All in One Piece (2 page)

“Yes, you could say Biscuit’s mine.” In fact, she’s half mine. Jo willed her equally to two owners. Don’t ask me why.

“This dog’s a chowder hound… Jo made the best chowder in New England.”

“Steven, I ate it as a child in this very house.”

“You must have your aunt’s recipe.”

But I don’t. To Marty, shellfish are the filth of the sea. He likes Omaha steaks. I could run the grill at Morton’s or the
Palm or Ruth’s Chris. “The chowder,” I say, “Jo made it by… by heart.” The moment sags. Biscuit lies down. I shift the
ice packs.

Steven says, “Reggie, you’re perfectly free to call the police, but do you really want the aggravation?”

“Someone hit me. I’m a citizen. I have a duty.”

“First duty to yourself. You’re upset. You need to rest for a while.”

“Resting isn’t my style. The police need to know about the hit-and—…” But I realize Steven won’t corroborate my story.
He’ll call it an accident and say I was jaywalking, in effect discredit me. “Steven, you’ve been wonderful, but I must let
you get back upstairs to work. I have some things to do.” Reggie, I tell myself, assert your authority as landlady. “Is everything
okay upstairs? Are you getting enough heat?”

“It’s toasty, everything’s great. Let me see your eyes… checking for dilation.”

“I’m fine.”

But he plants himself in the rocker. “So here’s something to think about, Reggie. You could use some good cheer today. Here’s
an opportunity.” Suddenly the medic sounds like a telemarketer. One way or another, I want him out. Every joint and muscle
cries its protest as I swing my legs down and sit straight, inching forward to signal
enough
.

“Your Aunt Jo and I got close over the last year before she got sick, Reggie. There was a deal we were working on together.
We kept it confidential. Something good for both of us. I’d like to tell you about it as soon as you feel better. Maybe you’d
be interested.”

“Maybe some other time.” “Deal” was Marty’s mantra, a word I can’t stand.

“A very favorable investment. As conservative as your aunt was about money, she saw the wisdom of this deal.”

“Steven, from now on, I’m a woman of modest means.”

His smile broadens. “No problem. There are ways.”

“Maybe we can talk about it in a week or so.”

And that ends it for now. The light is fading, but Steven’s smile is a halogen lamp. The youngish man silhouetted in my door
frame—that’s the parting image. Sometimes I think back and wish it was just that innocent, a moment when time hung still—just
before events again shoved me from behind, shoved me with a force of flesh and bone smashed against cold rock. Shoved me so
hard that today’s hit-and-run was just a teaser.

L
et me summarize the next hours, a countdown to disaster. I bandage my knee, pop pain pills, eat a light meal on Jo’s old Fiestaware—and
decide with huge reluctance not to call Detective Frank Devaney. It’s about my credibility. Under questioning, I’d say hit-and-run,
while Steven would insist that I jaywalked. My Boston police “street cred” would go down the drain in a he-said, she-said
waste of Devaney’s time. Worst of all, I could seem like a drama queen, the psychic who cries wolf. Devaney could decide to
handle his cases without the help of psychic Reggie Cutter, the cornerstone of my Boston life crumbling to dust. The Homicide
Division work, my life’s fizz and sizzle, finis. I work as a volunteer on an unofficial basis. I can’t risk it.

By 10:00 p.m., I reluctantly sink down into bed, vowing to rethink the whole thing in the morning. I’ve always been a fairly
sound sleeper, but something does go bump in the night even with the heating pipes banging now and then. I hear thudding,
rumbling. Biscuit gets restless, growls, and barks, and I let her onto the bed to calm her down. Fitful sleep, no rest.

At last, dawn. Slipping a raincoat over my robe, I take Biscuit out and then feed her. Downing pain pills and coffee, I simply
sit in the front room, too sore and sleepy to turn on a radio. The swelling in knee and elbow is down. My gaze is drawn to
the top shelf’s green whiskey bottle that Jo held in her hands, surprising Steven when his gift became a psychic prompt. I,
too, must touch a thing to “read” it. The bottle is a curiosity, but my main thought at the moment is that the whole shelf
needs dusting.

So I sit, rethinking a call to Devaney. And the dripping at first sounds clocklike. Drip… drip . . drip… . drip.
The intervals are irregular even to my so-so musical ear. All right, get up and check the faucets. From the kitchen to the
bath, no leaks, no droplets.

