Five days later, the medical examiner reported the death to the office of the Queens County Public Administrator, the institution temporarily in charge of disposing of the guy’s estate, and an investigator entered the scene, while the police were still carrying out their inquiries. Sometimes, winding up an estate can take a year or even longer—lost papers, a nephew from Utah who didn’t pick up the phone, two cousins fighting over an old car.
Purely by chance, that investigator was me, Jack Bertrand, yours truly.
At the time, there were four of us working as investigators for the Queens County Public Administrator. The others were Ralph Mendoza, a former police officer in his fifties, tall, sad, and divorced; Linda Martino, who had been a stay-at-home mom of three for the last seventeen years, before her husband suddenly died of a stroke, leaving her broke; and a twenty-something guy named Alan Cole, hired just a couple of weeks before, and whom I knew almost nothing about, except that he was from Missouri.
We worked in pairs, as a means of discouraging theft, but Linda and the new guy were already on an inquiry elsewhere and Ralph was off work to attend the funeral of a relative in upstate. So I took the bus to Jackson Heights by myself, and eventually tracked down the super, a short man with a strong Slavic accent. He showed me to the apartment on the second floor, removed the police tape from the door, opened it and left, after leaving a set of keys on the coffee table in the living room.
It was a seven-hundred-square-foot apartment with a Murphy bed and a small bathroom, a clean, decent home for a middle-aged single. My task as an investigator was to ransack the apartment in search of cash, rocks, gold, artworks, and any other valuables, which had to be kept secured until the next of kin were legally able to get their claws on them.
I knew that the detectives had already searched every nook and cranny for clues, but as they hadn’t found anything useful to their inquiry, except for some papers, all of the guy’s belongings still had to be there. I opened the window and sat on the couch for a while, trying to figure out where I should begin. Did he have any cash or gold stashed somewhere? You don’t have to be rich to hide things under the floorboards, especially when you live alone. Folks with deep pockets keep their valuables in concealed wall safes or bank deposit boxes. But this guy had no safe, so he probably had a stash.
The furniture was old and the items didn’t match; they’d probably been picked up from garage sales or second-hand stores. There was a small cream-colored rug on the floor, under the coffee table, with a pale, brownish stain in the middle, and five bookshelves by the window, with about fifty cheap paperbacks covered with dust, and a pile of old magazines. A strong smell of tobacco lingered in the air, but I didn’t notice any ashtrays or cigarettes. I stood up, moved the table into a corner, rolled up the rug, and put it by the door. Outside the window, I could hear a woman laughing loudly.
An hour later, I was sitting in an armchair, contemplating the shabby haul of items that were lying on the floor before me like the last remains of a vanished planet. A vintage, solid gold Hamilton wristwatch with a black leather strap, still working; twenty-one old American silver coins (nickels, dimes, quarters, halves, and dollars), stowed in a brain-tanned leather pouch; a Japanese etching, depicting a landscape viewed from above, set in a tiny plain frame; a St. Christopher-Pray-for-Us pendant on a chain, probably silver or silver plated, but without any hallmarks; another wristwatch, a gold Omega, not working; an expensive Ghurka Marley Hodgson old duffle bag, made of leather and canvas; a stag-handled Case XX folding penknife; a Zippo lighter, dry and with no flint, emblazoned with a golden Hawaii ad.
The keepsakes and family heirlooms left behind by those who die don’t lose their meaning, but in the absence of their former possessor, they just obscure their true significance, turning themselves into puzzle pieces. Every little object—a toothbrush in the bathroom, an empty prescription bottle forgotten in the medicine cabinet, a pair of old shoes in the cupboard, a pile of correspondence lying unopened on the dining table in the living room, a mysterious key that doesn’t fit any lock, some old photos—all these become small parts of the same riddle, and one has to fumble for each little piece until, suddenly, they reveal the real story of the one who once owned them. What kind of a person was he? Did he live a happy life? Did he know he was going to die soon and have time to prepare himself for the big jump, or was it something completely unexpected? What about that gold watch? Was it a gift from his parents? Were they still alive, wondering why wasn’t he calling them? Did he kill himself or was it just an accident?
That’s what I like more about my job: the riddles, each of them different than the others, each of them telling a completely different story.
I checked the clothes in the mirrored wardrobe by the bedroom window one more time, carefully searching every pocket and feeling each seam, but I didn’t find anything else. Just as I was about to go back into the living room, I spotted a Cole Haan shoebox, which I’d missed during my first sweep. I opened it. There were three spiral notebooks inside, filled with writing. I rifled through the pages for cash, but found nothing, so I put the box back in the wardrobe and went into the living room.
I’d noticed that there were no personal photos or letters in the apartment and I thought that the police must have taken them away, even though they usually didn’t do that.
After finishing the inventory, I put the items in the standard bag I’d brought with me from the office and sealed it. I made myself a coffee and drank it by the open window while smoking two cigarettes, one after the other. Usually in such cases, the super notifies the utilities suppliers right away, so that they can disconnect the phone, electricity, water, and gas. But all the utilities were still on and I wondered whether somebody else had already rented it.
