The Quiet Boy

by Ben H. Winters

Too late now. He rang the bell one more time and stood there like an idiot, snow gathering on his eyeglasses, snow slowly soaking his shoes.

  It was a tidy slate doorstep, flanked by two gigantic bronze urns. A limp American flag jutted out from above the door, the snowfall dampening its stars. The house was on Meridian Street, one in a series of stately homes, each set back from the road, each lawn full of tall, handsome trees. The cabdriver had seemed surprised when Ruben gave him the address, raised his eyebrows and muttered, “No kidding.” He’d come out of the airport with no luggage, just carrying an old orange canvas backpack, wearing a long-sleeve T-shirt and the same jeans he’d worn the day before.

  “Indiana?” his manager, Sunny, had said. “No. You’re not going to Indiana, Rabbi. I forbid it.”

  “It’s just for a few days.”

  “You say that, but what if you get kidnapped by some lunatic and he chains you to his radiator?”

  “Why would that happen in Indiana?”

  “Are you kidding? Don’t you read? That’s exactly where it happens.” Sunny in her TRUCK FUMP T-shirt had followed him out of the Killer Greens and blocked his way down Third Street. “Wait. Oh my God. Are you being catfished? Did you meet someone on the internet?”

  When Ruben told her that no, he was running a kind of errand for his father, she had been yet more incredulous.

  “You have a father?”

  He did. More or less.

  Ruben sighed, shivering, and tried knocking on the door instead of ringing. He stepped back from the front porch and looked at the upstairs windows. All were dark. The sky was gray, flat and toneless as a coffin lid. Ruben removed his glasses, wiped them off on his T-shirt, and put them back on.

  He raised his fist to try knocking one more time, and then the porch light came on, as bright and sudden as new understanding.

  “Yes?”

  A voice through the door, a woman’s, thin and high and polite.

  People in Indianapolis were very polite. He’d bumped into a woman at the airport line and when he apologized she smiled, red-cheeked, and said, Oh, you’re fine. In the main terminal was a banner declaring it, humbly, THE FRIENDLIEST AIRPORT IN AMERICA, which seemed about right.

  And now the door cracked open and a well-dressed woman peered primly at him from inside the house.

  “Hi. Sorry. Are you Eleanor Pileggi?”

  The woman nodded.

  “My name is Ruben Shenk,” he said. “I’m conducting an investigation into the death of your daughter.” Ruben met her eyes. He had practiced the short speech, muttering it to himself over and over on the four-hour flight from LAX. “I am very sorry for your loss, and for intruding.”

  “Oh, you’re fine.”

  “I hope you don’t mind, I just had a couple of questions for you.”

  “Well…” Her eyes, he saw now, were hazy. The house behind her was not dark, but dim. He pictured a half-empty glass of wine, a lipstick stain on the rim, in the kitchen, on a coffee table. A television that had been muted. “We understood that all of that has been settled. The man had been apprehended. The guilty party.” She said the guilty party with no particular emotion or emphasis, as if she were referring to someone who’d stolen her purse or hacked her computer. Not murdered her only child.

  “Well, yes.” Ruben cleared his throat. “He has.” He felt a hot rush of confusion and embarrassment. “However, as to the defendant—the killer, the alleged killer—there are some questions that need to be resolved.” He had to tell her, of course. He had to tell her right now. “I’m working for him. For the defendant. The defense.”

  There was more he could say, of course, and he would if she asked. He was here because his father, the defense attorney who had no business being a defense attorney, had sent him, an investigator who had no business investigating, to find some straw to grasp at, and he had found one. Your daughter, as it turns out, was the aggressor in the encounter that took her life. Your daughter, alone or with accomplices, had been harassing the guilty party, and then she attacked him, giving him reason to act, and so he’s not as guilty as we all thought. This new version of events based on what? Based on my dilettante’s inspection of the crime scene, based on the defendant’s daughter’s tender hopes, based on nothing.

  And for this, Ruben was asking to be accommodated? For this he had flown to Indiana, nosed in on the great tragedy of her life? A total stranger. An Asian, and a Jew. All the world’s curious otherness, on her snow-white doorstep.

