An Occasional Hell Read online

  CHAPTER TEN

  There is a song in your ear like the plucking of a guitar string, a high metal whine, short, stiff, a single note repeating. Is it outside or inside your head? It is inside, somewhere behind the eyes. It reverberates in the throat, choking, a tight string, too tight, about to break.

  It is an insistent song, trying to tell you something, but you do not understand and you would like it to stop. Maybe the ritual will help. It is time for the ritual again and even the house seems to know it, the house is quiet, dim and hushed. The bedroom is your altar. Here you unwind the plastic tubing, carefully, in no hurry. You feel it with your thumb, press out the crimps. You unroll the empty plastic bag, sticky with your perspiration. Make sure the clamp is secure. Lay the bag out at your feet. Double-check everything. Free the clamp near the catheter. And watch the gravity flow begin.

  The plastic tubing is transparent and so is the bag, and the dialysis solution that drains from you as you sit on the bed is clear too, innocuous looking, pure, and yet it is full of impurities. During the next twenty minutes you do not resent your plastic appendages. They are a part of your viscera exposed and you understand their workings better than you understand the spleen and appendix, the stomach and lungs and the heart. For a while now you are a man turned inside-out and the design of the convolutions becomes a tiny bit clearer.

  You know that the dialysate is filled with toxins and that if you hold onto these poisons they will affect the way you feel and the way you think. So now as you watch them draining away, as pure as filtered water, you imagine your body growing lighter, stronger, your head clearing. You feel as if you have been enveloped in a fog but now the fog is draining away. It speaks to you in a clear strong whisper only you can hear. This fog is truth or the illusion of it and if you pay very close attention it might tell you something you did not know you knew.

  Rodney Gillen was aware of and perhaps even condoned his wife’s affair, says the fog. It aroused him to think of his wife with another man. Also, he would benefit from any generosity bestowed upon his wife, especially if it came in the form of cash or gifts redeemable for cash. His is an unpredictable personality, however; he might encourage adultery, yet in the next instant fly into a jealous rage.

  Up to this point, says the fog, the explanation fits or can be made to fit. But this is an early point and you must look farther.

  Where would Rodney get his hands on a musket? Not difficult, says the fog. Working reproductions are available at department stores, hardware stores, by mail order catalogue. So then, not how but why? His motive for such acquisition? Two possibilities: A. having evidenced no intrinsic interest in the weaponry himself, he acquired it so as to sell to a collector; or, B. he acquired it so as to perpetrate an act of high irony, i.e. the murder of an individual enthralled with the very instrument that would destroy him.

  If the answer is A, why would Rodney have delivered the weapon primed and loaded? Would he command the expertise to accomplish these tasks? And why would Catanzaro be inclined to buy a reproduction he could more easily have obtained firsthand? Could the weapon possibly be authentic? How would someone like Rodney Gillen come into possession of such a valuable firearm? And would it, if authentic, still be fireable? Why jeopardize its monetary value, why risk personal injury, by firing a weapon that might blow up in your hands?

  All of which, says the fog, makes possibility A unlikely.

  By default then, we are left with possibility B. Premeditated murder. After which Rodney abducts or escapes with Jeri Gillen. Why then send a cat’s head to the victim’s wife? More bizarre kicks? Risk capture, arrest, imprisonment and possible electrocution for the thrill of terrorizing an already devastated woman?

  Possible, says the fog. But not likely. In the end, unacceptable.

  Explanation, says the fog: Rodney Gillen did not murder Alex Catanzaro. Or, Rodney Gillen did murder Catanzaro but is not responsible for the cat’s head.

  And if Rodney Gillen is not the murderer, who? Elizabeth Catanzaro? Jeri Gillen? An unknown third party?

  If Elizabeth, why hire an investigator to look for the truth? Because you feel certain he won’t find the truth, due to incompetence or infatuation or whatever other shortcomings sent him running for cover in the ivy tower? Possible, says the fog.

  But unacceptable, says the man.

