“There's men's clothing in the closets,” Officer Truax said.
The Chief shook his head. “Means nothing. They're all summer clothes. When you're as rich as the Kleins, you don't bother carrying wardrobes around with you. You just keep full closets in all your houses.”
The Detective thought a moment and then said, “What's his size?”
Officer Truax, stung by the Chief's dismissal, laughed sarcastically. “What, you want his hand-me-downs?”
“Truax,” the Chief said. He sighed, then looked up to the ceiling, seemed to study the intricate motions of the mobile.
How patient he is, the Detective thought, how controlled. “Truax, he's talking about the man, not his clothes.” The Chief turned to the Detective. “He was a big one all right, bigger than you. But that doesn't eliminate Mrs. Klein as a suspect; she still could have pushed him, tiny as she is. Just take a look at that walkway out there; it was built with the view, not safety, in mind.”
The three of them, all but Dexter, followed the Chief's pointed hand and stared through the glass wall to the cove. The Coast Guard cutter was half blocked from view by the promontory rock; the sky, as gray as the cutter's hull, was so overcast that the time of day was indiscernible.
“The body,” the Detective said, “is there much chance of recovery?”
The Chief shook his head. “No, and that means, unfortunately, that even if she did do it…”
The Detective nodded, completing the thought for him. “No corpse, no crime,” he said.
Charlie Wriggins broke in: “But you've got a witness.”
The Chief glanced at Dexter. “Who witnessed a falling body, not someone pushing that body. We'd never even make it to court on his testimony. Not without a confession. Well, any suggestions?”
The Detective hesitated: the Chief's eyes still veiled his mood, his motives, but there was no time left for stalling. Tact, the Detective lectured himself, be tactful, courteous; no swaggering, no arrogance.
“It does occur to me that a woman in Mrs. Klein's condition…well, that she might be frightened, confused by so many people.”
He paused. The Chief stared at him—a cop's stare, suspicious, penetrating. “You want to speak to her alone?”
“It might be helpful. Someone out of uniform. Give her a chance to relax; a simple conversation instead of an interrogation.”
The Chief said nothing, and the Detective watched him as he made up his mind, sympathizing with him, knowing from experience the painful conflict he was going through: duty versus personal pride. To have invited the Detective in as a consultant was excusable, but to leave him alone with the major suspect was to concede his own failure and to permit the possibility of the crime being solved without his own participation.
The Chief sighed. “All right. It can't hurt. I'll leave Truax outside in the patrol car to guard the place and relay any messages. Charlie here will give Dexter and me a ride back to town. It's what, three o'clock now? I'll give you till six or so unless something comes up in the meantime.”
Charlie broke in to protest his exclusion from the questioning. The Chief listened to him briefly, a slight ironic smile on his face, the first sign of emotion he had displayed since the Detective's arrival.
“Right, Charlie,” he said. “Just what we need to calm her down—a reporter recording every word out of her mouth. No, you go with the rest of us. And besides, we need the ride, don't we, Dexter?”
Dexter said nothing. A moment later, Mrs. Klein reentered the room, freezing the conversation in its silence. She stopped in front of the glass wall and stared out to the cove.
“I better let her know what's going on,” the Chief said softly. “The rest of you get going. I'll be out in a minute.”
Dexter, Truax, and Charlie Wriggins grabbed their coats and silently left the house. The Detective stood to the side and watched the Chief, a man of formidable bulk and presence in his dark blue uniform, as with hat in hand he lowered himself to Mrs. Klein's level and explained to her gently that he would return in a few hours. The Detective admired the Chief then, admired his patience and gentleness, the character it had taken to let the case out of his personal control; and he reexperienced through his admiration the sense of common mission which had always enhanced his love of detection, felt again that sense of higher duty, of belonging to a whole, a whole which, extending beyond the individual self, was defined by a devotion to one shared goal: solving the crime. The good ones always knew it. The prizes and medals, the media attention, none of that mattered; the one-man-against-the-multitude-of-evil image, the Sherlock Holmes syndrome, was the province of fictional romance, not reality. That the Detective understood and accepted this was both the source of his sincere humility and, to a degree, the secret of his professional success. He knew that individuals in and of themselves could rarely solve a case. It was the backing of a team, the consolidated effort, the combined and therefore relentless pressure of society's law that crushed the sordid and private mystery of a crime. The good detective merely directed the mass, discovered the pressure point where the weight of the law, once applied, would be irresistible.
