Body Language

by Michael Craft

  I sat there stunned as our lunching neighbors gasped, dropping forks. Someone hailed the hostess, wondering what should be done. But before anyone could act, Thad took over, having learned from experience how to handle these snits. He simply leaned over and tickled his uncle’s armpits. Joey burst into laughter, loving Thad’s attention. Uneasily, the others in the restaurant turned back to their food and attempted to pick up lost conversations.

  When things had calmed down at our own table, Thad told me, “I haven’t decided about God, but I do know that Miriam Westerman is a bitch on wheels—a lying, crazy bitch on wheels. I say there’s no way in hell she’s gonna bury Mom.”

  “I’m with you, Thad.” I patted his shoulder, and he did not pull away. “Joey seems to feel pretty strongly that Suzanne should have a Catholic burial. I’m not entirely comfortable with that, but at least they’ll put on a good show. Besides, there aren’t any other options.” I didn’t honestly think that Suzanne would have cared for either option, but since she had left no instructions, we were stuck with our best judgment. And in my judgment, if we went with the priest, we’d piss Miriam but good. It sounded like a plan. “Are we agreed then, guys? Should I tell the lawyer that the funeral will be at Saint Cecille’s?”

  “Sure. Yeah,” they told me, making it official with a round of shaken hands.

  The rest of our lunch was considerably less eventful. We returned to Joey’s chitchat about the weather and the food, and Thad volunteered a few comments about school—he’d enjoyed driver’s ed., he wasn’t into sports, and, surprisingly, he even had some cogent thoughts regarding As You Like It, his first exposure to Shakespeare. “By the way,” he told me, leaning back in his chair with an air of triumph, “Shakespeare started lots of sentences with ‘me’ instead of ‘I.’”

  I should have seen that coming. “Methinks thou art a mite confused, Thad. ‘Methinks’ is not ‘me.’ What’s more, it’s Middle English and archaic. Trust me.”

  I wasn’t sure how he would react, but he accepted my correction with good humor. Methinks he knew that I respected him for gaming with me on the issue.

  Sometime during dessert (three chocolate sundaes—what is it about cold weather that makes ice cream so appealing?), Elliot Coop, the Quatrain family’s old attorney, entered the restaurant with a couple of businessmen. They ended up at a table on the far side of the room, but as soon as Elliot noticed me, he excused himself from his companions and walked over to us. “Gentlemen, good afternoon,” he told us brightly. “So nice to see everyone getting along so well. Suzanne would be delighted, I’m sure.” He shook hands with me, mentioning, “It didn’t take you long to discover the best place in town.” Then he gave a genial nod to both Thad and Joey.

  I told him, “Glad we ran into you, Elliot. We were just discussing the controversy regarding Suzanne’s funeral. The family has decided”—I gestured with my hands that the word referred to all three of us—“that Saint Cecille’s will bury her. Could you convey our wishes to Father Winter, please?”

  “Delighted, Mr. Manning.” His head bobbed with a deferential bow. Then he chuckled and, turning to Joey, told him, “I thought perhaps you had called this meeting—to do a bit of arm-twisting regarding the house.”

  Joey looked up from the sundae he was spooning. “Huh?” There was chocolate on his chin and a dab of whipped cream hooked at the end of his nose. Though Joey’s response was far from eloquent, it summed up my own reaction to Elliot’s statement—I had no idea what he was talking about.

  The lawyer continued, telling me, “When word got out that the Tawkins were divorcing and the house would be sold, Joey came over to my office and made an offer to buy the place.” Elliot gave me a big obvious wink. “It was twice what you were willing to pay for it.”

  Interesting. This had a familiar ring. Monday night, in this very restaurant, Barret Logan told me that Joey had tried to buy the Register at twice what I was offering. Logan concluded that Joey was growing increasingly confused and frustrated about his role in the world. Now, hearing this news of a similar incident with the house, I saw the accuracy of Logan’s assessment.

