When some people die they just vanish, like pebbles into a pool. Everyday life just smooths back together and goes on as it did before. Other people die but stay around for a long time, either because they have captured the public’s imagination, like James Dean, or because their spirit just won’t let go, like our friend Sara’s.
Sara died ten years ago, but still, anytime her grandchildren say something bright or imperious, everyone will say, “She’s just like Sara!” Whenever I see two women driving along and laughing together, really laughing, I always think it’s Sara. And of course each spring when I plant I remember the fig tree we got in the garbage bin at PayLess, the bad fight we had over the miniature coral rosebush at East Bay.
Our country has just gone to war, which is why I’m thinking about her now. She could get madder at our politicians, and be more vocal about it, than anybody I know. I want to call her up; she always gave you something to do, made you feel you could do something.
Even though all of us continue to reminisce about her, we stopped talking about the way she died very soon after it happened. She was murdered, brutally, her head bashed in with a “blunt instrument.” A lover she had been going with had repeatedly threatened to kill her. She had called the police each time but they said there was nothing they could do. The man was a dentist, an alcoholic, some fifteen years younger than she was. In spite of the threats, and of other times that he had hit her, no weapon was found, no evidence placed him at the scene of the crime. He was never charged.
You know how it is when a friend is in love. Well, I guess I’m talking to women, strong women, older women. (Sara was sixty.) We say it’s great being our own person, that our lives are full. But we still want it, recognize it. Romance. When Sara spun around my kitchen laughing, “I’m in love. Can you believe it?” I was glad for her. We all were. Leon was attractive. Well-educated, sexy, articulate. He made her happy. Later, as she did, we forgave him. Missed appointments, unkind words, thoughtlessness, a slap. We wanted everything to be okay. We all still wanted to believe in love.
After Sara’s death her son Eddie moved into her house. I cleaned his house every Tuesday, so it turned out I was cleaning at Sara’s. It was hard, at first, to be in her sunny kitchen with all the plants gone but the memories still there. Gossip, talks about God, our children. The living room was full of Eddie’s CDs, radios and computers, two TVs, three telephones. (So much electronic equipment that once when the phone rang I answered it with the TV remote control.) His junky mismatched furniture replaced the huge linen couch where Sara and I would lie facing each other, covered with a quilt, talking, talking. Once one rainy Sunday we were both so low we watched bowling and Lassie.
The first time I cleaned the bedroom was terrible. The wall near where her bed used to be was still splattered and caked with her blood. I was sickened. After I cleaned it I went outside into the garden. I smiled to see the azaleas and daffodils and ranunculus we had planted together. We didn’t know which end of the ranunculus to plant, so we decided to put in half of them with the point facing down and the other half with the point up. So we still don’t know which are the ones that grew.
I went back in to vacuum and make the bed, saw that under Eddie’s bed was a revolver and a shotgun. I froze. What if Leon came back? He was crazy. He could kill me too. I took out each of the guns. Hands trembling, I tried to figure out what you did with them. I wanted Leon to come, so I could blow him away.
I vacuumed under the bed and put the weapons back. I was disgusted by my feelings and tried hard to think about something else.
I pretended that I was a TV show. A cleaning lady detective, sort of a female Columbo. Half-witted, gum chewing … but while she’s feather dusting she’s really looking for clues. She always just happens to be cleaning houses where a murder happens. Invisible, she mops the kitchen floor while suspects say incriminating things on the phone a few feet away. She eavesdrops, finds bloody knives in the linen cupboard, is careful not to dust the poker, saving prints …
Leon probably killed her with a golf club. That’s how they met, at the Claremont Golf Club. I was scrubbing the bathtub when I heard the creak of the garden gate, a chair scraping on the wooden deck. Someone was in the backyard. Leon! My heart pounded. I couldn’t see through the stained-glass window. I crawled into the bedroom and grabbed the revolver, crawled to the French doors that led to the garden. I peeked out, gun ready, although my hand was shaking so bad I couldn’t have shot it.
It was Alexander. Christ. Old Alexander, sitting in an Adirondack chair. Hi, Al! I called out, and went to put the gun away.
He was holding a clay pot of pink freesia that he kept meaning to bring to Sara. He had just felt like coming over to sit in her garden. I went in and poured him a cup of coffee. Sara had coffee going day and night. And good things to eat. Soups or gumbos, good bread and cheese and pastries. Not like the Winchell’s doughnuts and frozen macaroni dinners Eddie kept around.
Alexander was an English professor. He could drone on for hours, Gerard Manley Hopkins gashing gold vermilion. He and Sara had known each other for forty years, had been young idealistic socialists way back when. He had always been in love with her, would plead with her to marry him. Lorena and I used to beg her to do it. “Come on, Sara … let him take care of you.” He was good. Noble and dependable. But, if a woman says a man is nice it usually means she finds him boring. And, like my mother used to say, “Ever tried being married to a saint?”
And that’s just what Alexander was talking about …
“I was too boring for her, too predictable. I knew this chap was bad news. I only hoped that I would be around when he left, to help pick up the pieces.”
