Generous Death

  “Whiskey?”

  “Hot and Irish, please.”

  “You are a lot of trouble.” I smiled at him over my shoulder as we walked toward the kitchen.

  “But I’m worth it, or so the other ladies say.”

  “Yes, you are, and I’m delighted to hear you say so.”

  “No lectures, Swede, I’m here to charm and delight you, not alarm and affright you.”

  I groaned. “You’re a poet, do you know it?”

  “Of course, I’m a poet. All great lovers are poets.”

  In the kitchen, I pulled out a stainless steel bowl in which to whip the cream for his Irish coffee. I glanced at him as he perched on one of the stools at the counter… and experienced one of those jolting moments that had occurred occasionally in our friendship when I saw clearly what it was about him that left my secretary limp. Careful, I warned myself. You are merely horny; don’t use the nice man.

  “So you think you’re a great lover.” I tried to keep up the light bantering tone. But I knew he’d caught that instant of awareness in my eyes.

  He grinned at me. There was nothing even remotely platonic in his expression. “So they say, Jenny, or was it you who said that? Was it you, Jenny?”

  Absurdly, I blushed. I felt a little incestuous about those few times we’d slipped out of friendship into something else.

  “I may have mentioned something to that effect,” I mumbled. I opened the refrigerator to get the cream and hid my pink face among the shelves.

  “You have a terrific ass,” he said.

  “Michael!” I nearly bumped my head when I turned around to laugh at him. “I can’t believe you said that; that didn’t sound like you at all.”

  He sighed to the ceiling. “Oh that’s right,” he said, “saints don’t have sex lives. Just cold showers.”

  He was laughing, too, by then.

  “Fix my whiskey, woman!” he shouted and slammed a fist down on the counter top. He grinned wickedly, almost irresistibly. “I’ll be in the den. Contemplating my saintly navel.”

  He walked out of the kitchen, leaving me collapsed in giggles and blasphemous thoughts about saints—definitely blasphemous, not to mention obscene.

  Well, he had certainly taken my mind off the murders.

  I felt compelled, however, to tell him about them when I joined him in the den. And that took his mind off me.

  “But why would the killer want the police to suspect murder?” Michael said. “If they hadn’t found that verse in the bed at the museum, they might never have suspected that Arnie was killed.”

  “Maybe the killer wants to be caught,” I said doubtfully.

  “Not that hoary old chestnut,” Michael objected, but he couldn’t come up with any better ideas, and shortly thereafter I kissed him goodnight in a sisterly fashion and ushered him back out into the snow and the dark.

  I tidied up the den, turned down the thermostat and went to bed reflecting upon the fact that mature and responsible behavior is small comfort on a cold night.

  Chapter 9

  Hills and trees, your dog has fleas. Snow and Ice, don’t think twice. My thoughts flipped themselves into crazy rhymes the next afternoon as I drove the winding, two-lane blacktop to the Hampshire Psychiatric Hospital. Our crackerjack road crews had already cleared away last night’s snowfall, so I drove as absentmindedly as I usually did on those Sunday trips, allowing my mind to wander over figurative hills and dales just as my car hummed over literal ones. I kept a corner of my consciousness alert for Icy patches.

  Red and yellow, catch a fellow. I was glad to be alone, even though Michael’s mood had lifted so that he was an entertaining companion once again—maybe too entertaining. I didn’t need any more confusion in my life than the week had already presented to me.

  A jeep and a VW Rabbit whizzed by going the other way. I was not whizzing along. In the vintage Plymouth sedan in front of me, a very old and tiny driver pursued the minimum speed but couldn’t seem to push the needle up quite that far. If he had a wife beside him she was too short to be seen over the car seat. Sunday drivers. Sometimes I think that ministers release their elderly flocks from church with the admonition: “Go ye forth this day and drive!”

  Actually, I didn’t mind.

