Beaker's Dozen

  “Hey, Johnny.”

  “I’m calling to follow through on our conversation last week. I’m afraid the information you requested is unavailable.”

  I stood in my miniscule kitchen, listening to the traffic three stories below, listening to Johnny’s cold formality. “Unavailable?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry.”

  “You mean the file has disappeared? Been replaced by a later version? Somebody’s sitting on it?”

  “I’m sorry, the information you requested isn’t available.”

  “Right,” I said, without expression.

  “Catch you soon.”

  “Bye, Lieutenant.”

  After he hung up I stood there holding the receiver, surprised at how much it hurt. It was a full five minutes before the anger came. And then it was distant, muffled. Filtered through the Camineur, so that it wouldn’t get out of hand.

  Safe.

  Jeff Connors showed up at school after a three-day absence, wearing a beeper, and a necklace of thick gold links.

  “Jeff, he big now,” Lateesha told me, and turned away, lips pursed like the disapproving mother she would someday be.

  I was patrolling the hall before the first bell when Jenny Kelly strode past me and stopped at the door to the boys’ room, which wasn’t really a door but a turning that hid the urinals and stalls from obvious view. The door itself had been removed after the fifth wastebasket fire in two days. Jeff came around the corner, saw Ms. Kelly, and stopped. I could see he was thinking about retreating again, but her voice didn’t let him. “I want to see you, Jeff. In my free period.” Her voice said he would be there.

  “Okay,” Jeff said, with no hustle, and slouched off, beeper riding on his hip.

  I said to her, “He knows when your free period is.”

  She looked at me coolly. “Yes.”

  “So you’ve gotten him to talk to you.”

  “A little.” Still cool. “His mother disappeared for three days. She uses. She’s back now, but Jeff doesn’t trust her to take care of his little brother. Did you even know he had a little brother, Gene?”

  I shook my head.

  “Why not?” She looked like Lateesha. Disapproving mother. The raccoon eyes were etched deeper. “This boy is in trouble, and he’s one we don’t have to lose. We can still save him. You could have, last year. He admires you. But you never gave him the time of day, beyond making sure he wasn’t any trouble to you.”

  “I don’t think you have the right to judge whether—”

  “Don’t I? Maybe not. I’m sorry. But don’t you see, Jeff only wanted from you—”

  “That’s the bell. Good luck today, Ms. Kelly.”

  She stared at me, then gave a little laugh. “Right. And where were you when the glaciers melted? Never mind.” She walked into her classroom, which diminished in noise only a fraction of a decibel.

  Her earrings were little silver hoops, and her silky blouse was red.

  After school I drove to the Angels of Mercy Nursing Home and pretended I was interested in finding a place for my aging mother. A woman named Karen Gennaro showed me a dining hall, bedrooms, activity rooms, a little garden deep in marigolds and asters, nursing facilities. Old people peacefully played cards, watched TV, sat by sunshiny windows. There was no sign that eighty-year-old Lydia Smith had thrown herself from the roof, or that her J-24-bonded boyfriend Giacomo della Francesco had stabbed himself to death.

  “I’d like to walk around a little by myself now,” I told Ms. Gennaro. “Just sort of get the feel of the place. My mother is . . . particular.” She hesitated. “We don’t usually allow—”

  “Mom didn’t like Green Meadows because too many corridors were painted pale blue and she hates pale blue. She rejected Saint Anne’s because the other women didn’t care enough about their hairdos and so the atmosphere wasn’t self-respecting. She wouldn’t visit Havenview because there was no piano in the dining room. This is the tenth place I’ve reported on.”

  She laughed. “No wonder you sound so weary. All right, just check out with me before you leave.”

  I inspected the day room again, chatting idly with a man watching the weather channel. Then I wandered to the sixth floor, where Lydia Smith and Giacamo della Francesca had lived. I chatted with an elderly man in a wheelchair, and a sixteen-year-old Catholic Youth volunteer, and a Mrs. Locurzio, who had the room on the other side of Lydia Smith’s. Nothing.

  A janitor came by mopping floors, a heavy young man with watery blue eyes and a sweet, puzzled face like a bearded child.

