The Man on the Washing Machine (16 page)

“… careful not to … too wet. Like a squeezed-out sponge is…”

Haruto loves it when he gets questions from the audience so I knew he'd be delighted with the opener from a young guy with his arm around a girl: “Can you put dog and cat poo in it?”

Grandfather says Americans are euphemistically inclined.

“… glad you asked … the answer … no … harbor bacteria … don't want to hear about…” The crowd laughed.

Everyone watched intently as Haruto's face grew a few degrees pinker with each heavy forkful. A few people, I knew from experience, would be startled by the smell. Grandfather, accustomed to the perfume of the stable yard, wouldn't flinch.

Then three things happened more or less simultaneously. Haruto flung aside a particularly large forkful of compost, Grandfather did flinch, and someone produced a high, thin scream. A man with a mug of hot chocolate stood between me and whatever was happening. His cup slowly tipped and the cocoa dribbled unnoticed onto his trousers. Next to him a woman in gray and black sweats relaxed her grip on the string of a yellow helium balloon. It floated lazily away above her head.

What the hell was happening? Was Haruto injured? I stood on my toes to see over the crowd, but Grandfather was sitting rigidly on his shooting stick, blocking my view. And then he stood up abruptly and I could see all too clearly.

A woman's body lay partially exposed in the crumbly brown compost. Her throat was cut through to the spine, her head bent backward so that the wound was an enormous gaping smile above her abbreviated neck. Haruto's grip on the pitchfork wavered and he collapsed in a graceless faint.

The dead woman's hair was plastered with blood to her bare shoulders, so at first I thought she was naked. But then I saw that the rivulets of burgundy-brown stain only partially covered the glimmer of sequins. Blue and gold sequins. My stomach heaved and the ground felt watery beneath my feet. Someone gripped my arm to keep me from falling.

In awful slow motion, Nicole's bloody head flopped forward and a tiny avalanche of half-rotted vegetables fell out of her mouth.

 

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The garden stopped looking like a children's book and started to look like a painting by Hieronymus Bosch. Oddly mismatched groups stared blank-eyed at the tableau around the compost pile. A teenager with a blond Mohawk solemnly handed his can of Coke to an elderly woman who sat on one of the children's swings, her face sagging with shock.

“Oh, God, the children!” I said, suddenly defrosting and looking wildly around.

“They're fine,” Ben said, and touched my arm as if he thought I planned to take flight. He pointed at Sabina, holding a toddler in her arms, leading a cluster of young children farther down the garden, away from the horror. She was being trailed by an assortment of distraught parents like the tail on a comet.

The murmuring people closest to the compost pile were prevented from approaching it by my grandfather. He stood at parade rest with his back to her. No one, his uncompromising expression said, should even
want
to see her.

And then everyone, including Grandfather, was shooed away by uniformed police officers who materialized out of nowhere. An enormous, lurching fire engine crept slowly through the narrow entrance into the garden. With its red lights flashing and Klaxon blaring, it drove ponderously through the rose garden, crushing the bushes. Petals scattered, and the canes broke and splintered and lay slowly down under the wheels.

A sob caught in my throat.

“Theo?” Ben said.

I cleared my throat and wiped tears off my cheek with the flat of my hand. “The roses,” I whispered. “Nicole loved them.”

He frowned. “Wait here,” he said, and left. He came back with a mug of hot chocolate and wrapped one of my hands around the mug. When the warmth reached my fingers I inspected the chocolate in the mug carefully, but didn't drink it until he raised it to my lips. I couldn't taste it.

God, Nicole!

I looked vaguely at the people nearest the compost pile. Helga was resting against Mrs. Jupp's shoulder, staring unblinkingly at the compost pile. Haruto had come out of his faint in the care of a paramedic and was sitting on the ground holding a hand over his eyes. They were all going to need therapy. A woman in a familiar red jacket was speaking to the man in the cocoa-stained pants. He looked pale and shaken. He'd dropped the cup at his feet and he had his glasses in his hands. He was wiping them meaninglessly, over and over, on the tail of his shirt. Inspector Lichlyter came across the garden to where I was standing.