  If the murderer is Jeri Gillen, why would she have brought the affair to an end? Because the thrill was gone. Joyride over. Because Alex himself was planning to end it. Okay, says the fog. Any of the above is acceptable.

  But why would Jeri flee the scene leaving her clothes, purse, even her shoes behind, making it look as if she too were a victim, her husband the most logical suspect? Obviously, if she can masquerade as victim, she won’t be pursued as suspect. As for casting suspicion on her husband: accidental, a last-minute screw-up. She would have had no foreknowledge of Elizabeth’s incriminating call to Rodney. Only after the murder, or too late to stop it, would Rodney realize that he had suddenly been cast as primary suspect, and would therefore disappear along with his wife.

  Plausible, says the fog, but weak. Jeri’s motivation for the crime is insufficient. She murders her lover because she has grown bored with him?

  Her opportunity is doubtful as well. Somehow she acquires a musket, keeps it secreted or at least conceals its intended purpose until such time as she can prime and load it and aim it at Catanzaro’s head? When there is nothing material to be gained by such action?

  Let’s suppose this, says the fog. Alex Catanzaro already has the weapon in the car. The latest addition to his collection. Forget for a moment the fatuity of actually firing such a collectible; for some not yet conceivable reason Alex prepares the weapon and hands it to Jeri as she stands outside the car. She has been naked ouside the car on other occasions, so her modesty or lack of it is not a consideration here, not a problem. She is standing on the passenger side of the car, holding the loaded weapon. She starts playing around. Teasing. Alex cautions her to be careful, a gun is not a toy. He lies prostrate on the seat (why?), then lifts his head to look at her. The gun goes off. Accident. Jeri, in a state of shock, still clutching the weapon, wanders away. No; in that condition, dazed, somebody would have encountered her. No, when she fled she did so purposefully; she had enough sense to keep out of sight.

  But if she had enough sense for that, why not sense enough to get dressed? Or to conceal Alex’s body? Get in the car and drive away? Why take neither her money nor his, why leave her purse spilled in the dirt as if it had been ripped from her hand?

  The tube is empty now, the bag full. The fog waits, breathless, pulse throbbing in the catheter. Clamp off the bag, put aside. Attach a new bag, this one full of dialysate, sugar-sweetened blood cleanser. Elevate; free the clamp; fill the abdominal cavity with this new fog now, purer, wanting pollution.

  Why does Ernest DeWalt’s phone number appear a half dozen times in Catanzaro’s papers?

  Why do the Jewetts’ claim to have heard no gunshot on the morning of the murder? And, more significantly, how could they have not been aware that for a year and a half their inlet was being used as a lowrent rendezvous?

  And why, just eight hours ago, did Clifford Jewett attempt to avoid being seen on his own property?

  The new bag is empty now, the peritoneal cavity full. The fog is silent. The fog is truth but sometimes even the truth does not know. You clamp the catheter and then bind yourself with tube and bag and your movements seem dreamlike. Physically you feel okay and a certain clarity of purpose has returned to you, but you are slow to finish up and somewhat reluctant to quit the room. You know what awaits outside. You have a bag of poison to flush and even this simple act holds you longer than it should. But the delay is all part of the process of reassembly, the putting-together of a man appropriate for the day. You have been in the fog and it is never an easy place to leave.

  DeWalt arrived at the Catanzaro home at four-thirty in the afternoon. He had come early, he told himself, be
cause there was work to do in Alex’s study. The sun, lingering just above the treetops, was as orange as the heart of a gas flame, the sky a scalding blue. In the trees behind the field, crows had gathered, were calling noisily.

  DeWalt, as he stepped from the car, found their cries in the distance and felt somehow reassured. As a boy when he had stayed at his uncle’s farm he would awaken at first light to a similar chorus of caws and shrieks. Years later, after sitting up all night in a car, trying with camera and binoculars to catch people in the act of temporarily warding off their own emptiness, the sunset would be his morning, first light of a new clandestine day.

