Richmond Noir (4 page)
I was conflicted, afraid that returning the perfume was tossing away the only card I had, tossing away Rebecca herself. I couldn’t finish, but she seemed to know what I meant, because she pulled me to her by my waist and gave me a slow, full-hearted kiss.
“Do it soon,” she said. “I’ll meet you later. Goodbye.” And she disappeared into the crowd.
I waited, put crackers into my dry mouth, said quick hellos, then made my move. I was fueled with wine, sliding through back hallways, full of love for Rebecca. It wasn’t fair that we couldn’t keep it—I hadn’t been fair, keeping it from her. Wouldn’t it all blow over sooner or later? The old case of the missing perfume, just like the painting, which was by now a tired page on an FBI website. In the storage room I stood still, feeling the weight of the vial in my jacket pocket, and Rebecca’s hands still around my waist. I had
my
treasure—not the painting anymore, but Rebecca. And
she
, such the devoted student of Poe, deserved to have the perfume. If it was time to return anything, it was the painting. With a wild surge of clarity and elation I rejoined the throngs of people, who had begun dancing as if to emulate my joy. I couldn’t wait to tell Rebecca, to see her face; I’d have liked to see her uncle’s too, just to show him my pleasure and confidence. But I found neither. Someone tugged at my elbow. It was Trina.
“You looking for Rebecca, Mr. Vance? She left a little while ago.”
I stared at her, baffled, then said, “No, Trina. I’m not looking for Rebecca.”
The row of magnolias was empty so I circled back to the parking ramp. She’d be waiting for me, my getaway driver. At my parking spot I discovered three things almost simultaneously: Rebecca wasn’t there, my car was gone, and my keys were no longer in my jacket pocket. I ran home through the alleys trying to keep my mind blank, trying not to remember that last embrace with Rebecca, her hands snaking around my waist. Lou’s house was dark, as was mine. My door was unlocked. Inside I called her name.
Then I read the note:
Please forgive me. But you must see the bright side. The cloud of suspicion above you is lifted
—
evermore
.
R
.
I had my shot of whiskey, felt my body shudder, and then it came, the mean bang of fists against my door and the wave of blue uniforms through the halls. I heard my name from the lips of one officer, a young sergeant, who explained his warrant for search and seizure. I saw John in his suit, straight from the gala, and Lou Hamlin dressed in black like some prowler.
The young sergeant said solemnly, “Mr. Vance, is there a safe in your basement?”
I managed to ask if that was illegal.
“What you’ve got in it
is,”
said Lou, sneering.
They ushered me into my basement and Lou coughed with laughter when he saw the safe in plain view. The sergeant tried the handle.
“Open it up, shitbird,” said Lou.
The sergeant raised a finger to quiet Lou—this pleased me—and said, “You’ll have to open the safe, Mr. Vance. That, or it’ll be opened in the lab.”
I felt my cold body rise and fall with my breath; I waited, but nothing came to me: no idea, no plan of escape. I was done.
“No need for that,” I said, and went to open it.
“No,” said the sergeant, blocking me. “Just recite the combination.”
It was an unoriginal set of numbers, the poet’s birthday: 01-19-18-09. As I recited them I remembered spinning the dial earlier in the evening to retrieve the perfume, Rebecca behind me on the bed doing her makeup, mirror in hand. The click of the lock woke me. The flashlights came out like swords and the beams ferreted through the dark, but where the light should have by now found the black hair, the thin nose, the quiet eyes, there was nothing but more dark, and more light chasing in until the beams struck the rear wall of the safe.
All eyes—and the beams of flashlights—turned upon me.
“Where is the painting, Mr. Vance?” asked the sergeant.
I looked at Lou’s face, white and fishy, and kept my eyes on him when I said, “What painting?” It came out weak, unconvincing, but what did it matter? The empty safe was proof—the empty safe would hide my crime. Only John was touching the brackets on the opposite wall, and looking at the spotlights.
Lou erupted, snatching me by the collar and heaving me into the wall for some of his paternal policing. He got in one blow to my face before he was restrained by the officers. He fought at them too, and when he was finally subdued and handcuffed on the floor he was nearly foaming at his white mustache.
“She
said!”
Lou spat. “She said the painting was here! She saw it!”
Rebecca. His spy all along. I let this sit on my thoughts for a moment, as if seeing how long I could hold an ember.
The sergeant looked beat. He shook his head at Lou. Then his face brightened. “Mr. Hamlin, where
is
your niece?”
“She doesn’t have it,” he said. “She made this
happen!”
Oh, treacherous Rebecca! But her note was coming into focus. She’d duped me good, but she’d gone to great lengths to dupe her uncle too, and leave me protected.
