I continued through the list. One after another, each call ended in voicemail. Granted, it was late Thursday morning and folks were probably at work, but part of me suspected that the very tool that had delivered these phone numbers—caller ID—was preventing me from reaching anyone. After all, no one on my list would recognize my name. I was another junk call to them.
On the seventh number, my luck changed.
“You’re talking to him.” The voice on the other end of the line belonged to Joel McGowan. His accent confirmed that the 732 area code I’d dialed was in New Jersey, and a clip in his tone said he was a no-nonsense kind of guy.
I came straight to the point.
“Mr. McGowan, my name’s Emily Locke. I’m calling from Houston, Texas, regarding the death of Wendell Platt. Did you know him?”
The line fell momentarily silent. “Who’d you say you are?”
I repeated my name. “Is this the first you’ve heard?”
“I just talked to him last week.”
“Yeah.” Finding a vocal balance between sympathy and professionalism was difficult. “I found a record of that in his Caller ID log. It’s how I knew to call you.”
I let another moment pass, figuring McGowan was processing the news. “How’d you know each other?”
“School cronies,” he said. “Back in the day, we were like brothers. Harder to stay in touch as time went on, but we did what we could. What happened?”
“He was killed.” So there’d be no confusion with, say, a five car pile-up, I added, “Murdered.” I regretted the word choice but couldn’t think of an alternative.
McGowan’s breath caught in a tremulous way I wished I hadn’t heard. By way of avoidance I pushed forward. “Before he died, he asked a patrolman in his neighborhood about some kind of underhanded money scheme. I’m not sure if it was blackmail, embezzlement, bribery—”
“Elder abuse.”
“Excuse me?”
“He thought it might be identity theft, which is why he called me. I specialized in financial crimes. But from what he described, it was elder abuse…a tough crime to prove.”
“Are you a detective?”
“Was,” he said. “Retired.”
“So Dr. Platt called to get your take on a crime involving an elderly person?”
“His neighbor. He was looking for some advice about what to do.”
My thoughts flitted between crazy Ms. Herald and eccentric William Henry Saunders the third. “Do you know which neighbor?”
“He said it was an old guy, not quite right in the head. Some lowlife was taking him for everything he had.”
“What’d you tell Dr. Platt?”
“I asked him about the situation. Sounded to me like theft would be a real hard thing to prove. It’s always this way with the old folks.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s easy for crooks to talk them into things. If they write checks or hand cash over to somebody with a smooth story, it’s a gift, not a crime.”
I thought about Florence, probably sitting in her apartment across my landing right now watching Days of Our Lives. She had a fourteen hundred dollar vacuum cleaner in there, purchased a couple years ago from a good-looking twenty-something who told her he was a back-up lineman for the Texans.
“Anyway,” he continued. “Not much I could do from up here except explain all the work that lies ahead. I told him to tell the story to the local police and see if there wasn’t something they could do.”
I checked my notes. “You had this talk two weeks ago?”
“Sounds about right.”
“Dr. Platt say anything about approaching the neighbor?”
“Not that I recall.”
“Thanks, Mr. McGowan.”
“Call back if there’s more I can do.”
We ended it there and I sat on my couch with my phone clutched tightly in-hand and stared straight ahead at the wall. It had something to do with Saunders, and we were dealing with a con man. The morning’s credit card fiasco dovetailed nicely into this new information. But when Platt got close to exposing whatever scheme was underway, he’d ended up dead. So far I’d only come into scary e-mails and fraudulent charges. Why?
Too weary and lazy to deal with the blazing heat, even for the five steps it would take me to cross my landing, I speed-dialed Florence. It reminded me of years past when I worked across the hall from Jeannie but would e-mail her instead of walking to her desk.
“Hey lady,” she said. TV noise squawked in the background. “What’s going on?”
“Quick question.”
“Shoot.”
“Anybody new been around my place lately?”
“Don’t think so, no.” She hesitated. “I saw the exterminator yesterday. Don’t even tell me something’s missing.”
