The Death in the Willows (28 page)

“A careless aide or nurse could be covering up for his or her own protection. A shorthanded staff, a forgotten patient … negligent but not malicious.”

“Possibly, except a few minutes before she was killed, Kim saw Dr. Bunting in the sun-room holding opera glasses.”

“And a nurse or aide came and took her to PT. He or she put her into the tub and left on another errand.”

“You're making me feel paranoid.”

“I don't mean to. I'm just considering other possibilities. There is one other answer.”

“What's that?”

“Bunting herself.”

“Suicide?”

“It's not uncommon with some older persons.”

“Come on, Lyon. You met her. You know the woman's vitality and her zest.”

“If she were afraid of losing her faculties … that could be devastating for such a person.”

“But by scalding? What a painful way. If Fabian Bunting wanted to do herself in, I can see her finding a way to get into the medicine cabinet, but not into a hot tub.”

Lyon tried to make the mental shift from his recent total involvement with his monsters to the possibility of a senseless death. For senseless is what it was. An old lady, without assets or heirs, obviously harmless to the world, had possibly been murdered.

“Anybody home?” Kim called from the vestibule.

“In the Lyon's den,” Bea replied without moving.

“Oh, funny, funny.” Kim entered the room pushing the bar cart. “It is cocktail time, right?”

“You know it,” Bea said and began to mix martinis while Kim poured Lyon a pony of Dry Sack sherry. “A nice day on the barricades, hon?”

Kim sipped her martini and sat down. “Would have been. Could have been. We were to begin a negotiating session with management this afternoon, but fearless leader took off somewhere.”

“I thought this … what's his name?”

“Rustman. Marty Rustman.”

“Was the Sir Galahad of the labor movement.”

“He's honest, militant, articulate, and flaky. Although I can't understand why he just disappeared.”

Lyon turned his back on the panorama of the river. “Disappeared?”

“He was there at the home bright and early this morning when we set up the line. Sometime around ten this morning he took off. Funny thing about it is that he left his car.”

Lyon leaned forward. “Are you sure it was ten?”

“Sometime around then. Why?”

“Did you call his office, the union headquarters, and so forth?”

“Damn right I did! I was fit to be tied. We had to cancel the meeting. You know, those workers really need the money—they need to work desperately.”

“What about his home?”

Kim went to the telephone and dialed. It was answered on the first ring. “Mrs. Rustman? Kim Ward here. Is Marty there?… No. He left Murphysville about ten this morning and he's not at the union hall.… Have you heard from him?… No … Thank you.” She slowly hung up: “Okay, what's coming down?”

“I wonder if there isn't a connection between Bunting's death and Marty Rustman's inexplicable disappearance.”

“She was last seen in the sun-room with opera glasses,” Bea said.

“If there's no sign of him in the morning, I think we had better talk to Rocco,” Lyon said.

The van stopped after jouncing over several miles of dirt road. The rear doors were thrown open and he was pulled unceremoniously from the rear compartment and thrown onto the ground. He tried to mumble through the tape across his mouth, but the two men standing by the side of the van didn't look his way. After a few moments of consultation, one of them took a shovel from the rear of the van and walked twenty yards into the woods along the side of the logging road. He watched in fascination as the man inspected the ground carefully and then stuck the shovel into the earth. The man gave a grunt as the shovel cut through the layer of forest carpet and topsoil. He put the first shovelful of earth neatly to the side. They were going to kill him. There would be no baseball bat that would allow him to live another day. They were going to bury him!

3

The Rustman home was a small, white ranch with dark blue shutters located in the south end of Hartford. Bea turned the Datsun into the driveway and sat for a moment looking at the house. The grass was newly mown, the yard neat, and to the rear she could see an above-ground swimming pool where two tow-headed children played. The boy appeared to be around ten, the girl perhaps eight. They laughed with that distinctive sound children make when playing in water.

