Just One Look (14 page)

“Could you please leave now?” she asked Perlmutter.

“You know I can’t.”

She closed her eyes.

“I know about your tax problem.”

She stayed still.

“In fact, you called H amp;R Block this morning about it, isn’t that right? That’s where Mr. Sykes worked.”

She didn’t want to let go of the hand, but it felt as though Mike was pulling away.

“Mrs. Swain?”

“Not here,” Charlaine said to Perlmutter. She let the hand drop and stood. “Not in front of my husband.”

Nursing home residents are always in and happy to have a visitor. Grace called the number and a perky woman answered. “Starshine Assisted Living!”

“I’d like to know about visiting hours,” Grace said.

“We don’t have them!” She spoke in exclamations.

“Excuse me?”

“No visiting hours. You can visit anytime, twenty-four-seven.”

“Oh. I’d like to visit Mr. Robert Dodd.”

“Bobby? Well, let me connect you to his room. Oh wait, it’s eight. He’ll be at exercise class. Bobby likes to keep in shape.”

“Is there a way I can make an appointment?”

“To visit?”

“Yes.”

“No need, just stop by.”

The drive would take her a little under two hours. It would be better than trying to explain over the phone, especially in light of the fact that she didn’t have a clue what she wanted to ask him about. The elderly are better in person anyway.

“Do you think he’ll be in this morning?”

“Oh sure. Bobby stopped driving two years ago. He’ll be here.”

“Thank you.”

“My pleasure.”

At the breakfast table, Max dug his hand deep into the box of Cap’n Crunch. The sight-her child going for the toy-made her pause. It was all so normal. Children sense things. Grace knew that. But sometimes, well, sometimes children are wonderfully oblivious. Right now she was grateful for that.

“You already got the toy out,” she said.

Max stopped. “I did?”

“So many boxes, so crummy a toy.”

“What?”

The truth was, she had done the same thing when she was a kid-digging to get the worthless prize. Come to think of it, with the same cereal. “Never mind.”

She sliced up a banana and mixed it in with the cereal. Grace always tried to be sneaky here, gradually adding more banana and less of the Cap’n. For a while she added Cheerios-less sugar-but Max quickly caught on.

“Emma! Get up now!”

A groan. Her daughter was too young to start with the trouble-getting-out-of-bed bit. Grace hadn’t pulled that until she was in high school. Okay, maybe middle school. But certainly, definitely, not when she was eight. She thought about her own parents, dead for so long now. Sometimes one of the kids did something that reminded Grace of her mother or father. Emma pursed her lips so much like Grace’s mom that Grace sometimes froze in place. Max’s smile was like her dad’s. You could see the genetic echo, and Grace never knew if it was a comfort or a painful reminder.

“Emma, now!”

A sound. Might have been a child getting out of bed.

Grace started making one lunch. Max liked to buy it at school and Grace was all for the ease of that. Making lunches in the morning was a pain in the ass. For a while Emma would buy the school lunch too, but something recently grossed her out, some indiscernible smell in the cafeteria that caused an aversion so strong Emma would gag. She ate outside, even in the cold, but the smell, she soon realized, was also in the food. Now she stayed in the cafeteria and brought a Batman lunchbox with her.

“Emma!”

“I’m here.”

Emma wore her standard gym-rat garb: maroon athletic shorts, blue high-top Converse all-stars, and a New Jersey Nets jersey. Total clash, which may have been the point. Emma wouldn’t wear anything the least bit feminine. Putting on a dress usually required a negotiation of Middle East sensitivity, with often an equally violent result.

“What would you like for lunch?” Grace asked.

“Peanut butter and jelly.”

Grace just stared at her.

Emma played innocent. “What?”

“You’ve been attending this school for how long now?”

“Huh?”

“Four years, right? One year of kindergarten. And now you’re in third grade. That’s four years.”

“So?”

“In all that time how many times have you asked me for peanut butter in school?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe a hundred?”

