by Linda Barnes
I turned my attention back to my blonde friend. “So let me get this right. You thought you knew why your brother killed himself.”
“It was the only thing that made any sense.”
“See if it makes sense to me,” I said.
“Geoff’s a teacher. He’s been a teacher—God knows—forever. He shouldn’t have been. He should have been rich, you know? So he could have been a playwright, a full-time playwright, maybe a screenwriter. It’s tricky, being a high school teacher, being gay. Bi, really. I mean, I know some people say there isn’t any such thing as a true bisexual, but Geoff was damn close. He used to tell me it was perfectly okay for the big husky male teachers to hit on the little twelve-year-old girls. That’s fine. That’s ‘normal,’ but Geoff—well, he always had to be on the defensive.”
“This is the eighties, right?” I said.
“Yeah. That makes it worse. AIDS. The paranoia is incredible.”
I nodded.
“Could I have a glass of water?” he asked. “If I keep on drinking this stuff—”
“Yeah,” I said, “you might do something crazy.”
He actually blushed, and I did the routine with the kitchen and the gun again.
After he drank some water, which comes out of my tap an interesting yellowish shade, his voice got stronger.
“Six years ago,” he said, “maybe seven. Geoff got arrested on the Cape, in Wellfleet, at some kind of trumped-up raid on a gay bar. He was never convicted. The whole thing was just designed to throw a scare into the bar owner, to make him move out. Geoff was teaching at a school in the same town, and they fired him. It’s in the contract: ‘Moral Turpitude.’ Geoff didn’t fight it. I mean, he could have, because it was just an arrest, not a conviction, and ‘Moral Turpitude’ is not exactly a clear legal concept. He did hire a lawyer and the lawyer hammered out this agreement with the school board, that they couldn’t talk about his arrest, couldn’t mention it. I mean, they didn’t give Geoff a recommendation, but they let him resign. It was a technicality, but it meant he could still teach, still earn a living.”
“I understand,” I said.
“He was a damn good teacher. He’d never touch a student. He wouldn’t dream of touching a student. Sometimes if a kid was gay, and he asked, Geoff would tell him, just tell the poor kid he wasn’t the only gay person in the world, because it gave the poor kid some hope, you know, that there was somebody else like him, somebody who was making it. Outsiders pay a high price at the Emerson. Everybody’s got to be cut from the same cookie cutter. Geoff was different. He was a wonderful person, and a fine writer. He shouldn’t have had to work so hard.”
Stuart drank the rest of his water. I waited.
He said, “I thought you’d gone there to tell him his teaching career was kaput. I thought some wacko on that school board had decided to wreak vengeanace on homosexuals and tell the Emerson all. And that Geoff couldn’t face starting over again, with no seniority, no nothing …”
“That wasn’t it,” I said.
He sat there for about three minutes with his face working. Then he said. “I don’t understand.”
“You’re telling me he had no reason to kill himself,” I said.
“I could make sense out of it if he was gonna be fired. I mean, not really sense, but—”
“He wasn’t sick?” I said.
“No. Absolutely not.”
“Depressed?”
“Hell, no. When Geoff was down, he danced. The adrenaline picked him up. He worked. He wrote. He had friends.”
“Did he talk to you about quitting his job?” I asked.
“No. Never. He liked it there.”
“What about getting his play produced? Did he say anything about that?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“And when was the last time you talked to him?”
“Maybe three weeks ago. We had dinner sometimes. Our apartments are real close, and like, Thursday night, I just stayed at his place. I’ve got a key.”
“When did you get to his apartment?”
“Real late. Practically Friday morning. I’ve been working crazy overtime, and I thought we’d have breakfast together.”
“I’m the one who called asking for him.”
“Did I answer?”
“Yeah. You told me he was at the Emerson.”
“I don’t remember.”
“But you weren’t worried when he didn’t come home.”
“Nah. I figured he was staying with somebody.”
“He had a lover.”
“Usually. Nobody regular. I mean, with Geoff you couldn’t even hazard a guess—male or female. He got off on beautiful people.”