“Everything’s fine,” I told her. “Don’t worry.”
I hadn’t checked around yet and I’d never called for an exterminator. Until my talk with McGowan I’d assumed Richard was being paranoid, but if the apartment manager had sent someone to work in my unit, I’d have been notified. It was important not to rattle Florence.
“Richard’s being careful about our new case,” I said. “He asked me to check that nobody strange has been around.”
“Don’t think so. Anyway, what kind of bugs? Whatever you got is gonna head over here next.”
“Ants.”
She made a throaty, disgusted sound. “Long as it ain’t roaches.”
“The guy they sent over…was he the short cute one with the blond hair? I like that guy. Hard worker.”
This was what Richard called a fishing expedition. I’d never met any of the complex’s exterminators and wouldn’t have remembered them if I had.
“No, honey. This guy was tall—even taller than your friend.” Vince. “And he had brown hair and one of those weird beard things on his chin with no mustache.”
“A soul patch?”
She laughed. “Whatever you kids call it. Looks stupid.” She sighed. “But I guess as long as he kills those ants, don’t matter.”
“Thanks. And in case Richard’s right, if anybody happens to ask about me, say I keep to myself and that you don’t know me.”
“Got it.”
“Stay cool in there.”
“You too.”
We hung up and I pushed myself off the sofa and started to have a look through my things, beginning with my jewelry box, which most definitely had been pilfered. Jeannie and Annette had played with my necklaces the day before and the box’s contents were in disarray. At first I held out hope that nothing would be missing, only misplaced. But as I reorganized and sorted, I discovered, one by one, which of my favorites had been taken. Topping the list were my wedding and engagement rings that I’d only recently stopped wearing. That had been a reluctant decision made mainly out of courtesy for Vince. I thought now that if I’d given myself more time to think about it, maybe listened to my heart a little more closely, they’d still be mine.
I curled up on my bed and pulled a pillow to my chest, not caring what I saw outside when I stared passed the mini-blinds. Tears came, the quiet kind. This time there would be no sniffles, no tight throat or jagged breath. Only the gentle, lingering memory of my husband, skipping down my cheek again, landing silently on his pillow.
***
Later it puzzled me, the things the burglar left. There was my entire CD collection, plainly labeled and still unpacked—perfectly packaged for convenient theft, yet left untouched in the far corner of my bedroom. A whiskey jug that once belonged to Jack’s grandfather was still waiting on the corner of my dresser. Inside was two or three hundred dollars’ worth of spare change I’d accumulated, never feeling sufficiently motivated to schlep it to the bank’s coin roller machine. My TV had been left behind, but I figured that was because it was archaic. Before moving from Cleveland last spring, I’d finally upgraded to a better road bike. My clean, new Cannondale still leaned against the wall in the laundry room and I stared at its gorgeous frame, thankful but befuddled at the same time. Even Vince’s guitar, a 1966 Martin I was disinclined to return, had been spared.
I thought it over. The only explanation I could conjure was space constraints. An impostor exterminator could leave the apartment in plain sight with his pockets stuffed with my jewelry, but he’d be hard pressed to explain a bike or guitar. I doubted he was after my stuff anyway. In light of everything else going on, the jewelry theft seemed more like an opportunistic afterthought. My laptop had even been left behind.
I booted up. No doubt about it, there would be mail.
I was not disappointed.
FastCruzn had been back, and this time he was prolific:
Julius Caesar, John Keats, Andrew Jackson, Ella Fitzgerald, Johann Sebastian Bach, Babe Ruth, Aristotle, Marilyn Monroe, Leo Tolstoy, John Lennon, Malcolm X, Edgar Allan Poe, and me. But not Annette Locke unless you leave no choice
.
***
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Jeannie, not allowed to smoke in my apartment, chewed a stick of Wrigley’s like a zealot. She snapped the gum between thoughts. “All those people are dead.”
