Still, she should’ve had something. There wasn’t a single shelving unit. Besides the crude all-in-one printer-scanner, there wasn’t a scrap of equipment. No books. Not even one. Instead there were shades of Myrtle Trimm. Same tile on the floor. Same exhausted quality to everything. By the kitchenette were a café table and two chairs from Myrtle’s dining set. No living room or foyer. Soon as we passed through the door, we were at the kitchenette, bumping the ramshackle café table a footstep outside the study.
Despite all this, I didn’t breathe for at least a minute.
I didn’t want Doreen to pick up on my excitement. She might tell her relatives, it could get back to Masami; Bermuda is such that all of it was possible.
I call it a study out of respect for the work that happened there. It wasn’t a room, just a corner of extra space, a consequence of a misshapen wall. There was a card table with one of Myrtle’s plastic cabinets under it. A wire-framed stand as a sort of credenza. Doreen opened a drawer in the cabinet; and as she bent to peer inside, her head was level with the place—the actual corner of the actual peeling card table—where Javon’s co-inspectors found the remarkable documents that made prisoners of my thoughts. The folding chair behind the table: that was where she sat. Where Aetna Simmons rested her body while her mind gamboled beyond the boundaries of life and death. I stood still and tried to sense something of her. Just a whiff of her courageous and decisive spirit.
It was in vain. Doreen let me look into the drawers, but they were empty. The printer-scanner-fax on top of the credenza was full of unremarkable, white copy paper.
Cup of cheap pens on the table. Potted cactus. No papers; the police had them. Grocery receipts, Javon said, that was all.
In the document destruction business, you meet four kinds of people. People who keep everything and file it chronologically in fireproof cabinets. People who keep everything without meaning to do so; these people end up with stuff all over the place. There are people who keep a few important things and toss the rest. And people who throw everything away. What one throws away says something of one’s being-in-the-world.
Aetna tossed it all. Nothing was sacred. Only ten flimsy little things. The printer was just too big to go with the trash.
Yet she must have kept her laptop; her nursery and her archive and her menagerie. Perhaps she’d hidden it, I thought, somewhere in the cottage.
Doreen rummaged in the kitchenette, came up with a wok, a colander, and mismatched bowls. I looked through the window in the study. I saw Myrtle’s cedar box on her dining table. I saw the empty space where Czarina had kept her vigil.
The doorway to the bedroom squeezed between the study and the kitchenette. I found a twin bed, neatly made, lamp at the head and dresser at the foot, an armoire shoved awkwardly into a corner.
I checked the dresser while Doreen was in the kitchen. No computer. I found uninteresting underwear, pajamas, and socks. No teddies, no lacy bras, no thongs, not a single negligee. Disappointing but not nugatory: she wore Nabi’s size in the bikini cut Nabi likes, although nikkou prefers brighter colors. Clothes in the armoire were inexpensive. Her palette tended to brown and gray with the occasional maroon. There were jeans and slacks, a skirt or two. No dresses. Nothing sexy. But she was obviously compact and comfortable with her shape. Again like Nabi, who, however, likes to show her curves and rightly so. In the bottom of the armoire were a sorry pair of black wedges and some tattered sandals.
What kind of human female negotiates the age of consumerism in just two pairs of shoes? Nabi has at least a dozen, and that’s just counting the ones she stashes at my place.
Made me rethink the money. What if it really was sixty thousand a year, not per assignment? Five thousand a month, her rent was forty-eight hundred; and the money in Cayman was Clocktower’s, not hers. All the risk hardly seemed worth it.
“Find anything? Perhaps a key or combination for a wooden box?”
Doreen in the doorway. Dare in her stance.
“There’s something back here,” I said. I hadn’t seen anything.
I pretended to dig in the corner of the armoire, started to say I was wrong after all, and then…
It just didn’t fit. My hand hesitated above a small brown bag.
“That’s cute. Let’s see,” said Doreen.
It was worth about eight hundred dollars on Front Street. Aetna would’ve had to stop eating for four months.
