Voices in the Dark (7 page)

Sergeant Avery slammed shut the drawer of a file cabinet in which he’d been pawing for something he’d squirreled away and now couldn’t find. He swigged root beer from a can and said, “The chief I don’t know where he is, and Meg’s gone home to do something with her cats.”

“How many has she got?”

“Three last I knew, one died.”

“Hope she didn’t go into mourning. ’Course, she doesn’t show her feelings like the rest of us. What are you staring at, Eugene?”

“You look different. Your hair, right? A different color, sort of orangy brown.”

“You don’t like it?”

“I didn’t say that.” He took another swig and then tattooed the soda can with his thumbnail. “What are you doing here, May? Something I can do for you?”

“I hear you got a prisoner. I want to see if he’s the poor bugger came begging at my door.”

“He leave you a present too?” Sergeant Avery asked with a smirk, and May arched her back.

“Just because Dorothea Farnham makes an accusation doesn’t mean it’s true. He came to my house, he was a perfect gentleman. Christian charity is what he got from me. You going to let me see him, or don’t you have the authority?”

Sergeant Avery hesitated, then shrugged. “Sure, I got the authority. You want to see him, what do I care?”

She followed him through a doorway and down a short passage, a broom closet on one side and a lavatory on the other. At the end was the lockup. Peering through bars, she saw the prisoner napping comfortably on an army cot, a pillow under his head, a small table fan providing a breeze. “He looks different, but that’s him,” she whispered. “Sleeping like a baby.”

“That’s what he does best.”

“Does he have a name?”

“Dudley.”

“It suits him,” she said, tilting her head for a better look. “I let him eat a bowl of cereal in my gazebo. He had perfect manners and a wonderful way of speaking. He said the best time of day is when the dew’s still on the grass.”

“All I know,” Sergeant Avery said, still clutching the soda can, “is he’s locked up for uncouth behavior. That’s how the chief put it.”

“Chief should talk. His is X-rated if half what I hear is true.” She shifted her gaze to magazines on a shelf and found herself scowling. “Some of that reading material doesn’t look proper.”

“Must be Floyd’s.”

“I’ve a mind to tell his mother.”

The prisoner was awake. A single blue eye stared at her from the comfort of the pillow. Over her shoulder, a blast in her ear, Sergeant Avery belled, “How’s your stomach, Dudley? Any better?” In a lower voice the sergeant confided, “He’s constipated. Poetic justice, the chief says.”

Dudley sat up with a start, as if coming out of a dark place, and pulled at his ill-fitting shirt, which may have been disarranged in a dream. May watched him swipe the forelock from his face, which for a full moment suggested an old clock without the will to tick. Smiling through the bars, she said, “Do you remember me?”

A strange expression diminished his features, as if he were debating his own existence. Then he brightened. “Did you bring me anything?”

“Sorry,” she said, wishing she had. His eyes were coins spending themselves on her. “Are you in much discomfort?” she asked with real concern.

“I want one of those,” he said, pointing at Sergeant Avery’s root beer.

“Go get him one, Eugene.”

“Hell, no,” Sergeant Avery said, “they’re Meg’s. One I’m drinking I gotta pay for.”

“For God’s sake, I’ll spring for it.”

He shuffled off with a grumble, and she peered through the bars. What was she doing here? What did she want? As we grow older, she asked herself, do we all drift into some kind of nonsense? Dudley was looking at her curiously, his signet ring catching her attention, and once more she wondered whether he had stolen it.

“Are you a good person?” he asked.

She was as good as the next but nobody special. In church she sang without a voice and at home played the piano without talent. She had never learned to knit, which prevented her from emulating Dorothea Farnham, who brought her needles to town meeting and gave the impression that her life was devoted to doing two things at once.

“Are you a happy parent?” Dudley asked.

What a queer question! “My children are grown,” she said. “I don’t see much of them.” She did not mention that her son, only twenty-six, was beginning to bald, which made her feel ancient, and that her daughter, living in California, had made a mess of two marriages.

“Not everyone,” Dudley said easily, “should have children. Chronos devoured his. Agamemnon sacrificed his to make war. This isn’t anything I’m making up. It’s mythological fact.”