“Um, no.” Richard made no effort to conceal his annoyance. “It says ‘and me’ and whoever wrote that note is obviously not dead.”
“You know what I meant. Emily, why’d you even call him?”
“Guys, focus. You’re worse than kids.”
I was sandwiched between them. Jeannie, on my left, sipped from an oversized mug of coffee, her third cup. Richard had brought two waters to the table, one for each of us, but I was eyeing the joe. Jeannie must have noticed.
“Yes you do,” she said. “Need caffeine.” She got up and went to the kitchen for me. I didn’t argue.
When she returned, a long sip of coffee provided unexpected clarity. “I’m going to write back this time.”
“What? No.” Richard shook his head. “No way.”
“Go for it,” Jeannie said. “Call the bastard out.”
“It’s a mind game.” Richard spoke louder than usual. “He’s manipulating…goading you.”
“He’s talking about Annette,” I said. “I have to do
something
.”
Jeannie took her seat beside me again. “How do you suppose he got your e-mail address?”
I shrugged, disgusted. “How’d he get my credit card info?”
“That one’s easy,” Richard said. “Where do you keep your statements?”
I pointed to a thick vinyl accordion folder at the far end of my bookcase. Richard stood and retrieved it. He moved to unhook the little elastic loop that kept the folder closed and then, apparently concerned for my privacy, handed it to me. “Open it.”
I used my fake nails as pinchers, gathered the rubber band, and lifted it off.
“Run us through what you have there.”
I started at the front. “Up here are copies of some court documents…then receipts from a doctor I’ve seen a few times.” Actually, it was a therapist. I kept that to myself. “Next are print-outs of the credit card statements I mentioned. Insurance forms, a copy of my lease, last year’s tax return…general stuff.”
“So basically everything a normal person would keep in a filing cabinet.”
I shot him a look. “Do you see room for a filing cabinet in here?”
“Your birth date’s there, your social security number, all of your credit card account numbers. With that information, a thief can do anything.”
“We need to call the police,” Jeannie said. “File a report on your missing things.”
“I’ve been thinking about that but, if I report it, the officer will want to talk to Florence and I’d rather not upset her. She thought she was doing me a favor and if she finds out what really happened she’ll go berserk. Besides,” I looked at Richard, “I really doubt there’s any chance of recovering my jewelry at this point.”
His expression turned to regret and he shook his head.
“Anyway, Richard,” I continued. “You think he came in here to get this credit card information and then took my jewelry as a bonus?”
“Hard to say. The bigger question is how to keep you safe now.”
“What you
need
is a Ladysmith.” Jeannie moved her fingers into the shape of a gun, pointed at me, and pulled her thumb trigger.
Richard took back my folder and put it away. “I don’t think it’s safe for you to stay here anymore.”
I didn’t think so either. Richard probably would have invited me to stay with him and Linda for a while if it wouldn’t have meant the additional imposition of having Jeannie under his roof. She’d fray his nerves spectacularly, no doubt. Booking a hotel crossed my mind, but the indefinite nature of the stay was daunting. That could get expensive.
Richard surprised me. “Think you could stay with Vince for a while?”
Jeannie’s eyes opened wide, her excitement unmistakable.
Richard continued. “Until we see what’s what.”
He had no way to know how complicated it was and I sure wasn’t going to try to explain. So I nodded vaguely and took another sip of coffee, this time wishing it were wine or maybe hard liquor, anything to dull my worsening anxiety.
Paranoid about my own car being spotted, I’d opted for a change in vehicles. Jeannie’s rental, an Altima she’d cluttered with an alarming collection of empty Starbucks cups, was our ride back to the Heights. I pulled alongside the curb and the front tire bumped.
“We’re curbside four houses down,” I told Richard via cell phone. I put the rental in park and left it running, feeling like a guilty, selfish Earth-hater for my unwillingness to part with air conditioning.
“Alright,” Richard said. “Let’s see who’s home.”
He hung up and I waited, phone in hand, and watched William Saunders’ stately Victorian through the windshield.
