by Dick Cluster
The housekeeper pointed Alex to a chair whose rungs he’d bet had been turned on a hand lathe when electricity was used for telegraph messages and not much else. The tabletop was old walnut or oak, darkened with age and scarred with use. There would be a dining room somewhere, probably through the closed side door. Had this table been the place where the wife or the cook served breakfast to the kids? The housekeeper poured Alex coffee and set before him a tray of cold fish. In halting English she told him to wait, that Mr. Johnston would come soon. Alex wondered whether the cold fish was some kind of metaphor. He discovered it was ceviche, and delicious, tender but retaining its texture, cilantro and garlic peeking through the taste of lemon. He decided it had been prepared along with other easy-to-serve dishes for the condolence callers who would be dropping in.
Graham Johnston’s house put Alex in mind of a Puritan sea captain or farmer, grizzled, big-boned, austere. Johnston, who came in through the dining room door, was much closer to Tweedledum or Tweedledee. A round head with cherubic expression rested on a roly-poly body in a rumpled black suit. The only thing that destroyed the image of an overgrown boy was the heavy shadow on the cheeks and chin. Either he had not shaved, or some rugged ancestor’s genes had given him a naturally heavy beard. He was not at all shifty-eyed, yet Alex felt a shiftiness nonetheless.
“Ceviche,” the cherubic man explained, shutting the door behind him. “Fresh fish cured in lemon. I’m expecting my wife back from Europe this evening, in time for the funeral. But Josefina is an excellent cook.” He served himself some of the fish as he talked, and then he stopped talking to refuel. He shoveled the food in, but not absently. He enjoyed it. His tongue searched for any morsels that remained on his plump pink lips. “I understand you wanted to see me concerning Scatty,” he said then. He blinked. “Concerning my son.”
That answered one question Alex had not known how he was going to ask. The nickname was a childhood leftover, not part of the newer, shadier identity that Lowell Johnston had carved out.
“Yes,” Alex said. “It does concern Scat. Frankly, it concerns the circumstances surrounding his death.”
“I see.” More fish disappeared. “My older son said you represented yourself as an attorney. Am I being sued, or do you have some sort of… proposition to make?”
“Proposition. I am… a friend of a friend of your son’s. I wonder if you’d mind telling me about his nickname, by the way.”
“Not at all.” Not at all. Alex had a flash of the kind of jolly creature one should beware of in fairy tales— the friendly elf who feeds you a delicious meal, which you find out too late is a potion that turns you forever into a fish. Caroline Davis’s grandfather had allegedly renamed himself after the sturgeon, the caviar fish. “Lowell was the youngest,’’ the father said, “and so he was nicknamed by the older children. As an infant he would double over in laughter when they chased the cat. When he began to have words, he would try that one out whenever the creature appeared. ‘Scat,’ he’d cry at the top of his lungs. ‘Scat.’ ”
The father seemed genuinely pleased to share the recollection. He stopped eating and smiled inwardly, lowering his innocent blue eyes. Because he was remembering a happy time? Or because he envied the boy’s ability to scream that way, at the top of his lungs? It didn’t seem that Graham Johnston would ever do that kind of thing. “We should have stopped calling him that, I suppose,” he went on. “That’s what he did from this house, as soon as he got that motorcycle at sixteen. He went. Scat. Gone.” He blinked again. “I really didn’t know my son very well. But he was my son. I gather that to you he was, or is, only a means to some other end. So now let’s talk business. As you can imagine, this is a busy and difficult time.”
What business? Alex wanted to know. Something to do with New Hampshire. All he could think of was that Graham Johnston knew or suspected his son had been in some deep shit. So now he was expecting to be approached by— whom? Lawyers? Why? Business? What? Could you sue a father for damages inflicted by his late son? Was it wealth he was protecting, a trust fund, against a claim upon Scat Johnston’s estate? Or was he expecting to be hit up for money right now, hush money— as if the family name, the son’s reputation, was all that remained of the son’s life to be saved?
