Return to Dust (2 page)

Chapter One

When I sent flowers to Marta Kowalski's funeral, I considered it the last contact I'd ever have with her. It was my way of paying my respects to the woman who'd cleaned my small apartment twice a month. I'd even skipped the funeral. After all, we'd never been friends. Friendly, yes, because she knew people I knew in the small town. And she also dusted my furniture with a loving hand. A chatty woman, a little too perky for my tastes, she was small and round, with too much powder, too much drugstore perfume, and too many jangling bracelets. Worse—a smug church-going gossip who reveled in the vices of folks I'd never met. When she straightened my messy apartment, I made sure I was out. When she ran a cloth over the leather-bound books on my shelves, her eyes shone, happy. I liked her, I guess. After all, I did send flowers. That says something, doesn't it?

So I was surprised one night when her niece Karen phoned as I was getting ready for bed.

“Rick Van Lam?”

A good beginning. Not Rick Lam or even Mr. Lam. Not even the way some souls mispronounced it—as
lamb
. My full name—the way I like it.

“I know we've never really talked but we
have
met. I don't know if you remember me.” She stopped, drew in her breath, waiting. “Do you remember me? I'm sorry. I'm nervous. I'm Karen Corcoran.”

I did remember her because, well, I remember people. That's what I do. Pretty, almost waiflike, blond and slender, with razor-thin lips, she was probably in her mid-thirties. I remember that she was wearing a peasant-style dress, too baggy, unflattering, the kind of dress women wear to avoid being looked at.

We'd been at the same party, but some time ago. Somebody's birthday. An instructor at the college. We'd talked for a minute—she was a little flirty, I thought—and before she drifted away, she'd said we should get together for coffee. I never answered her. Later on, at one in the morning, lonely and a little desperate, I thought I'd approach her. But something kept me away. She stood in a corner, arms folded over her chest, head tilted. Her eyes darted about, unsettled and edgy. Those dusty blue eyes looked pale as old faded paper flowers. She wore her hair long, straight, uncomplicated, and, as I watched her, she pulled at a strand, nervous.

I'd seen her around town, of course. Sometimes when I saw her at a convenience store at night, picking up milk or pumping gas, or when I spotted her driving down Main Street, she wore her hair in a casual ponytail, almost sloppy, with strands flying loose. Even careless—especially careless—she was pretty. Crossing paths, we usually said “hi” or nodded at each other—but that was it. I was always planning future conversations with her, but I held back, afraid I'd be disappointed.

“I remember you.” I was smiling, waiting, happy to hear her voice. “Of course.”

“It's business.” Matter-of-fact, blunt.

I kept smiling. I felt a flush of pink rush to my cheeks.

“Business?”

“I want to hire you.”

That surprised me. So late at night for such a call. “You need an investigator?”

“To investigate my Aunt Marta's murder. Marta Kowalski.” A melodramatic pause, calculated. “Murder,” she whispered.

The rawness of her voice alarmed, chilled. I glanced at the clock on my desk. Midnight. Maybe she'd waited all night to get the courage to call. But midnight?

I could hear her suck in her breath, a small cry escaping from the back of her throat.

When I still didn't answer, her voice gained urgency. “I want to hire you to find her murderer.”

Marta Kowalski, the woman who cleaned my carpets.

“You don't think it was a suicide?”

A thin laugh, almost mocking. “No, I don't.”

“Why?”

“Can we have lunch tomorrow?”

Chapter Two

The next day, at one o'clock, I nursed a potent espresso in a little sandwich shop across the street from the strip-mall shopping arcade where Karen Corcoran operated her small art and gift gallery, Corcoran's Treasures, a cubby-hole store where tourists and visitors to the Farmington Conference Center at the Marriott down the street bought her own oversized, garish abstract canvases as well as the cookie-cutter pastel landscapes executed on Chinese assembly lines. She obviously made a living, though perhaps a slight one, but then so did hectoring, fast-talking drummers on cable TV.

