Calypso (87th Precinct), page 9
“Well,” Meyer said, and let the word dangle. He frankly did not know what he might have done had a beautiful blonde in a slinky white gown come around casting spells on him, but he sure as hell knew what his wife Sarah would have done if ever she’d spotted him leaving the Hotel Shalimar or any hotel with such a blonde on his arm. Within minutes, the cops of Midtown North would have been investigating the strange and baffling death of a bald-headed detective whose skull had been crushed by a stale bagel. “Did you mention this to George?” he said. “That his brother might have left with the blonde?”
“Nope,” Bones said.
“How come?”
“Fuck him,” Bones said, summing up quite simply how he’d felt about the late George C. Chadderton.
“This blonde,” Meyer said, “I wonder if you can describe her a bit more fully.”
“Gorgeous,” Bones said.
“How tall would you say she was?”
“Five ten at least,” Bones said.
“How old was she?”
“At first I’d have said her twenties, but I think she may have been older than that. Her early thirties, I’d say.”
“What makes you say that?”
“You can tell by the way a chick carries herself, you dig? This one was older. Maybe thirty, maybe even a little older than that. Healthy, you understand, all these California types are healthy as hell, man, they can fool you with all that healthiness, you can think they’re twenty when they’re really fifty.”
“But this woman looked to be in her thirties, is that right?”
“No, she carried herself that way.”
“I don’t understand,” Meyer said, puzzled. “Did she look thirty, or did she…?”
“Well, how would I know how she looked, man?”
Meyer blinked. “What do you mean?” he said.
“She was wearing a mask,” Bones said.
“A mask?” Meyer said, and blinked again. “At a wedding?”
“Oh,” Bones said. “Yeah.” He blinked, too. “Maybe I got something mixed up, huh?” he said.
Carella and Meyer, on the telephone together at 8:30 that night, agreed that somebody—either Barragan or Bones—had sure as hell got something mixed up. It was Meyer’s guess that Bones was the man with the faulty memory, and Carella agreed that perhaps the tall slinky blonde had indeed been a figment of the musician’s imagination since she seemed to have gone completely unnoticed by Vicente Manuel Barragan, who was otherwise possessed of total recall when it came to anything that had happened that night seven years ago, dredging up even snatches of dialogue such as Bones’s remark about the hotel swallowing up the whole Chadderton family. It seemed further odd to Carella that Bones’s tennis-playing lady in Pasadena appeared to be an exact replica of the blonde who’d lured Santo first onto the dance floor, where they’d danced cheek to cheek to the strains of the Harvey Cooper orchestra (amazing that Cooper was an orchestra leader in Barragan’s story but the groom in Bones’s story), and later went out into the night, where together and respectively (if not respectfully) they had proceeded to exorcise his pubescent passion and her oncoming menopause, afterward disappearing from the face of the earth forever. In Barragan’s story, the band had been playing at a fancy-dress ball, which seemed more likely than the wedding Bones remembered, especially since the blonde—if she existed at all—suddenly began wearing a mask when Bones thought about her a bit further. Barragan seemed certain that the affair had been a benefit for multiple sclerosis or muscular dystrophy. Was that where Bones had come up with the notion that Harvey Cooper was not only the groom but also someone who had recently been graduated from medical school? And was it the Stardust Ballroom or the Moonglow Ballroom? Or neither? Or all of the above?
“I think we’ll have to do some further work on this in the morning,” Carella said judiciously. “In the meantime, they’re waiting for me back at the table.”
“Who’s they?” Meyer asked.
“Teddy. And Bert and his wife.”
“Some people get to eat in nice restaurants,” Meyer said, “while other people eat in prisons upstate.”
“I’ll talk to you in the morning,” Carella said.
“Yeah, good night,” Meyer said.
“Good night,” Carella said.
In bed with Teddy that night, holding her close in the dark, the rain lashing the windowpanes, Carella was aware all at once that she was not asleep, and he sat up and turned on the bed lamp and looked at her, puzzled.
“Teddy?” he said.
