No one answered at Richard Wilcox’s apartment. I phoned throughout the day. Late in the afternoon, when I’d come to expect the long, perpetual ringing, a woman picked up the phone on the first ring, announced in a loud, booming voice that she was Richard’s housekeeper, and I became immediately confused. I immediately thought of Marta meticulously dusting that furniture, Marta whisking that vacuum across threadbare orientals.
This woman was young, with a singsong Jamaican accent, a deep voice, impatient. “Is not here.” She had work to do, and I was interrupting. The man “that live here,” she informed me, was at John Dempsey Hospital at the other end of town.
No, she knew nothing about his condition. “Is not my business.”
She used no subjects in her sentences, which gave her speech an incomplete sensation, like hang-gliding through the English language. The service dropped her off and picked her up, she said. She’d only met him twice.
I visited Richard in his private room at the hospital. Tucked into crinkly white linen and enclosed in antiseptic curtains, he looked like an unwilling specimen in some lab experiment, curled up and frightened. Surprised to see me walking in, he squinted, trying to focus.
“Well, at least you’re not the grim reaper.”
I smiled. “Not in my job description.”
He looked tired, and for a moment he nodded off. His eyes closed, his head dipped to his flabby chin. But then he opened his eyes, wide as coins, and shook his head.
“Don’t tell me you’re still pursuing that phantom. Murder, he didn’t write.”
“Afraid so.”
“Any conclusions?”
“None.”
He chuckled a little. “As I suspected.”
“How are you feeling?”
“I’m dying. Simple as that. Declarative statement with all the force it is intended to have. Death is a blanket prognosis.” His fingers twitched against his cheek. “A week, a month. I lived my life slowly, deliberately, conservatively. Never any speed. How ironic that the final cancer is raging through me as if my body is, well, a speedway. All deliberate speed.”
“I’m sorry.”
He interlocked his fingers, straightened his spine. “How can I help you?”
“You were the last person to talk to Marta—that we know of. Over the phone, at least.”
“And I’ve told you…”
“I’d like to review it one more time.”
“Why?”
“You may remember something.”
He waved his hand in the air. “Well, I have nothing but time now.”
“Thank you.” I sat down in the chair next to his bed. “Are you sure you don’t mind? I don’t want to disturb…”
He cut me off. “I actually welcome a visitor.” A thin grin. “Even you.”
“Thank you. I’m trying to construct a picture of Marta’s last day. You said at first she said she wouldn’t visit, then she changed her mind.”
He shook his head. “We’ll never know, will we?”
“She came to a decision about something.”
“Why?”
“Because originally she was coming to tell you something.”
“Young man, she committed suicide. She asked me to bury her.”
“But isn’t that odd?”
“She was really drunk.”
“Did she mention Joshua?”
“No, why?”
“She spent a lot of time tracking him down—only to have him die.”
Wilcox smiled. “When Joshua died, I thought it was over. At last she could finally believe that he was never coming back to that house.”
“No mention of his name?”
“No.”
“He became her only obsession. Can you remember anything else?”
“No. I can’t.”
“What did you say when she asked you to bury her?”
“I was silent. After all, she was tipsy. And I knew that she visited her husband’s grave all the time—placed flowers there.” He shook his head. “I sort of resented her request that I be in charge of her burial. But what does one say to that? Of course? Can you bury me? Probably alongside Joshua’s body. The poet all over again—I died for beauty but was scarce adjusted in the tomb when one who died for truth was laid in an adjoining room. A paraphrase, of course.” He snickered. “I still remember.”
“I doubt if we’re talking about truth and beauty here.”
“How crass!”
“I’m sorry.”
“The apology of the unrepentant.”
“So she said those words and headed to your place but never got there. She kills herself at the bridge.”
I was talking but Richard was not looking at me. Something had happened. I was sure of it. His eyes closed tight, his lips quivered, I thought he would pass out. I was ready to call a nurse when he opened his eyes, and what I saw there was raw fright. He raised a slender hand to his temple, supporting his head, and closed his eyes again.
“What is it? You okay?”
He nodded.
“You want a nurse?”
“No, no.”
I waited.
“I remembered something I said.”
“To Marta?”
He mumbled, “I realized some awful truth. My own words. I told her—‘No, no, no. Stop this nonsense.’ I didn’t listen to her. I was the one who murdered her. Yes, me. My words.”
“Tell me.”
He shook his head. “Why? It’s over. I murdered her. My silly, happy mouth killed her.”
“Tell me.”
But he was shaking his head, closing me out. “I take the blame. I am the one who murdered her. I killed her.”
I kept probing him but the conversation was over. His head rested against his chest. I stood up to leave, though he didn’t look up. Something had happened and I hadn’t a clue. In these few minutes he remembered words he spoke that—what? Words that led not to the suicide that he had believed in, demanded I believe in, but, instead, to the one thing he absolutely refused to accept—murder. His words: I was the one who murdered her. He didn’t say—my words drove her to suicide. Of course, I realized, he could be assuming blame for not understanding something, and called himself her murderer. That was possible. But I left with the words echoing in my head: I was the one who murdered her.