by Dick Cluster
“Yeah, the one—”
“Good, then tell her, ask her to meet me there, please, in an hour, or as close after that as she can.”
“Okay, I’ll—”
“Good. Thanks a lot. Good-bye.”
3. SERGEANT TREVISONE’S CALL
The Typhoon Restaurant was housed in a huge imitation Polynesian temple along one of metropolitan Boston’s finest strips of Americana, the old Route 1, heading northeast toward New Hampshire and Maine. Alex had not been inside the place in years, but he remembered the ambience as roomy, dark, and anonymous, and he remembered the long list of exotic cocktails available to drink. The pièce de résistance, the Typhoon Tahiti, mixed rum with three different French liqueurs. Like a storm aboard ship, Alex supposed, it would either knock you over or make you throw up.
The restaurant lay along the same stretch of Route 1, he explained to Meredith, as the steak house with the giant steer and saguaro cactus out front, and also the restaurant that was shaped like a ship. These big eateries were scattered among car stereo places and snowmobile dealers, bargain outlets and tuxedo renters, nightclubs and Italian restaurants moved out from the North End. Alex said that besides being concerned about Suzanne, he wanted to be along to show Meredith, a foreigner, these important sites. Meredith saw through this explanation, he was sure, but she didn’t object. All she said was, “All right. But remember, Alex, I’m the one Suzanne requested to come.”
So they had all three arrived at the Typhoon, a picturesque family group. Alex and Meredith and Maria would have dinner. Meredith would talk with Suzanne and find out what kind of trouble she was in. Now the waitress lit the candle, handed Alex three oversized menus, and asked whether he wanted anything from the bar. Alex declined. He drummed on the red tablecloth, his index fingers making soft, muffled thuds. He paid no attention to this drumming until he noticed what the rhythm was. The Beatles, “With a Little Help from My Friends.” The song was twenty years old by now, though Alex believed he could remember clearly when it had been new.
Suzanne did not exactly qualify as one of Meredith’s friends. She had taken one class from her during the summer, and then had dropped by Meredith’s office in December, when Meredith had just returned from her half-semester’s work in London. Suzanne had said that she wanted to know what Meredith would be teaching next. Then they’d talked a bit about Suzanne’s plans. Suzanne had originally planned to be a nurse. If she could get a nursing B.S. under her belt, she’d thought, she would always be able to make a living. But she was considering switching to anthropology or psych. Why, Meredith had asked, intrigued. “You see a lot of the world if you’re an anthropologist,” Suzanne had answered. “Maybe the Amazon, the Andes, some little village in Tuscany. Or with psych, you see a lot about people if you work with their minds.” And was she worried about getting a job? “Not if I don’t have kids to support. I used to be in a rush to grow up. Now I’m in a rush to slow down.”
A young woman with a handle on herself, Alex concluded. He tried to figure out why she had chosen this setting tonight. The restaurant was dark, simulating an outdoor Polynesian garden, illuminated by hanging electric lanterns and by spotlights that shone upward from behind large green leaves and through the waters of the goldfish pools. A lot went on here, Alex guessed. It was probably a place for putting out all sorts of feelers, business or romantic or otherwise. While the Typhoon served predominantly the North Shore towns, it was definitely a highway stop, not a neighborhood place.
Meredith and Maria appeared from behind a tangle of leaves and vines. Meredith shook her head behind Maria’s back. They had completed their tour, that meant, and Suzanne wasn’t here yet. When the waitress came back, the three of them agreed on spareribs, fried rice, thousand-flavor chicken, and pineapple pork.
The food was, as Alex remembered, greasy and sweet. When it was gone, the adults took turns testing Maria on her spelling list. Then, by candlelight, Maria finished her homework, building the words into sentences in her book.
“Writing is different by candlelight,” Meredith said. “The words hover, they’re less exact. Somebody or other claims the way we react to printed words in electric light is completely different from the way people used to see handwriting by sunlight or lamps or candles. Though it seems to me more important that now so many more people can read.”
Maria said, “It’s hard to remember there was a time I couldn’t read. That letters were just marks on paper, they didn’t mean anything.”
