Specimen Days

  “Disappointing.”

  “It’s like that first kid appeared out of thin air.”

  “Or nobody knows or cares that the first kid is missing.”

  “I know, I know. It’s funny, though.”

  “I agree. It’s funny.”

  Ed broke in. “Or somebody never cared enough to send their kid to a dentist.”

  “Always a possibility,” Cat said. “Have you noticed how he starts to disintegrate as he gets agitated?”

  “Go on,” Pete said.

  “His coherence fades. He starts throwing out lines from Whitman. Or, as he would say, from home.”

  “He gets more and more random,” Ed offered.

  “Maybe,” Cat said. “Or maybe, in his mind, he gets less and less random. I have a feeling that the poem is his language. It’s what’s in his head. Maybe it’s more of a stretch for him to say something like ‘I’m afraid to die’ than it is to say ‘Do you think a great city endures?’ ”

  “That sounds like a bit of a stretch, to me,” Ed said.

  Cat wanted to say, I have a feeling, but she couldn’t say that kind of thing in front of Ed. He’d use it against her. She was the girl with the degree from Columbia, who’d read more books than all of the men put together, who’d gone into forensics because she hadn’t managed to establish a private practice. She was overaggressive and underqualified. She was someone who relied on feelings.

  She said, “It’s just an idea, Ed. This seems like an excellent time for us to give free rein to our ideas, wouldn’t you say?”

  Queenly bearing, schoolmarm diction. She really had to quit that. Problem was, it worked. Most of the time.

  “Sure, sure,” Ed said. “Absolutely.”

  “There’s something strange about the kid’s associations,” she said. Back to regular voice. “It’s like he’s programmed. A concept trips a wire, and he’s got the line, but he hasn’t got the circuitry to make sense of it. He’s like a vessel for someone else’s wishes. The poetry signifies something for him, but he’s not able to say what it is.”

  “I thought we’d have a trace by now,” Pete said. “These are kids.”

  “Someone is putting them up to it,” Cat said.

  “I don’t know,” Ed said. “No one’s taken any credit yet.”

  Cat said, “Unless whoever it is wants these kids to call in. Unless that’s his way of taking credit.”

  Pete said, “I started that Whitman book last night. Can’t make head or tails of it, frankly.”

  “I’m seeing a woman at NYU later today.”

  “Good.”

  “What more do we know about Dick Harte?” Cat asked.

  “A lot,” Pete answered. “But nothing’s jumping out. No history with boys. Or girls, even. Nothing we can find. It’s all pretty standard. Went to law school—”

  “Where?”

  “Cardozo. Not Harvard. Practiced for a few years, then went into real estate. Married a decent girl, got rich, dumped the decent girl and married a new decent girl but prettier. Had two pretty children with wife number two. Big house in Great Neck, country place in Westhampton. All in all, a very regular guy.”

  “Apart from all that money,” Cat said.

  “Right. But it’s real estate. He didn’t have sweatshops. His employees didn’t love him, but they didn’t hate him, either. They got their salaries. They got their benefits. They got Christmas bonuses every year, plus a party at the Rihga Royal.”

  “In my experience,” Cat said, “very few rich people have no enemies.”

  “His enemies were all on his level. Basic business rivalries, guys he outbid, guys he undersold. But these people didn’t hate him. It doesn’t work that way. It’s a club. Dick Harte was one of the less sleazy members.”

  “What about the son who had to be sent away to school in Vermont?”

  “Just a troubled kid. Got into drugs, grades started slipping. Mom and Dad shipped him off to the country. I’m sure they weren’t happy about it, but it doesn’t seem like any big deal.”

  “What was Dick Harte up to at Ground Zero?” Cat asked.

  “He was one of a group of honchos pushing for more retail and office space in the rebuild. As opposed to those who favor a memorial and a park.”

  “That might be a big deal to any number of people,” Cat said.

  “But to a ten-year-old?”

  “This is a ten-year-old who’s memorized Leaves of Grass.”

