Epitaph

TWENTY-TWO

Black bag jobs, hit-and-runs, in-and-outs. Santini had been the acknowledged master, Jean the unacknowledged one, and William the class virgin. After all, you didn't have to break in on adulterers when you could peek in on them. Which was just as well, since William, of course, played by the rules, and the rules said private investigators had no more rights than a private citizen and therefore couldn't go breaking into other people's houses. Santini and Jean treated this rule like they treated other people's houses, that is, they broke it, then broke into other people's houses. Santini even had enough time left over to break into other people's wives as well, which means he may have been the real master of the surreptitious entry after all.

William, then, was at a disadvantage. He'd picked up a flashlight at a local hardware store, as well as some black electrical tape, though he would have been at a loss to tell anyone why.

I don't know, Officer, he'd have to say, and unlike the other twenty thousand would-be burglars they'd pick up this week, he'd really mean it.

He whiled away the hours at a Burger King, a street- side flea market, and finally at a movie which starred Jean-Claude Van Damme, and which only one hour later he couldn't remember a single word from. Okay, he remembered a few words-the part where they explained native Alabamian Jean-Claude's accent as a residue from his attending summer camp in Switzerland. Drawp your weepon-he said, and this bunch of rednecks refused to, but only because they didn't understand what he'd said. That was William's guess, although they might have been just getting him mad so that Jean-Claude could do his stuff and litter their junkyard with their thoroughly beaten up bodies. William left the theater wishing he knew the martial arts, so he could simply drop-kick his way into Dr. Morten's rose-brick town house.

Which was now precisely one half block from him, and growing increasingly redder as the day faded into evening. Which suddenly reminded him of a certain white dress, that day in East Brooklyn again, her dress, which had turned scarlet before his eyes as he did nothing but watch. Just like that other night outside the Par Central Motel, when he did nothing but watch either. Which meant that when you toted things up, he'd spent a lot of time watching-unlike Jean-Claude, say, who was nothing if not a man of action.

The light was failing quickly and taking whole sections of the street with it. The rose brick turned to brown, then gray, and staining darker by the minute reached a sort of poor man's indigo. If it had been winter, it would have been time, but being summer, the street was still throbbing with urban congestion. People stood around- against cars, on stoops, and on street curbs as if waiting for something to happen. And nothing did, so they sat around some more waiting for something else. Which didn't happen either. In fact, the only thing that actually happened was that William's leg began to ache something fierce, and everyone, but everyone, began to notice him. It might have been his occasional groans of pain that did it-yes, he would say that definitely got people's atten- tion-or it could have been the fact that he was leaning on a cane for hours on end without either sitting down or falling over. Maybe it wasn't hours-but to any casual observer, it would appear that way. Think about it. When they asked-Did anyone notice anyone unusual-everyone would have. It'd be unanimous.

Then, suddenly, deliverance. An ice cream truck rounded the corner a block away, belching out this monotonous jingle which seemed to hypnotize half the crowd into going after it. The other half-the woman in rollers, the two men playing chess across a lopsided bridge table, the man with three dogs-seemed perplexed by this sudden loss of community, and rather than wait for it to reappear, decided to forgo the night air altogether and withdraw en masse. And in the rose-brick town house-now as black and indistinct as rain clouds in a fog, the single light that had been shining brightly from an upstairs window went out abruptly as if snuffed.

Okay, Jean-Claude would definitely take this as the moment to act.

There were two basement windows set beneath the front steps. William had noticed them before; a large tabby had been licking its paws in one of them, staring out with a lazy indifference.

He shuffled over there now. Reaching the bottom of the town house steps, he turned left and stealthily slipped behind them. Translation: He made it there without tripping over his cane. It was cooler here than on the street, danker too, and he could feel moss in the spaces between the bricks. Suddenly, a large grotesque shape appeared in the window. He was this close to scramming, this close, when he realized the large grotesque shape was actually small grotesque him. Or rather, his reflection, staring him down like someone intent on doing him harm. And maybe he was-intent on doing him harm.