“As you know,’’ Alex said, “your son was involved in a fatal accident in New Hampshire shortly before he died.” He said this slowly, a man revealing his purpose bit by bit as the civilities and delicacies were put away and the men moved on to claret, business, and cigars. But in fact he could playact all he wanted; he had nothing more to say except the truth. “I’m trying to find out about that, and whether it could have any connection to what happened to him next.”
“If you are a private investigator, I’m not interested. I’m content to leave things in the hands of the police.”
“I’m not a licensed investigator, but I’m looking into this for Mrs. Davis, whose granddaughter was the skier in the accident.” Alex laid Rosemarie’s letter of introduction on the old, scarred wood. “You’re welcome to call Mrs. Davis if you have any doubts about me. She thinks the deaths may be connected. I’d like to ask you some questions on her behalf.”
Graham Johnston did not pick the letter off the table, but he read it carefully nonetheless. When he looked up, his face had lost its glow, and the shadow had become more pronounced. He rang a small Colonial-style bell, which he picked off the windowsill. Josefina appeared swiftly, and silently she cleared the two plates and what was left of the ceviche away. “I see,” Johnston said for the second time. There was no anger visible or audible in what he went on to say— only resignation, a sad fat boy’s resignation at being the way he was, and the world being the way it was, too.
“I have nothing to tell you,” he said to Alex. “Unless I find some reason to be dissatisfied with the police, I prefer, as I said, to leave it to them. They say that so far the trail leads right to that girl Suzanne. The two of them rode up to that other girl’s apartment on that damn motorbike, his new one, though the temperature was twenty degrees. At the time they say Scatty would have died, she ran out the door, mounted his bike, and roared off. I don’t think anything that happened anywhere else has any bearing on the case.”
“I see,” Alex said. “And suppose, as I look into this, I come up with any information about your son’s life that I think you would want to know. Should I route this information through the police?”
“None of it can hurt him anymore,” Graham Johnston replied.
“Well,” Alex said. “Thank you for your time, and please pardon my intrusion.”
“Yes.” Scat’s father stood and turned toward the dining room door. Over his shoulder he dismissed his visitor. “Josefina will show you out.”
Josefina did, and Alex got no chance to see who or what else was in the house. He retraced his steps down the path and then turned right on Brattle, taking himself for a walk instead of getting in his car. Graham Johnston had agreed to see him on the expectation there was some kind of proposition, some buying or selling to be done. He had been nervous, blinking and shoveling in the food, yet he had also been circling, sizing up, preparing for a fight. Then, when Alex had laid his cards on the table, Graham Johnson had grown calm. He had overestimated Alex’s hand, or mistaken him for someone else. When Alex turned out to be Rosemarie Davis’s emissary, blundering in the dark, that had been the end of that.
Alex walked till he came to an open green. It was a green in summer, of course. Now it was a big open white. It lay between the Mormon church and the Quaker one. It would be a good place to stand in the sun.
The old Puritan-descended churches— Congregational and Unitarian— were close in to Harvard Square. The heretical faiths had somehow ended up out here, on either side of a large elliptical drive, and had maintained the space in the middle as an empty buffer between them. Alex crunched his boots into the softening snow and turned so the sun could hit his face. There were four more hours until he could call for his test res
ults, just before five o’clock. He closed his eyes in the sunlight, tucked his pelvis, bent his knees, extended one hand in front of him palm out, and formed the other into a relaxed fist resting at the ready on his hip.
Just stand, he told himself, stand solid and breathe. Now imagine each breath entering through the hands and the feet and the toes. Let the four streams of healing breath travel inward through the marrow of your bones. Where the streams met, he imagined them rising through his spine and circulating also in the marrow of his skull. Then he breathed out, sealing off the marrow behind the escaping breath. The energy, now under a sort of pressure, was expelled through his open hand toward whoever or whatever might be in front of it.
