Return to Dust (10 page)

Chapter Twelve

Sitting in my car, I called Richard Wilcox, the last man known to speak with Marta. A retired professor, many years retired in fact, he occasionally wandered through the college hallways, visiting his old department and noisily decrying the rising illiteracy of the newer generations. He was heard to mumble something about Generation X one day as he stood in line in the library and was ill-treated by a mohawk-shaved, blue-haired, heavily tattooed, earring-clad kid. His remark—“X is how they sign their student stipends”—gained instant notoriety among the junior faculty.

He was, he would tell you immediately—an essentialist, though I had no idea what that was. Of course, your puzzled expression allowed him to explain. “An essentialist is one who believes there are certain essentials every student must learn.” Those essentials, I learned, did not include my specialty of Criminal Justice—or the newer departments of Business Administration or Computer Technology—programs the failing liberal-arts college quietly established to ensure its life in the new century. Old Richard Wilcox and I had nodded at faculty gatherings, but I always had the feeling he was New England xenophobic—somehow Asians had no place among his sheltered ivied walls.

He was hard of hearing so I had to raise my voice and speak slowly. He kept saying no no no—“No, I'm busy, no, I have no interest”—until I connected the words “Marta” and “murder.” He stopped and I heard asthmatic wheezing, a shortness of breath.

“I can see you briefly, young man. I've become ill and need to go to John Dempsey for a checkup at twelve. Come at eleven, and leave by eleven-thirty.”

He hung up without saying good-bye.

I waited the dead time at a McDonald's, savoring real coffee, Paul Newman's, in fact, with milk, hot and tasty. I extracted my Mac from the shoulder carryall and set up shop in a corner booth near some old codgers who all knew one another and were territorial about their seats. While I typed in my notes on Davey, including a few suspicions about what he was hiding in that rising tide of yellowing pulp newsprint, a youngster, standing in the next booth, peered over at my machine, burping into my ear. Now and then he'd hiccough and spittle would fall onto my shoulder, so I shifted my position. He kept blinking at the screen and my busy, fast-moving fingers. Finally I asked the mother to remove him from my soggy shoulder, and she got indignant.

“He ain't bothering nobody.”

The kid dropped back into his seat, punched his toddler sister, and for some reason, glancing a moment at the two little fidgeting kids, I zeroed in on Karen and Davey, two orphaned children under the autocratic control of Marta.

***

When I arrived at Wilcox's condo, the front door was open a crack. I tapped on the door and he mumbled, “It's open,” his voice thick.

He was sitting at a small card table near the kitchenette, dressed in an old-style narrow-lapeled suit and tie, an overcoat draped over his shoulders, an overnight bag by his feet. When he told me he'd be leaving for the hospital, he wasn't fooling.

His condo was a sad fifties apartment-complex-turned-condo—tiny rooms with no moldings or sills. Square, institutional windows overlooked Dumpster-lined parking lots. I was surprised to find an old retired professor there, but perhaps he had no money. I knew the pension he'd get from the college was minimal, but still…Well, no matter. He'd lined the narrow walls with deep bookcases and the effect was pleasant, if claustrophobic. Scanning the walls told me he'd been an economics professor in his glory days. After all, how many other people maintain a shelf—near the living room door and in my sight line—containing at least ten different editions of Adam Smith's
The Wealth of Nations
, paperback to hardcover?

He was rushed. “Sit down, sit down. Make this fast. The taxi is coming shortly. This is all foolishness.”

I sat across from him at the card table as though getting into position to deal a hand of bridge. A nervous, birdlike man, pale jaundiced flesh on tiny bones, a speckle of a man, someone near seventy or older. It was hard to tell his age because he seemed so frail, anxious, jittery, constantly looking toward the door.

“You okay?”

He ran his tongue over his upper lip. “At my age when I go into the hospital I fear I'll never come out. This is overnight, but I fear it's the cancer coming at me.”

“I'm sorry. You have cancer?”

