Honestly Dearest, You're Dead

Thirty-five

For a day and a half, I moved slowly through the turret, numbed by images of Maris flashing nonstop, like an old newsreel, against the back of my brain. Over and over, I saw Leo and me walk her home, those first days of that distant January. I saw how, after hardly any time at all, Maris and I found excuses to hang back, too awkward to name why we wanted-no, needed-to be alone. Again and again, I saw Maris hurry to step in front of me, to stop me with a smile, and ask me to a dance. A hundred times I heard her laugh at the thrift store as she held up my floral necktie. And a hundred times I chafed anew in my itchy wool suit as we walked to the school. Over and over, I found the new softness of her lips in the dim light of a straw-shaded lamp in a two-flat basement and felt the urgency of all the afternoons that followed as we raced to her apartment.

The day of Lillian’s funeral came again, lush and heavy with spring. Again I breathed in the mingling of newly cut grass and funeral wreaths, life and death, and later, the lighter scents of roses and Ivory soap on Maris’s skin as we moved on her bed and her face changed from tears to a strange sort of acceptance to something I could not understand at all.

Once more I felt my lungs fill with relief as I watched Maris, stern-faced in concentration, cutting our initials onto Kutz’s trailer, surrounding them with a heart and abating my guilt.

I again felt the heat of August and the wetness of her tears through my shirt before she ran, forever, from the stupid boy that I was.

I saw those things, and little else, as I moved through the turret. Gray daylight darkened into nightfall and lightened once again into gray, but I was barely aware. Time was passing as bundles of memories, separated only by such ragged little bits of oblivion as I could snatch, sleeping in the chair, on the bed, or on the floor. Always, though, the reality of the present jerked me awake, after but a few minutes, with the same oxygen-robbing sense of loss. There would be no more days and weeks and months and years of pretending that Maris was alive somewhere, and happy. Maris was dead.

I was aware, from time to time, of my cell phone ringing. Leo told me later that Amanda finally gave up calling and rousted him out of a meeting downtown at Sotheby’s. He picked her up at the Art Institute, and together they drove out to the turret. He said they banged on the door for twenty minutes before I came down, and then only to open the door an inch.

“She’s dead,” Leo said I said, through the crack in the door before I slammed it shut.

“This is about old love?” Leo said Amanda asked, when they got back to the Art Institute. It was the first time she’d spoken since they left Rivertown.

“No,” he’d said to Amanda. “This is about old guilt.”

At six o’clock the next evening, I came out of it enough to fumble for my cell phone and listen to my messages. There were twelve: seven from Amanda, four from Leo, and one from Dina, the hostess at the Scupper on Windward Island. There were none from cops.

I grabbed clean clothes and my gym bag and went out to the Jeep. An ancient orange Ford Maverick with a bad muffler and a broken headlight followed me too closely to the health center, but it hung back in the darkness as I parked in my usual spot, next to the doorless Buick.

Farther back in the lot, the thumpers-petty criminals in training-were in their last hour of lounging by their cars. By eight, they had to turn the parking lot over to the drug dealers so that serious crime could commence. I made a show of leaving the door of the Jeep ajar so that even the dumbest of the thumpers wouldn’t be tempted to cut the tape, or worse, the little remaining plastic on the side curtains. I even set the Discount Den radio up high and loose on the dash. There was no need for any of them to crack an unhealthy sweat looking for it in the cold air.

I ran four pounding miles, punishing my lungs and my legs and cultivating rage until I was sure I knew how to use it. Rage hones me sharper than does self-pity. Then I showered, put on fresh duds, and went to the Jeep. The Discount Den radio sat on the passenger seat, examined and rejected.

Leo put on a show of being delighted to see me when he answered his door.

“I seem to have picked up a tail,” I said, gesturing toward the irregular rumble of badly tuned exhaust coming from the street.