“What about a student?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “I don’t think so.”
“Did he ever mention a girl named Valerie?”
“I don’t think so. I don’t know.”
I wondered where Valerie had been the day Geoff Reardon died.
Stuart pushed his hair back off his forehead, grimacing at the pain in his shoulder. Then he said, “This is going to sound dumb.”
“Be my guest,” I said.
“You investigate things, right?”
I held out my business card. “Right.”
“Can I hire you to investigate Geoff’s … this?”
“You mean if I decide not to turn you in for attempted murder?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“I ought to,” I said. “It was incredibly dumb, as stunts go. I could have killed you. You could have fallen on the stupid knife.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m really sorry.”
“‘Sorry’ doesn’t stitch wounds.” I said. My mother used to say something like that. “Sorry doesn’t fix a broken vase,” I think it was.
“Yeah,” he said, fingering his temple. “Shit. I can’t do anything right. You might as well turn me in. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe Geoff killed himself, but I can’t believe he was murdered or something. Maybe I should talk to the cops.”
“Maybe you should hire me,” I said.
“Huh?”
“That’s what you were asking, wasn’t it?”
“Hire you to investigate a … murder?”
“Look, the Lincoln cops don’t think it’s murder, and I don’t think it would do you any good to mention the possibility. If it’s murder, I’m out of it. A private cop can’t meddle in that kind of stuff in this state. But if it’s not murder, I might be able to help you. I could find out what your brother had on his mind. I could check if he’d had any heavy financial losses. Find out if he was seeing a shrink. That kind of stuff.”
“Is it expensive? I mean. I’ve got the funeral to take care of—”
“Look, I’m interested in this case from another angle,” I said. “That brings my fees way down. And you might be able to help with something. That brings ’em down even lower.”
He said, “Oh, yeah?”
“Your brother had a drawerful of class diaries in his desk a few days ago. I’d like to see them. One of them, anyway.”
“Diaries? In his desk at work?”
“Notebooks his drama class kept, the class he called the misfits.”
“You want me to get them?”
“They’re not at his office now, not the one I want anyway. It could be at his apartment.”
“I can’t go back there. Not yet. Really. I’m sorry.”
I took one of my contract forms out of the top drawer of the desk. “But you have a key, right?” I said. “And if you sign one of these, give me a buck for a retainer, and lend me the key—I can.”
CHAPTER 22
The mailman came up my front walk as Stuart Reardon, holding his wadded handkerchief against his temple, staggered down. I hadn’t offered my assailant any cold towels or ice cubes. As a matter of fact, I hoped his head hurt like hell.
T.C. got bills, circulars, a copy of Mother Jones, and a sales pitch from a Hong Ko
ng tailor who didn’t carry his size. I was about to dump the whole lot in the waste basket when I noticed the Colombian stamp.
I slit the envelope with Reardon’s knife.
Dear Carlotta—
She’d used regulation airmail stationery and drawn faint lines to help keep the letters straight.
I skimmed it to see if she said when she’d be back.
Dear Carlotta—
How are you? I want to come home. Have you ever heard of a man named Carlos Roldan Gonzales? My mother and the man they say is my grandfather fight all day.
I hate it here. I’m going to run away. Maybe I can stow away on a boat and come back to you.
Love ya,
Paolina
Terrific, I thought. Another runaway. I stuck Reardon’s knife in my top drawer, thinking how upset and angry Paolina would be if I let some jerk kill me while she was away. She was always scared something would happen to me while I was a cop.
I wondered why Marta was fighting with her father. And who Carlos Roldan Gonzales was, and what the “man they say is my grandfather” business was all about. Since Bogotá isn’t a seaport, I wasn’t too worried about boats and stowaways. But I was worried about Paolina.
I’ve never been to Bogotá, so my image is warped by news accounts of kidnappings and drug wars. I remembered a Channel 5 special report featuring gangs of hungry beggar children, and I prayed Marta would keep a sharp eye on her daughter.