“Bet his phone’s ringing right now,” Jeannie said.
I’d asked Richard to call Saunders so there’d be no chance he’d associate a female voice with the personal visit I hoped would follow. His number was a public listing still in his father’s name. I’d asked Richard to block his own number with *67. Our assumption was that Mr. B., if home, would be too cautious to answer a blocked call. So if anyone picked up, we figured it’d be William. Either way, Richard would ask for Mr. B. If unlucky enough to actually reach him, the plan was to simply fall back on the truth and say he was calling regarding Wendell Platt.
A few moments later my phone rang. “Saunders answered,” Richard said. “When I asked for Mr. B. he told me to call back after eleven.”
“Thanks.” I snapped my phone closed and checked my watch. “It’s ten thirty,” I said to Jeannie. “He’s supposed to be back in a half hour. Call if there’s any sign of him.”
I climbed outside, immediately assaulted by unforgiving furnace-blast heat, and flung my door shut hoping to spare her. Behind my sunglasses I was squinting; everything seemed to be hyper-illuminated by the oppressive sun.
At Saunders’ door, I rang the bell and surveyed dead bugs on his porch while I waited for an answer. His arrival on the other side of the platen glass was sudden, almost like he’d been standing out of view waiting to pounce.
“It’s me, William,” I said. “Emily. We met on Tuesday.”
The dead bolt clacked and he cracked the door. There was the eye again. “Joseph Daniel H-Hennessey the third liked the Houston Oilers.”
I couldn’t help but smile. “Good memory. How have you been? Everything going okay?”
“You looked p-prettier the last time.”
Quite a bit so, I imagined. Leave it to an innocent teddy bear like William to say so. On Tuesday I’d been made-over, had styled hair, and nicely filled out Jeannie’s Armani mini-dress. Today it was back to jean shorts, a faded tank, sneakers, and minimal make-up. “It’s really hot out here. Could I come inside for a glass of water, please?”
“No.”
“Is Mr. B. here? Maybe we could finally talk about your neighbor, Dr. Platt.”
“No.” He moved to close the door.
I stopped it with my toe.
It was tricky for me, this line between respect and persistence.
“What are you up to today? Anything fun?”
He stared at me a moment, but with the kind of far-off look that made me wonder if he’d heard what I’d said.
“Would you like to go for a walk?” I was running out of ideas. Down the street, all I could see of Jeannie’s car was a blinding white glow reflecting off the windshield.
“I don’t like people looking at me,” he said. “And can you w-work a glue gun?” In the crack between the jamb and the door he produced the stub of a glue stick. “It’s hard.”
“Sure,” I said. “I can do that. What are you trying to do?”
He shifted his weight back and forth, resulting in the disappearance and reappearance of his single eye. “I’ll be in trouble.”
“Are you making something?”
He swayed faster. “Fixing.” His anxiety was palpable. “Nobody’s allowed inside.”
“Look, William. I’ll fix whatever’s broken and then leave. You won’t get in trouble.”
He moved away from the door and vanished, leaving me on the porch with a mostly closed door and no invitation. I pushed it forward a few inches and peeked into the empty foyer. The place smelled like burnt toast. “William?”
He reappeared from a space beyond the entryway stairs carrying the pieces of some kind of ornamental pitcher and I got my first full look at him. In sweats and socks, with a Texans tee, he looked like any other grandfatherly sports aficionado, except for an inconsistent limp that seemed to change sides and a slightly wild look resulting from hair that wasn’t thoroughly combed.
“I’m not supposed to cook when I’m by m-myself.” He thrust the pieces toward me and stutter-stepped away again.
The pitcher had broken cleanly. Fixing it would be nothing.
William stopped after a few paces and turned back. “Hurry.”
I followed him to the back of the house where we turned into a kitchen best described as Late Seventies. Wood grain Formica counters and an old-style stainless faucet reminded me a little bit of my father’s house. A lower cabinet door was missing and its absence revealed jumbled Tupperware lids and a discolored roasting pan. I felt uneasy spotting a mess that was supposed to be hidden from view.
