“No,” she said, “you’re right. It’s my feeling—and this isn’t based on anything in particular, it’s just my gut—but I don’t think she fell or was whacked on the back of the head by the boom of a sailboat. She was found in the slough—do you remember the slough there at the bottom of the orchard?—miles from where her sailboat grounded. She had boyfriend troubles to say the least. She was, I believe, sleeping with at least one other man besides the boyfriend. She has troubled and angry siblings—a furious sister. No, I don’t think it was an accident.” Sounding more vehement than she intended.
Dr. Lindstrom was silent for a long moment. “As law enforcement,” he said finally, “it must be very hard when you deal with people whose values are not your own.”
“I deal with people all the time whose values are not my own,” snapped Irene. “It’s nothing to do with values. Nothing. It’s dangerous behavior, that’s all. Come on, you know why crimes are committed as well as I do. Greed, jealousy, fear of exposure.”
“Has it been in the papers?” he asked.
“A notice in the Mason County Journal,” Irene said. “Summer resident, apparent boating accident.”
“How come you’re such a terrier on this? Why not let it go?”
It was a question she hadn’t seen coming, a question she was unprepared to answer. But she thought about it for only a moment, then said, “Why would I let it go? I’m a cop, Dr. Lindstrom, it’s my job.”
“Hmm,” he murmured, lifted eyebrows indicating his skepticism.
“I saw her,” said Irene, “I saw her dead body. I held her hand. She was a smart girl and a pretty girl, an accomplished person in the midst of her life. She didn’t need to die. I want to know who did this.”
BACK IN the car, Irene was grateful for the air-conditioning. She didn’t quite know how it had gone with Dr. Lindstrom. She knew more now, she’d learned some things, but he was cagy, opaque, and protective of the hospital. She wondered if she could have pressed harder, if there’d been an advantage she didn’t gain. You didn’t get do-overs with this kind of interview. You had your shot and showed your cards. Surprise was only on your side once. He would be circling the wagons now, directing staff not to talk, monitoring communications. There was something, she thought, that was elusive and important, something about Anne as a person, as a therapist—her personality and her availability—that made her vulnerability more plausible. No one was neutral on the subject of Anne. She wondered if she would have done better if she weren’t tired, if she hadn’t flown all night, if it were cooler. She wondered if she was out of her league. She was dealing with smart, educated, psychologically sophisticated people. She felt blunt and provincial in comparison.
XXII
Trees totally unlike the familiar, brooding conifers of home lined Fresh Pond Drive and shielded Longfellow’s yellow clapboard house on Brattle. At a corner market where Irene stopped for coffee and a doughnut, the clerk’s accent was startling— a’s flat as Kennedy’s. She felt again like Alice or Dorothy, traveling in a different universe.
The house was on Huron Street, a three-story frame structure painted barn red, porches across the front at each level, the roots of a copper beech in the front yard lifting the sidewalk—a house like all its neighbors in this part of Cambridge, tall, gawky, almost rickety. There must have been a building trend at some point in the last century. The houses were all too large for the lots, shoulder to shoulder, leaving narrow side yards used for off-street parking and garbage cans. Irene pulled up behind the black-and-white parked in front.
Officer Sean Egan was younger than she had expected, with black Irish good looks, dark hair, fair skin, weirdly pale hazel eyes—and a boxer’s pitched forward, balanced stance. He looked her over as they shook hands, noting, she thought, though he didn’t comment, her discolored eye, the concealing makeup atomizing in the heat and humidity. “Landlord’s not here, boss,” he said, “but on his way. I can let you in.”
Boss. She wondered if he said it ironically, tweaking her— rural heat from the sticks, not to be taken seriously, messing with his day.
The house would once have been a single-family dwelling, now converted to a duplex, with the landlord occupying the bottom two floors and Anne’s apartment on top. The foyer was more elegant than the exterior would have suggested, with a black and white marble floor, paneled pocket doors leading presumably into the landlord’s living space opposite the stairs, and a kitchen entrance straight ahead—a window in the door giving a glimpse of tall, glass-fronted cabinets. There was a Persian miniature in a gilt frame on the wall, which, when Irene leaned in to look more closely, she realized was erotic—a delicately painted vignette showing a prince or king in some sort of glade or garden, his hands on the hips of a courtesan kneeling before him, his enormous penis about to enter her, while attendants with averted faces awaited in surrounding thickets. For a moment Irene was transported—then she looked away in confusion, embarrassed and aroused.
