Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  The sun was setting. Manhattan was filled with river light. I drove up the West Side Highway with the window down, and remembered how much Margie had liked to do that, even in the winter. Real air, Gene. Chilled like good beer.

  Nobody at the Beth Israel Retirement Home would talk to me about the two old people who died there, Samuel Fetterolf and Rose Kaplan. Nor would they let me wander around loose after my carefully guided tour. I went to the Chinese restaurant across the street and waited.

  From every street-side window in Beth Israel I’d seen them head in here: well-dressed men and women visiting their parents and aunts and grandmothers after work. They’d stay an hour, and then they’d be too hungry to go home and cook, or maybe too demoralized to go home without a drink, a steady stream of overscheduled people dutifully keeping up connections with their old. I chose a table in the bar section, ordered, and ate slowly. It took a huge plate of moo goo gai pan and three club sodas before I heard it.

  “How can you say that? She’s not senile, Brad! She knows whether her friends are suicidal or not!”

  “I didn’t say she—”

  “Yes, you did! You said we can’t trust her perceptions! She’s only old, not stupid!” Fierce thrust of chopsticks into her sweet and sour. She was about thirty, slim and tanned, her dark hair cut short. Preppy shirt and sweater. He wasn’t holding up as well, the paunch and bald spot well underway, the beleaguered husband look not yet turned resentful.

  “Joanne, I only said—”

  “You said we should just discount what Grams said and leave her there, even though she’s so scared. You always discount what she says!”

  “I don’t. I just—”

  “Like about that thing at Passover. What Grams wanted was completely reasonable, and you just—”

  “Excuse me,” I said, before they drifted any more. The thing at Passover wouldn’t do me any good. “I’m sorry, but I couldn’t help but overhear. I have a grandmother in Beth Israel, too, and I’m a little worried about her, otherwise I wouldn’t interrupt, it’s just that . . . my grandmother is scared to stay there, too.”

  They inspected me unsmilingly, saying nothing.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I said desperately. “She’s never been like this.”

  “I’m sorry,” Brad said stiffly, “we can’t help.”

  “Oh, I understand. Strangers. I just thought . . . you said something about your grandmother being frightened . . . I’m sorry.” I got up to leave, projecting embarrassment.

  “Wait a minute,” Joanne said. “What did you say your name was?”

  “Aaron Sanderson.”

  “Joanne, I don’t think—”

  “Brad, if he has the same problem as—Mr. Sanderson, what is your grandmother afraid of? Is she usually nervous?”

  “No, that’s just it,” I said, moving closer to their table. Brad frowned at me. “She’s never nervous or jittery, and never depressed. She’s fantastic, actually. But ever since those two residents died . . .”

  “Well, that’s just it,” Joanne said. Brad sighed and shifted his weight. “Grams was friendly with Mrs. Kaplan, and she told me that Mrs. Kaplan would never in a million years commit suicide. She just wouldn’t.”

  “Same thing my grandmother said. But I’m sure there couldn’t be actual danger in Beth Israel,” I said. Dismiss what the witness said and wait for the contradiction.

  “Why not?” Joanne said. “They could be testing some new medication . . . in fact, Grams said Mrs. Kaplan had volunteered for some clinical trial. She had cancer.”

  Brad said, “And so naturally she was depressed. Or maybe depression was a side effect of the drug. You read about that shit all the time. The drug company will be faced with a huge lawsuit, they’ll settle, they’ll stop giving the pills, and everybody’s grandmother is safe. That simple.”

  “No, smartie.” Joanne glared at him. “It’s not that simple. Grams said she spent the afternoon with Mrs. Kaplan a week or so after she started the drug. Mrs. Kaplan was anything but depressed. She was really up, and she’d fallen in love with Mr. Fetterolf who was also in the trial, and his daughter-in-law Dottie was telling me—”

  “Joanne, let’s go,” Brad said. “I don’t really feel like arguing here.”

  I said, “My grandmother knew Mr. Fetterolf slightly. And she’s worried about his suicide—”

  “So am I,” Joanne said. “I keep telling and telling Brad—”

  “Joanne, I’m going. You do what the hell you want.”

