by John Philpin
Sarah always said I had a drinking problem. She was wrong. Only time I ever had problems was when I didn’t drink.
For Sarah, life was always a problem, drunk or sober. Who was the guy who said you should never sleep with a woman whose problems are bigger than your own? I should have listened to him. I knew the minute I met her she was crazy in the head. Depressed. It wasn’t just a mood. It was her whole way of looking at the world. I put enough of her stories together over the years to figure out that she had been abused, and it had left her feeling worthless. But then the clouds would shift and she’d be all smiles and energy, like she’d grown up with the Brady Bunch. I never knew when I walked in the door who I’d find in the house—the happy Sarah, or the suicidal one. After a while I quit wondering or even caring.
It’s a funny thing about marriage. You marry a woman and divorce her, but you never really quit thinking of her as your wife. There’s a tie there, something you can’t quite cut. At least that’s the way it was with Sarah and me. When she told me she was seeing someone, it hit me hard. I didn’t even know at first what that feeling was, but then I realized it was jealousy.
When I questioned Sarah about the shootings, I knew as soon as she started talking about this Wolf character that she was involved with him. I could see it in her eyes. The storm clouds lifted. The sun came out. She looked happy, at least as happy as a woman like Sarah can ever be.
The alley incident wasn’t the only thing I wanted to talk to Sarah about that day. She knew that I was looking into some murders that I thought might be connected—young women with nothing in common except that they died violently. There weren’t many, but more than a precinct our size generally racks up in the space of a year or two. We also had several women listed as missing, most of them not the type to just walk away from their lives. They had good jobs, husbands or lovers, solid reputations. It didn’t make sense.
I showed up at Sarah’s kitchen door late one night, blubbering about all the dead women littering the city. It was the drunkest I’d been in weeks. She let me in, made me some coffee, and listened to me go over what I knew about each case. She hated that shit. But that night she listened, and when I got to the Maxine Harris case, she recognized the victim’s name. She said Harris had been in the store and had even sold some of her used books to Harry, Sarah’s sleazebag boss. Just a few days before she died, Sarah had discovered one of them among her own collection—a book of poems that she had brought home from the store. Maxine Harris’s name was right there on the bookplate. Sarah said that some of the lines in one of the poems were highlighted in yellow.
I wanted to see that book. On Saturday, the day before she died, I stopped by her place to get it. She wasn’t there, so I parked a short distance from the house and watched—for what, I’m not sure. Maybe I thought Wolf would show up. I’d been wanting to get a look at him, to see if my hunch was right. I would have bet a year’s wages that he’d be a dead ringer for Alan Carver.
Sarah came home alone. I pulled into the driveway behind her and helped her carry some packages into the house. She acted pleased to see me, but there was something about her manner that bothered me. She seemed agitated or excited, like someone who is expecting something to happen. Someone waiting for something special.
That’s how she was toward the end, waiting for Liza to be born. Spacey. Kind of drifting around in her head—loopy, even. When I saw that same look in her eyes again, I knew that it was somehow tied up with Wolf and how she felt about him. It worried me because I knew the guy was a liar. Maybe worse.
When I told her that I had come for the book, she went straight to her coffee table to get it, but it wasn’t there. I could see that upset her. She said it had been there just a few hours earlier, and she hadn’t moved it. I could tell that she was concerned, that she really believed that someone must have taken it, but I chalked it up to her frame of mind. When we were married I had seen her do a lot of crazy things, like putting the ice cream away in the cupboard or pouring milk on her pancakes. I thought she’d probably find the book about two minutes after I walked out the door.
That’s why I went back over to her place last night. I wanted to see if she had located it yet. When I arrived, Sarah’s car was in the driveway, but the house was dark. “Probably out somewhere with her undersecretary,” I told myself.
I went back to my apartment, had a few beers, watched the tube, and took a nap. There was no use calling her. She always let that damn answering machine pick up her calls, even when she was at home. So, a little before midnight, I drove back over to her place to see if she was there. The house was still dark. Either she was asleep or she was out somewhere.
I kept checking back throughout the night, but the story was always the same. Then, on my fifth swing past the house, I glanced up at the porch and saw that the front door was standing wide open.
No lights on in the house. Door open. No signs of life. Something was very wrong.
I got out of the car and crossed the street, pulling my 9 millimeter as I crept up the front steps.
I stood close to the doorway with my back against the front of the house and listened. Dead silence.
A quick glance around. The place seemed deserted, so I stepped inside.
I used to call it “Sarah’s museum”—a living room filled with antiques, books, and furniture that looked like it would shatter if you brushed against it. Plants to the right of the door, pictures on the wall to the left, and more antiques—small things—on a shelf next to the pictures. A strange, raucous song played softly on the tape machine. The place felt eerie, but that was nothing new.
I never have understood what happened in that house. When I left the last time, I knew I wouldn’t be back to stay, but I would be back as often as I could find an excuse. Even though Sarah and I would never be together again, I’d never leave her; not totally. Lane said she understood that. I didn’t.
Now there was something wrong in the house—and the cop in me was taking over, absorbing every detail of the place. There was enough chill in the air that the furnace kicked on down in the cellar. When I heard it, I looked toward the other side of the room where the heating grate was.