  Joey seemed embarrassed that the lawyer had mentioned his offer. He put down his spoon and told me, “I just thought it would be nice to keep the house in the family. But it’s okay, Mark—you’re family, too.”

  “Thanks, Joey.” I patted his arm. “I’m glad you feel that way.”

  Oblivious to these emotional dynamics, Elliot prattled on, telling me, “While sifting through the details of disbursing Suzanne’s estate, I ran across a bundle of files that she had left with me for safekeeping. I’m not sure what should be done with them, but as you’ve been named her executor, Mr. Manning, I thought I’d offer them first to you.”

  My reporter’s instincts were suddenly on full alert. “Thank you, Elliot,” I told him, trying not to appear too interested. “What sort of files are they?”

  “I haven’t had time to study them—it’s rather a thick bundle, after all, and Suzanne’s instructions were simply to hold them for her, not to act on them—but they appear to have been compiled by various private investigators around the country. One might call them ‘dossiers,’ but that has such cloak-and-dagger overtones, don’t you think?”

  Semantics aside, I told him, “I’ll be happy to take them off your hands, Elliot. Shall I come to your office?”

  “That won’t be necessary. They’re already packed in my car, so I’ll deliver them to your house.”

  I was tempted to suggest that we dash outside to the curb and move them to my own car, but that might appear impatient, and, besides, he needed to get back to his table. So I thanked him for his thoughtfulness, and we wished each other a pleasant afternoon.

  When we had finished dessert, I paid the check, and we prepared to get up from the table. Glancing at my watch, I said, “I really need to get over to the Register’s offices—Parker is expecting me. Did you drive today, Joey? I wonder if you could give Thad a ride back to the house.”

  “Sure,” said Joey, eager to help. “No one cares if I’m late getting back to work.”

  Standing, I asked Thad, “Do you mind? I’m late already.”

  “No, no problem. But I have to tell you, Mark”—I noted that it was the first time he spoke my name—“I’d rather be seen in your car any day.”

  I thanked him for the compliment and handed Joey his overcoat from a nearby hook. While shrugging into my own coat, we all headed for the door. Then I thought of something. “Thad,” I asked, “you’ve started driving, haven’t you?”

  “Yeah, I got my license in the fall.”

  “I know you’re planning to go out with friends tonight.” I paused. Did I really want to make this offer? Was the risk outweighed by the possibility of some shred of the kid’s affection? “Would you like to take my car?”

  He stood speechless for a moment, not believing his ears, wondering if I was joking. When I did not burst into laughter and retract the offer, he said, “Would I!” He nodded stupidly. “Thanks, Mark. That’s really nice of you. I appreciate it.”

  Within five minutes, I had walked the block or so to the First Avenue offices of the Register, said hello to Connie, the ground-floor receptionist, and climbed the stairs to the newsroom. The pace of activity there was rising, so I did not linger while greeting the staffers who noticed me, though it was satisfying to note that I could now actually remember some of their names. While unbuttoning my overcoat, I zigzagged through the maze of desks toward the back of the building, passing by Barret Logan’s office (he was working on something beyond the glass wall that separated him from his secretary, who acknowledged me with a smile and a nod) and Glee Savage’s office (her quarters were considerably smaller than Logan’s, without a secretary—Glee sat working on a story, wearing a feathered hat, and she glanced up from her computer to wave as I passed). Then I turned into the corridor that led to the morgue.

  A woman at the desk saw me enter and offered to take my coat, d
raping it over an extra chair. I asked about Parker, and she told me he was at work in the stacks, pointing the way. Making my way through a narrow aisle of metal bookshelves, which housed not books but folders filled with photos and clippings, I emerged into a clearing where Parker sat working at a round library table. He looked up from the heaps of material he’d pulled from the shelves. “Oh, hi, Mark,” he said, rising, checking his watch as though he’d lost all track of time.

  “You need to come up for air now and then,” I told him. He laughed, sitting again, and I joined him at the table.

  “Did you manage to drag Thad to lunch?” he asked.

