Return to Dust (21 page)

Chapter Twenty-eight

Davey and Aunt Marta. An explosive combination.

I waited until Karen was home from the shop before I phoned her. What did she know about this deadly equation? What fit of anger, bursting from Davey's repressed confusions, might have triggered an attack on a vicious, unsympathetic aunt? Here was a woman who would gladly curse him to the fires of the hell he already believed awaited him. I hadn't mentioned seeing Davey in New Haven to Karen, but I debated what choices I had.

Karen was surprised to hear from me. “Rick, this is pleasant.”

“Karen, I have a question about Davey.” I hesitated. “His private life.”

She breathed in, a deep rasp. “I know what you're gonna say.”

“You do?”

A long time before she answered. “I've been waiting for this. I suspected. I mean, my aunt hinted something once or twice. When she'd had a little too much wine at dinner. I knew she disliked him for something like that. But I didn't want to deal with it.” She sighed. “I still don't want to deal with it.”

“Tell me, did they fight about it?”

“This isn't important, Rick.” Her voice rose. “I never cared who…he went with…
That
really wasn't his problem. No, it was the religious stuff that got him nuts. Not that other. He was receiving all these mixed messages about everything. He's never been…stable.”

“But your aunt…”

Suddenly her voice hardened. “Rick, you're going in the wrong direction. Stop it. Just stop it. My aunt was nuts about issues like that. Sex like that—to her…When she thinks—suspects—her nephew might like, you know, guys…”

“Maybe she confronted him?”

“I don't know. Look,” her voice got weary and faraway, “I think Davey has been hurt enough. Leave this one thing alone, okay?”

“But you hired me to look…”

She screamed at me. “Leave it alone, Rick. You hear me? Davey and I don't see the world the same way, but I'm not going to let him get hurt.”

“What if he hurt your aunt?”

“Impossible.” She spat out the word.

“She cut him out of the will because of it.”

A rush of words. “How do you know that?”

“I heard.”

Sarcastic, seething. “You're saying my brother murdered my aunt?”

“No, I'm not. When you hired me, you must have thought about suspects. Wouldn't you have thought—even for a second—about Davey, given what you knew?”

“No.”

“Come on, Karen. You never did?”

“Damn you.”

She hung up.

I sat back and shook my head. My temples throbbed, pain barreling toward the corners of my eyes. I shut them and saw stars. I needed exercise, I needed to run. To swim. A walk. I opened my eyes, rubbed them, and stared at the cluttered pegboard suspended over the computer, the rows of orderly index cards, all chronicling the strange death of Marta Kowalski and the world she left behind for me to deal with.

***

Davey opened the door after I knocked, and he didn't look happy to see me. Dressed in a tired blue wool sweater—holes at the elbows, food stains at the collar—he looked like a morning-after campsite, hair in his eyes, the rancid breath of a steady drinker. He didn't motion me in. Instead, he stepped forward, forcing me to step backwards. He had the advantage, and I didn't like it.

“I was gonna call you,” he said.

I was surprised at the softness of his voice, some of his words muffled.

“I was in the neighborhood.” I immediately regretted my words—too smart-alecky. Davey looked worn to a frazzle.

“Come in.” His head swiveled back and forth nervously.

He didn't invite me to sit down, so we stood close to each other, wary athletes on a playing field, sizing each other up. I looked past him, and the messy apartment looked worse than my last visit. More magazines, more newspapers, more detritus of a lonely man's disheveled life.

I stepped around him.

“Where you going?”

The last time I was there, he'd hidden something under a stack of magazines. I located that same spot and lifted yellowing stacks of the
Farmington News
. As I suspected, nothing had shifted in the apartment since my last visit, a packrat's inertia. A pile of pornographic male-to-male magazines, glossy covers revealing the vacant thrill of wiped-out sexuality that I always noticed in porn.

“Damn you,” Davey stammered.

I faced him. “This is your business. Only yours. But I need to know what it has to do with your dead aunt.”

An unfunny laugh, bitter. “That bitch.”

“Tell me.”

He slammed his fist against the back of a chair. It flipped over but landed in magazines, jarring a towering stack that now seemed ready to fall. “Damn you to hell.”

I thought I heard the hissing of a teapot, the sound of steam against metal. Then it stopped.

“I'm not like—him. Ken. He thinks it's a good time.”

“It's not a big deal these days, Davey. Nobody cares. Really.”

“I can never be one of them.”

I waited. Then, watching his face, “Tell me about your aunt.”

He sat down, dumping himself into a chair so that he filled it, his arms draped over his knees, his head buried in his chest. When he looked up, he seemed old, old. A painful keening escaped from his chest, then stopped. Silence, raw. I watched him.

