“Never did. Bill watches that TV show. It’s icky.”
“You know what I’d have to do to get Crime Scene to look over the house?”
“House?”
“Where the suicide happened. The Benson house in Greeley.”
“The—”
“Suicides. I want Crime Scene to check it out. But I don’t know what to do.”
“Something funny about it?”
He explained, “Just looked up a few things. The incident profile was out of range.”
“I’ll make a call. Ingrid’s still down there, I think.”
She returned to her desk and Tal rocked back in his chair.
The low April sun shot bars of ruddy light into his office, hitting the large, blank wall and leaving a geometric pattern on the white paint. The image put in mind the blood on the walls and couch and carpet of the Bensons’ house. He pictured, too, the shaky lettering of their note.
Together forever…
Shellee appeared in the doorway. “Sorry, boss. They said it’s too late to twenty-one-twenty-four it.”
“To—?”
“That’s what they said. They said you need to declare a twenty-one-twenty-four to get Crime Scene in. But you can’t do it now.”
“Oh. Why?”
“Something about it being too contaminated now. You have to do it right away or get some special order from the sheriff himself. Anyway, that’s what they told me, boss.”
Even though Shellee worked for three other detectives Tal was the only one who received this title—a true endearment, coming from her. She was formal, or chill, with the other cops in direct proportion to the number of times they asked her to fetch coffee or snuck peeks at her ample breasts.
Outside, a voice from the Real Crimes side of the room called out, “Hey, Bear, you get your questionnaire done?” A chortle followed.
Greg LaTour called back, “Naw, I’m taking mine home. Had front-row Knicks tickets but I figured, fuck, it’d be more fun to fill out paperwork all night.”
More laughter.
Shellee’s face hardened into a furious mask. She started to turn but Tal motioned her to stop.
“Hey, guys, tone it down.” The voice was Captain Dempsey’s. “He’ll hear you.”
“Naw,” LaTour called, “Einstein left already. He’s probably home humping his calculator. Who’s up for Sal’s?”
“I’m for that, Bear.”
“Let’s do it…”
Laughter and receding footsteps.
Shellee muttered, “It just frosts me when they talk like that. They’re like kids on the schoolyard.”
True, they were, Tal thought. Math whizzes know a lot about bullies on schoolyards.
But he said, “It’s okay.”
“No, boss, it’s not okay.”
“They live in a different world,” Tal said. “I understand.”
“Understand how people can be cruel like that? Well, I surely don’t.”
“You know that thirty-four percent of homicide detectives suffer from depression? Sixty-four percent get divorced, twenty-eight percent are substance abusers.”
“You’re using those numbers to excuse ’em, boss. Don’t do it. Don’t let ’em get away with it.” She slung her purse over her shoulder and started down the hall, calling, “Have a nice weekend, boss. See you Monday.”
“And,” Tal continued, “six point three percent kill themselves before retirement.”
Though he doubted she could hear.
+ − < = > ÷
THE RESIDENTS OF Hamilton, New York, were educated, pleasant, reserved and active in politics and the arts. In business, too; they’d chosen to live here because the enclave was the closest exclusive Westbrook community to Manhattan. Industrious bankers and lawyers could be at their desks easily by eight o’clock in the morning.
The cul-de-sac of Montgomery Way, one of the nicest streets in Hamilton, was in fact home to two bankers and one lawyer, as well as one retired couple. These older residents, at No. 205, had lived in their house for twenty-four years. It was a 6000-square-foot stone Tudor with leaded-glass windows and a shale roof, surrounded by a few acres of clever landscaping.
Samuel Ellicott Whitley had attended law school while his wife worked in the advertising department of Gimbels, the department store near the harrowing intersection of Broadway, Sixth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street. He’d finished school in ’57 and joined Brown, Lathrop & Soames on Broad Street. The week after he was named partner, Elizabeth gave birth to a daughter, and after a brief hiatus, resumed classes at Columbia Business School. She took a job at one of the country’s largest cosmetics companies and rose to be a senior vice president.
