While I Was Gone (38 page)

Well, yes. But I realized now, pulling the sutures on the shaved flesh below me, that I wanted to take this step, this next step available to me, before Monday. I wanted to take it now. I’d stopped myself from trying to force things, with Sadie, with Daniel. But any step out of all this that was made available to me was one I wanted already to have taken.

As we were washing up, I asked Mary Ellen if she could cover for me the next day. When she said she would, I went to the front desk to talk to Beattie. She called up my schedule on the computer and we reviewed it together, deciding who could be rescheduled, who would need to see Mary Ellen tomorrow, whom Beattie should telephone. She was, as she always was in this kind of situation, helpful and efficient.

When we’d mapped it all out, she sat back and looked up at me.

“Business or pleasure?” she asked. She wore two spangled barrettes in her dry, thin hair, one above each ear.

“What?”

“Your day off.”

“Oh.” I laughed.

“Exactly neither,” I said.

She called after me.

“That’s right. Don’t tell me anything.”

I stepped back into the doorway.

“Beattie, you don’t want to know.”

A lie, if ever there was one. She sniffed. She knew it too.

I CALLED THAT EVENING AND LEFT WORD FOR DETECTIVE

Ryan that I’d be in in the morning, but when I arrived at the counter in the homicide department the next day, he was out.

“I left a message,” I said.

“Last night. Maybe he left some kind of message back for me?

zVVhat is this regarding?”

He was an older man, much older than Detective Ryan. His hair was yellow-white, thick and curly. His face, too, was white, almost unnaturally so. Parchment color.

“It’s about an old murder case. Dana Jablonski. That was the victim’s name.”

“I’ll ask around,” he said.

I watched him move from desk to desk, stopping to laugh at one or two. He disappeared into the part of the long room I couldn’t see from my side of the counter. I stood there for some minutes, my hip beginning to ache. Finally another man, this one truly young—a kid, I would have called him—came up and said, “Mrs. Becker?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I’m Detective Lewis. I know something about the Jablonski case.

What were you coming in for?” He smiled at me, a kind of goofy, pointless smile. He had big teeth, oversize for his mouth.

“Just to get caught up, I guess. I don’t know if Detective Ryan had any more questions for me or not. I told him I’d come in Monday, but then I didn’t want to wait that long. I’m sorry if this is an inconvenience. I can come back Monday if this won’t work.”

“No, it’s okay. Why don’t you come in, sit down.” He opened the partition to allow me to pass.

“I’ll go over what we’ve got and be with you in a minute.”

“Are you sure it’s not a problem?” I was already stepping in.

“No problem. I was working on it with him earlier. I just need to catch up, and I’ll be right with you.” Over a white button-down shirt, he was wearing a shiny green Celtics jacket.

He led me once again to the room with the large table, and I pulled out a chair to sit down.

“Can I get you anything?” he asked from the doorway. Part of their training, apparently.

I shook my head.

“No. Thanks.” And he was gone.

It was nearly fifteen minutes before he returned.

“Got it figured out why he called you, I think,” he said, sitting down himself, several chairs away from me.

“Good,” I said. There was something too large about all his features, I saw now—lips, nose, eyebrows, ears—as though his face hadn’t grown into them yet.

“Basically,” he said, “I think Detective Ryan wanted to let you know that we most likely won’t go anywhere with your information.”

I was breathless for a few seconds.

“But why? I mean, he thought you would, I think.”

0 i “Yeah, but… well, see, it would need to jive with something else.

It would need to”—his hand flapped back and forth—“open something up. And the thing is, it doesn’t. What it’s come to is, it’s your word against his.” He looked at me with a keen and curious disinterest, and shrugged.

“So he denied it. That he’d told me he killed Dana.”

“Dr. Mayhew. Yeah. He denied it. Denied he said it, denied he did it.” This seemed somehow to please him.

“He was pretty adamant.”

I thought for a moment.

“But he would be, wouldn’t he?”

“Yeah, but the thing is, when we looked back at what we had in the box, nothing jumped out, if you see what I mean. What you said he said to you doesn’t make anything make more sense. Which is kinda what you look for. For corroboration.” He flashed his big teeth at me.

I was genuinely puzzled.

