Dead Crazy

  “Well, you’re right, of course. With mental illness, there is almost always a ‘yes, but.’ The voices could alter their message. He might even begin to hear different voices. It’s possible. Frankly, I don’t think it’s probable, given his long and consistent history with those demons, but I have to admit to you that it is possible.”

  “Where do you think he is, Marsha?” Geof said.

  She looked directly at him. “I do not know.”

  “Would you tell me if you did?”

  She looked over at me. “I do not know that, either. I’m thinking about it, though. Believe me, I’ve been thinking about that very question a lot today.”

  He didn’t press her further, and I kept my nose out of it.

  “Will you stay for dinner?” she asked us.

  But Geof needed to return to the station, and I didn’t want to interrupt her probably all-too-brief idyll with Joe Fabian, so we declined, asking for a rain check.

  Out on the street, by our cars, Geof leaned over to kiss me.

  “You taste like chili,” he said.

  “What will you do for dinner?”

  “I’ll pick up a sandwich, and then I’ll eat some chili when I get home. Where are you going now?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Home, I guess.”

  “The prints on the church door have been identified as Kitt Blackstone’s, Jenny. He’s been picked up a few times before, on minor charges, mostly having to do with vagrancy and disturbing the peace.”

  “Why didn’t you tell Marsha that?”

  “She knows his record, and she knows he was there.”

  “Geof, I really don’t think she’d hide him.”

  “I know you don’t.” He kissed me again, then lifted his head and squinted at me with a speculative gaze. “And crackers.”

  19

  I discovered that I felt too restless to go home.

  Instead, I meandered in my car, aimlessly following the streets that were clearest of snow and ice. Straight ahead onto Benjamin Franklin Avenue. Right onto Twenty-second. Down four blocks, left onto James A. Madison Boulevard. Across three blocks, left onto Seventeenth. Down five blocks, and right onto Adams, across one block, left onto …

  Tenth Street.

  Well, well. Now wasn’t this a coincidence….

  I parked in the first cleared spot I encountered, which was directly in front of Perry Yates’s neat brown saltbox house, and then I trudged out into the weather once more.

  My destination was the house next to Yates’s.

  I accept only a minimal salary from the foundation, which I thought I might actually try to earn that evening—since I hadn’t earned much of it that day—by shuffling up a few front walks, climbing a number of front steps, ringing some doorbells, and polling as many residents as I found at home.

  To the first person who opened a door, and to everyone after that, I said something along the lines of “Our foundation will decide tomorrow whether to purchase the old church basement for use as a recreation hall for former mental patients. In any project we take on, the feelings and opinions of the neighbors are very important to us. We’ll do this only if it’s okay with most of you; we don’t want to force any project down your throat. So, considering what happened last night, how do you feel about the idea today?”

  They didn’t think very much of it anymore.

  But another truth that also came out of this third batch of interviews was that they didn’t want the noise, dirt, and bother that the construction of Michael’s apartment complex would bring, either. They had liked the idea that MaryDell’s group would clean up the old church, pretty up the property, and let the improvements go at that. That prospect, it turned out, had appeared to them preferable to bulldozers, dust, hammers, power saws, and blocked traffic. Before the murder, that is.

  “Hell,” one crusty, voluble old homeowner said to me, after his wife had invited me into their tiny house for a very welcome and hot cup of tea, “we don’t want all them apartment people! Perry Yates talks about turning that old empty lot into a parking lot, but now I ask you, if you got a parking lot, what are you going to park in it. Cars, that’s what. Pickup trucks. Motorcycles. It’s gonna be noisy. It’s gonna be crowded, we ain’t gonna be able to find a place to park on our own street when all their friends start pilin’ in here. And you can bet them apartments ain’t gonna be no nice little places for families or retired people—no way. Never is, these days. Gonna be the only ones can afford ‘em gonna be young punks livin’ there in them apartments and workin’ gals, drinkin’ beer and party in’ all night. No thank you. I’ll take them quiet crazy people anytime over Perry Yates’s improvements! Besides, I hear most of them crazy people won’t be havin’ their own cars, so we won’t be havin’ a lot of extry traffic on the street.”

