Whatever went on in back of Donna Berens’s eyes stayed back there. She nodded, perhaps a bit jerkily, as if confirming something she had privately suspected. Her eyes left my face, then returned. “You’re—you’re quite positive?”
“Yes. However, the police will want you to identify her. If you’re up to it.”
Again she nodded. She left me. I found myself in front of the windows, studying the communal backyard, green-gray under the fading light of that gloomy day. Birds in the yard, making short work of the worms and insects brought to the surface by the suffocating wetness.
Mrs. Berens returned in what seemed only a short time, although the room was noticeably darker than it had been. The days were growing shorter. “Days like this remind you that you’re going to die,” she had said. I rubbed the still-healing injury to my left arm, the dull-aching reminder of a day I almost died.
She had changed into a simple gray dress, wide at the shoulders, narrow at the hip, short enough to be fashionable but long enough to be acceptable on a woman her age. Dark stockings. Black heels. She brought with her the subtle, almost subliminal scent of flowers.
“I’m ready,” she said, fumbling with a black leather handbag.
“You’ll want a jacket.”
She looked around the room. As before, it was as if she didn’t understand the sentence, as if she needed a translator. “I—The closet,” she said, a trifle breathlessly.
It was near the door. I found a navy-blue raincoat cut like a trenchcoat and held it for her. Then she turned and looked at me.
“I don’t know—What’s expected of me? What do I have to do? Is there some kind of … format? Some procedure I have to follow?”
“No. They’ll take you to see Meredith. It won’t be … She won’t look the way you’ll want to remember her looking, Mrs. Berens.”
She might not have heard me. She made no sign.
“You’ll identify her as your daughter. They’ll have some papers for you to sign. Then I’ll bring you home.”
“Will they want to question me?”
“Perhaps later. Not today.”
She nodded and turned toward the door. I followed her. She opened it and stopped and asked me, without looking back at me. “She was killed, wasn’t she? My little girl was murdered.”
There was nothing to say but yes, but I couldn’t locate the word. Donna Berens stepped through the doorway and I went after her, closing the door behind me.
She didn’t ask me who the killer was.
We went and she identified the body. She studied the battered face for a long time, saying nothing, betraying no emotion except a kind of mute fascination, a seriousness that was almost detached, almost professional. Finally she turned to Banner and said, “This is my daughter.”
Banner led us into a small block room, a kind of lounge, where Mrs. Berens could sit and sign the papers, where Banner asked her a couple of questions in a soft, almost conversational way—“Do you have any idea who could have done this to your daughter, Mrs. Berens?” “Did your daughter ever talk about someone threatening her or abusing her?” “Was there anyone your daughter was afraid of?” “Did your daughter have a boyfriend or boyfriends, someone she saw, or had been seeing, on a regular basis?” Donna Berens’s barely audible answer to the last one—“No,” as it had been to the others—prompted a raised-eyebrow glance from Banner to me.
It was over quickly, almost too quickly, and we were in my old clunker again. The afternoon was a deep gray. Traffic was heavy. My client, or ex-client, said nothing; it had been the same on the drive in. I parked in the little blacktop lot in front of her building, got out, opened her door, escorted her to her front step. She found her keys, found the keyhole. Her hands trembled. The lock gave and she opened the door several inches. Then she looked at me.
“I can’t be alone just now,” she said. “Help me.”
She entered the house and so did I. The room was cold and nearly dark, and she made no effort to address either of those conditions. She dropped her bag onto the wicker love seat that I had sat in at our first meeting, covered the bag with her raincoat, and moved toward a high, narrow table set against the far wall. The table supported three cut-glass decanters and six or eight stout glasses. She turned two glasses right side up, filled each to the halfway point, and turned. I was out of my jacket by then. I took the glass she offered, sniffed it before I drank. Gin. I detest gin. But I drank some. The perfect guest.
“There’s ice in the refrigerator,” she said, indicating an archway through which lay the kitchen. Nothing can save gin, so I didn’t bother with ice.
