G Is For Gumshoe

21

He looked like a zombie. I followed as he crossed to one of two matching wing chairs and took a seat. He rubbed his eyes, then pinched the bridge of his nose. His dress shirt was wrinkled, the tiny blue pinstripe stained with sweat at the armpits. "I gave her a Valium. Jermaine said she'd stay with her until she goes to sleep."

I stayed on my feet, clinging to whatever psychological advantage I had in towering over him. "What's going on, Clyde? I've never seen anyone react like that."

"Irene's a sick cookie. She has been ever since we met." He snorted to himself. "God… I used to think there was something charming about her helplessness…"

"This goes way beyond helpless. That woman's terrified. So was Agnes."

"It's always been like that. She's phobic about everything-closed spaces, spiders, dust. You know what she's afraid of? The hook and eye on a door. She's afraid of African violets. Jesus, violets. And it just gets worse. She suffers from allergies, depression, hypochondria. She's half dead from fear and probably hooked on all the prescription drugs she takes. I've taken her to every kind of doctor you can name and they all throw up their hands. The shrinks love to see her coming, but then they lose interest when the old voodoo doesn't work. She doesn't want to get better. Trust me. She's hanging on to her symptoms for dear life. I try to have compassion, but all I feel is despair. My life is a nightmare, but what am I supposed to do? Divorce her? I can't do it. I couldn't live with myself if I did that. She's like a little kid. I thought when her mother died… I thought once Agnes was gone, she'd… improve. Like a curse being lifted. But it won't happen that way."

"Do you have any idea what it is?"

He shook his head. He had the hopeless air of a rat being badgered by a cat.

"What about her father? Could this be connected to him? She says he died in the war…"

"Your guess is as good as mine," he said, smiling wistfully. "Irene probably married me because of him…"

"Wanting a father?"

"Oh sure. Wanting everything-comfort, protection, security. You know what I want? I want to live one week without drama… seven days without tears and uproar and dependency and neediness, without all the juice being drained right out of me." He shook his head again. "Not going to happen in my lifetime. It's not going to happen in hers either. I might as well blow my brains out and be done with it."

"She must have suffered some kind of childhood trauma-"

"Oh, who gives a damn? Forty years ago? You're never going to get to the bottom of it and if you did, what difference would it make? She is who she is and I'm stuck."

"Why don't you bail out?"

"Leave Irene? How am I supposed to do that? Every time I think of leaving, she ends up flat on her back. I can't kick her when she's down…"

I heard a tap at the front window. Dietz was peering in. I let out a deep breath. I was never so relieved to see anyone.

"I'll get that," I said and moved to the front door. Dietz came in, his gaze straying to Clyde, who had leaned his head against the back of the chair, eyes closed, playing dead. Dietz's mere presence caused the tension in the air to dissipate, but he could tell at a glance that all was not well. I lifted my brows slightly, conveying with a look that I'd fill him in once we were alone. "How'd it go?" I asked.

"Tell you about it in a minute. Let's get out of here."

I said, "Clyde…"

"I heard. Go ahead. We can talk later. Irene will sleep for hours. Maybe I'd be smart to get a little shut-eye myself."

I hesitated. "One question. Yesterday, when we were scouring the neighborhood for Agnes… do you remember anyone with a toolshed or a greenhouse on the property?"

He opened his eyes and looked at me. "No. Why?"

"The pathologist mentioned it. I said I'd get back to her."

He shook his head. "I was bumping front doors. There might have been a shed in somebody's backyard."

"If you remember something of the sort, will you let me know?"

He gestured a yes both dismissive and resigned.

I picked up the box and we walked out to the car. Dietz tucked me in the passenger seat.

"What's the matter, she didn't like the tea set?" he said. He shut the door on the passenger side and I was forced to hold my reply until he'd rounded the car and gotten in himself. He fired up the engine and pulled out. I gave him a quick rendition of Irene's collapse.

"What do you think she's sitting on?" he asked when I was done.

"Beats me. I can think of a few possibilities. Abuse of some kind, for one," I said. "She might have been a witness to an act of violence, or maybe she did something she feels guilty about."

"A little kid?"