Leo moved to the front window as I took off my coat. “Orange Ford Maverick with one headlight?” he asked, pulling aside the shade just enough to peek out.

“That’s the one.”

“Benny Fittle.” He laughed, letting the shade fall back.

“That sallow-faced kid who rides around on a scooter, writing parking tickets?”

He smiled. “Amanda and I noticed him yesterday, parked down the street from the turret. You sure he’s a tail? One headlight is awfully obvious.”

I sat in one of the slipcovered chairs. “I’m a murder suspect.”

Leo took it as a joke. “Not much of one, if the only surveillance you can attract is a meter man in a Maverick,” he said, alliteratively. “Want a beer?”

I apologized when he came back with the Pilsner Urquells. “I’m sorry I laid it on you that way.”

“I figured she was dead years ago,” Leo said, although his eyes said different. He was ever my friend.

“She is now.”

“And you’ll never forgive her for it?”

“I wish she’d called, just once, after that August.”

“You better call Amanda.”

“I will, but first I need help from you.”

Ma was at church, playing bingo, so we stayed in the front room, drinking beer and eating remnants of bridge mix from the previous night’s film festival. Only the hard nuts, the petrified pellets sure to crack dentures, were left.

I told it to him sequentially, beginning with the fact that Reynolds, the blueberry watchman, was really Severs, the Iowa cop.

“A dead cop,” I finished.

Leo took a long pull on the Urquell. “Severs killed Maris?”

“Dillard and Patterson might think so, but I have doubts. Severs stuck around at least a month after Maris disappeared. That’s a long time to risk hanging around after killing somebody.”

“Severs was a patient man. It took him until Christmas to track Maris to Rambling.”

“True enough,” I said.

“And he never did find the money.”

“Not if he never did find that key.”

“The key to nothing.” Leo forced a small grin. “Then the last Kovacs caught up with Severs and killed him?”

“Unless it was me.”

His eyebrows danced. “You weren’t kidding? They really suspect you of killing Severs and of having the money?”

I pointed at the window shade.

“And that’s why Benny Fittle is tailing you?” His lips broke into a wide grin. “Benny Fittle is going to crack this case? Benny Fittle?” He laughed then, louder and louder until he almost lost his beer, through his nose.

“They’ll still send out bulletins on the Kovacs brothers.”

Leo wiped his mouth with one of the cocktail napkins Ma set out on film nights. “With all that money missing, surely you deserve a greater effort than Benny Fittle.”

“I’m figuring Dillard called Rivertown’s finest, asked them to put an obvious tail on me. Benny Fittle is temporary, a shot across my bow to let me know they like me for killing Severs and grabbing the money. They’ll get an order to search the turret, comb through all my assets.”

“That won’t take but half an hour.”

I made the obligatory laugh, then said, “They don’t really think I did it. They’ve got nobody else.”

“There’s that Kovacs brother, unaccounted for.”

I wasn’t ready yet to tell him why I’d come.

“I thought I was protecting her,” I said.

“You were a kid,” Leo said, raising the bottle to his lips.

“I knew she hadn’t been abducted,” I said.

“You hoped.”

“I knew.”

Always I’d pulled back from the whole of it. I’d never wanted to know how much he had guessed. Now he had to understand all of it.

“Even though my boss at the laundry vouched for my alibi,” I said, “two detectives dragged me over to her apartment, to rub my nose in the scene. They were convinced I knew more than I was saying.”

“Rivertown cops,” Leo said.

“They were right. I did know more than I was saying.”

Leo’s eyebrows went still over the neck of his beer.

“They started me in the kitchen. By then, they’d carted Herman Mays away, but his blood was still all over the table, a big brown puddle, like spilled coffee. They made sure I saw that first.

