by McBain, Ed
Mrs. Lowery sat on the sofa under this picture and asked Carella if he’d care for something to drink. He wondered now if she’d been drinking before his arrival. He had not smelled whiskey on her breath, but she’d knocked back three fast ones in a row on the day of the funeral, and he suspected it did not take much to encourage her. She was, and he had not noticed this before, a woman who could be considered attractive, with her daughter’s dark-brown eyes and black hair, an abundance of hip and bosom, a rather sensuous mouth. Her eyes were red-rimmed; he guessed she’d been crying. He did not want to chat with her, the afternoon was getting on. But she had already poured herself a shot glass full of whiskey, and had put the bottle down on the coffee table in front of the sofa, and she urged Carella again to have a drink. When he refused, she downed her own drink with one quick toss and swiftly poured herself another.
“I can’t believe any of this,” she said. Her voice, he now realized, was whiskey-seared—the lady was a drinker, funerals or not. He glanced swiftly at her legs, and saw the black-and-blue marks on her shins, the habitual marks of a drunk who bangs into furniture. “Not any of it,” she said. “First that Andy could do something like this, and then that his sister would tell the police about it. I simply…It’s a nightmare. I woke up last night, I thought it had gone away. I sat up in bed, I thought, Dear God, it was all a bad dream, it’s gone away. But it was still there, I realized it was still there, my son had killed his own cousin, my daughter had seen him do it, she had seen him. Oh my God, it was still there.” Mrs. Lowery lifted the second drink to her lips, tilted the glass, and drained it. As she began talking again, she poured herself a third drink. “Can you have any idea how I feel?” she asked. “I loved that girl like my own daughter, I loved her. But how can I believe Andy did a thing like this? And yet I know Patricia doesn’t lie, she’s not a liar that girl, I know what it must have taken for her to go to the police. I love them all, do you see? I’m caught in this thing, I love them all. And one of them is dead, and the other one did it, and the third one saw him, oh my God…” She lifted the shot glass, drank half the whiskey in it, and then put it down on the tabletop. “May I talk openly with you?” she asked.
“Yes, certainly,” Carella said.
“I know you’re here to gather evidence against Andy, I know that. I also know that the strongest evidence against him is Patricia’s identification. I know that, too. But…can you realize how difficult this…this other thing is to…to accept? The…the idea of the sex? That he…that he forced Muriel to…to…” Mrs. Lowery shook her head. “And then wanted his own sister to…” She shook her head again, violently this time, as though the motion would dislodge whatever filthy pictures she had conjured. “This is…my son,” she said. “I haven’t even begun to think of him as a man yet, he’s still a boy in my mind. And now I’m being asked to think of him not only as a man but as some sort of…of perverted…per…per—”
She suddenly put her hands over her face, and began weeping into them. Carella sat watching her, not knowing quite what to say. It was, after all, the same old story, wasn’t it? The quiet neighborhood boy setting fire to his dear old grandmother and lopping off his sister’s head with a meat cleaver. Always had a cheerful word for me, the next-door neighbor would say. Hard-working lad, the grocer who’d employed him would say. Bright and alert in class, never caused any problems, his teacher would say. Sang beautifully in choir, the minister would say. But also forced his cousin to commit sodomy, and then brutally stabbed her to death, and turned the same knife upon his sister. What could you say to a woman who had just discovered her only son was a monster?
He waited.
“I suppose you hear this all the time,” she said, as though reading his mind. “But I keep trying to remember, I keep looking for clues, anything that would indicate he was…was capable of this, could do this, do you know what I mean? You see, I never once suspected he…he was harboring…was…was…May I speak frankly?”
“Yes, please.”
“I wouldn’t have cared,” Mrs. Lowery said suddenly, and lifted the shot glass, and drained it. “I mean, what the hell difference does it make? So they were cousins, so what? Haven’t cousins fallen in love before, even married before? I’m not suggesting there was even the slightest…but even if there was, so what? Would that have been any worse than…than wanting her so desperately he… he had to, to force, to…to…to do what he finally did…to take her by force and kill her? What’s wrong with this world, Mr. Carella? I tell you, I swear on my eyes, I tell you I wouldn’t have cared what the two of them were doing, if only it hadn’t come to this. If only it hadn’t come to the knife.”