My sidekick, Hank Nguyen, with all the accumulated wisdom of a twenty-three-year-old sage, once joked with me about Karen's artwork when we strolled past the gallery and glanced in the window. “It reminds me of a Technicolor digestive surprise.”

“Perfect for over the pull-out sofa in the basement rec room,” I'd added.

Now I watched as she strolled through the parking lot adjacent to the arcade. She'd asked to meet at one o'clock—she'd get someone to cover the shop—and it was already fifteen past. She moved quickly, her body half turned away as she tried to shake off an old woman who trailed her, touching her elbow, pointing back to the shop. Karen looked harried, yet her strides were deliberate, purposeful. Her phone voice echoed—hesitant yet determined. A curious combination. But whispered, too.

I stood up as she approached my table. I smiled but she didn't, which made me feel foolish. She was sizing me up—I recalled her stance at that party, her arms folded, that judgmental look in her eyes—and she nodded formally with a slight wave of her hand. Then she reached across the table to shake my hand. Her nails were painted a dark red.

“Hello, Rick.”

At that moment the waitress hurried over, but Karen, sitting down and adjusting the sweater she wore, ignored her.

“Two espressos,” I told the young girl. Karen nodded.

“Do you want to hear the special of the day?” the waitress asked, hovering. Young, chubby, with cobalt-blue lipstick and matching eyebrows, her hair streaked with blue and gold, she probably was a college girl, maybe even at Farmington College, its stately brick and pilloried buildings standing just down Main Street across from the town green. I didn't recognize her, though. I teach there part-time, but most of my charges are beefy ex-Marine crew-cut guys planning careers in Criminal Justice. When she moved her arm, pointing at a chalk-covered blackboard over the counter, I spotted a run of red and green tattoos down her arm. I told her we'd wait to order.

“I know I sounded odd on the phone last night,” Karen began, smiling slightly. “It's just that I had to work myself up to call. At midnight—well, I
had
to then. Or never.”

“I was awake.”

A pause. “I didn't care. Sorry, but I'd been planning it for days and I kept wondering if I was losing my mind and…”

I broke in. “You said murder.”

As I said the word, evenly, stressing it, she started, a small sound escaping her throat. For a second she closed her eyes. I expected her to cry. But when she opened her eyes, I saw hot anger in those pale blue eyes, now grown steely.

“My aunt would
never
commit suicide.”

“You sound so sure.”

“I am.”

“But the police…”

“I don't give a damn.” She breathed in. “I just don't.”

Marta Kowalski's bizarre death three weeks back had surprised everyone in Farmington, the affluent town outside of Hartford, Connecticut. It was the story everyone talked of for days. Marta was a woman people knew but scarcely thought about. A sensible woman in her sixties, a meticulously neat woman who wore too much makeup when she scoured your bathroom. Moral as all get out—she'd tell you so in case you missed her stellar character. Well, I never considered her as someone who, in the awesome grip of despair or depression, would hurl herself off the old stone bridge that arched over the Farmington River. A widow, Marta had been a housekeeper at Farmington College, retiring a few years back and living on her husband's pension, eventually taking a few cleaning jobs here and there.

“To keep the old hand in,” she once told me.

One of the places she cleaned was my apartment.

She certainly didn't need the money. Unsolicited, she'd shared that information more than once with me—and to perfect strangers at Walmart. She carried her elastic-bound weathered bank books with her, tucked into a huge black patent-leather purse, the kind women carry to bingo games at church halls—and she would produce evidence of her modest but comfortable wealth at the slightest provocation. She wore her shallowness like a badge of honor. I rarely thought about her, even as I wrote a check and left it on the hall stand. Like everyone else, I was startled by her sudden death. She left no suicide note. Hearing of her death, I'd felt guilty because I didn't think she had an interior life worth considering. I wasn't happy with my own moral lapse.

