The Dreaming Tree

by Matthew Mather

  She asked, “Did you get the Lowell file, too?” It was the same building as the medical examiner’s office.

  Coleman dropped the stack of files under his arm, picked up one, and waved it before putting it down.

  It was the first time she had brought her new partner here. She walked over to the pile of documents and scanned through them.

  “So this is your place?” he asked.

  “My mother’s, really. Rent control. Had it since the seventies. She used it as her painting studio—used it as everything back then. Rented it out for ten years, but she lets me have it now.”

  The loft, sixty feet deep and twenty wide, was the top floor of a five-story walk-up on Barrow Street, just off Bleaker in Greenwich Village. The back and side walls were red brick, with the only light coming from the large metal-framed windows at the front. The highest building in the immediate area, it just cleared the treetops, affording nice views of the uptown skyscrapers, but the view of the blue skies was what Del loved. Not much blue sky in Manhattan. The back wall was interrupted only by a steel fire escape door. In summer, Del would sometimes open it and barbecue off the back—illegal, of course, but then, she was a cop. The job did have its “cheeky perks,” as her dad would say.

  Coleman walked down the opposite wall and inspected the wood-framed canvases hung on wires from the exposed pipes of the sprinkler system. Dozens more paintings were haphazardly stacked on the floor, four and five and six deep against the walls. The parquet floor was speckled with a rainbow of dots and smudges. The place smelled of wood and turpentine and, more faintly, of boxing-gym leather and sweat.

  “Your mother was an artist?”

  “Still is, but these paintings are mine. She was well known in her day. Amede”—Del enunciated it clearly, AH-med-DEH—“Bechet.”

  “Amede? That’s unusual.”

  “Like Amadeus. Means ‘lover of God.’”

  “So your family’s religious?”

  “Complicated topic in our house, but sort of. My mum’s side of the family is Creole.”

  “You’re Cajun? I kinda thought you were Mexican or Porter Rican or something. No offense.”

  None taken. “Not Cajun. Creole.”

  “Would I know her?” Coleman asked. “I mean, heard of your mother?”

  “Only if you were into the Greenwich art scene in the late seventies.” Which was almost thirty years before Coleman was born. The young officer shrugged.

  Del picked up the medical examiner’s report from the night of Roy’s accident, out of curiosity more than anything else. A hunch, but hey, she was a detective, right? She had to listen to her hunches. She leafed through the file and walked over to sit down at a pocked and paint-spattered desk against the brick exterior wall halfway down the loft.

  A heavy bag hung from a steel chain from one of the roof joists in the corner. She used it for muay thai and boxing—an easy way to de-stress and keep fit in limited space. She thought of this place as her personal office away from her office, the one where she painted. Her Murphy bed was stowed against the wall, so it wasn’t as if she were bringing her partner into her bedroom. Still, she put the file down for a second to hide a pair of Manolo heels behind some boxing gloves—fancy shoes were a vice she struggled to indulge on her cop’s salary.

  “These pictures,” Coleman said, standing in front of a canvas hanging near the front window. “They’re, ah, nice, and all, but they’re all kinda white. All the same.”

  “To you they are, but to me, they’re filled with color and images. You can’t see what I see. I see ninety-nine million colors where you see only one. Like I said.” She reopened Roy’s ME report and started reading again.

  Coleman squinted at the picture. “Right.”

  Del said, “I mix my own pigments. Some have chemicals that phosphoresce in ultraviolet; some are heat sensitive. I’d love to show you what they look like to me, but that would be tough.”

  “So these are just for you? Nobody else can see them?”

  “They help me think—something you might want to try sometime.”

  She winked at Coleman and went back to reading the file.

  “Doesn’t it take a long time to commute?” Coleman asked. He had moved to the next painting.

  “I take the One train to Penn Station, then the Port Jefferson out to Hicksville. Takes about an hour. I leave my car there.”

  “Why don’t you get an apartment closer to the Second?”

  The Second Precinct of the Suffolk County Police Department, where their two wooden desks faced each other in the middle of the common area, was south of Huntington, about a third of the way into Long Island. Del tried to spend as little time there as possible. The thought of living in the suburbs made her feel as though she’d be giving up her soul, and the Second was as close to the city as she could get without being in the city.

  She hadn’t wanted to work for the NYPD. She needed her own space, needed to spread her wings away from her father. And the Suffolk Police Department was still one of the largest in the country, with three thousand sworn officers, and two million citizens to protect.

  “I still go to night school at NYU,” she said. “For my law degree. It’s easier from here. And sometimes I stay in Brooklyn with my folks.”

  She put Roy’s file down.

  Coleman saw her expression and asked, “What?”

  “Something’s not right.”

  14

  “I’m sorry,” Roy said. He and his wife sat in silence at the breakfast counter, the distance between them growing by the second.

  “Sorry isn’t good enough. You could have hurt me—maybe killed me.”

  “I told you, I thought I heard something,” Roy lied. But was she right?

  “We need to get a full-time nurse.”

  “You mean prison guard.”

  The landline phone on the counter rang.