Carella said nothing.
“You’re thinking, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, What about the sister? He also tried to…he also made demands on the sister. Oh my God, I don’t know what to think any more. I wish I were dead. I wish the ceiling would fall in on me, I wish I would die, please, dear God, let me die, how can I possibly live through this?”
She began to weep again, and he watched her and still said nothing, and at last the tears were spent, and she rose and dried her eyes and said, “You wanted to see Muriel’s room.”
“Please,” Carella said.
She took the bottle from the table, carried it to the cabinet from which she’d taken it earlier, put it on a shelf, and then closed the cabinet door. “Andy’s room is just across the hall,” she said. “Did you want to see that, too?”
“I’m not permitted to,” Carella said.
“What’s to stop you?” she asked wearily.
“The law,” he said.
She turned to look at him. Her eyebrows went up a trifle. She seemed in that moment to be taking his measure anew. Then she turned away and went out into the corridor, and walked directly past the door opening into her son’s room. As Carella went past the room behind her, he saw a portion of a bed covered with a blue spread; a wingback chair; a maple dresser against the wall, a mirror over it; a maroon pennant on the wall, gold lettering spelling out HADLEY HS.
“My bedroom is on the other side of Andy’s,” Mrs. Lowery said. “The girls’ room is here at this end of the hall.” She opened a door and stepped aside to let him enter.
It was September on the street, but in that room it was April. Green shag rug and white lacquered dressers. Ruffled bedspreads in yellow and green, curtains running rampant with daisies. A full-length mirror in a white lacquered frame. A desk just under the windows, white Formica top, white legs, three drawers. On its top, a yellow lacquered tray for papers, and a lamp with a frosted white globe. Greens in subtly shifting shades, yellows that roamed the spectrum, and a constant white that unified the color scheme. Together they gave to the room the quick bold look of spring-time—or of youth.
“This side of the room is Patricia’s, here by the windows,” Mrs. Lowery said. “Everything on this side of the room is hers. The other side was Muriel’s. The girls shared a closet, it’s the walkin closet here by the door, the left-hand side of it was Muriel’s, the right-hand side is Patricia’s.” She hesitated, and then said, “Will you need me? I feel suddenly exhausted.”
“I won’t take too long,” Carella said.
“Mr. Carella?”
“Yes?”
“He couldn’t have done it.”
“Mrs. Lowery—”
“But she saw him, didn’t she?”
“Yes, Mrs. Lowery.”
“His own sister saw him.”
“Yes.”
“Still…” she said, and seemed to debate the rest silently—tiny shakes of her head, small shrugs, and finally a sigh of defeat. She turned and went out of the room, and Carella heard her shuffling to her own bedroom at the other end of the hall. A door opened and then closed. A key turned, a lock clicked shut.
There were two distinct personalities in this room. He had never seen Muriel Stark alive, had known her only as a corpse on the floor of a tenement hallway, the ceiling above her about
to burst from a water leak that had swollen it to grotesque proportions. But she was here in this room as certainly as was Patricia Lowery, and the contrast between the two girls was as palpable as their possessions.
In Patricia Lowery, there seemed to be much of the child.
Full-color photographs of Robert Redford and Paul Newman covered the wall behind her bed, but at the same time—though surely she had outgrown them long ago—a collection of dolls sat like rag-and-plastic siblings on the shelves above and to either side of her dresser. The dresser top itself was neatly arranged with collections of shells, bottles, glass animals, scraps of brightly colored cloth, oddly shaped pieces of driftwood. She had stapled last year’s Christmas cards onto a strip of pink ribbon, and had hung this from the ceiling like a mobile; it twisted gently now in the faint breeze that came through the partially opened window. On another ribbon she had similarly stapled picture postcards, and these hung above the full-length mirror. The mirror was lined with photographs tucked into the lacquered white frame, pictures of girls mostly, probably classmates, one of Muriel making a face at the camera, another of her brother Andrew standing on his head and grinning.