Shrug.

“And how many times have I told you that your school doesn’t allow peanut butter because some children might have an allergic reaction?”

“Oh yeah.”

“Oh yeah.” Grace checked the clock. She had a few Oscar Mayer “Lunchables,” a rather disgustingly processed premade lunch, that she kept around for emergencies-i.e., no time or desire to fix a lunch. The kids, of course, loved them. She asked Emma softly if she’d like one-softly because if Max heard, that would be the end of buying lunch. Emma graciously accepted it and jammed it into the Batman lunchbox.

They sat down to breakfast.

“Mom?”

It was Emma. “Yep.”

“When you and Dad got married.” She stopped.

“What about it?”

Emma started again. “When you and Dad got married-at the end, when the guy said now you may kiss the bride…”

“Right.”

“Well”-Emma cocked her head and closed one eye-“did you have to?”

“Kiss him?”

“Yeah.”

“Have to? No, I guess not. I wanted to.”

“But do you have to?” Emma insisted. “I mean, can’t you just high-five instead?”

“High-five?”

“Instead of kiss. You know, turn to each other and high-five.” She demonstrated.

“I guess. If that’s what you want.”

“That’s what I want,” Emma said firmly.

Grace took them to the bus stop. This time she did not follow the bus to school. She stayed in place and bit down on her lower lip. The calm façade was slipping off again. Now that Emma and Max were gone, that would be okay.

When she got back to the house, Cora was awake and at the computer and groaning.

“Can I get you something?” Grace asked.

“An anesthesiologist,” Cora said. “Straight preferred but not required.”

“I was thinking more like coffee.”

“Even better.” Cora’s fingers danced across the keyboard. Her eyes narrowed. She frowned. “Something’s wrong here.”

“You mean with the e-mails off our spam, right?”

“We’re not getting any replies.”

“I noticed that too.”

Cora sat back. Grace moved next to her and started biting a cuticle. After a few seconds, Cora leaned forward. “Let me try something.” She brought up an e-mail, typed something in, sent it.

“What was that all about?”

“I just sent an e-mail to our spam address. I want to see if it arrives.”

They waited. No e-mail appeared.

“Hmm.” Cora leaned back. “So either something is wrong with the mail system…”

“Or?”

“Or Gus is still ticked about that small wee-wee line.”

“How do we find out which?”

Cora kept staring at the computer. “Who were you on the phone with before?”

“Bob Dodd’s nursing home. I’m going to pay him a visit this morning.”

“Good.” Cora’s eyes stayed on the screen.

“What is it?’

“I want to check something out,” she said.

“What?”

“Nothing probably, just something with the phone bills.” Cora started typing again. “I’ll call you if I learn anything.”

Perlmutter left Charlaine Swain with the Bergen County sketch artist. He had forced the truth out of her, thereby unearthing a tawdry secret that would have been better left deep in the ground. Charlaine Swain had been right to keep it from him. It offered no help. The revelation was, at best, a sleazy and embarrassing distraction.

He sat with a doodle pad, wrote the word “Windstar” and spent the next fifteen minutes circling it.

A Ford Windstar.

Kasselton was not a sleepy small town. They had thirty-eight cops on the payroll. They worked robberies. They checked on suspicious cars. They kept the school drug problems-suburban white-kid drugs-under control. They worked vandalism cases. They dealt with congestion in town, illegal parking, car accidents. They did their best to keep the urban decay of Paterson, a scant three miles from the border of Kasselton, at a safe distance. They answered too many false alarms emanating from the technological mating call of too many overpriced motion detectors.