Her back was to him, she could not see his lips. He touched her shoulder and she rolled over to face him, and he was surprised to see that there were tears in her eyes.
“Hey,” he said, “hey, honey…what…?”
She shook her head and rolled away from him again, closing herself into her pillow, closing him out—if she could not see him, she could not hear him; her eyes were her ears, her hands and her face were her voice. She lay sobbing into the pillow, and he put his hand on her shoulder again, gently, and she sniffed and turned toward him again.
“Want to talk?” he said.
She nodded.
“What’s the matter?”
She shook her head.
“Did I do something?”
She shook her head again.
“What is it?”
She sat up, took a tissue from the box on the bedside table, blew her nose, and then put the tissue under her pillow. Carella waited. At last, her hands began to speak. He watched them. He knew the language, he had learned it well over the years, he could now speak it better than hesitantly with his own hands. As she spoke to him, the tears began rolling down her face again, and her hands fluttered and then stopped completely. She sniffed again, and reached for the crumpled tissue under her pillow.
“You’re wrong,” he said.
She shook her head.
“I’m telling you you’re wrong.”
She shook her head again.
“Honey, she likes you very much.”
Her hands began again. This time they spilled out a torrent of words and phrases, speaking to him so rapidly that he had to tell her to slow down, and even then continuing at a pace almost too fast for him to comprehend. He caught both her hands in his own, and said, “Now come on, honey. If you want me to listen…” She nodded, and sniffed, and began speaking more slowly now, her fingers long and fluid, her dark eyes glistening with the tears that sat upon them as she told him again that she was certain Augusta Kling didn’t like her, Augusta had said things and done things tonight—
“What things?”
Teddy’s hands moved again. The wine, she said.
“The wine? What about the wine?”
When she toasted.
“I don’t remember any toast.”
She made a toast.
“To what?”
To you and Bert.
“To the case, you mean. To solving the case.”
No, to you and Bert.
“Honey—”
She left me out. She drank only to you and Bert.
“Now why would she do a thing like that? She’s one of the sweetest people—”
Teddy burst into tears again.
He put his arms around her and held her close. The rain beat steadily on the windowpanes. “Honey,” he said, and she looked up into his face, and studied his mouth, and watched the words as they formed on his lips. “Honey, Augusta likes you very much.” Teddy shook her head. “Honey, she said so. Do you remember when you told the story about the kids…about April falling in the lake at that PBA picnic? And Mark jumping in to rescue her when the water was only two feet deep? Do you remember telling…?”
Teddy nodded.
“And then you went to the ladies’ room, do you remember?
She nodded again.
“Well, the minute you were gone, Augusta told me how terrific you were.”
Teddy looked up at him.
“That’s just what she said. She said, ‘Jesus, Teddy’s terrific, I wish I could tell a story like her.’”
The tears were beginning to flow again.
“Honey, why on earth wouldn’t she like you?”
She looked him dead in the eye. Her hands began to move.
Because I’m a deaf mute, she said.
“You’re the most wonderful woman in the world,” he said, and kissed her, and held her close again. And then he kissed the tears from her face and from her eyes, and told her again how much he loved her, told her what he had told her that day years and years ago when he’d asked her to marry him for the twelfth time and had finally convinced her that she was so much more than any other woman when until that moment she had considered herself somehow less. He told her again now, he said, “Jesus, I love you, Teddy, I love you to death,” and then they made love as they had when they were younger, much younger.
He knew she was on the island, he had heard the launch pulling into the dock more than an hour ago, but she had not yet come to see him, and he wondered about this, wondered if he’d done something to displease her. She had left the island shortly after she’d fed him on Friday night, and he had not been fed since. The clock on the wall—a new acquisition he’d had to beg for—read 9:15. He’d had no breakfast today, and no lunch, and he wondered now if she was going to forget about dinner, too. Sometimes, he cursed the clock. Without the clock, there had been an almost blissful sense of disorientation. Minutes faded into hours to become days and then weeks and months. And years. He had looked up at the clock when he’d heard the launch last night—8:30 P.M., which meant that she’d be on the mainland by 9:00, that’s how long the trip took, a half hour. Figure close to two hours into the city, she’d have been in Isola by a little before 11:00.
