Murder Old and New

by Chet Williamson

  We both started laughing, and Dave waved for the check, which I tried to split. “No, no,” he said, “I asked you out this time. Next time you can ask me out.”

  “Okay, we’ll go to Subway then…”

  Dave paid and we left. I was cheered to see that he tipped 22 per cent. I think that guys who tip less than twenty are cheapskates, no matter how expensive the dinner. Once outside, the night was chilly, and we scurried into his car and headed toward his place.

  It was in one of those suburban developments where each house is set back a certain distance from the street and separated from each other by another set space, and has an attached two-car garage, very mid-sixties, the kind of place I would have died for when I was a kid. “My ex moved in with her new guy, so I got the house,” Dave said as he pulled into the driveway. I noted very distinctly that he didn’t put the car in the garage, so the expectation was that he would indeed take me home later.

  We went in through the kitchen. The room was full of a woman’s touches, and I could tell he hadn’t done much with it since he’d been on his own. There were still a couple of hanging baskets over the sink, and some folk tiles hung on a bare place on the kitchen wall. There were no dishes in the sink, so that was a plus. Actually, everything looked neat and clean. I’d expected a divorced cop’s home to be full of empty beer cans, crusted pizza boxes, and the stray piece of women’s undergarments, with an occasional overlooked foil condom wrapper under the sofa, but the Martha Stewartness of Dave’s place took me by surprise, and he seemed to sense it.

  “It usually isn’t this clean,” he said, “but when I get company…. Here…” He helped me doff my coat, which he hung on a peg, and then took me into the screening room. It was a nice, comfortable living room with overstuffed furniture, including a lounger which, along with a couch, faced the flat screen TV.

  “Have you watched all the noir films in the third volume?” I shook my head. “Good. I was thinking we’d try His Kind of Woman—it’s got Robert Mitchum, Jane Russell, and Vincent Price—“

  “As the Beaver,” I finished, and he caught it just fine and laughed. “John Farrow directed that one, didn’t he?”

  Dave looked at the case and nodded. “Why, have you seen it?”

  “No, but I’ve liked some of Farrow’s other movies—The Big Clock—and I love Mitchum.”

  Dave opened a bottle of Yellow Tail chardonnay, a safe choice, and we sat on the couch with our glasses and watched the film. It was fun, if not as good as I’d hoped, and by the time it was over the bottle was nearly empty. We talked about the movie as we finished the last of it, and then, in a moment between words, Dave leaned in and rubbed my cheek with the back of his fingers. I was glad he hadn’t tried any Mitchum moves from the movie. His fingers were warm and soft and smelled nice, and I closed my eyes and moved my cheek against his hand.

  He interpreted it, and rightly so, as permission to move on, and before I knew it his face was against mine and he was kissing me softly, gently, with no demands or urgency. I kissed him back, and it was nice, sweet. I hadn’t kissed anyone like that for a long time, and I was enjoying it. His breath, despite the spicy food, seemed fresh to me, a fellow partaker, and his mouth tasted just a little sweet. One of his hands went behind my head to caress my hair, and the other stayed against my cheek.

  We kissed like that for a long time, and finally I realized it was because he wasn’t sure what else to do. Unlike a lot of men (the majority, probably), he wasn’t ready or willing or brave enough to push it forward, and I sure wasn’t going to be the aggressor on the first date. I disengaged myself gingerly and with what I hoped was a moue of regret, and sat back.

  “This has been a great evening,” I said. “I really enjoyed everything, the food, the movie, especially the company.”

  “Me too,” Dave said. “I hope we can…do it again?”

  “That’s a definite.”

  “So…does this mean you want to go?”

  “I don’t want to, but I think I’d better.” Nothing like a little ego stroke, when you really don’t think you should stroke anything else.

  Dave took me home and remained the perfect gentleman. I kissed him goodnight at my door, a good, long deep kiss that, as they say in the bodice-rippers, held the promise of more to come. Fudge was waiting upstairs for me, more concerned with food than affection. I crawled into bed thinking about Dave Hutchins, and wondering if I should have thrown caution to the winds, made a major move, and spent the night with him.