  Brown and gold, catch a cold, I should have enjoyed the scenery, beautiful as it is in all four seasons, but the recurring nightmare of my family’s life waited at the end of the road. If a tree fell in the surrounding forest, I didn’t hear it; if the pines were lovely with their heavy wet snow, I didn’t see. My only identifiable emotion was tension, and that came from hoping that this day might bring a minimum’ of pain for my mother and me.

  Mao Tse-tung, who’ll get hung. The brunch with Simon and Ginger had been a great success. She loved his bawdy sense of humor; he liked her money. No, that wasn’t fair, I chided myself. He’d probably have liked her even before she was rich. They had similar natures, Ginger and Simon—blunt, bright and damn-your-eyes. All I’d had to do was make the introductions, then sit back and enjoy their banter while I polished off scrambled eggs, hash browns, link sausages and whole wheat toast. My car was not the only thing that I fueled with plenty of energy before my Sunday drives.

  At brunch, we had tiptoed around the subject of murder. Simon merely expressed his distress, Ginger accepted it. I seconded the motion and off we raced to other topics. What could we have said to each other: Did you do it? No, did you?

  The great stone gates of the Hampshire Hospital frowned at me under heavy eyebrows of snow. I’d like to be able to use a more original figure of speech to describe them, but that is how they look. I frowned back and turned into the hospital grounds. As it always did, that quotation from Dante nudged its creepy way into my mind: “Abandon all hope ye who enter here.” Yes, if one were writhing through the gates of hell; yes, for prisoners at the Tower of London. But not here, please God, not here.

  My mother was waiting for me where she always waited for me—where the attendants deposited her in the big oak, rocking chair in a private corner of the Recreation Hall. Some recreation: rocking, rocking, rocking.

  “Mother.” I smiled at her and bent down to kiss her cheek. The softness of her skin broke my heart, as usual. Unfortunately, as I raised up, she rocked forward, so the top of my head hit one of the hard back slate of the chair. She looked confused at the change in my expression from pleasure to pain.

  It was going to be a long afternoon.

  “Mom, you look so pretty.”

  I pulled a straight-backed armless chair close to her and sat down. I don’t know, I suppose that unconsciously I thought that if I got as physically close to her as possible someday I might also penetrate the spaces of her mind.

  She raised her lovely blue eyes to mine and tried to focus on my face and the question. I got my Scandinavian coloring from her side of the family. A dribble of spittle appeared at the corner of her mouth. I wiped it away with one of the tissues I always tried to remember to bring; the hospital tissues are so rough. She’d never notice the spit dribbling down her chin. It was I who couldn’t stand it.

  “Sherry, dear,” she managed, finally.

  “No, Mom, it’s Jenny.” Sometimes I let her think I was my sister, Sherry, so she’d think her other daughter had finally come to see her.

  She nodded the long wise nod of the mentally ill.

  I began to talk to her quietly, in one long continuous sentence that weaved in and out of the lives of people she might remember and places she had been. Sometimes she repeated a word I had said, and then I paused to say, Yes, Mom, yes, that’s right. But mostly she just rocked, letting my voice flow over and around her like the familiar music from the symphonies she loved.

  I murmured to her for an hour, until her eyes focused a bit more and she suddenly looked more aware.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” my mother said.

  I roused an attendant. While he and my mother shuffled off to perform one of the few of life’s functions to whi
ch she still paid attention, I sat. If my chair could have rocked, I would have rocked in it.

  I wanted to take a deep breath, but didn’t dare for fear I’d swallow a great gulp of the smell of the place—that peculiar smell of the sick and the senile, that odor of the humiliation of human beings who don’t know who they are.

  “There now,” my mother said when she was returned to me and resettled in her rocker. “There now.”

  A patient shuffled by—a boy about twenty. The shirttail of his regulation blue pajamas hung out. They all shuffle, all these strange lonely children of God, these mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, husbands and wives whose noisy aberrations are safely muffled now by drugs. They are safe now from the wild and fearsome rampages of their hallucinating minds, and all the rest of us are safe from them. But where there used to be too many voices in their heads, now there are none. In my mother’s house and in her head, there was nobody home. She’d gone away, perhaps for good.

