by David Daniel
The neighborhood was quiet. The ex-neighbor’s lawn gave off a sweet, fresh-cut smell. The other ex-neighbor would be reading the kids Dr. Seuss stories now. Lauren’s Honda was in the driveway, and as I started up the walk I had all I could do to keep from sprinting. The mail was still in the box, no lights on inside, no welcoming sounds of TV, or ice in the martini pitcher.
Beyond the aluminum screen the inside door was ajar. I thought of the .38 I kept locked in the bottom drawer of my office file cabinet, as useful now as a ceramic watchdog. I eased the door open but did not go in yet.
“Lauren,” I called and felt “I’m home” rise in my mind like a ghost. But I was not home. Not anymore.
No reply.
My right hand moved by rote to the light switches, one each for outside, the hallway, living room, coat closet. I hit the middle two and went in fast.
The living room looked like the aftermath of rowdy houseguests.
Adrenaline is the most potent upper there is: zero to sixty in no time. I did not brake to look at anything in particular, just moved through the dining room, scanning. More drawers and the china closet stood open. My heart was thudding as I approached the kitchen. I reached for the wall switch and something whacked the side of my head like the end of a two-by-four.
Fireworks. The blow staggered me. I tried to brace on the kitchen table, but it was not there.
I hit the floor on rubber knees, struggling to stay conscious. From the fogs of Queer Street I made out the smallish man-form as it started past. I grabbed a leg. I was vaguely aware of an Asian face in watery soft focus. The leg I was holding braced, then the other foot swung up fast and kicked at my head. I hunched away, taking the blow on the shoulder, falling backwards with the impact. The attacker bolted for the back door. When I finally got onto the porch and gazed into the thickening dark, nothing was shaking but me.
In the house I put on lights, all of them. Then, dreading it, I went up the stairs to the bedrooms, afraid of what I would find.
The master bedroom had been ransacked, bureau and vanity drawers out, jewelry box upended in a pirates’ booty of costume trinkets on the bed. Lampshades sat askew, like the shadows they cast. Lauren was not in any of the rooms. I used the hall phone and called the Lowell police for the second time in an hour.
In the downstairs bathroom I turned on the sink taps, letting the sound of running water soothe me. I washed my face, which was starting to bruise over my right cheek. When I shut off the taps, I heard something else. You learn the sounds a house makes: the appliances, a loose sash, where the floor squeaks when someone steps on it. The unfamiliar ones alert you.
Hurriedly I looked around for a weapon. They are everywhere when you need them. I removed a potted plant from the vitreous china top of the tank behind the toilet. Gripping the heavy lid with both hands, I eased it off and slipped into the hallway. Someone else was in the house, carefully moving my way. I raised the lid, set to break a skull. Lauren stepped through the doorway.
She yelped and I hissed my breath out. I lowered the lid. “You’re safe,” I said.
“I better be. What are you doing here?” She was in her exercise clothes, her face flushed from walking.
“Someone got in.”
“It looks like you did! I want to know why.”
“In the living room—sit down a minute.”
“This place is a wreck! What are you after? What’s going on?”
I had long ago learned that with bad news there is no good time, nor any useful indirection; the best you could do was the straight truth. “Lauren,” I said, as gently as I knew how, “Joel Castle is dead.”
That did it. She backed into the front room and dropped onto the couch, her face drained to a pallor. I told her.
20
LAUREN REGARDED ME as if I were one long bad news report. The look of suspicion had given way to tears that gleamed in her eyes but did not fall. We sat on the living room couch, straining the silence to its limit. Finally, to be doing something, I said I would make tea.
It had come back to me that the person who had tried to take my head off had been wearing latex gloves, so fingerprints were doubtful. Still, I touched as little as I had to. Moving about, I noted changes—new dishware, furniture rearranged. But it was not all new; the ceramic-handled copper kettle sat on the stove, a wedding gift, a ghost. I half-filled it and set it on a burner. Back in the living room I did not sit again. Lauren had a cigarette burning, which she smoked halfway down in edgy little dabs before crushing it out in a clamshell ashtray.
“The police will be here any minute,” I said. “They won’t bother you tonight if you don’t want, but they’ll need to look around. I asked St. Onge not to make it a circus.”
Lauren nodded. She seemed collected now, though it was probably numbness.
“Is there any way this makes sense?” I pried gently.
“No.”
“Had Joel gotten any threats?”
Same answer.
“Was he involved with anything or anyone that might make enemies?”
She closed her eyes a moment and sighed with fraying patience. “No, Alex.”
I took out the Eagle-Trib column I had swiped from Castle’s desk. “What about this?”
Her eyes flicked over it with only a remote flare of interest. “I knew about that. I told Joel the jade ring was part of the collection and ought to be kept with the rest.”
“You never got any jade?”
“I got a ruby.” She put her hand out and looked at it as if the ring and the finger it was on belonged to someone else.
“Did you ever see his jade collection?”
“I thought you said there wasn’t going to be any bother tonight.”
I wandered over to the picture window and opened the drapes partway and peered out. No squad car yet. Behind me, from the couch, Lauren sighed. “Yes, I’ve seen the jade.”