“But it does make sense. I mean, there were no fingerprints, and he told me he was wearing gloves. That connects. And he could so easily have gotten rid of stuff in the lab, which is what he told me he did.”

“Yeah, but none of that’s conclusive in any way. None of it’s news. I mean, we all knew way back then—you knew too”—he smiled again-“that the killer was wearing gloves. And, I mean, anyone could have pointed out at any time that Dr. Mayhew had the means to get rid of stuff. It’s nothing new, you see what I mean?” His voice was boyish also, there was an energy, an enthusiasm, in it that was startling to me.

“But he told me,” I said. My voice, by contrast to his, sounded dry and weak.

“And he says he didn’t tell you.”

We sat facing each other over the big table. His mouth was slightly open.

“But why would I make all that up? I asked at last.

“Well, that’s a problem, but it’s not our problem.” The teasing half smile lifted his face again.

“But he has much more reason to deny it than I do to invent it.”

He shrugged.

“Maybe.”

I was irritated.

“Well, of course he does. Why would I want to make all this… trouble for myself if it weren’t true?”

“Well, it’s trouble for you, but it’s trouble for him, too, isn’t it?”

“Well, why would I want to make trouble for him, then?”

I could hear that I was beginning to sound frazzled.

He lifted his hand.

“You tell me.”

“There isn t any reason. In a way, I barely know the man. I have no ax to grind here.”

“Maybe you do, maybe you don’t.”

“I don’t. I assure you, I don’t. Why on earth would I want to put anyone through this unless it was true? What kind of monster of ill will would I have to be to do such a thing?”

“It would be ill will, all right.” He sounded almost amused.

“But I have no such ill will. I have no reason for it.”

He let a little silence accumulate between us before he said, “Tell me something.”

“Of course,” I said.

“Were you ever, like… attracted to Dr. Mayhew, Mrs. Becker?”

And suddenly it was clear to me what Eli had said, how he’d defended himself. And even in that moment of clarity, with its accompanying sense of danger, I was aware also of being pettily annoyed, of wanting to say, “Look, I’m the doctor, he’s the mister.” For a moment I was speechless, but finally I said, “Is that what he told you?”

“Well, you know, we wondered, too, so we asked him why he thought you would go to all this trouble. It was an idea he had, let’s say.”

I shook my head.

“It’s not true.”

“So you were not attracted to him.”

Detective Lewis had blue eyes, bright blue below the heavy eyebrows, and they were steady on me now as he waited.

“I was attracted to him, but I didn’t seek revenge on account of it.”

“But you were attracted.”

“I had been, yes.”

“Were you disappointed in your attraction?” He was smirking, his lips tight over the big teeth.

“How elegantly you put it,” I said.

“No. No, I wasn’t. My attraction ended when Mr. Mayhew confessed to me, when he told me he’d murdered my friend.”

“So you weren’t pissed off at him that he didn’t respond to you.”

“Not by that time, no.” I shook my head.

After a pause, he said, “Did you ask him to meet you at the Ritz Hotel? Did you call him?”

“That is true, but—” “So you were still attracted to him at that point. At the point at which you called him.”

( ll “Why are you talking to me this way?” My voice was shrill.

“I’m not accused of anything.”

“Well, you are, kind of. You made some serious charges against Dr.

Mayhew, and it’s possible you did that vindictively.”

“I didn’t.” He was still looking at me, and I thought suddenly of how he must see me. Old. Desperate. Disappointed. I had dressed drably, I realized now—I suppose to seem responsible and reliable to Detective Ryan. This guy would be seeing it another way.

He shifted now in his chair.

“What were your expectations, Mrs.

Becker, when you went to the Ritz Hotel to meet Dr. Mayhew?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know.”

I shook my head.

“But maybe one possibility was beginning a relationship with him.

Maybe?” I didn’t answer. He sat back.

“Why did you choose a hotel, Mrs. Becker. You chose it, am I right? You suggested it?”

“It’s a famous bar. I don’t know Boston that well. I chose the Ritz bar.”

“There was no notion in your mind that Dr. Mayhew might spend the night with you?”

“Look, Detective Lewis,” I burst out.

“Having lascivious thoughts is one thing, and making up a terrible lie about someone else is another thing. And I didn’t. I didn’t make this up.”

