“Well, it’d still be pretty helpful.”
LaTour was wearing what he usually did, a black leather jacket cut like a sports coat and blue jeans. He patted the many pockets involved in the outfit. “Shit, Tal. Think I lost it. The questionnaire, I mean. Sorry. You have another one?” He grabbed the phone, made another call.
“I’ll get you one,” Tal said. He returned to his office, picked up a questionnaire from a neat pile on his credenza and returned to LaTour. The cop was still on the phone, speaking in muted but gruff tones. He glanced up and nodded at Tal, who set the sheet on his desk.
LaTour mouthed, Thank you.
Tal waited a moment and asked, “Who else was there?”
“What?” LaTour frowned, irritated at being interrupted. He clapped his hand over the mouthpiece.
“Who else was at the scene?”
“Where the Bensons offed themselves? Fuck, I don’t know. Fire and Rescue. That Greeley PD kid.” A look of concentration that Tal didn’t believe. “A few other guys. Can’t remember.” The detective returned to his conversation.
Tal walked back to his office, certain that the questionnaire was presently being slam-dunked into LaTour’s wastebasket.
He called the Fire and Rescue Department but couldn’t track down anybody who’d responded to the suicide. He gave up for the time being and continued working on the spreadsheet.
After a half hour he paused and stretched. His eyes slipped from the spreadsheet to the pile of blank questionnaires. A Xeroxed note was stapled neatly to each one, asking the responding or case officer to fill it out in full and explaining how helpful the information would be. He’d agonized over writing that letter (numbers came easy to Talbot Simms, words hard). Still, he knew the officers didn’t take the questionnaire seriously. They joked about it. They joked about him, too, calling him “Einstein” or “Mr. Wizard” behind his back.
1. Please state nature of incident:
He found himself agitated, then angry, tapping his mechanical pencil on the spreadsheet like a drumstick. Anything not filled out properly rankled Talbot Simms; that was his nature. But an unanswered questionnaire was particularly irritating. The information the forms harvested was important. The art and science of statistics not only compiles existing information but is used to make vital decisions and predict trends. Maybe a questionnaire in this case would reveal some fact, some datum, that would help the county better understand elderly suicides and save lives.
4. Please indicate the sex, approximate age, and apparent nationality and/or race of each victim:
The empty lines on the questions were like an itch—aggravated by hotshot LaTour’s condescending attitude.
“Hey there, boss.” Shellee, Tal’s firecracker of a secretary, stepped into his office. “Finally got the Templeton files. Sent ’em by mule train from Albany’s my guess.” With massive blond ringlets and the feistiness of a truck-stop waitress compressed into a five-foot, hundred-pound frame, Shellee looked as if she’d sling out words with a twangy Alabaman accent but her intonation was pure Hahvahd Square Bostonian.
“Thanks.” He took the dozen folders she handed off, examined the numbers on the front of each and rearranged them in ascending order on the credenza behind his desk.
“Called the SEC again and they promise, promise, promise they’ll have us the—Hey, you leaving early?” She was frowning, looking at her watch, as Tal stood, straightened his tie and pulled on the thin, navy-blue raincoat he wore to and from the office.
“Have an errand.”
A frown of curiosity filled her round face, which was deceptively girlish (Tal knew she had a twenty-one-year-old daughter and a husband who’d just retired from the phone company). “Sure. You do? Didn’t see anything on your calendar.”
The surprise was understandable. Tal had meetings out of the office once or twice a month at the most. He was virtually always at his desk, except when he went out for lunch, which he did at twelve thirty every day, joining two or three friends from a local university at the Corner Tap Room up the street.
“Just came up.”
“Be back?” Shellee asked.
He paused. “You know, I’m not really sure.” He headed for the elevator.
+ − < = > ÷
THE WHITE-COLUMNED COLONIAL on Meadowridge had to be worth six, seven million. Tal pulled his Honda Accord into the circular drive, behind a black sedan, which he hoped belonged to a Greeley PD officer, somebody who might have the information he needed. Tal took the questionnaire and two pens from his briefcase, made sure the tips were retracted then slipped them into his shirt pocket. He walked up the flagstone path to the house, the door to which was unlocked. He stepped inside and identified himself to a man in jeans and work shirt, carrying a clipboard. It was his car in the drive, he explained. He was here to meet the Bensons’ lawyer about liquidating their estate and knew nothing about the Bensons or their death.
He stepped outside, leaving Tal alone in the house.
As he walked through the entry foyer and into the spacious first floor a feeling of disquiet came over him. It wasn’t the queasy sense that somebody’d just died here; it was that the house was such an unlikely setting for death. He looked over the yellow-and-pink floral upholstery, the boldly colorful abstracts on the walls, the gold-edged china and prismatic glasses awaiting parties, the collection of crystal animals, the Moroccan pottery, shelves of well-thumbed books, framed snapshots on the walls and mantel. Two pairs of well-worn slippers—a man’s size and a woman’s—sat poignantly together by the back door. Tal imagined the couple taking turns to be the first to rise, make coffee and brave the dewy cold to collect the New York Times or the Westbrook Ledger.