  And now, with those two elements combined here, the sunset and the crows, he felt as if something new was starting for him. It was a vague kind of premonition; and probably, he told himself, illusory. Deceptive fragment of memory. Juxtaposition of old hope on a new landscape, a self-enticement, self-delusion: this notion that any moment for a middle-aged man could be the beginning of something rather than its end.

  Even so, DeWalt, what harm does it do to admire the sun hanging bright and swollen above the trees?

  Even a sunset is an illusion, DeWalt. Feeling safe is an illusion. Feeling somehow joined to another person’s life. Feeling that a virtuous life will make a difference. That someday the pain will stop.

  Yes, of course, even a sunset. Sunset, sunrise, floating fragments of memory, all of it. But if you know this and do not accede to the fraud, don’t be taken in by it, there is still the possibility of beauty or pleasure. You can enjoy the many illusions of life but you must never place any value in them.

  Yes, even a good deadbolt lock can be a thing of beauty, he thought. There was a new one on the back door. And yet this door stood open, open to him and the air and whatever else came along. Through the gray mesh of the screen door he could see into the kitchen. Elizabeth was at the sink, water running from the faucet as she rinsed a handful of broad red-tinged lettuce leaves from the garden. She was humming softly, sipping occasionally from a glass of white wine. He thought she looked as good from that angle as she did from the front, her profiled face pleasantly angular, jawline neither too fleshy nor taut, firm but with a softness, a womanness that made him not want to go inside just yet.

  She was dressed in baggy green chinos and moccasins and a silky white blouse; half practicality and comfort, half femininity. He imagined that if he were close enough he would smell apricots in her hair. Music played softly in another room, something airy, almost ephemeral, a single flute, the tinkling of a glass celesta, a delicate breeze of violin.

  Finally he tapped on the metal doorframe. Softly, yet still he startled her. When she turned he was surprised to see the glisten of her eyes, lashes jeweled with tears.

  But why should that surprise you, DeWalt?

  She brushed the tears aside with the knuckle of a finger. “Come on in, I’ve just started the salad.”

  Before he stepped inside he tapped the wooden door. “This is a good lock,” he said.

  “There’s one on the front door too.”

  “You should use them.”

  She, tending to the lettuce again, now rewashing the leaves one at a time, said, “The security system will be installed tomorrow.”

  “You get things done fast.”

  “I’ve got connections,” she said, and smiled. Then, half-turning, “I’m having a glass of wine. Can I get you one?”

  “No thanks.”

  “How about a beer? Whiskey? Vodka?”

  “I don’t drink,” he said. It sounded too abrupt; sanctimonious. “I used to drink. Too much, in fact. So now I don’t drink at all.”

  She picked up her glass of wine and looked at it.

  “Don’t stop on my account,” he told her.

  “Are you sure? Because I don’t mind. I mean if it makes it easier for you. This is my second glass anyway.”

  “It doesn’t bother me a bit. Enjoy your wine.”

  Before being shot he had relied heavily on alcohol and he had learned how to sustain over several hours that harmonious and bouyant numbness that precedes drunkenness, how to pace consumption so that the buzz of optimism did not drop away into despair until he was ready for sleep. It had been necessary in his line of work to find an acceptable narcotic. Alcohol softened the focus so that what he viewed nightly through his telephoto lens was not so startling nor ugly and in the cumulative not as dismaying as it might have been to a perfectly sober and reasonable man. The only other panacea to come close to it was sex with somebody he truly liked. He had made frequent use of that remedy too but the problem with sex was that the cure lasted only until your feet hit the floor. Sex was not a portable cure. You could not always engage in it spontaneously or without fear, suspicion, guilt, or remorse. A hangover was its own penitence but there was no penance for inappropriate sex. Still, he had relied upon both alcohol and sex and now both medicines were denied him and he had not yet found a reliable substitute.