She sat in the high-backed white wicker chair she had occupied the other day. I sat on the love seat, next to the coats. She drank quickly and silently. I made mine last, which was no trick. Only a few minutes passed before she stood and walked past me to replenish her glass. I caught the powdery, floral scent from her.
“Do they know who did this to my little girl?” she said quietly, from the drinks table.
“Not yet.”
“Do you?”
“No.”
She turned, glass in hand, and drank, and said, “But you suspect.”
“Suspicion doesn’t count for anything.”
“Who do you suspect? Whom.”
Everyone and no one. I said, “There are things that Meredith kept from you, Mrs. Berens. Things she kept from her friends at work.”
“Things.”
“Things pertaining to her private life, her very private life. Do you know a man named Thomas Wayne?”
“No.” She drank. “Should I?”
I shrugged, but in the darkness that had enveloped the room in the past minutes, it had no significance. “According to Meredith, he was her fiancé.”
“What do you mean, ‘According to Meredith’?”
“Wayne disputes it. They dated, fairly often, I gather. There’s no question about that.”
“Impossible,” she said quietly, as if to herself.
“They met at a party last winter. Dianna Castelli introduced them.”
“I should have known.” She drank. The faint light from the windows at the end of the room glinted on the glass in her hands. “I never liked that woman. I never trusted her. I told Meredith as much. She was always giving Meredith ideas. Meredith wouldn’t have moved out of her home, here, with me, except for that woman insisting, badgering, coming between us, getting her worked up. She said it was time for Meredith to make her own way. Go out into the world, she said. Well, she did. My little girl went out into the world, and the world killed her.”
As it does all of us, I thought.
There was movement on Donna Berens’s side of the room, followed by the scrape of the glass stopper being lifted from a decanter.
“That’s unfair,” I said gently. “I don’t know about Meredith’s moving out. There does come a time, I think, when it’s important for people to take responsibility for themselves. But Meredith’s death … you can’t put that on the Castelli woman.”
“No?” The voice was simultaneously silk and acid. Her heels tapped the oak underfoot; her smooth legs brushed mine as she brailled her way back to her chair. “Dianna Castelli introduced Meredith to this Wayne whoever?”
“Thomas Wayne. Yes.”
“And Meredith never told me about him. She never told me she was seeing him, much less engaged to him—which I doubt she was, by the way.” The words, spoken low, were coming fast, propelled by bottled-up emotion, lubricated by alcohol.
“As I said, there are many things that Meredith apparently kept from many people …”
“I’m her mother,” she said, as if that alone proved something. “She would have told me … naturally. But she didn’t. Why? Because she didn’t want me to know about this young man. Is he young?”
“Youngish,” I said. “Older than Meredith. About my age.”
“This young man. Why not? Because there was something to hide. Something she was ashamed of. Something sh
e was afraid of. You’ve met this Wayne person?”
“Thomas Wayne,” I repeated. “I’ve met him. He seems pleasant enough.”
She laughed. Not because she was amused. “Pleasant doesn’t count for anything,” she said. “I’ve known lots of pleasant men—family men—churchgoing men—pleasant, pleasant men with pleasant, pleasant wives and pleasant, pleasant kids. My husband is a pleasant man. Was. Ex-husban—The hell with it.” She drank. She was getting noisy at it. “The hell with them all.”
I figured we were fast reaching the point where there was no use my trying to carry on a one-sided rational conversation. I kept still.
“Whatsee do?”
“Wayne? Real estate. Commercial property, mostly.”
She made a noise. “Lotsa pleasant men in real estate. What kindsa name Wayne?”
“What kind? I don’t know. English, maybe. Irish, maybe. What’s the difference?”
She got to her feet, heading for the drinks table again. Whether owing to the darkness or the drink, or both, she stumbled, and caught herself on the arm of the love seat.
“You all right?”
She said nothing and continued on her mission.