Her daughter, I’d almost thought my daughter, but Paolina wasn’t mine.
I took her letter into the kitchen. It wasn’t dinnertime by a long shot, but hunger gnawed. Getting almost stabbed had something to do with it. Every time I’ve stared down a gun barrel or hit the floor under fire, I’ve gotten incredibly ravenous, or felt terribly sexy, or both.
Considering the state of my social life, I was glad I was only hungry. I had a sudden vision of Sam and how great he’d looked at the garage. I focused on food.
I stood on tiptoe and reached way in the back of the tiny cupboard over the refrigerator for my secret shrinking hoard of TV Time popcorn. Roz thinks I hide dope there. TV time is great popcorn, but damned if the manufacturers haven’t joined the microwave revolution. When my stash runs out, I’m going to have to buy a microwave just so I can make decent popcorn.
There’s progress for you.
I shook the stuff in a battered four-quart pot over an old-fashioned gas flame, feeling righteous. None of this stick-the-bag-in-the-oven-and-wait laziness for me. I melted too much butter, got a Pepsi out of the fridge, and figured I’d skip dinner.
Red Emma joined me at the kitchen table. She adores popcorn, practically inhales it. Then she has coughing fits because she gets salted out, and I have to feed her about a gallon of water.
“So,” I said to her, “think he’d have knifed me, with you there as a witness and all?”
“Fluffy is a pretty bird,” she said.
I extended my index finger, cautiously because sometimes she bites. She hopped on board, encouraged by the popcorn kernel I held just out of her reach.
Since she was in a chatty mood, I tried her out on a few Socialist slogans, “Workers of the world, unite!” and that ilk, the maxims of my mother’s union-organizing life.
“Pretty bird,” she said stubbornly, mimicking my Aunt Bea.
“Dumb cluck,” I said.
She dug her claws into my finger and got skinny and mean-looking.
“¿Habla espanol?” I tried, mindful of Paolina’s directive.
“Buenos dias,” said the bird quite clearly, ruffling up her feathers. God knows what she’d have said if I’d asked her to say buenos dias.
I let her perch on the rim of the popcorn bowl as a tribute to her bilingualism.
My fingers kept wandering to my neck, tracing the faint scratch. It interfered with my appetite, but not until I’d almost emptied the bowl.
I left a few kernels for Esmeralda-Red Emma-Fluffy, dialed Joanne at Area A, and lo!, she picked up the phone.
“Carlotta,” she said in an odd voice. I got the feeling she’d been expecting somebody else.
“Busy?” I asked.
“No more than usual,” she said too heartily, “But, uh, I haven’t got anything on that licence plate.”
“Nothing? As in zip?”
“I ran it and there’s no listing. You probably got the digits mixed up.”
“Joanne, that’s the plate.”
“What can I say, kid? I can’t help you on it.”
“Can’t?”
“That’s what I said. Sorry.”
I hung up slowly, puzzled because Joanne didn’t sound like herself. Puzzled because I knew I’d gotten the damn numbers right. It was a Mass. plate, and the Registry should have had a title to match.
I found the phone book and wrote down Geoffrey Reardon’s Somerville address. Then I folded the contract brother Stuart had signed, and stuck it in my handbag. It never hurts to carry an official-looking form.
CHAPTER 23
I had no trouble finding the address, choosing back roads all the way, avoiding lights and traffic like any smart cabbie. It felt good to drive, good to breath the stale car-heated air. My hands, busy with the wheel, the horn, and the signals, wandered to my neck less frequently.
I stopped across the street from number 85. If Geoff Reardon had committed suicide in the second-floor apartment of this Somerville triple-decker, nobody would have wondered why. It looked like the kind of place you rented when you came to the end of the line.
It was a weather-beaten beige house with a bad case of peeling shingles. Somebody had tried to jazz it up with blue window trim a few decades back, but the window frames were mostly rotted now, sun-faded. Two first-floor windows were cracked and sealed with cardboard to keep out the cold. No great loss; they didn’t overlook much of a view. The front lawn was a square brown patch. Narrow burnt-glass alleys separated the house from its closest neighbors. No driveways. A battered big-wheel tricycle rested against a dried-up yew hedge, waiting for some kid to come and play.
