Voices in the Dark (33 page)

“I like it when it’s happening, but not afterward.” An arm was flung over her eyes, a bracelet resting on her nose. “Do you have any idea what I’m talking about?”

“No, May.”

“I didn’t think so.”

The next day she went to the library, simply to get away from the house. She flipped through
Cosmopolitan
and
Elk.
When he showed up and sat across from her, she promptly moved to another table, despite Holly Pride’s lifted eyebrow and presumptuous smile, as if Holly had keyhole knowledge of her. When she was leaving, Fossey pressed a note on her, easier to take it than not. The penciled words were passionate and conciliatory. At home, she read it again and, setting the paper aflame, watched it writhe in her fingers.

Sunday, without Roland, she listened to Reverend Stottle’s sermon but didn’t believe a word of it, life being too short for so much avoidance of sin. What’s sin now might not be later. The language of Jesus, the reverend said in an aside, was Aramaic, which sounded to her like a shampoo. With other congregants she dropped to her knees to address her maker, whom she suspected had little or no interest in her.

“You want to do something for me, make me eighteen again.”

While she was picking up the Sunday papers at Tuck’s, Roland was pruning a hedge, though his crocodile arms lacked reach. Wearying of the work and of the sun on his neck, he entered the cellar through the bulkhead and returned the clippers to the proper place. Climbing stairs, he thought about things that had vanished, the soda fountain at Pearl’s Pharmacy, Jiggs and Maggie in the funny papers, the spring from his step. He was tired. In the front room he sat on the sofa and removed his shoes while awash in a tide of memories. Stretching out, he closed his eyes, and all in a moment his world was gone.

He lay stone still while his watch told time. Death molded his face into another self, which had little to do with what had been the live one. After eight minutes at room temperature, his brain sensed it was no longer needed and began decomposing.

May glimpsed him on the sofa, thought he was asleep, and didn’t disturb him. She lay the Sunday papers on the kitchen table and used the bathroom. Fixing the back of her hair, she
was clumsy with the hand mirror and dropped it, breaking the glass, her image with it. Seven years’ bad luck. She returned to the table and read parts of the Sunday
Globe.

A half hour later, she went into the front room. When she couldn’t wake him, she didn’t scream. She phoned Dr. Skinner and stood immobile near the window all the time it took him to arrive, which could not have been as long as it seemed. He was presentable. His fly was zipped.

“Nothing we can do, May.”

She didn’t quite believe him. She had thought he would administer a shot to the arm, a pound to the chest. “Are you sure?”

“He’s gone, May. He’s with God.”

Those were the lies in life one had to prepare for. She folded her arms tightly high over her chest. Dr. Skinner’s fatalistic stare was an affront to her intelligence.

“I’ll call for an ambulance,” he said and went to the telephone. When he got off it, she was tottering. “May, I’d better give you something.”

“I’m all right.” Her voice, though unnaturally high, was steady. “Does death come as a shock to the body or is it a blessing?”

“A bit of both,” Dr. Skinner replied. “The body has its own way of dealing with things.”

“Fine for him,” she said. “What about me?”

• • •

Sunday evening, tuned to the Bravo Channel, Chief Morgan watched an old French detective movie,
film noir
, in which a police inspector, habitually wearing a fuming cigarette on his lower lip, traced a killer of women to the depths of a public latrine, a dungeon of no return, the humid walls running with graffiti. The killer, unable to urinate in the presence of others, busied himself at a sink until he thought he had the place to himself. The inspector stood mute in a supposedly vacant stall. When he revealed himself, pistol in hand, a knife came at him like a flash of underground water. His body drank it. His cigarette clung to his lip as he fired off a single reverberating shot and collapsed outside the stall. In dubbed English, he thought of his soul as an erose leaf tearing loose from the twig. Dying on his feet, the killer pissed on him.

The ending flattened Morgan, and he had to force himself from the sofa, his thoughts burdened with the conviction he lacked the stuffing for his job. A sense of fraud followed him to the refrigerator, in which nothing looked appetizing. When the phone rang, he was heavy on his feet, each step a stamp.

It was Beverly Gunner.

“The man in the picture. Dudley. I know who he is.”

The receiver wedged between his jaw and shoulder, Morgan shook cornflakes into a chipped bowl. “What does it prove?”

