Mew is for Murder

by Clea Simon

  “I got extra ketchups. You’ve got salt, I see.” She looked from Dougie to me and raised her eyebrows. I didn’t respond. “So, whatcha been up to, Dougie?”

  We all reached for the paper-covered burgers and drinks, and the tension subsided. Maybe hunger had been a factor for both of us, I thought, as I tried not to wolf the thin, dry, but amazingly tasty burger.

  He proceeded to tell her, between bites, about the day program he was in and how he hoped to get into a job-skills class soon.

  “I don’t know if I’m ready.” He paused and put his burger down. “I’d like to try. I liked having a job.”

  “I bet you’ll do great,” said Violet, eating the cheeseburger with the gusto of a former vegetarian. She licked her fingers. “But only if you want to. Do you really want to work outside Greenleaf House? That’s what those classes are for, right?”

  “I don’t know.” Dougie looked down at his burger. For a moment, I felt we had lost him to his thoughts and wondered what we’d see next.

  “What are you thinking about, Dougie?” Clearly Violet had some concerns as well, her voice becoming softer and gentler as she called him back to the present.

  He looked up, recalled himself, and started to eat again. I thought he had forgotten the question, if he’d heard it at all. But after finishing his fries and starting on the fourth serving that Violet had bought for the table, he responded, his voice even, if low, once again.

  “I think I may have to get a job now, another job. I liked working, even if what I did was very simple. But I don’t want to fail again. My mother took care of everything. She always said everything was taken care of, but now I don’t know.”

  “Dougie, your mom did what she could for you and I know you’ll miss her.” Violet was trying to sound reassuring, despite her own sadness. “But you’re still getting your Social Security, your SSDI, right?” I recognized the initials for the disability payments that were the main support of Dougie and his fellow Greenleaf residents.

  “I get my SSDI. But now I don’t know. I always thought Mother took care of everything.”

  He looked up and just for that moment, I saw the huge sadness there. Poor man, so lost in his own mind. Seeing him like this, my nervousness evaporated. Instead, I wanted to reassure him. I wanted to tell him that it would all be all right. Even explain about the possible sale of the house, about Patti Wright’s probable disposal of the estate. No matter what she did with it or the neighborhood, he’d be the recipient of a good deal of money. But I didn’t fully understand the timetable for when anything would happen, or even the legalities of the matter. Wouldn’t he lose the Social Security payments if he came into a large cash inheritance? Might it not be worse to be waiting for the sale, anticipating a windfall that might never come? And would money in any form ever make up for the doting parent that he’d lost?

  Besides, I couldn’t let my sudden sympathy interfere with my reasoning. I had never suspected Lillian’s son of intentionally harming her. My sadness didn’t change the facts of his illness. Violet and I exchanged a look as Dougie polished off the fries.

  “Dougie, what happened after the fire? Why did you take off?” I had to bring up the subject. We were almost done with our food. It was now or never.

  “I tried to keep everything in order.” He was picking at the cardboard container, stabbing at crumbs and salt crystals with a thick, stubby finger. His nails looked bitten; several were lined with raw red flesh. “I told him everything I could. I wanted to explain, to show him. But he said I was holding back. Disorganized. Disorganized thinking.”

  “So you took off?” He seemed absorbed in his quest for the last salty bits and didn’t answer, so I tried another tack. “Who told you that you’d done a bad job, Dougie? Was it the police or the firemen who came after the fire? Was it one of the counselors you worked with?”

  “Disorganized thinking.” His voice had sunk to a whisper; those large hands had dropped to his side. From the way he hung his head, I suspected that he was quoting someone else’s hurtful words, phrases either actually spoken or lobbed at him by the demons in his head. I made one more attempt.

  “Did you go to visit your mother last week? On Monday?”