I looked into Karen's face. “Is there any evidence of foul play?”

She paused, drew her lips into a thin line. “No.”

“Then how…?”

She threw back her head, defiant. “The coroner said she died from injuries from her fall. To her head. Neck. A shoulder broken.”

“So you're saying she was deliberately pushed?”

“Well, something like that.” She stared over my shoulder.

I waited, but she offered nothing else.

“But Karen…”

The waitress returned with the coffee, determined to take our orders, and we chose quickly. Only designer food was available. I ordered homemade rye topped with oriental-style free-range chicken marinated in sesame oil. Karen pointed to beef drenched in oyster sauce served on watercress from the community garden across town. The chef had too many spices to work with. Everything on the menu was described in long paragraphs with too many adjectives—succulent, refreshing, inquisitive, innovative, startling, exotic, beguiling. Beguiling? I opted for that dish—the running-wild chicken. Few things beguile me. Women, I suppose, and Billie Holiday music. Not food.

“No, listen to me.” Karen's voice was hard, metallic. “You gotta investigate her murder, Rick Van Lam.” She stared into my face. “What are your rates?”

I sat back, watched her closely. I was most likely the only PI she knew of. After all, there weren't many in Farmington Center, and I was probably the only one whose apartment had been cleaned by the allegedly murdered woman. Talk about your job referrals.

“Slow down, Karen,” I told her. But the look on her face gave me pause. Humorless, deadly serious, a pinched tightness around the eyes.

“I guess I have to convince you.”

“I'm listening.”

“I can't convince you.” She took a sip of the espresso. “I don't have a shred of evidence that it wasn't suicide. I can't prove anything. I can't. But I have the money, and you, well, do this for a living, right?”

I shook my head, grinned. “Sort of. Actually I do insurance investigations out of Hartford. But I do get to turn down jobs, you know.”

She sat back in the seat, breathed in, sighed. “I'm sorry. I know I'm coming on like a speeding truck here, but, you see, I can't sleep at night.”

I tapped the table. “Look, Karen, suicide is difficult to deal with.” I knew I sounded a little patronizing, though I was trying not to. “It's shattering, it's…I remember there wasn't a note.”

“Yes, no note,” she echoed.

I shrugged. “True, not everyone leaves a note—last thoughts to a world they're leaving behind.” I stared into her face. “Especially if you hate that world.”

Karen's fingers tightened around the small espresso cup. I thought it might crack. “I hate hearing you say it that way. My aunt didn't
hate
the world. She loved life.” She looked around the room. “She—that sounds simple but it's true. That's my point.”

“What?”

“That's my evidence.”

I bit my lip. “That she loved life?”

I panicked. How could I get out of this sad scene diplomatically? I wasn't about to take money from a woman who was hurting, whose dark grief made her suspect foul play. Loved ones left behind, of course, have a lot of trouble with suicide, I've learned—they are being told that death is more beautiful than they are. Not always welcome news.

Karen saw something in my face. “I'm not crazy.”

“I'm sorry. I didn't mean it that way.”

She was wearing a light blue sweater, a little baggy in the elbows. I watched her body twist under it. She had an appealing way of flicking her head back whenever she finished saying something. I hadn't had a serious romance for a year or more, just bittersweet moments with faculty secretaries that drifted into silence and indifference. I tried to keep romance separate from business, but I sometimes faltered. Now I wanted to avoid looking at that sweater. Her skinny hands with the prominent blue veins, nervous hands—focus on them. Her nails were long, manicured, but painted that shrill red. There were traces of dried paint on her knuckles. An artist's weathered hands, dull with flecks of burnt sienna and white titanium. Out of nowhere I suddenly entertained an image of those fingers around her aunt's neck.

She spotted me looking at her hands and suddenly dropped them into her lap.