But the lives of law and business were behind the Whitleys now and they’d moved into the life of retirement as gracefully and comfortably as she stepped into her Dior gowns and he into his Tripler’s tux.
Tonight, a cool, beautiful April Sunday, Elizabeth hung up the phone after a conversation with her daughter, Sandra, and piled the dinner dishes in the sink. She poured herself another vodka and tonic. She stepped outside onto the back patio, looking out over the azure dusk crowning the hemlocks and pine. She stretched and sipped her drink, feeling tipsy and content. Ecstatic.
She wondered what Sam was up to. Just after they’d finished dinner he’d said that he had to pick up something. Normally she would have gone with him. She worried because of his illness. Afraid not only that his undependable heart would give out but that he might faint at the wheel or drive off the road because of the medication. But he’d insisted that she stay home; he was only going a few miles.
Taking a long sip of her drink, she cocked her head, hearing an automobile engine and the hiss of tires on the asphalt. She looked toward the driveway. But she couldn’t see anything.
Was it Sam? The car, though, had not come up the main drive but had turned off the road at the service entrance and eased through the side yard, out of sight of the house. She squinted but with the foliage and the dim light of dusk she couldn’t see who it was.
Logic told her she should be concerned. But Elizabeth was completely comfortable sitting here with her glass in hand, under a deep blue evening sky. Feeling the touch of cashmere on her skin, happy, warm…No, life was perfect. What could there possibly be to worry about?
+ − < = > ÷
THREE NIGHTS OF THE WEEK—or as Tal would sometimes phrase it, 42.8571% of his evenings—he’d go out. Maybe on a date, maybe to have drinks and dinner with friends, maybe to his regular poker game (the others in the quintet enjoyed his company though they’d learned it could be disastrous to play against a man who could remember cards photographically and calculate the odds of drawing to a full house like a computer).
The remaining 57.1429% of his nights he’d stay home and lose himself in the world of mathematics.
This Sunday, nearly 7 p.m., Tal was in his small library, which was packed with books but was as ordered and neat as his office at work. He’d spent the weekend running errands, cleaning the house, washing the car, making the obligatory—and ever awkward—call to his father in Chicago, dining with a couple up the road who’d made good their threat to set him up with a cousin (email addresses had been unenthusiastically exchanged over empty mousse dishes). Now, classical music playing on the radio, Tal had put the rest of the world aside and was working on a proof.
This is the gold ring mathematicians seek. One might have a brilliant insight about numbers but without completing the proof—the formal argument that verifies the premise—that insight remains merely a theorem, pure speculation.
The proof that had obsessed him for months involved “perfect numbers.” These are positive numbers whose divisors (excluding the number itself) add up to that number. The number 6, for instance, is perfect because it’s divisible only by 1, 2 and 3 (not counting 6), and 1, 2 and 3 also add up to 6.
The questions Tal had been trying to answer: How many even perfect numbers are there? And, more intriguing
, are there any odd perfect numbers? In the entire history of mathematics no one has been able to offer a proof that an odd perfect number exists (or that it can’t exist).
Perfect numbers have always intrigued mathematicians—theologians, too. St. Augustine felt that God intentionally chose a perfect number of days—six—to create the world. Rabbis attach great mystical significance to the number 28, the days in the moon’s cycle. Tal didn’t consider perfect numbers in such a philosophical way. For him they were simply a curious mathematical construct. But this didn’t minimize their importance to him; proving theorems about perfect numbers (or any other mathematical enigmas) might lead to other insights about math and science…and perhaps life in general.
He now hunched over his pages of neat calculations, wondering if the odd perfect number was merely a myth or if it was real and waiting to be discovered, hiding somewhere in the dim distance of numbers approaching infinity.
Something about this thought troubled him and he leaned back in his chair. It took a moment to realize why. Thinking of infinity reminded him of the suicide note Don and Patsy Benson had left.