Louis Vuitton’s Speedy 25 Minibag in Damier Ebene leather. I’d researched it for Nabi’s last birthday, eschewing it eventually for Louis’ Speedy Bandoulière 25 in a midnight-blue leather known as Infini ($2,500). She carried it everywhere. Told Martin she’d bought it for herself.
“Nice,” said Doreen. She took the bag.
She shook it.
I’ve thought a lot about the sound that snagged Doreen’s attention. That sound would’ve been like the breath of a mouse. I’ve come to the conclusion I never heard it.
“What’s inside?” said Doreen. She held out the bag to me.
I said, “A lady’s purse is her sanctum.” And dipped into the Damier Ebene.
Driving to St. George’s, I’d formed the sentimental idea that in Aetna’s cottage I’d find some kind of keepsake. The first clue. Something meaningful only to me. A tangible link between Aetna and me alone. Perhaps a book with a shiny black cover. Who knew that what I found would bring my life crashing down?
It was such a little thing. It rolled around in the handbag like someone lost without a flashlight in a deep cavern. The uninitiated would’ve pegged it for a tiny pearl.
I was glad I was sitting on the floor.
“What is it?” said Doreen.
The time when canniness and discretion would abandon me to frenzy lay in the unforeseen future. Swallowing a dozen impassioned curses, I said, “It’s a pearl. Fell off a necklace or something. Probably fake.”
Doreen held out her hand for it. Rolled it between her fingers.
It wasn’t a pearl. It was Empyreal.
Doreen put the thing in the pocket of her shorts. She wanted a break. We went back to the house, she got out her shaker, and this time the drinks were stronger.
Fact: I know every one of my clients by name and by sight. I’m not bad at voice-recognition either. Fact: According to the fine print, no one but yours truly could’ve sold Aetna that pill.
The facts left room for four possibilities. (1) A friend hooked her up. (2) She visited Boston and among its multitudes ran into one particular person. (3) Somebody violated the fine print. (4) She was a client whom I had known for years by another name.
The last was easy to rule out. None of my clients possessed the wherewithal, creativity, or organizational capacity required to pull off a double life, and no other disappearances were mentioned on the news. (1) would’ve required her to go out once in a while and spend money, which by all accounts she never did. (2) involved going through the airport with the stuff, and I can’t imagine Aetna signing up for that; she was waist-deep in risk already. Addicts are capable of a great many things, but if she was an addict, she’d have had at least a full box of Empyreal and a ton of cash ready to hand. Furthermore, I knew her. Her intellect was not that of an addict.
“You’re quiet,” said Doreen.
“Should we check out your old room?”
I put up a convincing front, opening a bin at random, seeming to check the contents. But I spoke little. I was too angry. My enterprise was a cutting-edge machine, and now here was some vandal trying to plant a virus in it; if one pill had gone over to some black-on-black market, maybe it wasn’t alone. I ransacked the archive in my head, each name, each voice. I looked myself in the eye by looking in, and I said, You stupid woolgathering screwup.
Then Doreen found the bank statements. She blinked like what she read was too idiotic to believe. “That woman gave Momma forty-eight hundred a month f
or that cottage.”
I clambered over bins to Doreen’s side. She gave me a narrow sheaf. “Any more in there?”
Back issues of The Daily Bread. Programs from the 1980 Bermuda Festival. A dozen statements from the Bank of Butterfield, one for each month of last year, chronologically arranged. There were the deposits. $4,800 a month. This correlated with Aetna’s record at HSBC. She held on to the cottage at that ridiculous rate, suffocating between hedges and high walls, always, always scrutinized through that oppressive window.
“The market can’t be that bad. The cottage isn’t worth that, is it? Be honest,” said Doreen.
“Divide by four. That’s what it’s worth.”
Doreen took the statements and glared at them one by one. The balances ran over six figures, yet she made no comment. Didn’t even crack a smirk.
