Painting With Fire (2 page)

Tom
pulled her away from Stan and the two of them walked back into the building.

“Not much of
an alibi you gave him,” Tom whispered harshly as soon as they closed the front door. “You should have told him we were together.”

“I wasn’t aware we were suspects,” Claudia said.

“Of course we are,” Tom said. “Who isn’t after something like that?”

“They’ve got no reason to thin
k I did it,” Claudia said. “Why? Do they have a reason to suspect you, Tom?”

“N
o,” he said loudly. He turned his back to her and thudded up the stairs.

“I mean, it’s not like we’re criminals or anything,”
she shouted after him.

Tom said nothing in response, just fumbled with
the doorknob and swung open the door back into the heat. She felt heavy as she walked up behind him. The silence was not a reassuring answer.

Chapter 2: Torn Paper Hearts

Within 24 hours of the body being found, the view from outside the old, oversized window had almost gone back to normal. The neighboring residents were back to their routine lives, driving off to work and walking to the train. They scurried down below in the snow with their black and brown coats, and their scarves wrapped around their mouths. Foot tracks crisscrossed the snow banks and a depression in the snow showed where the body had been dug out. But all that looked like a blank gray white canvas from the third floor looking down. Claudia kept compulsively checking the window. Did it really happen? There was no one to talk to about it. She had pulled up a chair and tied back the curtain. She couldn’t seem to sit still. She kept getting up and sitting back down, checking the window.

Tom had driven
her car to his day job. He was a cashier at a big-box retailer ten miles away. He called it an “evil, soulless corporation,” but the job paid the rent and supported his art habit. Occasionally, he sold something. Claudia wished she could say the same. It hadn’t always been this way. After dropping out of college, she had worked for a bookstore for five years before she was laid off. Sometimes, she thought about going back to school, but she couldn’t seem to decide what she wanted to do.

Hours passed and she looked out the window again and noticed something had changed in the landscape.
She stared out the window at seven people down below. She couldn’t see their faces, just the tops of their hats and their puffy winter coats hobbling below. Two were children with their heads bowed down. Claudia kept going to the window and looking out at them. They were standing right in the snow where the body was found, paying their respects.

Finally, s
he sat down on the couch and tried to watch TV instead. It was a soap opera in overdramatic Spanish that she didn’t really understand. She watched the women’s mouths move and tried to guess what they were yelling about under all that red lipstick. Maybe it was something about the crying baby. She suspected it was the same old plot about the baby who was swapped at birth. The mother was told the child died, but it was a lie. Of course, it would probably take months for the truth to slowly unfold on screen and she would never really know for sure what they were saying, what was really happening.

She wondered
about the soap opera down below. Claudia wanted to know what was going on since she found the man, but she didn’t want to intrude. It was none of her business who his family was or what they thought about it.

She
kept pulling out the clunky, black laptop and rereading the news story on the fingerprint-streaked screen. The words may as well have been in Spanish. There was so little detail to the story. The man’s name was Steve Jackson. The coroner ruled his death a homicide with blunt-force trauma to the head.

Police were still looking for a suspect.
She couldn’t stop thinking about it. Would they ever know why he was killed? She flipped the laptop shut and put it down on the table. The computer started to hum a loud, angry whirling sound, like it was about to burst into flames.

She
put on her jacket and hat. She hesitated on her way down the stairs but kept her feet moving. She just wanted to talk to someone.

A death notice had been put up at the entrance of the building, just like the notices they put up when they turn off the water for a few hours. It told the time and date of the wake and funeral.
It made the whole thing feel so mundane.

Outside, the children tied paper hearts to the bushes with words written on them. “Goodbye, Uncle Steve. We’ll miss you. RIP.” One of the paper hearts had already been ripped apart by the winter wind.

An old woman stared numbly at the half-melted snow bank, looking for something that wasn’t there.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Cl
audia said softly.

“I
always knew I’d lose him,” she mumbled. “Are you the one who found him?”

“Yes.” Claudia
swallowed a gulp of cold air.

“Thanks,” she said softly. “I’m his momma. I always
thought the drugs would get him, but not like this. He’s a sweet boy. He’s trying to change. He was going to a new church, praying to God for help. He planted flowers in my yard last summer. But the wrong people. He just kept seeing the wrong damn people.”