“You may never learn to do anything else that makes such a big difference,” Meredith told her, winning a broad smile in return.
“I don’t know,” Alex said. “Wait till you learn how to drive a car.” The inner voice wondering who would teach her, whether he, Alex, would be there to teach or watch, was soft and unobtrusive, almost whimsical tonight. In fact— Alex noticed, and congratulated himself— it wasn’t all that different from the voice in which Meredith speculated about the effect of lamplight. Alex’s self-compliment did not keep him from noticing the tall, graceful, broad-shouldered woman with her Afro cut in a punkish style, severely short on the sides. She passed their table slowly, stopped, and backed up. She regarded Meredith steadily with eyes that seemed a bit too determined, or a bit sinister, on her otherwise fresh and open face. “You’re Professor Phillips,” she said. There was no question in the tone.
“That’s right,” Meredith answered politely.
“Suzanne couldn’t come herself. She says I should bring you to her.” The accent was hard to place. Not New England, nor an accent of the ghetto or the South. A kind of absence of accent, like California. She kept her eyes on Meredith. They weren’t slanted, exactly, but they were somehow angular, that was what it was. Maybe she was part Indian— something about her nose seemed Indian to Alex. Her skin was a deep but reddish brown. Her forehead glistened in the wavering light. From nervousness? Alex wondered. But she said calmly enough, “Do you mind if I sit down?”
Meredith slid over on the bench. “I recognize you, but I don’t know your name.”
“Natalie. You maybe saw me outside of class with Suzanne.”
Maybe, Alex thought. Or in the hall, or the cafeteria, or anywhere else. An attractive black woman in a hairdo like that would stand out at UMass, though the last thing anyone, white or black, would do would be to admit it. Alex had one of his infrequent twinges of longing for New York, where, for all the tension, at least people were upfront about matters of race.
“These are Alex and Maria Glauberman,” Meredith said.
“Hi.” Natalie smiled, but tightly, not showily.
Alex watched his daughter try to smile back. She was worried now that Suzanne had failed to appear. Maria didn’t like it when a substitute teacher took over at school without explaining why the real teacher wasn’t there. She liked to know what was wrong. So did Alex. He put the question both for Maria and for himself.
“Is Suzanne okay?” he asked. “She told Maria that somebody died. Like it was somebody in her family, or a friend.”
“Sort of. Let her explain it, okay?”
“Uh-huh,” Alex said. “Well, I guess we’ll hear it from Meredith, then. I ought to be getting Maria home to bed.” He studied the bill and put money on the table. They all walked out together through the parking lot, huge and bare, surrounded by the big snowbanks that multiple storms and plowings had made. The lot was lit as brightly as the restaurant was dark. A safe place, the lights advertised. No muggers, no auto theft. Alex felt like one of the toy figures in a modern Christmas diorama, all Styrofoam snow, midget plastic consumers, and die-cast model cars. Natalie led them to a battered brown Civic four or five years old. There was a City of Cambridge resident sticker on the rear window. Meredith kissed Maria goodnight. The Civic sped out of the lot and turned right, north, onto Route 1.
Alex took Maria’s hand and led her to his own car. At the lot exit, he waited patiently for a break in the traffic and turned left, south toward home. The highway was no
diorama, more like an old amusement park funhouse. Neon and fluorescent signs at the entrances to stores, motels, and nightspots loomed and disappeared. Most of the names were Italian, though the Irish and the Jews also had their place. This was commuterland, home of the building boom that had followed World War II. This was where the old immigrant groups went as they leapfrogged out of Boston. Suzanne might pick a rendezvous here because she had been nearby. Or she might pick a rendezvous because she had not. Meredith had thought Suzanne once mentioned growing up somewhere out here— Saugus, or maybe Lynn or Revere. She thought Suzanne’s mother had commuted in to work at the Schraffts candy plant in Charlestown, no longer operating now.
“Strange stuff,” he said to Maria. “Maybe Suzanne has to explain to Meredith that she’s going to miss more classes or a paper or an exam.”
“Or she has to stay at home with somebody,” Maria said. “Somebody that can’t go out, and she wants Meredith to give her some work to do there.”