“Miss Bogart.” The depressed lines at the corners of her mouth were deeper than ever. She consulted the notebook in her hand. She was brusque with barely contained anger. I didn't get it and couldn't force my brain to work; why was she mad?

“The deceased was your business partner?” She didn't look up from her notebook.

“I think—I'm pretty sure—I mean I know it is because—Nicole.”

“Does she have family?”

I tried to get my brain to focus. “No. Yes. An uncle, but I don't know his name. She only has—had a married sister in Wisconsin, or Minnesota I think.”

She wrote that down in the notebook. “How are you doing? I have some more questions—”

“Right now she's going to sit down,” Ben said, and he was right; I needed to sit down before I fell down. I couldn't remember the last time I took a breath and inhaled audibly. He took off his leather jacket and laid it over my shoulders without saying anything. It felt heavy. The satin lining was warm. I pressed it against me and absorbed the warmth. I hadn't realized I was so cold.

The inspector looked up from her note-taking and inspected him. “Try one of those benches,” she said. “We won't be needing you for a few minutes yet,” she added to me.

“I'll wait,” I said vaguely, not very curious about why she might need me.

Her glance shifted beyond my left shoulder and I became aware of Grandfather standing composedly by my side. He took hold of my elbow in a courtly gesture and we walked slowly away. I looked back over my shoulder. A uniformed police officer was videotaping the scene immediately around the compost pile while another was taking photos. Haruto's pitchfork lay across Nicole's partly excavated body like a fallen spear and Grandfather's shooting stick was still planted firmly in the ground next to her.

Ben and Grandfather sat on either side of me on a bench facing away from the compost pile. I hunched inside Ben's jacket and thought of absolutely nothing. It felt as if my mind had simply shut down. I didn't think with any clarity about Nicole, or our friendship, or the terrible sight I had just seen. I didn't think about it, but I saw it as if through a telephoto lens. Every tiny detail was present in front of my eyes, even when I closed them. Shock and sorrow were warring with revulsion and seemed to be canceling each other out.

After clearing his throat a couple of times and evidently thinking better of it and lapsing into silence, Grandfather said finally: “The police will want to know when you last saw your partner alive.”

“On Friday,” I said. It helped to have something to concentrate on. “She came into the shop to borrow some money. She needed to pay her rent. I wish I hadn't…”

“Hadn't what?” he said sharply when I didn't go on.

“I gave her fifty dollars and a ton of righteous disapproval.”

Nearby, a knot of uniformed officers were talking in voices quiet enough to make individual words indistinct. For a few seconds, I tried to make sense of the murmurs, but the sounds remained confusing. I looked aimlessly back at my grandfather. His dark gray hair, impeccable as always, was slicked back with military precision by fifty strokes daily from a pair of oval, silver-backed brushes. A disobedient tuft of hair peeked coyly out over the top of his ear. His earlobes were very long. In early photographs of him, his earlobes were smaller. Age, I thought, makes strange changes.

His long face grew even more disapproving than usual as I stared at him. “Theophania, pay attention,” he said. “Your partner was stealing from you?”

“For about two months,” I said. “I told her it had to stop, or…”

“Or what?” He aimed a worried look at Ben. The two men had unexpectedly developed a rapport that required no speech.

I felt confined by their book-end presence and excluded from some exclusively male understanding. I considered standing up to make some sort of point and decided I felt too tired.

“I don't know. I hadn't figured out what to do. We had another fight. Oh, hell.” I leaned forward onto my knees. Gradually becoming aware of a certain quality in the silence, I looked up. Ben was staring over my head to the compost pile; Grandfather was chewing the inside of one cheek and frowning ferociously.

“I think I will telephone Adolphus,” he said finally. “My solicitor,” he added to Ben.

“I'm an attorney,” Ben said, with no relevance that I could see. Grandfather grunted.

They didn't talk anymore after that. Ben continued to stare over my head, and Grandfather chewed his cheek meditatively. I don't think he would have kept doing it if he'd been aware of it.

After what felt like hours, I watched our visitors slowly file out of the garden past Sabina's table, where two uniformed police officers sat, talking to each person. They inspected credit cards or driver's licenses and wrote down the answers to a series of questions before anyone was allowed to leave.