Cleansing the marrow, this technique was prosaically called. Like all exercises related to the internal schools of Chinese boxing, it drew no distinct line between relaxation and power, or between medicine and martial arts. This technique helped the practitioner to become rooted and to develop power. It was also a meditation, a healing practice. Alex liked to cleanse his marrow at least once a week. He enjoyed it, and after all it could do no harm. It was as prudent as changing the oil every two thousand miles. Today it was more than prudent. Alex wondered whether Taoism, from which tai chi was derived, included a concept of prayer. Soon he was ready to walk back to his car. He would call Bernie again and convince him that he could spare half an hour. Then he would park near the subway and meet Bernie downtown.
The sun stayed out, its glow nice on the white lawns. Some of the tree branches had been sheathed in ice, which now dripped and glistened in the faraway heat. All that marred the effect were the gray, gritty snowbanks heaped by the plows at the edge of the street— dirty, jagged ramparts now turning to slush. Alex was thinking about springtime when he noticed the glistening pattern on the windshield of his car.
It was a beautiful pattern, an intricate spiderweb gleaming like strings of icy pearls in the winter light. At first he thought it was just a trick of that light, a shining effect of the melting frost. Then he realized that there shouldn’t be any frost, or droplets, or any kind of lines. Because the window, when he left the car, had been dry. He felt that trapped thing again, that creature trying to fight its way out of his gut. He broke into a run. What he found was what he’d deduced would be there.
The windshield had been smashed— not just smashed, but worked over carefully, probably with a hammer. There was a gaping, jagged hole in the middle, and everywhere else spread a network of shatter lines. The same thing had been done to the back window, only the vandal had put two big holes there. Someone had stood here and methodically done this to the glass. Someone who wasn’t afraid to do so in public on this peaceful but well-watched Brahmin street.
Robbery was not the motive. Number one, the side windows, offering easier access to the door locks, were untouched. Number two, the car was more than ten years old, and almost any other on the street would have been more enticing to steal or to rifle. Number three, no effort had been made to break loose enough shards to get inside. And number four, Alex saw, was that wrapped tightly around the passenger-side windshield wiper, like a bandage holding together a wounded arm, was a white piece of paper, a note. He unwound it and found that it was typewritten in all caps. It was almost a poem. At least it had a title, the way a poem would. It was almost incoherent, too. Yet it was sharply focused; an offer of a trade, a deal, backed up by a threat.
ICE CREAM SUNDAE(Y)
SHE IS NOTHING, DESSERT, VANILLA CREAM PIE.
DO YOU KNOW WHAT IT IS TO LOSE A SON?
DO YOU HAVE SOMETHING (SOMEONE) PRECIOUS YOU ARE AFRAID TO LOSE?
I GIVE THE ORDERS. SERVE UP THE DESSERT BY SUNDAY!
SERVE IT UP,
THE PRETTY POISON, THE SCUM.
NO MORE TROUBLE NOW.
SUZANNE BY SUNDAY.
OR ELSE!!
Alex rerolled the note, taking care not to disturb the front side of the paper. He found his keys, unlocked the door, put the note in the glove compartment, and locked that. He unlocked the trunk and then started the engine so it could warm up. From the trunk he took one of the bricks he kept for blocking the wheels when changing a tire. He hefted the brick; got a running start down the concrete path, swiveled from his hips, and directed as much of his anger as he could into the snap of elbow, forearm, and wrist.
The brick crashed cleanly through a picture window. The picture window was to the right of the door, probably the living room. Two voices, Alex thought, screamed as he ran back to his car.
Accelerating away from the curb, heart pounding, Alex was no longer surprised at what he had found, nor was he surprised at what he had done. He understood that fury had a way of erupting. You could be controlled and as methodical as all hell about it, but still you couldn’t control what you were about to do. That could be true of himself, heaving a brick. It could be true of a Tweedledum going bang-bang-bang with a hammer after hastily typing a note. It could be true of a driver who rammed two tons of steel into a nineteen-year-old skier as she tried awkwardly to slide or quickstep across pavement. And it could be true of somebody who drove a knife, again and again, into a well-born man who dealt heroin, a man named after the act of scaring a cat.