"Hey, kids sometimes do things without meaning to. You never know. Whatever it is, if she has any conscious recollection, she's never mentioned it. And Clyde doesn't seem to have a clue."

"You think Agnes knew about it?"

"Oh sure. I mink Agnes even tried to tell me, but she couldn't bring herself to do it. I sat with her late one night down in a Brawley convalescent home and she told me this long, garbled tale that I'm almost sure now had the truth embedded in it someplace. I'll tell you one thing. I'm not interested in driving back down to the desert to investigate. Forget that."

"Be pointless anyway after all these years."

"That's what Clyde says. What's the deal on Rochelle Messinger?"

Dietz pulled a slip of paper from his shirt pocket. "I got her number in North Hollywood. Dolan didn't want to give it to me, but I finally talked him into it. He says if we get a line on the guy, we're to stay strictly the hell away."

"Of course," I said. "What now?"

He looked over at me with his lopsided smile. "How about a Quarter Pounder with Cheese?"

I laughed. "Done."

We got back to the apartment at one o'clock, fully carbed up, our fat tanks on overload. I could feel my arteries hardening, plaques piling up in my veins like a logjam in a river, blood pressure going up from all the sodium.

Dietz tried calling Rochelle Messinger. When he got no answer after fifteen rings, he turned the phone over to me. I was aching for a nap, but I thought I'd better find out if Dr. Palchak had seen the slides yet. I didn't like the idea of cruising the neighborhood around the nursing home, bumping all those doors again. With luck, I wouldn't have to.

I put a call through to the pathology department at St. Terry's and had Laura Palchak paged. I had Irene's cardboard box on my lap, using it as an armrest. For ten cents, I would have put my head down and gone to sleep right there. Sometimes I long for the simplicity of kindergarten, which is where I learned to nap on command.

She picked up the phone on her end.

"Hi, Laura. Kinsey Millhone," I said. "I was wondering if you'd had a chance to examine the tissue slides."

"You bet," she said. There was a grim satisfaction in her voice.

"I take it your hunch turned out to be right on the money."

"Sure did. This is one I've never run across myself, but I remembered an abstract on the subject from a few years back. The hospital librarian tracked down the journal, which is on my desk somewhere. Hang on."

"What subject?"

"I'm getting to that. This is an article on 'Human stress cardiomyopathy' written by a couple of doctors in Ohio. Here we go. Catch this," she said. "Mrs. Grey suffered a characteristic damage to her heart-a cell death called myofibrillar degeneration brought on by fear-generated stress."

"Can you translate?"

"Sure, it's simple. When the body gets flooded with intolerable levels of adrenaline, heart cells are killed. The pockets of dead cells interfere with the normal electrical network that regulates the heart. When the nerve fibers are disrupted, the heart starts beating erratically and, in this case, that led to cardiac failure."

"Okay," I said cautiously. I had the feeling there was more. "So what's the punch line here?"

"This little old lady was quite literally scared to death."

"What?"

"It's just what it sounds like. Whatever happened to her in those hours she was gone, she was so badly frightened it killed her."

"Are you talking about her being lost or something more than that?"

"I suspect something more. The theory is that, under certain circumstances, the cumulative burden of psychological stress and pain can generate lethal charges in cardiac tissue."

"Like what?"

"Well, take a little kid. Her father beats her with a belt, ties her up, and leaves her bound in a vacant room overnight. Next morning, she's dead. The actual physical injuries aren't sufficient to cause death. I'm not talking about the stress levels most of us experience in the ordinary course of events. Without getting graphic about it, it's analogous to certain animal experiments relating focal myocardial necrosis to stress."

"You're telling me this is a homicide."

"In essence, yes. I don't think Dolan would consider it such, but that's my guess."

I sat for a moment while the information sank in. "I don't like this."

"I didn't think you would," she replied. "In the meantime, if you haven't figured out yet where she was, you might want to try again."

"Yes." I felt a heaviness in my chest, some ancient dread activated by the proximity to murder. I'd done my job efficiently. I'd tracked the woman down. I'd helped facilitate the plan to move her to Santa Teresa, despite her fears, despite her pleadings. Now she was dead. Was I inadvertently responsible for that, too?