The words flooded out of her.
Claudia couldn’t help but notice the present tense, like Steve wasn’t really dead yet to his mother. Understandably, her mind hadn’t yet wrapped itself completely around the fact. Claudia found herself patting her on the shoulder, not sure if she should hug her or retreat back up the stairs.

“Is there anything I can do to help?” she asked.

“Not unless you can find the person who did this,” she muttered. “I pray that he finds Jesus.”

“Lord help him if I find him first,” the man next to her said. Faint blue circles lined his bloodshot eyes and Claudia could smell the beer on his breath.

The dead man’s mama sobbed. Claudia didn’t know what to do. She hugged her and cried with her. Through the thick downy layers of a winter coat, she could feel the woman’s small frame shaking in a shuddering mixture of anger and grief. She could feel the frozen tears against her cheek, mingling with her own.

“Thanks for finding my boy,” she said. “Are you coming to the funeral?”

“I’m not sure,” Claudia said, wiping her eyes. “Should I?”

She wrapped her red scarf tighter around her neck and over her mouth. It hurt to breathe the same cold air. It was a relief to march back up to the hissing radiator heat upstairs.
The pipes were banging.

She
cast off the wool jacket onto the floor. She unwound the scarf from around her neck and rubbed her throat. Then she sat down on the couch. She wished Tom were there so she could rest her head on his shoulder and tell him all about it. Instead, with it all still trapped inside her, taking short, tight breaths, she turned the TV back on and tried to forget.

It didn’t work. She couldn’t concentrate on the screen. Claudia
clasped her hands together, fingers interlaced so hard they ached at the joints. It was almost like a prayer. I hope they catch who did this, for this man’s family’s sake, if nothing else, she thought. Then she rubbed her hands, palms sliding against each other, trying to forget his icy grip. But it was a hard, cold thing to let go. She couldn’t seem to let it go.

Chapter 3: A Cookie Cutter Sermon

Claudia hadn’t really planned on going to the dead man’s funeral. She hadn’t met him alive so it seemed strange to intrude on his death. But she kept walking by that flier every time she left her apartment, and after meeting his mother, her mind changed. Funerals were for the living, not for the dead and she had met his family.

“I don’t want to go alone,” she told Tom. “Would you come with me?”

“Why do you want to go?” he asked.

“
I need some answers,” she said.

“But Claudia, a funeral isn’t about answers,” Tom said.
“It’s about saying goodbye to someone you knew.”

“I met his mom, Tom,” she said. “I feel like I have some kind of connection with this guy. It could have been me out there. It could have been you. Why did this happen?”

“I don’t know, Claude, but you are traumatized enough,” he said. “It seems morbid to go to a funeral of a guy you didn’t even know.”

“I found him in a snow bank, for Christ’s sake,” she said. “I found him. It doesn’t matter if I knew him or not. I want some kind of closure on this.”

“You think you’ll get that from a funeral?” he said. “Fine, we’ll go. But I don’t think it’s good for you, Claude. I think you need to step back from this, try to forget about it.”

She
clasped her hands together tightly on her lap again and said nothing. He studied the pain on her face with an artist’s precision.

“If you
really think it will help,” he said softly. “Then I’ll come with you.”

When the two got to the church, the dead man’s mother was clutching Alice’s arm at the entrance. Alice, their neighbor, was wearing a black blouse with long sleeves and a black skirt that fell just below her knees. Tom stared at her
long, sleek calves, while Claudia walked closer to hear the conversation.

“Thanks so much for everything you did for my son,” the dead man’s mother said, sniffling. “
He used to come back from your group repeating the mantra. ‘Divine love will set you free.’ He was so hopeful for a change. I got a few more years with him, at least.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t do more,” Alice said, her face scrunching up. Her kind, blue eyes brimmed with tears. “Maybe I could have prevented his death.
I never should have stopped running that rehab group.”

“Oh hon
ey, there’s nothing you could’ve done,” his mother said. “He made the choices he did, the bad friends he did.”

“Let me know if there’s anything I can do for you,” Alice said. Her eyes were red and watery. “I know it’s a difficult time.”

A man took Steve’s mother by the arm and walked her shakily down to the front pew.
Claudia walked up to her neighbor.

“I didn’t know you knew him,
” she said.

Alice grimaced and nodded her wavy blond hair. “I’m really not supposed to talk about it. Confidentiality.
You know I’m a psychologist.”

