she was talking over my words. “What?”

“A mistake. It's all a mistake.”

“What is?”

“Hiring you.” Her voice was drawn out, flat. “It was stupid.”

“No, you weren't. You did what you thought best.”

“And Davey died.”

“Not because of the investigation.”

Her voice got louder. “You're wrong. Real dead wrong. We killed him, you and I.”

“Karen, come on.”

“First my Aunt Marta kills herself. Maybe because of me? Who knows? Then my brother. That's my whole family.”

“Karen, do you want some company now? We'll go for a ride. We'll…”

“No.” Harsh, lethal. “You are to blame.”

That rattled me. “Karen.”

“I'm firing you.”

“What?”

“You heard me. I'm stopping this whole nonsense. You said a few weeks and I let you wander through my life and friends and smash things up. Pieces of debris surround me now. Bits and pieces of my life, like you dropped a vase and…”

“Stop, Karen. Stop it. Let me come over.”

“No more work,” she yelled. “Just when I wanted him back in my life again. No more. End this now. I'll send you a check but stop this.”

She was rambling on and on, sobbing, little gasps of grief seeping between the angry words. As she spoke, I was becoming more and more awake. My mind focused—not on anything specific but on my sense that something was falling into place.

“I need more time,” I told her.

“No.” She screamed the word.

“I'm close to something.”

“I have a right to fire you. You're delusional.”

A strange word to throw at me. Delusional. What did that mean? I started to ask her what she meant, but then I changed my mind. “Can't I help you with arrangements?” I said at last. “With the funeral. With anything?”

“Isn't that a little like a hangman asking to wrap the body in a shroud? Like a killer wanting to dig the grave?”

When we hung up, I crawled back into bed, but I couldn't capture the soft warmth of my covers again. I shivered through the long night. In the morning I dreamed of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse but I couldn't remember them all. I got Disease and Death and Famine, and I wasn't even sure of those three. Only when I sat up, sweating, did I remember the last one. Despair.

Chapter Thirty-four

The next morning I texted Hank, who called back immediately. He was headed to classes at the Academy. I filled him in on what had happened, the particulars of Davey's suicide. That stunned him.

“Want me to come over? You sound down.”

“No, I'm all right.”

“Look, Rick. You got to realize something here. Actually two things. The first is that you had nothing to do with Davey's suicide. Nothing. You hear that? And the second thing is this. You got to realize you're family now. My family. When you're down, you drop in for food—and Grandma.” He laughed. “You're Grandma's family. She keeps talking about you. I'm a little jealous about being replaced as number one on her list.”

“But not on your grandfather's list.” A stupid remark.

He clicked his tongue. “You can't worry about him. He's never going to like you.” He paused. “What's on your plate today?”

“Why?”

“I thought I'd join you.”

“I don't want you skipping class.”

“What are you doing?”

“Loose ends.”

“C'mon. I know everything already. Tell me.”

“No.”

“When's the funeral?”

“Tomorrow, according to the paper.”

“I'll go with you.”

“No. You don't even know these people.”

“I know you.”

“No, Hank.”

“I'll stop by, okay?”

I was tired. “Okay.” I thought of something. “A favor, Hank?”

“Yeah?”

“Could you call Aunt Marie for me? I have a delicate question, and you need to ask her.”

Tension in his voice. “What?”

I told him.

“You serious?”

“Yes.”

“Christ, Rick. Aunt Marie?”

“It's up to you.”

“All right.”

I hung up and thought about slipping back into bed. My body felt drained, empty.

I lingered over coffee, stale and cold, and found myself thinking about Hank. And smiling. He'd spoken to me as though he were the older one, the big brother. Family, he said—we're family. I thought of his big Vietnamese family, all loving and supportive. And I thought how hard it had been for Hank to usher me into that family—to go against so much that was hateful—his grandfather's unrelieved hatred of me because of my mixed blood, his hatred of the children of the dust. Me—
bui
doi.

Talking with him on the phone made me happy. It felt good that someone wanted to protect me.

***

I started calling Karen, but her machine kept coming on. Its redundant message, mournful and solemn in the best of times, took on macabre overtones that alarmed me.

“Karen, call me. It's Rick.”

But at one o'clock, idly dialing her number, she surprised me by picking up. “Hello.” Brusque, businesslike.

I didn't answer at first.

“Hello.” Again.

“It's Rick.” I heard her sigh, unhappy. “I wanted to see if everything was all right. Do you need any help?”

“I'm really busy, Rick.”

“I know. I'll help.”

“I don't want your help.”

“Karen, you can't do all this alone. It's not good.”

She spat out her words. “I know what's good for me.”

“I know, I know. But I'm a friend.”

“You're not a friend. You're a hired boy I fired last night.”

“I'll see you at the funeral.”

She answered with the raucous, unfunny laugh bitter people make. “I suppose so. It's obviously open season on my family.”

She hung up.

***

I had to retrace my steps. Something boiled beneath the surface. What? I decided to follow up on one loose end—Hattie Cozzins' IOU for twenty grand borrowed from Marta some time back. That curious scribbled paper needed some explaining.