  “Excuse me—have you worked here long?”

  “Four years.” He leaned on his mop, friendly and shy.

  “Then you must come to know the patients pretty well.”

  “Pretty well.” He smiled. “They’re nice to me.”

  I listened to his careful, spaced speech, a little thick on each initial consonant. “Are all of them nice to you?”

  “Some are mean. Because they’re sick and they hurt.”

  “Mrs. Smith was always nice to you.”

  “Oh, yes. A nice lady. She talked to me every day.” His doughy face became more puzzled. “She died.”

  “Yes. She was unhappy with her life.”

  He frowned. “Mrs. Smith was unhappy? But she . . . no. She was happy.” He looked at me in appeal. “She was always happy. Aren’t you her friend?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I just made a mistake about her being unhappy.”

  “She was always happy. With Mr. Frank. They laughed and laughed and read books.”

  “Mr. della Francesca.”

  “He said I could call him Mr. Frank.”

  I said, “What’s your name?”

  “Pete,” he said, as if I should know it.

  “Oh, you’re Pete! Yes, Mrs. Smith spoke to me about you. Just before she died. She said you were nice, too.”

  He beamed. “She was my friend.”

  “You were sad when she died, Pete.”

  “I was sad when she died.”

  I said, “What exactly happened?”

  His face changed. He picked up the mop, thrust it into the rolling bucket. “Nothing.”

  “Nothing? But Mrs. Smith is dead.”

  “I gotta go now.” He started to roll the bucket across the halfmopped floor, but I placed a firm hand on his arm. There’s a cop intuition that has nothing to do with neuropharms.

  I said, “Some bad people killed Mrs. Smith.”

  He looked at me, and something shifted behind his pale blue gaze. “They didn’t tell you that, I know. They said Mrs. Smith killed herself. But you know she was very happy and didn’t do that, don’t you. What did you see, Pete?”

  He was scared now. Once, a long time ago, I hated myself for doing this to people like Pete. Then I got so I didn’t think about it. It didn’t bother me now, either.

  “Mrs. Gennaro killed Mrs. Smith,” I said.

  Shock wiped out fear. “No, she didn’t! She’s a nice lady!”

  “I say Mrs. Gennaro and the doctor killed Mrs. Smith.”

  “You’re crazy! You’re an asshole! Take it back!”

  “Mrs. Gennaro and the doctor—”

  “Mrs. Smith and Mr. Frank was all alone together when they went up to that roof!”

  I said swiftly, “How do you know?”

  But he was panicked now, genuinely terrified. Not of me—of what he’d said. He opened his mouth to scream. I said, “Don’t worry, Pete. I’m a cop. I work with the cops you talked to before. They just sent me to double check your story. I work with the same cops you told before.”

  “With Officer Camp?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “With Officer Camp.”

  “Oh.” He still looked scared. “I told them already! I told them I unlocked the roof door for Mrs. Smith and Mr. Frank like they asked me to!”

  “Pete—”

  “I gotta go!”

  “Go ahead, Pete. You did good.”

  He scurried off. I left the build
ing before he could find Karen Gennaro.

  A call to an old friend at Records turned up an Officer Joseph Camphausen at Midtown South, a Ralph Campogiani in the Queens Robbery Squad, a Bruce Campinella at the two-four, and a detective second grade Joyce Campolieto in Intelligence. I guessed Campinella, but it didn’t matter which one Pete had talked to, or that I wouldn’t get another chance inside Angels of Mercy. I headed for West End Avenue.

  The sun was setting. Manhattan was filled with river light. I drove up the West Side Highway with the window down, and remembered how much Margie had liked to do that, even in the winter. Real air, Gene. Chilled like good beer.

  Nobody at the Beth Israel Retirement Home would talk to me about the two old people who died there, Samuel Fetterolf and Rose Kaplan. Nor would they let me wander around loose. After my carefully guided tour, I went to the Chinese restaurant across the street and waited.

  From every street-side window in Beth Israel I’d seen them head in here: well-dressed men and women visiting their parents and aunts and grandmothers after work. They’d stay an hour, and then they’d be too hungry to go home and cook, or maybe too demoralized to go home without a drink, a steady stream of overscheduled people dutifully keeping up connections with their old. I chose a table in the bar section, ordered, and ate slowly. It took a huge plate of moo goo gai pan and three club sodas before I heard it.

