Eleven

I BACKED AWAY FROM THE GORY REMAINS OF WYNN TELLER.

Down the three steps, out into the rain, where I breathed deeply—once, twice, a dozen times. It didn’t make much of a difference. I held on to an oak tree, the wet ground beneath me shining in the deceptively warm and homey kitchen light.

There were procedures you were supposed to observe. Tell somebody. Notify somebody, but don’t disturb the crime scene. As if I’d dare go in that house. I released the tree and backed off. After two days of obsessively searching, insisting time was running out, it had. There was no need for urgency.

I had to fight a powerful desire to rush home and bury my head under my comforter. The house to the right of the Tellers’ was dark, so I ran to the left and pushed the bell. “Help!” I shouted. I was soaked and scared and toppling toward hysteria. “Help!”

Nobody did. I wheeled around and checked the other side of the street, or what I could see of it in the downpour. A picture window directly across was brightly lit, so I ran, slipping in the middle of the road, soaking through my coat all the way to my underwear.

“Thank God you’re home!” I said when the door opened, even though I couldn’t see anyone.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” I thought for a moment she was a dwarf, because her head poked forward halfway down the door. Then I made out the edge of a wheelchair. “No door to door allowed in this neighborhood,” she snapped. “It’s a law. No soliciting. I saw you—I saw you over there, and now you’re here.” She shook her head so vigorously her glasses slid down her nose. They were steel-rimmed, as was she. From her iron-gray hair to her gun-metal wool dress to the chair itself, she was of a piece, and that piece was pure unyielding metal. “Well?” she said.

I was dripping and shivering at her half-open front door. Poor frightened wheelchair-bound woman, but poor me, too. “May I use your phone?” I asked. “It’s an emergency.”

“Car won’t start? No wonder. That maroon number across the street, isn’t it? You’re too old for that kind of thing. Teenagers drive cars like that.” Then she sighed, slowly and deeply, as if pneumatically lifting the weight of her considerable chest. “Tell me the number and I’ll dial it for you.”

I knew that was good sense. I do it myself when strangers want to use my phone, and this woman was especially vulnerable to crazies; but I was nonetheless shaking and soaking wet and as threatening as a dying flounder. “The police,” I said through chattering teeth. “Call them. They’re needed at the Tellers’.”

“Oh, my Lord!” Her iron ore melted slightly. “Used to be a safe neighborhood. I have nightmares thinking what happens these days.”

My nervous system was shot and my core temperature sinking too quickly for nonessential empathy. To be precise, I couldn’t give a damn about her bad dreams. “Please,” I said.

“Wait a minute,” she interrupted, eyes squinting, “why are you calling if they were robbed? Who are you, anyway?”

“Mother,” a gentle voice said. Its owner was a younger, upright version of the wheelchair-bound woman, with the minerals leached out. “I’ll call,” she said. “But please, what division needs to be alerted?”

“Division?” Her mother coughed a hard-edged laugh. “What are we talking about here? A war?”

“Homicide.” It is difficult to say that word gently.

The daughter looked stricken and suddenly much older than her childish voice and gestures had made me think. She turned and ran deep into the house to phone.

“Tell them I’m waiting in my car,” I called after her. Damp seats would be more hospitable than these front steps. “The Mustang.” Tell ’em to look for a lady in a car that’s too young for her.

“Oh, no. Wait. Wait a second,” the young woman said. It took longer than that, but not much, for her to return. “They’ll be right here, or rather, right there,” her daughter said. “I’m Patsy Benson, and why don’t you come in out of the rain?”

“Patsy!” her mother hissed.

Patsy waved me in.

“Well,” her mother said. “Don’t blame me if we wind up dead, too.” She shook her head. “Just don’t drip all over my clean floors, you understand? I’ll make tea so you don’t get sick and sue me. I know how people are these days.” She swiveled around and wheeled off.

“Please don’t mind Mother,” Patsy said. “When she’s nervous, she’s gruff, and she’s nervous a lot. Runs in the family, I guess.” She took my dripping raincoat and waved me toward a sofa. I tried to remember where I’d heard her name before.

