No Sign of Murder

by Alan Russell

  You don’t stare, especially at a male. That’s a challenge. And you stay seated, and act submissive. There were a lot of other commandments and I tried to remember them. One was to speak in soothing, not loud, tones, and not to say or sign anything upsetting. I guess that included any hinting about his smell. Massive gorillas have an aroma all their own, and with the door closed I couldn’t help but be ever more aware of that by the minute. It overwhelmed in close quarters, and promised to cling for some time to my hair and body.

  Harrison and Joseph had a good rapport. They talked for a while, and every now and then Harrison translated. Joseph had seen a cat stalking a bird before, and Harrison asked him about that. From what Harrison could interpret, Joseph didn’t think much of cats, but he did admire birds. Smart gorilla. Harrison asked Joseph whether he liked the way they flew, but Joseph stopped moving his digits. He went off in a corner and turned his back, not responding to Harrison’s entreaty to come back.

  “Sometimes he’s like that,” said Harrison. “Sometimes he doesn’t want to be bothered. He thinks a lot, I know that. He broods, too. Gorillas don’t truckle like chimpanzees. They don’t please for pleasing. I’m convinced Joseph has deep thoughts. With his signing we get hints of that.”

  “Would he know Anita’s name?”

  “Yes. And her sign.” Harrison made an A with his fingers. “But I’d prefer you wouldn’t say her name to him.”

  “Why?”

  “Gorillas form an attachment to their teachers. When Anita disappeared, he asked about her. They don’t like it when their teachers leave. They don’t like their environment changed.”

  There was a rapping at our door. It was the point lady and her clipboard. She hated to interrupt, but . . .

  “I’ll be back in a minute,” said Harrison.

  At Harrison’s departure, Joseph slammed his arm against the wall and then turned back to look at a reverberating me. I kept a firm grip on my seat. Joseph had several tires, one of which he propped against the wall. He balanced on that and looked out the window. Dr. Harrison and the point lady hadn’t kept him interested for long. He approached the thick bars of the cage, then strummed them like a human would a harp. That rattled them and me.

  I kept my eyes averted while looking at him, and he did the same with me. Then, surprisingly, he signed at me, and more surprisingly, I knew what he wanted. I got up, kept my back bent, and went over to the refrigerator. There were some nuts in there. I grabbed some and carefully proffered them to Joseph. He ate them and asked for more.

  “Sorry, Joseph,” I said. “All out.”

  I showed him my hands, and he seemed satisfied.

  “What now?” I asked.

  He signed again, and I was lucky. I knew chase, too. Joseph shuffled along from side to side, and I followed his motions. We both enjoyed ourselves, though I made a point of not getting too near the bars. By mutual consent, five minutes of chase was enough. I sat down again, and both of us went back to surreptitiously observing the other. I suppose I shouldn’t have, but it was a unique interview opportunity.

  “Joseph,” I said, “what happened to Anita?” I signed the name and repeated the question.

  He stared at me, and I at him, for the first time. He seemed to consider the question in a calm, almost melancholy manner. Then he turned around and shuffled back to his window. He never looked back at me, even stopped acknowledging my presence with his side-glances. He just looked out his window, out toward the back. He was the picture of someone in deep thought.

  “If only he could talk,” I thought, then remembered that he could. He just didn’t want to.

  10

  I GAVE THE RENTAL another workout in getting back to the City, and then parked illegally. My four o’clock appointment was pressing, but not as pressing as my need to wash. I smelled of gorillas and rotten vegetables and sweat. Ten minutes of lather made me human again.

  My car hadn’t been tagged by the police. I credited luck, or the threat from the opened windows. There was a definite lingering essence of Pongidae. I left the windows open, but the Gorilla Project remained close to all of my senses during the drive to Bush Street. My nose directed my mind, and led it back to my last hour at the project.

  When Harrison had returned to the bungalow, I excused myself for vegetable-moving duties. Afterward, I asked Harrison to let me look through the gorilla log book. He referred me to the point lady, who, with the imminent arrival of a news team, needed me like she did another entry on her crowded notepad. I coaxed her into letting me make copies of Anita’s entries. The point lady really wasn’t a bad sort; just another soul who had taken on a Sisyphean task. We talked over the hum of the copier. She was devoted to the project, devoted to Harrison, but there were “so many” problems. The plumbing didn’t work sometimes; the gorillas were outgrowing their quarters; better heating was needed; why, even the bamboo had some kind of rot.

  I asked her about the bamboo. Why had it been planted? And when?

  “It’s something we can’t get through the supermarkets,” she said, “and I’m told it’s a special gorilla treat. Dr. Harrison planted it as his New Year’s project.”

  “He planted in January?”

  She nodded.

  “Wasn’t that an odd time to plant?”

  “No odder than most of the things around here,” she said.

  The point lady noticed my missing button. I told her about Bathsheba’s quick hands, and she told me I wasn’t the first to suffer such a fate. I asked her whether the gorillas had ever hurt anyone unintentionally. She said she didn’t think so, but that I should ask Dr. Harrison to be sure.

