Alex Glauberman Mysteries Vol 1-3

by Dick Cluster

  Kim dropped Alex at his car just before nine. Alex drove thoughtfully down Somerville Avenue and parked just before Union Square. If Meyer lived a short commute away, in Melrose, he wondered, why was he staying in an expensive Harvard Square hotel? There was a North Suburban directory in his shop. The first thing he would do was to look Meyer up.

  Freddy’s Liquors, next door to Alex’s shop, was doing the regular Friday-night party business. Alex stuck in his head to keep up good relations with Freddy, who was watching the ball game on his little nine-inch TV. The Sox were two runs behind Toronto, Freddy said. What else was new?

  Inside the shop, nothing was: old furniture, old parts, old clothes, old tools. The front of the Volvo still rested a few feet off the ground. Minus its grille, radiator, fan, water pump, and gear cover, it looked like a patient sliced open and ready to have his or her guts fixed. Alex knelt in front of the exposed ends of the engine shafts, methodically screwing the three arms of the puller into the threaded holes of the upper gear. Then he twisted the center rod of the puller with a Vise-Grip so it pressed against the camshaft end. Like a cork from a bottle, the gear slid slowly toward him.

  Alex found an inexorable, simple-laws-of-physics assurance in this. He examined the broken fiber tooth. Volvo used fiber rather than steel to cut down on noise. It was a wonder they didn’t break more often. He got out a smaller puller and repeated the process on the steel-toothed crankshaft gear. Then he slid and bolted a new set nice and tightly into place. He replaced all the parts he had removed, and finally slid down under the front end of the car to tighten up the oil pan. Head resting on the cushioned end of the creeper, he tightened the last bolts, wondering where Meyer and his dollars might be now. While he lay there, the nightly prednisone rush came. Alex didn’t know why the three steroids he took first thing in the morning always hit him this way, at ten at night. But he’d been through it enough by now to know that they would.

  The rush came on greased, silent wheels with an acceleration like lightning. Alex slid out from under the car and quickly let down the front end. The pure fact was that, effects on his schedule aside, he loved this part of the drug. The onset of the effect was, like most drug rushes, a time not only of excitement but of confidence and internal power. There was a down side to come, a few days hence, but for now Alex looked neither forward nor back. He checked the exhaust hose, started the car, and let the rhythm of the engine carry him along. Good as new, it sounded. He turned the key, punched the clock, made out the bill, and headed for the shower. The phone jangled, stopping him in his tracks. Meyer. The clock said ten minutes past eleven.

  “Alex Glauberman?” It was a male voice, muffled. “This is Meyer. You forget all about what I told you today. Just forget it, you hear?” Then the phone clicked dead.

  Alex stood still, listening for any more sound, but the phone yielded nothing more. He couldn’t say for sure whether the voice on the phone had belonged to Gerald Meyer or not. He’d forgotten to look up Meyer in the book, but now he thumbed through the pages, leaving dark grease spots all over the Ms. There was no Gerald Meyer listed in Melrose, or in Malden (where more Jews lived), or in any of the surrounding towns.

  Being told what to remember and what to forget always rubbed Alex the wrong way. Just now, flying and knowing that his night was young, it rubbed him very wrong. He decided to go pay a scouting call, what could that hurt, to the return address that was supposed to belong to Meyer. In the shower, with warm, heavy rain falling all around him, he decided to call on the neighbors, delivering flowers.

  The night air was comfortable and auspicious, but if there were florists open at eleven o’clock between Somerville and Melrose, Alex didn’t know where to find them. He left the client’s car, with bill, on the street as promised. He locked up securely, and drove his own car to the all-night supermarket on Winter Hill. There he bought a nondescript $7.50 house plant and a roll of green ribbon. He tied the ribbon around the wide part of the pot with a big bow and followed the thinning traffic down the hill past the housing project and up onto I-93. A few minutes later he pulled off the interstate at the exit that led past the Metropolitan District Commission Zoo. Alex had been to the zoo often, but he’d rarely explored the bedroom communities nearby. Now he saw himself padding quiet suburban streets with the restless, implacable prowl of the big Siberian tiger. He hoped the tiger wouldn’t, opening his mouth, sound too much like the Manic Insomniac instead.