Patsy headed for a weathered wing chair that faced the front window. She turned it so that it more or less aimed toward me. “I’ll keep an eye out,” she said. It seemed obvious that her eye was constantly out, although what there was to watch on a dull suburban street escaped me.

Making conversation under these circumstances is not easy. I smiled to be sociable, but couldn’t think of anything except Wynn Teller’s destroyed face, my own pathetic rescue fantasies, and the terrible way Lydia Teller had solved her dilemma herself.

“Who is it?” Patsy whispered after a long silence.

“Mr. Teller.”

The brown eyes behind her round glasses widened. “I was hoping it was one of their guests. Nobody I know. Oh, why is it always the good ones? He devoted his life to helping children.” She pulled off the glasses and wiped at her eyes.

“Always kept it so pretty over there, too, shaping those shrubs so beautifully. I’ll miss his flower beds…he’d always wave to me.”

She stood up and clasped her hands, then sat back down. “Poor Lydia, too! What will she do? They were so close—a perfect marriage, everybody said. He even came home for lunch every day.” Then she pulled back, looking even more alarmed. “Oh, heavens, I didn’t even think—is she all right? Lydia?”

“She wasn’t there.” Actually, I didn’t know for certain whether that was so. What was I assuming—that if she were still there, having heard me call, she’d have stepped over the corpse with a cheery “Can I help you? I’ve just murdered my husband and it’s a bit of a mess, but give me a sec.”

Was Lydia alive, or had I just seen half of another MAN KILLS WIFE AND SELF headline? “What guests did you mean?” I asked. “Were the Tellers entertaining?”

“I thought they might be.”

“Who was there?” Hordes, I wanted her to say. All carrying guns.

Patsy put her glasses back on. “People. I only saw their backs, and the rain, you know. Coats, umbrellas.” She shrugged.

“But a lot of them?”

“Half a dozen, give or take. One or two at a time.”

Her mother wheeled in. “Tea’s ready. Come into the kitchen, and don’t listen to Patsy. How could you see anything, daughter, while you were washing dishes back in the kitchen?”

“Before then, Mama.” Her voice and attitude lost two decades when she talked to her mother. “And after. You know.”

“Don’t I ever,” her mother muttered.

I placed them. The adventure reader who never left home, and her mother. I controlled an urge to tell Patsy there were phobia programs that could help her. From now on I intended to keep a lid on all do-good urges. I stood to follow the two women into the kitchen, but lights flashed silently outside. The police were not using their sirens. “I’d better go over,” I said.

“You’ll catch your death!” Mrs. Benson snapped.

An ill-chosen idiom given the circumstances, but I acknowledged her kindness and took my leave. The best thing I could do for my health, both mental and physical, was get this over with.

There is an amazing similarity between policemen. Like springer spaniels, or guppies, they are a breed with only minor variegations and distinguishing marks. The species specific trait I detected for genus suburbia was that they seemed rather more shocked by the fact of murder than the exhausted and jaded city police have become. It endeared them to me. And then it made me wonder, and worry, whether they might have reacted differently than Mackenzie had if I’d brought them the book.

A plump and businesslike policeperson looked as reluctant to let me in from the rain as Patsy’s mother had been, but she eventually took me to a covered patio and through its sliding glass doors into the edge of a family room, where we huddled in relative dryness and warmth. We couldn’t speak for the teeth chattering and for the deafening refrain of “Everything’s Up to Date in Kansas City.” I saw the phonograph player, its arm up so that a record would repeat through eternity. I also saw more disarray and upheaval than I would have believed possible of the woman who cared for the pristine living room I’d glimpsed earlier.

My policeperson told me to stay right there and shouted some questions and suggestions to a cohort who came in from the center of activity in the kitchen and turned off the record player. “Okay, now,” she said. “From the beginning.”

“I was looking for Lydia Teller,” I said. “Is she okay? She’s not, she wasn’t also…was she?”

The policewoman shook her head. “You’re her friend, then?”

“More an acquaintance.” I wasn’t going to incriminate Lydia with talk of the underlined book.