  Penny leaned over to push the speaker button. “Could you please take us off your calling list?”

  A woman’s voice said, “Mrs. Lowell-Vandeweghe? This is Detective Devlin with the Suffolk County Police Department. I was hoping I could speak with your husband.”

  “Regarding what?” Penny answered, her voice coming down a notch.

  “I’m afraid I’d like to speak to him about that, if possible.”

  “And I’m afraid that’s not possible. My husband is in a home-care situation right now, and if you have any questions, please address them through our family lawyer, Mr. Atticus Cargill. Would you like me to spell that for you?”

  A second of silence, and another. “That won’t be necessary. Sorry for the intrusion.”

  The caller hung up, and Penny punched the speaker-phone button to turn it off.

  “Home care?” Roy said. Then, “Did you call the police last night?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then what do they want now?”

  “If it’s anything urgent, we’ll find out from Atticus.”

  Roy ran his hand through his hair. “I need to go out. Get some fresh air. Is that okay?”

  * * *

  “You did what?” Sam took a swig of his beer. His mane of gray hair ruffled in the wind coming off the ocean. It was almost seventy degrees, unseasonably warm for the end of November, and Sam wanted to make the most of the balmy weather.

  “I was standing right there over her,” Roy repeated, “holding a number thirty-three Louisville Slugger.”

  “And not on purpose?”

  “Before that was a total blackout. I don’t remember a thing.”

  “Sit down. Relax. Have a drink. Let’s talk this out.”

  A cooler filled with Budweiser occupied the space between two Adirondack chairs on the seaward deck of Sam’s sprawling Southampton estate. A perfect blue cathedral of sky encompassed a glittering view of the Atlantic,
just beyond two hundred feet of bayberry bushes, sedge, and switchgrass and a hundred feet of empty white-sand beach.

  The beach was technically public property, but Sam made it clear, using fences and signs, that nobody was to trespass on his virgin fifty acres. He even set up video surveillance. Both his parents had died ten years ago, and Sam, an eternal bachelor, lived alone in the massive ten-bedroom, nine-bath house. Off to their left was a seventy-foot swimming pool, and beyond that a double set of tennis courts, even though it was adjacent to the Meadows Club grass-court center just up the road.

  “What about, uh …?”

  It had taken Roy a while to find Sam after driving up the winding road in, past the stands of miniature elms, pitch pines, and crimson-ruby stands of chokeberry bushes. The front door was unlocked, the cavernous house echo-empty as he called out. Roy had given up and was about to leave when he saw two figures out on the sea deck: Sam and a young woman, whose name Roy couldn’t recall even after just being introduced.

  “Eva was just about to leave,” Sam said loudly, turning in his chair. “Weren’t you, honey?”

  The girl sauntered up the boardwalk from the house—a cat on a catwalk, in tiny shorts and high heels, but with an oversize sweater on top. She had a ham sandwich in one hand, a bottle of rum in the other. And “girl” seemed the apt word for her—the beautiful Latina with flowing auburn hair couldn’t be more than twenty.

  “Whatever you say, Papi,” she said as she put the sandwich and rum down on the table. She cast a quick smile Roy’s way before asking Sam, “We all done today? What about—”

  “It’s on the counter. The usual spot. The usual amount.”

  She kissed Sam on the cheek, smiled again, and walked back the way she had come.

  “I’m not even going to ask,” Roy said, trying not to watch her leave.

  “Hey, you always pay for it, one way or the other. Come on, sit. Beer?”

  “Not for me.” He flopped into the chair next to Sam.

  He felt exhausted. He had barely slept, and the unease in his belly had only worsened as he drove up Sam’s driveway. The sense of foreboding had intensified the closer he got to the beach.

  A loud, almost ear-splitting whistle sounded, but it was just Sam goofing around, wearing his usual ear-to-ear grin. “So a man goes to see a magical bird—a parrot that, it’s said, can remove any curse.”

  “Oh, God, really?” Roy wasn’t in the mood.

  “The guy spends years searching the mountains and forests, until he finally comes upon the magical parrot.” Sam whistled again, two loud bursts. “‘What can I do for you?’ the parrot asks the man.”

  “‘Can you remove a curse I’ve been afflicted with for the past thirty years?’” Sam said in a lower voice, now imitating the man in the joke.

  Yet another loud whistle. “‘Maybe, maybe,’” Sam said in a squawky nasal voice, this time impersonating the parrot. “‘But I need the exact words that were used to put the curse on you. Do you remember them?’” Sam’s eyes twinkled. Here it came. “And the guy says without hesitation, ‘I now pronounce you man and wife.’”

  “That’s very funny,” Roy said.

  “You’re the one waking up over your wife with a baseball bat in your hand.”

  “I think I will take that beer.”

  “How was the support group?” Sam asked.

  “You mean before the blackout?”

  “Yeah, before that.”

  “Depressing.”

  “That’s all?”

  “I mean, those people are dealing with sort of the same thing as me. The guilt. Except some poor bastard checked off ‘organ donor’ on a card and expected maybe they’d give a kidney to someone. Did they know they might end up giving their entire body? I’ve got that extra bit of guilt to deal with.”