The sergeant peered at me. “Where is Rebecca? Does she have the painting?”
I said nothing.
That’s when I heard John: “Rose. I smell rose.”
Suddenly, I could smell it too, as if it had exploded in my pocket; it was all over me, all over the bed and the walls and the safe. I looked away from John.
“Mr. Vance,” the sergeant continued, “if you can help us, it’ll be good for you.”
John leveled his gaze at me. “The perfume is here. I smell it. I smell the rose perfume!”
The sergeant patted me down and found the vial. He took a disinterested sniff, handed it to John, and turned back to me.
“Now there’s this,” he said, like a tired parent. “We could forget
this
altogether if you cooperate.”
I looked at the sergeant and at Lou and I savored it, my chance to turn the tables on her, to beat her at her own game. And then I let it go. “Sergeant,” I said, “Mr. Hamlin. Respectfully, I don’t know where Rebecca is and I have no idea what painting you’re talking about.”
“Arrest him,” Lou barked, sandwiched between officers. “Arrest him for the perfume!”
And they might have. But there was John again, the vial in his hand. “This isn’t it.”
“What?” I shouted, unable to stop myself.
John held up the vial and pointed to an unblemished lip. “No chip,” he said. “Anyway, smell it. Putrid!” He placed the vial on a cabinet and made sure I saw the great disappointment in his eyes.
I was berated for another hour by the officers. What kind of game are you playing with us? Do you think you’ve gotten away with it? Don’t you know it’s just a matter of time? Do you really think this is going to end here, tonight? I just stared into a corner, hardly listening. I was thinking of Rebecca on westbound 64, driving fast with my car into the night. The questions weren’t for me; they were for her. And when I found her, I would make sure she heard them.
When I was at last alone, I found the forged bottle where John had set it. Rebecca must’ve made the switch during our final night together. The vial rolled around on my palm. I was so disappointed that she’d forgotten to add the chip, I didn’t have the heart to remove the cork and smell the candy spray she’d put inside.
H
e waited until the game ended. He did not know the score. He watched parents greet their sons leaving the playing field. Some fathers tousled their boys’ heads, others made the choice to have a teaching moment about a missed fly ball, a swing at a bad pitch. By these reactions, he guessed which team won. Mothers ended chats with other women to fetch their kids to the cinder-block refreshment stand for snow cones. Very few kids were loaded into cars and driven off; most had walked here. This was a beauty of the place, close-knit and small, that had not changed in the ten years he’d been gone.
More things were unaltered. Airplanes still droned low overhead, approaching or departing the airport a mile west. For thirty years, his granddad had worked in the tower there, been among the first ex-soldiers in the 1940s to read the electric green sweep of a radar screen. His father labored at the airport too, but the radar-man’s son was not so clever—these things are known to skip generations—and for twenty-five years he flung down people’s luggage hard enough to give himself heart failure. For six decades the airport bore the name Byrd Field, after the Arctic aviator Richard Byrd. Now the complex was Richmond International, a jumped-up title long ignored by the folks of Sandston.
At his back, behind the bleachers, ran Union Street. Two blocks down, past the elementary school, stood the saltbox house where he grew up. He didn’t need to look to know it was there. Everything in Sandston lasted, another genius of the place. While the airport had been updated enough to get a new address, the little burg itself was designed to be timeless. Sandston existed in baseball fields and playground, VFW, dentist and barber, tack shop, elementary school, and several hundred houses too simple and affordable to ever be without some humble resident or other. All stood along roads with monikers that centuries would surely not pry away, named after the generals blue and gray who in 1862 struggled for this land, wooded then, during the Seven Days Battle. Jackson, Sedgwick, Magruder, Pickett, Garland, Finley, Naglee, Mc-Clellan, every street sign a banner to everlasting honor But he’d left Sandston.
He wore no hat. The sun made him wince. He sweated and bore the unstinted summer and hot metal bleachers, no money for a soda, no care for the families of Sandston.
The afternoon aged, pinking toward dusk without cooling. Someone on the sidewalk behind the stands spoke his name, in a question, recognizing him without certainty. “Carl?” He did not turn to look. The inquiry died.
He stayed in the bleachers past the time when the field emptied, the snow cone stand shuttered, and the game and crowd were echoes in his head. The midsummer sun vanished but took another hour to pull dusk down behind it. A block away, the last tennis players quit from the dark. Once the pulses of their game stilled and the streets were vacant, Carl came down.
He rummaged through a big trash can for bottles of water, soda cans with flat remnants in the bottom, cups with water from melted ice still in them. He drank what he could find, but would not eat thrown-away food. He did not parse himself for hypocrisy. Some things were beneath him, some were not.