He gave me a slight, bitter smile. “We'll find out, won't we? I am tired, tired all the time. Tired. Weak. And sometimes, lying in my hot sweaty bed, I know it's cancer. Sometimes you don't need a doctor to tell you what the soul already knows. You wake up feeling hollowness in your bones, emptiness in your blood vessels. You know it.”

Through most of this he didn't look at me, but at the end of the declaration—for that's how it came across—he stared directly into my face. “I've seen you around. At the college. One of the new people.” He glanced toward the door.

“I'll hear the taxi,” I said helpfully, but he glared at me. “If you want, I can drive you to the hospital.”

He shook his head back and forth. “Oh, no. They
know
me.” Again he checked the doorway. “It's amazing that I think of nothing but dying since my doctor suggested I go into the hospital for this battery of tests. I've always fought against negative notions.” He chuckled. “You probably find that amusing coming from an economist. We live our lives sugarcoating depression and recession and…” He stopped. “Talk quickly about Marta.”

I told him what I was doing, but he got impatient halfway through my explanation, causing me to stop, wave my hand emptily in the air, and wait for him to say something.

He rolled his eyes. “I'll tell you what I know so you can put an end to this madcap adventure of yours, young man. First of all, people like us do not commit murder—nor do we know people who do so. Marta once told me that Karen—a niece she dearly loved, I tell you, and constantly did for—was given to fantasy, imaginings, the preposterous gesture. Marta was not murdered. Her suicide was, if anything, unfortunate.”

“Unfortunate?”

“I've given this a lot of thought. Obviously. We were very close, she and I. We talked like old and cherished friends. I say unfortunate because, well, I think she didn't
plan
it. I think it came upon her almost as a whim, although whim is an—unfortunate word here.”

“But she was depressed, possibly clinically.”

He waved away my comment. “We all are when we get past sixty, young man. Some at fifty. I started at forty.” He chuckled. “We've just gone emphatically over the top of the roller coaster. Dame Fortune's wheel.” He started to rise, thought better of it, but his eyes fixed on the front door.

I pushed. “But we're talking extreme depression here, maybe so severe that…”

That wave again. “She was deeply depressed because of the death of another friend of ours, Joshua Jennings. They were extremely close. He got really old fast—he'd fallen in his big old house, feared his staircase—and he moved away. She had trouble with that. They hadn't been talking for some stupid reason—she never would tell me what it was—and then he up and died. A great-niece tended to his last days. Death is something old people do.” He smiled. “I may indulge myself shortly.”

“Any idea why they had a falling out?”

“No, but it must have been a lulu.”

“Why?”

“Marta gabbed about everything. If she refused to talk, you knew it was something really serious.”

“But then he died.”

“I must say, his death seemed to really haunt her, because they hadn't stayed friends. He died out of state, and she never, well, she never said good-bye. Sad.”

“Did she tell you this?”

“In so many words.” He looked to the door, looked down to check on the tidy overnight bag. He touched it possessively, and then looked at me. “We talked of his death and she was sad. So was I. He'd been my friend, too.”

“But depressed enough to kill herself?”

He pressed both hands together, closed his eyes and sighed. When he spoke again, his voice was less affected. “That's the strange part. I didn't think so. That's why I say it was whim. Whim.”

I echoed his word. “Whim?”

“Yes. She was walking to my home that night—we'd spoken over the phone earlier—and I think it all came together as she crossed the bridge over the river.”

“What came together?”

“The death of Joshua, my increasing weakness—I could do less and less—her own aging, her unhappiness with her pathetic nephew, her reservations about her niece—two ungrateful children, really—and the first chill of autumn. The approach of winter. That would make me kill myself. And she'd been drinking a little too much as the result of all of this. I could barely understand her on the phone. I think she approached that final bridge and caught her breath, looked over to my apartment in the distance, and just let herself fall.”

“But she'd told you she was coming over. She wanted to see you.”

Richard scratched his neck. I noticed loose dangling flesh, a chicken's jowls, flapping back and forth.

