The Murderer Next Door

by Rafael Yglesias

  “Actually, if you want to know the truth”—he tossed my coat on a chair, folded his arms, and talked rapidly, letting go, scornfully, of his angry opinion—“I think you’re acting out of guilt, terrible guilt that you’ve harbored for years, hidden from me, from everyone you know, even from your own awareness. You’re trying to make up for abandoning your mother to your father. You hold yourself responsible for the way she died.”

  I had trouble speaking. I was furious, but it was stuck in my throat, choking me. Stefan’s kindness all these years seemed to have been nothing but a lie, a phony manner adopted to disguise his low opinion of my psyche. “That’s…disgusting,” I managed to get out.

  Stefan rubbed his eyes. “Jesus…,” he mumbled. “That’s…I…didn’t mean…I’m angry.” He had it at last, the appropriate shrink babble. “I’m angry. I feel you’re pulling away from me so I resort to attacking you with jargon. I apologize. That’s why I think you should talk to Jim. Maybe you’re right, maybe you should deal with Ben. I can’t trust my own judgment. Jim’ll be objective. And I think it would also be helpful for you to be clear about your own feelings.”

  “You don’t think I’m normal.” I was insulted. Stefan’s love had been my company when I went out alone into the world: his belief in me had been constant and reliable, a better self.

  “Molly, what does normal mean? Your best friend has been killed. Anyone would have trouble dealing with that. And you have a special relationship to this kind of event—”

  I stopped paying attention. He was a phony again. The truth had oozed out with his anger. Stefan thought I was sick, not in control of my actions. I was insulted and I was scared he was right. Not to have his confidence hurt, hurt more than I understood immediately, but the fright of hearing his tentative diagnosis was worse. After all, Stefan was an eminent psychiatrist who knew me well, knew me best, and his judgment was that my behavior was irrational, an apparition out of the nightmare of my past.

  My legs trembled. My head was full of air, but there was no breath in my lungs. I was about to faint and that would have only confirmed Stefan’s opinion. “Shut up!” I shouted. I had to get out, out of the building, out of all the bad choices.

  I half knew when I took the bankbook and my goose-down jacket. I thought of packing an overnight bag. “I’m taking the car,” I shouted into the living room, and let the door bang shut as I left. I feared Stefan would come out and argue while I waited for the elevator, so I took the gray fire stairs, my hand skimming on the red banister, my feet a waterfall of noise as I accelerated down, faster with each landing—a kid fleeing school.

  THE GEOGRAPHY OF QUEENS ALMOST DID MAKE ME crazy. I went around and around searching for Harriet’s house, infuriated by the Xeroxed streets, misreading the curlicued numbers on the front doors, finally asking directions from a forlorn pedestrian. When I got to her place I realized I had driven past it twice.

  A car was parked in front, a visitor, no doubt an interviewer. It wasn’t Ben’s car. Harriet greeted me casually. “Oh, hello, Molly.”

  “Do you know where Ben is?” I asked matter-of-factly, hoping that would seduce an answer.

  She smiled. A wan, sickly, smug, regretful, infuriating grin. “Molly…,” she said with gentle rebuke. “You know he’s disappointed. He can’t trust you now. You don’t expect that he wants you to know his movements.”

  “Harriet, may I come in and discuss this with you? I feel I’ve done everything all wrong. Everyone’s misunderstood. I was simply thinking about Naomi. I realize now I was crazy even to think of taking her away from Ben. She needs him.” It was truly sickening to speak these words. Not a figure of speech: the lies were abrasive, cold, foreign objects whose texture and size were nauseating to expel.

  Harriet enjoyed them. “I told you. Isn’t that what I said when you tried to get me to sue Ben?”

  “Yes.” She wanted praise. I regurgitated more disgusting stuff: “You understood everyone’s feelings so well.”

  “I’ve always been very sensitive to other people’s feelings. I’m very intuitive. Ben was amazed that I was able to understand how a parent would feel, since I don’t have children. I told him, I’m a woman, after all. We know. Right?” She leaned back against the door and chuckled, her skinny tense body almost relaxed.