  He was a lovely man, and it would have been equally lovely to have had him in my arms that night, giving me something I hadn’t had for far too long. Oh yes, though I outwardly live like a nun, inside I’m a sexual being, and I know how to fulfill certain needs. Without going into too much detail, let’s just say that I’m quite familiar with my own body, and, thinking about Dave, I remade the acquaintance of some vital areas before I drifted happily off to sleep that night.

  Unfortunately, I awoke before dawn with not Dave Hutchins but with Genevieve Tucker on my mind. I hadn’t been dreaming about her, not that I could remember, but in the darkness of my bedroom her presence suddenly seemed overwhelming and menacing. As you must know by now, I have a penchant for constructing scenarios, the more outlandish and alarming the better, but hey, one of them might have saved my mother from whatever that unknown assailant might have had in mind for her.

  Now a new screenplay was writing itself in my head, one in which Genevieve Tucker had taken it upon herself to engineer her aunt’s demise, albeit for altruistic motives. I saw her giving her aunt an overdose of meds, then waiting until the old woman became drowsy, then carefully slipping the plastic bag over her head. The bag was clear, so that she could see her aunt’s face. Then, finally, she stretched the elastic band enough to get it over her aunt’s head and settled it over the opening of the bag around her aunt’s neck. Then she sat in a chair next to the bed and waited.

  She hadn’t expected it to take so long, or for her aunt to struggle so much. The bag got cloudy on the inside from her aunt’s breath, but Genevieve could still see the pale white skin through the plastic. Then the plastic was sucked into the old woman’s mouth, and a pit formed on the outside of the bag as she labored for air. At that point Genevieve almost stopped it, and she actually had the plastic in her hand before she realized that this was what had to happen, that dying, no matter how it was done, wasn’t easy, and whatever took place in the next few minutes would be far more merciful than what would occur in the next few weeks.

  She let go of the plastic and sat back down again. Or maybe she crossed the room to move further away from the inevitable. She might have tried to leave altogether, but she couldn’t. She had to stay with her aunt, to see her through this, to guide her if need be, to deliver her.

  Genevieve Tucker watched her aunt die, and it was harder than she had thought it would be in so many ways. Her aunt’s action belied in every way what she had said about wanting to die. Her hands under the covers tried to come up to pull the suffocating plastic away from her face, but the blankets were too heavy, and the medications had dulled her actions, had dulled everything except the will of the body to live on when it knows that it’s dying, the will to continue, that will whose strength Genevieve had not counted on.

  We’ll never know what happened then, whether Genevieve merely watched as her aunt took many minutes to choke to death, or whether she went over to the bed and took a pillow and pressed down on her aunt’s face so that she wouldn’t have to watch her suffer and to shorten what seemed the terrible eternity of that suffering. But what I saw on Genevieve’s harried and haggard face as she finally removed the elastic and the plastic bag from her dead aunt’s head was recrimination instead of relief, guilt instead of acceptance, a sense of failure and betrayal that would remain within her through her trial and all the years to come, and which would, fifteen years later, transform itself into madness.

  I told you I tend to overdramatize.

 
Still, I couldn’t help but think it was a possible, if not altogether reasonable, scenario. In order to justify the rationality of her act, she might feel it necessary to do it again, to deliver sick and feeble old women the way she had “delivered” her aunt. It wasn’t out of the question that she might feel a need or a desire to help other old ladies die, was it? A soul-wrenching moment like she must have experienced could unbalance anyone.

  Terrific. So now I’d made Genevieve Tucker not only my mother’s attacker, but the killer of Enid Shaw and Rachel Gold as well. And as I got up to make myself a cup of herbal tea, I knew that I was doing a woman who had already suffered greatly a great disservice.

  I sat there with my tea, Fudge at my side. He was no doubt wondering why, if it was morning, his stomach still felt fairly full. That was as complex as things got for cats. I wished I could be more feline—sleep, sleep, sleep, eat, sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep, play, sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep, eat…and so it goes. Never think too hard, never imagine things that never happened or anticipate things that never will. Oh yeah, and use the litter box occasionally.