  “You can’t just—all right, all right! Everything has to be your way!” She flounced up, threw me an apologetic look, and followed her husband out.

  There were four Fetterolfs in the Manhattan phone directory. Two were single initials, which meant they were probably women living alone. I chose Herman Fetterolf on West Eighty-sixth.

  The apartment building was nice, with a carpeted lobby and deep comfortable sofas. I said to the doorman, “Please tell Mrs. Dottie Fetterolf that there’s a private investigator to talk to her about her father-in-law’s death. My name is Joe Carter. Ask her if she’ll come down to the lobby to talk to me.”

  He gave me a startled look and conveyed the message. When Mrs. Fetterolf came down, I could see she was ready to be furious at somebody, anybody. Long skirt swishing, long vest flapping, she steamed across the lobby. “You the private investigator? Who are you working for?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say, Mrs. Fetterolf. But it’s someone who, like you, has lost an elderly relative to suicide.”

  “Suicide! Ha! It wasn’t any suicide! It was murder!”

  “Murder?”

  “They killed him! And no one will admit it!”

  “What makes you think so?”

  “Think? Think? I don’t have to think, I know! One week he’s fine, he’s friends with this Mrs. Kaplan, they play Scrabble, they read books together, he’s happy as a clam. Maybe even a little something gets going between them, who am I to say, more power to them. And then on the same night—the same night—he hangs himself and she walks in front of a bus! Coincidence? I don’t think so! . . . Besides, there would be a note.”

  “I beg your—”

  “My father-in-law would have left a note. He was thoughtful that way. You know what I’m saying? He wrote everybody in the whole family all the time, nobody could even keep up with reading it all. He would have left a note for sure.”

  “Did he-”

  “He was lonely after his wife died. Sarah. A saint. They met fifty-six years ago—”

  In the end, she gave me her father-in-law’s entire history. Also Rose Kaplan’s. I wrote it all down.

  When I called Johnny Fermato, I was told by a wary desk sergeant that Lieutenant Fermato would get back to me.

  In my dreams.

  “Somebody’s being screwed over, Margie,” I said. “And it’s probably costing somebody else pay-off money.”

  She lay there in the fetal position, her hands like claws. The IV was gone, but she was still connected by tubes to the humidified air supply, the catheter bag, the feeding pump. The pump made soft noises: ronk, ronk. I laid my briefcase on the bottom of her bed, which Susan would probably object to.

  “It wasn’t depression,” I said to Margie. “Della Francesca and Mrs. Smith went up to that roof together. Alone together. Samuel Fetterolf and Rose Kaplan were in love.” J-24 chemically induced love.

  The bag in Margie’s IV slowly emptied. The catheter bag slowly filled. Her ears were hidden under the dry, brittle, lifeless hair.

  “Johnny Fermato knows something. Maybe only that the word’s been passed down to keep the case closed. I did get the coroners’ reports. They say ‘self-inflicted fatal wounds.’ All eight reports.”

  Somewhere in the hospital corridors, a woman screamed. Then stopped.

  “Margie,” I heard myself saying, “I don’t want to come here anymore.”

  The next second, I was up and limping around the room. I put my forehead against the w
all and ground it in. How could I say that to her? Margie, the only woman I’d ever loved, the person in the world I was closest to. . . . On our wedding night, which was also her nineteenth birthday, she’d told me she felt like she could die from happiness. And I’d known what she meant.

  And on that other night eight years later, when Bucky had done his pills-and-vodka routine, Marge had been with me when the phone rang. Gene . . . Gene . . . I did it. . . .

  Did what? Jesus, Bucky, it’s after midnight—

  But I don’t . . . Father Healey . . .

  Bucky, I gotta start my shift at eight tomorrow morning. Goodnight.

  Gene, who’s calling at this hour?

  . . . say . . . good-bye. . . .

  Of all the inconsiderate . . . the phone woke Libby!

  Tell Father Healey I never would have made . . . good priests don’t doubt like . . . I can’t touch God anymore. . . .