A trench coat, a Panama hat, and a Red Sox baseball cap hung on an antique hall tree, and Irene glimpsed her own hot and disheveled face in the beveled mirror next to Sean Egan’s amused, pale visage. In the mirror he smiled. He had been there before and knew what she had seen.
A road bike leaned against the stairs beside a blue and white Chinese porcelain umbrella stand. This, Irene thought, was where Anne came home every night, to a cool marble hall and a bit of highbrow pornography. She was interested now in meeting the landlord, Dr. Bernstein, who, she had learned, was an organic chemistry professor at Barnard. She wondered if the bicycle belonged to Ira or to him.
Irene followed Sean Egan up two flights of steep, worn wooden stairs, too narrow to meet modern building codes, and arrived at a landing on the top level in front of the locked and sealed door to Anne’s apartment. They were both huffing slightly with the exertion. Two flights below Irene heard the front door open and a man’s voice called, “Hello?”
“Officer Egan, sir,” shouted Officer Egan, “Cambridge PD.”
“Right,” came the voice, “let yourself in. I’ll be up in a moment.”
Officer Egan cut the seal and unlocked the door, standing back to let Irene enter. Here, on the third story, the east-facing windows were capturing the late morning sun filtering through the coppery leaves of the beech outside, and the room was suffused in rosy light and was hot as an oven. Officer Egan moved quickly to shove wide the French doors that opened onto the porch. Irene looked around. They had stepped directly into Anne’s living room, a long narrow room running across the front of the house under sloping eaves. It was a pretty and comfortable room—white sofa, worn Oriental rug on the dark plank floor, a wooden trunk for a coffee table, book-lined walls, a dining table against the back wall, one end piled with catalogues and magazines. Irene could see the kitchen, white and old-fashioned, beyond a short cupboard-lined butler’s pantry. On the other end of the room a similar passage led past a bathroom to the bedroom. Start in the bedroom, she decided, in the back of the apartment, and work forward. It wouldn’t take long.
Shrinks had a penchant for mid-century Danish furniture. She wondered why that was. The Oriental rugs she understood— Freud’s room had had one, she’d seen pictures—but Danish modern hadn’t yet been invented in Freud’s time. On a leggy, two-drawer teakwood nightstand there was a framed photo of Anne and Ira in happier days in a sailboat somewhere, shoulder to shoulder, leaning into each other, backs against the gunwale. She searched quickly through the drawers. This was routine for her, something she was trained in. People’s personal lives revealed themselves, but it was more than that you were searching for, it was something unexpected, the item that didn’t fit—like the elementary school exercise, hat, coat, scarf, banana, boots, circle one.
Out in the other room she heard Officer Egan greet the landlord and the landlord’s voice responding. She was moving quickly, on to the closet now—clothes jammed together, exploding off the hanging rod above shoes, shoe boxes, shopping bags. In the
full-length mirror fastened to the inside of the closet door she glimpsed the room reflected behind her, the living room beyond, and the man moving through the doorway toward her.
Her heart stopped and her breath caught, she was reaching for the gun under her arm, sinking into a crouch, before she even began to pivot. One knee on the closet floor, arms together, outstretched, right hand supporting the left, the pistol steady as Gibraltar and pointed at his chest, arresting his forward momentum—his hands lifting, palms out in shock and fear, eyes on the gun, peril registering before recognition. Then his gaze lifted and he looked at her face, recognition dawning as they stared at each other. The landlord, Dr. Bernstein, was the man in her binoculars on the beach, the face in the speeding car.
Behind him Officer Egan’s startled face appeared in the doorway, taking in the tableau.
“Who are you?” breathed Julian Bernstein. Then, his eyes flickering to Officer Egan, “Who is she?” Fear and alarm in his voice. “What’s she doing here?”