  “A freak,” Ed added.

  “Or maybe a savant,” Cat said.

  “The one doesn’t necessarily rule out the other,” Pete said.

  “No,” Cat answered. “It doesn’t.”

  She spent the morning waiting in her cubicle, hoping for another call. Who were the great waiters in literature?

  Penelope—waiting for Odysseus, undoing her weaving every night

  Rapunzel, in her tower

  Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and all the other comatose princesses

  She couldn’t think of any stories about men whose job it was to wait. But as Ed had put it, Hey, don’t get all Angela Davis on me. She’d do her best.

  She listened to the tape, several times. She looked through Leaves of Grass.

  They prepare for death, yet are they not the finish, but rather the outset,

  They bring none to his or her terminus or to be content and full,

  Whom they take they take into space to behold the birth of stars, to learn one of the meanings,

  To launch off with absolute faith, to sweep through the ceaseless rings and never be quiet again.

  Little boy. Who do you want to take into space to behold the birth of stars?

  At ten-thirty, she tossed her cell into her bag and went over to Rita Dunn’s office at NYU. Dunn was in a building on Waverly. One of these buildings, Cat had never been quite sure which, had been that sweatshop, where the fire was. She knew the story only vaguely—the exits had been blocked to keep the workers from sneaking out early. Something like that. There’d been a fire, and all those women were trapped inside. Some of them had jumped. From one of these buildings—was it the one she was entering?—women with their dresses on fire had fallen, had hit this pavement right here or the pavement just down the street. Now it was all NYU. Now it was students and shoppers, a coffeehouse and a bookstore that sold NYU sweatshirts.

  Cat went up to the ninth floor and announced herself to the department secretary, who nodded her down the hall.

  Rita Dunn turned out to be red-haired, mid-forties, wearing a green silk jacket and heavy makeup. Dark eyeliner, blush expertly applied. Around her neck, a strand of amber beads just slightly smaller than billiard balls. She looked more like a retired figure skater than she did like a professor of literature.

  “Hello,” Cat said. She gave Rita Dunn a moment to adjust. No one ever said, You didn’t sound black over the phone. Everybody thought it.

  “Hello,” Rita responded, and pumped Cat’s hand enthusiastically. People loved talking to cops when they weren’t in trouble.

  “Thanks for taking the time to see me.”

  “Glad to. Sit.”

  She gestured Cat into a squeaky leatherette chair across from her desk, seated herself behind the desk. Her office was a chaos of books and papers (disorderly sister). On the wall behind her, a poster of Whitman—great lightbulb of old-man nose, small dark eyes looking out from the cottony crackle of beard and hair. In the window of Rita Dunn’s office, a spider plant dangled its fronds before the vista of Washington Square Park. Had seamstresses once huddled at that window, trapped by flames? Had they stood on that sill and jumped?

  “So,” Rita Dunn said. “You want to know a thing or two about Mr. Whitman.”

  “I do.”

  “May I ask what exactly you’re looking for?”

  “Relating to a case I’m investigating.”

  “Does it have to do with the explosion?”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t discuss the details.”

  “I
understand. A case involving Walt Whitman. Is he in trouble?”

  “I know it’s unusual.”

  Rita Dunn steepled her fingers, touched them to her mahogany-red lips. Cat felt, abruptly, the force of her attention. It was palpable, a clicking-on, a jewel-like zap that rose in her perfectly outlined eyes. Right, Cat thought. You dress like this to fool the men, don’t you? You’re a stealth fighter.

  “I like the unusual,” Rita said. “I like it very much. Can you give me a hint about where to begin?”

  “Let’s say this. Could you give me some idea about Whitman’s message to his readers?”

  “His message was complicated.”

  “Got that. Just tell me whatever comes to mind.”

  “Hm. Do you know anything about him at all?”

  “A little. I read him in college. I’ve been reading him again.”

  “Well. Okay. Whitman as you probably know was the first great American visionary poet. He didn’t just celebrate himself. He celebrated everybody and everything.”