She had been elected for the trip by default. Right after breakfast Lyon had run for the safety of his study. Kim had phoned from the picket line and said that Marty Rustman had never arrived.

She left the car and went up the narrow cement walk to the front door and rang the bell. The door was opened immediately by a thirtyish woman with washed-out blond hair that hung in stray wisps across her forehead. Her face was haggard with deep pockets of worry under each eye. She uttered a tentative “Yes?”

“I'm Bea Wentworth, Mrs. Rustman. Kim Ward who works with your husband asked that I stop by.”

“You know something about Marty?”

“That's why I'm here. To find out where he is.”

“Oh. Please come in.”

Bea followed Barbara Rustman through the living room into a sun-drenched kitchen. Being a haphazard housekeeper herself, she immediately recognized in their brief journey the signs of the obsessive cleaner and scrubber. She sat at a small kitchen table while Barbara Rustman prepared coffee. There was a haunted quality to the woman standing at the stove. She carried a deep burden and had for more than the few hours her husband had been missing. It was a deeply ingrained hurt that had been lived with for years, and was probably only alleviated by constant work.

Barbara Rustman placed a coffee cup before Bea and sat across the table. “I don't know where Marty is, Senator Wentworth.”

Bea laughed. “Not senator anymore. In fact, I'm temporarily out of politics.”

“Marty always admired you and agreed with your stands.”

“It's too bad you're not in my voting district. Kim Ward tells me only good things about your husband. She feels that he's a real asset to the labor movement.”

“Let me show you the article in
Time
magazine.” She reached into a kitchen drawer and placed a neatly clipped article before Bea.

Bea read the article. It praised Marty as one of the new breed of young labor leaders. At a recent national convention he had given an impromptu speech from the floor and received a standing ovation. The end of the article recounted his background. He had served in Vietnam as a medical corpsman and upon discharge had obtained a job as a lab technician at a Hartford hospital. When a union received NLRB sanction to hold an election at the hospital, Rustman had attended the organizational meeting. During the proceedings he had been elected shop steward. In a year's time he had become disenchanted with the union and resigned in protest. He formed an independent local, and in the space of a few years his union had won election after election, which forced management recognition. Recently his locals had been admitted into the AFL-CIO.

She looked up at Barbara sitting expectantly across the table. “He sounds like quite a guy.”

“Does anyone know where he is?”

“We thought you could help.”

“I don't know what to say. He's stayed away before at night. All-night negotiations and things like that, but he always called and told me where he was. He made a point of speaking to the children before they went to bed.”

A child's laugh from the rear yard penetrated the room and Barbara Rustman seemed to cringe away from the sound. Bea realized that the woman was a permanent victim, drained and immersed in expected hurt. A woman whose vital forces had been sucked from her until she was a hollow receptacle awaiting further pain. A victim not of a specific battle but of the constant skirmishs that shaped her life.

The truth about Marty Rustman did not lie in the mechanical pride his wife exhibited. It rested within the province of the quiet moments husband and wife spent together.

“I'm so worried about Marty.”

The same repetitious phrase. “Did you call the police?” Bea asked brusquely.

“The police? Of course not.”

“Why not?”

“Well … I … He might come home any minute.”

Out of shame for what she was going to do, Bea closed her eyes briefly. In that moment, as if she could hear the vital voice of Fabian Bunting, she knew she must find out the truth. She knew that she could break this emotionally frail woman sitting before her. The buttons were there, waiting to be pushed.

“He's with a slut again,” Bea said harshly as she knotted her fingers into fists under the table.

There was a sharp intake of breath from the woman across the table. Words faltered and stumbled. “No … He wouldn't do … I don't know.”

“He did last time.”

“That was different. He'd won an election, he'd been drinking.”

“And you think he's off whoring now. Don't you!” Bea leaned across the table and closed her hands over the other woman's clenched fingers.

“Yes. Yes. Yes.”