  “How can you say that? She’s not senile, Brad! She knows whether her friends are suicidal or not!”

  “I didn’t say she—”

  “Yes, you did! You said we can’t trust her perceptions! She’s only old, not stupid!” Fierce thrust of chopsticks into her sweet and sour. She was about thirty, slim and tanned, her dark hair cut short. Preppy shirt and sweater. He wasn’t holding up as well, the paunch and bald spot well underway, the beleagured husband look not yet turned resentful.

  “Joanne, I only said—”

  “You said we should just discount what Grams said and leave her there, even though she’s so scared. You always discount what she says!”

  “I don’t. I just—”

  “Like about that thing at Passover. What Grams wanted was completely reasonable, and you just—”

  “Excuse me,” I said, before they drifted any more. The thing at Passover wouldn’t do me any good. “I’m sorry, but I couldn’t help overhear. I have a grandmother in Beth Israel, too, and I’m a little worried about her, otherwise I wouldn’t interrupt, it’s just that . . . my grandmother is scared to stay there, too.”

  They inspected me unsmilingly, saying nothing.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I said desperately. “She’s never been like this.”

  “I’m sorry,” Brad said stiffly, “we can’t help.”

  “Oh, I understand. Strangers. I just thought . . . you said something about your grandmother being frightened . . . I’m sorry.” I got up to leave, projecting embarrassment.

  “Wait a minute,” Joanne said. “What did you say your name was?”

  “Aaron Sanderson.”

  “Joanne, I don’t think—”

  “Brad, if he has the same problem as—Mr. Sanderson, what is your grandmother afraid of? Is she usually nervous?”

  “No, that’s just it,” I said, moving closer to their table. Brad frowned at me. “She’s never nervous or jittery, and never depressed. She’s fantastic, actually. But ever since those two residents died . . .”

  “Well, that’s just it,” Joanne said. Brad sighed and shifted his weight. “Grams was friendly with Mrs. Kaplan, and she told me Mrs. Kaplan would never in a million years commit suicide. She just wouldn’t.”

  “Same thing my grandmother said. But I’m sure there couldn’t be actual danger in Beth Israel,” I said. Dismiss what the witness said and wait for the contradiction.

  “Why not?” Joanne said. “They could be testing some new medication . . . in fact, Grams said Mrs. Kaplan had volunteered for some clinical trial. She had cancer.”

  Brad said, “And so naturally she was depressed. Or maybe depression was a side effect of the drug. You read about that shit all the time. The drug company will be faced with a huge lawsuit, they’ll settle, they’ll stop giving the pills, and everybody’s grandmother is safe. That simple.”

  “No, smartie.” Joanne glared at him. “It’s not that simple. Grams said she spent the afternoon with Mrs. Kaplan a week or so after she started the drug. Mrs. Kaplan was anything but depressed. She was really up, and she’d fallen in love with that Mr. Fetterolf who was also in the trial, and his daughter-in-law Dottie was telling me—”

  “Joanne, let’s go,” Brad said. “I don’t really feel like arguing here.” I said, “My grandmother knew Mr. Fetterolf slightly. And she’s worried about his suicide—”

  “So am I,” Joanne said. “I keep telling and telling Brad—”

  “Joanne, I’m going. You do what the hell you want.”

  “You can’t just—all right, all right! Everything has to be your way!” She flounced up, threw me an apologetic look, and followed her husband out.

  There were four Fetterolfs in the Manhattan phone directory. Two were single initials, which meant they were probably women living alone. I chose Herman Fetterolf on West Eighty-sixth.

  The apartment building was nice, with a carpeted lobby and deep comfortable sofas. I said to the doorman, “Please tell Mrs. Dottie Fetterolf that there’s a private investigator to talk to her about her father-in-law’s death. My name is Joe Carter. Ask her if she’ll come down to the lobby to talk to me.”