I did my reconnoitering from the Toyota. The nearby houses had an abandoned air but were probably crammed with nosy neighbors. In crowded city neighborhoods, you can get away with anything if you look like you know what you’re doing. If you look uneasy, uncertain, people get antsy. Sometimes they even call the cops.
Breaking and entering, for that reason alone, should be done under cover of darkness. But I was not about to do a B&E, since I had a perfectly legit key. All I had to do was enter, which can be done in daylight under the right conditions.
I checked out the conditions. The house had two doors: one, more elaborate, for the first floor; the other, a common entry for the second- and third-floor apartments. I could see three separate buzzers, each with a nameplate. I took a deep breath and left the Toyota, my bag slung over my shoulder, the key palmed in my hand.
I don’t look much like a burglar. Sometimes it comes in handy.
I went up the porch steps with a purposeful stride, pretended to hit the third-floor buzzer, waited for a mythical friend to come bouncing downstairs, then, talking to myself, saying things like, “Hi. Gee, it’s nice to see you again.” I let myself in.
The key turned smoothly in the lock, which helped the illusion. Once inside the narrow foyer, I dropped the smile and the act and tiptoed up the stairs.
I needn’t have bothered with the charade. Reardon’s neighbors weren’t the noticing kind, or else they’d have noticed the person or persons who’d gotten there first and trashed the place.
Not that there was much to trash.
Reardon’s office at the Emerson spoke of quiet wealth, old money. His living room talked poverty. His furniture, even before the attentions lavished on it by the intruders, was Morgan Memorial’s best. And not much of that. He owned a bilious pink sofa that couldn’t have looked a lot better with the pillows whole, and a beige armchair, now lying on its back with one leg stuck in the pseudo fireplace. That was it.
/>
Unless, of course, whoever’d upended the chair had stolen the priceless antiques.
I wondered if the folks on the first and third floors were deaf. They must have heard somebody overturn the chair. Maybe Reardon habitually threw wild parties, but it sure didn’t look like that sort of place.
He had a living room, a kitchen, a bath, and a bedroom big enough for a double bed as long as you didn’t want to walk around it. The kitchen was a tiny galley with all the appliances lined up against one wall—if you call a two-burner hot plate and a three-by-five mini-refrigerator appliances. There was no oven. Three cupboards doors hung open. The refrigerator contained two cartons of moldy cottage cheese and a half-gallon of milk that I had no desire to sniff.
Somebody’d ripped the sheets and blankets off the bed, and tilted the mattress away from the spring. The lone picture in the entire apartment, a blameless print of Monet’s Water Lilies, was tossed face down on the bed.
The closet door was closed.
All the other doors in the place were ajar. Every drawer and cupboard, too. I stared at the closet and wished I’d brought my gun instead of rewrapping it in the old undershirt and sticking it in my desk.
Well, I could have gone home, fetched it, come back, and broken in all over again. Instead I crept closer, trying not to creak the wooden floorboards, hugged the wall, turned the doorknob, and flung the sucker open.
Of course, there was nobody inside. The place was too damn quiet. I wanted to hum or sing or whistle or something, but I kept remembering those first- and third-floor tenants.
The closet was dark, bigger than I’d expected, a walk-in. I flicked on the light switch by the side of the door and stepped inside. It was amazing.
At least the size of the bedroom, maybe bigger, it must have started life as a back porch. Somebody’d enclosed it and turned it into the closet of your dreams. Geoff Reardon may not have had furniture, but he had clothes.
I don’t know if gay or bisexual men are vainer than the hetero kind. I never conducted a survey. My feeling about alternate lifestyles is generally “live and let live.” Period. Well, maybe there’s a twinge of regret because so many good-looking guys are out of the boy-girl market, and so many of my female friends are searching for Mr. Okay, never mind Mr. Right.