Perlmutter had never fired his service revolver, except on a range. He had, in fact, never drawn his weapon in the line of duty. There had only been three deaths in the last three decades that fell under the possible heading of “suspicious” and all three perpetrators were caught within hours. One was an ex-husband who got drunk and decided to profess his undying love by planning to kill the woman he purportedly adored before turning the shotgun on himself. Said ex-husband managed to get the first part right-two shotgun blasts to the ex’s head-but like everything else in his pathetic life, he messed up the second part. He had only brought two shells. An hour later he was in custody. Suspicious Death Two was a teenage bully stabbed by a skinny, tormented elementary-school victim. The skinny kid served three years in juvie, where he learned the real meaning of being bullied and tormented. The final case was of a man dying of cancer who begged his wife of forty-eight years to end his suffering. She did. She got parole and Perlmutter suspected that it was worth it to her.

As for gunshots, well, there had been plenty in Kasselton but almost all were self-inflicted. Perlmutter wasn’t much on politics. He wasn’t sure of the relative merits of gun control, but he knew from personal experience that a gun bought for home protection was more likely-much, much, much more likely-to be used by the owner to commit suicide than to ward off a home invasion. In fact, in all his years in law enforcement, Perlmutter had never seen a case where the home gun had been used to shoot, stop, or scare away an intruder. Suicides by handguns, well, they were more plentiful than anyone wanted to let on.

Ford Windstar. He circled it again.

Now, after all these years, Perlmutter had a case involving attempted murder, bizarre abduction, unusually brutal assault-and, he suspected, much more. He started doodling again. He wrote the name
Jack Lawson
in the top left-hand corner. He wrote the name
Rocky Conwell
in the top right-hand corner. Both men, possibly missing, had crossed a toll plaza in a neighboring state at the same time. He drew a line from one name to the other.

Connection One.

Perlmutter wrote out Freddy Sykes’s name, bottom left. The victim of a grievous assault. He wrote
Mike Swain
on the bottom right. Shot, attempted murder. The connection between these two men, Connection Two, was obvious. Swain’s wife had seen the perpetrator of both acts, a stout Chinese guy she made sound like the Son of Odd Job from the old James Bond film.

But nothing really connected the four cases. Nothing connected the two disappearing men to the work of Odd Job’s offspring. Except perhaps for one thing:

The Ford Windstar.

Jack Lawson had been driving a blue Ford Windstar when he disappeared. Mini Odd Job had been driving a blue Ford Windstar when he left the Sykes residence and shot Swain.

Granted this was a tenuous connection at best. Saying “Ford Windstar” in this suburb was like saying “implant” at a strip club. It wasn’t much to go on, but when you add in the history of this town, the fact that stable fathers do not really just go missing, that this much activity never happens in a town like Kasselton… no, it wasn’t a strong tie, but it wasn’t far off for Perlmutter to draw a conclusion:

All of this was related.

Perlmutter had no idea how this was all related, and he really didn’t want to think about it too much quite yet. Let the techies and lab guys do their jobs first. Let them scour the Sykes residence for fingerprints and hairs. Let the artist finish the sketch. Let Veronique Baltrus, their resident computer weenie and an honest-to-God knockout, sift through the Sykes computer. It was simply too early to make a guess.

“Captain?”

It was Daley.

“What’s up?”

“We found Rocky Conwell’s car.”

“Where?”

“You know the Park-n-Ride on Route 17?”

Perlmutter took off his reading glasses. “The one down the street?”

Daley nodded. “I know. It doesn’t make sense. We know he left the state, right?”

“Who found it?”

“Pepe and Pashaian.”

“Tell them to secure the area,” he said, rising. “We’ll check the vehicle out ourselves.”

Grace threw on a Coldplay CD for the ride, hoping it’d distract her. It did and it didn’t. On one level she understood exactly what was happening to her with no need for interpretation. But the truth, in a sense, was too stark. To face it straight on would paralyze. That was where the surrealism probably derived from-self-preservation, the need to protect and even filter what one saw. Surrealism gave her the strength to go on, to pursue the truth, to find her husband, as opposed to the eye of reality, stark and naked and alone, which made her want to crouch into a small ball or maybe scream until they took her away.

Her cell phone rang. She instinctively glanced at the display before hitting the hands-free. Again, no, not Jack. It was Cora. Grace picked up and said, “Hey.”