The three of them sat down in the wooden pews and stared straight ahead at the closed coffin. Alice clutched a little flier close to her chest and inhaled sharply. It had Steve’s photo and biography on it. He was born in Missouri.

“Why are you guys here?” Alice asked.

“I found him. I met his… I just want to kn…” Then the blast of organ music began, cutting off all explanations.

Claudia folded her hands in her lap, her fingers locking themselves together again in a type of strange prayer. They seemed to do this whenever she thought of the dead man. The muscles constricted and her fingers went almost bloodless white, trying to squeeze out the muscle memory, the feeling of his dead touch. Tom looked down at her hand and placed his hand on top
of hers for a moment. The reassuring warmth of his hand brought Claudia back into the present.

She
was listening in and out to the sermon and it struck her how cookie cutter it all seemed. The pastor spoke about death as a transformation, “just like iron rusts and breaks down and then is melted, molded, recast and reborn into something new…”

Claudia couldn’t seem to concentrate on the words. She
looked around the church at all the people dressed in black sitting on wooden pews. The family shrieked and cried, as expected. Some had the bloodshot eyes of sorrows drowned in alcohol. The sermon didn’t fit. It was meant for an old man, not a young one struck down, Claudia thought. The pastor didn’t know Steve Jackson well, if he knew him at all.

A few young girls ran about in black dresses, with their dolls. Claudia saw a few faces she recognized. Another neighbor,
Sara Johnson, was in the middle of the rows. Her eyes had a glassy look. She was also looking for something in the church. Judging by the way she wrung her hands, she wasn’t finding it.

Claudia had to crane her neck to see Stan standing awkwardly in the back of the church in a black suit and tie. The trousers were too long for him and bunched at his ankles and hung over the backs of his shiny black shoes.

After the sermon, people lined up to visit the casket and milled about. Tom chatted with Alice. Claudia didn’t like the way she put her hand on his shoulder and steadied herself against him, so she went over to talk to Stan.

“Do you alw
ays come to the funerals of victims?” she asked.

“Sometimes, if the family wants me there,” he said. “Steve’s mom seems to think I have some special ability to detect the guilty party just by looking at them.”

“So she thinks it was someone he knew?”

“Not necessarily,” Stan said, shifting on his feet. He crossed his arms and scanned the crowd. His
brown eyes were always searching, and worry lines had worn into his forehead, but he was still a good-looking man, albeit a bit worn.

“I can hand out my card, listen if someone wants to talk. Sometimes, it just seems to help, seeing the same people that the victim saw during his life,” he said. “It paints a picture, like the grieving widow who’s not really grieving. That’s not the case here, obviously, but sometimes you can see things. Of course, seeing and knowing is not the same thing as proving.”

“Sounds like a hard job,” Claudia said.

“People want to pretend the dead guy is an angel, but he was a drug dealer and an addict.”

A woman a few feet away turned and glared at him, but Stan’s expression didn’t change.

”You know what the worst part of it is?” he said. “This kind of crime has a way of spreading like an oil spill.
These things tend to escalate. You better keep calling me, honey.”

His cell phone started to vibrate. “Excuse me,” he said and turned and ducked into the hall.

Claudia noticed Sara Johnson, with her head down, about to leave and touched her arm. Her husband was notably absent.

“So you knew Steve, too?” she asked. Claudia had always been curious to start up a conversation with her, but afraid
after all the late-night fights she had overheard between her and her husband. But here was a chance to talk surrounded by civilized people.

“I did,” she said, pushing back a strand of red hair behind her ear.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Claudia said. As she spoke she couldn’t help but scan the woman’s pale, freckled face for dark bruises. Despite the noises she had heard upstairs, she couldn’t find any. “How did you know Steve?”

“He was a friend,” she said.

“How did you meet him?” Claudia said.

“None of your business.” She inhaled sharply and turned to leave. She kept scratching her freckled arms like she was allergic to her coat.

Tom approached, carrying his jacket and Claudia’s. He had a thoughtful look on his face.

“Let me guess,” h
e whispered. “It’s confidential.”

They walked on crunchy shoveled sidewalks past blocks and blocks of cars until they got to the old, mangled Nissan.

“You know Alice kind of looks like Gwyneth Paltrow when she dresses in black,” Claudia said.