The first thing I did was turn on the vent hood. Its noise agitated William even more.
“This will help with the burnt smell,” I said. Glancing toward the toaster, I added, “You should clean up those crumbs so Mr. B. won’t know you were cooking.”
Red sauce was dried around one of the burners on the stove and something grainy, either salt or sugar, coated the countertop next to it. I assumed both were left over from something William’s caretaker had prepared so I didn’t bother cleaning them.
William lumbered toward the sink and wetted a dish rag. “Mother’s p-pitcher was next to the plates. I didn’t mean to.”
“I break stuff all the time,” I said. “We’ll fix it, don’t worry.”
He’d left the glue gun plugged in, lying on its side on the counter. A pool of congealed glue had formed under its hot tip and threads of glue criss-crossed the countertop in all directions, advertising several failed attempts. I set the gun upright again and fed it another glue stick.
“You’ll be our look-out,” I said. “Wait by the front window and tell me if Mr. B. comes back.”
His eyes widened. I tried not to think about what might have instilled so much fear of his caregiver.
“Where is he, by the way?”
William turned and left but I was certain he’d heard me. I stepped around the corner behind him. “William?”
“With Sandy,” he said.
“Sandy who?” I said to his back.
“Sandy Diaz. She doesn’t like orange juice and w-won’t eat bacon.”
I let it go. There wasn’t time.
My new acrylics made short work of cleaning up William’s disaster in the kitchen. I used them to pick at the countertop and separate voluminous strands of dried glue from its Formica surface. After moving them to the trash, I turned my attention back to the repair. The gun had suitably softened the fresh glue stick and it only took a few minutes for me to press the three large pieces back together. Cracks were visible, and it would never be serviceable again, but I doubted Mr. B. served up much iced tea or lemonade anyway. At least William wouldn’t have to explain an empty spot in the cupboard. I unplugged the gun, wrapped its cord around the handle, and as quickly and silently as possible, made for the stairs. They were carpeted but hadn’t seen a vacuum for a while. I bounded to the second floor, thankful for the padding.
Upstairs, I felt like the wind had been knocked out of me and it wasn’t from the hasty climb. Straight ahead was a work room like I’d never seen.
A series of tables had been arranged around three walls of the room, each serving what appeared to be a specific purpose. On the one nearest the door, two desktop computers hummed side by side, their monitors turned off. The tabletop behind them was thickly coated in dust.
A small basket nearby was filled with a variety of thumb drives and a watch. I turned the watch over and found a non-descript panel above the twelve o’clock position. When I peeled it back, a USB interface was nestled inside.
On my left I recognized a key grinder and an open leather pouch with eight slender metal tools inside, each crafted to a unique point. It was a lock pick set. Beside it, a box of fifty key blanks and a container of various blank pin-on name tags had been stacked on top of a tackle box. I opened the box and found several keys, some labeled indistinguishably, some not at all.
Coveralls and work shirts, none matching each other, hung in the closet: Baxter’s Automotive, CenterPoint Energy, Comcast, Wayne’s Heating and Air, AT&T, Burt’s Landscaping. Two button-ups, one garage brown and the other utilitarian blue, were unlabeled, but the brown one still had a nametag pinned near its pocket: “Manny,” from Herrera Cleaners. On the floor, wigs, various glasses, and a stash of ball caps had been tossed in a laundry basket.
I closed the door, horrified.
Piano notes, slow and detached, like those of a child practicing, drifted up from the first floor. I hadn’t noticed a piano on my way inside but I hoped its position afforded William a view of the street. Nervous, I crossed the hall and checked the neighborhood through the front window of an opposing bedroom. When I pulled the curtain back, I found more dust in the sill, and two dead flies, but no sign of Mr. B. Above the window, an irregular plank of wooden paneling had been nailed to the ceiling. It was the type of random repair I might expect from my neighbor Florence.