“That’s true,” Alex said, and though neither of these explanations was at all convincing, father and daughter had communicated that there were no worries or more adequate speculations that either one of them felt confident enough to discuss. Maria fell asleep on Route 128. Her own black curls, looser than Natalie’s, in fact so much like Alex’s, mashed against the door. Alex had always thought she had his ex-wife Laura’s face with his hair around it, but now this seemed to be changing. Her face was getting thinner; not so cute, but shrewder. He liked seeing more of himself— partly from possessiveness, partly because it was intriguing to see some of his own expressions in female form. However, it was also disconcerting to watch her face change. The face would alter a lot before she learned how to drive, and so would the thinking that went on behind it. She’d be able to get herself stuck, entangled in her thoughts. She would have those adolescent and becoming-a-woman times when, as Suzanne Lutrello put it, “all the choices I had were bad.”
Home, he parked in front and carried Maria inside. She woke up enough to get into pajamas, then dropped right back to sleep. Alex tucked her in bed and returned to his living room to wait. He was jealous of Meredith, summoned so mysteriously. She would face the task of winning Suzanne’s trust, of delivering the wise guidance or decisive action that Suzanne seemed to hope Professor Phillips could provide. No adventures planned, he’d told his doc. That didn’t mean none hoped for. He shook off these thoughts, began to stretch and then to move slowly, sinuously, through the tai chi form. He didn’t push, just allowed his muscles to remember what Terry had told him in class that morning. He had nearly reached the end of what he knew, halfway through the Repulse Monkey, when his telephone rang. He broke off and picked it up. A brusque, official voice asked, “Alex Glauberman there?”
“Yeah. You’ve got him.” Much to his surprise, he thought he recognized the voice. It belonged to the time his doctor had referred to, a strange, eventful time in September, in the midst of chemotherapy, when he had brushed close to other people’s deaths, violent ones, and had had dealings with this man. A rush of smells and sensations washed over Alex— nausea and excitement, acrid smoke, sweetness, sex, fear, and determination. But all the cues and all the associated memories floated amid a haze, a chemical haze that made what had gone on only partly real life, and partly a kind of parentheses. He told himself a lot of male, brusque, Boston-accented voices sounded the same.
“Sergeant Trevisone,” the man contradicted him.
Efficient Sergeant Trevisone, who must have pulled Alex’s unlisted number out of some closed-cases file. He was a small, lean, suspicious, intelligent man— a homicide detective, Cambridge police. Alex swallowed.
`“What— is something wrong?”
“Your girlfriend. You’ll need to come get her.”
“Come get her?” Harm to Meredith was not something he’d imagined.
“She’s okay. She just hasn’t got a car, is all. She arrived at the scene of a homicide. We had to bring everybody down here.”
A homicide. Alex heard again the voice that had called his shop for help.
“Was it… Suzanne Lutrello?” he asked.
“Suzanne Lutrello,” Trevisone repeated. “You knew her?”
“She baby-sat for my daughter,” Alex answered. She was only twenty-two or twenty-three, he wanted to add. That’s much too young to be dead. The previous time he’d dealt with this detective, the victim had been a much more proper age; that is, he’d been older than Alex by quite a few years. Suzanne’s death was too sudden, and Alex had spoken with her only hours before. But sudden was what homicide generally meant. Slowly Alex realized something else, which was that Trevisone did not need to call him up to tell him Meredith needed a ride. Surely Meredith had a dime. Trevisone was bothered that Alex Glauberman had popped up again. Trevisone wanted to talk to him face to face. “If you want to see me tonight,” Alex said, “I’ll need to bring my daughter along.”
“Somebody’ll take care of her,” Trevisone replied.
Somebody didn’t take enough care of Suzanne, Alex wanted to say. He didn’t relish explaining any of this to Maria as they drove across town to the police station. Cambridge, a city of about one hundred thousand, maintained only one. The station house was located discreetly in Central Square, out of sight of the universities that dominated Kendall and Harvard squares on either side. How was he supposed to explain this death to Maria, to put it in context, to take the menace out? Meredith went to see Suzanne and when she got there Suzanne was kaput. He shrugged angrily. Maria knew about murder. It was there every night on the cop shows, on the TV news, the broadcaster hawking his wares like a carnival barker in an excited, pretend-shock voice. Somehow Maria would sort it out, would put it in her perspective. How would it stack up anyway, to a nine-year-old, against the question of whether or not she’d go to the police station in pajamas? She’d said absolutely no to that.