  “You’re fine,” she said. “Actually, I’m glad you’ve come.”

  She said this like she had been waiting, and for some time perhaps, for someone like him to show up. For some Los Angeles weirdo to come trudging bootless to her door, to whom she could offer up a bargain: “You’re an investigator, you said?”

  “Of a kind.” Then, with more certainty, and actually feeling it to be true: “I am. Yes.”

  “Well.” She hesitated a long time. Gazing over his shoulder, nodding softly, consulting with ghosts that only she could see.

  “The thing is…” she said at last, and then paused again, and sighed. “The thing is, I don’t know anything. And I…I just want to know. Do you understand what I mean?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I just want to know about her. About my daughter. So, yes—” She looked him dead in the eye, her small pale face set and serious. “I will tell you whatever might be helpful. But then—anything you find out—about Theresa. Anything.” Her voice wavered and then returned, like a picture coming in and out of focus. “I hope that you will tell me.”

  “Yeah,” said Ruben. “Yeah, no. Of course.”

  But that wasn’t enough. “Do you promise, young man?” She reached for his ungloved hand, pressed her fingers into his bones. “You promise that you will tell me?”

  “Yes.” She held his hand for a moment, clinging to him. The winter wind keened like a bully through the thin fabric of his shirt.

  “OK, then,” said Mrs. Pileggi brightly. She stepped aside and gestured him in. “Then I’ll make us some tea.”

  Ruben sat down at the kitchen table in his soggy clothes.

  “Is your husband at home also, ma’am? Do you think he might want to join us?”

  “He is dead,” said Mrs. Pileggi flatly, unwrapping a tea bag from its paper pocket, placing it in a yellow mug. “Some years. He wouldn’t know anything about any of this.”

  She sat delicately across from him and smoothed her skirt in her lap. The table was a perfect circle of light wood. The kitchen had very clean white tiles and gleaming iron fixtures. There was a bowl of fruit, each piece of which seemed to have been chosen for the color it added to the room: shining red apples and rich purple plums. Mrs. Pileggi, in a pressed floral-print dress, her lipstick and blush, and her shining gold earrings, seemed overdressed for her own midday home. The smile was a permanent fixture on her face as she bustled in and out of the walk-in pantry for tea bags, as she set out sugar and milk in little brass containers. Providing, even in her grief, the sort of easy graciousness Ruben associated with earlier decades, or centuries. Or with Marilyn actually, really—Ruben felt it like a pang across his chest. The tea and all, the dress. It made him think of his mother.

  “Now,” she said. “What is it I can tell you?”

  Before he could answer, she stood up. The kettle had begun whistling. She moved to the stove.

  Ruben, for all his preparation—the notebook, which was open and ready, his phone on the table with the voice memo app running—remained uncertain about what he was actually going to ask. “Do you know what brought your daughter, Theresa, to Los Angeles at the end of last year?”

  “I do not. Whoops—careful.” She was pouring hot water. Ruben leaned backward, out of splashing range. “I sure don’t. I didn’t know she was going there, until she—” Both cups full, she set down the kettle. “Until she came back.”

  Ruben looked down at his mug, watching the water muddy with tea.

  The
resa Pileggi’s body had been sent here, to Indianapolis, to her people, when the Los Angeles County medical examiner was done with it. He knew that from the files. He resisted the urge to say “Sorry” again. How sorry could one person be?

  He felt too small for this. For the big weather of this lady’s grief and need. Too small and too young.

  “So she didn’t mention planning a trip to Southern California, late last year?”

  “No. Not to me.”

  Mrs. Pileggi rose yet again. She walked briskly across the kitchen, to a desk that was built into an alcove in the kitchen, and pulled a plastic card box from a drawer. “But if we’re being honest, she never told me much of anything.” She set the card box down on the table; it was a rigid plastic box with a snap lid and a worn Staples sticker across the top.

  “You know how it is with children. Once they reach a certain age, they are a universe unto themselves.”