The Chief had finished with Mrs. Klein. He walked with the Detective to the front door where he stopped, turned, and, after a pause, accepted the Detective's hand, shaking it with quick, vigorous jerks. A professional exchange; not friendship but respect—teammates.
“Chief,” the Detective said, finally dropping his hand. “I've been meaning to ask you about Dexter.”
“Oh, yes, Dexter. Well, he's reliable, if that's what you mean. You'll have to take my word on that for now, and you'll have to know the people around here a little better to understand it. They may not make much of a living or break any records for friendliness, but they do make great witnesses. Oh yeah, I believe him. It happened, all right…”
The police chief paused, placed his hat on his head and, staring past the Detective to Mrs. Klein and her glass-wall view of the promontory point, said:
“…whatever ‘it’ is.”
————
The Detective sat in the living room and attempted without success to adapt his sagging, aging body to the inflexible curves of his steel and lucite chair. Mrs. Klein, her back to him, stood ten feet away, silently staring through the glass wall toward the cove, her arms clasped from cold or fear—a fisherman's wife keeping an uneasy vigil, waiting for her husband's return from the sea.
“Are you feeling any better?” the Detective said. “I could make some coffee if you'd like.”
“We have no coffee.” She spoke without turning her head, an emotionless fact, a truism. “We don't believe in coffee.”
“I'm afraid I don't understand.”
“We don't believe in artificial stimulation.”
“Oh—bad for the heart, I suppose. Actually, I shouldn't have any myself; just decaffeinated.”
“Bad for the mind.”
“What's that?”
“We believe it's bad for the mind. We believe artificial stimulation is unnecessary, excessive. We believe the brain is biochemically sufficient without the addition of artificial stimulants.”
“Oh.” The Detective frowned, as puzzled by the delivery as by the words themselves. There was something about her insistence on the plural, there was something about her emphasis of that “we” that made him wonder if she were being bitter or ironic; but without seeing her face, he couldn't be sure.
“Yes, well, when you get to be my age you begin to wonder. Nothing in your body seems sufficient by itself.”
“You don't have to reach your age…” Mrs. Klein said; she paused and then added, as if she only grudgingly accepted a responsibility to be more than cryptic, “…to wonder.”
“I understand,” the Detective said, although he wasn't certain that he did. “It's the waiting. It's the not knowing. Don't worry—something should turn up soon; something definite.”
Mrs. Klein faced him for the first time; she turned, tilting her head, he
r arms clasped beneath her breasts. Her protuberant eyes were steady now, attentive and yet distracting still, their transformation from boredom to interest too sudden and complete.
“Is that what you think—that it's the not knowing?” She walked to a chair and sat down in it. “But then, you're a detective, aren't you?”
“Yes.”
“And it's your job—to know, I mean; to come up with something definite.”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“My husband's a detective in a manner of speaking.”
“Yes, I was told that he was a scientist.” The Detective flinched at his use of the past tense, but Mrs. Klein didn't appear to notice it. “A physicist, they said.”
“Yes, a physicist, but a detective nevertheless, a detective in a manner of speaking. Not knowing bothers him too; coming up with something definite is his job too. Matter in motion, that's his field, pieces of matter so small that they can never be seen by the human eye. He worked on the atomic bomb.”
“Yes, I believe someone mentioned that.”
“Aren't you going to ask if we feel guilty about it—the atomic bomb, I mean?”