“I won’t classify the news as bad or good, so let me put it this way. Do you want the weird news first or the really weird news?”

“Weird.”

“I can’t reach Gus of the small wee-wee. He won’t answer his calls. I keep getting his voice mail.”

Coldplay started singing, appropriately enough, a haunting number entitled “Shiver.” Grace kept both hands on the wheel, perfectly placed at ten and two o’clock. She stayed in the middle lane and drove exactly the speed limit. Cars flew by on both her right and left.

“And the really weird news?”

“Remember how we tried to see the calls from two nights ago? I mean, the ones Jack might have made?”

“Right.”

“Well, I called the cell phone company. I pretended I was you. I assumed you wouldn’t mind.”

“Correct assumption.”

“Right. Anyway, it didn’t matter. The only call Jack’s made in the past three days was to your cell phone yesterday.”

“The call he made when I was at the police station.”

“Right.”

“So what’s weird about that?”

“Nothing. The weird part was on your home phone.”

Silence. She stayed on the Merritt Parkway, her hands on the wheel at ten and two o’clock.

“What about it?”

“You know about the call to his sister’s office?” Cora asked.

“Yeah. I found that one by hitting redial.”

“And his sister-what’s her name again?”

“Sandra Koval.”

“Sandra Koval, right. She told you that she wasn’t there. That they never talked.”

“Yes.”

“The phone call lasted nine minutes.”

A small shudder skipped through Grace. She forced her hands to stay at two and ten. “Ergo she lied.”

“It would seem.”

“So what did Jack say to her?”

“And what did she say back?”

“And why did she lie about it?”

“Sorry to have to tell you,” Cora said.

“No, it’s good.”

“How do you figure?”

“It’s a lead. Before this, Sandra was a dead end. Now we know she’s somehow involved.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

“I don’t know,” Grace said. “Confront her, I guess.”

They said good-bye and Grace hung up. She drove a little farther, trying to run the scenarios through her head. “Trouble” came on the CD player. She pulled into an Exxon station. New Jersey didn’t have self-serve, so for a moment Grace just sat in her car, not realizing that she had to fill it up herself.

She bought a bottle of cold water at the station’s mini-mart and dropped the change into a charity can. She wanted to think this through some more, this connection to Jack’s sister, but there wasn’t time for finesse here.

Grace remembered the number of the Burton and Crimstein law firm. She took out her phone and pressed in the digits. Two rings later she asked to be connected to Sandra Koval’s line. She was surprised when Sandra herself said, “Hello?”

“You lied to me.”

There was no reply. Grace walked back toward her car.

“The call lasted nine minutes. You talked to Jack.”

More silence.

“What’s going on, Sandra?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why did Jack call you?”

“I’m going to hang up now. Please don’t try to contact me again.”

“Sandra?”

“You said he called you already.”

“Yes.”

“My advice is to wait until he calls again.”

“I don’t want your advice, Sandra. I want to know what he said to you.”

“I think you should stop.”

“Stop what?”

“You’re on a cell phone?”

“Yes.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m at gas station in Connecticut.”

“Why?”

“Sandra, I want you to listen to me.” There was a burst of static. Grace waited for it to pass. She finished filling the tank and grabbed her receipt. “You’re the last person to talk to my husband before he disappeared. You lied to me about it. You still won’t tell me what he said to you. Why should I tell you anything?”

“Fair point, Grace. Now you listen to me. I’m going to leave you with one last thought before I hang up: Go home and take care of your children.”

The line went dead. Grace was back in the car now. She hit redial and asked to be connected to Sandra’s office. Nobody answered. She tried again. Same thing. So now what? Try to show up in person again?

She pulled out of the gas station. Two miles later Grace saw a sign that said STARSHINE ASSISTED LIVING CENTER. Grace was not sure what she’d been expecting. The nursing home of her youth, she guessed, those one-level edifices of plain brick, the purest form of substance-over-style that, in a perverse way, reminded her of elementary schools. Life, alas, was cyclical. You start in one of those plain brick buildings, you end there. Turn, turn, turn.

