Angel of Mercy

by Andrew Neiderman

  “Yes?”

  Frankie showed her his identification.

  “I’d like to ask you and your husband about the Murrays,” he said. “I understand you were friendly.”

  “Just a minute.” She closed and opened the door to let him in, stepping back just enough to permit his entry, her eyes still full of suspicion. “My husband went to the supermarket,” she explained.

  Frankie thought she had the sort of aged face to which still clung what had once been youthful beauty. Her eyes, although revealing the sort of paranoia he frequently saw in older people, were still quite blue. She was an elegant woman, concerned about her appearance, dressing herself in her jewelry and hair combs even though she would only spend the day in her apartment watching television.

  He looked around the simple apartment with its thrift-shop furnishings and simple decor. The windows had slim wooden blinds and flower-print curtains, but the ceiling showed evidence of an occasional leak. He took out his notepad and smiled at Mrs. Stuart.

  “That’s all right. Maybe you can help. Were you surprised to learn Mr. Murray had committed suicide?” he asked.

  “Me, not so much, but my husband still can’t get over it. It’s made him sick.”

  “You knew Mrs. Murray was sick?”

  “Sick,” she said disdainfully. “Everyone we know these days is sick. She was a diabetic, but she didn’t watch her diet. Every year they returned, she looked worse and worse to me. I gave her many a lecture, but older people can’t shake their old habits as quickly as younger people.”

  Frankie smiled at her reference to the Murrays as old. What was she, a spring chicken?

  “Did you or your husband see Mr. Murray after his wife passed away?”

  “Of course. We went right over.”

  “How was he taking it?”

  “He was very upset. He was concerned that she had died here and he would have to ship her body back East.”

  “So he was planning on doing that?” Frankie asked quickly.

  “Why shouldn’t he plan it? That’s where they had their plot.”

  Frankie nodded.

  “And he didn’t say anything to you or your husband about killing himself?”

  She sat down on the sofa.

  “He said he wished he was dead, too. My husband was worried, so he went back to stay with him, but he didn’t stay long.”

  “Why not?”

  “He was asleep and the maid said she would stay there, maybe even spend the night.”

  “The maid? What maid?”

  “He had a maid come … to help with things right afterward. Dorothy was a stickler when it came to keeping her place clean, so Sam got it in his head that he better get a maid. People do funny things when they suffer deep grief,” she said, reaching back into her pool of wisdom.

  “Did you or your husband know this maid?”

  “No. I think he got her from some agency. Most people here don’t have maids. These aren’t big apartments and it’s an expense they can’t afford. When I can’t clean for myself, we’ll check into a home,” she added dryly.

  “Do you remember this maid’s name?”

  She thought a moment and then shook her head.

  “You think your husband might remember?”

  “Maybe.”

  Frankie thought a moment.

  “Do you know how Mr. Murray killed himself?” he asked. She grimaced.

  “I heard he used her insulin.”

  “That’s true. He also took some sleeping pills. Dilantin. Could you have given him some sleeping pills?”

  “What?”

  “I mean, only to help him sleep.”

  “No, I didn’t give him any pills. My pills are all prescription pills. You don’t give someone else your prescription pills. They have to get a prescription from their own doctor. We’re old, but we’re not stupid,” she added bitterly.

  “I’m sorry. I had to ask.”

  “I’m sorry, too,” she said and stared wistfully at her hands. “This will be our last season here. We got to find someplace else. It’s too depressing now.”

  “Can I have your phone number? I’d like to call your husband later and see if he remembers the maid’s name.”

  She gave it to him and then got up to show him out. After she opened the door, her eyes brightened as if she just had realized the possibilities.

  “The police don’t think Sam killed himself?”

  “What do you think, Mrs. Stuart? Why did you say you weren’t as surprised as your husband?”

  She shrugged.

  “You can’t help thinking about yourself and what you would do. Poor Sam. He woke up, looked at his four walls and decided he was too tired to go on. You’re still a young man,” she said, “but when you’re older and retired and you’re doing the same things day in and day out with the same person and you have only yourselves … you get tired, especially when you find you’re alone.”

  Her words drilled deeply into his own self-awareness as her eyes filled with tears. How true was the prediction? What was he more afraid of … living with a time bomb in his chest or retirement?

  “Thank you. You’ve been very helpful. I hope you find a brighter, more cheerful place to stay next year.”

  “If it’s near the Fountain of Youth, I’ll let you know,” she replied. He laughed.

  “Please do.”

  He left and considered going home for lunch just to reassure Jennie, but he wanted to spend more time on this. He decided to call her and tell her he was having lunch with Charlie Porter, the only other member of the Palm Springs Police Department who came close to him in age. Charlie was a patrolman who had never developed interest in plainclothes. He did find him at the station and they went to their favorite Mexican spot, a small hole-in-the-wall on South Palm Canyon.

  After lunch he called the Stuarts and spoke to Mr. Stuart, who remembered the maid’s name was Susie.

  “I don’t remember her telling me her last name.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “Pretty girl. Not too tall, not fat.”

  Frankie smiled. With that description, he would go far.

  “Do you remember the color of her hair?”

