Mr Smith. Oh My God, Mr Smith. Claire had finally fallen into a blessed, bourbon-induced sleep somewhere around four, four-thirty. Since she awoke a couple of hours later, fully clothed, to the sound of the doorbell, she has simply been reacting – to the sheriff’s deputies, to the cops – all the while having forgotten most, if not quite all, of what happened last night:
The emptied house;
The vanished family; and
Mr Smith.
(And what happened to Dee? Wasn’t Dee here? Where did she go? Home, let’s hope, so she doesn’t a) get caught up in this; and b) witness Claire’s further humiliation.)
Jesus Christ, the court-ordered foreclosure three months ago? Her house is about to be seized within the month and auctioned off to the highest bidder, because it isn’t her house any more. And now cops are here, like at the beginning of some TV show, leading her to the scene of the crime, and she has to figure out what to say about her dead dog. Claire is aware, as she follows the detectives past the deck and down towards the apple trees in the backyard, that they are looking at her strangely, as if she is not sufficiently surprised or upset by their arrival. But she knows what they’re going to find, and in any case, what is the appropriate way to behave when you’re confronted with the kind of news she has had? She has been more or less gaping for the twelve or so hours she has been home, gaping and bailing and gasping for breath and waiting for the camera crew to appear out of the bushes and say ‘Surprise! It’s all a big hoax! Here’s your husband!’
So she can kill him with her bare hands.
It’s not that the death of her dog is the least of it, but she does wonder if, across the United States, whenever a pet is found dead, two detectives are dispatched to the scene as a general rule, or is it just a Mid-West thing? Since she has no direct experience of the police to date, she can’t say, but it does strike her as unlikely. And how do they know anyway? The thought sequence, again on loan from a TV cop show: helicopter surveillance (at night); infra-red photography (she’s not sure what this is, but has a notion it’s what you need to use); cops identify and secure crime scene. And sure enough, she can see two officers in uniform unspooling yellow tape and a police vehicle disgorging a photographer and some kind of forensic specialist in a white paper suit. For a dead dog? It briefly reminds her of a TV detective show the girls used to watch, but instead of humans, everyone was an elephant or a hippo or a chimp, and the dog wouldn’t have been dead, it would just have had a sore paw. But the girls would never watch such a show now, considering themselves far too old for such childish nonsense, and neither, probably, would anyone else, unless it winked over the shoulders of the children with allegedly humorous allusions to sex and drugs and political scandals. She tears up suddenly, vivid with the sense of passing time and lost innocence, of infants growing old and cynical, of the sad inevitability of decay and death, an entire bolt of somber, Four-Last-Things thought and feeling unfolding and falling through her mind in a lurid cascade. As they pass beneath the gold- and rust- and red-leaved apple trees, her feet crunching on fallen fruit, shivering now in the sharp October air, she braces herself for the sight of Mr Smith in full light, ashamed that she didn’t bury the body, or do more than strew a blanket over it, ashamed that she failed to treat him with the respect she feels was his due. But how could she have buried the family dog without the girls, without Danny?
‘It’s Mr Smith I feel sorry for.’ That was what Danny used to say whenever some domestic crisis hit, and Mr Smith, merrily oblivious, couldn’t understand why no one was playing with him. And of course Mr Smith, in his merry, giddy oblivion, was the great disspeller of domestic crisis, the repository, as the girls grew older and complicated and human, the locus of sheer happiness in their house, the only one when domestic crisis hit that you could play with, that you wanted to. Claire is shaking now, her eyes so blurred with tears that she is upon the scene before she can discern that what is lying there is not remotely what she expected. Her first thought is: maybe it was a dream after all! Because Mr Smith’s body is nowhere to be seen. Instead, there is the body of a man, his hair and clothes stained with mulch and dead leaves and clay, his clothes torn, dark smears of what might be blood around the four or five wounds to his stomach and chest. The body of a dead man, not a dead dog. It was like a sneeze, she says later, as involuntary as a sneeze, the sound she makes, the laugh she laughs, as if some sorcerer had waved his wand or cast his spell and reality had been overthrown, and there, before the fascinated, appalled eyes of the detectives, stands a woman laughing at the sight of a corpse in her own backyard and, indeed, resisting a powerful urge to clap her hands.