  “Minus the brain,” Sam pointed out. “An entire body minus the brain.”

  “Maybe not. This Dr. Brixton? He was there last night. Had a chat with him. He says the body has two brains—that there’s an ancient one in the gut, connected via the vagus nerve.”

  “Sounds like a cheerful guy.”

  “He said that as my neural connections solidify, this other guy’s ancient gut-brain is going to start talking to me. Gut thinking. Danesti never told me any of that. Never said anything about it.”

  “I read more about this Brixton guy,” Sam said. “He’s a bit of a flake. Not doing transplants anymore—something about a donor that wasn’t fully dead.”

  “You’re the one who sent me to him.”

  “Was it helpful?”

  Was it? Roy at least felt that he had more people to talk to, an outlet. And if Brixton was a flake, he at least gave a different perspective on what was happening in Roy’s head. “I guess.”

  “Something’s better than nothing, right?” Sam raised his beer to clink with Roy’s. They both took a sip.

  “Except for the blackout,” Roy added.

  “Maybe that’s just part of the process. This was never going to be easy.”

  “Easy?” Roy jumped out of his chair. “My wife finally wants to have a baby, she says, but what? I’m going to have sex with her using some other guy’s penis?”

  “Did you ever touch it?” Sam asked. His grin gave a little twitch. “I mean, like, held it, and—”

  “Can you be serious for just one second?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Even if I got her pregnant, it’s not even my sperm. It’s not my DNA coming out of there. It’s this other dead guy’s that I’m attached to. So it would be his kid.”

  “I gotta admit, that is kinda messed up.”

  “And I’m taking immunosuppressant drugs, just like the other people at the support group last night—but the drugs are to prevent this body from rejecting my head. If I don’t take the drugs, will my head drop off? Explode? They say it’ll start to rot like dead meat.”

  “Calm down.”

  “This wasn’t just an accident.” The thought had tickled the back of his mind, circled around and back, but it was the first time he’d said it out loud.

  Sam got up out of his deck chair to join Roy at the railing. “What wasn’t an accident?”

  “Penny said she was driving that night, but she doesn’t know how to drive stick shift.”

  “Better her grinding the gears than you—you were howling drunk that night.”

  “Did you see her drive?”

  “I saw both of you leave together.”

  “Were we fighting?”

  “No more than usual. So you think she crashed the car on purpose? Why would she do that? She could have killed herself.”

  “Maybe that’s what she wanted, or maybe she wanted to kill me.” For all her carefree attitude, his wife did have a dark streak. “What did she tell you about my dog, Leila?”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “She’s lying about it, or somebody is. My mother said something else, too. No straight answers.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s not just that, Sam. Things don’t add up. Maybe the crash was an accident, but this?” Roy pointed at his body. “You know what the odds are of getting a healthy young body, undamaged, with a blood and genetic—”

  “Sometimes luck happens, man. Sometimes it doesn’t. When it does, take it.”

  The man was an inveterate gambler. He had even dragged Roy in from time to time, mostly for the World Series or Super Bowl games. It was about all that kept him busy, he liked to tell people. His family was old money—started with distributing booze after Prohibition, with connections to the Anheuser-Busch families. He had helped Roy’s father get started when he first came to New York, introduced him to the Hamptons crowd.

  “It’s a gut feeling,” Roy said. He gulped down his drink. Gut feeling. There it was
again. He’d said it without thinking. “That’s the best I can explain it.”

  Sam finished off his drink, too. “Let’s take a walk.”

  They got new beers and started off on the boardwalk to the beach.

  “So you think Penny faked the crash?” Sam asked. “Did you remember something new?”

  It was a constant topic of conversation. Roy still didn’t remember anything from the end of the party. “Something doesn’t feel right.”

  “No kidding, but I mean—what do you mean?”

  “And if it wasn’t an accident, then I’m not safe and Penny isn’t safe, either. Not least of all from me. I could have killed her last night!”

  “But you didn’t. Did you talk to Dr. Danesti about it?”

  “I don’t trust him, either. I’m just a building block for his billion-dollar empire.”

  “You think maybe Danesti arranged this? With your mother? That’s dark, man, even for her.”

  “He was my mother’s doctor before this. Don’t you think that’s a little too much?”

  “Your mother can be a battle-ax, but she’s—”

  “She’s trying to get at my trust fund. I asked Danesti how all this was being paid for. He was vague. Said he was paying for most of it, that the Chegwiddens paid, too, and my trust fund was paying part of it.”

  The family lawyer, Atticus Cargill, was executor of the trust, but Sam had been named a secondary trustee, not that he paid much attention. “Could you ask Atticus about that for me? I want to know what’s going on.”

  “I’ll see what I can find out. Sure.”

  “Danesti’s got too much invested in me. I don’t trust the guy.”

  “He did save your life.”

  “Maybe so, but even if he did, for what, exactly? What pound of flesh do I owe?”

  “I think you’re being paranoid. The doc said this would happen. I think you need to go home and calm down.”