  “I think it was brown, maybe light brown. I don’t think it was black. Hey, when you get to be my age, you don’t look at girls the same way.”

  Frankie laughed.

  “Anything else you can remember about her?”

  “No, I don’t … oh, wait. Yes, she limped when she walked.”

  “Limped?”

  “She wore something on her leg … not a bandage … a metal contraption.”

  “A brace?”

  “Yeah, a brace.”

  “Okay, that’s very helpful, Mr. Stuart. Your wife told me when you went back to see Mr. Murray, he was asleep.”

  “Yes, and the maid was straightening up in the kitchen. She said she would be there awhile longer and if there were any problems, she would call me. But she never called and … well, you know the rest, I guess.”

  “I do. I might come by to see you, Mr. Stuart.”

  “I’ll be here most of the time,” he said sadly.

  “Thanks.”

  Frankie began by looking up every cleaning agency listed, but none of the agencies had any Susie working for them and certainly not a young woman wearing a leg brace. Perplexed, he sat back and wondered how to follow up this lead. A short while later, Rosina returned from her stakeout at the car wash with Derek.

  “You’re still here?” she asked with surprise.

  “Nolan and I have come to a sort of truce for the moment,” he said. Then he grew serious.

  “Did you know the Murrays had a maid at the apartment the day before Mr. Murray was found?”

  “A maid? No.”

  “I’ve been trying to track her down. All I have is a first name, a skeleton description with one big identifying characteristic.”

  “Which is?”

  “She wore a brace on
one leg and limped.”

  Rosina smirked.

  “A handicapped maid. Interesting.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “And you found all this out by …”

  “Questioning a neighbor. It’s called follow-up,” he kidded. “Anyway, I’ve called every agency listed and no one of that description is employed by any of them.”

  “Sounds like a lot more follow-up is required.”

  “Yeah, well … it will keep me from thinking about my immediate future, I suppose.”

  “What does Jennie say about all this?”

  “I haven’t exactly …”

  “Told her everything. She better not ask me. I tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth,” Rosina warned. Frankie rolled his eyes. He gazed at the clock.

  “I’d better get home. My son and his wife are driving in from L.A. for dinner. If you come up with any ideas as to how I can locate this limping maid …”

  “Call you at home?”

  “Disguise your voice if Jennie answers,” he half kidded.

  “Frankie, just go home, will you.”

  “Why is it everyone says the same thing? Even Charlie Porter thinks I’m nuts hanging around here.”

  “Think about it,” Rosina said. “Maybe you are nuts. I gotta go report to Nolan. Have a nice dinner.”

  “Flores,” he called after her. She turned. “Your biological clock is ticking.”

  “Vamos, git,” she said, waving toward the door. He laughed and left.

  He was surprised when he turned into his street and saw Beth’s car parked in their driveway. The white LeBaron convertible was caked with mud and grime. She had obviously driven through some storms. The backseat was covered with signs and posters denouncing antiabortionists and proclaiming the basic right of a woman to choose.

  Beth and Jennie were sitting in the living room talking when he entered. Beth took after Jennie when it came to her looks. She had Jennie’s beguiling green eyes, eyes that could take a strong grown man prisoner in a twinkle and get him to relent or promise and obey. She had Jennie’s soft, sensuous lips that turned up just a smidgen at the center when she became thoughtful, curious, or skeptical and pressed them together; and she had the same cute small nose, the kind that would give a plastic surgeon a wet dream.

  But her thoughts and her attitudes and her steel-vise determination made her assume Frankie’s authoritative demeanor, especially these days when she was being driven by her feminist causes. She was about two inches shorter than he was, but somehow she always seemed taller to him whenever they got into one of their frequent political arguments. The old adage about like poles repelling never seemed as true as it was in their case. How he wished she didn’t have his stubbornness and his grit sometimes. And then there were times, times he never openly acknowledged, when he stood off to the side and proudly watched her in action with others, plowing over their prejudices and narrow vision and trampling them into the ground with her bulldozer of facts.

  “Hi, Dad,” she said. Since he had last seen her at the hospital, three days earlier, she had gotten her hair cut severely just below her ears, the bangs clipped back to reveal almost all of her forehead with its sprinkle of rust-colored freckles.

  Her well-proportioned figure, shaped by an almost religious devotion to exercise videos and sensible eating, was buried under a NOW sweatshirt and a pair of those loose-fitting jeans he hated so much because they made her waist and rump look wider. He once had had the audacity to say they weren’t feminine, a remark that led to half an hour of accusations in which she compared him to a Neanderthal and finally to Dan Quayle, whom she considered the twentieth-century version of a caveman.

  “Car looks like you went through hell,” he said.

  “There was a terrible rainstorm in Arizona and so much road construction all along the way. If you want to get an idea how bad the infrastructure in this country is, just take a ride across it.”

  “Oh, honey. Why did you drive all night?” Jennie moaned.

  “I was juiced up, Mom. We had a great protest. They thought they’d close down the clinic, but we were right there to stop them and protect any woman who needed it. Not one woman scheduled for an abortion had to cancel,” she said proudly.

  “It’s a waste of time,” Frankie said. “The Supreme Court’s probably going to make it illegal someday.”