Now the reflection wasn't exactly grotesque anymore; more like pathetic. What was he doing? Even his state- of-the-art flashlight couldn't brighten his chances of success. He was out of his element, he was out of his mind. Seventy-year-old man kills self while breaking and entering-another headline for Mr. Brickman's collection. Old men enter houses the old-fashioned way-they wait to be asked in. He went back up the front stoop and knocked.

Dr. Morten didn't look particularly surprised. He didn't look particularly happy either. What he looked like was particularly resigned.

"You knew him," William said. "When I said his name, you knew him."

And Dr. Morten said yes. Yes. Oh yes. Yes he had. it it it

Fair was fair. Dr. Morten had a point. They'd both told stories to each other. Now it was time to tell other stories to each other. True ones.

First Dr. Morten asked him if Jean was really dead.

Yeah. Dead all right.

Dr. Morten sighed, the way you sigh at the end of a movie that's moved you to tears. Hard to believe it's over, but it is.

Then Dr. Morten said you go first. You're not here to settle the Goldblum estate, that's for sure.

So he did. He took a deep breath and jumped right in, and after a while he found the water wasn't too uncomfortable after all.

"I used to work with him," he began, the way he'd begun with Rodriguez and the hooker. "We were the Three Eyes Detective Agency. We were moderately successful, but Jean was the star. Definitely. When it broke up, we all went our separate ways. It wasn't like we had bowling nights when we did work together. So no one kept up with no one. We got old and I started reading the obituaries. I had death on the brain. One day I saw his obituary. I went to the funeral because I thought it was the least I could do. It would've been. Except I forgot to say rest in peace. I started learning things. Like the fact that he wasn't retired. Ready to join the shuf- fleboard league and he wasn't retired. I think that pissed me off. I was actually mad at him. I found out he'd been selling runaway kids back to their parents. Picture it- fourteen-year-old Minnesota kids stepping off the bus and there's Jean fighting the pimps and Covenant House priests for them. I imagine Jean played the sympathetic grandfatherly type-let me buy you a milk shake and you can tell old Jean all about it. Sure, I understand why you'd leave a home like that. Absolutely. Why don't you just give me your parents' number and I'll make it all right for you. Some of them did give him their parents' numbers. And then he'd get on the phone and play the concerned detective. I've found your daughter. Your son. Yes I have. Now if you just send me a money order to cover expenses I'll send them right back to… what, you don't want to pay expenses? Haven't hired me, you say? Low on cash? Click. Jean would give them the old fongul. Beat it, kid, he'd say. By the next week, they'd be out turning tricks. That was Jean. That was the Jean I knew and loved back in the good old days. So, big deal right? Go back to your apartment and pick up the obits again. Except I learned something else. That Jean had stopped selling kids. Honest. Given it up for a real case. Something, anyway, that was real to him. Real big. Real important. I don't know if I believed it. I didn't believe it. Not at first. I don't know why I bothered to find out if I should. Maybe because I'd retired a long time ago and he hadn't. Maybe because I got spit on on the way to his funeral and it felt like just another day at the office. Maybe I had survivor's guilt. Who knows-you're the psychiatrist. Okay, maybe I'm lying. Maybe it was the case. Unfinished- and cases are meant to be finished. After a while, I think it was that, the case, all these missing people I was turning up. So I thought I'd finish it for him. Why not-do the same for me, wouldn't he? And then somebody threw me down a deep dark hole. Tried to kill me-just like that. Came close to doing it too. So I thought, okay, maybe Jean wouldn't do the same for me. Maybe reading the obits isn't so dull after all. Maybe I'll re-retire. No such luck. Now I had this case on the brain. I found out other things. That Jean had this case on the brain too. That it had relieved him of something. That it had somehow balanced the books. He went and had his Mauthausen tattoo burnt off with acid because he said he'd earned it. Now what does that mean? Eighty years old and he's undergoing cosmetic surgery. Now here's what I start to think. I was following this case and everyone was saying he went that-a-way. Remember the old westerns? When they said that-a-way it always turned out to be the other way. The smart sheriffs knew that. So maybe I finally got smart. This case is about what was. It goes back. I don't think a client came out of the woodwork to give Jean a case. I think Jean was his own client. I think this was his own case. I think Jean was spanking himself for a long time, and that he was suddenly shown a way out. That-a-way. I think he saved his best case for last."