  A gas-pump attendant directed him to Old Mill Circle, which turned out to be three sides of a square. Cruising slowly, Alex picked out a few small, old cottages among the newer, larger homes. Maybe there had once been a mill here, when the town had really been a town. Some houses were dark, but most still showed lights behind curtained windows. It was a family neighborhood, not a place for lonely, twice-divorced old men.

  The lots were of a medium size, with grassy lawns and straight walks from front door to street. Number 91 was written out in wrought-iron script by the door of a two-story home with yellow aluminum siding. No watchers slouched in parked cars outside. Except in the blacktopped driveways, Old Mill Circle contained no parked cars at all.

  The second time around, Alex parked in front of a brick house with its porch light extinguished, across the street from number 91. He wasn’t sure he wanted to barge in on Gerald Meyer tonight, but he did want to know whether Meyer could really be found behind that yellow siding. He hoped that nighttime flower delivery was the sort of part-time, no-benefits job going begging these days. He hoped the people who took it didn’t need to wear uniforms, or shave, or have their names printed on their coats. He hoped it was okay for them to drive around in ’75 Saabs.

  There was no name on the door of the brick house either. When he rang the bell, Alex got a quick response and a suspicious look from a man about his own age. The man had disheveled red hair receding from his temples.

  “Olympia Florists,” Alex recited officiously through the screen door. “Sorry to disturb you so late, but I’ve got a real rush delivery here. Gift for Mrs. Meyer, if you’d care to sign for it.”

  “No Meyer here, Mac,” the man said.

  Alex consulted his clipboard full of car-repair orders. “Mrs. Gerald Meyer, 91 Old Mill Circle,” he said in a brusque, confident tone.

  “This is 94.”

  “Oh, well, my mistake, then, sir. I couldn’t make out your number from the street. Sorry. Can you do me a favor and show me the Meyer house?”

  “That’s 91 across the street, Mac. All the odd numbers are on that side. If you’ve got a delivery for number 91, talk to them about it. Otherwise, you ought to call it a night before somebody calls the cops.”

  “Yessir. Thank you.”

  Alex marched across the street and up the opposite walk. There was a welcome mat on the concrete stoop, a Melrose Soccer League sticker in the window, but no name under the bell. Alex rang once, took a deep breath, and rang again. At length the inner door opened and a small, dark-haired woman in a deep purple bathrobe appeared. She was a lot younger than Gerald Meyer. She made a point of checking the lock on the screen door, to make sure it couldn’t be opened from the outside. Her plump lips pursed in an angry way.

  “Olympia Florists,” Alex declared. “Gift for you, if this is 91.”

  “Gift? What are you talking about?”

  “It’s just a plant, ma’am. A house plant. Olympia Florists.”

  “It looks half dead,” the woman told him suspiciously. She tightened the belt of her robe and peered sharply at Alex through the screen. Her eyes were large and probing, dark eyes that matched her short, sculpted hair. She had a kind of pixieish good looks, but just now— or maybe always— the severity of her expression took over. “Who’s sending me junk like that?” she demanded.

  Under her scrutiny, Alex felt like a bad little boy caught out in some trick. He held the plant higher as if to examine it. “Should be a card on it, ma’am.” He consulted his clipboard and opened his mouth to ask if this was the Meyer r
esidence. A big man, in sweatpants and T-shirt, appeared next to the small woman in the purple robe. Alex had the feeling he had interrupted them just as they were getting down to Friday-night sex. The man stared ferociously at Alex. He said, “What the hell is this, Joanna?”

  “Olympia Florists,” Alex maintained. “Plant for Mr. Meyer. Is that you, sir?”

  The man said “Nope” and started to add something more. The woman turned toward the man, muttering disgustedly. “Jesus Christ,” Alex heard her say, “What assholes they got out tonight!” Then her heel slammed the door shut in his face.

  * * *

  Nothing ventured, nothing gained, Alex rationalized to himself as he let out the clutch and eased the Saab away. So Meyer didn’t live at 91 Old Mill Circle, Melrose, MA 02176. Why should he make himself easy to find? The florist charade could make for comic relief in the story that he might tell Maria, and Maria might tell to the grandchildren. Comic relief or a shaggy-dog ending.