  “I wanted to show him.” Dougie looked up. “He was my friend.” For a moment, his eyes met mine, and if Violet hadn’t warned me, I’d have reached to embrace him. He looked so lost, so sad, so alone. The moment passed and he looked back down, staring at the empty wrappers on the table as if they held the future or could explain the past. “Dougie and Davey.” He’d begun to rock a little in his seat, much as he had at Lillian’s memorial. “Dougie and Davey,” he repeated. “Dougie and Davey.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  “What was that about?” Violet positively hissed at me once we were outside. Dougie had excused himself to smoke a cigarette and stood at the end of the concrete walk, while we waited by the car.

  I didn’t pretend not to understand her.

  “You want to know what happened to Lillian, right? Well, you’ve got to consider all the possibilities.” She looked at me hard, waiting. “Violet, Dougie’s a sick man. He might have caused his mother’s death. Face it, he’s not completely there even with the drug treatment. If he were off his meds, isn’t it possible he might have done something to Lillian?”

  “He’d never hurt his mother.” Her whisper grew louder. I raised my hands to quiet her and she nearly spit back at me. “He loved her.”

  “I don’t doubt that, but it could have been an accident. Maybe she startled him and he reacted.” I had to watch to keep my own voice from growing louder. “Hell, he could have started yelling and maybe that caused her to fall back and hit her head. I’m just trying to look at all the angles here.”

  “How do you know he was even in Cambridge?”

  “I don’t, but he doesn’t always come home at night, right?” She stared at me, then nodded once. “And he knows how to get out to the city. He’s got money for bus fare, right?”

  “But he’s never been violent. He’s never hurt anyone.”

  “After the fire, when he disappeared, didn’t the police pick him up?”

  “Yeah, but that was because he was sitting outside. It was early March. He was talking to himself, freaking people out, and it was like zero degrees out. They took him in cause they thought he’d freeze to death, and that’s how they got Lillian’s name and number and she picked him up and got him into a hospital. She got him stabilized and he was fine.”

  “But where did they find him?” I suspected I already knew the answer, but I wanted to hear her say it.

  “In Cambridge. He was sitting on a bench in Central Square, why?”

  “Cause he was in Cambridge and he was incoherent, and he feels someone has done him wrong. Seems like reason to lash out to me.”

  “You’re wrong. I know you’re wrong.” She kicked at the dirt. My reasoning was getting to her.

  “Prove it to me, then. Find out if he was here, in Northurst, last Monday night.” A thought had occurred to me. “Seriously, you want to spend more time with him, right? Well, I’m going over to the local newspaper. There’s a reporter there I want to speak with.”

  “I’ll do it, but you’re wrong, Theda.” She glared up at me, and we both looked over at Dougie. He was done with his cigarette, and we watched as he carefully ground it out with his heel and then picked up the dead butt to carry it to a trash can. I unlocked the car for our trip back.

  “I hope you’re right, Violet.” I didn’t want this gentle man to have made his own life worse. “I really hope so.”

  mmm

  Dougie seemed to have regained his composure with the nicotine fix, and we had a jolly ride back to Greenleaf. Violet was telling Dougie the latest news about her band, and he looked happy for her, though the mention of a sold-out crowd in a packed club made him wince. I dropped the pair off, telling Violet I’d come back in two hours, at most. Dougie seemed to have forgiven me my intrusive questions and once
more thanked me politely for my visit in his quiet, courtly manner.

  Finding the Northurst Eagle wasn’t hard. A slow cruise down the town’s main street didn’t turn up its offices, but it did bring me to a newsstand. A copy of the paper gave me the address, and the vendor was kind enough to direct me, once I’d paid my fifty cents. Investigative journalism, I reassured myself, sometimes meant bribing sources.

  Of course, I hadn’t called ahead, so I had no idea if Jim Brett would be working today, or if he’d be free to talk if he was. But I was counting on professional courtesy—journalist to journalist—to get me into the morgue, the paper’s archives, if not.

  “Hold on.” Unlike the lackadaisical security at the Mail, the Northurst Eagle had a real security guard, one who wasn’t going to let me into their second-floor offices without the word from someone inside.

  “Jim, there’s a lady here to see you?” He’d picked up a phone and someone must have answered. “A Thea something?”

  “Theda, Theda Krakow.”