  I sang my solo to her for a while longer, my monologue of gossip and memories, and then I stroked her hands and kissed her cheek and left. There was no use seeing the doctor, there was nothing to say. And what was said a few years ago had been said too late.

  “Your mother is not an alcoholic,” the doctors had told Sherry and me. “She suffers from a rather common chemical imbalance that just makes her act like one.”

  Too late. Too late to save Sherry from the humiliation of an adolescence spent with a stumbling, mumbling mother. Too late for the handsome husband whose strength was in his body, not his heart. Too late for the friends who watched her descent into aberrant behavior and sidled, shamefaced, out of the door.

  “We might have been able to help your mother a great deal,” the doctor had said, “if only medicine had discovered this chemical imbalance years ago when she was young.”

  If only. But they hadn’t.

  And so my mother joined the ironic fraternity of children who caught polio before the Salk vaccine, of women who died in childbirth before surgeons learned to wash their hands, of all the victims of “if only we had known,” the disease that is caused by being born too soon.

  I pushed open the big glass doors of the hospital. it was snowing again; the roads would be hazardous. It would be a long drive home.

  Chapter 10

  The murders finally made the papers on Monday morning. Read all about it, as the boys used to yell on street corners. Read it and weep, as we used to say about our report cards in high school.

  I sat in the breakfast nook, reading fast and gulping coffee. The impact of the story stole my appetite, which was just as well since I didn’t have time for bacon and eggs. I knew I’d better hie myself to the office because this story would create a rumpus among my staff and clients.

  I pulled open my mother’s yellow curtains and let the thin, sharp winter sunshine puddle on the table-top. It’s the sort of cozy breakfast nook that deserves a calico cat. I wished I had one to talk things over with. Cats are such good listeners, better than dogs because cats don’t take personally everything you say. Dogs take your tone of voice to heart even when you’re not talking about them; cats listen judiciously, without comment.

  Good sense triumphed over my moment of anthropomorphic whimsey. I scatted my imaginary cat away and rinsed my cup in the sink. I would have loved to have a pet, but my schedule didn’t have the cracks of time required for a cat or dog—or gerbil. I can’t think of a pet as just a warm piece of furniture to leave casually behind me every day; if I ever own a Spot or a Tiger, I want time enough to love it.

  I had learned a few things from the newspaper story. I considered them as I bundled up in brown leather boots, camel’s hair coat, tan mohair scarf and the tan felt number that Derek calls my lady executive hat. A quick check with the hall mirror verified my qualifications for the Most Boringly Dressed List. Pat Nixon in her good Republican cloth coat had nothing on me. I looked professional, frugal and trustworthy; I could out-bland oatmeal. Little did the world know that my undies were red silk. Hah.

  According to the paper, Arnie had gone to the museum that Monday night about eight-thirty after dinner at the club. He’d used the staff entrance at the South Wing; the guard remembered watching him sign in. He had that blue comforter and the pillow in a big sack under his arm; he said he’d brought them as “little gifts” for the women’s staff lounge where there was a cot so the women could nap during lunch. Somebody had complained of the chill factor and voila! sugar daddy to the rescue. How like him, I thought fondly, how wonderfully like him.

  Simon Church reported having seen him, too, but only long enough to share a couple of drinks from a bottle of red wine that Simon kept in his desk drawer—for the chill factor. He wasn’t drunk, Simon said; or at least he didn’t act it. Arnie was still sipping the wine when he left the office, Simon said; the police had, in fact, found the wine glass where it had rolled under the testered bed.

  Simon said that Arnie left his office about nine-thirty. The old man did not mention the change of wills, but Simon thought he had seemed fidgety and nervous. Several times Simon thought Arnie was about to tell him something, but each time Arnie opened his mouth he shut it again.

  And that’s the last time anybody admitted to having seen Arnie Culverson alive.