  “Right.”

  “He spent his life, and it was a long life, extending and revising Leaves of Grass. He published it himself. The first edition appeared in 1855. There were nine editions in all. The last, which he called his deathbed edition, appeared in 1891. You could say that he was writing the poem that was the United States.”

  “Which he loved.”

  “Which he did love.”

  “Would you call him patriotic, then?”

  “It’s not quite the right term for Whitman, I don’t think. Homer loved Greece, but does the word ‘patriotic’ feel right for him? I think not. A great poet is never anything quite so provincial.”

  She picked up a pearl-handled letter opener, ran a fingertip along the blade. Aristocrats with tentative claims to thrones might have been just this impeccably overdressed, Cat thought. They might have possessed this underlayer of fierce, cordial vigilance.

  Cat said, “But might someone, reading him today, interpret him as patriotic? Could Leaves of Grass be read as some sort of extended national anthem?”

  “Well, you wouldn’t believe some of the interpretations I’ve heard. But really, Whitman was an ecstatic. He was a dervish of sorts. Patriotism, don’t you think, implies a certain fixed notion of right versus wrong. Whitman simply loved what was.”

  “Indiscriminately.”

  “Yes and no. He believed in destiny. He imagined that the redwood tree was glad for the ax because it was the tree’s destiny to be cut down.”

  “So he had no particular sense of good and evil.”

  “He understood life to be transitory. He was not particularly concerned about mortality.”

  “Right,” Cat said.

  “Is that helpful?”

  “Mm-hm. Does the phrase ‘In the family’ mean anything to you?”

  “Do you mean, do I recognize it from Whitman?”

  “It’s not from Whitman.”

  “I thought not. Though I can’t claim to know every single line.”

  “Does it suggest anything to you?”

  “Not really. Could you put it in some sort of context?”

  “Say, as a declaration. If somebody said to you, ‘I’m in the family.’ In light of Whitman.”

  “Well. Whitman empathized with everyone. In Whitman there are no insignificant lives. There are mill owners and mill workers, there are great ladies and prostitutes, and he refuses to favor any of them. He finds them all worthy and fascinating. He finds them all miraculous.”

  “The way, say, a parent refuses to favor one child over the others?”

  “I suppose you could say that, yes.”

  “What about the idea of working for a company?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “If somebody said, ‘We all work for the company.’ In light of Whitman.”

  “Hmm. I could go out on a limb a little, I suppose.”

  “Please do.”

  “Well. When Whitman published the first edition of Leaves of Grass, the industrial revolution was well under way. People who had lived on farms for generations were all moving to the cities in hopes of getting rich.”

  “And…”

  “A handful did in fact get rich. Almost everybody else worked twelve-hour shifts in factories, six days a week. It was the end of the agrarian world and the beginning of the mechanized one. Do you know that universal time didn’t exist until around the late 1800s? It was two o’clock in one village, three o’clock in another. It wasn’t until the transcontinental railroads that we all had to agree on when it was two and when it was three, so people could make their trains. It took a full generation just to convince people that they had to show up at work every single day at the same hour.”

  “Everybody worked for the company, in a manner of speaking.”

  “You could say that. But, really, it’s impossible to pin a poet like Whitman down this way. Was he writing about industrialization? Yes, he was. Was he writing about family? Certainly. And he was also writing about logging and sex and the westward expansion. You can go at him from just about any angle and find something that seems to support some thesis or other.”

  “I see.”

  “ ‘Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power, cheerful, for freest action form’d under the laws divine, The Modern Man I sing.’ I’m afraid that if you insist on too much focus here or there, you miss the larger point.”

  Cat said, “ ‘To die is different from what any one supposes, and luckier.’ ”

  “You know your Whitman, then.”

  “Just a line or two. I shouldn’t take up any more of your time.”

  “I don’t think I’ve been very helpful.”