He moved away from the trash can and the flies drawn to it, returning to the bleachers. He did not climb up but sat under them, cross-legged like a Buddha with candy wrappers and napkins. Overhead, the bleacher seats blocked the stars like drawn blinds.
Carl stared only at the home across the street.
He had nothing. This suited him, because he wanted nothing.
No, there was one thing he had. It, itself, was multifaceted. He had hunger, but he was accustomed to it so it felt separate from him, like an item in his pocket. He had pain; this was diffuse, also familiar, and would go away soon, tonight. He had returning memories of the little ball field, these hot stands, his name called not cautiously but loudly so he could hear it out on the field, running hard to catch a ball or score. Lots of people cheering. The memories had no shelf or cubby inside him where he could tuck them away to wait until he was better. The images continued to rise, going the opposite direction of the sun. Tiny desks inside the elementary school, the tennis courts behind the VFW, parents wearing caps of their sons’ teams, lawn chairs, chain-link fences separating small backyards in the Sandston neighborhood behind him. He tried closing his eyes against the old scenes. Instead, the emptiness beneath his lids made a canvas for the hunger and pain, both patient, so he opened his eyes and submitted to the memories. They were the thing he had.
Then, to balance and return to zero, there was one thing he wanted. Tonight.
He’d been in that house once. He did some quick math to figure out how long ago, nineteen years. Nothing had changed about it: the clipped hedge on both sides of the flagstone sidewalk still led to concrete steps, the house was scaled with weathered gray siding, the window mullions painted white, the door scarlet, a plastic wreath hung around the pineapple brass knocker. Inside, he recalled doilies. Hook rugs, flowery fabrics, a cool checkerboard of black-and-white linoleum on the kitchen floor. When he was nine, it was an old lady’s house.
He’d been inside because he’d hurt himself here, on the ball field. He’d tripped on the base path, rounding second, trying to be fast like a Yankee or a Cardinal. He’d skinned his knee and his palms, and ripped his uniform pants. The fall coated him with the red dirt of the infield and he was shamed at being tagged out, sitting between second and third, sucking his teeth, clutching a stinging knee to his chest. His coach yelled from the dugout, “What were you thinking?” The umpire made a fist in the air to say,
You’re out
.
He could get up but he wanted to sit and cry, to cover his mistake. No one offered him a hand from the other team, and his coach shouted, “Come over here!” The umpire walked away, back to first base, because there were two outs and no one left on base. Carl had hit a double and was stretching it into a triple when his feet tangled. Someone should give a guy a hand up when he does that, even when he doesn’t make it.
The whole ball field went silent. Carl heard a crow, that’s how quiet it was that day.
The metal bleachers sounded a slow drumbeat, hollow and dirgeful. Mrs. Wilcox stepped down them, resolute. She strode out of the bleachers, away from all the others who would not stand and who had shouted at him for making an out. She was a tall, pale, gaunt woman. He did not know her first name but believed it was Agnes, Mildred, or Virginia, something austere.
Mrs. Wilcox walked onto the field. She looked nowhere but at him. No one, not even his coach, shouted at her When she reached him, she did not bend but sent down an open hand. He took it and was lifted to his feet. The torn knee smarted and dirt clung in the scrapes on his palms, but he walked with her hand-in-hand away from the game, across the street, into her house.
“You were showing off,” she said, pulling out a kitchen chair.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And you see where that got you.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She disappeared, to return with a bottle of iodine and a box of Band-Aids.
“Roll those pants up.”
He did so gingerly, loosing dirt from his uniform onto her kitchen floor.
“I’ll get that,” she said. “Come on.”
She soaked a washcloth, then took the chair beside him. She patted her lap, for him to lift his leg up. He did. Her leg under his did not feel so bony as he’d figured it might. She patted clean his scrape. When the blood and infield dirt were wiped off, the wound looked like claw marks, little trenches that filled with blood again. Mrs. Wilcox pressed the washcloth over his knee and watched his face for a reaction. He gritted his teeth and looked down.
When she pulled away the cloth, the gouges stayed white. “There, now.”
She coated iodine over the cuts, blowing while she painted. Then she moved him to the sink, washed his hands, and dabbed the slices on both his palms with more iodine.
When she was done and the throbs in all his wounds eased, she stood back, hands on hips. She towered.
“Back to the field with you.”
“You came to the game.”
“It’s right across the street from my house. Why wouldn’t I?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ve seen a few of your games, Carl. I like to keep up with my favorite students.”
“I was your favorite?”
“One of my favorites.”
She walked him to the front door. He went out first and held the screen door for her to follow. She stayed behind.
“You go ahead,” she said. “Finish up. I’ll see another game.”
He looked into the white bottom of her chin. Her open hand floated to the top of his head to lift his ball cap. Mrs. Wilcox rubbed his crown.
