He took a quick turn over to Broad Street, then a fast left, and another right, heading down Perry Street, past the Trenton Times offices. He accelerated up a rampway onto Route 1, then, just as quickly, took the Olden Avenue exit. At the bottom of the exit ramp he made an illegal U-turn, and headed back the way he’d just come. He thought he saw the detective then, trapped by the traffic, and he quickened his pace.
Martin Jeffers tried to dissect his feelings. In a way, he thought, it is childish to insist on losing the detective. He realized that, but he wanted to digest what he’d learned, and he wanted to do it in a solitude of his own construction. He headed back to the hospital, slowing, trying to compartmentalize his knowledge.
He knew he was no longer being followed. The downtown area of Trenton is an unlikely maze of streets and construction, daunting enough for the regulars, hopeless for the uninitiated. Miami, he thought, is probably all thruways and boulevards, wide, tree-lined streets, not the tangled confusion of an old Northeastern city clinging to life and livelihood. He envisioned the detective, her cool, silken presence melting in the twisted melee of cars, buses, and work crews. He wondered why it did not seem more amusing to him.
And, at the same time, he was still unable to shake the sense of foreboding that followed him even more doggedly than the police detective.
She, of course, was about a hundred yards behind him, her eyes set dead ahead, her mind a blackness of anger.
At five minutes past five p.m. Detective Mercedes Barren knocked on Dr. Martin Jeffers’ office door He let her in immediately, motioning her to a chair in the cramped office. She sat down, placing her pocketbook on the floor and a small leather briefcase in her lap. She quickly glanced about herself, eyes scanning the rows of books, the stacks of papers, the weak attempt at decoration with a pair of framed posters. She thought to herself: Don’t let the clutter fool you; he is likely to be as organized as his brother.
Jeffers chewed on the end of a pencil before speaking.
“So, detective, you’ve come all the way from Miami, and I’m still confused as to why you need to see my brother with such dispatch.”
She hesitated briefly before replying.
“As I said earlier, he is a material witness in a murder investigation.”
“Could you explain exactly how?”
“Have you been in touch with him today?”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“Answer mine first. Doctor, your evasiveness about this is irritating. I am a police detective investigating a homicide. I do not have to explain myself in order to obtain your cooperation. If need be I can go to your superiors.”
That was a bluff. She knew he knew it.
“Suppose I said, go ahead.”
“I would.”
He nodded. “Well, that I can believe.”
She thrust forward: “Did you talk with him today?”
“No.”
They hesitated.
“There’s an honest answer for you,” he continued. “I have not been in touch with him today. Here’s another honest answer: I don’t know how to get in touch with him.”
“I don’t believe that.”
He shrugged. “Believe what you like.”
Again they were silent.
“All right,” she said after a moment. “I think your brother has information about a murder. I said that earlier. I do not know the extent of his involvement. That is why I want to speak with him.”
“Is he a suspect?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Detective Barren, if you want me to answer any of your questions, then you damn well better answer a couple of mine.”
Her mind raced, trying to sort out small lies from big ones, trying to chart a course that spoke some truth, enough to gain the brother’s assistance.
“I cannot say whether he is or isn’t. A piece of evidence that we have traced to him was discovered adjacent to the crime scene. For all I know he may have a perfectly good explanation for this. He may not. That’s what I’m here trying to find out.”
Martin Jeffers nodded. He was trying to deduce whether she was at least in part truthful. Sex offenders are easier, he thought wryly.
“What kind of evidence?”
She shook her head.
“All right,” he said. “The crime is . . .”
“Murder.”
“And your involvement . . .”
“I’m a police detective . . .”
He pulled out one of the photostats of Susan’s obituary and slid it across the desk to her. His voice was rigid with distaste. “I hate lies, detective. My whole business, my whole being, is dedicated to the pursuits of certain kinds of fundamental truths. It is an insult for you to come in here and lie to me.”
He thought he sounded properly pompous and angered. He was unprepared for her response. He had expected her to adopt a polar position, either chastened or outraged. She was neither.
“I insult you?” she asked in a frightening, low voice. She did not wait for an answer before plowing ahead. “And now you have the audacity to make a speech about truth? And all the time you’re sitting there smugly, playing a little head-game and hiding your brother from—from—from questioning. All right. First you tell me that you think your brother is incapable of this.”
She fished about briefly in her briefcase, finally bringing forth one of the crime-scene photographs and tossing it onto his desk.
He pushed it away without looking at it.
“Don’t try to shock me,” he said.
“I’m not.”
He realized then that her words had the force of screams, but that she’d not once raised her voice. He picked up the picture and stared at it.
“I’m sorry for you,” he said.