“Detective Irene Chavez,” said Officer Egan blandly, “from Washington State. As arranged.” Mildly, “You two know each other?”
“Cuff him,” said Irene.
“Easy, boss,” said Egan.
“Detective Chavez,” repeated Dr. Bernstein, processing.
“Right,” she snapped.
“I talked to you,” he said.
“Right,” she said again.
“I didn’t know it was you,” he said.
“Now you do,” she said. She thought about the times he’d seen her—walking barefoot on the beach in her plainclothes and later whizzing past in her unmarked car. Nothing to suggest an officer of the law. Her name, her voice on the phone, not connected to any image of her. No wonder he was surprised. As much a surprise to him as to her. They had no more expected each other than the man in the moon, though she’d been seeking him while he’d probably never imagined he’d see her again. Her heart was slowing. She straightened up out of her crouch, keeping the gun trained on him. “Cuff him,” she said again, “We’re taking him in.”
Officer Egan rolled his eyes but she jerked her chin and he made a little pirouette in the air with a downward pointing finger, and Julian Bernstein turned cooperatively and leaned against the wall and allowed himself to be patted down and handcuffed. Irene holstered her gun and read him his rights.
“My, my, my,” said Officer Egan.
HOURS LATER, twilight in Cambridge, long after having called Jet Blue to cancel her return, and calling Wanda to explain the delay on the east coast to question a suspect, her cell phone rang. It confounded her that the phone could work here on the east coast, receive a call from Mason County three thousand miles away, when she couldn’t pick up a signal or receive an incoming call in Mason County itself. It didn’t compute. She thought about the signal relayed from tower to tower like a ping-pong ball, crossing the Rockies, bouncing over the plains, across the Mississippi, rolling up the Ohio River valley and popping over the Alleghenies and Appalachians to vibrate the phone on her belt here where she sat in a hot, dreary interrogation room in Cambridge, Mass.
It was Giles Yates, one of her department’s detectives who was working on the narcotics investigation with the Kitsap County officers, calling to report that he’d manufactured an excuse to drop in on Patrick McGrath, who was jumpy as hell and probably hiding something, whether it was a grow operation or a human bite along his jaw. He had a four-day stubble and if there was a laceration his beard was concealing it, and should he trump something up and bring him in for closer inspection?
“Don’t worry about it,” she told him, “let’s drop it. Thanks for trying.” She didn’t care. She’d had blood drawn before she left. It was only for information since there was nothing wrong in her mouth suggesting she was vulnerable and nothing to be done in any case; but still, she’d tasted his blood and it scared her and she wanted to know. They’d draw blood again in thirty days and again after ninety, and then she’d be in the clear. Or not. She wanted the whole thing behind her.
She’d walked out into the hall to take the call, tired and glad of the break, the excuse to leave the room. She walked the length of the hall and dialed Victor. He answered and reported that he’d just gotten off work and he was by himself and when was she coming home? As soon as she could get on a flight, she told him—and what would he have for supper? Sausages he’d brought home from the store. Please walk the dog. Anything else new?
“That guy came by again,” he said, “Theo.”
“What’s up with that?” she asked.
“I think he’s more interested in you than in me, Mom,” he said.
A bird fluttered in her chest, then closed its wings. She ignored it. Victor saw her differently now, she realized, no longer as just his mother, part of the furniture of his world, but suddenly as a separate person, a woman, with a constellation of her own, others in orbit besides him, and potential perils and promises. An exponential leap in growing up.
“I don’t think he’s going to prosecute us,” he added.
“Is that what he said?”
“Well, not exactly.”
“Well, what exactly did he say?” she asked.
“He didn’t say anything really. I think he wanted to know where you were.”
“And what did you say?” she asked.
“I said you were working.”
“Okay,” she said, “I am.”
“’Bye,” he said.
“I love you,” she replied.
“Okay,” he said. And hung up.