“My husban’ was a pleasant man,” she said again, apropos of nothing. She followed it with a long pause. The pause begged to be filled, so I said, “Mm-hmm?” I heard her turn and, in the gloom, sensed her eyes on me. “Pleasant,” she said. “Thoughtful.” Another pause. “When he beat me up he always made sure the bruises didn’t show.”
I was silent.
“He never hit my face,” she went on, softly, almost reminiscently. “I could never wear backless dresses, and sometimes I had to wear long sleeves in the summer, and I wore a lot of ankle-length skirts. But never my face. Not like … My little girl. My poor little girl.”
A minute passed. Then, her voice low and steady, she said, “An animal beat my little girl to death, Mr. Nebraska. Only an animal could do something like that to a beautiful girl.”
There was nothing there that I could disagree with.
“An animal like that deserves to die the same way,” she said matter-of-factly. “Beaten to death. Slowly.”
I heard the heels on the floor again and pulled my legs in to give her room to pass. She wasn’t as good at it as the other times. She stumbled and nearly ended up in my lap. I had parked my drink on the glass-topped table nearby, so both hands were free to catch her. Her face was near mine. I felt her breath, smelled the flowers she was scented with, and both smelled, and felt the liquor as a small amount of it ended up on my arm.
“Mrs. Berens, are you all right?”
“I’m a little drunk,” she said, her breath heavy with liquor.
Then she was deadweight in my arms.
CHAPTER TEN
I hung around awhile. The mother hen instinct. Donna Berens had had a lot to drink in a short while and on no dinner. I wanted to make sure she was all right. It was the least I could do for her. It was the least I could do for Meredith.
With neither help nor resistance from the unconscious woman, I wrangled her into what appeared to be the master bedroom. The archway off of the living room was set perpendicular to a corridor that led, on the left, to the kitchen, and, on the right, the bathroom and two bedrooms. One of the bedrooms, the first along the hall, was frilly and fussy and populated by stuffed animals and dolls and filigreed pillows. The second bedroom was larger and more remote, its stark, black-lacquered furniture vaguely oriental in a modern, off-putting way. Donna Berens’s room without a doubt. I deposited her on the bed and pried off the high-heeled shoes and surveyed the lay of the land. At this point in the detective books, the hard-boiled hero is supposed to peel off the distressed client’s clothing and roll her between the sheets. All in the name of chivalry, of course. He’s to provide commentary on the acceptability of the client’s warm and available body, too, but only for local color, since the next step is to haul the covers over her and depart with not so much as a dent in his shining armor.
There was no denying that Donna Berens had a nice body. The gray sheath she wore was close-fitting enough to evidence that, and the way it had marched up her dark-stockinged legs when I let her down onto the bed verified it. I tugged at the hem but the cloth was bunched up behind and under her and wouldn’t budge. I loosened the buttons at her throat and wrists and relieved her of the little bit of jewelry she wore. Chivalry or no, I wouldn’t have minded following the formula and getting her out of her clothes. I’ve played the scene before, I know all the moves, and I’m honest enough to say my motivation hasn’t always and entirely been the prevention of wrinkles in women’s clothing. But, looking at the unconscious woman sprawled across the bed, I knew, or sensed, that this would be different. Not good clean dirty little boy-girl horseplay, the kind that may or may not develop into something later, but an invasion, an obscene invasion of a very private woman. Private, and very much alone.
I put the jewelry on a low, long dresser, put the shoes on the hardwood alongside the dresser, and looked at their owner again. After some consideration I rolled her onto her side, propping her into place with a rolled-up pillow. She murmured a protest when I manhandled her, but put up no fight. The only movement she made was to draw her legs toward her belly, a half-fetal position. I evaluated my work. I didn’t know what kind of a drinker she was, and if she’d drunk enough that I had to worry about her throwing up without regaining consciousness, but I figured with her in that position the results would be messy but nonfatal. Then I took the edge of the spread from the far side of the bed and pulled it over her, like folding an omelet. I put out the light and left the door open and felt my way down the near-dark corridor.