“Hey, Mrs. Becker, this isn’t even my case.” His big hands rose.

“All I’m saying here is we ended up with two people with profoundly different versions of what went on, and why, and our job is to sort out plausibilities. If there’d been one thing that made your story more plausible, we would have gone ahead. But there was nothing. And it flies in the face of some evidence we do have.”

“What? What evidence?”

“He had an alibi, did you know that?” Lewis was slouched now. He was enjoying this, I saw.

“Every one of you had an alibi, someone who would vouch for you. In his case, someone in his lab who saw him at just about that time. And he had test results coming in that he recorded over that whole period.”

I shook my head. I hadn’t known. How could Eli have arranged it?

Half-lit scenarios began to play in my mind, but even as I started to construct them, I knew that to offer them up would be to seem more desperate, defensive. I knew it would be useless.

“And then there’s the money,” he said.

What I thought of instantly was the money I’d kept in my drawer.

Which I’d had to explain then, several times. My “unusual system of banking,” one of the cops had called it. I must have looked confused or blank, because he said, “Money was stolen, if you remember. I think you must have forgotten that.”

I saw it then, the cop coming in from the backyard, carrying the plastic bag. The red-and-green Medaglia d’Oro can in it, empty.

Larry, Sara, nodding Yes, that was it.

cleared my throat.

“But it would have been the easiest thing in the world for Eli to take that to cover up for himself.”

“Did he tell you he took it?”

“No.”

“But he was so candid with you about other things.” He couldn’t keep the sarcasm from his voice.

“I can’t believe he wouldn’t have explained that too.”

After a long moment, he shook his head. He was smiling again.

“I don’t think so, Mrs. Becker. See, it just doesn’t pull the pieces together.”

I’m sure I looked defeated, done in. His voice, when he spoke again, was not unkind.

“Look, what I can tell you is that we still think your friend’s murder was a breakin that went bad. And we still think maybe someone will talk about it, maybe even someone in jail for something else. Though as time passes—and we know this too—it gets less likely. What we don’t think is that Dr. Mayhew was involved.

That’s what I can tell you.”

I was silent, looking out the window at the pale sky. Then I said, “So you think I’m a pathological liar.”

He smiled once more, that false, vulpine smile. His head tilted.

“Just out of curiosity, Mrs. Becker,” he said pleasantly.

“Why the fake ID back then? All the lies to your roommates?” And when I didn’t answer, “Hey,” he said, “we checked it out. We called him. He came in, more than once. We poked around. You can’t ask for more than that.” He lifted his hands.

“I

guess not,” I said at last. My voice was small.

“So, ” he said, pushing his chair back.

“That about takes care of it, I guess.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Yes, I guess it does.”

I was trembling, with a kind of rage, I think, as I walked back to the car, and when I got there I sat for a while turned sideways in the driver’s seat, my feet on the ground still, light-headed in a way that made me feel I might at any moment throw up.

When it passed, I was slowly aware of a pure relief, a relief so intense that I gradually began to feel nearly giddy. It was over.

That’s what I was thinking. It was finished. I had acted. I had done the right thing as I saw it, dreading what it might lead to, and it had led to nothing To air and freedom. To my life coming back to me. I could begin again.

I started the car. I drove across Cambridge toward Route 2. I was going down Brattle Street, between the rows of widespread, splendid houses, the vast yards opening on either side of me. I was thinking again of Dana, as I so often had in these weeks and months, but this time with such ease and familiarity that it seemed I could hear her hoarse, ugly voice speaking to me. Sudden tears spilled from my eyes.

I signaled and pulled over to park.

When I had gained control of myself and could see clearly again, I looked around. A fence ran along the edge of the sidewalk next to me. It was made of tall, solid spikes, square, their white paint gently peeling here and there. The grand posts that interrupted their progress every ten feet or so were topped with elaborate and improbable wooden urns. The yard behind the fence swept up to a Georgian house. It was gray, with black, listing shutters. In front of it, an elderly woman—at first I thought her a man, but then I saw the wisps of hair drooping down from under her cloth hat—was slowly, nearly ceremonially, clipping branches from a large, scraggly shrub. Forsythia.