Scott Spencer

by Man in the Woods (v5)

  Caltagirone looks at the girl. Suddenly, Marmont is all he is interested in. As far as he is concerned, the father has ceased to exist, and he wants her to feel it, too, feel her own importance.

  “You saw this?”

  She nods.

  “And now…” He looks at his watch. It’s June 3. “Seven months later, you’re here?”

  She shrugs. And then says, “Sorry,” in a whisper.

  Even this modicum of mental anguish is hard for her father to witness and he puts a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “She had reasons to remain silent. They were afraid I would be angry about the fact that one of my employees was committing an act of statutory rape against my daughter. They were afraid I would fire him, or perhaps call the police, and because he is an illegal, they were afraid he would be deported, even without the sex charges.”

  “Fear’s a bitch,” Caltagirone says to Marmont. She smiles distantly, and she’s as far from believing he is sympathetic to her as she is from finding him attractive, and he knows it. It might be best to work her through the father, after all.

  “Look here,” Caltagirone says. “Withholding material information from the police during the investigation of a felony is a crime. I’m sure your father has already explained that to you.”

  “I was going to come down here with my lawyer,” Slouka says. “Maybe I should have.”

  The daughter gives him a look; she thinks maybe he should have, too.

  Caltagirone opens the bottom drawer of his desk, which squeals like an anguished pig. “Jesus, Jerry, grease that thing!” one of the cops shouts from across the room. Caltagirone rifles through thirty or forty hanging folders, all of them unlabeled. “Here we go,” he says, breathing audibly. He opens the folder and pulls out a photograph of a man and a woman on a pier, taken in the evening, with a Ferris wheel in the background, bejeweled like a crown with red, yellow, white, and blue lights. The woman is blond, with broad, masculine shoulders, a wide smile, dressed as if to go sailing, and the man, dark-haired, barrel-chested, is pointing at the camera with his mouth half-open, maybe clowning around and pretending to sing, maybe telling whoever was taking the picture to stop.

  “That’s William Claff, beaten to death, and you saw it happen,” Caltagirone says, tapping his finger on Will’s face. “Nobody deserves that. You understand?”

  “Sure,” Marmont says. “I’m here aren’t I?”

  “No one, not on my watch.” Caltagirone realizes the girl has already agreed it shouldn’t happen and there’s no need to continue emphasizing the fact. “And this lady here? It’s killing her, too. She had to fly across the country to identify the body, all by herself. She’s got no family. This man was all she had in the whole world. You understand me? You need to tell me what you saw.”

  “It was pretty hard to see,” Marmont says.

  “You told me you saw,” her father says.

  “All right,” Caltagirone says. “Let’s start with the easy stuff. When you pulled into the parking lot, did you see another car? Do you remember that?”

  “The person I was with doesn’t own a car, he doesn’t make enough money. And my car was in the shop. We rode our bikes and just stowed them in the woods and walked it.”

  “So you were never in the parking lot?”

  “No. But it doesn’t matter. I saw him.”

  “Who?”

  “Him.” Marmont juts her chin toward the photo in Caltagirone’s hand. “He was in a track suit.”

  “This man here’s with God,” Caltagirone says. “But we’re here, we’re here right now, right now. It’s the other guy that matters.”

  Marmont looks as if she’s trying to find a way to disagree, but she nods yes. “The other guy was wearing a leather jacket.”

  “Here we go,” says Caltagirone.

  “He was younger,” she says. “I sort of suck at telling how old adults are. I think everybody’s sort of forty.”

  Her father smiles, and says to Caltagirone, “I’m forty,” as if there might be something just a little bit endearing about that.

  “What else?” Caltagirone asks. “Clothes? Anything at all.”

  “He had brown hair, cut sort of long, like folk rock. And boots.”

  “Boots? Cowboy boots?”

  “No. Work shoes. Athletic. No beard, no mustache, nothing to stand out. He just seemed regular, until the fight.”

  “What did he seem like?”

  “Really mad. Hey, I gotta go to the bathroom.”

  “Can it wait?” Caltagirone asks.

  “I’ve been waiting.”