I turned.
“He kept the collection at home, for now. You were probably wondering that,” she said. “He hoped to acquire one last piece to complete a group. Some kind of dragon.”
“Who had that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Was it the same person who sold him the jade he had?”
“I couldn’t say.”
“Do you know who the original seller was?”
“Look, Joel handled business affairs by himself. It’s the way he was. He took responsibility for things, Alex.”
The ghost in the kitchen began to whistle.
My nerves wanted chamomile tea, something to soothe them, to cut the adrenaline and put me out of the fray; but I knew the evening was not over yet. I brewed the high-test in two cups with Far Side cartoons on them and brought them back to the living room. The police made their well-oiled arrival a minute later: a gray sedan and a squad car, St. Onge and a pair of uniforms. As the patrolmen checked the yard and the forced front door, St. Onge sat with us. Declining tea, he lit a cigarette for Lauren and one for himself. They had always liked each other back when the three of us and Ed’s wife, Leona, would get together for dinner and bridge. Lauren said she didn’t mind talking, so he took her over some of the same ground we had already covered. When he got to Castle, he asked his questions tactfully, for which I was grateful.
“What about you?” St. Onge said to me. “What can you add?”
I filled him in from the time I had left Castle’s to almost braining Lauren with the toilet tank cover. I debated giving him the newspaper clipping, but Lauren had not brought it up, so I didn’t. He already had notes on the jade and the fancy wristwatch as possible motive for Castle’s death; he didn’t need gossip too—or my scattershot guesswork that whoever had killed Castle might have seen the clipping and made the link to Lauren and come after her too, thinking she had jade.
I walked St. Onge through the events there at the house, and we finished up in the kitchen, where I’d been hit.
“Nothing else you remember seeing?” he said.
&
nbsp; “Stars mostly. I think he was Asian.”
“Based on a foggy glance in a dark room.” He shook his head.
When he went out to see how his troops were doing, I sat in the living room with Lauren. She was sunk back deep in the cushions now. In the clamshell on the coffee table, her cigarette grew ash. She was seeing through the furniture and walls.
One of the oil paintings was off-kilter, I noticed. There were a pair of them that went with the abstracts in my office, and they took me back to the little apartment on Varnum Avenue where Lauren and I had lived just after we got married. One day I found half a dozen paintings stacked on the sidewalk with the trash. When you have bare walls and a thin wallet, you take something like that as a sign. In time I learned that our neighbor was an impoverished young painter named Montejo. He would reuse canvas until it was layered so thick with paint it would not take another coat. The rejects—which were most of them then—wound up on our walls by way of the trash pile. The first time I invited him in and showed him, he scowled and said something in Portuguese about someone’s mother, but I think he was secretly pleased. He donated some additional paintings before he moved away. I had not heard of him since, but if someone came in one day, recognized the brushstrokes, and said Montejos were selling like hotdogs in SoHo, I was ready. Okay, their outlines and colors were too sharp, the perspective skewed, but I still liked the paintings. They had energy and promise. They took me back to those times on Varnum Avenue. I straightened the one on the wall. Lauren did not seem to notice.
“Want me to stick around?” I said.
She was slow answering, drugged by whatever chemical the body produces to help it cope. “I’m going to call Nancy and Rod and stay with them tonight.”
“I can take you over,” I said.
“Or maybe I’ll go to a hotel.”
“You sure you don’t want—”
“Positive.” She stared at me. “Okay?”
Castle was not the cause of what happened between us. A catalyst maybe, but the change had been in me and in her. It was real, and if I’d known it a day, I’d known it for months. I just had not been able to admit it. Now, a one-word sentence had shown me. Signatures on paper were only a formality. “Okay,” I said.
I found St. Onge in the driveway, talking on the sedan’s radio. He had folded his jacket and hung it over the open car door. Neighbors were watching through parted curtains, but no one had ventured over. Ed slung the mike.
“Hot town,” he said, “summer in the city.”
I looked at him.
“There are impressions in the grass in back where someone took off on foot. Probably had wheels down the block. I’ll have a cruising patrol keep an eye peeled. We’ll canvass the neighbors in the A.M., see if anyone saw something.”
“A small white car maybe, white wheel covers?” I shook my head. “The guy who was here had on gloves, which says he was careful. You should still tell Andover to print Castle’s place. They’ll find mine, but that was afterwards. And someone ought to check the woods beside his house. If that was the pool gate I heard, the killer could have parked at the Sheraton and come and gone through the woods.”
“You writing a text on investigative practice?”
“No.”
Ed nodded tiredly. “You could’ve called the locals directly. That’s going to raise questions.”
It was his way of asking again what I had been doing at Castle’s in the first place. I stayed dumb. He said he would talk to a sergeant he knew on the Andover force. We listened to crickets and the garble of the sedan’s two-way for a moment, then he took his coat off the door and tossed it onto the front seat. “I’m going to keep a patrolman here awhile.”
“Lauren may stay with friends tonight.”
He angled his head toward the lighted windows of the living room. “Any chance you two patching things up?”
