An Occasional Hell Read online

  DeWalt figured that he had met more than his share of faculty and corporate wives and he was pleased that Elizabeth Catanzaro did not fit the mold. There was no reason to be pleased because he was not going to have anything to do with this case, but the pleasure was there anyway. There was no evidence in her of that typical hostess mentality he had grown to abhor, that shallow self-centeredness of women whose days are comprised of lunch, tennis, and cocktails, of wives utterly dependent upon their ambitious if neglectful husbands, women who because they take frequent shopping trips far from home see themselves as liberated and independent, women independent of nothing but self-honesty, arrested in development somewhere between Sak’s and L.L. Bean’s. All such women struck DeWalt as particularly asexual. He much preferred the company of working women, that category to which Elizabeth Catanzaro most certainly belonged. His preference was a useless one, of course, but it existed nonetheless.

  She walked away from DeWalt now, she went to the metal basement door beside the water tap, the door canted at a forty-five degree angle between the ground and the house. She sat down on this door with her elbows on her knees and her hands clasped between them.

  “It’s just that I’ve been away from this kind of work too long now,” DeWalt said, even though she had asked for no explanation. “I’m in no shape for it anymore. I couldn’t do you any good.”

  She looked at the dogs, who were standing with their noses to the fencing.

  “The police don’t have any evidence against you, do they?” he asked. “If they did, you would have been charged by now.”

  “Just the phone call,” she said.

  “What call is that?”

  “The one I made to Rodney Gillen.”

  “Rodney Gillen being Jeri Gillen’s husband?”

  She nodded.

  “When did you call him? And why?”

  “The same morning Alex was murdered. And I called him to tell him exactly where he could find his wife and my husband.”

  DeWalt blew out a slow, heavy breath. Yes, she certainly was a woman who would be angered by betrayal. “Why did you want Rodney Gillen to have that information? What exactly was it you wanted him to do?”

  She looked to the side, looked at the ground, head cocked, jaw held crookedly.

  The phone had rung at least twenty times on the morning of August 16th, twenty times before Rodney Gillen, groggy with barbituates, stopped shouting for his wife to answer the phone, crawled out of bed, stumbled into the living room, and snatched up the receiver in the middle of a maddening ring.

  “Yeah? What?” he had answered.

  “Is this Rodney Gillen?”

  “Who’s calling?”

  “Are you married to Jeri Gillen? The waitress at the Colony Restaurant?”

  “What about her?” Gillen had asked, coming awake now, awake with suspicion, a flowering of fear. “Who is this?”

  “My name is Elizabeth Catanzaro. And I thought you might like to know that your wife and my husband are together at this very minute. As far as I can determine, they’ve been together every Saturday morning for the past year and a half.”

  Gillen said nothing, neither encouragement nor denial.

  She continued, angered by his silence, another form of collusion. “Just in case there’s any doubt in your mind as to what they’re doing together, you can go see for yourself. They’re parked in my husband’s silver Accord on a private road beside the river. You head out of town on Third Street, turn left off the Abrams Hill bridge, then follow route 38 north for five and six-tenths miles. On your right there’ll be a dirt road with a NO TRESPASSING sign at the entrance. That’s where they are.”

  Again she waited. She expected her information to be challenged, her veracity questioned. She had more to say if he wanted to hear it. But Gillen said nothing. In silence he held the phone for half a minute, and then he hung up.

  “And what did you do after that?” DeWalt asked.

  She laughed. A small laugh, soft, self-deprecating. It was the first she had laughed since DeWalt met her.

  She said, “I went upstairs and got all of Alex’s clothes and carried them downstairs. I was going to burn them out on the front lawn. I wanted him to see the smoke on his way back home.”

  “But you didn’t go through with it?”

  “I never even noticed it was raining until I stepped out onto the porch with a bundle of clothes in my arms. And it was raining hard. Thunder, lightning; the water was already an inch deep on the driveway.”

  “So you changed your mind.”

  “It was like.…” She smiled to herself and shook her head. “I put his clothes back in the closet, and then I got in my car and drove to a little Presbyterian church a few miles from here. I didn’t try to go inside or anything.” She looked up at DeWalt now. “This is getting pretty melodramatic, isn’t it?”

  He smiled in return. “I can take it.”

  “Anyway, I just sat there in my car. And I prayed, I guess. I just wanted everything to be made right again.”

  “How long were you there?”

  “Close to an hour. Long enough to start thinking maybe it was a mistake to have called Rodney Gillen. That maybe I’d given him the wrong idea or, I don’t know, that I’d had the wrong idea about what should be done.”

  “You were afraid Rodney would go down there and kill them?”

  “I don’t know, I just had a feeling. I felt strange all of a sudden. Sick to my stomach but … not physically sick. Do you understand?”

  “Of course.”

  “So I went to the nearest phone and called Rodney Gillen again. There’s a phone booth outside a bar maybe a mile or so from the church. Anyway, there was no answer this time.”

  “Which made you even more worried.”

  “Terrified.” She plucked a tuft of grass, then let it fall. “So I called the police. And they sent a car down to the inlet. And it was too late.”