  “Oh, it’s Theda something. She’s from the Boston Mail? Okay, will do.” He hung up and grabbed a clipboard for me to sign in on. “He said he’d come get you. Let me write you out a badge. You’ve got to keep this on while you’re in the building.”

  I clipped the plastic ID to my shirt and looked around the lobby. Tiny, really just an alcove at the top of the stairs, separated by a glass wall, it had a flash of color from a few framed prints. Through the glass front, a picture window looked out across the stairwell, too, letting in more daylight than most of my old newsroom ever saw.

  “Theda Krakow?” I turned and looked up. The man who addressed me was tall, way over six feet, with a shock of Dennis the Menace brown hair that seemed in danger of falling in his eyes. I recognized his voice even before he introduced himself. “I’m Jim Brett.”

  “Hi.” We shook. “I’m really sorry to barge in like this. I was out here and thought I’d see if you were in.”

  “Doug Helmhold and the Greenleaf House fire, right?” I must have looked surprised. “I have a memory for conversations. Comes in handy when the tape recorder fails at interviews.”

  We both smiled at that and he led me through the door behind security into the workings of the paper.

  “It’s so quiet!” I couldn’t help myself. Despite the necessity of concentration for both writing and editing, the newsroom at the Mail always seemed to be operating at a low roar. This office hummed, if anything, with a pleasant mellow buzz. I could hear keyboards clicking and somewhere a low voice making polite conversation on the phone. As Brett led me past row after row of carpeted cubicles, I had to stop myself before I blurted out, “And it’s so clean!” The gray-carpeted cubicles were kept from sterility by the personal touches: photos and posters had been thumbtacked everywhere, as well as the usual official notices and circulars about everything from early deadlines to someone’s ’64 Impala being for sale. But the carpeting showed no dark stains, at least to my eyes, the trash cans weren’t overflowing. I couldn’t smell any burnt coffee or forgotten lunches. “It’s so nice,” I said instead.

  “It’s a very nice maze,” agreed Brett. “We’re very nice little mice.”

  “Oh, come on now.” I was tempted to explain the comparison and then stopped myself. A lot of the people working here probably dreamed about getting onto a big city paper. Anything I said comparing the two would seem disingenuous, or even insulting.

  “You don’t have to say it. I know what you mean.” Brett led me down one little hallway to a cubicle that held a desk and a tall, padded chair. He folded himself into that one, reached across into the empty cube opposite and rolled another chair in for me. “We may be mice in a maze, but at least there are no rats and no roaches like some newsrooms have. Have a seat.” I did, surprised once again by his perceptiveness. “I spent eight years in Hartford, four more in New Haven,” he continued. “I know what those city newsrooms can be like.”

  I hoped my face didn’t register my surprise.

  “What am I doing here?” I guess it had. “Quality of life. That and our third kid, my little girl.” He plucked a framed photo off the top shelf of three, and I saw two brown-haired boys with their father’s cowlick and a Buddha-like infant in the arms of a smiling mom. “When we had Renee we decided we really wanted to get out of the city, have a place with a yard and trees. So when this opened up, I grabbed it. Less money, but I still find some interesting stories. And as you noticed, I’ve got a quiet place where I can actually think about what I’m writing.”

  “Impressive.” I found myself nodding and wondering about the possibility myself. No, I was too much of a city person to ever give that up.

  “So, tell me what brings you out here. You’re looking into some kind of bigger story, aren’t you?”

  “Newspaper instincts?”

  “Something like,” he nodded. “Also, we got a phone call from a cop, someone from your neck of the woods. He also wanted to hear what I could tell him about Doug Helmhold.” A wave of relief washed over me. I wasn’t the only one thinking about Lillian’s son! My thoughts must have shown on my face, because Brett pushed his chair back and sat for a moment, looking at me. “So, spill.”

  I had been the one counting on professional courtesy and it only seemed fair, so I did. From the first visit with Lillian through finding her body up to my lunch with Dougie. I kept out some of the details, of course, like the fact that Violet was routinely illegally entering the now-vacant house. But I did share her suspicion that the death was not accidental, and my own growing fear that her son may have somehow been involved.