“I don't think…”
“We don't believe in guilt. Oh, it exists, but we don't believe in its importance other than as a corrective adjustment for future behavior. We believe guilt is a feedback mechanism.”
The Detective shifted in his chair. There was no doubt in his mind now; he saw bitterness in her face, heard sarcasm in her words—the overemphasis on the “we,” the mock blank expression—and instinctively he began to think of motive. Sarcasm negated meaning: “We don't believe in guilt” enunciated that way meant that she did believe in guilt, that she felt guilty. Or at least that she disliked her husband's lack of guilt. But ideas do not motives make, the Detective told himself. Wives do not kill their husbands because they worked on the atomic bomb; it was always more petty, irrational, personal. Murder was a personal act, the Detective had come to learn, though often rationalized by grander notions. Perhaps Mrs. Klein had convinced herself otherwise; but if she had killed Mr. Klein, the true motive would lie in the slough of their everyday lives, the balance of power between husband and wife, the subtle shades of emotional betrayal, the knife-glances and abused intimacies, the resenting of someone who knew her too well.
“And you,” Mrs. Klein said, her eyes growing wider, circular and white-rimmed, “do you believe in guilt?”
A frame, blurred frame, discolored from age (what day, what year, which moment, or is it many moments recomposed into one?); in it a chair, shapeless and unclear (which chair? whose chair? try to remember, to focus the picture but all that appears is the chair, an abstraction, an idea); Sadie in the chair, Sadie not abstract, Sadie now and forever a face in a moment, a profile turning toward him, pride smoldering in silence…all her accusing glances merged into one: “The Motive?” “The Motives?”
“But of course,” she said, “you're the detective, the criminal investigator, and the detective must believe in the assignment of guilt—first degree and second degree, felony and misdemeanor. That's your job, after all.”
“No, that's not my job.” The Detective sat up, a sore point struck, an argument he had fought time and time again. “Guilt is subjective; it's assigned by the judge, by the jury. I, I just…”
“You detect.”
“Yes, I detect. I tell them what happened.”
“The objective truth.”
“The objective truth; as close as I can come to it.”
“Your subjective view of the objective truth.”
The Detective watched Mrs. Klein, uncertain of her intent, unable to enter a rhythm of conversation because he didn't know what to anticipate next. She sat five feet from him, legs and arms crossed, a knot of intensity, her shorn head stretched forward in expectation of an answer from him—sincere, too sincere; serious, too serious; and above all, too logical, the supralogic of the insane. Her eyes were drawn into a stare too focused to sustain, the Detective waiting uneasily for them to jerk into their jittery searching again. Beyond all this, though, beyond the facts before his eyes, her physical presence, was the suspicion that she was acting, this entire conversation a contemptuous deception, the murderess's self-defense. But a suspicion based on what—what besides the paranoia he had absorbed from Sally lately? The Detective wasn't sure, and sitting within the Klein living room, that oddly antiseptic opening to the stark Maine coast, he felt himself trapped in some visual conundrum, the impossible metaphor of his own confusion, poised at a fulcrum where paired opposites met—time and timelessness, nature and artifice, pity and suspiciousness, all coming full circle and fusing at a border as paradoxical as glass.
“No answer for me, Descartes?” Mrs. Klein said. “Too confused to answer?—It's the not knowing, isn't it? It's the not knowing that upsets you so. Don't worry, Descartes; something should turn up soon. Something definite.”