  “Only for the poor,” Beth retorted.

  Frankie shrugged.

  “Nothing new about that.”

  “And that makes you happy? You can live with that?” She looked poised, ready to pounce like a cat.

  “Please,” Jennie pleaded. “No discussions. Let’s have a truce. No politics in the house tonight, okay?”

  “You can’t cut it out of your life, Mom. You can’t ignore what’s happening out there by turning on a soap opera.”

  “How about what’s happening in here?” Frankie snapped.

  Jennie bit down on her lower lip and her eyes started to moisten.

  “All right, all right,” Beth said quickly. “I’ll keep my mouth shut.”

  “That will be a first,” Frankie muttered. She reddened, but stifled any retort.

  “I was going to ask how you were feeling, Dad, but I see you’re the same old Dirty Harry.”

  “Frankie,” Jennie warned him before he could respond. He nodded.

  “All right,” he said, plopping into his easy chair. “I’ll be good. I’ll sit here and read my paper and drink my Geritol cocktails and reminisce about the good old days.”

  “As you see, your father is not taking his situation well. He’s not,” Jennie said, emphasizing with her widened eyes, “rolling with the punch the way he always advises other people to do.”

  “I’ll teach you how to meditate, Dad,” Beth said in a softer tone. “Mark says most nervous conditions and even some mental problems could be cured easily if people would learn to meditate.”

  “Sure, you and your mother will turn me into a card-carrying senior citizen,” he said.

  Jennie and Beth gazed at each other and laughed.

  “Yeah, what’s so funny?”

  With a second conspiratorial glance at Beth, Jennie replied, “Beth’s bought us some presents.”

  “Presents? You had time to shop on this protest trip? I thought that would be considered blasphemous.”

  “It’s not a twenty-four-hour thing, Dad. We do get time to be real people,” Beth said. Jennie kept smiling.

  “All right, what’s the joke? What did she buy?”

  “She bought me a nice house gift, that clay vase on the hutch.”

  Frankie looked and nodded.

  “It is nice.”

  “And she bought you something nice, too. Go look. Your present’s in the bedroom,” Jennie said. He gazed suspiciously at Beth and then got up and gingerly entered the bedroom to see the neon green Bermuda shorts and matching polo shirt laid out on the bed. Beside them was a pair of matching green knee-high socks.

  “Very funny,” he called from the bedroom. His wife and daughter roared. He returned to the living room, the garments in hand. “And exactly where am I supposed to where this?”

  “Anywhere, Dad,” Beth said. “It’s your new undercover uniform.”

  “I’ll give you undercover,” he said. He couldn’t help smiling, however. He held up the shorts. “Right size at least.”

  “I know your sizes, Dad,” Beth said, suddenly growing serious.

  “Aren’t you going to thank her, Frankie?”

  He smirked.

  “Thanks,” he said. “Did your mother put you up to this?”

  “No. I just picked up a recent copy of Palm Springs magazine and looked at some of the pictures.”

  “Great. You know what I’m going to do?” Frankie threatened. “I’m actually going to put this on. How’s that?”

  “Doesn’t scare me, Frankie Samuels.”

  “I’m not so sure about me,” Beth said.

  “Stevie called from the car ph
one,” Jennie said. “They’re about forty minutes away.”

  “Great,” he said.

  “So where were you all this time, Frankie?” Jennie asked with abrupt directness.

  “What d’ya mean, where was I? I called you from the station.”

  “And I called back just after you left the first time,” she said, her eyes small with suspicion.

  “Jesus. Who’s the detective in this house anyway?”

  “Never mind all that. Spill it.”

  Frankie looked at Beth, who was smiling from ear to ear. She just loved to see Jennie handle him.

  “An old man committed suicide. I did a simple follow-up,” he confessed. When it came right down to it, he couldn’t lie to Jennie face-to-face.

  “Why did he kill himself?” Beth asked.

  “Wife passed away and he couldn’t face life without her.”

  “Oh, the poor man,” Jennie said.

  “Doesn’t surprise me,” Beth said. “Not with the way the elderly are treated in this country. The richest country in the world, and we have a segment of our older population eating pet food to survive. A couple of F-15s would probably end hunger in a dozen states, and vastly improve the health care they get …” She laughed. “I know people who get better care for their dogs and cats. No, what surprises me is more don’t commit suicide. In fact, it might do some good.”

  “What good would that do?” Frankie snapped.

  “It could bring more attention to the problem. One mass suicide …”

  “Oh, Beth,” Jennie said, grimacing.

  “I’m sorry, Mom, but sometimes, most of the time, unfortunately, the only thing that moves the power brokers in this country is a violent or dramatic action.”

  “So a few dozen old people should be bused to the White House lawn and left there to cut their wrists?” Frankie said.

  “No, leave them here and let the indifference cut their wrists for them,” Beth shot back.

  “Can’t we change the subject?” Jennie begged.

  Frankie pressed his lips together.

  “Yeah, sure.” He looked at the Bermuda shorts. “I’ll just change into my new uniform and take my place in my assigned rocker on the patio and wait for the suicide march on Washington.”