  Chapter 13

  The next morning was so busy in the store I barely had time to grab the usual starvation lunch. I wanted to get to the Gates Home a little early and pop in on Karen, so as soon as I’d downed my yogurt (caramel cream flavor, all ninety calories of it) I set Ted up with enough work to gainfully employ him and motored on over to the Gates Home. I caught Karen on a rare break, but before I could fill her in on Genevieve Tucker’s shady past, she insisted I tell her all about the date with Dave. I did, and she didn’t believe the happy if dispassionate ending.

  “You didn’t stay the night?” she asked.

  “No, I didn’t stay the night, nor did I become overly intimate with him. Just some lovely kissing, and that was all. But I didn’t really come over here to share the details of my sex life, or lack of same.”

  And then, swearing her to secrecy, I told her about Genevieve and her aunt. I was rewarded by the sight of Karen’s eyes getting bigger and bigger, until at the end I thought they might pop out into her coffee cup and splash her white sweater.

  “Oh, my god,’ she said. “Oh, Livy, you have to tell Doris about this.”

  “I don’t know if that’s such a good…” But Karen was already out the door and down the hall, and I followed in self-defense.

  Once inside Doris’s office with her, we closed the door. Doris looked up at us in surprise as Karen said, “Go ahead. Tell her.”

  Well, I had no choice, so I told, making Genevieve’s actions as sympathetic as possible. Doris’s eyeballs didn’t bug, but I could tell she was concerned when I’d finished.

  “So you know for sure,” Doris said, “that Genevieve was involved in an assisted suicide.”

  “Apparently she was involved in some way, but she wasn’t actually guilty of anything,” I said. “She was acquitted. Nothing even went on her record.”

  “Legally it wouldn’t have to.” Doris shook her head. “But still…”

  “I don’t know her that well,” I said. “How’s she been since she’s worked here?”

  “She’s fine,” Doris said. “Some of the nurses are just businesslike, but Genevieve is very friendly to everyone, very solicitous to the patients. Not in an obnoxious way, just quietly helpful. She’s always seemed concerned over the residents’ welfare. In fact, the only time she ever slipped up was not making sure that door was locked when she…”

  Doris’s words trailed away, and I knew what she was thinking. One mistake that marred an otherwise exemplary record, at least at the Gates Home, and I could see her wondering whether that mistake, conspicuous in its singularity, was a mistake after all. Doris looked directly at me. “How’s she been with your mother?”

  “She’s been…great. She visits her frequently, seems very concerned about her.” I didn’t say anything else. No suspicions that Genevieve’s interest in her might be less than friendly, and especially no suspicions that the burglar was Genevieve in disguise. “Look, I’m not implying that Genevieve is anything other than what she seems to be, or that she had anything to do with Rachel or Enid’s deaths—“

  As soon as it popped out of my mouth, I thought oh shit, where the hell did that come from? But it was too late now.

  Both Doris and Karen looked at me as if I’d said goddamn in church. “What?” Doris said. “What do you mean, Livy?”

  “Well…” I fumfered for a moment, then recovered. Slightly. “I just mean…I know that both those deaths were a little, well…”

  “What?” Doris said again.

  “Well, you know, just a little, well…”

  “What?” The limitations of Doris’s vocabulary seemed limitless.

  “…suspicious?” I ventured.

  It wasn’t a word Doris wanted to hear. “Suspicious?” she repeated, and the word, dripping from her mouth, resonated as though she had said pig feces. “I don’t know what you mean. What on earth was suspicious about the heart failures of two ill and elderly ladies?”

  “Um, their, uh, faces?”

  At least she didn’t say What? again. She just looked at me as if I’d climbed out of a pool of aforementioned pig feces.

  “There was some talk,” Karen said in support.

  “I know,” said Doris. “I heard it, and there’s nothing to it. Believe me, in this job I’ve seen a great many patients and residents who’ve passed on, and I’ve seen many who’ve died in their rooms, locked from the inside, who had terrible expressions on their faces. Even if it comes naturally, death doesn’t always come easy. So that’s no indication that there was anything suspicious about those ladies’ deaths. Or that Genevieve Tucker had anything to do with them.”