But his imagination was swept into a slippery vortex of fright. The picture seemed like an etching by Goya, each shadow hiding some terror, each line a sense of horror. He saw the young woman stretched in death, savaged. He thought of a moment in medical school when he’d confronted his first corpse. He had expected someone, something, old, tired, misshapen with age and disease. But his first cadaver had been that of a sixteen-year-old prostitute who’d overdosed one unfortunate night. He had looked down into the dead eyes of the girl and been unable to touch her. His hands had shaken, his voice quavered. For an instant he’d thought he was going to faint. He’d turned away, heaving air into his lungs, gasping. It had taken him every fiber of strength to go to the anatomy professor and request an exchange. He remembered switching with another student—a loathsome man who’d remarked, “Nice tits,” as he wielded his scalpel. Jeffers could still see the corpse of the elderly wino he’d been assigned, wanting in some strange way, before plunging his own knife into the man’s hairless chest, to embrace this skeletonlike shape and thank him for ridding him of some of his terror.
He stared at the picture again and thought of the girl on the slab.
“I could never do it,” he said softly.
For a moment he did not realize what he’d said.
She did. It seared her. She summoned more control from her heart.
Detective Barren let the silence mount around them before she cracked it ever so gently with a simple question: “But what about your brother?”
Jeffers felt his insides churn. With difficulty he gathered himself together and retreated into his best clinical tones.
“I don’t believe my brother is capable of such a thing, detective. I can’t believe it. I won’t believe it. I don’t believe it. You’re talking about savagery, uh, despicable, reprehensible, I don’t know. I’m insulted that you’d even ask.”
Detective Barren stared at him.
“Are you really?” she asked gently.
He managed an ineffectual snort
and an impotent wave of the hand in response.
“Assume, for the sake of this conversation, that . . .”
He interrupted.
“Assume nothing, detective. I don’t want to play with hypotheticals. My brother is a prize-winning photographer. He is one of the most sought-after freelancers in journalism today. He travels the world. His work appears in every major publication. He is honored and respected. He is an artist. In every sense of the word, detective. An artist.”
“I didn’t ask you about his professional qualifications.”
“No, that’s correct. You didn’t.”
He hesitated before adding:
“But it’s important to realize we’re not dealing with some, some . . .”
She cut in: “Ordinary man?”
He nodded. “All right.”
Her voice re-formed on the edge of rage: “You think an ordinary man could do this?”
He reeled.
“You misunderstand me.”
“No, I don’t. I don’t at all.”
She stared at him and he used the moment to try to regain some distance. Jeffers decided to go on the offensive.
“And this, I suppose, is a routine investigation?”
“Yes. No . . .”
“Well, which?”
“It is not routine.”
“It couldn’t be, could it, detective? Not when the victim is your niece.”
“Correct.”
“Then explain to me, detective, if you will, why you are here trying to connect my brother to a crime that has already been solved?”
He reached down and thrust another photostat of a news story across at her. She glanced at it rapidly, then pushed it aside.
“The murder of Susan Lewis was not solved. It was only attributed to that man. I have evidence that indicates he did not commit the crime.”
“Will you share that with me?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so.”
“The evidence is circumstantial.”
“I would imagine so. Because if it were more than mere guesswork, detective, then you would have tried to browbeat me with it already.”
That was true. She nodded.
“You’re correct, doctor.”
He paused before continuing. He felt stronger, more aggressive. He returned to his best clinical approach.
“Please, detective, enlighten me. The aunt of a murder victim arrives here seeking to connect my brother to a crime that’s been solved. Now why shouldn’t I find that confusing and unusual?”
He looked across the desk at the detective and realized that there was something new in her eyes. They seemed to glow. He realized, too, that all of his pedanticism was useless. There was silence before she replied in a singularly deep, even voice.
“You should,” she said. She paused again before continuing.
“But if it was so goddamned surprising to hear that your brother was sought in connection with a murder, why didn’t you toss me out then?”
She looked directly at him, her eyes harsh and unforgiving.
“Why weren’t you shocked? Speechless? Astounded?”
She breathed in and out evenly.
“I know why,” she continued quietly, terrifyingly. “Because you weren’t surprised to hear it. Not at all, goddammit.”
She hesitated again while she registered the effect her words had on him.
“Because you’ve been waiting to hear exactly that for some time, haven’t you?”
Her words were like bullets probing for Jeffers’ heart. He forced his mind to go blank, not accepting the questions she’d thrust at him, denying his own imagination simultaneously.
He stood and walked to the window.
She sat watching.
The summer evening was closing in. The dusk seemed gray. He thought it was the hour of the day most like the first few moments after a nightmare, when people are not certain whether they are safe, awake in their bed, or still asleep, trapped by their dream.
He took an immense breath. He released it slowly, then took another. To himself he screamed: Get control! Show nothing!
But he knew these were impossible commands.