A second coffee poured, I sit back down. Still the insistent drops. Is it a leaking radiator? The roof? Boston’s having a
wet autumn, but it’s doubtful that the roof… anyway, my ceiling is Steven Damelin’s floor, so it’s unlikely that a leak
would escape his notice. Maybe one of his sinks is stoppered, his bathtub overflowing.

Wide-awake, I go room to room scanning the ceiling. Plaster, moldings, everything’s okay starting from the two bedrooms in
back, mine and the smaller second one, which is the study. Then to the bathroom off the hall, forward to the kitchen, once
again to the hall and back to the front room right to the corner behind the sofa—

Where I see the spatter on the floor by the radiator.

Droplets dashed on the hardwood have formed a small puddle. A phase of my Molly’s art flashes, her Pollock period. I lean
down and touch and smell it. That iron odor. The darkening red.

“Biscuit, no, get away from there.” I pull her back and scoop her into my arms. Then a drop falls into my hair, sticky wet
on my scalp.

I look up. Drops are falling where the steam pipe runs from my radiator upstairs to Steven’s.

From Steven’s down onto my floor.

Let it be paint.

Let it be enamel, finger paint, rustproofing, any kind of paint. Pray for paint. Because in that frozen moment, denial is
the lifeline. Please, God, paint—because the minute you let go, the world will rupture forever.

Dashing upstairs, I try Steven’s door—locked from inside—and bang the brass knocker. And slam my palm on the door panel. And
I scream his name.

Tripping on my robe going back downstairs, I ask, where’s that key? Where did I put the key to the upstairs flat? In the hall
table drawer. The dog squirms and yelps, but I hold her tight against me and root among coupons, stamps, rubber bands. No
key.

The phone book—nutty, but I call Steven’s number—tethered by the cord of one of Jo’s old land line phones. Fourth ring, and
here’s his upbeat voice. “Leave me a message…”

Back to that spot by the heat pipe. The slow drip. The pool of blood. Then I remember—the key is on a hook by the kitchen
window. I grab the key, dash upstairs, open the door—and find fifties-sixties furniture, fake zebra pillows, boomerang tables
all tumbled and knocked over. A sideways Lava lamp forms a slow blue belch.

Biscuit leaps, dives, and hits the floor. “Here, Biscuit!” But she barks frantically and runs to the next room. “Come here!
Here!” She’s back a moment later, her white muzzle stained, her paw marks rusty red against my robe.

Back and forth she runs as if to show the way, barking and whining me to Steven’s radiator.

First, a sneakered foot, then a jacked-up knee. Then his body lying on its back, a twisted mannequin, arms out stiff, something
dangling from the wrists, dark strips, like shoelaces. Mouth open, a ridge of teeth, wax museum eyes that stare at nothing.

And so much blood, his shirtfront mapped in blood, continents of blood. Small blood circles up and down his arms are a polka-dot
pox of wounds that weep.

The floor slants, I retch, grab at a wall, stumbling on something hard that slides when my foot kicks at it—a yellow drill
that’s slick with blood… the murder weapon, could it be?

It touched the hem of my robe.

Then something else. I lean close to see… nailheads. They pin down the skin of Steven’s calf and ankle, and his wrists
and neck too. A few inches apart, they stretch the skin tight. It looks upholstered, like a button-back sofa. Human flesh
treated like upholstery—I lean closer and fight for balance. It takes everything not to throw up.

S
udden as lightning, the thought that a killer could still be inside. In his kitchen, a back bedroom?

I grab the dog, run back downstairs, slam my door, and call 911. Unreality sets in, like a jerky handheld camera. Whose voice
do I hear reporting a dead body at 27 Barlow Square? Whose words say the unspeakable? Me and not me. Steven and not Steven.

The patrol car comes fast, the cop like on TV. I give him Steven’s key.

“Lady, you stay inside here.”

Still in my robe, I slip into moccasins. Stupid quandary: can I dress? Is a witness required to stay as is? For that matter,
am I a witness?

“Settle down, Biscuit,” I say as much to myself as to the dog. The sight of Steven Damelin. My gorge rises.

More sirens, then heavy footfalls upstairs.

Steven’s leg, his splayed fingers and purpled throat. Those strips. The nails.

The lights of patrol cars flash up and down Barlow Square. Blue uniforms are everywhere on the sidewalk out front. Clutching
my robe, I step outside on the stoop. Yellow crime tape already bands the front of my building like crazy gift wrap.
Police Line Do Not Cross Police Line Do Not . . .