  “As a matter of fact, I did, and it was productive. He, Joey, and I decided that Saint Cecille’s will bury Suzanne—so that’s one issue resolved.”

  Parker nodded. “Yeah, but what about the tone of it? Did Thad behave?”

  “He was fine. This may be premature, but I think his hostility toward me is actually beginning to wane. It didn’t hurt that I offered to lend him my car.”

  “Hey”—Parker laughed—“whatever it takes.”

  “In fact,” I continued, “if there was any difficult behavior, it came not from Thad, but from Joey. He worked himself into a little snit at one point and made quite a scene. I think the hostess was ready to dial nine-one-one.”

  “Oh, no. Really?” Parker shook his head in amused disbelief. “Not one of his threats about turning blue?”

  “Exactly. But Thad snapped him out of it, and we had a nice lunch. Then, during dessert, who should arrive but Elliot Coop?” I leaned toward Parker, elbows on the table, knowing the next bit of information would be of great interest to him. “Guess what. Suzanne had been collecting personal files, dossiers compiled by private investigators around the country. They were left with Elliot for safekeeping, and he asked if I’d like to have them.”

  “Well?” said Parker, rising an inch or so from his seat. “Where are they?”

  “They’re still in Elliot’s car,” I answered calmly. “I didn’t want to appear too anxious. He’s going to drop them off at the house.”

  Parker literally rubbed his hands together, hungry to get at them.

  “It’s intriguing, to say the least,” I said, “but I can’t imagine what’s in them.”

  Without hesitation, Parker said, “I’ve got a theory. And it fits what I’ve been finding here. Look”—he slid a pile of folders across the table toward me, opening the one on top—“I’ve begun to reconstruct Suzanne’s morgue research, and it seems to have focused on two areas. First, her older brother, Mark Quatrain.”

  I glanced through the folders he had given me, and, sure enough, they contained newspaper accounts of my older cousin’s high school and college achievements, his victories as a swimmer and a runner, his being sent to Vietnam, his death there. Conspicuously, there was nothing mentioning his rape and murder of the Asian girl. The photos were old, stiff, and unnatural. Anyone could see that he was handsome, but he had the look of being frozen in time, in an earlier generation, without those vital sparks that had let him live in my imagination for so many years. Missing were the sound of his voice, the touch of his hand in my hair, the way he moved—his body language.

  “Second,” said Parker, sliding another pile of folders toward me, “her research also focused on the period three years ago when her father died.”

  The second group of clippings reported Edwin Quatrain’s death with page-one headlines, accompanied by various retrospectives of his work at Quatro Press, founding it with a long-gone partner and nurturing it into the county’s biggest industry. There were less flashy stories, consigned to the paper’s business pages, detailing the probate investigation of his estate, which was ultimately resolved, without incident, naming Suzanne Quatrain as his principal heir. The photos of my uncle were far more recent than my memories of him, and it surprised me to see him in his seventies. His image, like his son’s, was now frozen in time, though this wizened Uncle Edwin seemed to peer at me not from a past generation, but from an age I had not yet known.

  The photos of both my cousin and my uncle stirred emotions that sapped my reasoning, and I found myself unable to analyze the hard facts within the files. “I’m sorry,” I told Parker, “but I don’t know what to make of all this.”

  Parker scooted his chair closer to mine, as if he needed to speak confidentially. Leaning nearer, he touched his shoulder to mine. With lowered voice, he said, “I have a theory, and it may sound farfetched, but hear me out. Before she was murdered, Suzanne went to a lot of effort to review, first, details of her brother’s death and, second, details of the probate investigation when her father died. Maybe she had reason to see some correlation between those two events.”

  “Maybe,” I agreed. “That’s not at all farfetched, but I can’t imagine what that correlation could be—can you?”

  “Yes,” he said forcefully, but his voice was now barely above a whisper. “Mark Quatrain may still be alive.”

  The words caught me totally off guard, and I felt my jaw muscles slacken. Reacting to my dumbfounded expression, Parker amplified, “More to the point, I think that Suzanne may have thought that her older brother could still be alive.”