I closed the window, washed the mug, put it back in the cupboard, and left, taking the belongings with me. I tried to find the super, but he wasn’t in his office on the ground floor, so I held on to the keys.
That was on a Tuesday. The woman showed up three days later, on Friday, at around six p.m.
*
Over the next two days I thought of Abraham Hale every now and then, the man who had become just another case number in the computer system at our office. His belongings were down in the underbelly of the building, in the property room, so for all intents and purposes my work on the case was basically over. I hadn’t mentioned to anybody that I still had the keys to his apartment. No one asked me about them, anyway, and the super didn’t call me to retrieve them.
On the third day, I couldn’t resist asking my boss, Larry Salvo, whether the police had dug up any information on Hale. But he just shrugged and sent me to another address, somewhere in College Point, on 127th Street. This time, I went there with Linda Martino, so on the way I had to listen to her endless stories about her kids, bad schools, and groping bankers.
After we’d finished, I lied to Linda about having to meet somebody in the area, so she dropped me off near a subway station. I took the train to Jackson Heights and got off at Roosevelt Avenue. I’m not sure what I was thinking. Maybe I just wanted to give the keys back to the super. But then, as I was walking down the street, I remembered the notebooks and got curious. I told myself that it wouldn’t do any harm to take a closer look at them. What if they had sentimental value and I’d left them there, for someone to throw away?
I used the brass key to enter the building, and it was then that I first noticed the mailboxes on the left of the lobby. After you die, your mail keeps on growing, like your hair and nails. People continue to send you letters, because either they don’t know or they don’t care that you’re gone, as if they were playing some macabre prank on you. I used another key to open the mailbox with his name on it and took with me the wad of envelopes and fliers that were inside. The building was silent and still.
I let myself into the apartment and closed the door behind me. I noticed a mug on the table, which hadn’t been there three days ago. The police must have come back
and one of the officers had made coffee. I checked the lights and the faucets: the electricity and water were still on, and the phone hadn’t been disconnected either, which was unusual.
I sat down on the couch and looked through Hale’s mail, discarding the fliers and ads. There was a letter from a bank, in a white envelope, and an invoice from Time Warner Cable.
I opened the window and smoked a cigarette, using a saucer as an ashtray. I asked myself what I was doing there. If I were caught in the apartment, I’d be in deep trouble. I took the notebooks from the wardrobe and began looking through them.
Two were old spiral Rhodia notebooks, and the third was an elegant Clairfountaine, with a black cover. The notes looked as if they’d been written at different periods, but there was nothing that could have helped me put an exact date on them. They didn’t look like diary entries, but rather like random, occasional jottings. I didn’t know which of the notebooks to start with, so I picked one of the Rhodias at random, opened it, and read:
When you really want to rob someone, you destroy not his future, but his past. The future is by definition a nebulous uncertainty, a sum of blurry hopes that often won’t come to pass, and if they do—usually either too late or too soon—they’ll be rather disappointing, because our expectations are always too high.
Our past is the sole certainty, the only real shelter we have, even though our memory has in the meantime poured the long-gone important facts and the not so important facts into a completely different mold. The past is unique and unrepeatable, and unlike the future, it’s all yours; good or bad, significant or insignificant, wasted or fruitful, nobody else can have it.
This is what he took from me.
I carried on reading for another two hours or so, walking now and then to the open window to take a few drags on a cigarette. A couple of times, I thought I heard light footfalls outside, but nobody rang the doorbell. The lights were off and the apartment was growing dim.
In his notebooks, Hale had written about an unspecified period of time in the mid-seventies, when he’d been in Paris with two friends of about the same age: Joshua Fleischer, his former roommate at Princeton University, and a French woman by the name of Simone Duchamp, his lover. Later, things had gone south, although he didn’t provide very many details in his notes about why that had happened, and he’d returned to the States. It looked like his friend had seduced Simone, and she’d broken up with him, despite their having been very happy together up until then. In a couple of places he went on about how unscrupulous Fleischer used to be when it came to getting what he wanted. Now, Hale was hell-bent on revenge and hatched all kinds of plans for how to get even. It was clear that he’d kept a close watch on Fleischer, who had also returned to New York by then.
Suddenly, the phone rang. It was a clunky old model, perched on a small stand by the couch. I started violently enough to drop the notebook on the rug.
For a couple of seconds, I tried to figure out what to do. Finally, I decided to answer, thinking I might come by some useful information for the ongoing investigation. Whoever was calling probably knew Hale, but hadn’t yet heard about his death. I reached over and picked up the phone.
There was a woman on the other end of the line. Without introducing herself or even saying hello, she asked me whether I would like her to come over in half an hour, as previously agreed. It somehow felt inappropriate to tell her that I wasn’t the man she was looking for or to give her the bad news over the phone, so I just told her to come right over. She said goodbye and hung up before I had time to change my mind. Everything happened very quickly, while I was still deeply immersed in the story I was reading.
