Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman (31 page)

 

T
he conference—Murder in Small Cities: Who, How, Why?—was well-attended, and reporters showed up for some sessions, but we don't get the
Register
at home, and if Pekko read the article headlined scholars debate value of prison, which recounted a discussion about the efficacy of long prison sentences in preventing murder, he didn't mention it. I had listened, inward questions unanswered, then left the room when my cell phone vibrated.

The session on Malik Jones was impassioned. The main speaker, a black sociologist, repeated what those of us who lived in town had long known—that the issue was not the shooting as much as the pointless police chase leading to it. I had expected that a Boston police detective, speaking next, would disagree, but he concurred, which made the hour satisfying in a sense but repetitious. Yet, sitting in a dark corner of the auditorium, away from the participants, who quarreled and praised and questioned their way through the days—real persons in jackets and ties or jeans or pantsuits, who'd replaced the theoretical audience I'd been working with for months—I felt, during the question period, something large. A remark by one of the speakers—I wasn't even sure which—made me imagine Malik Jones's death in a way I never had before: his young, scared, defiant vitality, and then, when the adults wouldn't give up—and he couldn't—his ceasing to be. I stood, trembling a bit, feeling nothing but the terrible fact that human beings die, and some too soon, that nature doesn't care—there are enough left to continue to populate the earth—and also that each loss is as bad as anything could be, that the death of young people is something to weep for, over and over again. Gordon waited for me in the aisle, and we walked together to the back of the auditorium, an old-fashioned, particularly Yale-like setting, with mullioned windows and scarred old furniture. I almost didn't want to be with him. I wanted to be alone, to think of what I'd just thought, to imagine murder.

“I didn't think it would fit, and it didn't,” Gordon said.

I didn't answer. Finally I said, “It needed to be talked about.”

“You've said that, Daisy,” he said and briefly put his arm around my shoulders. I couldn't help but lean into him, like a child—or a lover—and my body flared with erotic pain. Gordon pulled me tighter yet while the participants, who'd been gathering their folders and interrupting one another's progress toward the exits, began to walk toward us. Then he dropped his arm. I stumbled and recovered. Nobody looked surprised at our awkward embrace, if anyone saw it. It was a collegial gesture, what friendly cohosts do all the time. Maybe people thought we hugged clumsily because we were so professional and shy that we'd never touched before. Someone came up to me to ask about restaurants. I didn't cry out as Gordon waved and departed before she and I had finished speaking.

 

T
hat night Pekko and I went out to eat. We went to Amato's on State Street, a plain Italian restaurant where there was always a table of cops in the corner. I drank red wine and pleated my paper place mat with its map of Italy, and Pekko had two birch beers with his eggplant parmigiana. We talked about the conference. I had my cell phone, but it didn't ring. I enumerated all the calls I might get. The next morning—I didn't say this—we'd be holding the last session, the one on Marie Valenti's murder. I talked about our decision to serve fruit salad along with muffins and coffee, though it required plates and spoons. I talked about Gordon's quick, funny introductions of speakers.

Pekko was quiet for a long time, eating. Then he said, “You think you know about murder in New Haven.”

He hadn't criticized the conference in a long time.

“I think I know how to order fruit salad and muffins.”

“These murders you're talking about,” he said—and I wondered if he'd somehow seen a schedule and knew we'd be discussing Marie Valenti in the morning—“these are the showcase murders, the fancy murders that get all the attention.”

“You mean when black people murder other blacks, that doesn't get attention,” I said. “We had quite a discussion about that yesterday afternoon.”

“It doesn't have to do with race. You think everything has to do with race. You don't know who gets murdered in this town, who doesn't—it's not always in the paper. It happens, and nobody knows, or a few people know, but nobody says.”

“But
you
know,” I said with some irritation. I was tired.

“Sometimes I know,” he said. “Your little Denny Ring, the supposed druggie. He was murdered.”

“Denny was murdered?” I said.

“Dennis Ring was murdered. I can't prove it, but I know it. He was not taking drugs—not then. He did not inject himself with an overdose. People knew he was living in the store, and he talked too much. He was a courier who knew names and talked a lot, and somebody decided to inject him with an overdose. That's how he died.”

“How do you know?”

“I knew before it happened. I tried to stop it. I went to people who knew and tried to stop it.”

“So what is your point?” I said through sobs. “Why are you telling me this? You know about every murder in the city of New Haven forever? You go around with all these secrets, just to make yourself feel good?”

“Nobody could prove it. There was no reason to ruin
my
life, talking about it. I'm sorry I made you cry, Daisy. My point is that it's more complicated than you know—more complicated than Skeetling knows.”

I pushed my plate of meatballs aside and dropped my head on my arms to cry. I'd done nothing to help Denny, all those years ago. I could do nothing for anyone. I cried for his solitude, alone with a murderer. Denny was almost always alone. That was why he was irresistible. He told me no secrets—though he talked all the time—and I told him none. I never had a phone number for him. He didn't even clutter my address book. “My conference isn't bad,” I said finally, “even if the people talking don't know everything. Even then.”

“Let's go home and walk Arthur,” Pekko said. “I'm sorry. I should have told you years ago, or kept my mouth shut.”

The leaves were turning and falling now, and our feet crushed leaves as we walked, with Arthur pulling to the left and right, sniffing, pissing on piles of leaves. The night was breezy, and the leaves on the trees were dry enough now to rustle. I had put on a heavy sweater when we stopped at the house for Arthur, and I pulled the sleeves down over my hands. We walked through Goatville to East Rock Park, and along the path at the edge of College Woods. The moon was out, and it was easy to see. We didn't talk. I thought of Denny, times I'd been in this park with him. He liked to sit on the swings. He liked what he called “kid things.” When I too sat on the swings one night, Denny said, “You're like a kid in some ways, Daisy, but not in my way.”