Sarah was there—lying on the rug—dressed in white and, I thought, made up like a clown with a great red smile painted across her mouth. For a second I wondered why she’d be doing that, and then I saw that it wasn’t a smile, and it wasn’t her mouth. It was a gaping wound across her throat.
I moved sideways in the room, thinking that maybe if I looked at the picture from a different angle it would change. It didn’t.
It was a joke, but Sarah didn’t have that kind of sense of humor. She wouldn’t put wineglasses on the table, lay out crackers, dress up, pour blood all over the carpet, and sprawl out on it.
But when I could pull my gaze away from the wound on her neck—when I could see her face, her mouth—it almost looked like she was smiling. No, not smiling, but like she was content, finished.
When the furnace blower started, the smell of death came on strong. My Sarah was beginning to decompose, to dissolve, right in front of my eyes. I backed away.
My cell phone. Who do I call?
I punched buttons until I heard Lane’s voice. “Her throat,” I said.
Lane was on her way, but I don’t know how I knew that. I sat in one of the fragile chairs, the cellular phone in one hand and my gun in the other, staring at what was left of the child I’d met on a beach so many years ago. I was a lifeguard then, protecting swimmers. Sarah was a kid waltzing around in a sexy bathing suit making passes at the lifeguard.
Once when I was drunk I told Sarah how I hated being the guy who finds the bodies. I told her I hoped I’d never have to find hers.
God, how I wanted a drink.
Sarah used to kid me about what I liked to read—gun magazines, Field & Stream, Soldier of Fortune. I never read novels or poetry. She’d hand me that shit, but I just couldn’t do it.
But I do remember something s
he read to me once. She was trying to teach me to like poetry. All the answers to everything were in poems, she said—all the feelings, all the thoughts, all the attitudes.
What I remember is,
It turns, the earth
it turns with its trees, its gardens, its houses
it turns with its great pools of blood
and all living things turn with it and bleed
It doesn’t give a damn
the earth
it turns and all living things set up a howl
it doesn’t give a damn
it turns
it doesn’t stop turning
and the blood doesn’t stop running.
I was going to quote it back to her, to show her I wasn’t the dunce she thought me to be. For a while I even remembered who wrote it.
But then I forgot.
And I forgot to quote it back to her.
I heard Lane come in. “Jesus Christ,” she said.
“Nobody gives a damn,” I told her.
Lane
My first act as officer in charge was to tell Robert to get out of the house. I radioed Fuzzy, one of the few uniforms who seems to genuinely like Robert, to come pick him up. “Take him home and stay with him,” I said.
I also knew of Fuzzy’s belief that the best medicine for any ailment was 100 proof and bottled by the quart. But there wasn’t anything I could do about that.
The house filled up fast. Some of the cops had a reason to be there. Others were just curious. But they were all sympathetic. Even when it’s an ex-wife, it’s like a death in the family. Usually a murder scene sounds like a sick comedy club, with cops wisecracking their way through tasks that would otherwise have them in tears. But not this one. It was as quiet as a church, with all necessary conversations as subdued as prayer.
I told Miller and Towns to dust for every latent in the place, even down in the basement and up in the attic. Anything that wouldn’t lift, I told them to package it in paper bags and take it in for fuming.
Hal Levinson, our resident hair and fiber expert, had a go at Sarah’s dress even before Dr. Rimlin, the medical examiner, arrived. Working with his magnifying lens and tweezers, Levinson managed to fill up one whole corner of a Baggie with what he called “foreign matter of a consistent nature.”
Benny did his thing with the camera, getting plenty of shots before, during, and after Rimlin’s cursory examination of the body. I also had him cover the entire living room, coordinating his shots with the crime scene sketches that Sergeant Alsop was making. Then I asked Benny to do a walk-through of the house.
“I want shots of every room,” I said. “From every angle.”
Benny gave me a look that said I was wasting his time. “What are you looking for?” he asked.
“I don’t know yet,” I said. “But I don’t want to find myself two weeks into this thing, thinking about what I should have done.”
Benny shrugged and headed off toward the kitchen.
A little after ten, Captain Hanson showed up. As far as I could remember, that was a first. Hanson’s strictly a pencil pusher, an administrator.
“Terrible thing,” Hanson said, his voice barely above a whisper. “Just awful.”
I nodded, watching Levinson tweeze something from Sarah’s ankle.
“How’s Robert doing?” Hanson asked.
“Not good. Fuzzy took him home.”
“So what have we got here?”
“I wish I knew. Robert says Sarah didn’t have friends, but she didn’t have enemies either. Says she more or less tiptoed through life, not bothering anyone, never making waves.”
“Who found her?”
“Robert. He said she had something he needed for one of his investigations—a book of some sort. He’d been over on Saturday to pick it up, but Sarah couldn’t find it. When he came back to see if she had located it yet, he saw her front door standing open.”
“Any sign of breaking and entering?”
I shook my head. “No, this guy was invited in. They had a little wine. Listened to some music. Indulged in a bit of romance.”