  “Yes,” I agreed, and pretended to shiver. Actually, in my red goose-down jacket, I was hot. Late November and still New York continued to have mild weather. “It’s cold.”

  “Come in. Have some tea.” She stepped back and waved me in, her long arm dipping low and sweeping back, a dancer’s gesture. She was in an expansive mood. As I entered, she took hold of my arm, pulled me close to whisper in my ear: “I could use your advice. He wants me to write a book.” She nodded toward her living room.

  A young man was seated in an armchair of sixties vintage. It was typical of her furniture—every piece was shaped into sharp angles, their fabric a dull green. “Hello!” he called out cheerfully. His young face was red cheeked; his blue three-piece suit almost shined. He looked bright and bold in the faded room, an odd contrast, as if he were a brassy cartoon figure superimposed on a black-and-white film.

  “This is the son of a neighbor,” Harriet said, introducing us. The young man shook my hand vigorously while she explained. “Robby Tatter. He’s just starting at the William Morris Agency—”

  “I’m interning there actually,” he interjected.

  “—and he thinks maybe there’s a book in all this. And a movie?” she asked him, rising on her tiptoes, her lips pursed, eyebrows up, a picture of dainty greed. She could express emotion with her entire body—maybe she was a talented dancer.

  “TV, I think. The important thing is to get in first. Look at the Steinberg case—there are at least three books, probably just as many movie deals, and that’s only a month old.”

  He was a fraud. He had been an unpaid intern during the summer thanks to a famous relative, the novelist Fred Tatter; he was a freshman at City College and hoped someday to work in, as he put it, “the entertainment industry.” Harriet loved his jargon. He babbled that her story was “sympathetic. A modern woman who had chosen to devote herself to her career suddenly being given the responsibility of mothering. And not just regular mothering, but to handle a little girl involved in a sensational murder case.”

  “Won’t people think she’s exploiting Naomi?” I asked.

  “Oh, no!” Harriet covered her mouth as if she had spoken my horrible words.

  “No way!” Robby was so eager, he rose from the armchair. He gestured to take in the whole house. “She needs the money for the girl’s sake, to raise her right.”

  “I do,” Harriet agreed. “All of Ben’s money is going to go to his defense—he’s going to sell his apartment and they’ll live here. I can’t afford to raise a child. Especially not in New York—”

  I considered telling her that this boy had no more connection to agents, publishing, television, or movies than a clerk in a video store, but I thought better of giving good advice. Why help her? Let her chase show business red herrings.

  When she ushered him out and asked my opinion, I told her there was no harm in letting him “set up some meetings,” as he put it. “Thank you. I’m not worldly,” she said. Her mood clouded over with the rapidity of time-lapse photography. Clear blue sunny sky. Blink. Cloud on horizon. Blink. Stormy weather. Her shoulders slumped, her face lengthened. She wore a look of profound sadness that you might see painted on a clown. “That’s what ruined my career.”

  “I thought you were injured,” I commented, and cursed myself instantly. I didn’t want to be stuck there, playing the interviewer.

  “It’s the old story. Not what you know, but who. I used my back as an alibi. I couldn’t make myself, you know, suck up to the right people. All dancers deal with pain—I did for years. I stuck with it. I was stoic. Until they broke my heart.”

  Has anyone ever failed because they were inadequate to their ambition? I resent excuses:
they rob the successful of their due credit. “Harriet.” I made a last try. I took her hand—her fingers were cold. I baked them between my palms. “I want to help Ben take care of Naomi. Tell me where they are—”

  “I can’t—”

  “Please!” She smiled at my desperation. There were tears in my eyes, my arms shook with fatigue and tension—I craved this simple information. And she smiled. My opinion of her changed. She wasn’t pathetic. There was malice in her, pleasure at her power over me. I rubbed her fingers briskly. “You’re cold,” I said.

  “I’m always cold,” she answered slyly, and grinned. Her long hollowed face was ghastly in triumph. Her teeth were dull, her gums gray. Harriet was death. A vain, dry, childless woman—like me. She scared me even more than Ben—I couldn’t become him.

  “Tell me where they are,” I whispered, a seduction.