There. Quite a speech. But he'd told it all, all he knew; he hadn't held a single thing back.

"Your turn," he said.

"What if I don't want a turn?"

"We had a deal."

"You can get out of the deal if you want."

"I don't want."

"Maybe you do, and you don't know it."

"Now you're losing me, Doctor. Come on, this was I'll- tell-you-mine-if-you-tell-me-yours."

"You don't want to hear mine."

"Why?"

"Because mine's worse. Go home."

"I can't."

"Go home, William."

"I can't. Why did you know him?"

"I can call you a cab."

"Fifty years later and you knew his name. Why?"

"Because I couldn't forget it. I've tried."

"It's your turn, Doctor."

"If I tell, you'll wish I hadn't."

"I wish I hadn't read the obits. One wish to a customer."

"Okay," Dr. Morten said. "Okay," his voice trailing off like a muffled prayer. And what was he praying for? For William to listen to him maybe, for William to take the next cab home, and leave what was buried, buried. But William had gone too far; he'd crossed that point where going back was longer than going forward. He was committed to the journey now, no refunds, no cancellation insurance. Like Mr. Leonati on another journey to hell, he was good and stuck.

"Okay," he repeated. "But I've got to figure out where to begin. Do I begin with him or with me? We're both important here. Take me. I was a kid, a psychiatric intern, just starting out. He wasn't much older. But he'd been through it. Like the rest of them. Bones-walking skeletons with that dead stare in their eyes. He wasn't different, just more bitter than the rest of them. Help him, they said. Help him. He was my first-you never forget your first, right?"

Clarence the cat was pirouetting crazily on the end table, like a music box ballerina gone haywire. Dr. Morten didn't seem to notice. He was back in time, a fresh- scrubbed intern about to shrink his very first head.

"He's a hero, they told me. Lost his family in the camps. Refused to eat when they liberated him. Wanted to die. Help him, they said. Sure thing, I answered. After all, this is what I wanted, what I'd gone to school for. I was going to make him forget, make him come to terms with his loss.

"At first, he was uncommunicative. Sat in the corner and didn't say a word to me. I let him stew in it too- tried to use the silence as a tool. But it didn't work with him. He was back there sizing me up-even then I knew that. So I started to talk-telling him a little about me to see if he'd bite. Of course, before I knew it, I was doing all the talking and he was doing all the listening. See- he'd turned things on their head-reversed roles with me. He was the doctor and I was the patient. It didn't take him long to come up with a diagnosis either. Terminal tenderness-the fatal desire to help others. He had me right where he wanted me then.

"So he began to talk. And talk. Suddenly he wasn't so dead anymore. Suddenly he wasn't so pathetic and tortured. Because suddenly I was. I thought about getting up and leaving him. Just refusing him as a patient. Wishful thinking. We were stuck with each other. At least till the next session when he decided not to show up again. He didn't have to. He'd said everything he wanted to."

Dr. Morten leaned forward.

"But to tell you about Jean, I have to tell you about someone else first. Someone you may find it hard to believe was real. Except he was. Afterward, I looked up everything I could about him. There wasn't a lot. But there was enough-even today. In the absolute butchery that was World War II he was just an afterthought. Maybe he didn't have the right press agent-his numbers weren't up there with the big boys. But he was smarter than they were. Much smarter."

As Dr. Morten continued, William could sense something had changed. No, Clarence still sat on the end table licking his paws with undisturbed relish, the blinds still lay drawn and shuttered, the door still firmly shut to the world. But there was another visitor in the house now. No doubt about it. Someone had sneaked in through the cracks, drawn up a chair, and put up his feet on the kitchen table.

Had he ever heard of Marcel Petoit, Dr. Morten wanted to know. Dr. Petoit?

"No," William replied.

"Now you will." And as he told him what he knew, William felt like he was six years old again and listening to a fairy tale in the dark, one of those gruesome fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm. Just a fairy tale. Because when you got right down to it-it was easier that way.