Hanson arched an eyebrow. I pointed to the wineglasses and what had once been candles.
A couple of guys from the morgue were lifting Sarah and placing her on a gurney. It looked so effortless, like she didn’t weigh an ounce. She was just a wisp, a feather, barely anything at all. And yet, she was the most formidable opponent I’d ever faced. So many times when Robert pulled me into his arms, I knew that he was wishing I were Sarah. And there wasn’t a thing I could do about it, except get out of his way, and watch him go back to her. Trouble is, the only time he seemed to want her was when he wasn’t with her.
When Hanson left, I headed for Sarah’s bedroom. The bed was a four-poster. The spread was undisturbed, and there were no indentations on the feather mattress. It hadn’t been slept in or sat on since the bed was made.
I flipped open Sarah’s jewelry box, not certain what I expected to find there. There was an array of antique pins, some miscellaneous rings, and several pairs of earrings. I also took note of a plain gold band. Though it barely fit my pinky finger, it must have been Sarah’s wedding ring.
Her dresser—an elegantly carved hunk of walnut—had three large drawers and two small ones, each filled with neatly folded personal items like slips and scarves and sweaters and socks. She kept bars of scented soap in the drawers, a flowery fragrance that I know I will always associate with her.
In her closet she had blouses hanging on the left, skirts on the right, with belts suspended from a hook on the inside of the door, and her shoes lined up on the floor. I went through the pockets of all the skirts, but came up empty—except for a sugar packet with the name of a restaurant printed on it. Fast Eddie’s.
From the top shelf of the closet, I took down several photo albums—but I put them back as soon as I saw that they contained pictures of Sarah and Robert and an infant that I knew had to be Liza.
In the drawer of the bedside table I found a black-and-white notebook, a composition book like the ones students use at school. It wasn’t exactly a diary, but Sarah had been writing in it, and making some drawings. I opened it to a page at the center and began to read:
America. Antarctica. Europe. Asia. Australia. Africa. It pleases me that the first letter of every continent’s name is the same as the last. I find such symmetry satisfying. Comforting. I was born in my parents house, and that is where I hope to die—my life a circle, with no beginning, no end.
“Well, Sarah, it looks like you got your way,” I said. I put the notebook into my briefcase. I knew I’d want to spend some quiet time with it.
Before I left the crime scene, I told Officer Carey to seal the place and post the usual sign. Then I picked up Sarah’s cordless phone and pressed the redial button.
What I heard was a woman’s voice saying, “Hasty Hills Municipal Building. May I help you?”
I switched off the phone. “Carey, where’s Hasty Hills?”
“Ritzy town up in Connecticut,” he said.
When I stepped outside, a light rain was falling. As I walked down Sarah’s steps, I noticed a guy leaning against one of the unmarked cars, staring at me. When I moved toward him, his flat gray eyes never wavered, but they seemed to change color—to a deep, cobalt blue. “Do I know you?” I said.
“Robbins,” he said, pointing to the ID that was hanging out of his jacket pocket. “DA’s office. I guess I was staring. Sorry. I’m a little spaced out. I’ve been up for twenty-four hours straight.”
“Lane Frank,” I said.
“You’re the lead, right?”
I nodded. “Why haven’t we met before?”
“I’m filling in for one of our guys who’s out sick,” Robbins said. “Usually I handle white-collar stuff. My degree’s in accounting. For fifteen years I’ve been looking at bank records. But Rafferty got the flu, and I inherited his homicide.”
Now I was staring. Robbins had the most piercing eyes I’d ever see
n. He looked about forty, dark hair flecked with gray, well built.
“Something wrong?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “I must’ve seen you around. You do look a little familiar. Anyone brief you?”
“I’m all set for the time being,” he said. “If I have any questions I’ll call.”
I watched as Robbins pushed himself off the car and walked away down the street.
“It’s all sealed up, Detective,” Carey said from behind me.
“Oh, thanks, Carey.”
“I’ll leave one of my boys here, too.”
I was nodding, turning back to the street, wondering where to begin.
Robert
Fuzzy Lannehan was directing traffic when I was a kid. He’s a sergeant in the uniform division, but he still likes to get out in front of a school in the morning and Wave his arms. He’s probably the only uniform cop I get along with.
Besides stopping a line of cars and blowing his whistle, the other thing Fuzzy’s always been good at is locating and drinking good whiskey. He led me out of Sarah’s house and down to his patrol unit.
He hit his lights, but not the siren, as he directed the cruiser into traffic. Then he reached under his seat and produced a bottle.
“Crack that open, Bobby,” he said, handing me a sealed fifth of premium Irish whiskey. “It’s good for whatever ails you.”
I took a long swallow and felt the heat in the back of my throat. My eyes watered and I coughed.
“Take it easy,” Fuzzy said. “That ain’t like the piss you drink all the time.”
I sipped and leaned back in the seat, feeling the heat spread through my neck and up into my head. “Did you see her, Fuzzy?”
“No, son. I didn’t.”
When my father died, Fuzzy Lannehan was the only constructive influence left in my life. He kept me out of juvenile hall. He also talked me into going into law enforcement And Fuzzy had been at our wedding—the only cop there.