  She said this as if they were both middle-aged, veterans of the heartaches of parenthood, although surely she could see that Ruben was younger than her, younger even than her own dead child. Ruben had left his shoes by the front door. He moved his toes inside his wet socks. Outside the snow was endless, coming in slantwise, gathering in the corners of the windows.

  He eyed the box uneasily. Were those her ashes? Was Theresa Pileggi in that plastic box?

  “When exactly did she leave for Los Angeles?”

  “Oh, I couldn’t tell you.”

  “She was—I’m sorry—she was killed on December twentieth. You don’t know how long she’d been in LA before then?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t.”

  “Right, but…wait. I’m sorry. Sorry.” Ruben fumbled off his glasses, which were steaming now from the tea. “Maybe I’m confused.”

  “We all are, dear.” She smiled rotely. “We’re all trying our best. Our very best.”

  “But she was living here, wasn’t she?”

  The coroner’s report had listed this as her address. It had been the address on her driver’s license, on all the identification in her purse in the motel room. And it was what the head of Human Resources at UC Riverside had told Ruben when he called. According to their records, Theresa Pileggi had resigned her position abruptly in the spring of 2009 and returned home. Left an address in Indianapolis so her mail could be forwarded. This address.

  “Oh yes. She had been living at home for ten years—or, no—nine, I think? Yes. Nine. Which was, between you and me, just such a treat, when she came home. So nice to have my little girl back. Grown up as she was, she was still my child. I am sure your parents would feel the same way.”

  Ruben let this particular sentiment slide by unexamined.

  “And, can I ask—what was she doing here?”

  “I’m not sure I know what you mean.” Mrs. Pileggi’s voice took on a slightly aggrieved quiver. What was he suggesting?

  Ruben wondered the same thing. What was he suggesting? He set his glasses down on the table, beside his teacup. He stared into the two lenses, as if looking into his own eyes, gathered his thoughts a moment.

  “Your daughter had a pretty good job in California. Right? She had a teaching position at Riverside, and grants for her research? She owned a home?”

  “An apartment, yes. A condo. Not to my taste, but yes.”

  “But she gave all that up and came back home.”

  “Yes,” said Eleanor. “I believe that something—well, that something happened out there. A disappointment. A breakup or a shock of some kind. Young people’s lives can be very complicated, of course.”

  Ruben was noticing something unsettling about the way she spoke: it was like a series of aphorisms, observations drawn from human experience by someone who has never personally experienced it. “Young people’s lives can be very complicated, of course.”

  “Did she say anything about a case? A lawsuit?”

  Mrs. Pileggi furrowed her brow. “No. What—do you mean recently?”

  “No, when she came home. In the summer of 2009.”

  “No.” Mrs. Pileggi frowned. “Was she in some sort of legal trouble?”

  It wasn’t worth getting into. All of Pileggi’s wasted work on Keener. The case itself, its slow buildup and sudden, devastating collapse. The handful of terrible moments when everything fell apart. The look on Theresa’s face. On Jay’s. Ruben remembered the day for a blurred sad instant and then he let it go.

  The Rabbi could have told the whole story if he wanted. He could have chanted it like Torah.

  “No, ma’am,” he said quietly. “She wasn’t in any trouble.”

  “Whew.” Mrs. Pileggi’s face, absurdly, was flooded with relief—as if her daughter wasn’t, right now, in the worst possible trouble a person could be in. Dead now and dead forever.

  Ruben’s tea, untasted, was growing cold. The steam had stopped swirling above it. He was feeling his way toward something here, but he didn’t know what. The dishwasher was chugging softly in the corner. The snow continued to fall against the windows, wet trails melting in streaks.

  “I guess what I’m asking, Mrs. Pileggi, is what she was doing here the last nine years.”

  “Oh.” Eleanor smiled. “She was working on a project. Some new research project, for which she required the solitude and lack of distraction that only her childhood home could provide. My Tess was a scientist, you know.” Eleanor’s smile widened. Her face was lit with pride. “A brain scientist.”

  “And how did she seem, when she was home? To you and—was your husband still living?”

  “No. She wouldn’t—” She made a hard stop, adjusted her tone. “She wouldn’t have come to this house if that man was still living.”