Together forever…
He pictured the room where they’d died, the blood, the chilling sight of the grim how-to guide they’d bought. Making the Final Journey.
Tal stood and paced. Something wasn’t right. For the first time in years he decided to return to the office on a Sunday night. He wanted to look up some background on suicides of this sort.
A half hour later he was walking past the surprised guard, who had to think for a moment or two before he recognized him.
“Officer…”
“Detective Simms.”
“Right. Yessir.”
Ten minutes later he was in his office, tapping on the keyboard, perusing information about suicides in Westbrook County. At first irritated that the curious events of today had taken him away from his mathematical evening, he soon found himself lost in a very different world of numbers—those that defined the loss of life by one’s own hand in Westbrook County.
+ − < = > ÷
SAM WHITLEY EMERGED from the kitchen with a bottle of old Armagnac and joined his wife in the den.
It had been her husband arriving fifteen minutes ago, after all, driving up the back driveway for reasons he still hadn’t explained.
Elizabeth now pulled her cashmere sweater around her shoulders and lit a vanilla-scented candle, which sat on the table in front of her. She glanced at the bottle in his hand and laughed.
“What?” her husband asked.
“I was reading some of the things your doctor gave you.”
He nodded.
“And it said that some wine is good for you.”
“I read that, too.” He blew some dust off the bottle, examined the label.
“That you should have a glass or two every day. But cognac wasn’t on the list. I don’t know how good that is for your health.”
Sam laughed, too. “I feel like living dangerously.”
He expertly opened the bottle, whose cork stopper was close to disintegrating.
“You were always good at that,” his wife said.
“I never had many talents—only the important skills.” He handed her a glass of the honey-colored liquor and then he filled his. They downed the first glass. He poured more.
“So what’ve you got there?” she asked, feeling even warmer now, giddier, happier. She was nodding toward a bulge in the side pocket of his camel hair sports coat, the jacket he always wore on Sundays.
“A surprise.”
“Really? What?”
He tapped her glass and they drank again. He said, “Close your eyes.”
She did. “You’re a tease, Samuel.” She felt him sit next to her, sensed his body close. There was a click of metal.
“You know I love you.” His tone overflowed with emotion. Sam occasionally got quite maudlin. Elizabeth had long ago learned, though, that among the long list of offenses in the catalog of masculine sins sentiment was the least troublesome.
“And I love you, dear,” she said.
“Ready?”
“Yes, I’m ready.”
“Okay…Here.”
Another click of metal…
Then Elizabeth felt something in her hand. She opened her eyes and laughed again.
“What…Oh, my God, is this—?” She examined the key ring he’d placed in her palm. It held two keys and bore the distinctive logo of a British MG sports car. “You…you found one?” she stammered. “Where?”
“That import dealer up the road, believe it or not. Two miles from here! It’s a ’fifty-four. He called a month ago but it needed some work to get in shape.”
“So that’s what those mysterious calls were about. I was beginning to suspect another woman,” she joked.
“It’s not the same color. It’s more burgundy.”
“As if that matters, honey.”
The first car they’d bought as a married couple had been a red MG, which they’d driven for ten years until the poor thing had finally given out. While Liz’s friends were buying Lexuses or Mercedes she refused to join the pack and continued to drive her Cadillac, holding out for an old MG like their original car.
She flung her arms around his shoulders and leaned up to kiss him.
Lights flashed into the window, startling them.
“Caught,” she whispered, “just like when my father came home early on our first date. Remember?” She laughed flirtatiously, feeling just like a carefree, rebellious Sarah Lawrence sophomore in pleated skirt and Peter-Pan-collared blouse—exactly who she’d been forty-two years ago when she met this man, the one she would share her life with.
+ − < = > ÷
TAL SIMMS WAS HUNCHED FORWARD, examining the details of suicide, jotting notes, when the dispatcher’s voice clattered though the audio monitor, which was linked to the 911 system, in the darkened detective pen. “All units in the vicinity of Hamilton. Reports of a possible suicide in progress.”