The names sailed over her head, but his smile warmed her, as if he understood everything and judged not. Sergeant Avery returned and thrust upon her an unopened can of root beer, cold to the touch. She poked it through the bars. “For you, Dudley.”

“Something for you to remember,” Sergeant Avery warned, working wisdom into his round face. “No good deed goes unpunished. That’s what the chief says.”

May said, “Screw the chief.”

• • •

In facing chairs in her sitting room, Regina Smith listened to Harley Bodine talk in low and measured tones. He was in his dark lawyer’s suit, his back stiff, his legs crossed. His movements were formal. “Kate and I don’t fuck enough,” he said. “That’s one of the problems.”

The crudity did not disturb her, merely surprised her, though the look she returned was impersonal, almost as if he were a tradesman. “Whose fault is that?” she asked.

“I don’t think it matters.”

“That sounds too casual.”

“It’s not something I can talk about with her.”

“There’s the real problem.”

His face, monotonous in its grimness, looked used up. “We’ve never been truly open with each other. My fault, no doubt.”

She could readily believe that, for people invariably summed him up as a tightass. Phoebe Yarbrough had speculated that his butt was a hairline fracture.

“I’m not easy to get along with,” he added.

She could well imagine him as one person at the office, another in the privacy of his home, and a third here. His work world, like her husband’s, was high up in one of those verticals of concrete and glass, in a suite of dark mahogany, stainless steel, rich carpeting, and abstract art. She had heard that he could wither an underling with a look.

“I don’t know how to get close,” he said. “The sexual act is only an illusion of closeness. No one can truly get into another person. We die strangers, one to the other.” He flicked an ash into the dish she had provided. “Thanks for letting me smoke.”

She had served iced tea. His was gone. “Would you like another?”

He shook his head. “Does Ira know I’ve been taking up your time?”

“I’ve mentioned it.”

“Good, I wouldn’t want him to think …”

They sat through a few moments of dead silence, which was broken by approaching voices. He stubbed out his cigarette, and Regina, relieved that her daughter was wearing something over the bikini, said, “You remember Patricia?”

Rising, Bodine had obvious trouble reconciling the memory of a child of ten or twelve with an adolescent of burgeoning maturity. The girl was lovely, lovely, like her mother. Same glossy black hair, same dark and indifferent eyes lacking only the mysterious cast in one. He lightly shook her hand. “You’ve grown.”

“That’s what they tell me,” she said.

“And of course you know Ira’s son,” Regina broke in. “Anthony. Though he prefers Tony.”

The boy, wearing a T-shirt and swim trunks, had the torso of a greyhound. Bodine shook his hand with vigor and feeling and said, “You knew Glen, didn’t you, Tony?”

“Yes, sir. He was in some of my classes.”

“All you boys who came to the funeral, I appreciate it. You were one of those he looked up to.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that, sir.” The boy looked embarrassed. “More like the other way around. His grades were far above mine.”

“All the same, I know he admired you.”

Patricia leaned over her mother, said something, and left. Tony stayed because Bodine’s eyes held him. Each stood tall, and the air in the room seemed to tighten around them. Regina sat motionless in her chair. Bodine said, “I’m going to ask you something I shouldn’t, Tony, but maybe you can appreciate my state of mind. Do you think Glen took his own life?”

“No, sir. I don’t think he’d have done that.”

Bodine went silent, as if something infernal were picking at him. Regina spoke. “Why do you say that, Anthony?”

“It’s what I feel.”

Bodine spoke. “That’s all?”

“I know he was sick and all, sir, but he never made much of it. Just the opposite. He said he was going to become a doctor.”

“I know,” said Bodine. “He had his heart set on Harvard Medical School.”

The boy slung back his hair, which he wore long. His handsome face was a slant of light. “Wasn’t it an accident, sir?”

“That’s my problem, Tony. You see, I don’t know what it was.”

The boy left. A travesty of a smile seemed to detach itself from Bodine’s face as he busied himself with private thoughts. Regina noticed that his eyes were red-rimmed. “I should be going,” he said but stood rooted. “I should be working things out on my own.”

“Shouldn’t you be doing that with Kate? Give her a chance, Harley.”