Bea sat back slowly in her chair as Barbara Rustman's eyes clouded and feeling retreated to some inner place. She asked softly, “Want to talk about it?”

“There's no one to listen.”

Her voice softer still. “I will.”

The words began like a small freshet trickling down from a craggy ledge. They picked up strength as they tumbled into a rushing mountain stream, becoming a torrent of words that spilled over each other in their rush for expression. Bea listened without comment and felt the hurt.

“We grew up together. Not ten blocks from here. We lived next door to each other. Everyone always said we were meant for each other. I never dated anyone else. I think Marty did once in a while on the sly, but he always came back to me. We went to all the high school dances together and then got married a week after we graduated. It was wonderful in those days.”

Bea nodded, although it wasn't necessary.

“I got a job right off, filing at the insurance company, and we had this great little apartment in a three-family house. Marty was always ambitious and didn't want to work in the aircraft like his dad. He went to technical school. A good lab tech can always get a job. After the two-year course, he got a job at the hospital. Then he went to Vietnam.…”

“That changed a lot of men.”

The other woman looked at Bea as if the simplistic statement was a unique revelation. “Yes. Changed. He changed. He was one of those medical guys that went with the soldiers.”

“A corpsman.”

“When he came back, he was different. When we made … when he went to bed with me, it was different. He seemed to want to hurt me. I knew he was unhappy back at the hospital. Then when he got involved with the union, it seemed as if he liked the battles and arguments. He liked the organizing, the yelling, the picket lines, and sometimes the fights.”

“Did anyone ever threaten him?”

“All the time. It used to frighten us, but we got used to it. They'd call up in the middle of the night and say they were waiting for him … things like that.”

“Anyone specific?”

“It had gotten worse recently. There were a lot of problems at the convalescent homes. Marty said there was a sweetheart deal between union and management in several of the homes. He said they were corrupt and ought to be exposed. He liked a fight like that. In Murphysville he had to take on the old union and management at the same time. After he won a fight, he'd go off and have a few drinks someplace and then maybe a few more and go off with … it was never the same.”

The tears had been held within her for a long time, and when they brimmed her eyes, she seemed to melt. Her body shook violently in an arch of grief, and Bea comforted her.

They pulled him along the ground. His head hit rocks and roots as it bumped along the forest floor. They dragged him to the grave and dropped him in. His face hit the bottom. His eyes were wide as they stared at the rich loam inches from his face. He knew he was a dead man
.

The shot seared the rear of his skull. He felt a ring of blood seep over his forehead and into his eyes. The sun was warm. His body convulsed as the first shovelful of dirt fell onto the small of his back
…
and then more … and more … as they buried him
.

Rocco retreated into the small room he had built near the boiler in the cellar of his home. Martha and Remley were in Boston for the weekend, which made the night his. He pulled a paint-splattered kitchen chair across the rough cement floor and centered it carefully in front of the doll house. A pint of vodka lay in the workbench drawer. He flipped off the top and poured a jelly glass half full. He held the glass casually and tilted his chair back while he looked into the serenity of the miniature Victorian mansion.

It had been a bad day. A lot of them were. The kid had been picked up after running a stop sign and was found to be driving with a suspended license. Jamie Martin had brought him in for booking after confiscating an ounce of grass. Rocco had passed through the processing room when the kid had lunged for him. The roundhouse blow had glanced off his right cheek and barely staggered him.

He had reacted automatically. His fingers had extended into a straight plane as his hand swung forward in a blow that caught the kid across the larynx. He had stood over the prone body as his victim gasped for breath. His long arms had hung loosely by his side with the fingers balled into fists. When it was apparent that the kid writhing on the floor had not suffered permanent damage, he had left the room without a word.

It was such incidents that made them call him a mean son of a bitch. It was always the young ones between seventeen and twenty-five who caused the problems. Over the years he had become, he suspected, brutalized by them to the point where he reacted without thought, as he had this afternoon.