  After Melrose, Alex’s own neighborhood felt a little more alive. A few kids were drinking at the playground, and a siren wailed somewhere in the distance. He turned the corner into his own street and found a space a few doors down from his apartment. He wondered whether anyone would know, or care, that he had not obeyed the instruction to forget all about Gerald Meyer. He climbed the porch steps quietly, but saw no one lurking behind the shingled half-wall. No one crouched down below, among Frank LaFarge’s rose bushes, either.

  No one sapped him with a blackjack in the entryway. His living room was as he’d left it, his kitchen empty and smelling slightly of garbage. The smell hit him as an affront, like the door that had been closed in his face. He lifted the bag from the trash basket and, feeling foolish but careful, snatched up the magnetized flashlight from the door of the refrigerator to light his way to the bins out back. When he opened the rear door, Antoine, the LaFarges’ matted old tiger cat, looked up into the flashlight’s beam. The cat’s eyes gleamed yellow, with narrow slits of pupils, amid its dark, irregular stripes.

  “Hey, Antoine,” Alex said softly, squinting as he liked to do to cats. He had read that they interpreted half-shut eyes as a kind of communication. “Hey, Tiger. You staying out all night again? Seen anybody suspicious? I’ll let you in on some mighty fine catnip if you can finger a guy name of Meyer for me.”

  Antoine squinted back and returned to sniffing around the garbage cans. “Well, if you change your mind,” Alex began, and then stopped. Behind the cans, toward the driveway, the cat had found something that both attracted and disturbed him. He disappeared to sniff it out and appeared again, backing off, near the LaFarges’ Chevy Caprice. He sniffed his way toward it, vanished behind the cans once more. He reappeared close to the porch, squinting questioningly at Alex.

  “Strange behavior, old guy,” Alex said. “You been at the catnip already?” This time he followed the cat and found a man slumped against the row of rusty cans. The man’s knees were drawn up against the chest, and his head was slumped down on the knees. What Alex recognized first were the shoes, like the ones his father wore to funerals. He knelt down to look at the contorted face, paler than ever in the flashlight beam, staring sightlessly at the ground. Meyer’s creeping baldness did not stand out anymore, though it came back to Alex with a shimmering clarity that this, in the post office, had been his first impression: a balding man, impatient to get to the front of the line. Now the skull’s hairlessness was masked by congealed blood, and overshadowed by the dark, gaping hole where bone had been punched inward like plaster. Inside the hole, and flecking the sticky blood around it, was a kind of nondescript matter, neither liquid nor solid, that Alex realized with revulsion had to be brains.

  Without warning, he added to the mess by throwing up his half-digested cheese and salami. He did manage to miss both the cat and the corpse.

  8. A White Rose

  Alex went back inside, noted that the time was thirty-six minutes past midnight, and dialed 911 to report that he had found a dead stranger in the driveway. Then he rinsed his mouth, blew his nose, and dug a pair of winter gloves from the bottom drawer of his bureau. He pulled the wool liners out of the leather. He wanted another look, but he did not want to take the chance of leaving his fingerprints behind.

  Kneeling in the dark amid the smell of garbage and vomit, Alex trained his light on the man’s brown suit jacket. He tried to fight off the compulsion to take another close look at the mystery of death, but could not. This time the hole and the brains did not come as so much of a shock. Alex recoiled not from the gore but from the fact that this leak, this blown seal, this injured part had suddenly, perhaps even instantly, caused the whole machine to stop functioning— beyond repair.

  The back pants pockets were jammed under the dead man’s rear. Alex let them alone. He searched the jacket pockets, inside and outside, and the front pockets of the pants. All were empty. Someone had done this searching before.

  Alex played his light around the ground near the body, but found nothing. He wished he hadn’t called the police right away. He needed to figure out how he would explain this. The best explanation would be the closest to the truth. He picked up the bag of garbage from the back porch, climbed down the three steps again, and pulled the big aluminum can toward him as he would normally do. Meyer toppled over backward and to the side, still folded up.

  Now Alex wormed his hands into the back pockets, expecting an icy-cold sensation even through the gloves. There was no icy cold, and no wallet— just a feeling of invasion, of being where he shouldn’t be. He wondered what people felt like who rolled drunks.