After I hung up, I sat there so long I found Dietz staring at me with puzzlement. I was picking at the flaps of the cardboard box, peeling the first layer of paper away from the corrugation. I tried to imagine Agnes Grey's last day. Had she been abducted? If so, to what end? There'd been no demand for money. As far as I knew, there hadn't been contact of any kind. Who had reason to kill her? The only people she knew in this town were Irene and Clyde. Not beyond the possible, I thought to myself. Most homicides are personal crimes-victims killed by close relatives, friends, and acquaintances… which is why I limit mine.

Blindly, I looked down. The paper was coming loose from around the cup I'd rewrapped. The broken halves lay in a torn half-sheet of newsprint that was yellow with age. I blinked, focusing on the banner partially visible across the top. I tilted my head so I could read the newsprint. It was the business section of the Santa Teresa Morning Press, a precursor of the current Santa Teresa Dispatch. Puzzled, I removed the paper from the box and smoothed it across my lap. January 8, 1940.I checked the exterior of the box, but there were no postmarks and no shipping labels. Curious. Had Agnes been in Santa Teresa? I could have sworn Irene told me her mother had never been here.

I looked up. Dietz was standing right in front of me, hands on his knees, face level with mine. "Are you all right?"

"Look at this." I handed him the paper.

He turned it over in his hands, checking both sides. He noted the date as I had and his mouth pulled down in speculation. He wagged his head back and forth.

"What do you make of it?" I asked.

"Probably the same thing you do. It looks like the box was packed in Santa Teresa in January of nineteen forty."

"January eighth," I said, correcting him.

"Not necessarily. A lot of people save newspapers for a time at any rate. This might have been sitting in a stack somewhere. You know how it is. You need to wrap up some dishes and you grab a section from the pile."

"Well, that's true," I said. "Do you think Agnes did it? Was she actually in this town at that point?" It was a question we couldn't answer of course, but I needed to ask it anyway.

"You're sure the box was hers? She might have been holding it for someone else."

"Irene recognized the teacup. I could see it in her face for the half second before she started screaming."

"Let's see what else we've got here," Dietz said. "Maybe there's more."

We spent a few minutes carefully unpacking the box. Every piece of china-cups, saucers, creamer, sugar bowl, teapot with its rose-sprigged lid, some fifteen pieces in all-was wrapped in the same edition of the paper. There was nothing else of significance in the carton and the news itself didn't reveal anything of note.

I said, "I think we ought to get Irene out of bed and find out what's going on."

Dietz picked up his car keys and we were out the door.

We rang the Gershes' bell, waiting impatiently while Jermaine came to the door and admitted us. I had pictured her tidying things in our absence, but the living room looked exactly as it had when we'd left it, a little more than an hour ago. The couch cushions were still askew where Irene's thrashing had displaced them, the birth certificate, death certificate, and the "Vital Documents" file still strewn haphazardly across the coffee table. I caught a whiff of drying urine. The characteristic silence had descended again, as if life itself here were muffled and indistinct.

When I asked to see Clyde or Irene, Jermaine's dark face became stony. She crossed her arms, body language echoing her manner, which was clearly uncooperative. She said Mrs. Gersh was sleeping and she refused to wake her. Mr. Gersh was having "a little lay-down" and she refused to disturb him, too.

"This is really important," I said. "All I need is five minutes."

I could see her face set with stubbornness. "No, ma'am. I'm not about to bother them poor peoples. You leave them lay."

I glanced at Dietz. The shrug was written in his face. I looked back at Jermaine and indicated the coffee table with a nod. "Can I pick up the papers I left here earlier?"

"What papers? I don't know nothin' about that."

"For now all I need are the forms Irene and I were working on," I said. "I can come back later for a chat with her."

Her gaze was pinned on me with suspicion. I kept my expression bland. "Go on, then," she said. "If that's all you want."

"Thanks." Casually, I crossed to the coffee table and picked up the birth certificate and the entire document file. Thirty seconds later, we were out on the porch.

"What'd you do that for?" Dietz said as we headed down the steps.

"It just seemed like a good idea, I said.