“That bitch.” He looked up, not at me, but beyond me, talking to the wall, to the murky unwashed curtains. “She called me a sick faggot one night. We were eating somewhere, and her face turned—she could get real ugly—and the words just spilled out of her mouth.”

I sat down across from him, sitting on newspapers.

“How did she know?”

“She kept hammering at me. I ran out of that restaurant, but she phoned me. Said the same thing. ‘Do you think you won't burn in hell?' That's what she kept saying into the phone. I could hear it in my sleep. And then I knew I
would
burn in hell, but then I knew I
wouldn't
. I love my God. I go to Mass.” He was talking to himself now, looking down into his hands.

“And your aunt?”

He looked up, startled, jerking his head back. His eyes got wide, the eyebrows bunched together. “Nothing.”

“It never came up again?”

He gave that insincere horse laugh, but it caught in his throat. “How could it? She never spoke to me again.”

“You never tried to talk to her?”

He stood up, his jaw tight. “It was a done deal. She was nuts. A crazy drunken old bitch.”

“She kept your secret, though.”

He paused, digesting the information. I saw hesitation.

“Who'd she tell?” I asked.

A sad voice. “She told Joshua, that's who.”

“Joshua.” I was surprised. “Why?”

Davey sighed. “No use keeping it a secret now, I guess. You want to know why Aunt Marta and Joshua stopped being friends? It wasn't her begging him for marriage. No, he took my side.”

“You knew Joshua?”

“The shop had a contract to deliver fertilizer and mulch in the spring and fall. Every so often I dropped off the stuff. Once I'm leaving and Marta's driving in. This was after we stopped talking. Her face fell. Joshua didn't know I was her nephew. Now I got on with the old man—he liked me—and she tells him I'm a faggot and to throw me off the property. I'm standing right there. Joshua looked dumbfounded. He starts to say, ‘Marta, leave the boy alone. It's his life.' I couldn't believe how decent he was about it. Marta flips out and calls him—Joshua, mind you—a faggot, too. Says maybe he likes me. I beat the hell out of there. Left the two of them screaming at each other.”

“So that was their big fight?”

“It was the last straw. Joshua told me she'd called the cops on the yardman, Willie Do. He's the one I often dealt with. Joshua fought with her about the way she treated him—tracking dirt in or something. I think Joshua could have let that go—maybe not—but then, a day or so later, the brouhaha with me. Joshua—I mean, he
burned
.”

“I heard all about the ruckus with Willie Do.”

“I bet you did.” Sarcastic. “You folks stick together, right?”

“Yeah, we're funny that way.”

“But Willie didn't fight her. I did.”

“So Joshua had had it?”

“Next time I go there, Joshua says Marta and he were, you know, kaput as friends. I heard through the grapevine that she was never the same.” A slick grin. “Sad to say.”

“They never spoke again.”

“He was furious being called a queer on his own front lawn. In
this
town. But no, they never spoke again. Funny, though…”

“What?”

“Last time I saw him, he said he still missed her company. The house was nothing without her. Just before he moved, he told me he might reconcile with her. That was his word—reconcile. Even though she was dreadful at times—‘I'm too old for battles,' he said.”

“But he never did.”

“Maybe he did. I don't know. I never saw him or her after that.”

“And then she died.”

He pointed a finger at my chest, like a kid aiming an imaginary gun. “Just a minute, buddy,” he yelled. “This has nothing to do with her death. Nothing.”

He crashed his fist down on the stack of newspapers, making a dull thud of noise.

“Damn it,” he swore. “That fucking Ken.”

He twisted around, his heavy body ungainly. He didn't know what to do in the tight space of his apartment.

“You know, he got off on that scene in the street. I begged him to keep still, but he just laughed. He got a kick out of it.”

“I repeat, Davey. No one cares. It's your life.”

“It's the life Jesus allows me.”

“But it shouldn't…”

“You want to ruin my life. That's what it is.”

“Davey.”

He ran to the door, threw it open, and the hallway light showed a face streaked with tears. “You and my sister. I bet you're fucking her. Isn't that a conflict of interest or something? You're fucking her. You're gonna push her into a wall, too. She'll hide in a corner and hate you. She'll turn on you.”

I followed the direction of his extended arm—out the door. As I walked by him, he bent his head toward me. His breath smelled, a mixture of anger and fear and excitement and decay. My stomach turned.

His breath covered my neck. “And you can tell that bastard Ken Rodman—you tell him he opens his mouth, I will kill him. I'll kill the motherfucker.”

I took a step into the hallway. He shoved me. I started to topple, regained my balance, and looked back. He'd already slammed the door.

Chapter Twenty-nine

No one answered at Richard Wilcox's apartment. I phoned throughout the day. Late in the afternoon, when I'd come to expect the long, perpetual ringing, a woman picked up the phone on the first ring, announced in a loud, booming voice that she was Richard's housekeeper, and I became immediately confused. I immediately thought of Marta meticulously dusting that furniture, Marta whisking that vacuum across threadbare orientals.