“Mrs. Wilcox?”
“Yes?”
“Will I have you again in fourth grade?”
“No.”
She handed him back his cap.
“Go on,” she said. “And don’t worry. You can come see me anytime.”
He touched his own head now, beneath the bleachers, watching the dark windows of her house.
He crawled from under the stands, ducking the crossbars, and walked onto the diamond. The dimensions struck him, how small the field was. He sat in the red dirt between second and third, feeling gargantuan. He thought of his old coach and teammates, wondering where any of them were today. Did he get lost, to know nothing of them anymore? Were their lives so different from his, that they never crossed paths? Surely, he thought. He grew irritated, that he should be the one to consider himself lost. Why him? He was the one stretching a double into a triple. He fell, but he was the one.
They
were the lost boys. They never went for it.
An ache brought his hand to his gut. The last time he sat here, he hurt too. He rose, and like he did long ago, walked with his pain off the field, across the street.
He stopped in front of her home. He cased the house in a minute. One story, probably two bedrooms. No bars or electronic alarms. No lights inside, no car parked in front. He slid along a wall to the backyard. No doghouse or pet toys on the grass. He crept up the back steps to peer inside the kitchen door. No dishes in the sink or on the counter, nothing on the table, the same table where she’d painted him with iodine and blown on it. Curtains drawn against the summer sun.
He sucked one deep breath, considering another way to go. Walk off. Choose something else. That was the difference, he thought. Choice. He did not have it. In the end, that was what set him apart from everyone else. It made him innocent too. He took from his pocket a small flashlight. With the butt, he tapped the pane closest to the doorknob, just hard enough to break it.
The glass rived into fissures. He paused to see if any light or sound came from inside. He flung his eyes to the neighbors’ yards, checking for lights flicked on, any attention paid to the suspicious noise he’d just made. Nothing. He returned to the broken pane. The house remained dark. He pushed in one crack; a lone shard grinded and gave way, to break on the kitchen floor with a tinkle. He pulled to him more swords of glass, until he had enough room to reach his hand inside to the locked bolt and doorknob.
He stepped on tiptoes into Mrs. Wilcox’s house. The only glow came from a digital clock on the stove. He laid the sharp bits of broken glass in the trash can, and with the flashlight in his teeth chased down the busted pieces on the floor.
He quickly found the first thing he needed, a cloth grocery bag. Keeping the flashlight from straying across the curtains and Levolor blinds, he surveyed the kitchen. It matched his memory; a few new knickknacks had been added, but the layout, the tile floor, the feel, remained unaltered. He opened and closed a few drawers. There’d be nothing of value in this room, but he lingered until he caught himself running his hand over the kitchen chairs.
He moved into the den, careful with the flashlight beam. Just as on the ball field across the street, he felt huge against this room. The feeling swept not only out of his recollection, when he’d been so much smaller, but now, as a trespasser.
The shelves and tabletops in the den offered nothing he could sell. Mrs. Wilcox’s own memories were on display, in pictures and bric-a-brac. He cursed under his breath before shining the light on one silver cup, engraved with an acknowledgment of forty-three years’ teaching in Henrico County. There was her first name,
Julia
. He never would have guessed. He dropped the cup in the sack. Keeping his touch light, he slid open the drawer of a side table.
“I don’t have any jewelry.”
He whirled, shining the flashlight straight at her She stood in pink nightclothes, barefoot, her long hand on the wall of the arch leading to the hall.
“I do have two gold fillings.” She shuffled forward. He left Sandston Elementary sixteen years ago; he had not seen her again until now. She remained taller than him. She said, “But if you were a dentist, I doubt you’d be breaking into people’s homes.”
Mrs. Wilcox felt her way through the room, one arm outstretched. She dodged a table and lamp to deposit herself on an easy chair, which rocked back when she sat; a pad lifted under her feet. The chair was a recliner.
“Go ahead,” she said, wagging the back of a hand at him across the little room. “I can’t be expected to sleep while I’m being robbed.”
He aimed the flashlight directly into her face. Crinkles creviced her eyes and the circumference of her mouth. Her face was spotty and white like a full moon. She didn’t flinch.
“Did you call the police?” he asked.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I honestly do not possess one item that anyone could find a reason to steal. And I do not want the ruckus the police will bring with them. So, grab whatever you think will have value. I likely won’t miss it.”
He took steps toward her, not on tiptoes now, searching her with the flashlight beam. She held no phone, no weapon. Her nightdress exposed her contours, breasts sagging at her age; she concealed nothing. She wore no necklace or bracelet. Her arms and legs in the sallow light were paler than he recalled. Her hair, cut short, had gone snowy.