“No,” he said. “I can’t trust her anymore.”

Regina now had other things to do and rose from her chair. With a gentle but firm grip on his elbow, she took him from the room and guided him over an expanse of gleaming hardwood and then of dense carpeting. He moved with a heavy gait and some reluctance. At the front door he turned to her.

“I told you Kate’s been seeing someone. He’s not one of us. He’s a townie.”

“Then it can’t be serious,” she said, wondering who in the world among the locals would interest Kate, from whom she had expected better taste.

Bodine said, “Do you remember the man who came to the Gunners’ party to tell me Glen was dead?”

“You’re joking. Not the — ”

“Yes,” he said. “The police chief.”

• • •

Racked with a fear that Dudley was lying somewhere dead, Mary Williams roamed the Public Garden in the hope of glimpsing him alive and well. She approached a man sleeping on the grass and then veered away. The heave of the sun hurt her eyes, and she almost stumbled into a great bed of marigolds that her fancy took for heaps of gold coin unloaded from a pirate’s ship. Blazing begonias her mind made into the hemorrhage of battle. On the walkway a vagrant held out a raddled hand, but she was too distraught to grease it. When two children ran in front of her, she nearly tripped over them. She had to get out of there. Too much pressed upon.

On Arlington Street she remembered that Dudley sometimes spent hours in train stations and airline terminals, a pretender among travelers. On Boylston Street she hailed a taxi that had jousted too long in Boston traffic. Its front was jagged, its windshield cracked, and its trunk sprung. It looked savage. She climbed in anyway.

The taxi crept through Chinatown, where hot street air wafted in on her and Asian faces paid her passing attention. Chatter from the sidewalk reached in like a hand and took hold of her. Plaster-doll children with rolling eyes raced across the narrow street, but the driver was careful. Several minutes later, angling out of traffic, he pulled up at South Station. She spoke to him in an appealing voice through the opening in the clear panel that separated them. He was a middle-aged black man with warm brown eyes, who did not mind waiting.

“As long as you can pay the fare, ma’am.”

Inside the great stone station her footsteps echoed over old marble. Nerve-worn, uncertain, she avoided undesirables loitering near the entrance to the public toilets and scanned the concourse. Men on benches goggled at her. Walking fast, she surveyed concession stands and gave a fleeting glance into a pizzeria. Two elderly women quailed at the raucous sounds of youths near the gateway to Track 4. That was when she fled.

“Logan Airport,” she said, settling herself back into the taxi. Then she changed her mind and gave another destination, much closer. The driver looked at her.

“That’s where you want to go?”

“Yes, I do,” she said.

He eased into traffic, fell behind the reek of a slow-moving bus, and, much to her relief, escaped it with a quick turn at the first intersection. Without comment, he drove to the city morgue, the facade gray and granite. Twisting his neck, he said, “This is it. This what you want?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m looking for somebody.”

His expression was sympathetic. “Somebody you hope isn’t there?”

“Yes,” she said, climbing out.

Inside the building, instinct showed her the way. Sculpted sphinxes flanked a stairwell, which she descended into a chill that made her think of polar snow. A passageway delivered her into an office where the furniture seemed to have been frozen into rigidity, like pieces in a museum. A man with a quiet, relaxed face and hair shaded zinc and nickel stood ready to help, though appointments were customary, some authorization mandatory.

“Do you have any unidentified …” Her voice failed, then half returned. “I have a friend who …”

“Are you up to it?” he asked, and she nodded. He took her into a long, lurid room of white tile and naked plumbing, where the taint of mold laced a greater chill. Her gaze swept banks of compartment doors, one of which was open, a vacant body tray visible. “Male or female?” the man asked.

She shivered as she spoke. “Male.”

“White, black, or yellow?”

“White,” she said. “Very white.”

“Then you don’t need to look,” he said.

When she stepped out of the building, the heat came at her like a blast. The city sun drenched her. The driver turned to look at her as she pushed herself into the back of the taxi. She did not close the door right and slammed it the second time. “He’s alive,” she said.

“He’s alive in there?”

“He’s alive somewhere,” she said. Instead of relief, she felt strain, which told on her. Her color was high, her hands trembled. “One more stop,” she said and told him where.