In the desk drawers Carella found her stationery (pink with P. L. in the left-hand corner, in delicate script lettering) and an address book, and school notebooks, and an assorted collection of letters she’d been saving for years, some of them addressed to her in Bunk 11 at a camp called Bilvic in Arlington, Vermont. The postmark on the envelopes told Carella she’d been at the camp five years ago, when she was ten. The letters were all from her parents or her brother Andrew. And in those same drawers were compositions Patricia had written in the sixth grade (How to Train a Turtle was the title of one of them) and arithmetic tests from God knew how long ago (she was apparently very good in math—all of the tests were graded in the high nineties) and some poems he guessed were recent, judging from the greater sophistication of the handwriting. A look at the paperback novels on one of the shelves told him that her taste in fiction ran to Gothics, or books about nurses, or in one instance (an obvious regression), a book about a little girl and her horse. The magazines she read were Seventeen and Mad. The calendar on her side of the room was a Charlie Brown calendar, and her piggy bank was a replica of Snoopy. Her records were rock. Hard rock, acid rock, schlock rock—but strictly rock. The clothes in her dresser drawers and on her side of the closet reflected a taste that was somewhat uncertain, somewhat experimental, sometimes babyish, sometimes outrageously sexy; her clothes, in short, were the clothes of a fifteen-year-old moving uneasily toward womanhood.
Muriel Stark, at seventeen, seemed to have got there already.
Where Patricia still clung to a childhood that was slipping away—the various collections, the correspondence, the school compositions and exams, even last year’s Christmas cards—Muriel already seemed to have thought of herself as a woman. The lack of any souvenirs may have been due to the fact that she’d lost her parents in an automobile crash two years ago and had come to live in someone else’s house; presumably, you didn’t carry a trunkful of seashells with you when you were accepting someone’s hospitality. But in contrast to Patricia’s dresser top, Muriel’s was strictly utilitarian, a place for her to put her perfumes and cosmetics, her nail polishes and her jewelry. There was a good light on the dresser, and a mirror over it, and Carella assumed this was where she applied her makeup after having washed in the hall bathroom. A floral-design paperweight was on the far end of the dresser, and it rested on a sheaf of articles clipped from various magazines, each of them describing various career possibilities for women. She seemed particularly interested in becoming an airline stewardess. In addition to several articles on flying, there were two brochures from two different airlines, explaining their requirements, training programs, salaries, and opportunities. The books on her shelves ran mostly to nonfiction, and reflected an interest in a wide variety of subjects. The magazines she read were Harper’s Bazaar and Cosmopolitan, though on the top shelf of her side of the closet Carella found a copy of Penthouse—presumably an excursion into the forbidden and not part of her normal reading diet. The clothes on her side of the closet clearly expressed an already developed, sophisticated taste. Her record collection (she presumably had shared the record player with her cousin) consisted only of LPs. There were some albums by rock groups, but she seemed to have outgrown these and was moving more into original Broadway show albums and albums by female vocalists—judging from the preponderance of such material on her shelf. One album seemed to have been played countless times; the sleeve was ragged and the disc inside was worn and scratched. This was Carly Simon’s No Secrets.
In the top drawer of the dresser, buried under a pile of nylon bikini panties, Carella found a dispenser for birth-control pills. There were twenty-eight slots in the dispenser. The outside ring showed Carella that the last pill Muriel had removed was from the slot marked SAT. She had been killed on September 6, and September 6 had been a Saturday. There was one pill left in the dispenser.
In the hallway outside, Carella heard footsteps.
The door to the room next door—Andrew’s room—clicked shut. He listened. He could hear the squeak of the bedsprings in the next room as someone’s weight collapsed onto the bed. In a little while he heard someone weeping, the sound clearly penetrating the thin wall that separated the two rooms. He went into the corridor outside, and knocked on Andrew’s door.
