Cloudland (14 page)

“Don’t worry, I won’t call on you to read it.”

Now finally he was worked up, breathing quickly, reminding me of ex-military guys who came to study with me after going to war: pent-up and uneasy fellows who often bridled at having to answer to a woman. Something told me even then that despite his willingness to comply, down the road he was going to be trouble anyway.

I said, “However, may I use your dog assignment, maybe even read it aloud, to hammer my point about manipulating the reader?”

He groaned but then agreed.

“How about you do this: write about when your father left.…” I saw his look of pure horror. “Not for the class, but just for me.”

“Okay,” he said, “but only if it’s just for you.”

The piece he turned in to me was rather good, written with effective simplicity, and once I read it I understood why he preferred to keep his life story from other students. A sickly child born with his feet turned in, he’d had to wear leg braces for several years. To complicate matters, at the age of two he’d also suffered from meningitis, which left him with some nerve damage. His father, embarrassed by his son’s physical weaknesses, neglected him, treated him like a maimed, mangled child. Matthew detailed long family car trips where his father barely even spoke to him and how his mother, whom he described as “traditionally subservient to her husband,” a “born-again Seventh-Day Adventist,” never backed him up, never confronted his father’s criticisms, his cruelties, because she obviously feared sometime in the not-too-distant future her husband would leave her. And he did, for a time. “Interminable,” Matthew called those two fatherless years; ten years old, he was virtually left to fend for himself by a mother who became so unstable she could barely take care of the household and spent many of her waking hours praying for her husband’s return. Finally his father showed up back at home, offering little explanation for his absence, and yet was accepted by his mother unconditionally.

Matthew, in the meantime compensating for his early frailty and leg braces, began lifting weights as a twelve-year-old and taking up hockey—presumably as a way of proving himself to his implacable father. But even when he mastered the sport and grew physically stronger, his father never gave the approval he sought; and his mother was far too weak willed to provide any sort of encouragement. Against many odds, he turned himself into a fairly well-functioning, if brash, young man. A man I ended up falling in love with, a man over whom I suffered greatly and who suffered greatly over me, a man who comforted me and whom I comforted, a man from whom I resolved to part and could not part.

*   *   *

I wiped the tears from my eyes and was putting his letters away when I heard funny scratchy noises going on downstairs and hurried down to the first floor. Henrietta had once again chewed through the childproof lock on the cupboard in which I kept the garbage, and this time the kitchen was strewn with eggshells and coffee grounds and zucchini peels. After the impromptu meal, she’d managed to burst through the barrier that I used to cordon off my living room from all the animals and was hiding behind my grandfather’s smoking chair, blubbering and shaking. There was a trail of piddle on one of my old Aubusson rugs. “You stupid f’ing pig!” I cried out, despite myself. “Who needs you anyway?” Her response: half grunt, half sob. “Oh come on, Henrietta,” I said.

I’d managed to herd her into the kitchen and was just finishing cleaning the rug with rags and some stain cleaner when there was a knock at the door. Standing there with a brown-wrapped square under his arm, Paul was gazing at me with his huge, doll-like eyes.

“I heard you might stop by,” I told him. “What’s that under your arm?”

“Your birthday present,” he said sweetly as I opened the door for him.

The gift clearly was one of his paintings. In the midst of my delight at his generosity, I wondered if he was giving it to me because lately he’d been worrying about dying, worrying that, in the event of his death, his close friends would be taken care of. A painting such as this could be worth $150,000—not that he’d expect me to sell it. He hugged me and, wishing me a happy forty-second, dutifully followed me to the kitchen and beamed when he saw Wade’s cake.

“A chip off the old block,” I said, referring to the fact that Paul was a superb baker.

Paul said, “Mom’s recipe, actually.”

“But your mom was Cuban,” I pointed out. “Is carrot cake popular down there?”

“They—my family—used to make carrot cakes in Cuba before they emigrated,” he said. “They did everything American. Anyway, this is for you.” He held out the wrapped parcel.

I slowly unwrapped the brown paper and saw that the painting was based on a photograph he had taken of me half-reclined on a chaise in a very traditional polka-dot dress. The composition was clearly an homage to David’s portrait of a famous beauty,
Madame Récamier,
which Paul knew to be one of my favorite paintings. The figure on the chaise was hardly an exact likeness, the woman’s face is rounder and wider-eyed than I am, created in the tradition of Paul’s more primitive-looking subjects; however, the arms, the long legs, the leaning-back posture was definitely
moi.