  And then I’d known. I was out of the apartment in fifteen seconds. Shoes, pants, gun. In my pajama top I drove to the seminary, leaned on the bell. Bucky wasn’t there, but Father Healey was. I searched the rooms, the chapel, the little meditation garden, all the while traffic noises drowning out the thumping in my chest. Father Healey shouting questions at me. I wouldn’t let him in my car. Get away from me you bastard you killed him, you and your insistence on pushing God on a mind never tightly wrapped in the first place . . . Bucky wasn’t at his mother’s house. Now I had two people screaming at me.

  I found him at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows. Where I should have looked first. He’d broken a stained glass window, just smashed it with a board, no subtlety. He was in front of the altar, breathing shallow, already unconscious. EMS seemed to take forever to get there. The on-duty cops were faster; the stained-glass was alarm-wired.

  But when it was over, Bucky’s stomach pumped, sleeping it off at St. Vincent’s, I had crawled back in bed next to Margie. Libby asleep in her little bedroom. I’d put my arms around my wife, and I’d vowed that after Bucky got out of the hospital, I’d never see him and his messy stupid dramas of faith again.

  “I didn’t mean that,” I said to Margie, inert in her trach collar. “Sweetheart, I didn’t mean it. Of course I want to be here. I’ll be here as long as you’re breathing!”

  She didn’t move. IV bag emptying, catheter bag filling.

  Susan came in, her nurse’s uniform rumpled. “Hi, Gene.”

  “Hello, Susan.”

  “We’re about the same tonight.”

  I could see that. And then the Camineur kicked in and I could see something else, in one of those unbidden flashes of knowledge that Bucky called heightened connective cognition. Bucky hadn’t phoned me because he didn’t really want to know what had happened to those old people. He already had enough belief to satisfy himself. He just wanted J-24 cleared publicly, and he wanted me to start the stink that would do it. He was handing the responsibility for Rose Kaplan and Samuel Fetterolf and Lydia Smith and Giacomo della Francesca to me. Just the way he’d handed me the responsibility for his break with Father Healey the night of his attempted suicide. I’d been used.

  “Fuck that!”

  Susan turned, startled, from changing Margie’s catheter bag. “I beg your pardon?”

  Margie, of course, said nothing.

  I limped out of the hospital room, ignoring the look on Susan’s face. I was angrier than I had been in eighteen months. Anger pushed against the inside of my chest and shot like bullets through my veins.

  Until the Camineur did its thing.

  A dozen boys crowded the basketball hoop after school, even though it was drizzling. I limped toward my car. Just as I reached it, a red Mercedes pulled up beside me and Jeff Connors got out from the passenger side.

  He wore a blue bandana on his head, and it bulged on the left side above the ear. Heavy bandaging underneath; somebody had worked on him. He also wore a necklace of heavy gold links, a beeper, and jacket of supple brown leather. He didn’t even try to keep the leather out of the rain.

  His eyes met mine, and something flickered behind them. The Mercedes drove off. Jeff started toward the kids at the hoops, who’d all stopped playing to watch the car. There was the usual high-fiving and competitive dissing, but I heard its guarded quality, and I saw something was about to go down.

  Nothing to do with me. I unlocked my car door.

  Jenny Kelly came hurrying across the court, through the drizzle. Her eyes flashed. “Jeff! Jeff!”

  She didn’t even know enough not to confront him in front of his customers. He stared at her, impassive, no sign of his usual likable hustle. To him, she might as well have been a cop.

  “Jeff, could I see you for a minute?”

  Not a facial twitch. But something moved behind his eyes.

  “Please? It’s about your little brother.”

  She was giving him an out: family emergency. He didn’t take it.

  “I’m busy.”

  Ms. Kelly nodded. “Okay. Tomorrow, then?”

  “I’m busy.”

  “Then I’ll catch you later.” She’d learned not to argue. But I saw her face after she turned from the boys sniggering behind her. She wasn’t giving up, either. Not on Jeff.

  Me, she never glanced at.

  I got into my car and drove off, knowing better than Jenny Kelly what was happening on the basketball court behind me, not even trying to interfere. If it didn’t happen on school property, it would happen off it. What was the difference, really? You couldn’t stop it. No matter what idealistic fools like Jenny Kelly thought.

  Her earrings were little pearls, and her shirt, damp from the rain, clung to her body.