  He gave me a startled look and conveyed the message. When Mrs. Fetterolf came down, I could see she was ready to be furious at somebody, anybody. Long skirt swishing, long vest flapping, she steamed across the lobby. “You the private investigator? Who are you working for?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say, Mrs. Fetterolf. But it’s someone who, like you, has lost an elderly relative to suicide.”

  “Suicide! Ha! It wasn’t any suicide! It was murder!”

  “Murder?”

  “They killed him! And no one will admit it!”

  “What makes you think so?”

  “Think? Think? I don’t have to think, I know! One week he’s fine, he’s friends with this Mrs. Kaplan, they play Scrabble, they read books together, he’s happy as a clam. Maybe even a little something gets going between them, who am I to say, more power to them. And then on the same night—the same night—he hangs himself and she walks in front of a bus! Coincidence? I don’t think so . . . Besides, there would be a note.”

  “I beg your—”

  “My father-in-law would have left a note. He was thoughtful that way. You know what I’m saying? He wrote everybody in the whole family all the time, nobody could even keep up with reading it all. He would have left a note for sure.”

  “Did he—”

  “He was lonely after his wife died. Sarah. A saint. They met fifty-six years ago—”

  In the end, she gave me her father-in-law’s entire history. Also Rose Kaplan’s. I wrote it all down.

  When I called Johnny Fermato, I was told by a wary desk sergeant that Lieutenant Fermato would get back to me.

  In my dreams.

  “Somebody’s being screwed over, Margie,” I said. “And it’s probably costing somebody else payoff money.”

  She lay there in the fetal position, her hands like claws. The IV was gone, but she was still connected by tubes to the humidified air supply, the catheter bag, the feeding pump. The pump made soft noises: ronk, ronk. I laid my briefcase on the bottom of her bed, which Susan would probably object to.

  “It wasn’t depression,” I said to Margie. “Della Francesca and Mrs. Smith went up to the roof together. Alone together. Samuel Fetterolf and Rose Kaplan were in love.” J-24 chemically-induced love.

  The bag in Margie’s feeding pump slowly emptied. The catheter bag slowly filled. Her ears were hidden under the dry, brittle, lifeless hair.

  “Johnny Fermato knows something. Maybe only t
hat the word’s been passed down to keep the case closed. I did get the coroners’ reports. They say ‘self-inflicted fatal wounds.’ All eight reports.”

  Somewhere in the hospital corridors, a woman screamed. Then stopped.

  “Margie,” I heard myself saying, “I don’t want to come here anymore.”

  The next second, I was up and limping around the room. I put my forehead against the wall and ground it in. How could I say that to her? Margie, the only woman I’d ever loved, the person in the world I was closest to . . . On our wedding night, which was also her nineteenth birthday, she’d told me she felt like she could die from happiness. And I’d known what she meant.

  And on that other night eight years later, when Bucky had done his pills-and-vodka routine, Marge had been with me when the phone rang. Gene . . . Gene. . . I did it . . .

  Did what? Jesus, Bucky, it’s after midnight. . .

  But I don’t . . . Father Healey . . .

  Bucky, I gotta start my shift at eight tomorrow morning. Goodnight.

  Gene, who’s calling at this hour?

  . . . say . . . good-bye . . .

  Of all the inconsiderate . . . the phone woke Libby!

  Tell Father Healey I never would have made . . . good priests don’t doubt like . . . I can’t touch God anymore . . .

  And then I’d known. I was out of the apartment in fifteen seconds. Shoes, pants, gun. In my pajama top I drove to the seminary, leaned on the bell. Bucky wasn’t there, but Father Healey was. I searched the rooms, the chapel, the little meditation garden, all the while traffic noises drowning out the thumping in my chest. Father Healey shouting questions at me. I wouldn’t let him in my car. Get away from me you bastard you killed him, you and your insistence on pushing God on a mind never tightly wrapped in the first place . . . Bucky wasn’t at his mother’s house. Now I had two people screaming at me.

  I found him at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows. Where I should have looked first. He’d broken a stained glass window, just smashed it with a board, no subtlety. He was in front of the altar, breathing shallow, already unconscious. EMS seemed to take forever to get there. The on-duty cops were faster; the stained-glass was alarm-wired.