In the painting I recognized certain objects from his living room: an imperial yellow Chinese vase, an incense censor dating back to the fifteenth century, an umbrella stand filled with peacock plumes. But he’d added an interesting feature, a translucent drape or screen of sorts that glows with illumination and is imprinted with the silhouette of a man. Paul had always been very much against my relationship with Matthew Blake, was disturbed by the amount of suffering it caused me, and I naturally interpreted this unrest in the sense of a masculine form looming almost malevolently over me.

“It’s lovely,” I said, continuing to study the painting. “Beautifully done, really. I’m so … well, honored … you made this just for me.”

“Well, I didn’t make it
for
you. I made it because I was inspired to make it,” he announced to me with a bit of defensive imperiousness. “You just happened to be the subject. And then when Wade reminded me that your birthday was coming up, I just felt that I wanted to give it to you.”

I hugged him tightly and told him how much his friendship meant to me and even apologized for being so cranky at times.

“It’s okay. You’ve had a lot on your mind.” Glancing around the kitchen he said, “If you want my opinion, there’s a good place for it,” pointing to a vacant spot on the wall that divided the open cooking area and the dining table. He took the painting, which fit perfectly between two crown moldings. “Got any picture hooks?” I went into my tool chest and found him a brass one as well as a hammer. Within minutes the painting was on the wall and seemed as though it was meant for just the place it hung.

We were both standing there admiring it when Paul turned to me, looking fretful. “You know they questioned Wade for an hour.”

Choosing my words carefully, I said, “I think that they question a lot of people when this kind of thing happens.”

Sounding annoyed, Paul said, “I told Wade I thought he was at home. I would have gladly gone on record. I mean, what I don’t remember I don’t remember.”

“Yes, but it’s not the truth, then, is it? And you don’t want to mess around with lying. Because if and when they find out, it makes you look suspicious and possibly complicit.”

“But he didn’t do it. He’s not the killer.”

“Of course he isn’t.”

“You don’t sound very convincing,” Paul complained.

That’s because I wasn’t convinced. However, I said, “Well
I
don’t think he did it.
I
don’t think he has it in him. But I just hate the fact that he can’t prove where he was.”

Paul sighed and shook his head and said, “You’re obviously not going to give me the reassurance that I want. So let’s not talk about this anymore.”

The moment had turned strange, terribly awkward in light of the fact that Paul had just given me an extravagant birthday gift.

“Paul,” I said at last, “I’m sorry. I really don’t mean to sound circumspect.”

“I know you don’t, and that’s all right. But I’m getting too upset and probably shouldn’t discuss it anymore,” he warned, as though such a state of mind was a bad idea, bad for his health.

“Well then, let’s just keep moving along,” I suggested. “Are you still working on that painting with all the office workers?”

“Yes,” he said, sounding somewhat relieved to be speaking of other things. “I’m thinking of calling it
The Bureaucracy.
”

NINE

T
HE NEXT DAY ON MY WAY
into the prison to teach my class, I noticed Prozzo getting out of his Jeep and Leslie Fullerton climbing out of the passenger side, his belly jiggling through his starched uniform. I thought of Matthew Blake at twenty-four, hockey solid; what a shame it was that this young Statie was already letting himself go. I also wondered why Prozzo had Leslie in tow. Surely he wasn’t considering this not-the-brightest-bulb-in-the-box as an amanuensis of sorts.

I approached them, said hello, and then to Prozzo, “He your new protégé?”

“Assigned to me for a few days. He thinks he wants to cross over into my line of work.” I shot Prozzo a look that meant “You’ve got to be kidding, right?” He actually winked slyly at me.

I said, “I hear you’re keeping very good tabs on Cloudland.”

Prozzo smiled strangely. “Your friend Wadey seems mighty shady.”

“He’s the nervous sort. And you’re not exactly the guy who sets people at ease.”

“On the contrary,” Prozzo said with a tense smile. “But that’s my job.”

“I obviously understand that.”

“And Wade
does
have a record.”