  But he was a tough old bird; the others were not so sanguine about the murder on their block. I was disappointed, for the sake of the project, but I could hardly blame them.

  Finally, I stood on the stoop of yet another gray saltbox house, one with a bright red door and a blue doorknob.

  Marianne Miller opened the door much more cautiously this afternoon than she had this morning.

  “Oh, Jenny,” she said when she recognized me, and then she urged me to “please come in.”

  I had been so upset myself that morning that I hadn’t noticed that her blue eyes had blue circles under them. I saw them now. Her small, pretty mouth was pinched and trembling a little, maybe with exhaustion, maybe with tension or fear. She seemed to have changed since this morning, but then, I supposed she’d had a rough day. Two kids, trying to work, and having a murder next door would certainly have worn me slick, I decided.

  “I’ll take that,” Marianne said, as I removed my coat in her tiny foyer. She held out her hands for my hat and gloves as well. I thought she would stash them on the hooks that were attached to the wall in the foyer, but she stuffed the hat and gloves inside the coat in a distracted, fumbling sort of way. She draped my coat over her arms and carried it with her as she preceded me into the living room, as if she’d forgotten about it. I followed her, observing her slender shoulders covered by a red plaid shirt, and her trim hips and legs in their blue jeans. And I finally thought of the one thing that I knew about Derek that the cops didn’t, that Faye didn’t, that nobody else did, in fact: he’d been attracted to this woman.

  20

  I followed her into a scene of cheerful chaos that I seemed to be seeing for the first time, which just goes to show how distracted I’d been that morning. In the living room, I stepped carefully between a potter’s wheel and a Fisher-Price toy barn, and sat on a cushion that she hurriedly cleared for me on a ratty old sofa near the bay window where we had stood, watching the cops arrive.

  Still holding my coat, Marianne lifted a rattan rocking chair over the floor strewn with toys, kicked some of them out of the way with one foot, set the chair down near me, and sat in it. She folded my coat onto her lap. Her fingers began to fiddle absently with my lapels, as if the coat were a security blanket and the lapels were the silk binding. It was odd. I nearly said, “Don’t you want to get that coat out of your way?” But the obvious truth was that she didn’t, and since I didn’t really care if she wrinkled the coat—it needed to go to the cleaners anyway—I let her have a go at it.

  “Jenny, have they found the guy who did it?”

  “I don’t think so, Marianne.”

  She looked as if she might cry. “It scares me so much.”

  The noise level in her house was such that I might have thought she was running a nursery school if I hadn’t known there were only the two girls. She offhandedly introduced them to me as Blake—a pretty, blond five-year-old and Chesley—an adorable redheaded toddler. Whenever either of the girls raced by, their mother grabbed them, pulled them onto her lap—on top of my coat—and hugged them until their protests and fidgeting forced her to release them again.

  She acted as if she could hardly bear to let t
hem out of her sight or her grasp.

  “How do you get any work done?” I asked.

  “Oh, this work gets done.” She pointed vaguely at a bright, clever abstract oil painting that hung on the wall to my right. “I get the important stuff done. I’m not sure how; I mean if you ask me in five years how I managed to produce anything worth selling during this period of my life, I probably won’t be able to tell you, but somehow it gets done. Of course, I don’t sleep a lot, and I haven’t read a book in three years, and I wouldn’t recognize a date if he bit me. But mostly it’s the other stuff that never gets done like the housework, or the bills that don’t get paid on time, and I don’t expect I’ve balanced my checkbook in three months, and, God, I never return phone calls like I ought to—it’s a wonder I have any friends left—and I forget to put out the trash, and it piles up … well, it’s stuff like that, that’s what I can’t seem to get done. It used to make my husband crazy. Gosh, it makes me crazy sometimes. Maybe I’m raising crazy kids …” She stared around her living room. “I mean, wouldn’t it make you crazy, if you lived like this?”