Or she did, and I failed to notice. I was pawing through my memories of suave conversations and expensive handshakes. I pushed my hands into a bin, then the one beside it and the one next to that, and dammit tried to think like a scholar. If my hypotheses were lines of poetry, I thought (not with any real logic), then somewhere a third line waited to be discovered, so altogether Aetna’s situation would form a Dantean canto. Somewhere in that house, maybe right there in Doreen’s room, that third line resounded. I told myself I heard it as one hears a distant echo; embedded in it somewhere was the reason for that stray Empyreal, and to hear it properly I had to damn it all and dig. Maybe all I heard was ire buzzing in my ears, but I couldn’t stop flipping through Myrtle’s old Gazettes any more than I could prevent connections reaching out to one another in my head, fusing with a spark, and reaching out once more.
Myrtle knew what Aetna did, I concluded. Somehow she knew enough to keep Aetna in that cottage under any condition, and for Aetna it wasn’t simply inconvenient. It reduced her small fortune to a shoestring budget, fattened the risks she took a thousandfold. Blackmail, yes: a threat made present every moment as a face in the window. Aetna heading for Supermart, Myrtle watching till she disappeared around the hedge. Myrtle unlocking the cottage, Czarina sniffing and snaking round her heels.
A woman of the shadows, who shunned every convention because she loved freedom above all. A woman like that under the avaricious thumbs of Myrtle Trimm and an insurance company. Every human being who drew near to Aetna’s close, umbrageous world was a greedy so-and-so bent on yoking her to them. She would’ve gone out of her mind.
I’m not sure of the chemistry, but it’s easy to imagine certain designer compounds bringing on a stroke in an eighty-one-year-old. Empyreal makes cocaine look like a spoonful of sugar. It makes Hallelujah look like Centrum Silver. It dissolves on the tongue without scent or taste, so it could’ve gone into the milk or the Ensure, something Myrtle was sure to ingest not right away but eventually.
So there was time. When Myrtle succumbed, Aetna was already dead. And so a certain grisly theory remained far from anybody’s mind.
It was enough to make me freeze with my hand in a jar of tarnished spoons. Once I’d overcome the urge to hurl the jar at the nearest bin, I assessed alternate theories.
After Aetna died, nothing Myrtle said could’ve done Aetna any harm. In fact Aetna may have wanted to expose Clocktower as her final act on earth. The mere presence of the Ten testifies to this, in which case she had no reason to kill Myrtle.
Except of course revenge, that old poisoned spur. Myrtle made Aetna’s life a living hell. What if she left behind her story—all of it, say, on some flash drive—hoping the truth would mortify the nosy old witch right before she met her end, so she had time for remorse and nothing else?
Or Clocktower killed them both and with a little help made Aetna look like an assassin.
So, Dr. Caines, how’s it feel to be an accessory to murder?
“What is it?” said Doreen.
“Nothing. What if the key’s in here? You know, for the box.” I upended the jar of spoons. Their noisy clatter did little to relieve my desire to snap them all in two.
I felt like someone had spilled yellow paint on one of my tailored suits. If ever it came out that Myrtle Trimm had died from a misapplication of a certain shortcut to enlightenment, I’d find myself disavowed by my conservative supplier. In Bermuda, unwelcome scrutiny is anathema to doing business. Aetna was dead, leaving no one else to take the rap. In short, this could ruin me.
One good thing: Myrtle was already in the ground. If she’d had an autopsy, nothing came of it. Otherwise it would’ve made the news. The conjecture that her stroke was anything but natural rode on the potential of Empyreal that wasn’t there. The presence of a pill in a handbag in a corner of a dead woman’s closet is in itself no evidence for the onetime existence of another pill which, if it existed, would hopefully have dissolved in the other dead woman’s bloodstream.
I was putting spoons back in the jar (no key), wondering how I might sneak the pill out of this house without arousing the daughter’s suspicions.
Doreen said, “Something’s wrong, I can tell.”
How could she tell? I affected an idle demeanor as I unfolded embroidered aprons from the bin. Beneath them were yellowed tablecloths, the scintillating feathered cape of a Gombey dancer.
“Your dad was a Gombey?”
“How should I know? Never met the bastard. I asked you a question.”