SHE WALKED back down the hall. Julian Bernstein had been right, the cuffs weren’t necessary. He wasn’t dangerous, wasn’t a flight risk. He was amenable and cooperative. She had sat for hours in the small, windowless interrogation room at the Cambridge Police Department headquarters asking questions, listening to his answers, and now, after it all, she had nothing—no compelling evidence that he caused any harm to Anne Paris that would justify an arrest. Just his proximity, which alone was not enough, and his strangely obsessional relationship with Anne. She couldn’t hold him. She was going to have to let him go. What she did know was his story, which had come out slowly at first, in terse answers to her questions, then in a raw, confessional rush that sounded truthful and unedited.
XXIII
Initially, Julian Bernstein didn’t think he liked Anne. She’d come to look at the apartment. A tall girl, and taller still in platform sandals, with streaked blonde hair, disorganized as though she’d just gotten out of bed, long bangs falling into her eyes, wisps along her collarbone, surprisingly dark brows like crow’s wings above arresting blue eyes level with his own. And young, a decade and a half his junior, just beginning a psychiatric residency. Not pretty exactly, he said, but very assured and self-possessed. Her voice was husky and melodic, and soft so that when she spoke you had to lean in to hear, and he felt drawn against his will, tilting his head to hers. He was annoyed when she laid her hand on his arm. Then she was all business. She ran the water in the shower and said the pressure was low and the drain was slow. It would have to be fixed. She looked in the oven and under the sink and said her boyfriend would have to leave his bicycle in the downstairs hall unless there was covered parking where it could be locked up. They would paint, she said, but he would have to supply the materials, and no, she would not agree to his approval of the color, it would be shades of white in any case. A princess, he thought, and who does she think she is? But she wrote a check for the first and last months’ rent and he gave her the key, wondering what he was in for. In imagination he lay in bed listening to the clack of her heels crisscrossing the ceiling overhead, tracking her movements while sleep eluded him.
He felt, he said, afraid she would take advantage of him somehow, afraid that he shouldn’t have allowed her in and that she’d gained a purchase in his world that put him in some way in jeopardy, and so he watched her. He listened for her car, for her footsteps on the stairs and the rush of water in the pipes in the walls
signaling a bath or a shower or the toilet flushing. At night he noticed the lights from the rooms of her apartment going on and off reflected on the limbs of the trees growing next to the house. Her mail came through the slot in the front door along with his own, and he read the names of the senders as he sorted hers into a bowl on the hall tree. He learned to recognize the handwriting of her parents and he knew the catalogue companies she ordered from and the magazines she subscribed to.
She paid the rent on time and she and Ira made small improvements to the apartment, adding wooden blinds and bookcases that Ira installed and painted so they looked built-in and original. Their days were long and they came and went separately, Ira on the bicycle and Anne in her Subaru.
Sometimes Julian smelled cooking and could tell what they were having for dinner, curry or a roasted chicken. Rarely, friends came over and there was music and laughter overhead and Julian could neither concentrate nor sleep. Once, when he went up to protest, Anne gave him a seductive, reproachful look and took his arm, drawing him in, putting a glass in his hand, introducing him to the guests as ‘the disturbed landlord from downstairs.’ Disturbed. Disturbed how, he wondered? It wasn’t clear. Disturbed by the noise or disturbed as a term of art, his mental state? Did she know he listened and watched? He wondered if he had been found out. Or had she ascertained something about him he didn’t know himself and made a diagnosis?
He was, he knew, very much alone. He had been divorced for a long time and his last girlfriend had left several years before. In Anne’s apartment—his apartment, really, if you thought about it, the top of his house—he felt awkward and out of place and wondered how to leave. Just walk out the door, he said to himself. Say ‘goodnight’ and ‘keep it down’ and leave. But he didn’t. He lingered and drank too much red wine, talking to no one in any meaningful sense in any way that he could remember, watching. Later, Latin music pulsing, Anne climbed onto the coffee table and danced an exuberant, uninhibited salsa, her high heels castanets on the trunk lid, sinuous arms outstretched. Julian was mesmerized by the twitch of her hips. When the party broke up he left feeling agitated and confused. He didn’t know if he’d been welcomed or been had. He wished he hadn’t gone up. Perhaps, he thought, he should ask them to leave.
An Unattended Death Page 14