  Caltagirone sends her back to the waiting room and when she’s gone her father suddenly starts acting as if he regrets ever bringing her to the station in the first place. Caltagirone’s guess is that for whatever reason she finally told him what she had seen and told him about the guy she was screwing and Dad blew up and threw her in the Lexus and brought her in to teach her a lesson. Now he wants to tell him what a good kid Marmont is, and what a tough time the both of them have had since her mother died. The way he puts it it seems as if the mother’s body isn’t cold yet but it turns out she’s been dead since Marmont was four years old. Then Slouka announces he’s in the rock business, which Caltagirone first takes to mean he builds driveways or has a masonry contracting company, but what it really means is he does concert promotion and he’s letting Caltagirone know that if he ever wants tickets to, say, a Neil Diamond show at the Garden or maybe Springsteen at the Meadowlands, Slouka would be more than glad to hook him up. Leaning halfway across the desk, he asks Caltagirone, “How do you think we ought to handle the boy? Of course he’s fired, but I don’t know if we need to make any more trouble for him than that.” As if this was something the two of them were going to decide together.

  “We gotta bring him in, too.”

  “Easier said than done,” Slouka says.

  Just then Marmont returns, flicking tap water off her fingertips as she walks. “There was some lady crying in there,” she announces, as if she had seen a woodpecker.

  “I want you to look at another picture for me,” Caltagirone tells her. He reaches into his folder, produces a five-by-seven color photo of a round-faced, jowly guy with swept-back hair and sunken eyes. He’s wearing a colorful Hawaiian shirt, a riot of pineapples and parrots. His expression is blank but somehow menacing—you’d know that if you knew anything about menace, if you knew that when a man puts on a blank mask it usually means there’s going to be hell to pay.

  Marmont reaches for the picture but stops herself. “Can I hold it?”

  “Be my guest,” Caltagirone says.

  The overheads put a glare on the glossy finish and Marmont tilts the photograph to get a better look. “Is this the guy?” she asks.

  “You tell me.”

  “His hair’s different.”

  “Hair’ll do that.”

  “Not the eyes though,” she says.

  “Be careful here, honey,” Slouka says.

  “You don’t need to worry about this guy,” Caltagirone says.

  “Well it’s totally him,” Marmont says.

  “Totally who?” Caltagirone says, narrowing his eyes.

  “The guy we saw.” She puts up her fists. Her father must have told her to go easy on the jewelry; there are pale circles on her fingers where the rings used to be.

  “You sure?” Caltagirone says. Marmont nods and then Caltagirone says, “You’re positive.”

  “Yeah,” Marmont says.

  “Who is this man?” Slouka asks.

  Caltagirone turns slowly toward him, as if he’s momentarily forgotten his existence. “He collects for bookies out in Los Angeles.” Caltagirone opens the middle drawer of his desk and pulls out his tape recorder. He peers through the smudgy, postage-stamp-size window on the recorder’s side, to make sure there is a microcassette loaded in, and then presses the play button to make sure there is still juice in the triple A’s.

  “What about the dog?” Marmont says.
>
  “The dog?” Caltagirone asks.

  “They were fighting about a dog,” Marmont says. “The runner guy was kicking the dog and…” Marmont flutters the picture; it looks for a moment as if the Hawaiian is nodding his head in agreement. “This guy was trying to stop him. That’s why we were for him. I mean, before we knew how far it was going to go.”

  Caltagirone writes the word dog on the corner of his desk pad, and circles it. Then he remembers talking to the landlord about the dog and the lady from Philadelphia who knew Claff as Robert King, who said that Claff stole her dog, and he’s already deduced that the dog leads nowhere, the dog, wherever it is, is collateral damage, and Caltagirone crosses the word out, first with a line, then with another line, and then he rubs the point of his Rollerball over and over the word until it is invisible.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Summer arrives early, full of temper—scorching blue-gray days, brooding starless evenings, and stormy, astonishing nights, with the sheets of rain falling with a furious rattle. In the middle of the workday, Shep sleeps in the cool air beneath Paul’s truck, with nothing of him showing but his paws. Next to the truck is Evangeline’s newly purchased Subaru Legacy, which, according to her, is the car of choice for gay women. Parked closer to the house, and somehow in more direct contact with the sun, is Kate’s Lexus, its chrome bumpers and door handles blazing with light, its tinted windshield a fiery greenish mirror in which an upside-down tree holds the white sun in its black leaves.