“A
curvier Gwyneth Paltrow,” Tom said. “Maybe.”
“It almost looked like you were trying to pick her up,” Claudia said, scowling.

“What’s it to you,” he said, with a smirk.

“Well, it’s kind of tacky to pick up women at a funeral, don’t you think?” she said. She wasn’t sure why it bothered her so much all of a sudden. She’d seen him pick up women before, but at a funeral? Really. That must be why it bothered her.

Claudia
pulled shut the delicate, rusted car door a little too hard. “In any case, I didn’t think she was your type. From what I understand the religious organization she works for is pretty old-school about sex out of wedlock.”

“I could still ask her out,” he mumbled.

“Maybe she could convert you,” Claudia said.

“Or I could convert her.” He laughed and gripped the handle above his seat as the car accelerated jerkily through the snow. “Just kidding for Christ’s sake!”

Claudia sighed and shifted gears.

“Only you would joke after a funeral,” she sighed. But somehow, the distraction made her feel better for a moment. Her hand loosened its iron grip on the gear shifter.

When they got back, they ran across Alice fumbling with her keys outside the front door. Her hands were shaking.

“Are you ok?”
Claudia asked.

“Not really,” Alice
said.

“Would you like to stop by our
place for a drink?” Tom asked.

She hesitat
ed for a moment and then said, “Sure.”

Claudia was surprised Alice agreed to come over.

Tom couldn’t help but raise his eyebrows as he poured out two glasses of bourbon and handed one to Claudia and one to Alice sitting on the couch.

“
I may work at a religious nonprofit, but I’m not a saint, you know,” Alice said with a sheepish smile that quickly faded.

“Everything’s good in moderation,”
Claudia said, taking a swig and wiping her mouth with her wrist.

“You know
, talking is really helpful in situations like this,” Alice said. “It’s important to create a safe place after a traumatic event, to talk to someone, debrief and decompress.”

“I talked with Steve’s mom for five minutes and I felt like my heart was going to explode,” Claudia said
, crossing her arms and gripping her elbows tightly. “So sad. How do you do it? How do you psychologists listen to these terrible stories all day? Don’t you get depressed?”

“We’ve got a lot of
training on how to deal with it,” she said, “But it’s still hard. You can actually get secondhand post-traumatic stress syndrome, if you aren’t careful. You can always call me, if you want to. I have a lot of clinical experience with these things. Sometimes it helps to write, pray, meditate, whatever works for you.”

Alice’s
eyes glazed over as she nursed the bourbon and looked off into one of Tom’s paintings. It was a small figure at the end of a winding road paved in odd dark purplish bricks. Claudia could never figure out if the black silhouette was skipping or the person was about to fall down, grabbing their leg in agony. She loved the ambiguity in Tom’s work. She loved getting lost in his pictures when she didn’t want to think about reality and lately she found herself staring at them a lot.

After about
three drinks, Alice was sitting on the couch, holding her head in her hands.

“
Confidentiality doesn’t really matter anymore. He’s dead,” she sniffled. “I should’ve never stopped running that rehab group. Healing through faith helps so many people. Why couldn’t it work for Steve? I’m sure they found meth in his bloodstream during the autopsy.”

Her blue eyes scrunched up
and she touched her face with her sleeve.

“Is that how
Sara knew Steve? Through the group?” Claudia asked.

Alice nodde
d. “I knew the two of them kept meeting up on the side. I knew she was married.

“I try not to judge these people,” Alice said. “It doesn’t really
help anything. They already feel bad enough about their own lives.”

Tom sat close to her and placed a hand over hers.

“So it isn’t a coincidence those two are always fighting and we find a dead guy outside?” Tom mumbled.

“I don’t know,” she sobbed. “You know, I should never have stopped running that group. I feel responsible. Maybe I could have done something differently. I just keep remembering his face.
”

She leaned forward on the couch and pressed her hands against her face, wiping away tears.

“Maybe Steve was visiting her and it got ugly with her husband,” Tom said,

“Dan Johnson did show up to the meetings once. There was a scene. He said…
oh God… I feel like I’m going to be sick,” she said.

“I better go.
I’m sorry. I don’t normally drink,” she said, crying and wiping her face on her sleeve. “I should go home. I should go to sleep. I just don’t know if I can. It’s just, the whole thing has me so upset.”