  “And now you blame yourself.”

  “I am responsible, aren’t I?”

  “Not in a criminal sense. Not unless you suggested the course of action, or offered payment for it, or supplied the weapon.”

  “Are you asking me if I did? Go ahead, ask. You wouldn’t be the first one to ask that question.”

  DeWalt chose to say nothing. He did not need to know. He was not involved.

  “I know how it looks,” she said. “Because the murder weapon was a musket, and because Alex was a collector, and because I called Rodney Gillen and told him where to find them … don’t you think I know how it looks?”

  “Has Rodney implicated you in any way?”

  “Rodney Gillen, like his wife, is still ‘whereabouts unknown’. Same as the musket is. All of which leaves me with no way to defend myself. With nobody on my side.”

  For some reason, DeWalt’s heart was racing. The air was muggy, thick, it sat in his chest like mud. It pooled on his forehead, oozed down his spine. And yet he felt frozen in that hollow space beneath his heart, he felt the coldness of the plastic bag folded against his belly, the chilly pinch of the catheter.

  He thought it peculiar too how words could come so easily when directed through a pen, and so clumsily when he tried to speak aloud. Maybe if he pursed his lips to pensize, tightened the flow … nope; now he would not only sound like an idiot but look the part too. Fortunately she was staring at the ground.

  If he could count on her to not look at him again, maybe he could get away from here unscathed. Slink back to his little house that was easy to keep clean and quiet and back to his tiny backyard with its cedar blockade fence that kept him from seeing beyond it. But out here in the open he was having a difficult time containing his thoughts, they went out and on forever, they were crows in the distant trees, calling for him to find them.

  He asked, “So how do you think Rodney Gillen got hold of a musket from your husband’s collection?” A single crow took to the air; a black frown against the gunmetal sky.

  “It wasn’t from Alex�
��s collection,” she said. And now she looked up at him. “Nothing of his is missing. You can check with the insurance company; Alex had everything insured.”

  If she was lying she was very good at it. But he did not think she was lying. But whether he believed her or not did not matter. His heart had slowed down now and was beating heavily again, dully, a hammer pounding clay. As for its brief freneticism—why do hearts do that? he wondered. Do they possess a secret knowledge, a way of knowing, or fearing, what the mind does not?

  Anyway he would not be taking this or any other case. He looked to see if she was still holding the slip of paper he had given her. She was. It hung between her thumb and middle finger, brushing the grass, a yellow leaf about to fall.

  “You call those people,” he said, and nodded toward her hand. “They’ll straighten things out.”

  “I thought that’s why I was telling you all this,” she said.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry I gave you that impression.” He could have left then but didn’t. He stared at the treeline. “You should probably change your phone number too, get an unlisted number. Or at least an answering machine. You’ll be receiving some crank calls before long.”

  “I’ve gotten several already.”

  He nodded. “The DA isn’t going to charge you unless he can come up with something solid, so you can relax about that. Their first job is to find the Gillens and the murder weapon.”

  “I don’t care about being charged, Mr. DeWalt. No, that’s not true, I do care. Most of all, though, I want the truth.”

  “You know the truth.”

  “I think I do. But that’s not enough.”

  “Sometimes it’s all we get.”

  “It’s what we get if it’s what we’re willing to settle for.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just impossible for me right now.”

  “Aren’t you curious as to why my husband would have written down your name and number so often?”

  He smiled. “I’m trying not to be.”

  “I don’t understand how you can do that.”

  He kept smiling, even though the smile felt crooked somehow, ersatz. “Good luck,” he told her, and turned away.

  Conscious of every step, he walked back to his car. By the time he reached the car he was out of breath and his heart was racing again. His legs felt rubbery, feet like sweaty slabs of ham. Damn it, he told himself, I’m not that far out of shape that I can’t walk fifty yards without collapsing. Get ahold of yourself, DeWalt.

  Inside the car he started the engine, turned on the air-conditioner and closed the windows. Cool air flooded over him finally but it had an unpleasant odor, it left a sour taste of metal on his tongue. When he had his breath back he slipped the car into reverse, backed up to the garage and faced the highway again.

  It was then he noticed the treehouse twenty feet up in a tall black oak, the boards of the small cabin as dark as bark, a ladder of short and variously tilted boards nailed to the thick trunk. It made him catch his breath again, his breath snagged on something sharp inside his chest.

  Children, he thought. He had heard about them on the news. How could you forget about the children, DeWalt?

  He shut off the car, got out and walked to the rear of the house. She was still there, still sitting on the basement door.

  “How many children do you have?” he asked.

  “Two,” she said. “Nikki and Chris.”

  “And they are how old?”

  “Nikki is eight, Chris is eleven. Why do you want to know?”

  “And where were they the morning you called Rodney Gillen?”

  “I had sent them the night before to stay with their grandmother, about thirty miles from here. So that they’d be out of the house when I made the call. And also when Alex came home afterward and we’d have it out. Or so I thought.”

  “And those mornings when you went to check on your husband and the girl?”

  “I left them here watching television. Saturday morning cartoons. And I know what you’re thinking—”

  “I’m not thinking anything.”