  “Yes,” I had to agree.

  “I’ll bet you don’t have any kids, though.”

  “Nope,” I also agreed.

  She sighed and stroked my lapels as though they were a cat’s back. “You get up in the morning, you have a leisurely cup of coffee, right?”

  “Yes, more or less.”

  “Saturday, you want to sleep late, you can. At night, you want to watch prime-time TV, no problem; you want to curl up with a good book, no big deal, you just do it. Talk on the phone any time you want to, take your time in the shower, go to the bathroom by yourself—”

  “It’s that bad, is it?”

  Chesley skipped by and her mother grabbed her, hugged her fiercely, and then released her.

  “It would almost be worth getting married again,” she admitted, and then her voice turned bitter. “Except just because you have a man around the house doesn’t guarantee he’ll be any help.”

  When the child was out of the room, Marianne asked me, in a tight voice, “Do they know who did it?”

  “I don’t really know,” I hedged, like a good police spouse. But then, I thought, that’s not fair to her; she needs to be able to protect herself and her kids. “Well, they are looking for a suspect, a man whose name is Kitt Blackstone, but who calls himself Mob—”

  “Mob?” She looked incredulous. “They can’t possibly mean Mob. I know Mob. Well, I mean I guess I know him as well as anybody could, but I do know he’s a gentle soul. Well, okay, maybe not gentle, exactly, but Mob wouldn’t kill anybody. Why in the world do they think that?”

  I was incredulous now. “Because he was there last night, Marianne, in the basement, and he left a sort of confession. How in the world do you know him?”

  “Oh, he used to hang around here,” she said, almost casually. “Around the neighborhood, I mean. Asking for coffee or doughnuts and stuff. There was one old lady who fed him regularly, and they used to let him sleep in the church sometimes.”

  “Good grief,” I said. “Did you tell the police this?”

  She widened her eyes. “Well, no. Why would I? They didn’t say anything to me about Mob. They just asked me if I saw or heard anything, which I hadn’t. Oh, Jenny, if they’re looking for Mob, they’re looking for the wrong person—I don’t care what sort of confession he’s supposed to have written. Mob was always writing stuff! He was always leaving notices on trees and funny, crazy little messages in our mailboxes. It wasn’t any of it real, it was all just his imagination! Jenny, if the police are looking for Mob, that means the real killer is getting away. Oh God. Right next door,” she whispered fearfully. “It happened right next door while my babies were asleep. What if he’d broken in here, what if he’d—”

  “Do the children understand what happened?”

  She shook her head until her ponytail swung behind her shoulders, but her words partially belied the motion. “No! Well, sort of, I mean, they kind of know what dead is, and they see killings all the time on TV, but it isn’t real to them. I’m so scared they’ll have nightmares about it tonight, and what will I say to them? God, how will I sleep, what if he comes back to this block, how can I protect them all by myself?”

  “Marianne, the reason I’m here again is that I’m looking for my assistant director, Derek Jones. He was on this block, conducting interviews last night. You didn’t happen to see him, did you?”

  “Derek?” she said, with a sudden, quick smile that gave me the answer. This woman seemed to know all the missing people in Port Frederick.

  “Was he here?”

  She nodded and blushed—an old-fashioned reaction to a new-fashioned question. “He said he had a couple of other questions to ask me, and well, I’d already put the kids to bed, so I invited him in for a cup of coffee. Well, actually, we had a couple of beers, is what we had, I hope you don’t mind, I mean, it was after hours, and all—”

  “I’m not a cop, Marianne.”

  She smiled nervously. “Yeah, but you’re his boss. He says you’re a great boss. Well, anyway, we talked about the project a little, and—” She stopped and then amazed me by blushing furiously and glancing down at her hands. When she looked up, it was to smile shyly and to say, “He’s very nice, isn’t he?”