“Names, addresses, and telephone numbers,” Ben said. “Routine.”

He got up and stuffed his hands in the pockets of his jeans, watching the scene behind my back with undiminished attention.

I heard crunching steps on the bark chips of the path and Sabina appeared and knelt down beside me.

“This is so awful. Poor Nicole!” Her voice cracked a little. “Are you okay, Theo?” she whispered.

“Not too bad,” I lied. “How about you?”

She grimaced. “Not great. Kurt threw up.”

Kurt did? I would have thought a doctor would be immunized against most horrors.

Grandfather cleared his throat and she looked at him in confusion and then at Ben. “Mr. Pryce-Fitton, I didn't see you. And, er—”

“Ben Turlough,” he said economically.

“Oh, right,” she said vaguely. “I guess I'll be getting back to the kids and Kurt if you're okay, Theo. Are they finished with you? Are you going up to the apartment?”

“The police,” I croaked. I cleared my throat and began again. “They want me to stay and talk to them when they get finished. They asked me if Nicole had any family, but I couldn't tell them much except for her sister.”

Sabina's brow crinkled. “She was married twice, but I don't know anything about her exes. There was a cousin or something,” she said.

“An uncle, I thought.”

She nodded. “Right. An uncle. Had a weird name. A nickname? It reminded me of horses.”

“G.G.?” my grandfather said unexpectedly.

Sabina looked at him doubtfully. No point in explaining to Grandfather that Americans don't understand arcane English patois. But Sabina's face cleared. “Oh, right. No, it wasn't that. A kind of horse, maybe? She only mentioned it once and that was years ago.”

“I didn't know you knew her that long,” I said.

Her color was suddenly brilliant. “Not as long as some people,” she said, and made a peal of penetrating laughter that rang like a bell in the silent garden. Heads turned in our direction. The laugh had obviously surprised Sabina, too. Her eyes went wide and she covered her mouth with her hand.

“Is Haruto okay?” I asked, anxious to get off the subject of horses and inappropriate laughter in case Grandfather hadn't run out of suggestions. The guessing game was too frivolous for the occasion; a nickname wasn't going to tell us much anyway and the police would find what they needed from Nicole's phone contacts.

Concern for Haruto reclaimed Sabina's earlier manner.

“Ruth D'Allessio has him wrapped in a blanket somewhere.” She sounded approving. “I'd better get back to Kurt. The police have told us we can leave. I'm going to cook for him to take our minds off things—I'll make plenty and bring some up later, okay?”

“Sure. Thanks,” I said, and tried not to observe that Nicole's death was already bringing Kurt and Sabina together. She gave me another hug and left.

“Nice young woman,” Grandfather said with more approbation than I'd heard in his voice in years. He obviously didn't recognize her as the leather and motorcycle-helmeted object of his disapproval a few days before. He was probably blinded by her knowledge of horses. When I was three years old, he had held me up on his beloved and enormous hunter, and I'd screamed in terror. Later attempts had the same result. Because he gave me no choice, I eventually learned to ride competently, but I never learned to love horses as he did and, I'm convinced, they learned to despise me.

“They've put a screen around Nicole's body,” Ben said some time later. All I'd been aware of in the meantime was the silence all around; even the birds had stopped singing, frightened away by the fire engine's raucous arrival. The only thing unchanged was the sweet smell of the hundreds of flowers in bloom all over the Gardens.

“Ms. Bogart?” Inspector Lichlyter had approached quietly. “I wonder if you'd make a formal identification?”

“Isn't that usually done with photographs?” Grandfather said with a frown.

Lichlyter gave him a considering look. “Not always,” she said. “We've moved her so she looks less distressing,” she added unexpectedly to me.

“Distressing” wasn't the word I would have used, but I appreciated the sentiment and clung to it as we rounded the screen shielding Nicole's body. She was lying in a long, black plastic bag, with an opening that went only as far as her chin. Supported from behind by some fortuitous bump in the terrain, her head still looked attached. She was puffy, soft and swollen and unnaturally pale, especially her lips, which were almost gray. My treacherous memory presented me with a reminder of Haruto's pride in the temperature of his compost pile.