  All he had found were various ways to lie about his need for the medicines. It sometimes surprised him that a man who valued truth so highly could lie so often and efficiently. He tried to limit himself to lies of omission, but this too was not always practical.

  Elizabeth Catanzaro took another small sip of wine and then set the glass on the sink. She rinsed the last of the lettuce leaves, shook the water off and then laid them on a paper towel. “I’m afraid dinner won’t be ready for awhile yet,” she told him. “I didn’t know exactly what time you’d be coming. I planned for around six.”

  “That’s fine,” he said. “I have a little work to do first anyway.”

  She nodded. “It’s stuffed roasted chicken with garlic and thyme. Plus just about everything I could get from the garden. Do you like sliced tomatoes with mozzarella and basil?”

  “You grow mozzarella too?”

  “You don’t grow mozzarella, city boy; you make it.”

  “And you make your own?”

  “As a matter of fact,” she said, “no.”

  He smiled, watching as she dried her hands on a dish towel, enjoying just this, the sight of her, the sunwarm kitchen and its odors, fruity wine and greenery and the sweet distant melody of an unfamiliar song. He watched too long probably, watched in a way that did not see until finally he realized that she was no longer holding the dish towel, it lay folded on the counter, and Elizabeth was standing there not quite looking at him but waiting for him to get on with it, to move or speak, do something to erase the moronic glaze from his eyes.

  “What kind of work do you need to do?” she asked.

  And he came quickly back, out of that region of unthought which you can never get to if you try. He said, “I’d like to take another look at Alex’s papers. If that’s okay with you.”

  She turned to the cupboard, opened the door and, after reaching behind the spice rack, produced a key. “Do you think the police might have overlooked something?”

  He stepped forward to take the key from her hand. “They’re working under a different set of assumptions than I am.”

  She nodded, said nothing more, told him with this silence that she understood the implication. She went back to her glass of wine and sipped from it as she faced the sink. He bounced the key in his hand.

  “They’re small this year,” she said.

  He did not understand, but waited.

  From the bottom of the sink she lifted a handful of fingersize carrots. She turned on the cold water and held the carrots under the stream.

  “It’s been so dry this summer. If we don’t get another good rain soon, the melons and pumpkins won’t be any good. The kids will have to buy their jack-o-lantern pumpkins at a store.”

  He remembered one thorough rain of the summer, only one. And not a good one, but a drenching, a washing away of tracks, of clues, a submersion of bodies.

  He said, “You put a lot of time into that garden, don’t you?”

  “It’s something to do,” she said.

  “It’s more
than that.”

  She smiled faintly, turning the carrots back and forth in her hands under the splashing water, the carrots no bigger than a child’s thumb. “The first summer we lived here,” she said, “I didn’t do a garden. I went to lunch everyday with all my new friends from the university. Played tennis, drank martinis, gossiped, giggled a lot. A very meaningful life.” She laughed softly. With her thumbnail she scraped a dark spot from one of the carrots.

  DeWalt asked, “So what happened to change you?”

  “Wax,” she said.

  “As in …?”

  “As on cucumbers and peppers and apples and nearly everything else I bought at the store. You can’t wash it off, you know. I tried, but all I had was the shiniest produce in the county.” She laid the carrots in the sink again and shut off the tap. With a paring knife she began to nip off the carrots’ roots and stems.

  “Even around here,” she said, “where we’re surrounded by so much farmland, even here all the food in the stores has been trucked in from hundreds of miles away. It’s artificially grown, artificially ripened, artificially attractive. I began to think about what stuff like that might do to my kids. A lifetime of junk like that. It gave me the shivers.”

  “So you abandoned your life of leisure.”

  “Yep,” she said. “Not that the kids appreciate it, though. They’d live on candy and chips and cookies if I’d let them. But what responsible mother would?”

  “I never even tasted a store-bought cookie until I went away to college,” he told her. “My mother made everything from scratch. And the way she made them, with oatmeal, raisins, honey and brown flour—cookies like that cost a dollar each in the mall these days.”