“After a minute, they walked me through the front room, to Maris’s bedroom. ‘Ever been in here, son?’ the biggest of them, a greasy son of a bitch, asked as he went to her closet. He kept his eyes on me as he started touching her skirts and her blouses with his filthy hands. He had dirt under his fingernails, probably from lunch-the pig-and I kept thinking I wanted to hit him, hit that slug for daring to touch her clothes with his dirty fingernails. He must have seen that on my face, because then he went to her dresser and began opening drawers, slowly, one by one, pulling out her bras and her panties, caressing them with his filthy fingers. Watching me with those fat eyes the whole time. I had to look away, at the wall.”

“Jeez, Dek, don’t tell me this stuff…”

“It was a good thing those were the days before DNA, because they might have found…my…” I stopped to concentrate on the blank television screen, and on taking slow breaths.

“It’s over, Dek.”

“It’s not over.”

“Fittle?” Leo asked, misunderstanding. “He’s just a slap. He’ll go away when the cops learn you don’t have the money.”

“Someone has to pay for Maris.”

“Severs is dead, Dek.”

“Maybe it wasn’t Severs.”

“That surviving Kovacs, then?”

“I still see her bedroom, back in high school. The curtains she’d made, white with a kind of pink piping; a tiny dresser crammed with girl bottles, perfume, a hairbrush, some cream. Not a lot of stuff, but girl stuff. Her stuff. There was a tiny nightstand with a Tinkerbell lamp her mother gave her when she was little. And the bed. Jesus, Leo, that narrow, lumpy, saggy bed with the white bedspread that she’d sewn piping onto to make it match the curtains.” I tried to take a deep breath, but my chest was too tight to let it all the way in. “It was a crummy little bedroom in a crummy little apartment, but she made it special: white, with a little pink.” I looked at him. “I still smell that bedroom, Leo.”

He leaned forward, worry lined deep on his forehead. “Why are we doing this?”

“That fat cop was wasting his time, trying to unnerve me by touching her things. By then, all I was focusing on was making my face a mask. Because, right off, in the kitchen, I knew she hadn’t been abducted.”

“Come on, Dek-”

“I knew she hadn’t been abducted when I saw the kitchen table.”

Leo’s thick eyebrows touched, confused. “The blood?”

“The typewriter.”

“You knew right away that the typewriter was missing? The cops let you look in her closet?”

“No. She’d taken to leaving the typewriter out, on the kitchen table, all the time. No more hiding it, no more knuckling under to her father. I hadn’t known why, exactly. All she’d say was she’d told him she wasn’t going to be stuck in some factory town her whole life. She was going to go to college and then become a famous novelist, she wasn’t going to end up…”

“Like him?”

“She wanted to rub the bastard’s nose in it, so she left the typewriter out, right there on the kitchen table.”

“M. M.’s future machine.” Leo smiled, the ghost of the memory flitting across his face.

“She was going to be somebody.”

“If not a famous novelist, then a famous reporter, or a well-known playwright, all with that typewriter,” Leo said. “I remember.”

“When that miserable bastard came home at night, stinking of beer and sweat and whores, that typewriter was the last thing he’d see before he passed out at the kitchen table.”

“She must have come a ways since that afternoon when we first brought the typewriter home. Remember how she was afraid Herman would discover it?”

“No more. At the end, she was using it to taunt him. In the middle of the night, when he roused himself awake, when he got up to come…” I took a sip of beer. It had gone warm. “That typewriter was the first thing he’d see,” I finished.

Leo looked at me, not understanding.

“The typewriter wasn’t there, Leo.”

Leo set down his beer. “You said that. And that told you she hadn’t been abducted.”

I watched his eyes saying nothing, letting him work it.

“And from that, Holmes, you deduced, being such a smart young man, that she used the typewriter to smash the head of the miserable Herman as he slept at the kitchen table?”

“Yes.”

“It’s too much of a reach. We know she took the typewriter, because you found it in Rambling, but to think that she used it to murder her father…too big a reach. Where’s the motive?”

“She was pregnant.”

He stared at me, blank-faced. Then he said, “You poor bastard.”