“Like everyone else,” she went on, “I resigned myself to Aunt Marta's suicide. Not that it made any sense, mind you. Marta was a devout Catholic, you know. But who was I to say? The police report and all…”

“The autopsy?” I assumed there was one.

She didn't answer me.

“What about her state of mind? Was she unhappy?”

“Aunt Marta was really depressed lately. I knew that. You could see it in her face. She never smiled anymore.”

“When did you last see her?”

“A week before…maybe. She was bothered by something, but she wouldn't talk about it.” She lowered her voice when a couple of older women were seated at the next table. She strained her neck, trying to see them. “I thought that was someone I knew,” she said. “I'm a little nervous talking in such a public place about something like—like murder.” She whispered the last word, but it still must have startled her. For a second her mouth trembled.

“Karen, depressed people kill themselves.”

She leaned into me, her fingers almost touching mine. “I
know
she didn't kill herself. In my bones, Rick. I was going through some of her papers—you wouldn't believe the boxes of letters and coupons and newspaper clippings she left behind—and there was a packet from her travel agent. Two tickets to Las Vegas. Right there. For three weeks after the day she died.” She rushed her words. “She'd be leaving this week.”

“So what're you saying?”

“I'm saying that she had planned this super vacation to Las Vegas with her friend Hattie. They had tickets and an itinerary and hotel accommodations—all in this little packet from Argosy Travel in Hartford. Coupons for free slot-machine money. That sort of thing. She dies on Friday night, the middle of October. At home there's a ticket to Vegas the first week of November. She was going on a damn vacation. Come on. You see?”

She sat back, triumphant, satisfied. The look on her face saddened me—expansive and smug, the face of a brilliant child who feels she has won an irrefutable argument. Absently I rubbed my palms together. When I'd been on the police force, I'd witnessed so many times when the people who killed themselves—or even killed others—had made elaborate plans for the next day or even the next year—sometimes with the very people they ultimately confessed to murdering. “Karen…”

The food arrived and we delved into understuffed sandwiches and more espresso, which was making me wired. I had never eaten there. I purposely avoided the fashionable luncheonettes—all retro Victorian tinplate advertisement and spit-clean chrome polish—that had become trendy in this part of swanky Farmington, along with exotic crafts boutiques, avant-garde art galleries, gourmet food shops, and fern bars with Peruvian wicker and bitter local wine. Book shops with coffee table books on New England covered bridges and rediscovered Connecticut Indian trails. Surprised as I was that the food was delicious, I noticed that Karen stopped eating after a few bites. I'd already finished half a sandwich, gobbling it down, licking my lips like a comic-strip character, and I got embarrassed. I always ate too fast—the result of being a little boy in a Saigon orphanage. Or so says the beautiful psychologist who used to be my wife.

“Buying a ticket for a vacation doesn't mean much for someone who is really unhappy.”

“It's more than that.” Karen pushed her plate away so she could fold her arms on the table. “She was gloomy, yes, but she said something that convinced me—when I remembered it later.” Karen's eyes got wide, demanding. “She said in three more years she would be seventy and…and…she smiled and said she wanted to travel somewhere—like Europe or California. She'd promised herself. At seventy. Because both of her parents had died in their early sixties. Her husband died in his early fifties. Her brother—my father—died young. Forty-seven. We don't live long—all of us. You see, Rick, she saw seventy as a badge…of survival.”

I scratched my head. “Okay, I see that. But what about the depression?”

“Yes, she
was
depressed. A few weeks before, we learned that Joshua Jennings passed away in New York.”

“They were friends?”

“She was real close, but…well, I always thought a lot of it was in her head, you know. She cleaned his house, but they
liked
each other.”

A strange coupling, I thought. The gaudy woman and the severely conservative old Yankee.

“I knew Joshua a little.”

She wasn't listening. “Sort of close.” She hesitated. “For years, I guess. You know, this is a small town. Joshua and Marta got friendly when they went on the same tour of Russia a few years back. The college sponsored it.”