“Do you know her present whereabouts?”

“No. I was looking for her here.”

I retold each step of my arrival and discovery. Take away the book and the dreadful pressure it had produced, my arrival wasn’t much of a story when you got right down to it.

No, I said, I hadn’t seen, let alone removed, a murder weapon.

The questions continued, but they were not the ones I wanted answered. Like where was Lydia, and who were the people Patsy’d seen coming and going tonight?

My mind backed up and bumped into Neil Quigley, wild-eyed in the office, stumbling through an unnecessary explanation of why he couldn’t have picked up his materials earlier, forcing it on me, although I wouldn’t have even wondered if I hadn’t had such a guilty conscience and if he had simply kept quiet. That same Neil who, earlier in the day, had sworn he’d get Teller.

I had more secrets than I could handle, so I said only what I absolutely knew, which was nothing. And I said it several more times. Yes, I had met Dr. Teller twice, but only in a professional capacity. I’d applied for a tutoring position.

Soon as I said that, I realized that the death of the man who’d interviewed me probably meant I could kiss my island fantasy good-bye. My sad sigh seemed to convince the law that I was not a warped killer who’d stayed to call the cops.

“You didn’t see anybody leaving?” the policewoman asked again.

I shook my head. “They must have left before I got here. It’s obvious some outsider was here,” I said.

The room was the before picture of the living room. Similarly comfortable furnishings, but neither cool nor fastidious. There were family photos—I recognized several of Hugh, and another of Lydia’s cameo face above a high-necked Victorian blouse. I wondered if she’d adopted a covered-up style because she liked it or because she needed it. There were bookshelves with ornaments and photo albums along with the encyclopedia and assorted volumes.

But the lived-in ambience had been pushed a bit far. Record albums littered the sofa cushions, photos were strewn around, books tossed helter-skelter on tables, chairs, and the floor, drawers open, papers mussed on a desk in the corner.

I have a certain expertise with slovenliness. Enough, at least, to know that Lydia didn’t qualify, even from where I stood at the back edge of the room. “It’s not what a messy person would do,” I said. “No glasses making rings on furniture, no dishes with food remnants, no discarded shoes or clothing. None of the typical droppings that…” That I have been known to leave around, but I didn’t say so.

“Right!” she said, with visible relief. I recognized another guilt-ridden woman who didn’t always hang towels back up or wash dishes immediately. “Although, of course, she could have done it herself, tidily, like it is, trying to make it look like a break-in.”

“Why would she do that?”

The policewoman squinted at me, as if I’d gone out of focus.

“No,” I said. “A cover-up? I can’t imagine Lydia Teller doing that.” And as I said it, I realized how peculiar it was, because what I had truly imagined was Lydia Teller herself. The only things I hadn’t made up were an underlined book, a few photos, and random comments by her acquaintances. I suddenly felt frightened and wanted to go home.

“Can you think where’d she go? Who’d take her?” The policewoman’s expression was cryptic.

“Take her? Why?”

“There are two cars in the garage. Hers and his, unless they had more than one apiece. Doesn’t seem a night for a long wander on foot, does it? We’ll check the cab companies, of course, but I thought maybe you’d have an idea.”

I shook my head. I’d done that so often tonight, I felt like one of those plastic dolls with springs for necks.

Shortly thereafter, I was dismissed, leaving behind my phone number, address, and employer’s name.

There have not been many nights in my life when home seemed more appealing. I nearly dived into my car. I wanted out, and away, and done with it. I had to work hard not to floor it, but I wanted no further business with the police.

My bed and comforter beckoned. If my luck changed, there’d even be a clunker on the late show, a movie whose plot hinged on a quaint old-fashioned defunct morality. Where whether Rock Hudson or Sinatra would seduce an innocent rather than marry her was the single burning issue—and a wedding was the happy ending. Where not even the concept of wife-beating existed. Give me undistilled, one-hundred-percent-proof genuine make-believe, please.

I drove carefully, letting my muscles untwist and unknot one by one. And then, directly behind my right ear, so close I felt its breath and heat, a voice said, “Don’t scream.”

I did anyway.