  “Violence against family members, the last taboo.” He nodded, when I was done, considering the option.

  “I know people don’t like to talk about it, but….”

  “Yeah, I know.” He reached for a fat green book off one of the shelves and found a reference. “What’s the risk factor? Something like ten percent of family members reported some violence, according to one National Alliance for the Mentally Ill study.” I remembered the cousin he’d mentioned. “And that ten percent is pretty much the folks who go off their treatment plans, or who have never been diagnosed or treated.”

  “Dougie was supposedly never violent before, but he did have a history of going off his meds, right?”

  “Hmmm.” He replaced the book and tapped his pen. “Yeah, he did.” Clearly he was thinking through the chain of events. “So the big question now is whether Doug Helmhold was at Greenleaf last Monday or had he gone AWOL, right?”

  “Right. I’ve got a friend trying to dig that up this afternoon.”

  “Well, let me see what I have in my files, see if anything rings a bell.” He rooted around on his desk and then bent himself almost double to open a file cabinet drawer. I held my breath in hope.

  “No,” he said, leafing through it. “Nothing new. Nothing since the local cops gave up on tracking that lost money.” Damn, I was disappointed. “You might talk to one of our freelancers, though. Guy named Ethan Reinhardt?”

  Ethan! He’d never gotten in touch. Well, I’d offered. “Yeah, I’ve met him. He did some of your coverage?”

  “A lot of it, actually. He spent the most time with Doug, went back a couple of times for follow-up interviews, drove all over the county collecting background.”

  “That’s right.” I remembered an in-depth story on the halfway house. “I read the story.”

  “It was good. He can write, but I think he was disappointed with the play it got. Ethan’s ambitious. He was, well, he was noticeably peeved when he didn’t get offered a staff job on the basis of that series. But who knows? He did so much work, maybe he can sell a magazine piece on the whole affair.”

  That was always the staff writer’s take on things: in their eyes, we had an infinite number of markets. They didn’t understand the insecurity, or the frustration of being passed over. “You wouldn’t know how to contact Ethan, would you? I’ve run into him a few times, but I didn’t get his i
nfo.”

  “Hold on.” Brett flipped through a Rolodex and came up with a card. “I think he’s trying to get into your market. The last few times I called, I got his answering machine. He had said something about spending time in Boston, and he hasn’t called back. I really was sorry about that staff job.” He paused, and I decided to cut him some emotional slack. Maybe he did understand what we dealt with. “The powers that be felt he was a little too, I don’t know, intense. I think he’s just too smart for our little burg, and got frustrated. With reason! He sure knows how to put a story together. Hey, try him anyway. He’s got no reason not to talk to you.” He copied down the number, a local one, and handed it to me.

  “There was one other thing,” I said, thinking aloud about what Dougie had said at lunch. “The counselor who went missing, Doug seemed to have been really attached to him. Do you have anything on him, even a name?”

  Brett pored through the file, pulling out papers. “You mean Anna Nussbaum? Here, did I give you her number?” He handed me a page. I put it on his desk.

  “You did. This was a guy, though, a Davey something?”

  “Davey? Oh yeah, hold on, here it is.” Brett pulled a yellow loose-leaf page out of his file and began to read down it. “Yeah, I remember him. Davey, David, Dave Sullivan? Fitzgerald? Whatever, he was a real charmer. Smooth talker and he had those Irish looks that you gals always seem to fall for.”

  “Blonde hair, freckles?” I asked, feeling superior. That had never been my type.

  “Tall, pale, no freckles. Ah, here it is.” He stopped, with his finger halfway down a page. “David Connolly. Knew it was something like that. And no, not blonde. This guy looked more like a gypsy. Dark hair, lean, but he had these really weird blue eyes, and something with his tooth.” He motioned to the front of his mouth, and I froze, thinking of Connor’s similar gesture as he explained the chip in his perfect grin. Connor, who had just shown up in town, right around the time this Davey must have gone missing.