“I’ve never told anybody else about it.”
“Well, don’t,” I suggested, thinking of what happened to the two people who had already “confessed” to adultery and fornication. “Please don’t, ever. How’d you manage it, Ginger, with his whole family around?”
She grinned. “Tuesdays.”
“The blessed Sabbath?”
“You said it, baby.”
“And you want me to tell Geof?”
“If you think it’s important, if it adds anything to the picture of Ron’s character or their marriage or … I don’t know.”
I didn’t know either.
Ginger and I hooked arms together for the long walk back down her steps to her front door. On the way, I said to her even more gently, “When Ron Mayer died … were you … okay?”
She compressed her lips, and her eyes seemed to deepen as if she were thinking back to those days. “Well, it was over by then, and I hadn’t talked to him or even thought much about him for months. So I was shocked, Jenny, I was really surprised. I felt sad for him, for her … especially for their kid. Your kid.” She smiled, but it was a sweet one. “It seemed like a real tragedy to me all around, no matter how you looked at it.”
“Ginger, did he ever talk about David’s stepfather?”
“He didn’t talk, Jenny, remember?” She laughed a little, remembering it herself. “Except for explaining that his wife couldn’t have sex, which was his way of rationalizing the affair, I think. And saying thank you.” She laughed again. “So I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout nothin’.”
At her front door, she handed me a check already made out with a figure, although the date and the payee and the line for her signature were blank.
I took it and stared, then grabbed her in a bear hug.
“Are you really sure you want to give this much, Ginger?”
“Do you think it’s enough? When we settle on a name for the foundation and you get the accounts set up, I’ll fill in the rest of that check. I thought you might like to have it around to show to other potential donors, maybe inspire them to contribute, too.”
“I love you!”
“I know, I know.” She pushed me out her door. “Too boring. Go buy me a new lover.”
Halfway down Ginger’s front walk, I turned back to wave at her. I wondered if she had appeared in pajamas such as those when the Mayer Construction Company showed up for work one morning. I imagined Ron Mayer taking one look and deciding she looked so good—
“Oh, my God,” I exclaimed and raced for the Jeep.
“Jenny? What are you doing?” Geof asked me.
I was grabbing for the tape in the glove compartment, that’s what.
“I’ll be right back!” I promised him and raced back up to Ginger’s.
When she opened the door this time, I waved the videotape in her face and said, “I want you to listen to something. Where’s your VCR?”
She led me into her family room and showed me how to operate the machine. Hiding the first part of the tape from her vision, I managed to mute it and to fast-forward it to the end.
“Close your eyes,” I instructed her as I turned the sound back on. “And tell me who this is …”
From the television came the voice of a man tenderly saying “Good.”
“It’s Ron!” Ginger cried. “I’d know that bedroom voice anywhere!”
And now I knew why it had sounded familiar to me, too: It was the same voice that I and hundreds of other people had heard on the 911 tape the newscasts had played so many times the previous March, when Ron and Judy died. On that tape, Ron Mayer had told the 911 operator that he had just killed his wife, and now he was going to kill himself and would they please send somebody over to see about things? And when the emergency operator, trying desperately to keep him on the line, said, “We’ll send help, sir,” Ron had responded by saying softly, “Good,” and then hanging up.
I grabbed the tape from the VCR, then grabbed Ginger in another hug. “Thank you. I’m sorry to do this to you. I promise I’ll explain some day. Right now, all I can say is that you’ve been a bigger help than you know.”
This time I left my friend looking confused and, to my guilty regret, a little forlorn.
18
I GOT INTO THE JEEP, WHERE GEOF WAS IMPAtiently waiting for me.
“Was it an accident that killed him, Geof?”
“Looks that way. Jenny, what in the world—”
“The voice on the tape belongs to Ron Mayer. I know because Ginger identified it and not just because she heard him when he was working over here. Ginger had an affair with him, Geof. Every Tuesday. Or at least on some Tuesdays. She says he claimed he couldn’t have sex with his wife because of Judy’s physical problems.”