  Immobile, Meyer seemed heavier and more solid than he had as an active being. Had he been forced into this compact position before being shot, or had he been arranged this way after?

  No sirens sounded yet. Alex made one last circuit around the body with the light, but found nothing more. He was in the kitchen, putting a flame under the kettle, when his doorbell chimed.

  The cop sported a broad, sandy mustache on his open, pink face. He seemed very young. He’d left the cruiser double-parked, light still circling. “You Mr. Glauberman?” he wanted to know.

  “Yes.”

  “You the property owner?”

  “No, Mr. and Mrs. Francis LaFarge, upstairs. That’s their door, right there.”

  “Okay,” he told Alex, “let’s go see what you found.” Alex stepped outside, led the cop down the driveway to Meyer’s remains. Antoine reappeared but ducked under the car. The policeman shined his own flashlight, touched Meyer’s lips, looked at the puddle of vomit.

  “That was me,” Alex said.

  “Yeah,” the cop said. “Bullet to the brain. It’s ugly. Can we bring the owners downstairs to your place?”

  “Sure,” Alex said. “Come in, Officer…”

  “No, I got to radio. Someone will be along to take care of you in a couple minutes.”

  Alex brewed himself a cup of weak tea while the patrolman went back to his car. It didn’t take long for another cruiser and an ambulance to arrive, sirens blaring. After a few minutes the young cop came back with a shorter, older one in plain clothes. The new one had a thin, combative face and a black mustache that angled sharply down from his nose on each side. It was sort of a Billy Martin face, Alex thought. The young one said, “This is Sergeant Trevisone.” Trevisone came in, while the other one rang the LaFarges’ bell.

  Alex showed Trevisone to the living room, invited him to take the stuffed chair. Trevisone turned toward the couch instead, as if this was something he’d been taught in Questioning 101: never take the seat that’s offered, keep them off their guard. His eyes took in Kim’s paintings, above the couch, before he sat down.

  “Anybody else in your apartment besides you?”

  “No.” Alex stayed on his feet, expecting Frank and Anne. Anyway, he was too jumpy to sit. “I mean, I have a daughter, but usually she’s here only half the week. And this week she’s been with her mother the whole time.”

  “No girlfrien
d?”

  Alex shook his head. “She’s away for three months, working, and she doesn’t live here when she’s not. Would you like me to make some coffee or tea for everyone?”

  Trevisone shook his head, looking around the room without comment. He took in the stereo system, the antinuke poster, and the worn rug. On the wall opposite him, on either side of the chair he’d turned down, were a full bookcase and a set of mounted photographs. Alex had the feeling the sergeant was cataloging the book titles and committing the photos to memory, one by one.

  A lot of cops lived in the neighborhood, and Alex knew some of them to say hello to. But no police had ever been in this apartment before. For the first time Alex wondered about the wisdom of putting his life on display. He felt the pictures behind him, travelogues of his own journeys. His parents posed in front of the elephants at the Bronx Zoo. Hans Heidenfelter towing a wreck out of the Platte River. Alex himself in full hippie regalia, under arrest in the Nation’s Capital, chatting with a crew-cut national guardsman about when they might both get to go home. Maria dressed as Rosa Parks for a school play— eyebrow pencil all over her face, peering out the front window of a refrigerator-packing-box bus labeled “Montgomery, ALA.” Meredith and Maria, backs to the camera, feet in the Atlantic, looking east from Cape Cod. Bernie in a three-piece suit, caught at lunch hour on State Street. Bernie and Alex, on the ski slopes at Wildcat. The pictures that weren’t there were of Alex and Gerald Meyer: in the post office, in the little park, in the coffee shop, on the street outside. No photos, but witnesses to these meetings there would probably be.

  Trevisone sat and watched until the uniformed cop ushered the LaFarges in. “Thanks, Al,” the sergeant said. Al left again, presumably to help with sizing up and removing the corpse. Alex offered Anne the armchair and sat himself cross-legged on the rug. The sergeant invited her husband to take the other end of the couch. He balanced a small notepad on his knee, clicking a blue ballpoint a few times.