“How am I like a kid?” I said.

“You're by yourself.”

“Kids aren't by themselves,” I protested. “They're surrounded. Family, teachers . . .”

“You felt surrounded because you were all by yourself,” Denny said as we swung—sometimes parallel, sometimes one up, one down or one forward, one back. “When I was a kid, I didn't feel surrounded. I felt
with
people.”

“But now you're alone.”

“Not the way you are.”

“You're the most alone person I know!” I said, all those years ago.

Now Pekko and I sat down on a bench. A few years ago, workers took out trees and installed two benches at a place on the path where the river turns. The view is surprisingly grand—even in the dark—as the river comes toward you. We sat until I was cold. Pekko talked about a dog he'd had as a boy, who ran away. He stroked Arthur, who wouldn't have run away but was firmly attached to his leash. We stood up. “I shouldn't have told you, lovey,” he said.

“I'm not perfect, either,” I said but gave no details.

When we got home, it was too late for the news—we'd have to trust that there was nothing new and big—not in New York, Washington, or Afghanistan—and we went to bed quickly. I fell asleep while Pekko was still brushing his teeth.

 

S
o I slept late and had to hurry in the morning, but it's only a short drive from my house to the Yale building where the conference was held. I glanced at the
Times;
although people were worried about anthrax cases in Florida and New York, nothing significant had happened since the day before. I heard a weather forecast and one song while driving to the conference. When I reached the lobby of the building where we'd held most of our sessions, the caterer was setting out rows of muffins on trays, and a few early participants, talking together with cups of coffee in their hands, were eyeing them. A man squatted near the wall, the
Times
open in front of him.

I answered a question the caterer put to me. The door crashed open behind me, and I knew it was Gordon from the urgency of the sound. When I turned he was standing still, squinting in the dim light, but then he came toward me swiftly. He had a newspaper under his arm, and I could see that it was the
New Haven Register,
a paper he ordinarily bypassed. “Guilty to making it happen. Not guilty to making it happen today,” he said. He seemed excited—happy—but a little uncomfortable.

“What?”

“Haven't you seen the paper?”

I tried to remember if I'd seen a headline on my way over. I hadn't passed a box. He handed it to me. I still was more interested in the moment his hand touched mine as he thrust the newspaper at me than in what he wanted to show me. Yet I also felt a peculiar, new discomfort—noting his discomfort—and some fear: had something unbearable happened, too late for the
Times
? Then I had a sudden crazy thought that a decade late the newspaper was reporting the murder of Dennis Ring, young, white non–drug user, living in a frozen yogurt store that hadn't existed for years and years.

The headline announced the arrest of a suspect—Edmund Doyle, said the first sentence of the article—in the ancient Marie Valenti murder case.

“I didn't make it happen this way on purpose,” Gordon was saying. “It's going to look like a cheap trick. Are you too busy counting muffins to talk for a minute about how we can work it in
without
making it seem cheap? Of course we have to include it. The worst thing—do you agree? Tell me if I'm wrong—would be to lead up to it and then announce it as a surprise. And I suppose it would backfire—somebody would have seen the paper and would bring it up too early.”

“You went to the police?”

“Well, of course I did. I don't know why you didn't. I don't know why Pekko didn't, long ago. Well, I suppose there was a certain loyalty there, but he could have made it happen without doing it himself. Maybe that's why he told you. Maybe that's what he wanted to do—make it happen without making it happen.”

“No,” I said. I don't think I've ever been less able to speak and make sense, but Gordon wasn't listening. I didn't ask myself whether somebody should have turned Edmund in. At the time all I took in was the difference I had made. What I had said—what
had
I said?—had made it possible for Edmund to be arrested.

“But I didn't know his last name,” I said.

“Oh, that was easy. My contact said they had a list of everybody who'd been in school with her. But there was no reason to connect him, no more than any of the others. I guess there weren't many Edmunds. Finding him was easy, once they knew.”

The arrest had been made on the basis of fingerprints, which they had kept, of course. Edmund had been fingerprinted ten years ago for a job. That was long after the active search had ended.

We'd walked through the corridor and into a stairwell. Time was passing. “So,” said Gordon, “I'm sorry if this isn't what you had in mind. But I think the main thing right now is the morning session. What do you think?”

“Did you mention Pekko?” I said. “Is Pekko going to be arrested?”

“I did not mention Pekko. I said I had a friend who had a friend. I refused to give names, other than mine. Pekko won't have to be a witness—unless he chooses to, of course.”

I thought of Daphne's house. If she recognized Edmund's picture, she could turn Pekko in. Pekko had been Edmund's teacher. It would be easy for the police to prove that Pekko knew Edmund, and not too hard to prove that he was sheltering Edmund. I didn't know what the penalties were for obstructing justice, but I understood at last that because of what I had done, and because of Pekko's unique notions of right and wrong, not only could Edmund go to prison but maybe Pekko could as well.

“But Edmund was doing good work. It was a single, terrible moment in his life. There was no point in ruining it now. What good will it do? Will it bring her back?”

“Oh, Daisy, that's nonsense, of course I had to turn him in. You're proposing a totally chaotic legal system, in which everybody has his own philosophy and that's how we make decisions.”

“But didn't you think of what it will be like for him, for his parents?”