  Inside the house, Ruby sleeps in her bed, after having been up most of the night, sick to her stomach, and full of manic energy after that, dispensing disquieting observations, such as The floor is happy or Now it’s the stairs’ turn to walk up me or My fingers don’t want to be fingers anymore.

  While Ruby naps, Kate calls a woman named Dr. Joan Montgomery, who is the only child psychologist in the area. “I actually happen to have an opening for one thirty this afternoon—I just got a cancellation,” Montgomery says. Kate isn’t sure she believes her, but Montgomery has a pleasant, elegant voice and Kate is relieved there is someone in the area who can take a look at poor Ruby.

  Kate sits now in the front of the house, ostensibly reading a thriller, but after half an hour with the book in her lap, she has read only the first paragraph and she had read it four or five times, gathering the words again and again with her eyes and attempting to thrust them into her mind. She has already crept up the stairs a number of times, once to more widely open Ruby’s bedroom door so any alarming noises would be easily audible down on the sofa, and a few times after that just to peek in, not that much can ever be gleaned by watching somebody sleep: they will look either ridiculous in their waxy seriousness or darling and vulnerable, but either way their bodies look like the shells left behind after their souls have been taken.

  Now, an hour later, taking Ruby to the psychologist, Kate almost collides with the truck from the courier service as she is speeding up her own driveway. The driver, in shorts and a white straw pith helmet, as if he is going on safari, stops next to Kate’s car, hands her an envelope, and reverses out of the driveway so fast he looks as if he is on a strip of film running backward. Kate tosses the envelope into the backseat—it’s from her agent and she’s pretty sure what it is. A proposal from Heartland, renewing her contract.

  It is not until she pulls into the parking area of the Windsor Counseling Center that Kate realizes this is the place where she and the last man in her life uselessly went for couples’ therapy after he fell in love with another woman. He never had any intentions of breaking it off with his new beloved, and the hour was a humiliating waste of time and money—even the therapist, a Dr. Fox, knew this and didn’t bother to ask them if they wanted to make a second appointment as he nervously escorted them out of his office. Oh my Lord, she thinks, I was in a relationship so hopeless I was booted out of couples’ therapy!

  That time she could at least vent her displeasure. Now, when she talks to this Dr. Montgomery she can only hint about the subterranean pressures Ruby might be absorbing back home. Her own frequent absences can be mentioned, but not that the new man of the house has killed someone.

  Ruby has been essentially silent since her nap and now looks as if she might doze off again. Her eyes are heavy, and she leans her head against the side window. She is wearing yellow shorts and a white tank top, both of which are too small for her, but she won’t part with them. Her bare feet are squeezed into a pair of salmon-colored flip-flops, also too small. Kate is not certain what Ruby knows or understands about the nature of their appointment this afternoon.

  “There’s someone in town who’s an expert at talking to kids and helping them with stuff that’s bothering them,” Kate had said, and Ruby shrugged as if it meant next to nothing to her. “Anyhow, I made an appointment,” Kate had said.

  All Ruby had wanted to know was if Kate was going to come along, too, and when Kate said she was Ruby changed the subject.

  “Well, here we are,” Kate says. She reaches over, releases Ruby from her seat belt.

  “So this is a psychiatrist?” Ruby asks.

  “I don’t think so,” Kate says, hiding behind a little hedge of pedantry—Dr. probably means PhD. Not MD, and so, technically, she is not a psychiatrist. “Anyhow, the important thing is the rules. Just about every place has rules—like no running in the halls when you’re in school, and no talking in the movie theater. Do you want me to tell you what the rules are here?”

  “Probably bird rules.”