  She rose graciously, a compassionate duchess who’d reached the limits of her ability to intercede in the coarser mysteries of the world, its infestations and calamitous weather. There were afflictions that were probably best addressed by local methods—by chants and ritual burnings, the drawing of pentagrams.

  “May I ask you one more question?” Cat said. “It’s not related to Whitman.”

  “By all means.”

  “Is this where that fire was, the one that killed all those women? Was it this building?”

  “No, actually, that building is around the corner. It’s part of the biochemistry department now.”

  Cat rose and went to the window. It was all calmness below. It was students hurrying to class and, at the end of the block, the leaf-shimmer of Washington Square Park.

  She called Pete on her cell when she got to the street.

  “Ashberry.”

  “I just talked to the Whitman person.”

  “She tell you anything?”

  “It seems you could interpret him as some sort of voice for the status quo. As in, if you worked at some awful job in a factory, twelve hours a day, six days a week, here was Whitman to tell you that your life was great, your life was poetry, you were a king in your own world.”

  “You think the kid thinks that?”

  “I think somebody thinks that. I think somebody is speaking through the kid.”

  “You on your way back in?”

  “I am.”

  “See you.”

  Pete was waiting in her cubicle when she arrived. He didn’t ask about Whitman. He said, “Dick Harte’s wife just gave us a little something.”

  “What?”

  “He woke up in the middle of the night, the night before he was killed. Said he heard a noise.”

  “A noise?”

  “One of those middle-of-the-night things.”

  “He was scared?”

  “She didn’t say scared. She said he said he heard a noise. She said he said he was going to go see what it was.”

  “She was scared.”

  “Yeah. But she takes a little something to help her sleep. She doesn’t rouse easily, it seems.”

  “And?”

  “And he got up, left the bedroom. Was gone maybe ten minutes. Came back, said it was nothin
g, the two of them went back to sleep.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it,” Pete said.

  “You think it means anything?”

  “Probably not. What do you think?”

  “Hard to say. Probably not.”

  “At least she’s talking now.”

  “The daughter?”

  “Still in the ozone. Seriously unhinged.”

  “What’s up with the son?”

  “Mondo cooperative. Scary cooperative. Boy detective seems to like his sudden fame.”

  “As people do.”

  “He’s a piece of work, as it turns out. Serious drug history, lately turned to Jesus. That school in Vermont’s a jail, basically, for rich kids.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Semi-interesting. You don’t think the son’s involved, do you?”

  “No. I don’t.”

  “We’re not going to get anything from the family, I don’t think. I mean, I don’t think there’s anything to get.”

  “Probably right,” she said.

  And yet, an image crept into her mind. She pictured Dick Harte roused from sleep, walking through a big, dark house in his pajamas (he’d have worn pajamas, wouldn’t he; a balding fifty-three-year-old with no record of drug use or illicit sex, a man who paid his bills on time, whose pretty wife number two sent herself to Pluto every night with the help of a few key pharmaceuticals), tracking down a suspicious nocturnal sound. What would it have been like, being Dick Harte? Was he satisfied; was he prospering in his heart? Had he had a premonition that night, out there in the stately abundance of Great Neck? Cat imagined him going down the staircase, walking barefoot over parquet and Oriental rugs, finding nothing amiss, but wondering. She pictured him going to a window—make it a living-room window, Thermopane, with heavy brocade window treatments (the wife was a decorator, right?); say it looked out onto an expanse of black lawn, with hedges and rosebushes and the dark glitter of a pool. She saw Dick standing at the window, looking out. She saw him understanding—he would sense more than see it—that a child stood on his lawn, a boy, skinny and erect and alert, crazy and worshipful: a sentinel, watching Dick Harte’s slumbering house the way a guerrilla fighter might take a last look at a village, its lamps extinguished and its people dreaming, before he set it on fire. The child would have vanished immediately, nothing more than a child-shaped shadow that resolved itself into a patch of darkness where a rosebush bore no blooms. Dick would have shrugged it off, gone back to bed, assured his zonked-out wife that there was nothing to fear.