This woman was young, with a singsong Jamaican accent, a deep voice, impatient. “Is not here.” She had work to do, and I was interrupting. The man “that live here,” she informed me, was at John Dempsey Hospital at the other end of town.

No, she knew nothing about his condition. “Is not my business.”

She used no subjects in her sentences, which gave her speech an incomplete sensation, like hang-gliding through the English language. The service dropped her off and picked her up, she said. She'd only met him twice.

I visited Richard in his private room at the hospital. Tucked into crinkly white linen and enclosed in antiseptic curtains, he looked like an unwilling specimen in some lab experiment, curled up and frightened. Surprised to see me walking in, he squinted, trying to focus.

“Well, at least you're not the grim reaper.”

I smiled. “Not in my job description.”

He looked tired, and for a moment he nodded off. His eyes closed, his head dipped to his flabby chin. But then he opened his eyes, wide as coins, and shook his head.

“Don't tell me you're still pursuing that phantom. Murder, he didn't write.”

“Afraid so.”

“Any conclusions?”

“None.”

He chuckled a little. “As I suspected.”

“How are you feeling?”

“I'm dying. Simple as that. Declarative statement with all the force it is intended to have. Death is a blanket prognosis.” His fingers twitched against his cheek. “A week, a month. I lived my life slowly, deliberately, conservatively. Never any speed. How ironic that the final cancer is raging through me as if my body is, well, a speedway. All deliberate speed.”

“I'm sorry.”

He interlocked his fingers, straightened his spine. “How can I help you?”

“You were the last person to talk to Marta—that we know of. Over the phone, at least.”

“And I've told you…”

“I'd like to review it one more time.”

“Why?”

“You may remember something.”

He waved his hand in the air. “Well, I have nothing but time now.”

“Thank you.” I sat down in the chair next to his bed. “Are you sure you don't mind? I don't want to disturb…”

He cut me off. “I actually welcome a visitor.” A thin grin. “Even you.”

“Thank you. I'm trying to construct a picture of Marta's last day. You said at first she said she wouldn't visit, then she changed her mind.”

He shook his head. “We'll never know, will we?”

“She came to a decision about something.”

“Why?”

“Because originally she was coming to
tell
you something.”

“Young man, she committed suicide. She asked me to bury her.”

“But isn't that odd?”

“She was really drunk.”

“Did she mention Joshua?”

“No, why?”

“She spent a lot of time tracking him down—only to have him die.”

Wilcox smiled. “When Joshua died, I thought it was over. At last she could finally believe that he was never coming back to that house.”

“No mention of his name?”

“No.”

“He became her only obsession. Can you remember anything else?”

“No. I can't.”

“What did you say when she asked you to bury her?”

“I was silent. After all, she was tipsy. And I knew that she visited her husband's grave all the time—placed flowers there.” He shook his head. “I sort of resented her request that I be in charge of her burial. But what does one say to that? Of course? Can you bury me? Probably alongside Joshua's body. The poet all over again—I died for beauty but was scarce adjusted in the tomb when one who died for truth was laid in an adjoining room. A paraphrase, of course.” He snickered. “I still remember.”

“I doubt if we're talking about truth and beauty here.”

“How crass!”

“I'm sorry.”

“The apology of the unrepentant.”

“So she said those words and headed to your place but never got there. She kills herself at the bridge.”

I was talking but Richard was not looking at me. Something had happened. I was sure of it. His eyes closed tight, his lips quivered, I thought he would pass out. I was ready to call a nurse when he opened his eyes, and what I saw there was raw fright. He raised a slender hand to his temple, supporting his head, and closed his eyes again.

“What is it? You okay?”

He nodded.

“You want a nurse?”

“No, no.”

I waited.

“I remembered something I said.”

“To Marta?”

He mumbled, “I realized some awful truth. My own words. I told her—‘No, no, no. Stop this nonsense.' I didn't listen to her. I was the one who murdered her. Yes, me. My words.”

“Tell me.”

He shook his head. “Why? It's over. I murdered her. My silly, happy mouth killed her.”

“Tell me.”

But he was shaking his head, closing me out. “I take the blame. I am the one who murdered her. I killed her.”

I kept probing him but the conversation was over. His head rested against his chest. I stood up to leave, though he didn't look up. Something had happened and I hadn't a clue. In these few minutes he remembered words he spoke that—what? Words that led not to the suicide that he had believed in, demanded I believe in, but, instead, to the one thing he absolutely refused to accept—murder. His words:
I was the one who murdered her
. He didn't say—my words drove her to suicide. Of course, I realized, he could be assuming blame for
not
understanding something, and called himself her murderer. That was possible. But I left with the words echoing in my head:
I was the one who murdered her
.