‘Ms Taylor?’ Detective Fowler says, and there’s a tone to it, a ‘pull yourself together woman, for God’s sake’ undercurrent she almost appreciates, as if it is clear she’s being hysterical and in truth deserves a slap.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘It’s just …’
‘Just what?’ says Detective Fox abruptly.
But Claire can’t really say what it’s just.
It’s just that someone has gotten rid of the body of her slaughtered dog and replaced it with the body of a man she thinks she recognizes, a man she suspects she saw a week ago at the barbecue, disguised as the Angel of Death, standing at her garden gate, waving his hand (or shaking his fist) at her husband.
It’s just that her husband armed himself with a knife before he approached this man, and then they disappeared out into the Arboretum together.
It’s just that she never asked Danny what had happened (she was in a hurry after the party to get to the airport for her Chicago flight, or at least that’s what she told herself) even though she could see he was shaken by whatever had happened.
It’s just that she didn’t see this man’s face then, but she recognizes him now. She knows that he’s one of Danny’s oldest friends; she knows his name.
It’s just that she’s pretty sure her husband didn’t know she knew him. Or that she had met him. Or that she had as good as slept with him.
‘Ms Taylor, have you ever seen this man before? Do you know who he is?’
Claire reckons she has to say something, and better, when the cops are involved, that it be true.
‘Yes. His name is Gene Peterson.’
Last Night When We Were Young
Fowler and Fox. That’s what they went by. It always sounded like an old English firm to Nora, makers of saddles, or boots, or marmalade. Fowler and Fox, by Royal Appointment. And by rights it should have been Fox and Fowler, given she does all the work. All right, that isn’t entirely true. Just all the legwork, what most people would call the policework. And the fact that it suits her means she isn’t resentful, much. It’s just, when they catch a case, when they arrive at a crime scene, when the whole deal is breaking, is real, it has gotten so she can actually sense these waves of apathy, of indifference emanating from her partner, indifference and, worse, actual hostility toward the business in hand. It isn’t laziness – sit Detective Ken Fowler at a desk and he’d pull a twelve-hour shift – and it isn’t because he’s eight months away from his twenty (although that hasn’t exactly helped matters). He’s always been like this.
He simply doesn’t like being out and about. In someone else’s house, on a call, on patrol, it doesn’t matter: if Ken can’t be in his own home, he likes to be in the station house. It’s something deep in his wiring. He is the most domesticated man she has ever met. Even when his marriage was in trouble on account of his wife running about town drinking and screwing around, he still wouldn’t stay out for more than a second drink. ‘I’ve got to get home,’ he would say, and he would go on saying it for as long as she kept making a fool of him, and after she left him, and when it was more than clear even to him that she was not coming back. ‘I’ve got to get home,’ Ken would murmur, and slope off into the night, flicking his hair back from his forehead in that eighties way he had, too much a creature of habit to imagine what his life might be like if he were to cont
emplate changing it.
So she knows that he will suggest to Claire Taylor that she come down to the station to talk to them there as a matter of course, not because he has weighed up the pros and cons, or thinks she might respond positively to the stimulating environment of an interview room, or has considered whether, because she’s probably never even been arrested before, she might in response get intimidated and anxious and freak out and lawyer up on them, but simply because he wants to get back to his zone.
It’s not that he’s a bad detective. Each of the squad, or at least each of them in the West District, which is all she knows about, has at least one major flaw, something the others have to put up with and work around. With Nora, it’s an impatience, a pride in not suffering fools, a harrying, chivying impulse and a caustic tone of voice that can turn a simple cross questioning of a witness – never mind a suspect – into a hectoring confrontation. To guard against which, she has to watch herself like a hawk: no hangovers, no sleepless nights, rigid impulse control. Easy.