I emptied my improvised ashtray into the trashcan, closed the window, and put the notebooks back in the wardrobe. I decided to tell her (one of Hale’s relatives? his lover? an acquaintance?) that there was still some paperwork that needed to be done and that’s why I was there. It crossed my mind that I could also tell her that I’d met the man before by chance, which was how I knew a couple of things about him and his life. No, we hadn’t been pals, I wouldn’t go that far, but he’d once told me that he’d lived in Paris for a short while, in the mid-seventies. Then I thought better of it: if she asked me something I couldn’t answer, she would end up calling the cops. I considered that she might be able to give me some information about him: occupation, place of work, tastes and inclinations, what motives for suicide he may have had, if he’d ever mentioned the idea of killing himself.
Hale had written in his notebook
People like talking about the dead. It’s as if they conjure them back to life. Everything to do with the deceased already belongs to the past. It’s all carefully stored away in closets, trunks, and boxes, and the timeline has been settled once and for all and it has that definite clarity which comes only with the ending, once all potentialities, uncertainties, reversals or disappointments have been eliminated, and nothing can be misunderstood or reinterpreted anymore. It’s all there, as solid and silent as a gravestone.
I was still thinking about his words when the woman knocked, ignoring the bell. I turned on the lights in the living room and opened the door.
She was around my age, maybe a bit younger, and had the uneasy air of somebody who really wanted to be somewhere else, even though she did greet me with an attempt at a smile. I stepped aside to let her in, and she looked around the place, paying careful attention.
“I know it isn’t exactly the Four Seasons,” I said.
She stopped in the middle of the room, under the light fitting. She didn’t ask me my name or what I was doing there or where Hale was, and I didn’t know what to say. Without waiting for an invitation, she put her shoulder bag on the floor by the couch and sat down in an armchair. She lit a cigarette and glanced around for an ashtray. I went to the kitchen and fetched a saucer, which I put on the coffee table. She crossed her legs and thanked me.
“You’re welcome. Would you like some coffee or tea?”
“No, I’m good, thank you.”
She wasn’t quite beautiful, but she was delicate, had great legs, very nice eyes, and elegant gestures. She was wearing a dark gray two-piece suit with matching shoes. Given the nature of my job, I’d learned to pay attention to apparently insignificant details: the purple polish on her fingernails, the delicate string of pearls round her neck, the minuscule gold earrings, and the small mole by the right corner of her upper lip. She had dark circles under her eyes, which she was unable to fully conceal beneath her makeup.
I lit a cigarette, and for a couple of minutes we just smoked, looking at each other from the corners of our eyes, each waiting for the other to say something. I found the silence embarrassing, so I decided to take the plunge. “I take it you don’t know what happened …” I said.
She raised her eyebrows. “No, I don’t. What are you talking about?”
“Well, I’m very sorry, but your friend, Abraham Hale, passed away three days ago. His body is at the Queens Hospital Center, on Jamaica Avenue. Do you know where that is? The police are still looking for someone who can formally identify him.”
For a couple of minutes, she made no comment, as if weighing how she should react. Then, she stubbed out her cigarette and said, “Well, I’m very sorry to hear that,” and lit another one. Her gaze drifted around the room, almost absently. After a while, she asked, “How did it happen?”
I shrugged. “Nobody knows for sure yet. But it looks like he swallowed too many sleeping pills.”
“You mean he took his own life?”
“Well, it’s possible, but the police think it was most likely an accident.”
“I see …”
I sat down on the couch, next to her. I had a strong feeling that the whole situation was somehow absurd and disconnected from reality, like some random scene from a movie that would be meaningless to anybody who had missed the opening.
“Maybe you’re wondering who I am and what I’m doing here,” I said.
“I don’t think
it’s any of my business, but please go on,” she stressed. “May I use the bathroom first?”
“Please, do. It’s on the left.”
“I know where it is.”
She left her cigarette in the ashtray, stood up, and walked to the bathroom, her high heels clicking on the floor. I finished smoking and swallowed a Tylenol, sensing a migraine was closing in on me. She came back, took off her jacket, and hung it on the hook by the door.
“Were you close friends?” I asked her.
“You might say that.”
She took her cigarette, walked up to the window, and gazed outside. She held her back rigidly straight, in that slightly stiff posture typical of women who attended ballet classes in childhood.
“I knew him a little,” I said. “He told me he lived in Paris for a while. But I didn’t know he was on medication.”
“Sure,” she confirmed, without turning her face toward me. “He really loved talking about those years … I didn’t know about the medication either. I wasn’t aware that he was ill, I mean.”
“Do you know what he did for a living?”
“I never ask personal questions, Mr. …”
I realized that we hadn’t introduced ourselves. I told her my name, but she didn’t tell me hers.
“So, Mr. Bertrand—”
“Please, call me Jack.”
“Okay, Jack … And what did you say you were doing here?”
“I’m thinking of renting this apartment. Do you live in this area?”
“No, I have a place in Woodhaven. Before that, I lived in the Bronx. I’m not from here. I moved to New York ten years ago.”
“I noticed your accent. Is it French?”
“Yes, it’s French. And when do you intend to move in, Jack?”
“Soon, maybe next week. I haven’t finished the paperwork yet.”
Bad Blood Page 10