“Mrs. Lowery?” he said.
“Yes?”
“I’ll be going now,” he said.
“All right, fine,” she said.
“Mrs. Lowery?”
“Yes?”
“Mrs. Lowery, I wouldn’t drink any more this afternoon, if I were you. It’s not going to help, Mrs. Lowery.” He listened. “Mrs. Lowery?”
“Yes?”
“Did you hear me?”
“Yes,” she said. “I heard you.”
In the lobby of the building downstairs, Carella took out his notebook and was leafing through the pages when he heard an argument at curbside. A uniformed cop was yelling to the super-intendent about having put out his garbage cans too early. The super maintained that the garbage trucks would be here at 6:30 the next morning, and unless he chose to get up at the crack of dawn, he had to put them out the night before. Yes, the patrolman agreed, but this isn’t the night before, this is still the afternoon before, this is still only 2:30 the afternoon before. And you’ve got these dozens of garbage cans lined up at the curb here, stinking up the neighborhood to high heaven, and that’s a violation sure as I’m standing here. The super explained that he’d been doing it this way for years now, rolling the garbage cans up from the basement at 2:30, 3:00, and he’d never had any complaints from the cop who used to have this beat. And he sure as hell hoped nobody was looking for a payoff because he wasn’t the type of man to go paying off anybody who was supposed to be doing a damn job for the city. The uniformed cop asked the super if he was insinuating that somebody was on the take, and the super said all he knew was that he was always allowed to roll his garbage cans out at 2:30, 3:00, and now all of a sudden it was a big violation. The cop told him it wasn’t such a big violation, it was in fact a small violation, but it was a violation nonetheless unless he chose to wheel those cans right back down to the basement again, where they wouldn’t stink up the whole neighborhood to high heaven. The super spit on the sidewalk, two inches in front of the cop’s polished black shoes, and then he spit again and said that was probably a violation, too. But he rolled the cans brimming with refuse back down the ramp into the basement. In the morning the Department of Sanitation would find the cans at the curb again, ready to be emptied into the big clanging garbage truck and driven to an area on the Riverhead shore, near the Cos Corner Bridge, where the garbage would be dumped for land fill. But in the meantime, it would not stink up the whole neighborhood to high heaven.
According to Carella’s notes, Muriel Stark had worked as a bookkeeper at the Mercantile Tru
st on Nestor and Sixth. Carella looked at his watch now. It was indeed a little past 2:30. He’d have to hurry if he wanted to get to the bank before closing.
He was not looking for trouble.
Patricia Lowery had identified her brother as the killer; the grand jury would undoubtedly indict; there was an excellent chance for conviction even without further evidence. So Carella was not looking for trouble when he went to the bank. But the man in charge of the bookkeeping department was named Jack Armstrong, and he had brown hair and blue eyes. And Carella could not forget that Patricia Lowery—when she’d been lying to protect her brother—had first said the killer was a man as tall as Carella, with blue eyes and hair that was “either brown or black, but very dark.” As he stood opposite Armstrong now and shook hands with him, he was looking directly into the man’s blue eyes, and the top of the man’s brown-haired head was level with his own. He knew there were possibly 2,365,221 dark-haired, blue-eyed men in this city (Patricia had in fact picked one of them out of a lineup when she was still pursuing her initial lie), but it now seemed extraordinarily coincidental that the man who’d been Muriel Stark’s boss also happened to have dark hair and blue eyes. So whereas Carella was not looking for trouble, he nonetheless wondered whether Patricia had ever met Jack Armstrong, and whether this might have triggered an unconscious association. Why, for example, while she was inventing a killer, hadn’t she said his hair was blond and his eyes green; or his hair brown and his eyes brown; or his hair red and his eyes blue? Why dark hair and blue eyes—which Jack Armstrong, Muriel’s boss, most definitely had? He also had the name Jack Armstrong, and he immediately explained to Carella that this had caused him no end of embarrassment over the years.