  “Parker,” I said at full voice, pulling back from him as if to clear my head and force us back to reality, “what on earth leads you to such a conclusion?”

  “Hear me out,” he repeated, fixing me with his stare, luring me close again. “Consider: Barret Logan told us a few nights ago that Mark Quatrain’s body was so badly mutilated in the ambush, his remains were identified on the basis of his dog tag. Some thirty years later, Edwin Quatrain died, leaving an enormous estate to be settled by a haggling crew of probate lawyers. I suspect that the lawyers, leaving no stone unturned, reviewed the circumstances of Mark Quatrain’s death in Vietnam and concluded that someone with a motive could have switched identities with a dead man on the battlefield.”

  Listening, I realized that Parker’s theory was not so farfetched. It made sense. I recalled, “At the time of the ambush, Mark Quatrain was awaiting a military trial on charges of rape and murder. That would make him plenty motivated to change identities and start a new life—if he actually survived the attack and if circumstances permitted him to make the switch.”

  Parker reminded me, “Suzanne said, within minutes of first meeting me in your front hall, that she was involved in a big research project, that it related to DNA. And, in fact, I’ve traced numerous books and articles on that very topic, which she checked out from the Register’s morgue.”

  “And DNA,” I picked up his reasoning, “is used, forensically, to identify people. It fits. She may have been searching for her brother, who was presumed but not proven dead. She may also have employed private investigators in hopes of locating him, which would explain the existence of Elliot Coop’s dossiers.”

  “Exactly,” said Parker. He leaned back in his chair. “I doubt, however, that I need to point out to you that this theory, while compelling, still lacks something.”

  “Exactly,” I echoed him, standing. “The ‘why.’ Why would Suzanne expend so much time, effort, and money researching the mere possibility that her brother was still alive? After all, her father’s estate was settled—uncontested—and she was the principal beneficiary. Did she simply want to make sure that there would be no future claims against her?”

  “A possible obsession, but not likely,” said Parker, standing. “Or, was she just hell-bent on avenging her brother’s murder of some unknown Asian girl, a total stranger?”

  “Another possible obsession,” I admitted, “but again, not likely.”

  “We’ve got some thinking to do.”

  “I’ll say.” I couldn’t help laughing at the puzzle we’d created for ourselves. I stepped to him and clapped him on the shoulder. “Good work, Parker. You’ve taken this further than I thought you could—and you’re not even on the payroll yet.”

  “Soon enough,” he assured me, “but first things firs
t. If we don’t clear you of suspicion with the DA, I could be out of a job before it starts.”

  He was right. I had not yet gotten used to the idea that a lot of people would soon depend on me for their livelihood—all the more reason to resolve Suzanne’s murder quickly, to clear my name before any rumors could hurt the Register or its staff. I mused aloud, “I should have listened to Glee Savage that first morning she came to visit me.”

  “Oh?” said Parker, unsure of what I meant.

  “She said that she sniffed a story here all along. What’s more, she felt that it was all tied to Suzanne’s recent research. If your ‘brother from the grave’ theory pans out, Glee’s going to have one hell of a story on her hands. She asked for the assignment, and I gave it to her.”

  “You assigned it to Glee? I mean, she’s features—soft news.”

  “Have you read her stuff? She’s one hell of a writer. Just as important, she has a real passion for this story. In fact, this probably wouldn’t even be a story if it weren’t for her persistence in pursuing it. She deserves the assignment.”

  “Fine,” said Parker, busying himself with the files on the table. “I didn’t mean to question you. It struck me as an odd decision at first, but if nothing else, Glee should bring a unique slant to the story.” His words were agreeable enough, but his manner in handling the files seemed uncharacteristically slipshod, and I could not help wondering if he resented my assigning the story without consulting him. As managing editor of the Register, he could expect to be routinely responsible for such decisions, but as publisher, of course, I could take an active role in any matters that interested me—and this story interested me greatly.