I scheduled an appointment with Joshua Jennings’ lawyer in New Haven late the next afternoon. Off Chapel Street, near the Yale Art Gallery, the nineteenth-century brownstone was a curious anachronism nestled in among a fast food restaurant, a frame-it-yourself art store, a faded luncheonette, a discount furniture store, and the milling hordes of laughing hip-hop kids who were hanging out on the bus benches under the high leaded-glass windows. Winslow, Winslow, Winslow, and Clay, Inc. I felt sorry for Clay.
I didn’t need to feel sorry for Clay. William Clay, Esq., I discovered, was the only surviving senior partner. Clay, I realized, would soon be joining them. An old, leathery man, small and wiry, creaky as old wood, sort of like Joshua Jennings himself, but in an expensive suit, with a calculated haircut for the four strands that insisted on inhabiting his crusty scalp.
He was granting me ten-to-fifteen off-the-clock minutes, which must have cost him in the range of two thousand in billing time. So I calculated. He was doing it because he’d once liked Joshua. Those were his words: “I once liked him.”
He nudged a file toward me. I took it.
“I met the niece once,” he informed me. “A looker.”
I tried to imagine the Mary Powell I spoke to in New York as a looker, but the only images I created were of a scared young woman. To the ninety-year-old Clay, with his Coke-glass eyeglasses, halitosis breath, and liver spots on his wrists as big as silver dollars—who knows what constituted a looker?
“A nervous woman,” he told me. “But smiling. But jittery.”
“Why was she here?”
“She said she had friends in New Haven. I had spoken with her by phone—she called from New York about Joshua—and then she was in Clinton with him. Then he was sick and in New York. It was hard to follow her movements.”
“Did you see her again?”
“I spoke with her once on the phone. Then she sent a copy of the death certificate and a brief note he’d written to me before his death. It’s there. A copy.”
I leafed through the thin folder and read the death certificate. Fairly standard, dated September 15 in New York City. I started to jot down the doctor’s signature.
“The folder is yours.” He looked annoyed. I thanked him. Inside was a photocopy of the note Joshua wrote, a few painfully written, scribbled sentences saying hello, dated a week before his death. There was also a three-line typed note from Mary Powell that listed the legal documents enclosed.
“Nothing funny about the will?”
“Funny?” He didn’t like the word. “It was years old, of course. I reviewed it, I remember, but an associate handled it. I spoke with him, and it was pro forma, actually. Old will on file, no codicils of any sort, fairly standard, no bequests other than to the school and college. All charity. A comfortable man. No property other than bank assets.”
“But he left nothing to his niece.”
“Nothing unusual there. I was told that he had only known her a short time. He’d located her online. That bothered him, of course. Some genealogical site. A distant relative. Who knows? She wasn’t happy he found her—wanted to write an end to the whole business, she said.” He locked eyes with mine. “She admitted that he gave her ten thousand dollars, a gift.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“If she told me that, I imagine the amount was higher. But the will was ironclad. She’d have an uphill battle contesting, a point I made to her—in case she harbored such an idea.”
“Had she mentioned the will?”
“She told me on the phone that she didn’t want money from him—didn’t expect it, in fact. I gather she found him a nuisance.” The old man smiled. “She did say something amusing, I thought. ‘Lovers take care of me,’ she said, and I thought that a most frank and unnecessary admission.”
“She didn’t mention any lovers’ names?”
He seemed surprised. “How would one respond to such a line, Mr. Lam?”
I could think of a dozen, but maybe I come out of a different time and place.
He raised his hand. The conference was over. We shook hands. “Intriguing,” he said to my back.
“What is?” I looked back.
“Alive, Joshua was an uneventful man. Joshua has only become interesting after his death. It’s what I hope for my own life.”
I walked out. How would you respond to such a line?
***
Leaving his office, I walked into darkness and bitter cold. The New Haven streets were filled with people headed home, huddled against the chill wind. I enjoyed being in the city, loving the aimless wandering, watching a storekeeper fighting with some resistant Christmas lights that refused to stay put. It wasn’t even Thanksgiving yet. Americans, I discovered, like to rush the holidays, frantic to get them over with. Although I celebrated no holidays myself, Liz and I—in our fairy-tale honeymoon period in New York—had celebrated Christmas with a little real tree we bought on Carmine Street in the village, and Hanukkah candles. A mish-mash. She was (not is) Jewish. I was (not am) Buddhist. Somehow, though, we both remain Jewish and Buddhist. And oddly Christian. Happy holidays. Shalom. Feliz Navidad.
…like a Buddha in a dying lotus blossom
…like honey blanketed by swarms of bees…
I’d always hunger for order and balance. For calm, serenity.
I glared at the storekeeper. He kept fighting with the strings of lights.
I lingered in a deli over pastrami on rye and a Sam Adams ale.
Back on the street I found myself exhilarated. Yale students streamed through upper Chapel Street, bumping into one another, laughing, their faces bright against the cold. I recalled nights back at Columbia, jostling with buddies down Broadway toward Tom’s Restaurant. We didn’t give a damn about anything. So I wandered now. By the time I decided to head back to Hartford, it was after ten o’clock. My car sat on a side street, a ticket slapped on the windshield.
I fumbled for my keys, my fingers numb against the cold lock. Across the street I heard forced laughter, a man’s reedy high-pitched warble in counterpoint to another man’s deeper, more aggressive boom, and I suddenly realized that the laughter was familiar. Turning, I stared through the darkness, past the faltering neon of a kosher Chinese restaurant, past the art-deco neon of a corner bar. There were two men standing in front of the bar, and they were laughing.