The word that came to him was “home.” The idea of the owners here shooting themselves was not only disconcerting, it was downright eerie.
Tal noticed a sheet of paper weighted down by a crystal vase and he blinked in surprise as he read it.
To our friends:
We’re making this decison with great contentment in hearts, joyous in the knowldge that we’ll be together forever.
Both Patsy and Don Benson had signed it. He stared at the words for a moment then wandered to the den, which was cordoned off with crime scene tape. He stopped cold, gasping faintly.
Blood.
On the couch, on the carpet, on the wall.
He could clearly see where the couple had been when they’d died; the blood explained the whole scenario to him. Brown, opaque, dull. He found himself breathing shallowly, as if the stain were giving off toxic fumes.
Tal stepped back into the living room and decided to fill out as much of the questionnaire as he could. Sitting on a couch he clicked a pen point out and picked up a book from the coffee table to use as a writing surface. He read the title: Making the Final Journey: The Complete Guide to Suicide and Euthanasia.
Okay…I don’t think so. He replaced the book and made a less troubling lap desk from a pile of magazines. He filled out some of the details, then he paused, aware of the front door opening. Footsteps sounded on the foyer tile and a moment later a stocky man in an expensive suit walked into the den. He frowned.
“Sheriff’s Department,” Tal said and showed his ID, which the man looked at carefully.
“I’m their lawyer. George Metzer,” he said slowly, visibly shaken. “Oh, this is terrible. Just terrible. I got a call from somebody in your department. My secretary did, I mean…You want to see some ID?”
Tal realized that a Real Cop would have asked for it right up front. “Please.”
He looked over the driver’s license and nodded, then gazed past the man’s pudgy hand and looked again into the den. The bloodstains were like brown laminate on cheap furniture.
“Was there a note?” the lawyer asked, putting his wallet away.
Tal walked into the dining room. He nodded toward the note.
The lawyer looked it over, shook his head again. He glanced into the den and blinked, seeing the blood. Tur
ned away.
Tal showed Metzer the questionnaire. “Can I ask you a few questions? For our statistics department? It’s anonymous. We don’t use names.”
“Sure, I guess.”
Tal began querying the man about the couple. He was surprised to learn they were only in their mid-sixties.
“Any children?”
“No. No close relatives at all. A few cousins they never see…Never saw, I mean. They had a lot of friends, though. They’ll be devastated.”
He got some more information, troubled he had to leave blank the questions that could only be answered by the responding officers. Tal felt he had nearly enough to process the data but one more question needed an answer.
9. Apparent motive for the incident:
“You have any idea why they’d do this?” Tal asked.
“I know exactly,” Metzer said. “Don was ill.”
Tal glanced down at the note again and noticed that the writing was unsteady and a few of the words were misspelled. LaTour’d said something about them drinking but Tal remembered seeing a wicker basket full of medicine bottles sitting on the island in the kitchen. He mentioned this then asked, “Did one of them have some kind of palsy? Nerve disease?”
The lawyer said, “No, it was heart problems. Bad ones.”
In space number 9 Tal wrote: Illness. Then he asked, “And his wife?”
“No, Patsy was in good health. But they were very devoted to each other. Totally in love. She must’ve decided she didn’t want to go on without him.”
“Was it terminal?”
“Not the way he described it to me,” the lawyer said. “But he could’ve been bedridden for the rest of his life. I doubt Don could’ve handled that. He was so active, you know.”
Tal signed the questionnaire, folded and slipped it into his pocket.
The round man gave a sigh. “I should’ve guessed something was up. They came to my office a couple of weeks ago and made a few changes to the will and they gave me instructions for their memorial service. I thought it was just because Don was going to have the surgery, you know, thinking about what would happen if…But I should’ve read between the lines. They were planning it then, I’ll bet.”
He gave a sad laugh. “You know what they wanted for their memorial service? See, they weren’t religious so they wanted to be cremated then have their friends throw a big party at the club and scatter their ashes on the green at the eighteenth hole.” He grew somber again. “It never occurred to me they had something like this in mind. They seemed so happy, you know? Crazy fucked-up life sometimes, huh? Anyway, I’ve got to meet with this guy outside. Here’s my card. Call me, you got any other questions, Detective.”
Tal walked around the house one more time. He glanced at the calendar stuck to the refrigerator with two magnets in the shape of lobsters. Newport Rhode Island was written in white across the bright red tails. In the calendar box for yesterday there was a note to take the car in to have the oil changed. Two days before that Patsy’d had a hair appointment.
Today’s box was empty. And there was nothing in any of the future dates for the rest of April. Tal looked through the remaining months. No notations. He made a circuit of the first floor, finding nothing out of the ordinary.
Except, someone might suggest, maybe the troubled spirits left behind by two people alive that morning and now no longer so.
Tal Simms, mathematician, empirical scientist, statistician, couldn’t accept any such presence. But he hardly needed to in order to feel a churning disquiet. The stains of opaque blood that had spoiled the reassuring comfort of this homey place were as chilling as any ghost could be.