With Ken, it’s the urge to bring everyone downtown, no matter how counter-productive it’ll turn out to be: kids, old people, informants who don’t want to be outed, rich people who alternately despise and think they own the cops. It doesn’t matter to Ken: come on over to my place. The shame of it is, he is twice the interrogator Nora is: subtle, empathetic, able to manipulate and steer a conversation without anyone being aware of it, even him, or so it sometimes seems. In that interview room, Ken can seem like some kind of intuitive artist, an actor improvising a scene, seamless, flawless, just pulling it out of the ether, etching it on the wind. Provided, of couse, he hasn’t queered the pitch by insisting on jumping the gun, Nora thinks, smiling at how the cliché overload would make Ken wince. Between them, they make one good cop: the Pantomime Detective, Don Burns, their sergeant, calls them, occasionally with the capper that it’s just too bad they’re each the ass end.
So it’s second nature to Nora this morning to pay as much attention to Ken as to Claire Taylor, and just when it looks like he’s going to succumb to the temptation to invite Claire down the station, Nora clears her throat and catches his eye. Sometimes, stubborn, ingenuous, he can affect not to understand what she means; this morning, he takes the point clear enough, as well he might, given the thorough-going complexity, not to say epic weirdness of the situation. For a start, when Claire Taylor initially saw the body, an exhumed corpse lying in her own backyard, her reactions were, firstly, to yell with laughter, like she was … relieved, it looked like, almost triumphant. Then, having identified the body, she burst out crying. And then, when the tears banked down, this:
Claire: ‘Where’s Mr Smith?’
Nora: ‘I beg your pardon?’
Claire: ‘Mr Smith! Mr Smith!
Nora: ‘I don’t understand, Ms Taylor. Mr Smith?’
Claire: ‘Yes, Mr Smith. Last night, this guy wasn’t here.’
Nora: ‘By “this guy”, you mean the body you have identified as being that of Gene Peterson?’
Claire: ‘Yes, yes, Gene, Gene Peterson. He wasn’t here. Mr Smith was here. Mr Smith. (Sobs.) Oh God. Oh my God. Sorry, I’m sorry. I stepped on him, you see. Mr Smith’s body, last night, in the dark. I got blood on my shoes. Mr Smith’s blood. The poor little guy. And so … so someone must have taken his body away and put this body here … why would anyone have done that? Jesus Christ, this is so fucked up.’
Ken: ‘Ms Taylor. Is Mr Smith … a dog?’
Claire: ‘Of course he’s a dog. What did you think I was talking about?’
This is when Ken looks like he’s beginning to flail a little, and his fringe falls in his eyes, and Nora clears her throat and suggests to Claire that maybe they could go in the house and talk, her manner as gentle and solicitous as she can manage. And Claire says OK, but they’ll have to sit on the floor, as all the furniture has been cleared out. Like she said, weird.
As it turns out, there is some furniture remaining, a couch and a couple of chairs and an oak desk in a kind of den up a spiral metal staircase, and that’s where they’re sitting now. Kind of a student crash pad, Nora thinks, with plenty of actual student memorabilia, posters and photographs and so on, but more, or less, than that: a messy, uncertain, semi-formed feeling, the couch and chairs not really matching the carpet or the wallpaper or each other, dolls and soft toys and postcards and concert tickets and theater programmes scattered about, as if the room belonged to an actual university student and not the extremely well-kept late-thirties-looking woman sitting across from her.
Ken arrives back with some takeout coffee from Michael’s Frozen Custard on Monroe, since there’s nothing left in the kitchen to make coffee with or in, or drink it from, and once they’ve had some, and tasted some pastries, Nora makes eye contact with him. He flicks his fringe and gives her the raised-eyebrow invitation: ‘Whenever you’re ready.’