I watched quietly as they moved off the sidewalk, coming closer to where I stood. The man nearest me, I realized, was Davey Corcoran. And he was gripping the sleeve of Ken Rodman, my upstairs neighbor.
I looked past them, back toward the bar, and through the half-lit window, I saw the press of dancing men. I may be slow when it comes to such things, but I did live in New York. I know a gay bar when I stumble onto one.
Davey and Ken were crossing the street. The laughter had stopped but not the intimacy. I wrestled with the scene—there was no way I could have connected Ken with Davey. Ken, freshly divorced and finding his way alone in the apartment above mine, seemed a placid insurance executive. Marta, Davey’s aunt, had cleaned his apartment.
And Davey, that bitter isolato—or so I thought—locked away in that messy, littered apartment, dressed in his Mayberry RFD flannels and hayseed mentality, was just a guy with a smart-alecky mouth. He was a lonely reader of books. Here he was, still dressed in flannel, with a camouflage vest over it, and jeans and boots. The way he always dressed, I guess. But now he was far from home—and in the company of men, as they said in Victorian novels. Sort of.
“Davey,” I yelled. I regretted it immediately, but I knew he’d spot me within seconds.
He stopped in his tracks, literally locked in place, and stared across the street. When he saw me, his smile faded, his laughter ended.
Worse, he shuddered as though chilled, and looked left and right. He threw his large head back, almost melodramatically, as a character would in an old tearjerker, then bolted. That’s the only word to describe his actions—he bolted. He ran, bouncing off the dark walls, careening around a couple of late-night partygoers leaving the Chinese restaurant, and then disappeared around the corner.
“Davey,” I yelled to the empty black corner.
When I looked back at Ken, he was standing with his arms by his side, staring at me. But even across the street, under the purple haze of streetlight and November wind and neon garishness, even under that artificial light, I could see he was grinning.
***
The next evening, unplanned, my friends showed up at my apartment. First Liz stopped in. I’d spoken to her earlier about Marta because she was wondering what was going on, and she told me she was a few streets over.
“Come on up,” I told her.
Though she hesitated, she agreed, and promised to bring take-out from Triple Star. We’d finished our moo shu pork and sesame chicken when Jimmy dropped in, and Gracie soon followed. Jimmy was dressed in a bright sky-blue sweater with giant white cobwebs covering it. He looked ready for a ski slope. He made a grumpy sound when I told him this, and Gracie giggled, saying that Jimmy’s only exercise was carrying a box of cigars from the car into his house. He beamed at her. She was, of course, the only person he ever grinned at. I mean, he smiled and charmed, and he laughed. But when Gracie was around—tonight she’d dipped herself into some potent hyacinth perfume and decked herself out in a go-to-bingo pants suit with sequins and sparkles—the two of them acted out their light and innocent romance, if that was what it was.
Liz and I served drinks—for a moment I experienced déjà vu, the two of us in our Manhattan apartment entertaining friends. We relaxed. Within minutes there was a knock and Hank wandered in. He’d shaved his head. He long sported a close-cropped haircut, but now he looked…bald.
“Christ, a skinhead,” Jimmy sang out.
“This is how guys look now,” Hank protested.
“I like it,” Liz told him.
Then, just as I was remembering I had a batch of term papers I had to grade, my Criminal Justice students stumbling through their case-study reports, Vinnie and Marcie dropped in. They were coming home from dinner, driving by, saw Hank parking his car, and spotted the lights on in my apartment. Everyone was talking at once, everyone was laughing. I smiled at everyone, overjoyed, but I was tired.
Jimmy said he missed the days when he could have a cigarette with his beer—and I remembered Willie Do’s declaration in his own apartment. Gracie teased Hank. She’d taken a real shine to him—“Such a cute boy, and quick”—and loved goofing on him. Liz gave him a bear hug. Hank always looked embarrassed by the attention, but I could tell he was pleased. Since Hank and I became buddies, he’d slowly worked his way into all my friends’ affections. Now, with all my friends around me, Gracie kidded Hank about his shaved head (“a skinny Buddha”) and his shadowing of my investigation.
“I want to learn from the master,” Hank declared grandly.
Jimmy interrupted, “I’m not taking on any pupils, Hank.”
We laughed.
There was a sudden rapping at the door, and we all jumped, guilty of something. It gave me pause. After all, my closest friends were at that moment huddled in the room with me, and the hour was late. Who? The police? I thought of Karen, but I knew she’d never drop in. Nobody came to the door around midnight. Everyone must have been thinking the same thing because we became quiet, very quiet.
I opened it. Ken Rodman looked sheepish and uncomfortable. He had on an overcoat, so I assumed he was coming home from somewhere. His face looked stiff with cold.
He looked over my shoulder at the crowd, all of them staring back with expressions ranging from accusation to curiosity.
“I didn’t know you had company,” he said.
That surprised me. We were raucous enough to warrant eviction—had the landlady herself not been a major culprit in the noise.
“Come in.”
“Oh, no.” He backed off. “I wanted to talk to you about last night.”
“I want to talk to you.”
“I have something to tell you.” He mouthed the word Davey silently. “I should have told you before.” But he was already backing off, fast now. “Later on. I’ll catch you later.” He backed off, headed up the stairwell.
I stared at my friends. An obligatory moment of silence, then the frantic Babel of insistent voices rose in awesome crescendo.
“I have nothing to say.” I relished the moment.
They pushed into me, trapping me, all of them believing they’d seen a pivotal moment in the Case.
“I have nothing to say,” I repeated.
No one believed me. Then, smiling, I quoted Buddha: “‘Look for sand in your rice. Look for rice in your sand.’”
Everyone groaned.