“It’s what we were arguing about on the sidewalk, that last time.”

“Jeez,” he said, “old Herman found out, there was a row, and she killed him.”

“That day on the sidewalk, she’d just gotten it confirmed by the doctor. She hung on to me, sobbing, saying stuff I didn’t understand. But one thing I remember: The doctor said she was well into her second trimester.” I stopped, then went on. “All I could say was we’d get a place.”

“You poor bastard.”

“Damn it, no!”

Leo leaned back in his chair to give me some space.

“You remember my Aunt Lillian?”

“The nice one? She died just before we graduated, right?”

“End of May. Her funeral set me off, made me almost crazy with the fear of death. That was the day Maris and I… The only time,” I finished.

The new thought clouded his face. He’d done the math in a second.

“You’re sure she said second trimester?” His voice was a whisper.

“I didn’t know what that meant. Not for a long time did I think to wonder what that meant.”

“Working backward from August 10, assuming she was at least four months pregnant, brings you to…”

“Early April, at least six weeks before Lillian died.” I looked at him. “If only I’d listened, out there on the sidewalk. If only I’d listened.”

His words came out clipped. “You heard ‘pregnant’ on that sidewalk that day. It’s the loudest word in a young man’s world; it drowns out everything else.”

I went on, in a hurry now to get it all out of my gut. “That last day, she put her hands on the sides of my face and told me I was naive. If only I’d listened, I would have understood, really understood, why she’d taken to leaving that typewriter on the kitchen table. She wanted to make sure Herman saw it when he woke up in the middle of the night…”

“All horned up?” Leo’s eyes raged.

“She wasn’t going to let him break her dream.”

Leo got to his feet and started pacing. “That miserable prick. It wasn’t enough that he had her vacuuming and doing his laundry, he had to-” He stopped pacing and looked at me with eyes full of pain. “I wish he was alive, so I could kill him.”

“I was so blind right after she disappeared. I thought I’d caused it all. It wasn’t until I did the arithmetic, worked it backward, that I dared to believe it couldn’t have been me, not from that one time in late May.”

He came back and slumped in his chair. “What’s the point now, Dek? Even if you had figured it out, right away, and told the cops, they would have heard the words ‘motive’ and ‘weapon’ the way you heard the word ‘pregnant.’ They would have launched a manhunt for her that would have ended with her in jail, maybe for life.”

“Perhaps.”

“They might have even implicated you, at least until they found out you weren’t the one who got her pregnant.” He shook his head. “No sir, you left them with no motive, and no weapon. You protected Maris. You left her free to run.”

He started to reach for a mummified almond, thought better of it, and sat back to appraise me from his chair. “It’s not over, is it? There’s still the matter of the missing money. More important, there’s still the matter of who killed Maris.”

“That’s why I’m here.”

I pulled out my cell phone, punched the buttons for message replay, and handed it to him.

The corners of his eyes tightened as he listened.

Dina had left the message toward the end of my thrashing through the fog.

“Dek? A police officer stopped by the Scupper the day before yesterday, showing around a couple of photographs. He didn’t say what it was about. None of us recognized either of the two men, and I didn’t think much more about it. But today, a very rough-looking man came by, asking if anyone knew where Carolina Dare had moved. He said she’d inherited something, and he’d been hired to make sure she received it. He wasn’t that kind of man, Dek. He was one of the men in the photographs.”

“The surviving Kovacs brother, at last.” Leo handed back my phone.

“Somehow he learned enough to track Severs to Florida.”

“Does that mean he doesn’t know Maris was killed in Rambling?”

“No. He could have killed Maris, then Severs, and then begun backtracking her movements to find the money.”

“He just doesn’t know about you, and that key.”

“Not yet.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Dina told Kovacs she’d look for a forwarding address, and to come back today.”

“No cops? Why would she do that?”

“I’ve had an inspiration,” I said.