Back in the work room, I continued my search. Inboxes, like those typically used in offices, were aligned along the table on the far wall. On the floor underneath, two bottles of acetone and a single bottle of bleach had been jammed into a corner beside a stack of small plastic buckets and a pile of newspapers. White arcs in the carpeting told me that the person who used this room either worked in a hurry or had little regard for the home. I riffled through the paperwork in the boxes, disbelieving.
Xeroxes of about forty employment applications for a local electronics superstore filled the top bin. Below were a stack of pre-paid VISA gift cards held together by a thin rubber band. Beside those was a MasterCard, still stuck to its letterhead, with an activation sticker pressed across its front. I knew the routine—call the 800 number printed on the card from your home phone to activate the card. When I read the name on the card I shuddered: Daniel Gaston.
I shoved it in my pocket.
There was more: an embossing machine, plastic stock, solder irons, and some kind of machine that looked like it was made for running credit cards. I pulled out my phone and took a few pictures, astonished the camera function still worked. A clock on the wall said 10:49.
I dug through the wastepaper basket next, removing its contents haphazardly in my rush, and found more copies of employment applications, some from the electronics store, others from a bank. Envelopes—stamped but not postmarked—and associated bill payment stubs for half a dozen men and women with names I didn’t recognize were mixed among them.
Then I hit paydirt. A single e-mail printout was wedged in the bottom of the trash.
Dated nine days earlier, it was written from Claire to Platt:
I won’t be ignored, Wendell. Keep it up and I’ll make you sorry.
Out of time, I shoved the papers, all except the e-mail, back into the trash can and went downstairs as quietly as I could, folding the note as I went. Anything sent from Claire’s account nine days ago should have turned up in my search of her account, yet the address on the header was the same one she’d given me.
Disconnected notes from
When the Saints Go Marching In
drifted from the front room, where I found William seated on a piano bench that he absolutely dwarfed. Afraid of startling him, I coughed before joining him in the room.
“It’s finished,” I said. “Remember to put the pitcher and the glue gun away, okay?”
He only cocked his head and repeated the same measure he’d just finished. I caught the faint scent of rancid water and turned to find a wilted bouquet of mixed wildflowers decaying in a vase near the window.
“William,” I said. “Where does the blue pitcher belong?”
“In the c-cupboard next to the sink.”
“And the glue gun?”
“In my mother’s desk drawer.” He pointed to an antique secretary piece in the room and then returned his attention to the sheet music propped open in front of him. The songbook he used was yellowed and its binding had been poorly mended with Scotch tape.
I went to the kitchen and put away the pitcher, then brought the gun back to the front room.
“Which drawer, William?”
“The s-second.”
At the desk, only steps behind William’s back, I examined mounds of paperwork and notes. Significant documentation, some organized, some not, crowded the limited space and I couldn’t help noticing that most of it looked like medical records. I slipped the glue gun into the second drawer and allowed myself a moment to take in all the forms. A series of brightly colored sticky notes, most lime green, dotted several piles. I glanced at William, who seemed to have forgotten me, and ran a finger over the papers.
A bold, black pen had been used on all the sticky notes. Judging by the identical handwriting on each sample, they’d been written at the same time:
Bathes every other day. Allow privacy
. This was stuck to a list of William’s preferred soaps and shampoos.
Absolutely no unsupervised cooking
. Sandwiches and cereal were okay, but apparently William was not to use the microwave or toaster oven without help. Knives were off-limits so any fruits or veggies should be pre-sliced.
His payments sometimes lapse because he forgets about due dates. Please promptly remit any utility bills. Call me before paying anything that comes from the insurance company
. This one was stuck to the vinyl cover of a checkbook. I flipped it open and was surprised that the account belonged to William. Then I felt ashamed for assuming he could do nothing by himself.
One note, stuck to the edge of the desk, seemed to be a catch-all for instructions that didn’t fit elsewhere:
Has trouble matching clothes but can dress himself
.