Her voice trembled. “You’re the policeman, James.”

He did not have the heart to disabuse her.

• • •

One side of his face empty, Paul Gunner gazed up asymmetrically at his elder son and spoke in the crippled voice. “She comes here, you know what to do.”

“Yes, Papa,” Gustav replied, prideful his father had chosen to speak privately to him, without Herman.

“You don’t want her to get you.”

“She won’t get up the stairs, Papa. I’ll see to that.”

“Your papa’s helpless,” Gunner said, his voice wavering.

“You’ll get better!”

“I know numbers.” Gunner’s eyes were teary. “I know the odds.”

“Don’t cry, Papa.”

“You boys will get everything.”

A few moments later Herman came into the room. His face hung out like an apology for being there. “How’s Papa?”

“Leave us alone,” Gustav said.

The male nurse appeared, displaced both boys, and looked down at the bed. “How are we doing, Mr. Gunner?”

Gunner didn’t respond.

Isabel Williams stood splendidly straight, extended a hand, and said in a charming voice, “A pleasure to meet you, though I must say I’ve never been interviewed by a policeman. You look much too pleasant to be one.” She led him into a small sitting room off the vestibule, where there was privacy, cushioned captain’s chairs, and vases of wildflowers.

Seated, Chief Morgan said, “It’s very nice here.”

She smiled through the seamless glaze of her stretched face. “Never has an inmate lived so comfortably. Almost obscene, wouldn’t you say?”

“You’re not confined.”

“Not in the sense you mean.” She leaned forward in her chair, an elbow propped on her knee. The low top of her dress revealed modest breasts the pale yellow of certain apples, the nipples the button caps of mushrooms. The scent of her perfume fanned out. “If you don’t mind my asking, how old are you, Chief Morgan? Older, I suspect, than you look.”

“I’m vain about my age,” he said.

“ Ah, like me. I won’t ask you to guess
my
age.” She sat back, crossing her legs and exhibiting the waxy smoothness on her knees. “What is it you want to know about Dudley?”

“What’s his full name?”

“I’m not sure I ever knew.”

“Dudley his first or his last name?”

“Could be either.”

“Tell me about him.”

“A frivolous man — effete, to my mind — and a born liar. He claims he went to Harvard, which is pure bullshit. He lives in a fantasy world, though I’ll admit he’s clever, clever enough to sponge off my daughter. Pains me to say this, but she’s also a fruitcake. Do you have children, Chief Morgan?”

“No.”

“You’re fortunate. What in the world do you want with Dudley? Beverly Gunner was very mysterious passing around that picture. I’m afraid she’s in her own world too.”

“Dudley claims he kills children.”

“Sounds like something the silly ass would say. What can I tell you? He enjoys shocking people.”

“He claims he does it for money.”

“Bully for him. It would be the first time he earned a dime of his own.”

“Then you don’t believe a word of it?”

“No, but it’s interesting you do.”

“I didn’t say I did,” Morgan said, shifting in the chair. “Could he have known Harley Bodine?”

“I don’t know any Harley Bodine.”

“Paul Gunner?”

“Hilda’s son? Yes, indeed, some time ago when my daughter visited me more. Dudley used to tag along and wait in the lobby. He was never shy about introducing himself. Paul Gunner during his visits took a shine to him. God knows what they talked about, but I’m sure Dudley amused him. I remember thinking a genius and an idiot. They go together.”

Morgan, quiet for an extended moment, said, “Do you have Dudley’s address?”

“You’d have to ask my daughter.”

“May I have her number?”

He provided a ballpoint and a slip of paper. The paper was a cash register receipt, on the face of which she jotted a Boston number. “You won’t upset her?”

A stillness hung over his face. “I promise.”

“Does this have anything to do with Hilda’s granddaughter?”

“Why do you ask?”

“It’s not hard to put two and two together, though don’t be surprised if you come up with five.”

“I usually do,” Morgan said.

• • •

Sitting uneasily on a bench in the Public Garden, Regina Smith frequently consulted her watch to give passersby the impression that time mattered to her. Only the useless and forsaken sat alone on public benches and watched bits and pieces of life float by. It bothered her that strangers might think her devoid of destination and purpose. Her worst fear growing up was being thought common.