“Detective, what you say is provocative. I think we had best continue this conversation tomorrow . . .”
It was weak and ineffectual, but he knew he needed time. Insist on it! he said to himself.
She started to speak, but he wheeled away from the window and held up his hand.
“Tomorrow! Tomorrow, goddammit! Tomorrow!”
She nodded.
“After my group session, around noontime.”
“Okay.”
She paused before asking, “You’re not going to cancel that like you did today’s appointments?”
He glared at her. He didn’t reply.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll take that as a negative.”
She stood and looked at him.
“You won’t call him?”
“I told you, detective, I can’t.” Jeffers, she saw, was struggling for composure. What a fragile man he was, she thought suddenly. She wondered how she could use this to her advantage.
“Suppose he calls you? Suppose that happens—what’re you going to say?”
“He won’t.”
“He might.”
“I said he won’t.”
“But if he does?”
“He’s my brother. I’ll talk to him.”
“What will you say?”
Jeffers shook his head angrily. “He’s my brother.”
VIII
OTHER DARK PLACES
13. They drove north, paralleling the Mississippi River.
Douglas Jeffers called it “The mighty Miss-sah-sip” and gave Anne Hampton a short course on Mark Twain. He was clearly disappointed to learn that she’d read only Tom Sawyer, and that when she had been a senior in high school. She was uneducated, he told her bitterly. If she did not know about Huck, he said, she knew nothing. She certainly would find it more difficult to understand him. “Huck is America,” Jeffers insisted. “I am America.” She did not reply, but scribbled down his words in her notepad.
He spoke this in a low voice. Then he adopted a pedantic, lecturing tone and told her that the river had once been the most important route for commerce in the nation, that it had been the signaling point for the jump across the West, that it slid through the heart of America, carrying politics, culture, civilization, and sustenance on the backs of its waters. To understand the river, he said, was to know how America formed. He told her that the same was true of people; one merely had to determine what river coursed through a man, or woman, then follow it to the basin of comprehension. She looked bewildered and he suddenly screamed at her, “I’m talking about myself, goddammit! Can’t you see what I’m saying? I’m trying to teach you things that no one, no one in the world knows! Don’t sit there like a slug!” She cowered, waiting for the blow, but he held off, though she saw his hand clench into a fist. Then, after a momentary pause, he continued musing about the river.
Occasionally they would swing close enough in the car for her to see the gleaming wide surface reflecting the daylight, the waters flowing ceaselessly, steadily onward toward the gulf that lay behind them. He insisted she take down all of his rambling speech, almost word for word, saying that someday she would recognize the value inherent in the phrases and fragments, and she would be thankful that she had managed to copy them down properly.
She did not understand that, but during the past days she had found it comforting when he would talk about the future, no matter how vaguely, as if there were some world extending beyond the windows of the car hurtling through the countryside, a life past Douglas Jeffers’ long reach
. She obeyed, scratching letters, shaping words as quickly as she could.
When he asked her to reread it to him, she obeyed.
He asked her to make a small correction, then a small addendum. She obeyed.
She obeyed everything. To refuse him anything was utterly alien to her.
Several nights had passed—she had trouble saying to herself precisely how many—since he had shot the derelict. Since I shot the derelict, she thought. Then: No, since we shot the derelict. They stayed each night in some forgettable motel near the edge of the highway, the kind of places with neon red vacancy signs blinking in the darkness, where the waterglasses are wrapped in paper and the management puts signs on the toilets to say that they have been properly sanitized.
As they were entering their room in one of the motels she saw a man standing next to a soft-drink machine a short distance away. He wore a cheap brown suit and a tie loosened by the day’s heat. She thought of Willy Loman and realized that he was a traveling salesman. He was leering at her as he fed quarters into the machine. She watched as he purchased three cans of orange soda and saw that he had a bottle of vodka in his pocket. She cringed at the man’s look, shrinking in fear from the design in his eyes. Jeffers snarled at the man like an animal surprised at the door to its den, and the man shuffled away, protecting his soft drinks and liquor and the evening’s oblivion that they held out in promise. Jeffers had said, “Why kill him unless you’re a punk looking for a fifty-buck score? What he’s drinking will kill him just as sure as a bullet. Just not quite as quick.”
In bed each night she slept fitfully, if at all, tossing about as much as she dared, but more often lying rigid, listening to his even breathing but not believing that he slept. He never sleeps, she thought. He’s always awake and ready. Even when he emitted a snore, she refused to believe that it signaled sleep. When she listened to him, she tried to remain absolutely quiet, as if even the slight whisper of her own breath would rouse him. She thought at those times that she could no longer hear or feel her own body functioning. She would surreptitiously put her hand to her breast and try to sense the heartbeat beneath. It seemed distant, weak; it was as if she were close to death, mortally fragile.
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