Tal froze. He pushed back from his computer monitor and rose to his feet, staring at the speaker, as the electronic voice continued. “Neighbor reports a car engine running in the closed garage at 405 Montgomery Way. Anyone in the vicinity, respond.”
Tal Simms looked up at the speaker and hesitated only a moment. Soon, he was sprinting out of the building. He was halfway out of the parking lot, doing seventy in his tinny auto, when he realized that he’d neglected to put his seat belt on. He reached for it but lost the car to a skid and gave up and sped toward the suburb of Hamilton on the Hudson, five miles away from the office.
You couldn’t exactly call any of Westbrook County desolate but Hamilton and environs were surrounded by native-wood parks and the estates of very wealthy men and women who liked their privacy; most of the land here was zoned five or ten acres and some homes were on much larger tracts. The land Tal was now speeding past was a deserted mess of old forest, vines, brambles, jutting rocks. It was not far from here, he reflected, that Washington Irving had thought up the macabre tale of the Headless Horseman.
Normally a cautious, patient driver, Tal wove madly from lane to lane, laying on the horn often. But he didn’t consider the illogic of what he was doing. He pictured raspberry-brown blood in the Bensons’ den, pictured the unsteady handwriting of their last note.
We’ll be together forever…
He raced through downtown Hamilton at nearly three times the speed limit. As if the Headless Horseman himself were galloping close behind.
+ − < = > ÷
HIS GRAY ACCORD swerved down the long driveway leading to the Whitley house, bounding off the asphalt and taking out a bed of blooming azaleas.
He grimaced at the damage as he skidded to a stop in front of the doorway.
Leaping from his car, he noticed a Hamilton Village police car and a boxy county ambulance pull up. Two officers and two medical technicians jogged to meet him and they all sprinted to the garage door. He smelled fumes and could hear
the rattle of a car engine inside.
As a uniformed cop banged on the door, Tal noticed a handwritten note taped to the siding.
WARNING: The garage is filled with dangrous fumes. We’ve left the remote control on the groun in front of the flower pot. Please use it to the door and let it air out before entring.
“No!” Tal began tugging futilely at the door, which was locked from the inside. In the dark they couldn’t immediately find the remote and a fireman with an axe ran to the side door and broke it open with one swing.
+ − < = > ÷
BUT THEY WERE TOO LATE.
To save either of them.
Once again it was a multiple suicide. And another husband and wife, too.
Samuel and Elizabeth Whitley were in the garage, reclining in an open convertible, an old-fashioned MG sports car. While one officer had shut off the engine and firemen rigged a vent fan, the medical techs had pulled them out of the car and rested them on the driveway. They’d attempted to revive them but it was futile. The couple had been very efficient in their planning; they’d sealed the doors, vents and windows of the garage with duct tape. Shades had been drawn, so no one could look inside and interrupt their deaths.
Talbot Simms stared at them, numb. No blood this time but the deaths were just as horrible to him—seeing the bodies themselves and noting the detachment in their planning: the thoughtfulness of the warning note, its cordial tone, the care in sealing the garage. And the underlying uneasiness; like the Bensons’ note, this note was written in unsteady writing and there were misspellings—“dangrous”—and a missing word or two: “use it to the door…”
An interview of the neighbors who happened to hear the car engine’s unusual rattle wasn’t helpful. They’d seen nothing.
The uniformed officers made a circuit of the house, to make certain nobody else was inside and had been affected by the carbon monoxide. Tal entered, too, but hesitated at first when he smelled a strong odor of fumes. But then he realized that the scent wasn’t auto exhaust but smoke from the fireplace. A glance at the brandy glasses and a dusty bottle on the table in front of a small couch. They’d had a final romantic drink together in front of a fire—and then died.
Trouble in Mind: The Collected Stories, Volume 3 Page 39