He was staring at me, openmouthed.
“I just love it when I manage to shock a cop.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, really, it’s because you think you’ve seen everything …”
“Jenny!” Geof was shaking his head in wonderment just as I had up in Ginger’s bedroom. “Sometimes I think this town is so fucking small you need a microscope to see us.”
“An appropriate adjective,” I murmured, “considering.”
“I thought the guy was supposed to be so religious!”
“That’s what I said to Ginger.” I shrugged. “He was human. So’s Ginger.”
He started the car. “I’m not condemning her.”
“I know you’re not. She wanted me to tell you. She was too embarrassed to confess it to you herself.”
“There seems to be a lot of that going around.”
“What?”
“Confession.” Geof pulled away from the curb in front of Ginger’s house. “Let’s go see if we can wrest one out of Uncle Matthew … like … Did he or did he not beat up his own nephew last night?”
“Maybe we ought to go to school first to check up on David?”
I told him about the secretary’s request. That news put a nervous twitch into the anxious frown that appeared on his face. But still he said, “All right, but now that we know where he is, there’s no hurry. We’ve got all day and other things we have to do first.”
“Well, we have until school gets out,” I corrected him. “Geof, don’t you have to work for a living?”
“I have to work, but not necessarily for a living.”
“I don’t think that I understand what that means.”
“When I figure it out, I’ll let you know.”
“Okay, so you’re not going in to work. So, where does David’s uncle Matthew live?”
“According to the phone book, on the same cul-de-sac where his parents are, and there just happen to be three other Mayers listed next door to one another as well: Mark, Luke, and John.”
“Really? They all live together? It’s like a compound, isn’t it? Geof, can you imagine living so close to your parents and brothers?”
He, who had two brothers himself and even liked them, made a pretense of shuddering. “It’s a good thing that you and I live in this century; we’d have had a hard time back when families were expected to stay close together all of their lives.”
“I drove by there this morning, and a guy at the house on the southeast corner really glared at me as if I were trespassing.”
“What were you doing there?”
“Exercising my curiosity.”
“Really? I thought it was already pretty well developed.”
“Very funny.”
“Good biceps, quads, plenty of aerobic stamina—”
“Will you stop?”
After a couple of blocks of congenial, if highly charged, silence, he suddenly said, “When’s Ginger going to lose weight?”
“Why do you care?”
“It’s annoying,” he said.
“Well, how inconsiderate of her to annoy you with those extra pounds of hers. I’ll have to ask her to stop that. Give her a break; she’s lonely, Geof.”
“Oh, p
lease.”
“Oh, please what?”
“You’re saying she eats because she doesn’t have a man?”
“No, I’m not saying that”
“It’s true, though, isn’t it? Ginger doesn’t consider herself to be good enough company all by herself. So what’s she doing about it? Making life more interesting for herself by expanding her knowledge or her experience? Or maybe going into therapy to find out what’s wrong with her? Hell, no. Looks to me like she has decided that the only cure for loneliness is having a man and the cure for being without a man is to put on enough extra pounds to equal the entire weight of one. She’s turning into two people, each of them weighing about ninety pounds, maybe a hundred.”
“I am not going to react to this meanness!”
“Mean? You think I’m being mean?”
After we drove a block in silence, I said, “It would have to be a very small man.”
“What?”
“The extra weight that Ginger is adding.”
“I’m mean?” He smiled a little. “Listen, I’m sorry I picked on your friend. I don’t know why I’m taking it out on her.”
“She’s a big target?”
“Jenny!”
I retorted pointedly, “Just kidding.”
He glanced at me. “All right, I get it.” And then he patted his own stomach, which was not as flat as it used to be. “And I’ve got my own.”
“Does that mean you’re lonely?”
“Will you stop?”