But the Starshine Assisted Living Center was a three-story faux Victorian hotel. It had the turrets and the porches and the bright yellow of the painted ladies of old, all set against a ghastly aluminum siding. The grounds were manicured to the point where everything looked a tad too done, almost plastic. The place was aiming for cheery but it was trying too hard. The whole effect reminded Grace of Epcot Center at Disney World-a fun reproduction but you’d never mistake it for the real thing.

An old woman sat on a rocking chair on the front porch. She was reading the paper. She wished Grace a good morning and Grace did likewise. The lobby too tried to force up memories of a hotel from a bygone era. There were oil paintings in gaudy frames that looked like the kind of thing you’d buy at one of those Holiday Inn sales where everything was $19.99. It was obvious that they were reproductions of classics, even if you had never seen Renoir’s
Luncheon of the Boating Party
or Hopper’s
Nighthawks
.

The lobby was surprisingly busy. There were elderly people, of course, lots of them, in various states of degeneration. Some walked with no assistance, some shuffled, some had canes, some had walkers, some had wheelchairs. Many seemed spry; others slept.

The lobby was clean and bright but still had that-Grace hated herself for thinking like this-old-people smell, the odor of a sofa turning moldy. They tried to cover it up with something cherry, something that reminded Grace of those dangling tree fresheners in gypsy cabs, but there are some smells that you can never mask.

The singular young person in the room-a woman in her mid-twenties-sat behind a desk that was again aiming for the era but looked like something just bought at the Bombay Company. She smiled up at Grace.

“Good morning. I’m Lindsey Barclay.”

Grace recognized the voice from the phone. “I’m here to see Mr. Dodd.”

“Bobby’s in his room. Second floor, room 211. I’ll take you.”

She rose. Lindsey was pretty in a way that only the young are, with that enthusiasm and smile that belong exclusively to the innocent or the cult recruiter.

“Do you mind taking the stairs?” she asked.

“Not at all.”

Many of the residents stopped and said hello. Lindsey had time for every one of them, cheerfully returning each greeting, though Grace the cynic couldn’t help but wonder if this was a bit of a show for the visitor. Still Lindsey knew all the names. She always had something to say, something personal, and the residents seemed to appreciate that.

“Seems like mostly women,” Grace noted.

“When I was in school, they told us the national ratio in assisted living is five women for every one man.”

“Wow.”

“Yes. Bobby jokes that he’s waited his whole life for that kind of odds.”

Grace smiled.

She waved a hand. “Oh, but he’s all talk. His wife-he calls her ‘his Maudie’-died almost thirty years ago. I don’t think he’s looked at a woman since.”

That silenced them. The corridor was done up in forest green and pink, the walls lined with the familiar-Rockwell prints, dogs playing poker, black-and-whites from old movies like
Casablanca
and
Strangers on a Train
. Grace limped along. Lindsey noticed it-Grace could tell the way she cut quick glances-but like most people, she said nothing.

“We have different neighborhoods at Starlight,” Lindsey explained. “That’s what we call the corridors like this. Neighborhoods. Each has a different theme. The one we’re in now is called Nostalgia. We think the residents find it comforting.”

They stopped at a door. A nameplate on the right said “B. Dodd.” She knocked on the door. “Bobby?”

No reply. She opened the door anyway. They stepped into a small but comfortable room. There was a tiny kitchenette on the right. On the coffee table, ideally angled so that you could see it from both the door and the bed, was a large black-and-white photograph of a stunning woman who looked a bit like Lena Horne. The woman in the picture was maybe forty but you could tell that the picture was old.

“That’s his Maudie.”