If Alex wasn’t careful, the message on his wiper blade proclaimed, that kind of fury could be unleashed on his daughter too. He drove home. He steered with one hand as he punched out the hole in the windshield with the other gloved fist. The glass came off like sections of jigsaw puzzle, the pieces still clinging together as you take the puzzle apart.
8. EMERGENCY ROOM
The house where Alex lived was a two-and-a-half decker, built close to the street. It had no yard, unlike the Johnstons’ house, but it did have generous front porches on the first and second floors, each enclosed by a half-wall.
Alex lived in the first-floor apartment. The owners, Frank and Anne LaFarge, lived on the second and third floors. Anne liked Alex. Her youngest child had just gone away to college, the first to do so, at UMass’s bigger campus in Amherst. The older children were married and working, with homes of their own. Anne had recently hinted that she’d like to sell the house to Alex if she could talk Frank into moving to a newer and smaller place the way she’d like. She mentioned that Alex and Meredith, together, might make enough to get a mortgage, even with rates and prices the way they were. Two-family homes weren’t under rent control; either apartment could bring in a pretty high rent. If they couldn’t come up with a down payment, maybe they knew some other “young people,” as Anne said, to make the place into condos, one unit per couple.
Today Alex and Anne arrived home at the same moment. Alex wasn’t quite sure why he’d come home, since he recalled that he had a spare set of windows in his shop. These came off a Saab 99 EMS like his from a customer who had skidded hard into a telephone pole the first bad freeze of the winter. It didn’t take much, in the insurance company’s view, to total a car that old. Thanks to the shoulder belts, both the customer’s head and the windshield had survived.
Alex supposed he was coming home because of the screwy threatening note and the careful way his car had been mauled. He wanted to know that his apartment was safe and undisturbed, that nothing had been done to Maria’s pictures and posters, her toys, her old stuffed horse, her desk with pens and pencils stacked neatly to be ready when she returned. This would allow him to feel the threat had been vacant, a blind flailing-out, that “SOMETHING (SOMEOME) PRECIOUS” was not really aimed at Maria at all. However, when he saw Anne staring at his windshield, he wished he’d gone to the shop instead. He began to make up something about vandalism and insurance estimates as they each got out their keys to the separate entrance doors, side by side on the front porch. He didn’t look around the porch. Anne, with pride and responsibilities of ownership, did.
“That girl…” she said, her glove coming to her mouth.
What girl? he started to say, what local scandal was this? Then Alex caught the true shock in Anne LaFarge’s voice. Suzanne L
utrello lay huddled on her side in the far corner of the porch, hidden from the street, hidden as well from the sun. Her legs were drawn up in a fetal position. Her arms, instead of being curled around her knees, stretched straight, unnaturally straight, behind her back. Her head rolled forward, the left temple pressed against the floorboards. Her eyes were shut, and she looked as if she had been there a long time. She wasn’t wearing a coat, only a black sweater. Anne went toward her, but Alex hurried past. His first guess was that Maria was no longer in danger— that Suzanne, the vanilla ice cream, was not just cold but dead. He could see that her hands, bare beyond the sleeves of her sweater, were blue. Her wrists were tied together with what looked like the cord from a venetian blind.
As he got to her, Suzanne opened her eyes and then let them shut. That made twice now that Alex had given her up for dead when she was not. He felt guilty, vowed to make it up to her, as he tried to sit her up. She gasped and then groaned. Alex fished for his pocketknife to free her hands. Meanwhile, Anne Lafarge crouched down and laid the younger woman’s head in her lap. She began massaging Suzanne’s face. Alex cut through the cord and tried to restore circulation in the wrists and hands. Suzanne gasped again and now she tried to move, so Anne and Alex both helped. Suzanne grabbed awkwardly for her left shoulder with her right hand. She missed. Alex felt her shoulder, to see what was wrong. She screamed a soft, whimpering scream.