He wondered where she went in the city, wondered about her life outside this room and off this island. He had seen her in the city only once, the night they’d met, and that had been seven years ago—she had let him keep a calendar before she allowed him to have the clock. He would try to count the days, but there were no windows in the room and he never knew when the sun had risen or when it was setting. In the first year, he miscalculated by a month. He thought it was Easter. By his reckoning, trying to keep time without a clock, marking off by guesswork the days on the calendar, he thought it was Easter already. She laughed and told him it was only February the twelfth, he’d been there only five months, was he growing tired of her so soon?
The room—his cage, he called it—was perhaps fifteen feet wide by twenty feet long, he had paced it off the first time she’d locked him in here. He had been on the island only a week then, and had told her he wanted to go back to the mainland, and she’d said, Sure, she just wanted to make a phone call, why didn’t he mix himself a drink, relax a bit, she wouldn’t be a minute. He trusted her then; this was after a week of fucking their brains out all over the house—her bedroom, the living room floor, the kitchen with her bare ass on the countertop and her legs wrapped around his waist, the playroom, and this room, which had been a guest room before it became his cage and which—she told him—had been a psychiatrist’s office before she bought the house. That explained the double doors.
The doors were massive, made of sturdy oak, one opening into the room with the knob on the left, the other opening out with the knob on the right. If you were inside the room and you opened the first door, you found yourself smack up against the second door. This was for privacy. When the psychiatrist owned the house, he didn’t want anyone to hear the rantings of the crazy people who paid him $60 an hour to lie on his couch. Thick double doors. Piano hinges on each of the doors, you couldn’t take out any pins and lift the doors off their hinges because there weren’t any exposed pins to take out. Locks on both doors, the inside one and the outer one. No windows on any of the walls because this was a room that had been part of a big cinder-block, rectangular-shaped basement with the furnace in one corner before the psychiatrist built some walls around the furnace and divided the remaining space into equal halves—the playroom next door, where Santo had fucked her on the pool table the first week he was here, and this room, his cage, that had once been the psychiatrist’s office, but was now a proper guest room with a wall unit opposite the bed, and a couch against one of the walls, and pictures on the walls, and the big double bed itself of course, and the private bathroom with a sink, a toilet, and a tub.
“Sure,” she’d told him, “you just relax, make yourself a drink. I have these phone calls to get off my mind, and then well hop in the boat and I’ll take you back to the mainland, okay, sweetie?” Sure, sweetie. He’d gone to the bar that was part of the wall unit opposite the bed, and he’d mixed himself a scotch and soda, and then he’d sat on the couch listening to the stereo. This was seven years ago, the record collection was old even then, most of the tunes going back a long, long time. She hadn’t replaced any of the records in the past seven years; he listened to the same stuff over and over again, the records worn and scratchy now, the way he was worn and scratchy, seven years, seven years in this room. But that night long ago, after they’d spent a week together out here on the island, beautiful that September, woman with her own private little island off Sands Spit, man, he was impressed! Couldn’t get enough of him, told him she was twenty-eight years old, but he saw a college graduation picture of her in the living room, and there was a date on the back of it, and he figured a person graduated college when they were twenty-two, right? Well, maybe younger if they were real smart, so okay give her the benefit of the doubt, say she graduated when she was twenty, nobody graduated college younger than twenty, which according to the date on the back of the graduation picture would’ve made her thirty-two years old and not what she claimed to be, not twenty-eight like she claimed. Which made her thirty-nine years old now, an old lady.