A poorly dressed man shambled up the walkway with a face in danger of being a mere skull. Auschwitz and AIDS, each at the same time, popped into her head. Christ, let it not be him. A trash barrel abruptly occupied him. A noisy passel of children paraded by, two women in their midst. Then someone dropped down beside her. She glimpsed a boyish tousle of gray locks and crested buttons on a blue blazer, which looked brand-new.

“Beautiful day,” he said.

That was what he was supposed to say whether the day was that way or not. “If it doesn’t rain.” She said that on her own. Then: “Dudley?”

He dimpled when he smiled. “I would have liked to have been born with a silver spoon in my mouth, but it wasn’t there.”

A number of overly fed men and women tramped by, one after the other, as if obesity were contagious and epidemic. “I don’t need explanations,” she said.

“Do you have the money?”

She had booty from her first marriage, wise investments she had converted to cold cash, contained in a weighty accordion folder secured by sturdy laces. She passed it over, and he undid the laces, reached inside, and rubbed a thumb over one of the bands of bills as if to determine authenticity.

“The correct amount, I presume.” He placed the folder beside him. “I believe we’re in business. I may have questions.”

“You won’t.”

“If he has an automobile, I’d like you to disable it.”

She looked at him coldly.

“It’s really not that tricky,” he said. “I’ll tell you how.”

• • •

In his office, with a feeling he was winding inward, Chief Morgan rang up the Boston number and got a woman’s voice, quite pleasant, somewhat professional. He said, “Miss Williams, my name is James Morgan. I’m the police chief in Bensington. Your mother gave me your number.”

“She’s all right, isn’t she?”

“She’s fine. She said you could tell me the address of your friend Dudley.”

“I could have,” Mary Williams said without hesitation, “but I haven’t seen him since last spring. He was living here, you see.”

“You don’t know where he is now?”

“I wish I did. He left owing me money. I attract the wrong kind of men, my mother probably told you that. What has he done?”

Morgan let a pencil slide from his grasp. “Would you know his full name?”

“He was rather theatrical. Dudley was all he went by.”

“Where’s he from?”

“I don’t know. He told many stories.”

“Where did you meet him?”

“In the Public Garden. I do tend to pick up strays. I have one now. You haven’t told me what Dudley’s done.”

“I merely want to talk to him.”

“I wish I could help you.”

“I may get back to you.”

“Please do.”

Morgan, loosening his shirt, made another phone call and learned from a man identifying himself as a nurse that Paul Gunner had suffered a stroke. The pencil he had allowed to escape he retrieved and broke in two. He stepped from his office and sank into a chair alongside Meg O’Brien’s desk.

“What’s happening, James?”

“Too much,” he said, “and not enough.”

16

THE SUN FLOODED THE FRONT ROOM AND RACED THROUGH May Hutchins’s hair, in which she had let the gray creep back. Roland’s ashes were in a brown paper parcel, as if delivered in the mail. Everett Drinkwater, the undertaker, had placed the parcel beside Roland’s picture on the table near the window. She had not wanted the ashes in the house but eventually had come around. “Not much to show for him, is there?” she said.

Seated on the sofa, Drinkwater said, “The shame of it, May, is he wasn’t that old.”

“He was running on failing batteries,” she said, her eye moving to the picture.

“Death does what it wants,” Reverend Stottle said from an armchair. She had served sherry, which he appreciated. His second glass, which he held by the stem, had begotten a mood, one not all that different from Drinkwater’s.

Drinkwater, who usually didn’t like to explore the subject, said, “The greatest mystery in the world is what it’s like to be dead. I still haven’t figured it out.”

“He didn’t have enough fuel in him to continue the fight,” May said. She sat herself in a chair near the reverend, diagonal to Drinkwater, and unknowingly flaunted her legs.

“In death,” the reverend said, “one joins the speed of light. In near-death experiences the light is glorious. In death it’s blinding.”

“Then how do we see God?” Drinkwater asked.

“There’s no need.”

May had left her sherry glass somewhere and didn’t feel like fetching it. Drinkwater, divining the bind, lifted himself from the sofa and retrieved it for her. He also freshened the reverend’s glass and his own. “When I was a girl,” May said, “I saw Jesus in a dream. I’ve never forgotten it, but I wonder if he’ll remember me. I’ve changed so.”