I noticed for the first time that the drapes were different, brighter. “That’s history,” I said. “Like a lot of things about this city.”
I drove back downtown and cruised by the darkened DSS office, just to assure myself that Ada was long gone. I had forgotten to call her as I had said I would. It was after ten when I got home. Maybe not too late on a Friday night …
“Mea culpa,” I said when she answered.
“I guess I was just last on a list of things to do,” she said in a tone I couldn’t read.
“The evening got hectic. I’m sorry.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You were sleeping?”
“Not anymore. In fact, I’m thinking about going out to meet someone. There’s a good jazz group at the Hilton. Interested?”
“I’d be a lousy third person,” I said.
“Who said anything about three?”
21
AT ELEVEN P.M. Ada Chan Stewart got out of a Diamond cab in the circular drive under the Hilton awning and came through the plate glass doors into the lobby like a sweet dream after a jag of nightmares. Until that moment I had been giving myself excuses for why I was not up to this. All at once I didn’t want one. She was wearing a deep iridescent green dress that went to mid-calf and swished and clung and showed off the lower part of her legs, which flexed in the black medium-heels she wore. She held a tiny black-beaded purse and had on a wide-brimmed hat of black straw, tipped at an angle, and she smiled from under it when she saw me. I had showered and put on my pale gray summerweight suit.
The lounge was not too busy as we went in, and I loved the way she put her hand on my arm as though it belonged there. Some women can do that without it becoming a big deal. We got a booth separated from the bar by a low partition with ferns growing in a trough on top. A waitress lit the candle, and we ordered a pair of gin and tonics. The group was into a set, four musicians, racially divided, and a Latino female vocalist who was doing a sultry “Teach Me Tonight.”
We got caught up. She reported her day in the trenches with such energy I got the feeling we were winning. I began to fill her in on my day. The smile she had gotten when I told what Ms. Sydney Keyes at the Haskell and MacKay Gallery had said about her turned to seriousness when I got to the next part. I hesitated only on the most recent stretch, involving Lauren, then I told that too. Not to would have left a gap that I did not want to have to scurry around later to backfill and then worry whether I had filled it enough. Ada was a good listener, though maybe it was just the training.
“She’s probably in emotional limbo now,” Ada said. “God knows I would be. She’ll come out of it. She sounds level-headed.”
“She’s that,” I agreed.
“Perhaps this will bring you back together.”
I shook my head. “Tonight I saw what I’ve been avoiding. I just hadn’t found the words yet.”
I said no more, and Ada knew to let it lie. But there was the fact of Joel Castle’s death. I had told her my uneasy suspicions. After a spell she said, “So you really think Joel Castle’s death is connected with Bhuntan’s?”
“Do you want to talk about this now?” I asked.
“I think we have to.”
I had already told her what Samol Lim had revealed about the Khmer Rouge executions. Now I said, “The gunshot pattern is too similar not to consider it. But we’ll have to wait to hear what the investigators find. If the two are linked, there’s only one point of juncture I can see.”
“The jade.”
“Stone of heaven.”
She thought a moment before saying, “Does that mean you think Suoheang Khoy might be around?” She sounded surprised, and I was too—that she had remembered the name.
“I haven’t got that far yet,” I said. “And right now, I don’t want to.” I ordered new drinks.
In a booth across from us, a silver-haired man took out a cigar that looked like it had been manufactured by a large dog and slowly, lovingly got it going. If he paid his wife half the attention he was bestowing on the cigar, he had a happy marriage—though why did I doubt the babe he was with was his wife? An
d why was I thinking about wives anyway?
Ada said, “It’s amazing what you’ve accomplished. But it’s a little frightening. I don’t like you getting hurt.”
“Let’s form a club,” I said.
“I mean it.”
“Maybe I should get some tattoos for protection. Lim showed me his. Do the women get them too?”
“No.”
“Give them a generation to assimilate. Tattoos are one of the little extras that slipped across the gender lines during the women’s revolt, along with ulcers and neckties. One that got turned back at the border was cigars. I’ve yet to meet a woman who smoked them, or wanted to.”
Her mind was not on the patter, so I quit. “What say we dance before the sprinklers go off.”
We slipped her purse into my coat pocket and waded to the parquet, where half a dozen other couples were drifting easily to a mellow reading of “For Sentimental Reasons.”
The vocalist was a reed-thin, intense woman, the tenor player a large, sloe-eyed black man whose shaved head gleamed like an ebony newel post. As unalike as they seemed, they had a nice magic working. Despite her starved look, she got a lot of South American lushness into her phrasing. His solos were spare and cool until they went hot enough to water drinks in the room. The piano, drums and bass backgrounded nicely, stepping out to blow solo, then melting back into the lineup.
In her heels, Ada came to where her head nuzzled the hinge of my fresh-shaven jaw. I liked it that she was not skinny. There was flesh on her and she moved fluidly in my arms. She made me feel like Patrick Swayze. Our heat released an incense of jasmine. We stayed on the floor. When the band broke, we got another round of drinks and took them onto the outdoor patio overlooking the canal. Ada’s cheeks were flushed from the dancing. She drew the conversation back to before.