He made a right turn, then stopped the car. Five houses all in a semicircle. All of them big authentic old Colonials, all of them sheltered, nearly hidden, by long setbacks and lush greenery, all of them in beautiful repair, perfectly painted. And each of them inhabited by Mayers.
“Yesterday, didn’t you know they were all here?”
“No, I was just looking for his parents.”
“So why did Ron and Judy live somewhere else?”
“That, my love, is a damned good question.”
“And why was he spending the Sabbath with Ginger instead of home with his family?”
“Another good one.”
He pulled the Jeep into one of the driveways and parked us right behind a green truck.
“David over here last night? I wish he was!”
The man who was “Uncle Matthew” had one big foot propped on the running board of his immaculate green pickup truck, the other planted on his gravel driveway. He wasn’t the same man I’d seen earlier. This man was bigger, burlier, with a ruddy face with a seemingly permanent smile pressed onto it. He was dressed for going to work in clean white denim overalls, a pressed white T-shirt, and white tennis shoes.
“If I could get my hands on that kid,” he said in a mock threatening tone, but all the while he kept smiling.
We had walked up to him, smiled in a friendly way, and Geof had simply said, “Hi, we’re looking for David, we heard he was here last night …”
“What would you do?” I asked him, smiling back.
“Hold him down!” He laughed, but it had a rueful sound to it. “I’d keep him, sit on him if I had to. We’re supposed to be his guardians, my wife and I, but how can you guard somebody who won’t have anything to do with you? He’s a good kid but stubborn as the day is hot. And the darned thing of it is, legally we can’t do anything about it. Well, I mean we could ’cause he’s still a few months away from being eighteen, but then he’d just escape from us again. He acts like our house is some kind of prison! Like we’re wardens forcing him to eat three square meals a day and have his own nice room and give him spending money and help him settle his folks’ affairs and give him a real family life. Does that sound like punishment to you?”
“When’s the last time you saw him?” Geof asked.
“Oh, heavens.” Matthew Mayer took out a white handkerchief and wiped his broad forehead with it The day was heating up like a blacksmith’s anvil. “Weeks, I’m embarrassed to tell you. You must think we’re awful, appearing to let that boy loose like this. But you’ve got to know him to understand how headstrong David is. He will do what he wants to do every time, always has. Takes after both of his parents.”
The big man’s smile faltered for the first time. He put the handkerchief over his mouth as if he felt sick.
We waited for him to recover, feeling the sun baking the tops of our heads, the tips of our shoulders, our feet, the backs of our hands. I felt a little light-headed and thought about leaning against his truck but then thought about how hot that metal might be.
“I’m sorry.” Like an asthmatic, he took several quick breaths as if fighting for air. “I’m sorry …”
“So he wasn’t here last night, he didn’t have a fight with you, you didn’t catch him trying to take something from your house, you didn’t punch him in the eye …”
“Is that what he said?” He didn’t try to recover his smile but leaned all his weight against the frame of his truck and closed his eyes. “No. My nephew …”
“What?”
He opened his eyes again and stared at his own foot on the running board. “Nothing.”
“Is a liar?”
Matthew Mayer pulled himself together, straightened his posture, but wouldn’t meet our eyes anymore. “Maybe it was one of my brothers he saw, maybe it was one of their houses. But they’d never fight with him. He’s only a boy, for heaven’s sake! And he’s ours. Our brother’s son. We’d never hurt him, we only wanted to help …”
“Mr. Mayer, are you all right?” I asked, feeling concerned for the big man, he looked so pale, so unsteady, so ill. “Why don’t you sit down in your truck for a minute?”
“Thank you.” He reached for the rim of the driver’s door and held on as if he’d fall if it didn’t support him. “I’ve got to get to work. I’m sorry I can’t help you. If you find David, if you talk to him, tell him please to come home, will you?”