Grace nodded, lost for a moment in this image in the silver frame. She thought again about “her Jack.” For the first time she allowed herself to consider the unthinkable: Jack might never come home. It was something she’d been avoiding from the moment she’d heard the minivan start up. She might never see Jack again. She might never hold him. She might never laugh at one of his corny jokes. She might never-and this was apropos to think here-grow old with him.

“Are you okay?”

“Fine.”

“Bobby must be up with Ira on Reminiscence. They play cards.”

They began to back out of the room. “Is Reminiscence another, uh, neighborhood?”

“No. Reminiscence is what we call our third floor. It’s for our residents with Alzheimer’s.”

“Oh.”

“Ira doesn’t recognize his own children, but he still plays a mean game of poker pinochle.”

They were back in the hall. Grace noticed a cluster of images next to Bobby Dodd’s door. She took a closer look. It was one of those box frames people use to display trinkets. There were army medals. There was an old baseball, brown with age. There were photographs from every era of the man’s life. One photograph was of his murdered son, Bob Dodd, the same one she’d seen on the computer last night.

Lindsey said, “Memory box.”

“Nice,” Grace said, because she didn’t know what else to say.

“Every patient has one by their door. It’s a way to let everyone know about you.”

Grace nodded. Summing up a life in a twelve-by-eight box frame. Like everything else about this place, it managed to be both appropriate and creepy at the exact same time.

To get to the Reminiscence floor you had to use an elevator that worked by a coded numeric keypad. “So the residents don’t wander,” Lindsey explained, which again fit into the “making sense yet giving the willies” style of this place.

The Reminiscence floor was comfortable, well appointed, well staffed, and terrifying. Some residents were functional, but most wilted in wheelchairs like dying flowers. Some stood and shuffled. Several muttered to themselves. All had that glazed, hundred-yard stare.

A woman deep into her eighties jangled her keys and started for the elevator.

Lindsey asked, “Where are you going, Cecile?”

The old woman turned toward her. “I have to pick up Danny from school. He’ll be waiting for me.”

“It’s okay,” Lindsey said. “School won’t be out for another two hours.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course. Look, let’s have some lunch and then you can pick up Danny, okay?”

“He has piano lessons today.”

“I know.”

A staff member came over and steered Cecile away. Lindsey watched her go. “We use validation therapy,” she said, “with our advanced Alzheimer’s patients.”

“Validation therapy?”

“We don’t argue with them or try to make them see the truth. I don’t, for example, tell her that Danny is now a sixty-two-year-old banker with three grandchildren. We just try to redirect them.”

They walked down a corridor-no, “neighborhood”-filled with life-size dolls of babies. There was a changing table and teddy bears.

“Nursery neighborhood,” she said.

“They play with dolls?”

“Those that are more high functioning. It helps them prepare for visits from great-grandchildren.”

“And the others?”

Lindsey kept walking. “Some think they’re young mothers. It helps soothe them.”

Subconsciously, or maybe not, they picked up the pace. A few seconds later, Lindsey said, “Bobby?”

Bobby Dodd rose from the card table. The first word that came to mind: Dapper. He looked sprightly and fresh. He had dark black skin, thick wrinkles like something you might see on an alligator. He was a snappy dresser in a tweed jacket, two-tone loafers, red ascot with matching hanky. His gray hair was cropped close and slicked down.

His manner was upbeat, even after Grace explained that she wanted to talk to him about his murdered son. She looked for some signs of devastation-a wetness in the eye, a tremor in the voice-but Bobby Dodd showed nothing. Okay, yes, Grace was dealing in heavy generalities, but could it be that death and big-time tragedy did not hit the elderly as hard as the rest of us? Grace wondered. The elderly could be easily agitated by the little stuff-traffic delays, lines at airports, poor service. But it was as if the big things never quite reached them. Was there a strange selfishness that came with age? Was there something about being closer to the inevitable-having that perspective-that made one either internalize, block, or brush off the big calamities? Can frailty not handle the big blows, and thus a defense mechanism, a survival instinct, runs interference?