+ − < = > ÷
WHEN HE WAS STUDYING MATH at Cornell ten years earlier Talbot Simms dreamed of being a John Nash, a Pierre de Fermat, a Euler, a Bernoulli. By the time he hit grad school and looked around him, at the other students who wanted to be the same, he realized two things: one, that his love of the beauty of mathematics was no less than it had ever been but, two, he was utterly sick of academics.
What was the point? he wondered. Writing articles that no one read? Becoming a professor? He could have done so easily thanks to his virtually perfect test scores and grades but that life to him was like a Mobius strip—the twisted ribbon with a single surface that never ends. Teaching more teachers to teach…
No, he wanted a practical use for his skills and dropped out of graduate school. At the time there was a huge demand for statisticians and analysts on Wall Street and Tal joined up. In theory the job seemed a perfect fit—numbers, numbers and more numbers, and a practical use for them. But he soon found something else: Wall Street mathematics were fishy mathematics. Tal felt pressured to skew his statistical analysis of certain companies to help his bank sell financial products to the clients. To Tal, 3 was no more nor less than 3. Yet his bosses sometimes wanted 3 to appear to be 2.9999 or 3.12111. There was nothing illegal about this—all the qualifications were disclosed to customers. But statistics, to Tal, helped us understand life; they weren’t smoke screens to help us sneak up on the unwary. Numbers were pure. And the glorious compensation he received didn’t take the shame out of his prostitution.
On the very day he was going to quit, though, the FBI arrived in Tal’s office—not for anything he or the bank had done, but to serve a warrant to examine the accounts of a client who’d been indicted in a stock scam. It turned out the agent looking over the figures was a mathematician and accountant. He and Tal had some fascinating discussions while the man pored over the records, armed with handcuffs, a large automatic pistol and a Texas Instruments calculator.
Here at last was a logical outlet for his love of numbers. He’d always been interested in police work. As a slight, reclusive only child he’d read not only books on logarithms and trigonometry and Einstein’s theories but murder mysteries as well, Agatha Christie and A. Conan Doyle. His analytical mind would often spot the killer early in the story. He called the Bureau’s personnel department. He was disappointed to learn that there was a federal government hiring freeze in effect. But, undeterred, he called the NYPD and other police departments in the metro area—including Westbrook County, where he’d lived with his family for several years before his widower father got a job teaching math at UCLA.
Westbrook, it turned out, needed someone to take over their financial crimes investigations. The only problem, the head of county personnel admitted, was that the officer would also have to be in charge of gathering and compiling statistics. But, to Tal Simms, numbers were numbers and he had no problem with the piggy-backed assignments.
One month later, Tal had kissed Wall Street good-bye and moved into a tiny though pristine Tudor house in Bedford Plains, the county seat.
There was one other glitch, however, which the Westbrook County personnel office had neglected to mention, probably because it was so obvious: To be a member of the sheriff’s department financial crimes unit, he had to become a cop.
The two-month training was rough. Oh, the academic part about criminal law and procedure went fine. The challenge was the physical curriculum at the academy, which was a little like army basic training. Tal Simms, who’d been five-foot-nine and had hovered around 153 pounds since high school, had fiercely avoided all sports except volleyball, tennis and the rifle team, none of which had buffed him up for the Suspect Takedown and Restraint course. Still, he got through it all and graduated in the top 1.4% of his class. The swearing-in ceremony was attended by a dozen friends from local colleges and Wall Street, as well as his father, who’d flown in from the Midwest, where he was a professor of advanced mathematics at the University of Chicago. The stern man was unable to fathom why his son had taken this route but, having largely abandoned the boy for the world of numbers in his early years, Simms Senior had forfeited all right to nudge Tal’s career in one direction or another.
Financial crimes proved to be rare in Westbrook. Or, more accurately, they tended to be adjunct to federal prosecutions and Tal found himse
lf sidelined as an investigator but in great demand as a statistician.
Finding and analyzing data are more vital than the public thinks. Certainly crime statistics determine budget and staff-hiring strategies. But, more than that, statistics can diagnose a community’s ills. If the national monthly average for murders of teenagers by other teenagers in neighborhoods with a mean annual income of $26,000 is .03, and Kendall Heights in southern Westbrook was home to 1.1 such killings per month, why? And what could be done to fix the problem?
Hence, the infamous questionnaire.
Now, 6:30 p.m., armed with the one he’d just completed, Tal had decided to return to his office from the Benson house. He input the information from the form into his database and placed the questionnaire itself into his to-be-filed basket. He stared at the information on the screen for a moment then began to log off. But he changed his mind and went online and searched some databases.
He jumped when someone walked into his office. “Hey, boss.” Shellee blinked. “Thought you were gone.”
“Just wanted to finish up a few things here.”
“I’ve got that stuff you wanted.”
He glanced at it. The title was, “Adjunct Reports. SEC Case 04-5432.”
“Thanks,” he said absently, staring at his printouts.
“Sure.” She eyed him carefully. “You need anything else?”
“No, go on home…’Night.” When she turned away, though, he glanced at the computer screen once more and said, “Wait, Shell. You ever work in Crime Scene?”
Trouble in Mind: The Collected Stories, Volume 3 Page 38