He was halfway into the truck when Geof said, “Mr. Mayer, did you know that Dennis Clemmons died last night? A handicap ramp outside his apartment came apart, and he fell two stories in his wheelchair to his death.”
Mayer turned so quickly to face us that he nearly struck his head on the cab of his truck. “No! That’s impossible! That ramp is built so tight it’s as solid as concrete. That ramp wouldn’t fall down in a million years.”
“How do you know, Mr. Mayer?”
“Because my brothers and I built it for him.”
“You did what?” We stared at him. “Why …?”
“Because Ron asked us to, because our brother was the nicest guy in the world and the most forgiving, because he felt sorry for that jerk that Judy married after she left Ron, because once he married her, once he had David living with him, he was part of our family whether he liked it or not, and because we always help family, no matter what. Look, that ramp couldn’t just fall down, not unless a tornado hit it. I want to look at it, I want to see this supposed accident!”
“I didn’t say anything about an accident, Mr. Mayer.”
Uncle Matthew looked up, stared, then said, “Then I’ll say this: He knew a lot of rotten people, Dennis did, and that’s all I’ve got to say. Just you be clear about two things. One, David is our nephew and we love him and we want him back with us. Two, that ramp didn’t fall down through any fault of our design or workmanship. Now I’ve said all I’m going to say, and I’ve got to get to work while this weather holds. The sun doesn’t wait for any carpenters. Do you mind movin’ your car now?”
“What do you know about a videotape that has Dennis Clemmons ‘confessing’ to coveting another man’s wife?”
When he stared at us this time, his knowledge about that tape was absolutely clear in his eyes. He knew just what Geof was talking about, his eyes said. His expression also suggested that he was shocked to hear the question.
“I have to get to work.”
“Why would you help out a man who confessed to that sin?” Geof put verbal quotation marks around the word con
fessed and also around sin, but maybe I was the only one who heard them.
Matthew Mayer turned his back to us, seemed to have second thoughts, turned back around to face us. “A man who repents, who does proper penance, that man deserves the rewards of heaven.”
“What is a just penance for adultery, Mr. Mayer?”
“That’s between Dennis Clemmons and God.”
“It certainly is now,” Geof snapped.
“Will you please move your car?”
“And what was Judy’s penance?”
“What?”
“Her penance for the sins that she confessed to, what was it?”
The big man looked angry now, and when he put both of his feet on the ground and faced Geof, I became aware of how much bigger he was than my good-sized husband. If Geof was six feet two inches, then Matthew Mayer had to be at least six feet four inches and probably fifty muscular pounds heavier as well. Geof didn’t move back an inch; if anything, he leaned forward. For a slightly hysterical moment, I half expected them to snort and paw the ground, like two overwrought bulls in a pasture. “That’s nobody’s business either, and I think you could show a little respect for the dead. Judy paid her debts; she doesn’t owe any accounting to you.” Matthew Mayer reached for his steering wheel to pull himself into his truck. “Neither do I or any of the rest of us.” He looked back down at us briefly. “We’ve paid heavily, already, every one of us.”
He slammed his truck door.
Geof and I walked back to the Jeep, and he backed us out of the driveway. Mayer came out behind us, riding so close to Geof’s front bumper that I was half afraid he’d run us over if we didn’t hurry. Geof, of course, didn’t rush. He took his sweet time backing out, pulling back out of the way in the street, pausing to let Mayer get away.
I found that my palms were sweaty as Mayer drove off.
Even after he drove out of the cul-de-sac, Geof didn’t drive us away immediately; he seemed to want to sit there for a while in thought with the Jeep idling. Finally, I had to break the silence.
“There are a lot of things you didn’t ask him, Geof.”
“Only because of what he didn’t ask us. I didn’t introduce myself, you didn’t introduce yourself. He didn’t ask who we were, what we were doing there, what business it was of ours to ask about his nephew. I didn’t identify myself as a cop. Now why would a man show so little curiosity about two strangers who are being so nosy about hin* and his family?”