  “Doris, I didn’t mean to imply that for a minute,” I said. “I’m sure that Genevieve is a good nurse—a great nurse—who was just faced with a horrible dilemma at one time in her life. Unfortunately, I found out about it, and it made me think some goofy things, things I shouldn’t have thought. I have too much imagination for my own good, I guess. I mean, I know she didn’t have a thing to do with the burglar getting in…well, she left the door open, but other than that…”

  I was babbling and I knew it and I couldn’t do a thing to stop it. I felt like when I was eight years old and had been called into the principal’s office because I had put a bunch of torn-up tablet paper into Emily Ebersole’s closed umbrella, and when Emily opened it to walk home, the papers had drifted down and then stuck to the wet asphalt. It was a mess, and the next morning Mrs. Kipe had sent me to see Mrs. Dundorf, and I babbled on and on about how sorry I was and how I’d pick up all the pieces of paper if it took me till dark and I’d never do it again and on and on until Mrs. Dundorf was finally happy to get rid of me.

  And now I was doing the same thing, nearly forty years later. When the poet says that there are boys in men and girls in women, he ain’t just whistling Dixie. “I mean,” I was going on, “I even was so crazy as to think that maybe Genevieve came back in a disguise after she left the door open.”

  Oh poop. Why the hell did I say that? I’d specifically made a mental note to myself not to say that. Next I’d be telling Doris that I’d had this silly idea that Genevieve was the Antichrist and had a suitcase stuffed with dead babies in her work locker, and why don’t we go check right now just to make sure that she didn’t? Idiot. I was a blabbering idiot.

  “In a disguise?” Doris said. “Why on earth would you think that? You saw this person, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, but not very well. And they were the same height as Genevieve, same long brown hair…but it was silly—I just said it was silly! It’s silly!”

  I hoped I’d gotten my point across, and, from the gradually fading look of contempt on Doris’s face, I thought I had. After all, she couldn’t afford to get too shirty with me—I was not only a volunteer, but what with my mother as a resident I was a client as well.

  “Well,” Doris said, leaning back into h
er chair, “even if she did help to euthanize her aunt, there’s really nothing I can do about it. I already disciplined her for leaving the door unlocked, and if I did any more after this…news was presented to me, it’d probably qualify as harassment in the workplace or some such. I will keep an eye on her, though, and thanks for letting me know about it, Livy.”

  The thanks seemed insincere, and I wanted to tell her that I’d originally had no intention of spilling the beans until Karen dragged me into her office, but the way I’d been running at the mouth I had no idea of what might come out next, so chose to remain silent. Still, when I got Karen alone, I gave her my most sullen frown, the “I am so peeved to have to be bidding against you” frown that I sometimes use at auctions.

  “Why did you make me tell her?” I asked. “Now she thinks I’m a bubble-headed idiot.”

  “I wasn’t the one who started in on the conspiracy theories,” Karen replied. “You got pretty Mel Gibson on her ass. Do you really believe some of the stuff you said?”

  “I don’t know what I believe any more. I mean, she may be right about Enid and Rachel, but still, how likely is it that two ladies would both die on Monday nights with terrible expressions on their faces?”

  “You heard what Doris said about that—that sometimes people just die hard. It doesn’t mean that some crazy Monday Night Killer is prowling the halls. And even if there was—and there isn’t—it doesn’t mean it’s Genevieve Tucker, no matter what she might have done to ease her aunt’s pain.”

  I threw up my hands. “All right, okay! Everything is just as it seems. Two natural deaths, which happen all the time in nursing homes, one random burglary, which happens all the time in the city, and one employee with a tragic past…which happens. Separate and unconnected occurrences, no links between any of them. Happy?”

  “Delirious.” Karen shook her head. “You should’ve gotten laid last night. If you had, you’d have had something nice to think about, and you wouldn’t come up with all these weird ideas.”