  I did ask him, my last question before leaving, and he answered with as terse a “no” as I’d ever heard. It was his final word on that, or any, subject, as he chose to walk away from me. The man was sensitive about his gorillas.

  On my drive into the city I was going against the flow of traffic. At four o’clock everyone tries to leave the financial district. I parked in a garage near the Standard Oil Building. I was running late, and it didn’t help that Terrence Walter worked in a security building. Visitation approval took another five minutes, so when I finally met up with him at 4:30, he was looking at his watch and his briefcase.

  “I had allotted you fifteen minutes, Mr. Winter. You’ve used ten.”

  Terrence Walters was a small man, well dressed and well groomed. His suit jacket was buttoned, and he had a button-down shirt, monogrammed on the cuff. He didn’t smile, but still managed to show enough polished teeth to give the impression he had a dentist on retainer. His hair was thinning, but each follicle had its place. He had manicured nails, little white and pink pearls on dovish hands that were never offered my way.

  I didn’t make a point of offering my hand, either. I took up a few more of his precious seconds by looking around the office. It was adorned tastefully. There were some nice, subdued paintings, a few antique clocks, and a few framed diplomas. All of the paper clips on his desk were stored in a receptacle, and the pens were neatly lined up. There was an aura of respectability everywhere. Maybe that’s why I doubted him.

  It’s said in every fat person there’s a thin person screaming to come out. There wasn’t any conscious reason to think it, but in Terrence Walters I sensed something dirty screaming to come out. Or be kept in.

  “Five minutes should be enough, Mr. Walters,” I said, “at least for now. I’ve a few questions for you. Some or none of them might be pertinent to Anita’s disappearance. Right now, I’m doing a lot of fishing.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “How’d you get along with your daughter?”

  “She was away at school for much of her life. I think that prevented us from being very close.”

  “When did she first go away?”

  “When she was six.”

  “But she was home summers and holidays?”

  “Mostly, yes.”

  “Mostly?”

  “She started going to school year around
.”

  “At what age?”

  “Twelve.”

  “Is that usual for the deaf?”

  “Anita decided that she needed the extra schooling.”

  Walters never hurried his speech. He reminded me of a lawyer—which he was—but it was more than that. He was too careful with his words, talked in what I like to call “adulterer’s speech.” At some point in their life some people purposely lose the capacity for verbal spontaneity. Some do it to maintain the veneer of the person they’ve chosen to create. For others there’s the necessity of sifting through a sheaf of stories and lies to find the appropriate answer. My job was to listen to Walter’s answers and hear the echoes behind them.

  “Did you ever visit Anita at Greenmont?”

  “I’m a very busy man.”

  “Did you?”

  “No.”

  “Do you love Anita?”

  “I don’t like your line of questioning, Mr. Winter. And I don’t see how this will help you in your search.”

  “I still have two minutes by your timepiece, Mr. Walters. I’d like you to answer the question.”

  “Yes. I love Anita.”

  “What do you know about her life?”

  “What kind of a question is that?”

  “One that I’d like you to answer.”

  “I obviously know many things about my daughter’s life. I know she’s a model. I know she loves animals . . . ”

  “How do you know these things? Do you know sign language?”

  “Not really.”

  “So how do you know these things?”

  “Mostly my wife keeps me up to date.”

  “Did Anita talk with you?”

  “Of course.”

  “How? And when?”

  “On occasion she texted.”

  “How often?”

  “Every few weeks.”

  “Did she love you?”

  “Of course.”

  “Of course? A father who can’t even communicate with his daughter? A father who doesn’t visit? What does that say to you?”

  “It says that I’m very busy. It says that you lose skills if you don’t constantly practice.”

  I still couldn’t open him up. He was the unflappable lawyer who birthed every word with a cautious heritage.

  “I understand Anita hated you.”

  “And where did you hear this?”

  “One of her teachers told me that.”

  “That’s news to me.”

  “Why would she tell that to a teacher?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe because I gave her a Camry instead of a Porsche for her sixteenth birthday.”

  “Why was she angry?”

  “Who says she was?”

  “Just about everyone I talked to. They say her anger began to surface when she was fifteen or sixteen.”

  “Isn’t that the usual age?”

  “I wouldn’t call her anger usual.”

  “What would you call it?”

  “Long-consuming.”

  Walters looked at his watch. It agreed with the antique clocks. The interview had gone for three minutes too long.

  “I have an appointment, Mr. Winter. I would suggest punctuality next time.”

  He gestured with his hand. I decided to leave. Walters saw me to the elevator, but didn’t take it down with me. Which was just as well. I spoke to the four walls. “Son of a bitch.”

  I texted Ellen and asked if she had any dinner plans. When she said she was free, we debated pasta or Chinese. We settled on Chinese, with a spumoni compromise.

  Ellen agreed to drive into the City and meet me at the Hunan on Kearney St. I got there early to claim a table. It’s probably the most popular hole-in-the-wall restaurant in the world. Success had dictated a new and larger clone on Sansome, where the food was just as good, but I liked the cramped atmosphere of the original Hunan. I was sure Ellen would like it, also. The din and clatter were part of the place, a part she’d miss, but the better part was the smell and taste of the food.