  “They’ll be back Sunday night. You can see her then. Maybe you can help me!” she added brightly, and withdrew her fingers. They had absorbed my heat. My hands felt raw. “You probably have a lawyer at your firm that handles books and movies, don’t you? Someone who specializes in all that?”

  “We do entertainment law. I could get you help. If you tell me where they are.” I wanted to fight back. At least make her admit she was a schemer.

  Blink. She winced in pain. “Oh, no!” Blink. She was irritated. “I can’t do that.” Blink. She was cool. “If you don’t want to help me, that’s fine. I thought we had become, you know, maybe not friends, but friendly. I thought you might want to help me make sure the story is told right for Naomi’s sake.”

  “And I thought you might want to tell me where they are for Naomi’s sake,” I said, coming right back at her. No more babying. It had gotten me nowhere. “You know, so far I have been friendly. Very friendly. I don’t have to be. That can change.”

  Her nerves couldn’t conduct that much electricity—she jangled in front of my eyes, twitching, rising from her chair, her answer staccato: “I can’t…Go…I won’t stand for…I should have…Ben was right…Get out! Get out of my house!”

  I left her. I hated her. I stood outside her house and hated Queens. She lived near the Long Island Expressway. I listened to the cars humming low on the ground. After a few moments, I could hear the jets landing at La Guardia, tearing the sky with their slow descent.

  I wanted to go north, where it was clean and cold, bright green or stark white everywhere you looked.

  I started my car and drove home to Maine.

  THE MURDERER NEXT DOOR

  BRIGHT GREEN OR STARK WHITE, AND YET THERE WAS a lot of sludge too. On the highways and especially in the service stations along Interstate 95. But no people. I looked for them, the way a country girl might search for missing trees in the city. Where was the normal background?

  I was glad to be alone. Maybe that’s why the drive appealed to me. Reaching my destination was something to be deferred. Being alone, even missing Wendy and Stefan (not the critical Stefan of today, but the loving Stefan of yesterday), was pleasant.

  I stopped that night in Augusta. Oddly, I had my first good night’s sleep, dead to grief and worry, in a motel room so anonymous I could fantasize that when I opened my curtains in the morning I would see not a white frosted parking lot but a hot tropical paradise.

  Back on the road again Saturday morning I was happy to be solitary and in motion. Why not go on forever, like that? If I cashed out of the law firm, insisted Stefan pay me half of what our co-op was worth, what could I realize? Half a million dollars…one million? Living on treasury bond income, I could drive back and forth across the United States endlessly. Call me the Phantom of Route 80, heroine of a perverse television series, stopping in each town only long enough to heal the emotional wounds of others, while mine sting, the cuts still glistening red, forever.

  But the food would kill me. Between that and the lack of exercise I’d bloat up—at last I would become a Boneless Person.

  By midday, when I reached Sargentville, the fantasy was jaded. I was sick of sitting in the car, relieved to arrive at the retirement apartments where I paid for my aged father to live. It’s a low complex, fashioned to resemble a string of little New England houses: the gray aluminum siding mimics clapboard, there are dummy chimneys, and the signs for the office, laundry, and dining room pretend to be hand-painted in black script.

  I parked in front of a substantial snowbank created by the plowing in the visitor’s parking, and braced myself for Sargentville’s weather. My bones squeezed together at the blast of cold when I opened the freezer door and walked into my hometown’s winter. This cold is sharper than can be measured by numbers. The damp and frozen air ignores layers of clothing, slices through skin, dissolves hollows in your bones, and blows ice into your joints so that you creak and get stuck in place, as if you were the unlubricated Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz. Finally, to move a dozen paces toward a building seems an impossible trek. You lunge at entrances, half-convinced you’ll die on the steps, legs numbed, too weak to propel you inside. Imagine freezing to death so close to home, so near to rescue.

  The door to my father’s apartment was open. I found him alone in the living room, erect in a red chair, staring at a game show on a portable black-and-white television. He had nothing beside him. No book, no paper, no snack, no empty coffee cup, no cigarettes, no ashtray. His expression was grave. Watching was a matter of life and death apparently.

  The sight of me seemed to scare him. “Molly…?” It was a fearful question, asked of a possible ghost.