Nora takes it with a barely perceptible nod, but is in no hurry to get started, or rather, is biding her time until she figures out what to start with. She looks at Claire Taylor, who is sitting perfectly still on the couch, long legs tucked beneath her, fingers steepled above her empty coffee cup, head tilted back, eyes staring at the ceiling. For someone who has been through what Claire has just told them she’s gone through, she’s looking pretty together: long auburn hair sleek and straight and shining, skin clear and creamy, blue eyes startling in their intensity. Claire has the look, Nora thinks, the tall and slender with long straight hair look Nora once thought she maybe might contract as a teen. Then she realized, somewhere around fifteen, when other girls had grown into it and she was still five-three, and, not exactly squat, quite shapely actually, but with hair that had kinks and waves an iron couldn’t satisfactorily remove, and always only a pound or two away from fat, that she was never going to morph into tall and slender with long straight hair. And twenty years later, when the look is triumphantly back in style, it kills her just a little that she still minds quite so much. Nora nods her head briskly, her face creasing into a characteristic smile, as if a little embarrassed by her narcissistic reverie (but then she is always a little embarrassed by something) and clicks the top of her pen a couple of times.
‘So, Ms Taylor … maybe we should start with the dead body. You say his name is Gene Peterson. Could you tell us, what was your relationship to the deceased?’
Claire lays her cup on the sofa beside her and looks directly at Nora, her blue eyes cold, her expression haughty. ‘I didn’t have a “relationship” with Eugene Peterson,’ she says, with some heat.
Nora doesn’t exactly lean forward, but it’s all she can do to keep still: the most innocuous question in the book meets with a XXL-sized tell, which she doesn’t want to flag by greeting it with one of her own.
‘All I mean by a relationship is, how did you know him?’
‘He was an old friend of my husband’s. They were at school together.’
‘And you’ve seen him over the years? Your husband kept up with him?’
‘Not really, no.’
‘Then how do you know who he is, Ms Taylor? How were you able to identify him so confidently?’
Color rushes into Claire’s face, and she looks away.
‘I understand your reluctance to speak, Ms Taylor … Claire. I know you want to think the best of your husband, and of course you want what’s best for your children. But you’ve got to understand that these two wishes may not be compatible. The facts as we know them are, without your knowledge or consent, your husband has left, with your kids, having let the bank – I took the trouble to talk to the Sheriff’s deputies before they left – having let the bank initiate foreclosure proceedings, right from underneath you, so to speak. On top of that, we’ve got the body of a dead man, who you claim was one of your husband’s oldest friends, in the backyard. Now, at the very least, you have been lied to, Ms Taylor. At the very least. And I know you want what’s best for your children, and I can certainly tell you that I – that is to say, Detective Fowle
r and I, on behalf of the Madison Police Department – want to find your children safe and sound. That’s our number-one priority. And I can assure you, in cases like these, where the husband has absconded with the children – well, let’s just say time is a significant factor. Urgency is what’s needed now. You understand me? So maybe the first thing you should do is tell me about this man, Gene Peterson.’
Claire blinks and nods and begins to speak.
‘I met Danny at UW, and we were together for three years, and then we broke up and I went to Chicago and lived there about eight years. And then I came back and married Danny and we had our babies and we’ve been together ever since, twelve years? And when I was in Chicago, there were men, a couple serious, a couple not. And one of the nots was Gene Peterson. He … I’d never met him before, but he knew who I was – I was working as an actor back then, and he came to see a show, and stuck around after, and introduced himself, said he’d heard about me from Danny. And … he was nice, at first, and I was broke, and he took me out to dinner, and he was only in town for the night, and … well, in the end, nothing really happened, it … we didn’t hit it off. And that was that until Sunday a week ago.’
‘What do you mean, that was that?’
‘I mean, Danny never wanted chapter and verse on who I dated when we were apart. So I never told him. I mean, he knew about a couple guys, the serious ones, but I wasn’t going to say, “Oh, you know that friend of yours from way back?” As far as I was aware, he never knew. Until Sunday a week ago, we had a barbecue here, a lot of friends, last day in the outdoors before winter, a big party. Suddenly, there’s a guy appears at the backyard gate. Gene Peterson.’
‘Did you recognize him?’
‘No, he was … he was wearing a mask.’
‘A mask?’
‘A cowl, actually. You know, the Angel of Death. It was a Halloween party. Early, because I was on my way to Chicago.’
‘So you didn’t see his face?’
All the Things You Are Page 5