In the middle of the afternoon, unannounced, I knocked on Hattie's door, and stood there a long time. The hallway to her apartment was freshly painted, but the old walnut woodwork hadn't been scraped or sanded. A new layer of thick paint had been carelessly slapped on. Some splatter on the tile floor, drips of deck green paint on the doorknob. An old building, and successive generations of cheap paint lent the dim hallway a faded, spent look—all dressed up but nowhere to go.

I was running my finger over the glossy paint when the door opened slowly. Hattie watched me. She said nothing, her eyes squinting as though she were looking into the sun.

“Hattie,” I blurted out.

She smiled dreamily.

I'd obviously wakened her from an afternoon nap, yet she also betrayed the drained, blowzy look of someone coming out of a hangover. Today she wore no makeup, missing that blatant layer of sweet-scented old-lady powder she'd worn the last time I met her. Her skin looked as crinkly and tender as snapped kindling.

“I remember you.” She stood back and waved me into the room with a flip of her wrist and a slight nod. The small room smelled close and thick with old clothes and the cloying, fragrant aroma of spilt bourbon.

When I sat down, she began speaking, her whiskey voice raspy. “What do you want this time?” Blunt, a finger pointed at me. “You have to make it quick. I've been sick.”

“I'm sorry. I just have one question.”

She closed her eyes, as though bolstering herself for some unpleasant inevitability. “Shoot.” Like she was at a gaming table.

I told her about the note Karen and I had found among Marta's possessions. “You were in her debt?”

She chuckled, low and throaty, lost for a second in her own thoughts. A heartbeat. “I hoped that damn note had got lost. But I should have known Marta would have tucked it somewhere. There were two, a typed one she made me sign. Me, a friend. A formal one, she said. The handwritten one wouldn't do.”

“I didn't find that one.”

She was still chuckling. “I managed to steal
that
one back one day when Marta wasn't looking. I knew where she'd hid it. The other—the one you found—she told me she'd thrown it out. She threw nothing out.”

Buddha talked to me:
Abstain from taking what is not yours
.

I shook my head. “Well, she kept the paper because you hadn't repaid the loan, right?”

“True.”

“Why not?” Looking around the cramped room, I wanted to open a window to let the cold November chill seep in, smother the cobwebs of the dank room.

“Look, mister. Marta lent me that money begrudgingly. She was a cheapskate—and a nuisance. We fought, but I was desperate. I had to blackmail her—I can admit that now because she's dead and it's all unimportant.”

“About what?”

“Nothing important, at least now. She cherished this reputation as this devout Catholic woman, marching in anti-abortion protests, wooing the priest when she lied in the confessional, buying flowers for the altar at Easter. Mother Angelica with flowers in her hair. But drunk, the two of us, we could get crazy. I knew Marta's seamier side, the casino broad, hell to pay, and one time, hammered, she tried to perform a—well, a sex act on a man in an Atlantic City bar. She wasn't serious, of course. God, we were in a tavern, but the play-acting got a little too—how shall I put it?—risqué. He turned out to be a vacationing priest from New Haven—a little loose wire himself, I might add—but Marta's values clashed, as it were. She was always torn between being the Catholic angel and a hotsy-totsy devil in a red dress marinated in patchouli. So she was humiliated. She really wasn't like that, of course. A moral prig, most of the time. But, of course, I threw that in her face, threatened to tell Joshua and Richard Wilcox. Her niece Karen. It was cruel of me, but it had its effect because she lent me the money.”

“But you didn't repay it.”

“A gambling debt. I got in heavy with some guys. Something stupid. They're—what can I say?—unyielding. And I continued to gamble. I kept promising her, but I didn't
want
to. I actually couldn't. She was sitting on a pile of cash. She even plotted to get Joshua's treasure. Then she was dead.”

“And you didn't have to.”

“I thought I was free.”

“You didn't like her, did you?”

She pursed her lips. “It's funny. She often irritated me—that I knew. But I didn't really know I hated her until after she died. I didn't kill her, by the way. Get that notion out of your pretty skull, young man. But when she died it hit me how much I
resented
her. She got so much damn attention by killing herself. Look at this—you're here talking about her long after she's dead. She was a cheap woman. With money, with men. You should have seen her and Joshua. Snotty, snobby. ‘Joshua's instructing me in the classics.' What? I thought to myself. Classic positions? Honey, you got them down pat. Kama sutra. At our age it's—kama suture.” She screamed out a laugh. “Her and his books and art and shit. Irish shop girl. Slop girl. She pushed right in there and took what she wanted. I got leftovers, always. I was the church mouse, and she'd throw me crumbs. You know what she used to say? ‘Good enough.' She always used that expression with me. ‘He's good enough for you.' Or ‘That dress is good enough for you, Hattie dear.' Second string. I was a fool.”

“But now she'd dead.”

“And I still can't pay that loan.”

“It doesn't matter.”

She smiled. “That's not the case you're hired for, is it, dearie?”

I smiled. “Exactly. It's your business.”

“So it's over.”

“Well…”

She cut me off. “So now you can leave. Tell Karen to stop this nonsense.”

“She's busy with the funeral.”

Hattie's expression shifted, her eyes danced. “What are you talking about?”

She didn't know, I realized. “Her brother Davey took his own life.”

“You're kidding. Runs in the family, don't it? God, how Marta hated him.”

“I heard.”

“He got what he deserved.”

“How so?”

“We all knew he was a filthy little faggot.”