  I smiled, nodded. But how in the world could I now, with any tact—and even in this new-fashioned world—ask her how long he had stayed with her, or when he had left her house?

  “You don’t think Derek noticed anything next door, do you, Marianne?”

  “No!” She shuddered a little and rubbed my coat lapel furiously between the thumb and fingers of her right hand. “I don’t think there was anything for us to notice! The cops told me they thought it happened after midnight, and I was asleep by then, and Derek had gone home a long time before that. And I guess poor Rod was stabbed, so it’s not as if there was any gunshot to hear, or anything—”

  “You didn’t hear any screaming, or—”

  “No.” She swallowed convulsively. “Oh, poor Rod. He was a real dumb bum; I suppose that’s terrible to say, but, really, I never could stand him, he was always smirking at me, like I should be interested in him or something—”

  She stopped cold and seemed to turn a little pale.

  “What? What, Marianne?”

  “Nothing.” She gave a little shake. When she looked at me, her glance slid quickly away. “It’s just … it’s just that I didn’t even like him to be around the children; he was just so greasy and smirky and kind of filthy in every way, you know? Nothing like Derek. It was so nice to be around somebody as nice as he is; I mean, he’s so nice and clean-cut and intelligent and funny and—Did you say you’re looking for him, Jenny?”

  I nodded.

  “Why?”

  I hedged again. “He didn’t come in to work today.”

  “Really?” She started to smile, then hid it.

  “If you hear from him,” I said, “would you ask him to call me, please?”

  “Sure. He said he’d call me. But I don’t imagine I’ll hear from him.” But she blushed saying it, thus divulging just how much she hoped to hear from Derek again. I didn’t seem to have planted any additional fears in her mind. That, she didn’t need, what with worrying about murderers and about whether her new acquaintance would call her. I, on the other hand, was already worried about her not hearing from him. It was a matter of principle with Derek always to call a woman if he said he would and never to leave her dangling, wondering what she’d done wrong. Derek had an understanding of power—from the powerless person’s point of view—that most men didn’t. It was one of the perceptions that had drawn him into social work. That sense of the responsibility of sexual power had been one of the things I’d expected least from him and then had learned to admire most about him.

  I noticed that in his absence I was sainting him—and people only become saints after they’re dead. This past tense business had to stop. I c
oncentrated for a moment on some of Derek’s faults—procrastination, laziness, lack of initiative, irresponsibility of other sorts—and sure enough, he came infuriatingly alive to me again.

  “Marianne, I may not be a cop, but I’m married to one,” I told her.

  “I know,” she said, and then grinned.

  That was another one of Derek’s failings: he gossiped about me altogether too much!

  “Well,” I said, “if they’ve made an arrest, I’ll hear about it and call you. All right?”

  “Thank you.” It sounded heartfelt.

  “I’d better go.” I got up from the couch and tried to glance tactfully at my coat. It was now thoroughly crumpled in her lap. But when she handed it to me, she seemed unaware of any lapse of etiquette on her part. When I slipped it on, it smelled of the patchouli fragrance that she wore. She walked me to the door.

  “I wish you didn’t have to go so soon,” she said fretfully.

  When I stepped outside, she closed and locked the door quickly.

  Late afternoon had slid into an early night. Compared with the bright, lively mess of her little house, Tenth Street suddenly seemed very dark, cold, and quiet.

  21

  It was time to go home. I should have gone home. I figured that I had finally earned it. But beyond the darkened church basement and the empty lot beside it, lights glowed in the shabby little saltbox house where Grace Montgomery lived. If Marianne Miller was frightened, the crazy old pig lady was probably terrified—and all alone with her dementia.

  Sure, I thought as I stood on the snowy sidewalk pondering the prospect of visiting her, she might scream at me, she might be way beyond reaching, she might not even open her door to me this time. I should forget it and go home. But would it kill me to try? Would it kill me to try to offer her the same small comfort that I had promised Marianne—that I’d call her as soon as the police made an arrest? Besides, it would only take a few more minutes.