  “Ayah,” I said, unconsciously sinking into Down East lingo. “Wanted to have dinner with you. So I drove up.”

  “What’s going on?” He was suspicious. But he pretended not to be, glancing away from a study of my face after he asked his question, to return his attention to the set.

  “Nothing,” I told him. “Came to see you,” which was, after all, the truth.

  “I see,” he answered in a tone that implied he did not.

  “Going to take you to supper.”

  He nodded. On the tube contestants squealed with delight at winning furniture. Even Father didn’t think the prize was worth a celebration. “Looks regular to me. Nothing special,” he commented.

  “Expecting someone?” I asked because of his open door.

  “No,” he said.

  We drove into Blue Hill. I took him to the town’s fancy restaurant. Its prices are moderate by New York standards, but the atmosphere is pretentious because they cater to the summer traffic and to the retired rich in the winter. At the entrance my father appeared uncomfortable. He pulled on his red-and-white-checked wool shirt to tuck it into his dungarees and wiped his boots feverishly on the mat outside. Whatever dirt he scraped off from their soles, he could do nothing about the stained leather on top. I was fascinated by a large white blotch that covered the toes—it could be a snowman’s tear.

  “Need a jacket to go in there, I think,” he worried.

  “Doesn’t say that,” I dared him, and went in.

  He took it, entering behind me. He cleared his throat at the sight of the interior. Probably looked grand to him: tables covered with linen, real china plates, comfortable chairs instead of booths, carpeted floor, stone fireplace burning real logs, waitresses dressed in real clothes, not a uniform. I didn’t intend to make him uneasy. The other choices were a fast-food joint in Ellsworth or a pizza restaurant run by former wood hippies. He wouldn’t eat pizza and McDonald’s wouldn’t have allowed me to proceed at the right pace. I wanted more than a fast-food conversation.

  “Molly,” he asked me over the top of the menu, “do you think they’ll give me the steak without any glop on it?”

  He meant the wine, shallot, and mustard sauce described in calligraphy on the menu. “I’ll ask,” I said. He was as intimidated and scared as a little boy would be. I watched his old eyes, dulled and worried, shrinking in their sockets, nervously survey the empty room.

  At four o’clock we were hours ahead of the n
ormal dinner traffic. They had warned us the kitchen was idle and we would have a half hour wait for our food. I asked for bread right away. Father’s stomach was in agony—he was accustomed to having his supper at three. “Don’t say nothing,” he decided about the sauce. “I’ll shove it off myself.”

  I daydreamed of taking Father to New York. I pictured him: Jimmy Stewart, gawking and excited, astride Fifth Avenue, arms akimbo, in jeopardy from the onslaught of indifferent traffic. No, wrong actor. Gary Cooper, maybe. Not only awed—also skeptical and scared.

  His face was thoroughly wrinkled, grooved and floppy, a beagle’s fur. His blond-gray eyebrows appeared to be glued on: how could anything grow out of that tough hide? I ordered a bourbon and encouraged him to do the same.

  “You mean it?” he mumbled, sticking his tongue into his cheek and poking, pretending indifference.

  I ordered for him.

  “What’s going on?” he asked crossly. “We celebrating?”

  “Want to come back with me to New York? Visit for a while?”

  He raised his bushy brows. They had grown around the sides of his eyes, half-formed spectacles. “No, ma’am!” he said, and laughed. Briefly. It was a loud squawk, like a complaining gull.

  “You’d like it,” I told him.

  “No I wouldn’t. Can’t even take Ellsworth. Too many people at the mall in the summer. Can’t find what I want. Place like New York’d make me go blind and deaf.”

  The drink and the waitress’s easy manner relaxed him. He ate a roll with butter and drained his glass. He rattled the ice and cracked cubes between his teeth.

  “Want another?” I asked.

  “Hmmm?” He had heard. He wanted more; pride made him pretend indifference.

  I signaled and asked for another round. When she brought them to the table, he sipped his immediately, he was so thirsty for the stuff. “My father wants a steak,” I said, watching Father close his eyes at the taste, savoring the pleasure. “But he doesn’t want your sauce.”