  Kate furrows her brow, pretends to consider this, though these increasingly frequent non sequiturs from Ruby are making her frantic. Sometimes Kate is certain that the eruptions of nonsense are deliberate, a continuation of the child’s long infatuation with exaggeration and attention grabbing and a primitive sort of theatricality. And there are other times when she believes the nonsense is deliberate and involuntary both, that Ruby knows there are no bird rules yet she feels nevertheless compelled to say there are. And there are other times—and this third way is becoming dominant—when Kate believes her daughter is being slowly stolen away, seduced, perhaps, by an alternate reality that poor Ruby (the prefix is becoming permanent) has created because the one she has been living in is unsustainable. Or poor Ruby may be turning into a different person on the most basic cellular level, transformed into this sleepless, feverish creature by the drip drip drip of bad chemicals. If it is a chemical imbalance, a chemical solution must be found, in which case this Dr. Montgomery, whom Kate already imagines as a font of New Age drool, will not be of much use—she may be able to write a haiku but Ruby will need someone to write a prescription.

  “The rule here,” Kate says, “is you”—she touches Ruby’s nose—“are allowed to say whatever you want, there’s no secrets, nothing to be afraid of, nothing to hide.”

  The asphalt parking area is sticky beneath their footsteps, stinking of pitch, and hellishly hot in the sun. Ruby makes a move as if to scratch herself and Kate takes her hand. In the parking lot Kate reads the bumper stickers with dismay: COMMIT IRRATIONAL ACTS OF KINDNESS and PSYCHOLOGISTS DO IT WITH UNDERSTANDING. Poor Ruby, poor poor Ruby. She gathers the child closer to her. Why are we here? she wonders. Why not a church, a minister, what about God? When was the last time I prayed for this child? When was the last time I prayed?

  Kate pulls open the counseling center door to a blast of air-conditioning. There’s a reception desk but no one is at it, a waiting room with nobody in it, a couple of low tables with magazines, a couple of small sofas, and a white-noise machine whooshing away in the corner. The wall clock chimes the half hour and Dr. Montgomery emerges, a compact, conventionally pretty woman, vaguely familiar to Kate, with boyishly cut frosted hair and freckly arms. After a glance at Kate, she directs her attention to Ruby.

  “Hello, Ruby, it’s nice to meet you.” She offers her hand and Ruby shakes it. “You can follow me, if you like.”

  “Should I come, too?” Kate asks.

  “We can al
l talk together, to begin with,” Montgomery says.

  “Me want bathroom!” Ruby proclaims.

  As Montgomery gives Ruby directions to the toilet, it strikes Kate where she has seen her before—many Wednesday nights ago, at the Leyden AA meeting. She attended only once, maybe twice, and Kate can remember she sat silently, her trembling hands and overwhelmed eyes her only eloquence. Kate follows her into her office, a large space with two child-sized chairs, a small trampoline, and a table upon which is a tray filled with sand and an array of figures made of painted rubber—a man on horseback, a woman holding a wand, a mummy, a groom, a king. Montgomery takes her seat in a stuffed armchair and Kate sits in the other adult-size chair.

  “We can take this time and you can tell me what your concerns are,” Montgomery says, blushing deeply as she speaks.

  “Basically what I told you over the phone. Agitation, sleeplessness, blurring the line between fantasy and reality, and reverting to infant behavior, especially in terms of hygiene.” Kate scans the walls, looking for diplomas, but all she sees is a picture of Einstein with his tongue out, and a photo of a huge, quivering sun setting at the seashore, the ocean a vast watery Wurlitzer of bright colors.

  “She has a nice firm handshake,” Montgomery says.

  “Then I guess we’re all set.”

  Montgomery smiles. “I have to tell you something, Kate. I read Prays Well with Others a few months ago and it’s one of my important books. I haven’t heard your show on the radio yet, but that book is really something.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I just love your little mishaps. They’re quite funny, but there is always the moment, the lightbulb moment, when you get it. You’re inspiring—do you know that?”

  “I’m not inspiring, or inspired, I’m just broken. But thanks, I am glad I wrote something you could use.”

  “And I thank you. Most spiritual writers sort of stick in my craw. But you’re so honest and so human and so…you. I feel as if I know you.”