“That's the strange part. We talked on the phone, but briefly, unexpectedly. It was a Sunday, and Sundays are bleak, unreal days for people like us. Killer days. I said come over, she said no, and then, later on, she called and said she would walk over. But she was panicky, her voice so low I could hardly hear her. She was drunk—never a very attractive side of her, I must say, but she also seemed scared.”

“Scared that someone was going to kill her?”

Richard started laughing, then stopped, coughing and choking. He composed himself. “My Lord, you young people watch too many TV shows. No, I just think she was afraid of being alone that afternoon.”

“But you said she was scared.”

“My interpretation. That's all.”

He seemed so frozen, sitting still, packaged for the road, that I needed to move. As I wandered to his bookshelves, he watched me closely. There were no personal photographs in the room. Book-lined shelves, regimented and ordered, and heavy, unattractive furniture hugged the corners of the room. Without the books there would be no personality here. But no popular books, no novels, no magazines. No flashy dust jackets. No, everything had the utter seriousness of an old-time college professor's office and library.

Wilcox followed my movements, my fingers on a dusty book jacket.

“My books miss Marta's adroit cleaning touch. I'm forced to employ an agency that has no love for books. Marta loved the old volumes. She loved my old books.”

“That's right,” I said, “she was your cleaning lady.”

He bristled. “Young man, Marta was hardly anyone's
cleaning
lady in any conventional sense. True, she cleaned houses, but she chose her clientele carefully after her retirement. She didn't need the money, you see. And so she cleaned friends' houses….”

“She cleaned mine,” I interrupted, sitting back down.

Wilcox looked angry, whether at the idea of her helping me or at my interruption, I couldn't tell.

“She liked to keep her hand at it, she told me. Cleaning, for Marta, was really part of the social life she maintained with three or four of us. Marta was a serious, careful woman, true, a woman given to inexplicable biases and hardheaded attitudes. Some so childlike—maybe I should say childish—that she came off as charmingly…primitive. Straightlaced, as it were. But, you see, I find myself smiling when I think about it. She was a woman who liked the company of sparkling, intelligent men. I say this selfishly, because I was one of the chosen.”

His long reverie had a dreaminess about it that made me fidget. I recalled a junior faculty member referring to Wilcox as a sterile little man. At the time I thought it a cruel, unnecessary remark.

Silence, long and deadly. He smiled mischievously. “You'll discover that Marta loved the company of men. I'm sure you'll discover this as you violate her life. She had little use for the cattiness and foolishness of women her age. One friend, a dreadful boor named Hattie. Doubtless you know that. But Marta, well, I guess you'd say she shone around men. She radiated. She simply liked our company. Now there's nothing scandalous in this, I hope you realize, but simply affection—yes, that's the word—affection, genuine and real and true, for the company of men. That, my young man, is why she cleaned apartments, as you call it. That's probably why she cleaned
yours
.” He was grinning now.

“So you were companions, social friends, or…?”

“I looked forward to her visits. I'm alone most of the time. We'd chat and we'd walk for lunch, and she'd entertain me with her nonsensical stories of Atlantic City and slot machines and Don Rickles shows. It was all very amusing. I couldn't stop her once she began.”

“That sounds patronizing.”

His eyes became steady. “You don't understand.”

“Help me.”

“We
liked
each other.”

There were sounds coming from the street. I talked faster. “You mentioned Marta's problems with her nephew Davey Corcoran?”

He grimaced. “A loser. But I never met him, to tell you the truth. Marta insisted he was charming and handsome in his early days. I told her we were all charming and handsome in our early days.” He chuckled. “But they were close back when. Years back. He wrestled with bouts of extreme Catholicism. In and out of church. Madness, really. A zealot, then one who lapsed. He drove her places, flattered her, you know, that sort of thing. But something happened. She wouldn't tell me but I do know that she refused to mention his name. One time I mentioned him and she stormed away, didn't even stay for lunch.”

“How'd you meet her?”

He smiled. “I'd seen her around, of course. A woman who liked to be looked at. This is a small town, you know, and I saw her at the college when she worked on the housekeeping staff. I came to know her when we all went on that trip the college sponsored to Russia in 2003.”