“The answer is nothing.” Bits of mirror winked out of the cape, sewn into the velvet among embroidered birds and lilies and long ribbons. I started to lift the garment from the bin, and Doreen grabbed my hand.
“Something spooked you in the cottage. If it’s something about Momma, I deserve to know.”
Her voice was low, her face unlined. But something in her eyes seemed to be on fire. In that moment her beauty was that of sunlight setting the ocean ablaze: look at it an instant and you’d look away blinded. Dazzling was the mirror that seemed to reflect my own anxiety from the depths of her black pupils.
It made me hesitate. How much could she see? Was she a demon after all with the power to see right through me? Never in my life had a stranger threatened me this way. Even Nabi and I had to learn each other. It took time even in our childish eagerness. And still, of my dark, pearl-studded territory—which I feared Doreen could stumble on even if I sent her on a wild goose chase—Nabi knew absolutely nothing.
In a way it was Masami who made me press on. I imagined Doreen having nightmares just like mine, starring Myrtle and an undead Siamese cat and all the same questions: What has she done, what does she want from me… Myrtle’s daughter creeped me out and mixed me up, but she didn’t deserve that, I thought, nobody deserves that. Christ, what a sucker.
“Okay, look,” I began. “Nobody would pay that kind of money for that cottage. Unless something else was going on.”
Doreen’s nails threatened to break my skin. She was shrewd; a moment’s thought, and it was she who said the word. “Extortion.”
“The tenant, Aetna Simmons. Did your momma ever tell you anything about her?”
“Estranged, remember?” Doreen dropped my hand, delved into her pocket. “What’s that got to do with this?”
Empyreal. So tempted to grab the thing and swallow it.
Doreen said in her hypnotic way, “You know what I think? If this is a pearl, then it’s a real one. It’s not junk. I think Momma had all kinds of stuff like this. Her CAM portfolio is the tip of the iceberg. Somehow the tenant stole this, meant to stash it till she could find enough evidence to sue Momma for extortion. Everybody died before she got the chance. Except you.”
She turned her fishy eyes on me. “You’re here to learn how much of CAM’s money Momma tainted.”
Doreen’s alone. Smart, quick, ambitious, fearless. Powerless. She’s out of a job, desperate for money, probably for a long time. Then a momma whom she doesn’t care two pennies for dies on top of an invisible bonanza. If only it wasn’t �
�tainted,” it could spell the end of Doreen’s woes. If only Myrtle hadn’t been whatever discarded or repelled Doreen in the first place.
That’s how it looked to her, I figured. I figured it felt like the puny raft she’d made of broken mizzenmast and torn-up poop deck sweeping out from under on a wave. I am familiar with this feeling.
I’m not saying I felt sorry for her. It’s just when door after door keeps slamming in your face, even doors supposed to lead to those who give a shit, including doors inside your head, you forget how to tell an open door from a slammed one. So I mean, I felt sorry for me, not her. Maybe a little sorry for her. Doreen didn’t look cowed or teary, not even angry; she looked smooth, dark, solid, and unfairly, corrosively beautiful. I imagined her, Myrtle’s DNA raging through her, taking the ersatz pearl to some jewelry exchange to sell for cash and ending up humiliated. I imagined Doreen’s relentlessness driving her too far. Knowing the pitiless way she went about asking questions, it was easy to imagine her barging into CAM, demanding explanations from Masami and Barrington. Both of us were vulnerable. That’s how I saw it.
I said, “Honey, that’s not a pearl.”
“And therefore you said it was?”
“Because, look, it’s a pill. It’s a designer drug. It’s the Bugatti of designer drugs.”
Better that she find out from me than anyone else. A police lab tech, say.
“Extortion and illegal drugs. My Momma.”
I could only shrug. I knew that feeling too, having looked up at the CAM mountain.
“Eighty-one years old. Too cheap to buy herself a car. Just to make sure we’re talking about the same person. I mean, I just get this feeling that you’re about to tell me you think Aetna Simmons got sick of being taken, used this stuff to give my mom a stroke, and then committed suicide. Am I right, Kenji? You think Momma was murdered.”
Drafts of a Suicide Note Page 12