* * *
He didn’t explain anything yet. First he wanted to find out the story himself. Dressed, Maria sat silently with the policewoman behind the desk. Alex turned and followed Sergeant Trevisone through the doors. Trevisone’s office had not changed: same insurance-agency calendar, same steel desk, same battered, padded-seat, straight-backed chairs. Meredith was waiting in one of these, her own back straight but eyes tired and shoulders slumped. Alex walked toward her, but her eyes lifted and shoulders straightened to say hands off. He didn’t know whether that meant I’m handling this my own way or whether it meant Don’t show off any ownership of me. He stopped short and sat down in the empty chair.
“When Suzanne arrived to take care of your daughter,” Trevisone said abruptly, “how did she seem?”
“I don’t know. Kind of distant and vacant— the way most baby-sitters seem. Do you have kids?”
“They’re grown up.” The detective let Alex know that he didn’t appreciate the attempt to turn the tables. He added, “And we weren’t in the hired-sitter class.” Then he relented, waved away the implied criticism, and pointed as if at something in the near distance. “My sister’s kid we used, up the block. Go on.”
“I mean, she listened to me talk about bedtimes and stuff, but she wasn’t really there. Baby-sitters have heard all this shit a hundred times, and they know it’s really up to them and the kid. I thought she was taking in Meredith’s scene, that I was Meredith’s boyfriend, and figuring what kind of kid Maria was.”
“Ms. Phillips says you didn’t leave a number where you could be reached, and Suzanne didn’t ask. Why didn’t she? Could she have been distracted by something, afraid, worried, maybe?”
“Maybe. But usually they leave all those moves up to the parent. If the parent doesn’t offer, they might not ask.”
Trevisone did not seem interested in Alex’s baby-sitter generalizations. It’s because you’ve never been a single parent, Alex thought. The detective stroked the ends of what Alex had once thought of as a Billy Martin mustache. It was a Billy Martin mouth, really, he decided this time. There was som
ething about the lines radiating out from the mouth, and the set of the jaw. Trevisone was skilled and crafty and probably not the type to pick fistfights either in bars or in the line of duty, but he was still a Billy Martin rather than, say, a Sparky Anderson type. His tenacity was not just a craftsman’s, but was powered by some untold anger or hurt.
“Forget the baby-sitter angle,” he said. “just tell me, as a person, a girl, a woman— how did she strike you?”
“I really didn’t know her. I’d recognize her again, but that’s about it. She was about—shorter than Meredith, taller than Maria— about maybe five feet two. Seemed like a lot of people her age. Black hair, teased into kind of a mane, you know, kind of loose sweater, I think, tight jeans, cowboy boots. Alert, with it, like I said. Not to what I was saying, but to what was going on, the situation…”
“Attractive?” Trevisone asked. “If you’ll answer a question like that in front of your girl— woman-friend.”
The phrasing was meant to provoke someone, Alex or Meredith, but Alex chose to let it go by and Meredith, he saw, was directing her attention not to Trevisone but to him, knitting her brows in teacherly disapproval as if he’d made some mistake, leaped to some incorrect conclusion that she was waiting for him to see. Whatever it was, Alex let it go, too. He realized he’d been trying to fix Suzanne Lutrello’s image for the past two days: an interesting face, dark eyes, penciled eyebrows but no lipstick, a narrow mouth, a straight nose, not turned up— altogether a face that was alive but also haughty in a certain Italian way. She moved with confidence, he remembered that; her breasts had swelled the loose sweater and her hips had been wide without being fat. He remembered all of this, and he wanted to give Trevisone a truthful answer if only because painting an accurate picture of Suzanne was all he could do for her now that she was dead.
“Listen, can you tell me what happened to her?” Alex asked.