  She arrived with a breathless “Hello,” followed by “What smells so great?” She proved a woman after my own heart, and got down to the serious business of looking at the menu right away. We agreed to share soup, appetizers, and entrees, and quickly decided on sweet-and-sour soup, pork pot stickers, barbecued ribs, and kung pao chicken. The last entree was debated. She wanted Mongolian beef; I made a case for the harvest pork with the bean sauce. We settled on the Hunan beef and clicked beer bottles. Then I presented her with three napkins.

  “Why the napkins?” she asked.

  “Winter’s theory of a good Chinese restaurant,” I said. “If your nose isn’t running, if your eyes don’t tear some, the food’s no good.”

  The food was good, everything that I promised, three napkins and more. We ate with chopsticks, and even with those wooden obstacles the food disappeared quickly. Finally, we came up for air.

  “TGIF,” I said.

  “What do you usually do on Fridays?” she asked.

  “Call Dial-A-Prayer.”

  “Really.”

  “Call Audubon’s rare bird alert number.”

  “What’s that?”

  “528-0288.”

  “Quit teasing. What is it?”

  “Bird-sighting recording. Tells you what and where and when. And now you’re going to ask, ‘why?’ ”

  “You’re really a bird watcher?”

  “Yes. Now and again. Maybe one day I’ll be confident enough to announce myself as an amateur ornithologist.”

  “How often do you go out?”

  “Not as often as I’d like.”

  I didn’t mean to be defensive, and she didn’t mean to pry, but it seemed as if we were guilty of both. It was the new awkward stage, there because our intimacy had preceded our knowing each other. Our minds had to do the fancy footwork to catch up to where our bodies had been. I picked up a piece of kung pao chicken with the chopsticks and made the offering to her mouth. She accepted, and reciprocated. We vied with each other to find the tastiest remaining morsels, and found the greater pleasure in the giving and not the taking. With Hunan food, that says a lot.

  “So, did you go birding last week? That’s what they say, isn’t it? Birding?”

  “Yes, that’s what they say. And no, I didn’t. I was on a different hunt.”

  She encouraged me with a craned neck.

  “I was on a surveillance last week. It was the kind of case I didn’t want to take, but it involved a friend of a friend of a friend.”

  The craned neck asked for more. I don’t deny fine necks and birds, usually in that order.

  “Sometimes people call private investigators hoping we can fix their life’s problems. Usually we can’t.”

  “But you helped?”

  “I hope so.”

  “Tell me.”

  I sighed, but she couldn’t hear sighs, so I talked.

  “Six months ago, an assailant stripped, beat, and abused a woman in her own house. He did everything but rape her. And he told her he would be back one night soon to do that.

  “The woman was terrified. She went to the police. And after taking the report they couldn’t do anything but offer coffee and professional sympathy.

  “The woman was a little unbalanced from the assault, and a lot scared. Her world, all the big and little in it, seemed turned against her. Strangers were enemies, and friends weren’t the same. And then the terror started, and I guess that made her a little more unbalanced.

  “Her assailant came back. Several times. She once saw him across the street. He just stood and waved.

  “Another time he came to the door. She had a peephole. He stood there and told her he was selling magazines, and held up one of those supposed true crime ones, with the banner headlines about dismemberments.

  “The next time she saw him was midnight. She hadn’t been bothered in more than a month and was beginning to think her horror was over. She was asleep on the second floor when someth
ing awakened her. There wasn’t anyone in the room. There wasn’t anything to make her believe anything was wrong, except . . .

  “A tapping. Not a constant tapping, not a regular tapping, but a tap, and then a long pause, or several, and another tap. The noise was coming from a downstairs window.

  “Her first impulse was to call the police, but she didn’t. By this time, she knew they thought her a kook and a nuisance. So, she listened, and every so often she heard the sound. It could be a bird, she decided, or some animal, or a loose shutter. It could be a lot of things. Finally, she went downstairs, and every now and again the tap. Tap. Tap.

  “She approached that window. There wasn’t any way to look out to what was making the noise except by opening the curtain. She reached out. Tap. And when she opened the curtains, he was there. And he wagged his fingers from his ears, and stuck out his tongue, and made a horrible face.

  “She screamed to wake the dead. He liked that. He fed on her terror, fed on that power of making her believe in the bogey man, and the devil, and how there’s no God above to help, there’s just him, the master. When the woman told me her story, I believed her. I couldn’t disbelieve her terror. In the end I said those words a private investigator shouldn’t: ‘I’ll help.’ ”

  “But you said you did help.”

  “I was lucky. I waited for him for five straight nights. How many people do you think have that kind of money?”

  “She was rich?”

  “No. I didn’t charge her. How could I? She was just a victim. But a private investigator doesn’t make a living by giving away professional favors. And usually you don’t take a case because it can be solved. Just about everything can be solved, but can you afford the time?”

  “No sermonizing before you finish the story.”

  “On that fifth night he showed up. And I caught him.”

  “That’s all?”