  He had not signed out, but unfortunately the guard had not thought anything of it at the time. Frequent visitors to the museum often neglected to sign out, and he simply thought Arnie had left while the guard made his rounds of the building. With the guard gone from his post at the staff entrance, people inside the museum could still get out, but nobody outside could get in—unless, of course, Arnie or Simon had let them in.

  If there was anybody else in the museum that night, neither the guard nor Simon knew of it, they said. And that didn’t make things look too good for them. But Arnie could easily have let somebody in while the guard was out. And that somebody could have killed him and then waited to sneak out when the guard made his next rounds.

  Ginger Culverson, the paper said, spent the night of her father’s death watching TV in Idaho, but her only witness was a parakeet. Her mother and brother said they’d played canasta until midnight. No, they hadn’t worried when, their husband and father didn’t come home, they said. Why should they care, they didn’t say.

  The police had no explanation to offer—at least publicly—for why they had not found the verse in the bed at the museum any sooner than they did. And of course, it wasn’t really they who found it, but a janitor. I thought that delayed discovery was mighty curious. The testered bed is an exquisitely, elegantly simple piece of work; nasty poems on bright white paper ought to have stuck out like a Picasso head on a Vermeer lady.

  As for Moshe, he’d been drinking too much wine the evening he died, in celebration of the theater premiere. He’d had those drinks with crowds of people at the cocktail party at the country club, the one to which Michael went and I didn’t. Everybody, as they say, was there. Which meant that anybody could have doped his wine. The hypertension medicine that killed him—Soronal, the paper said—was what killed Arnie, too. It came in capsules, which could easily be opened and their powdered contents quickly dissolved in liquid. In sweet wine, the taste would not be apparent. The coroner was quoted as saying it probably took about nine capsules to kill Arnie because he was used to the drug and had developed some tolerance for it, but it took considerably less to kill Moshe. The murderer could have dissolved the medicine in a single glass of wine all at once, or spaced his poison out over several drinks. Easy and effective either way.

  The newspaper article listed the beneficiaries of the two men. The Foundation was mentioned twice. I can happily do without that sort of publicity, thank you very much.

  I knocked snow off my boots as I got into my car. Then I slammed the door, started the engine and waited a bit for it to warm up.

  I backed out of my parent’s driveway. My radial tires crunched noisily into the crusty old snow that lay beneath the two inches
of fresh. When I reached the edge of the street, I gave the car a little gas to get me over a hump of snow the plow had thrown.

  I got over the hump all right.

  And applied just enough brakes to throw me into a skid that twirled me deep into a snowbank in my own front yard.

  So much for rushing to the office.

  I left the car in the snowbank (well, it was my front yard and the car was in nobody’s way) and got Derek on the phone just before he left his apartment.

  “If you know what’s good for you,” I said as I stepped into his snappy red Toyota, “you will not mention that hunk of metal resting in the snow in front of the house.” I closed the door and he accelerated carefully.

  “You mean that interesting piece of modern sculpture?” He was trying not to laugh at his boss. “Wouldn’t dream of saying a thing.” But he couldn’t resist. “Although … I might call Simon Church later and tell him how much I admire this new practice of placing large works of art around the community. What’s this one called?”

  “The sculpture, you mean?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Car in the Yard.”

  He laughed and shook his head sympathetically. We followed the local (miniscule) variety of rush hour traffic in compatible silence for a while. The building which housed our office loomed ahead; at six stories, it’s the town skyscraper.

  “Interesting paper this morning,” Derek said quietly.

  “Um.”

  “To paraphrase a certain well-known book and movie, Somebody is Killing the Great Philanthropists of Port Frederick.”

  I told him about the rumors that Mr. Ottilini had whispered to me over the phone. He wasn’t surprised that the Cohens might contest the will.

  “But I can’t believe that people will suspect anyone connected to The Foundation!” he said. “That’s crazy, is what that is. Why would any of us do it?”