  Something in the way her mouth closed at the end of that sentence, buttoned shut like a pocketbook, made Ruben know that this subject, at least, was finished.

  Ruben saw Douglas Pileggi. He had been staring at him the whole time. There was a formal photograph visible past Eleanor in the adjacent dining room. In it Mr. Pileggi was staring straight ahead, a jowly man with the slicked-back hairdo of a TV-show detective. He was not smiling; Theresa, who must have been sixteen or seventeen in the picture, looked equally unhappy. Only Mrs. Pileggi looked cheerful, and in the context of Douglas’s and Theresa’s dour expressions, more than slightly deranged. Like all reasons for happiness were gone, but no one had told her yet.

  “So she came home, and she was sort of holed up in her room?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Working on this—on a project of some kind?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what was she—did you know what she was working on?”

  “Oh, not exactly. But she came home and got to work right away, burrowed away there. Buried herself in her work.”

  Ruben got a strange chill at the words burrowed away. At the words buried herself.

  Whatever Theresa Pileggi was doing, whatever she was working on, it culminated late last year. Ten years since Wesley hit his head. Ten years since they drilled a hole in his skull and he woke up walking. Ruben knew from Evie that she called Richard in early December, a couple weeks before she was killed.

  Leave me alone. Evie standing in the hallway, watching her father on the phone, seeing that he was frightened, her father who was never frightened. You people leave me alone.

  It sounded like this wasn’t the first call. And Theresa of course was just one person. So what had he meant, you people?

  Even as Ruben asked himself these questions, the answers were here. They were floating in the air around him. Even in Eleanor Pileggi’s quiet kitchen, the night man was here.

  “So her work. This work she was doing,” Ruben said. “She was conducting research on the brain?”

  “Oh, well. She’s so intelligent. But I’ve never been able to understand anything about her work. Neurons and dendrites and all of that.” Mrs. Pileggi seemed uneasy. Confused, suddenly. “She was not, I must say, terribly communicative about it. You know how kids are.”
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br />   Ruben didn’t know how kids were, but he knew how Theresa Pileggi had been, and it was absolutely clear what this period had been like for her mother, no matter how hard she was working to tell herself otherwise. And she was trying so hard. The strain of it like taut ropes at the corners of the smile. Her hands trembling on her mug. Working to remember this as a good and happy time in her own history, and in her daughter’s. She’s just doing what everybody does, Ruben realized. Struggling to construct a life in a world she can be happy in. Struggling harder than most people have to.

  “She would come out for meals. Usually. Not always. Sometimes I would just set food down in the hall. Knock on the door, just to let Tess know I’d made supper.” She demonstrated, miming a hesitant tapping. “She was…industrious, you know? Whatever it was, it was quite consuming, I can certainly tell you that. She was in there for hours. Just hours on end.”

  “Working? Writing?”

  “No…no, I don’t…” Her smile was absolutely empty. “I don’t quite know what she was doing. But she was moving around a lot, I know that. Pacing and—and sort of speaking quietly to herself. All the time.”

  “Was she—” Ruben hesitated, a split second, and then just said it. “Was she using drugs?”

  “She was not…” Mrs. Pileggi’s hand, tight on the handle of her mug, tightened further. “She was not the kind of person who did that.”

  Ruben nodded, OK, noting that she hadn’t actually answered his question. On the other hand, Ruben didn’t think Theresa Pileggi had been using drugs. She was on something, trapped inside of something, but it wasn’t drugs.

  “Was she on the phone? Did she make phone calls?”

  “Gosh, you know, I’m not sure. I did sometimes hear her…” Mrs. Pileggi began.

  Ruben waited. “You would sometimes hear her doing what, Mrs. Pileggi?”

  “Moaning.” She looked up. “Isn’t that funny? Not like—” She made a surprisingly frank expression. “Not like that. But moaning. A very uncomfortable sound. During this time. I would—” She laughed, nervously. “Sometimes I would put my ear to the door, and I would hear her in there. Walking, as I said, pacing, you know, and muttering, or moaning.”