“Lady, get back inside.”

“Yes, Officer.” In the vestibule, however, I’m stopped by the sight of big rust-red smears on the outside of my own door.
Did I somehow get blood on my door when I ran downstairs minutes ago? No, there’s not enough blood on me to leave those marks.
They don’t look random. They’re not smears. They’re too definite. Patterned, they’re patterned. They’re like… brushstrokes.

How did they get there? Who marked my door in blood? I go inside, grab my phone, call Frank Devaney in the Homicide Division,
and fight hysteria as I leave him a voice mail.

Seated near the phone, I wait out an eternity. Finally there’s a knock on my door and a voice calling, “Ms. Cutter?”

“Come in, Frank,” I yell, then move toward my door as it opens.

But it isn’t Frank Devaney.

“I’m Detective Edward Maglia. You called 911?” Before me in the door frame stands a compact man in his late thirties, with
short dark brown hair, narrow face and features. He wears a blue suit with a certain sheen, and his nails look manicured.
“I’d like to ask you some questions.”

“But I called Detective Devaney. I left a message for him.” As if he were a custom-ordered dial-a-detective? Reggie, get a
grip. “Please come in.”

At the flash of the badge, he’s in like a weather front. I gather my robe around me as he stares at a disheveled woman whose
robe is stained with blood. A woman who hasn’t washed after kicking that drill. The hem of my robe is streaked the color of
iodine.

“I didn’t know whether to get dressed. Still in my robe.”

Maglia nods. He’s in the rocker where Steven Damelin sat less than twenty-four hours ago. I excuse myself a moment to put
Biscuit in the study and close the door. Refusing coffee, Maglia opens a notebook and starts into my background. Who am I?
How long have I resided here? What relation to the owner of record, Josephine Cutter?

“I am her niece and heir. My aunt died last February, of cancer, and I moved in the same month. Steven Damelin was my upstairs
tenant.” I spell “Damelin.” “He moved in about a month ago. He was subletting.”

“When last did you see the deceased alive?”

“Yesterday, about two in the afternoon, I was crossing the street out front here on Barlow Square with my dog, and a small
blue car hit me. Hit-and-run, actually.” His eyes narrow. I part my robe just enough to show the deep bruise on my calf and
the gauze pad on the kneecap. “The car clipped me. I barely made it across. I fell forward—” He stares at the gauze pad. Face
it, Reggie, Steven’s murder dwarfs your near miss. Natter on about the blue car, you’ll sound worse than callous. “I fell
forward on the pavement,” I say, “and Steven ran out to help and came inside with me until I felt better, about an hour altogether.
That’s the last I saw him.”

He makes a note. “So he left here at approximately three p.m.” Maglia’s voice is soft but probing. “As landlady, you had a
key to his apartment?”

“To his door, which is off the second-floor landing.”

“And you used it to enter the apartment this morning when you discovered his body? Any sign of anybody in the stairwell or
hallway?” I shake my head. “The first-floor door to the street, Ms. Cutter, was it also locked?”

“The door to the street?” It’s the main door at the top of the granite stoop. I’d opened it to let the uniformed cops in.
It has a spring bolt. In my frantic state, had I twisted it open? Is there blood on it too? “I think it was locked.”

“You’re not sure?”

“I think… surely it was.” But “surely” isn’t good enough. If the killer came in the front, he or she—or they?—first had
to enter through the street door, pass my door, then take the inside vestibule stairs up to Steven’s apartment.

It hits me—Steven’s killer then came back down and marked my door. The marks are Steven’s own blood. Life blood, death blood.
Nausea rolls from the pit of my stomach, and it’s all I can do to focus on the door, the outside door that I’d paid no attention
to. “I was very upset,” I said. “I didn’t really think about the outer front door. It wasn’t on my mind.” My arm and leg throb.
Maglia’s eyes narrow as if the lapse is a mark against me.

Like a good hostess of twenty-five years, I try to compensate, mentioning Luis and the Big Buddies charity. I tell the detective
that Gibralter Realty did a background check on Steven and might provide additional information. Breathless, I also tell about
the night bumping noises and the dripping, how I came to find the body. My statement lasts at most ten minutes, a monologue
from hell.

“Let’s go back to yesterday, Ms. Cutter. When Steven paid a visit.”