Meredith’s room, as I’ve said, was the next door along. The light switch was one of those illuminated jobs, glowing softly against the wall like a feeble light in the window for someone who would never come home. Flipping it ignited pale yellow light behind a frosted-glass square hanging from the ceiling.
It was a little-girl room, loaded with plush, too-cute artifacts that girls collect because, I suspect, they’re trained to. I surveyed the dolls and the bears and the pillows and the little sachets without touching them, as if they were museum pieces. In a way they were. The room was as perfect and clean and uninviting as the worst museums. And, now, it was something in the way of a memorial to a dead race. A race of one.
The dresser, a long, low, six-drawer chest with a tall mirror, was loaded with pictures, both portraits and framed snapshots. Most of them were of Meredith and her mother. They had the stiff, posed, unnatural look of tourist photographs snapped by strangers pressed into temporary duty. I recognized some of the backgrounds. The plaza at the United Nations. The lobby of the Empire State Building. The Golden Gate Bridge and the entrance to San Francisco’s Chinatown. The monorail at Peony Park in Omaha.
The pictures covered a span of I don’t know how many years. In the earliest of them, I guessed, Meredith was perhaps twelve. She was a skinny, gangly kid with a wary, self-conscious smile. In later photographs she was taller than her mother, and beginning to fill out, the gangliness being erased by the smooth layer of fat that makes girls look like women. Finally she was a young woman, in shorts and a halter at a picnic table, in slacks and a fuzzy sweater in front of the Christmas tree, in her graduation portrait. She looked healthy and strong and well-made. The smile was still guarded, but now, with Meredith’s budding maturity, its self-consciousness had developed into a kind of sly modesty that was attractive in its own way. She would be described as a quiet girl. Shy, maybe; maybe not—such designations, like beauty, depend on the prejudices of the observer.
I picked up the graduation picture, an eight by ten of the same shot Donna Berens had provided me, and studied the face. It was a longish though well-proportioned face, framed by Meredith’s long dark hair. Her eyes were bright and smiling. Her lips gleamed softly with a pale-pink gloss. Her facial structure was not as pronounced as her mother’s but, like Donna, Meredith
seemed to have too many teeth for her mouth. A pretty girl. Even allowing for the photographer’s artifice—the slightly soft focus that erased any flaw in the skin, the backlight that highlighted the long hair, the kick light that illuminated her eyes—she was a pretty girl.
The image in my hand suddenly was replaced by the image I had seen in the morgue, the bruised and broken flesh, the blood, the shattered bone, the torn and matted hair. I felt a little lightheaded and, replacing the picture, leaned against the dresser for a long minute, studying myself in the mirror, until the giddiness passed.
I looked in on Donna Berens. She appeared to be resting comfortably, as the MDs say. As comfortably as you can rest with a bellyful of gin. She was as I had left her: on her stomach, her face near the edge of the mattress, turned toward the door.
An hour should do it, I figured, based on no knowledge or expertise in particular. Within an hour the contents of her stomach either would no longer be in her stomach or they would be there for the duration.
I collected our glasses from the living room and rinsed them in the kitchen sink. I raided her refrigerator, hoping to find something to take the taste of gin out of my mouth and gut. There was no beer, so I made do with a glass of grapefruit juice and an apple. Not a combination I’d recommend. There was a little pastel-colored black-and-white television set on the round kitchen table. I turned it to a newscast, the volume low although I was certain it would take more than a weathercaster to wake Donna Berens. By the warm glow of the range light I watched the news and a rerun of Barney Miller and ate another apple and checked Donna Berens three times. She was fine. So was the show. It was the one where the Twelfth Precinct has an apparent visitor from the future, and the resident gay couple has snatched the less sissified one’s kid from the schoolyard. I had seen it probably half a dozen times and it was still funny, which is the mark of a truly well done production. That I didn’t do much laughing was my fault, not its. After the program was over I checked Donna one last time and let myself out of the townhouse, making sure the spring lock secured the door after me.
Things Invisible (A Nebraska Mystery Book 4) Page 14