  The whole next week, I left the phone off the hook. I dropped Libby a note saying to write me instead of calling because NYNEX was having trouble with the line into my building. I didn’t go to the hospital. I taught my math classes, corrected papers in my own classroom, and left right after eighth period. I only glimpsed Jenny Kelly once, at a bus stop few blocks from the school building. She was holding the hand of a small black kid, three or four, dressed in a Knicks sweatshirt. They were waiting for a bus. I drove on by.

  But you can’t really escape.

  I spotted the guy when I came out of the metroteller late Friday afternoon. I’d noticed him earlier, when I dropped off a suit at the drycleaner’s. This wasn’t the kind of thing I dealt with any more—but it happens. Somebody you collared eight years ago gets out and decides to get even. Or somebody spots you by accident and suddenly remembers some old score on behalf of his cousin, or your partner, or some damn thing you yourself don’t even recall. It happens.

  I couldn’t move fast, not with my knee. I strolled into Mulcahy’s, which has a long aisle running between the bar and the tables, with another door to the alley that’s usually left open if the weather’s any good. The men’s and ladies’ rooms are off an alcove just before the alley, along with a pay phone and cigarette machine. I nodded at Brian Mulcahy behind the bar, limped through, and went into the ladies’. It was empty. I kept the door cracked. My tail checked the alley, then strode toward the men’s room. When his back was to the ladies’ and his hand on the heavy door, I grabbed him.

  He wasn’t as tall or heavy as I was—average build, brown hair, nondescript looks. He twisted in my grasp, and I felt the bulge of the gun under his jacket. “Stop it, Shaunessy! NYPD!”

  I let him go. He fished out his shield, looking at me hard. Then he said, “Not here. This is an informant hangout—didn’t you know? Meet me at 248 West Seventieth, apartment 8. Christ, why don’t you fix your goddamn phone?” Then he was gone.

  I had a beer at the bar while I thought it over. Then I went home. When the buzzer rang an hour and a half later, I didn’t answer. Whoever stood downstairs buzzed for ten minutes straight before giving up.

  That night I dreamed someone was trying to kill Margie, stalking her through the Times Square sleaze and firing tiny chemically poisoned darts. I couldn’t be sure, dreams being wha
t they are, but I think the stalker was me.

  The Saturday mail came around three-thirty. It brought a flat manilla package, no return address, no note. It was a copy of the crime-scene report on the deaths of Lydia Smith and Giacomo della Francesca.

  Seven years as partners doesn’t just wash away. No matter what the official line has to be.

  There were three eight-by-ten color crime scene photos: an empty rooftop; Mrs. Smith’s body smashed on the pavement below; della Francesca’s body lying on the floor beside a neatly made bed. His face was in partial shadow but his skinny spotted hands were clear, both clutching the hilt of the knife buried in his chest. There wasn’t much blood. That doesn’t happen until somebody pulls the knife out.

  The written reports didn’t say anything that wasn’t in the photos.

  I resealed the package and locked it in my file cabinet. Johnny had come through; Bucky had screwed me. The deaths were suicides, just like Kelvin Pharmaceuticals said, just like the Department said. Bucky’s superconnective pill was the downer to end all downers, and he knew it, and he was hoping against hope it wasn’t so.

  Because he and Tommy had taken it together.

  I’ve moved, Bucky had said in his one message since he told me about J-24. I’d assumed he meant that he’d changed apartments, or lovers, or lives, as he’d once changed from fanatic seminarian to fanatic chemist. But that’s not what he meant. He meant he’d made his move with J-24, because he wanted the effect for himself and Tommy, and he refused to believe the risk applied to him. Just like all the dumb crack users I spent sixteen years arresting.

  I dialed his number. After four rings, the answering machine picked up. I hung up, walked from the living room to the bedroom, pounded my fists on the wall a couple times, walked back and dialed again. When the machine picked up I said, “Bucky. This is Gene. Call me now. I mean it—I have to know you’re all right.”

  I hesitated . . . he hadn’t contacted me in weeks. What could I use as leverage?

  “If you don’t call me tonight, Saturday, by nine, I’ll . . .” What? Not go look for him. Not again, not like thirteen years ago, rushing out in pants and pajama top, Margie calling after me Gene! Gene! For God’s sake . . .