Sarcastic and yet pitying, contemptuous and yet compassionate—the Detective couldn't be sure. Although they were not at all alike physically, in some illogical way that he couldn't quite conceptualize, this strange woman, this murder suspect, reminded him of his wife; aroused in him a similar complex of conflicting emotions, a frustrating urge both to accuse and embrace, to punish and console. Yes, that was it; Mrs. Klein was right, the Detective suddenly understood; it was the not knowing that bothered him so, the lack of certainty that paralyzed him with second thoughts and indecision. If he knew, if only he knew which were true: grieving widow or deceiving murderess; loving, loyal wife or…The Detective thought of Sally; missed her. She would be in the kitchen now, at the table or at the stove, on the phone, keeping informed while making supper, a vigilant ear for incipient trouble; and he could almost hear spoons striking pots, the familiar tattoo of her knife against the cutting board, the way those sounds eased into consciousness as he lay half-asleep in his shuttered study. That was his reality now; not crime or detection, not the intimate dance of interrogation, but the muffled preparation of the bourgeois dinner—soft, safe, distant.
“I say that to Andy,” Mrs. Klein said. “I've said it for years now. It's a joke, an in-joke. You know, the sort of silly thing that couples share?”
The Detective nodded. He knew; he knows: the wine mispronounced on their first wedding anniversary is mispronounced on the second, and on the third, and on the tenth, is forever mispronounced, and no one else may mispronounce it, an exclusive right of Sadie's and his, giving shape to their marriage, to their special, secret life together—now and forever.
“Whenever he's stumped, whenever he's reached a dead end in his work, whenever those tiny pieces of matter in motion have confused him so much that he begins to despair of ever finding out the truth about them, I say to him, ‘Don't worry, Descartes, something will turn up.’ It's an in-joke now, one of those little rituals that make up a marriage, one of those little boosts that sustain our momentum. It keeps him going, he says. I'm his inspiration, he says. His accomplice.”
“His accomplice?”
Mrs. Klein ignored his question. “Should I do that for you—be your inspiration, help you to discover something definite? Should I become your accomplice?”
“About your husband,” the Detective said, trying to initiate the interrogation.
“Yes, about my husband. Do you think he's dead?”
The Detective blinked, his hands fumbling with his pocket notebook; stunned, he stared at her for a moment. The question had been normal, but the manner of its asking, incredible—intellectual curiosity, as if she were working on some academic problem.
“I'm…well, I'm skeptical, let's put it that way. What about you?”
“Yes,” Mrs. Klein said, “that makes sense. You're skeptical—the definite knower, the objective truth-seeker, the detective. Andy, who is a detective in a manner of speaking, has always promoted skepticism. We believe in it.”
“Yes, Mrs. Klein, but your husband, right now: do you think that he's dead or al
ive?”
Mrs. Klein looked away from him, her sarcasm suddenly failing her, her eyes gone manic again, caught up in their waking dream, searching, searching. Her loss of control frightened the Detective, but excited him too, his blood-instinct aroused by her sudden vulnerability, by the appearance of a pressure point that he could use.
“At this moment, Mrs. Klein, at this exact moment, is your husband dead or alive?”
The Detective tried to lean forward in his chair, to press home the question with his physical presence, his body resisting with its inertial pain, Mrs. Klein avoiding his insistent stare.
“Why must you know? Why do you have to keep on the trail? What if I told you that whatever happened, it was for the best—couldn't you just leave it at that?”
She knew; she did know. “Dead or alive, Mrs. Klein?”
Mrs. Klein hid her face in her hands. “I,” she began, “I believe…” She paused, measuring her breaths, gaining control by degrees. She dropped her hands, lifting her face to meet his stare; yes, she nodded to herself, yes. Her eyes had begun to steady themselves.
“We believe he's alive.”
She had slipped away from him; he had allowed her to slip away, into her sarcasm or her pretense of sarcasm, out of her vulnerability, the pressure point so visible just a moment before suddenly gone. The Detective was tired, felt a tepid disgust for his own inadequacy. Fact: he was losing his touch. He no longer had the mental tenacity, the will required to force the connections—he didn't really want to. Something was missing, a subtraction of old age, some basic drive dried up, that insatiable desire for solution. But he must try; if only to keep his life coherent, if only out of allegiance to his old self-image, he must try to finish it. And so he stalled, staring at the blank pages of his notebook, twisting his feet in the orange carpet, as he tried to organize his thoughts.
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