“A juvenile record,” I clarified.

“Okay, but he can’t account for himself the night of the blizzard.”

“He claims to have spent the night in his office.”

“Curious alibi, don’t you think?” Prozzo said.

“Not the best one I ever heard,” interjected Leslie.

Annoyed, I turned to look at him and I’m sure my expression radiated “What do
you
know?”

Prozzo continued, “It just so happens that I have a woman who claims Wade spent the night with her.”

“With
her
?” I asked, having trouble hiding my bewilderment.

“Did you think he was gay?” Prozzo looked bemused.

I backpedaled. “Honestly, with him it’s been hard to tell. He always plays his cards close to his vest.”

“Apparently,” Prozzo said. “Because he lied to us
and
to you about where he was the night of the blizzard.”

“Is this lady … trustworthy?”

Prozzo scratched his head and glanced at Leslie. “You tell me. Local landscape architect. Works for those swells up on Wild Apple Road, the people who live off of the salt mines in Utah, but who are so green they sell their excess solar-generated electricity back to Vermont Power.”

“I know the woman you mean. She’s around fifty? Light brown hair?”

The detective nodded. “According to her, Wade arrived rather late on the night of the snowstorm, between ten and ten-thirty.”

I’d always had my suspicions, but never had been able to pinpoint Wade’s sexual taste. “I admit it doesn’t look great,” I said. “Anthony obviously knows about this.”

Prozzo nodded. “I told him I wanted to speak to you about it.”

I opened my palms to him. “Here I am.”

“Okay, so do you have any idea of why Wade might be covering up his private life?”

“My amateur armchair view? Fucked-up parents who made him feel unworthy. But you might want to check my theory with Anthony, your shrink on retainer.” There was a moment of silent weirdness out there in the parking lot and then I said, “Have you gone back to Wade with what you found out?”

“A few hours ago I stopped by the town hall. He immediately admitted he’d been lying. But that doesn’t necessarily implicate him either. As I’m sure you know, lots of innocent people tell stupid lies when they think they might be under suspicion.”

“Do you mind if I confront him about this, the fact that he even lied to me?”

“Yeah, sure, have at it,” Prozzo said.

“He actually made it a point to come over to my house and discuss the fact that you questioned him. He seemed very nervous. Now I know why.”

We were distracted by some arguing going on in the prison, and one of the guards, presumably, yelling, “Shut the fuck up!” Then the detective resumed, “Now to the other item on my punch list … this book you were talking about.”

“What about it?”

Prozzo looked speculative. “At first I thought: murdered women found by trees with religious material stuffed in their pockets is interesting, but not … bingo. Plenty of crimes have strange religious motivations, right? However, when I got in touch with the FBI in Washington, they couldn’t find anything that matches this scenario.” Leslie, I noticed, kept glancing at the entrance of the prison as though expecting somebody to appear. “So we basically have two victims with tracts found in their pockets. One dead and one alive.”

“Angela Parker and Marjorie Poole.”

“And if Washington can’t give me anything, I need to know more about the book. Because I’m thinking: maybe we could be on to something … at least for these two killings.”

“So now you’re thinking there might be two murderers?”

“Hard to say. Perps will change up certain things to make themselves harder to pinpoint.”

“What do you want to know about the novel: the plot; the rarity of the edition; the fact that it’s a fragment with an outline?”

“Any and all,” the detective said.

I hesitated. “Like I said, it’s incredibly rare. In fact, mine might just be the only copy between here and Yale University. So…”

“If I have to borrow it I’ll take good care of it.”

“If you lost it, I’d have to kill you.”

Prozzo smiled and turned to Leslie. “Well, at least then we’ll have solved this particular case, right?”

*   *   *

Once I arrived home I called Wade at the town clerk’s office. His assistant told me he was in a day-long meeting with the tax assessors. I left word for him to call me. Then sat down at my desk and was writing about places in Boston and New York City where one can go for the “re-tinning and repair of copper pans” when the phone startled me. It was a New Hampshire number that I didn’t recognize, but then the name flashed: Hubert Parker. I stopped, for a moment uncertain whether or not I wanted to answer the phone call of Angela Parker’s husband. Finally I grabbed the cordless and went to sit down in my granddaddy’s smoking chair.