Where was his dinner, wasn’t she gonna bring him no dinner tonight, was she going to starve him the way she did for two weeks that time he almost escaped? Would’ve made it, too, if it hadn’t been for the dog. She knew he was scared of dogs, he’d told her so, pillow talk during their first week together, terrified of dogs, you know what I mean? When I was eight years old, I got bit by a dog on the roof. Goddamn fox terrier, guy had taken him up on the roof to do his business, fuckin’ mutt came at me and tore a piece out of my leg. I had to get rabies shots, you ever have rabies shots? Christ, the pain. I been scared of dogs ever since, I shit in my pants a dog even comes near me. He was over the wall and out when she let the dog loose—big German shepherd, came after him with his fangs bared, knocked him to the ground, he went tumbling over in the tall sea grass at the ocean’s edge, clawing at the dog’s big head, trying to keep those teeth away from him, the ocean pounding in, her voice coming in over the roar of the surf, “No, Clarence, no,” some fuckin’ name for a killer German shepherd, Clarence! Picked up the dog’s leash in one hand, and told Santo to head back for the house like a nice little boy, saw where he’d picked the locks on both doors and locked him in the bathroom for the night, with the dog sitting just outside the door. All night long, he could hear the dog growling. She starved Santo for the next two weeks, as punishment for having tried to escape, and when finally she fed him again, there was something in the food—it knocked him out completely. He didn’t know how long he was out, but when he woke up there were new locks on both doors, dead-bolt locks, he couldn’t have picked them even if he was a pro. And from then on, the dog was always outside those big double doors, sitting in the hallway.
But that was later, that was—he kept losing track of time. The first time she’d locked him in here, yes, he was listening, yes, to her records, and sipping at his scotch, just digging the sound and thinking he’d be back in the city again soon, playing another gig with Georgie and the guys, sipping, smiling, and then becoming aware of time all at once, looking at his wristwatch and realizing she’d been gone a good half hour. Well, leave it to a woman, goes to make a few phone calls and takes forever. Smiling, he got off the couch and went to the door and twisted the knob the way he would have ordinarily, not suspecting a thing yet, and then discovering the door was locked, she had locked the door on him. He began yelling for her to come unlock the door, but if she heard him, she didn’t come do it. He doubted if she heard him, anyway, through those big double mothers. She didn’t come back till the next morning, to bring him a tray of breakfast. She had a gun when she came into the room, he didn’t know whether she’d had it in the house here all along, or whether she’d taken the boat over to the mainland to buy it. He didn’t know anything about guns, he couldn’t tell one caliber of gun from another. But this didn’t look like no dainty little gun a lady would keep in her handbag. This looked like a gun could blow a man’s head off. She told him to back away from the door, and he said, “Hey, come on, what is this?” and she wagged the gun at him and just said, “Back.” Then she put the breakfast tray on the floor and said, “There’s your food, eat it,” and went out, locking both doors behind her.
That breakfast was the first time she put anything in his food. He drank his orange juice, and then he ate his cornflakes and drank his coffee, and he didn’t know which of the things he ate or drank was doped, but something was because he passed out cold almost immediately afterward, and when he woke up again—he didn’t know how many hours later—he was naked on the bed, all his clothes gone, his wristwatch gone, his wrists tied together behind his back, and his feet tied together at the ankles. He started yelling for her again. But again, he didn’t know whether she could hear him through those double doors. Anyway, he was beginning to understand that she would come to him only when she wanted to. There was no sense yelling or screaming, there was no sense doing anything except trying to figure a way out.
He knew what the island looked like; she’d shown him around it during that first week when he was still a guest and not a prisoner, fucked her on the boat and on the beach, fucked her in the little pine forest that ran along the southern shore, fucked her day and night, never met a woman like her in his life, and told her so. But, you know, he missed, the city, wanted to get back to the city—“Are you getting tired of me?” she asked. “No, no, just want to walk those streets again, you know, hear those sidewalks humming under my feet, huh, baby? I’m a city boy, born and raised there, my mom’s from Venezuela and my pop’s from Trinidad—haven’t seen him since I was three and he took off with a girl used to waitress up in Diamondback—but me and my brother Georgie are one hundred percent American Yankee-Doodle Dandy boys, yessir,” he said, and burst out laughing. “Stay just another day,” she said.