Tears came into his eyes then. “I feel responsible for her death. I knew he had hurt her, would hurt her. I should have interfered some way. All I cared about was my own resentment and jealousy. I am guilty.”
I held his hand and tried to cheer him up, and we talked for a while, remembering Sara.
After he had gone I went in to clean the kitchen. Hey, what if Alexander really was guilty? What if he had come over that night, with the pot of freesia, or to see if she wanted to play Scrabble? Maybe he had looked through the curtains on the French doors, seen Sara and Leon making love. He had waited until after Leon left, out the front door, and had gone in, wild with jealousy, and killed her. He was a suspect, for sure.
The next Tuesday the house wasn’t as messy as usual so I spent the last hour weeding and replanting in the garden. I was in the potting shed when I heard the bells and tambourine. Hare Hare Hare. Sara’s youngest daughter, Rebecca, was dancing and chanting around the swimming pool.
Sara had been upset at first, when she had become a Krishna, but one day we were driving down Telegraph and saw her among a group of them. She looked so beautiful, singing, bobbing around, in her saffron robes. Sara pulled the car over to the curb, just to sit and watch her. She lit a cigarette and smiled. “You know what? She’s safe.”
I tried to talk to Rebecca, get her to sit down and have some herbal tea or something, but she was spinning, spinning like a dervish, moaning away. Then she was jumping and twirling on the diving board, interrupting her chants with violent outbursts. “Evil begets evil!” She raved on about her mother’s smoking and coffee drinking, about her eating red meat, and cheese with retin or something in it. And fornication. She was at the very tip of the diving board now, and every time she hollered “Fornication!” she’d bounce about three feet up into the air.
Suspect number two.
I only cleaned Eddie’s once a week, but invariably at least one person came into the backyard. I’m sure people came in every other day as well. Because that’s how she was, Sara, her heart and doors open to everyone. She helped in big ways, politically, in the community, but in little ways too, anyone who needed her. She always answered her phone, she never locked her doors. She had always been there for me.
One Tuesday, out of the blue, the biggest, worst suspect of all showed up in the backyard. Clarissa. Eddie’s ex-girlfriend. Wow. I don’t think she had ever been near Sara’s house before, she hated her so much. She had tried to get Eddie to leave his mother’s law firm, come live with her in Mendocino and be a full-time writer. She wrote letters to Sara, accusing her of being domineering and possessive, and fought with Eddie all the time about his law career and his mother. Clarissa and I had been friends until finally it came down to choosing between the two women. But not before I heard her say a hundred times, “Oh, how I’d love to murder Sara.” And there she was, standing under the lavender wisteria that covered the gate, chewing on the stem of her dark glasses.
“Hi, Clarissa,” I said.
She was startled. “Hi. I didn’t expect to see anyone. What are you doing here?” (Typical of her … when in doubt, attack.)
“I’m cleaning Eddie’s house.”
“Are you still cleaning houses? That’s sick.”
“I sure hope you don’t talk to your patients like that.” (Clarissa’s a psychiatrist, for Lord’s sake…) I tried hard to think of what questions my cleaning lady detective would ask her. I was at a loss, she was too intimidating. She really was capable de tout. How could I prove it though?
“Where were you the night Sara was killed?” I blurted.
Clarissa laughed. “My dear … are you implying that I am guilty of the crime? No. Too late,” she said as she turned and walked out the gate.
As the weeks went by my list of suspects continued to grow, everyone from judges to policemen to window washers.
The only thing about the window washer was the weapon, the pole he carries around with him, along with his bucket. It was scary, seeing his silhouette through the curtains. A big man, carrying a pole. I had wondered about him for years. He is a homeless young black man who sleeps at night on Oakland buses and sometimes in the lobby of Alta Bates Emergency. During the day he goes from door to door asking people if they want their windows washed. He always has a book with him. Nathaniel Hawthorne. Jim Thompson. Karl Marx. He has a nice voice and dresses very well, tennis sweaters, Ralph Lauren T-shirts.
After Sara paid him for washing windows she’d always give him some god-awful old clothes of Eddie’s. He’d say, Thank you, ma’am, real polite, but I used to be sure he threw them in the garbage on his way out. Maybe she was a symbol or something. A jumpsuit with a broken zipper the last straw?
“Hello, Emory, how are you?”
“Just fine, and you? I saw that Miss Sara’s son was living here now … wondered if he needed his windows washed.”
“No. I’m cleaning for him now, and do the windows too. Why don’t you try at his office, on Prince Street?”
“Good idea. Thanks,” he said. He smiled and left.
Okay, I said to myself. Pull yourself together and cut this suspect business out right now.
I went in and got some coffee, went back to sit in the garden. Oh. The Japanese iris were in bloom. Sara, if only you could see them.
She had called me several times that day, telling me about his threats to her. I was impatient with her about Leon by then … why didn’t she just break up with him? I listened to her and I said things like, “Call the police. Don’t answer your phone.”
When she called why didn’t I say, “Come right on over to my house”? Why didn’t I say, “Sara, pack your bag … Let’s get out of town.”
I have no alibi for the night of the crime.