  “Well, you’d have the right to. It was stupid of me to leave them alone like that. What if something had happened to them while I was gone?”

  “Nothing did though.”

  “No, but it could have. I hate myself for doing that.”

  A few moments later he asked, “Where are the kids now?”

  “They’re staying with my mother. I want them to stay there until this thing is cleared up. Before school starts, I hope. Which is eighteen days from now.”

  “You should have told me you have children,” he said.

  “Why should that make a difference?”

  He remembered the scene from the six o’clock news. She had been standing on her front porch, top step, late afternoon of the murder, looking down, arms hugging herself. A spa-slender mustachioed reporter in a powder blue suit pushing a microphone in her face. “How do your kids feel about what’s happened?” he asked. And she, looking almost sleepy with grief, insentient with her surfeit of loss, she had lifted her head then and with blazing eyes asked in a low even voice, “You asshole, how do you think they feel? How would you feel? Or do you feel anything? Maybe you can’t feel anything, maybe the only thing you’re capable of doing is sounding like a goddamn idiot!” And she turned and stormed inside, the screen door banging shut. Her expletives had been cut but there was no mistaking what she had said. The reporter faced the camera then, nodding mournfully, looking appropriately sympathetic as he made his closing inanities. It was good theatre, it was real. They ran the same clip again at eleven.

  “How long were you married?” DeWalt asked.

  “Thirteen years. I was one of his students when he was a graduate assistant at Penn State. I guess he had a weakness for younger women even way back then.”

  DeWalt could not look at her now, did not think she would want him to. And when he did not look at her and they did not speak, it was as quiet there as had been his uncle’s place. His aunt had raised chickens and there were no chickens here but the crows in the far trees were a suitable substitute. It was just as clean here and as quiet and it made him wish there were a way to be young again.

  He glanced at her now and saw that she was staring at the grass between her feet. He could hear a woodpecker in one of the trees left of the house, hammering its brains out. He could hear his own breath rasping in the hollow of his chest and he could hear her finger and thumb rubbing up and down across the slip of paper he had given her.

  “Is there anything else I should know about?” he asked then, not as a reprimand but gently, an apology for ignorance.

  “Lots,” she said, and looked into the sky.

  He stepped closer and extended his hand.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  In structure the Jewett home was much like the Catanzaro home, a two-story frame house covered with three-inch clapboards, a long covered porch stretching from one front corner to the other, a side entrance, overhanging gables and a steeply-pitched roof. But there the similarity ended.

  An original coat of white paint on the Jewett house was all but erased now, the boards blistered and warped, the house the color of chalk dust, a variegated gray. Beside the front door, beneath the porch roof, someone had once begun to repaint, this time with an ochre colored pigment, but even this area—no larger than that which a man could reach to both sides and above his head without stretching—was old enough to have lost all trace of sheen.

  At the side entrance, the lower half of the screen door’s frame was scorched black, most of the screen itself melted into clots of metal held suspended by a few threads of wire, like empty insect shells trapped in an abandoned web. The wooden door stood intact, however, the glass of its small triangular window replaced with cardboard covered with aluminum foil, the outer skin of the door charred in an inverted chevron pattern whose point reached nearly to the window, the varnish having been boiled into bubbles long since harden
ed into tiny black agates. There remained only enough of the three incinerated steps that had once led to this door to suggest their original purpose.

  The roof of the house was splotched black with tar in six places visible from the front, six wide black shadows flattened against the curled and brittle leaves of the shingles. Growing thirty feet to the side of the porch but extending branches over the porch roof was a hundred-year-old oak, all but leafless now, dying from the inside out, its heart full of sawdust and beetle shells. One gnarled limb grew with several crooked fingers thrust against an upstairs window; the glass was cracked but not yet broken through. Last year’s leaves, acorn husks, twigs and windfall branches littered the roof and ground.

  The property surrounding this house seemed to be returning to its primal state. Maple and oak seedlings sprouted at random in the dark earth virtually bare of grass. The light was dim, a few broken shafts, weak straws of timid yellow. The air smelled vaguely musty. Depending on the breeze there were other odors as well, the least pleasant the scent from a hole being sunk ten yards off the left side of the house, where Clifford Jewett and his brother Draper were excavating the septic tank.

  Ernest DeWalt parked his car, a professor’s car, a maroon-colored Acura, beneath the oak whose branches were about to poke through the upstairs window. Ten minutes earlier he had been at the inlet where Alex Catanzaro had been murdered, a place now four miles away by car but less than a half-mile downhill by foot. He shut off the engine and, moving slowly, wanting to appear in no hurry, climbed out. Clifford and Draper Jewett leaned on their shovels to watch him approach.

  They were pale; their skin, where it showed on the arms and face and neck, as white as their dingy tee-shirts. Draper had not been doing much of the work: the hilt of his shovelblade remained fairly clean, not caked with orange clay mud, as was his brother’s. Draper’s boots too, and the cuffs of his jeans, were not soiled to the extent of Clifford’s, who wore the ochre stain of muck as high as the crotch of his trousers. A tear of sweat swung from the tip of Clifford Jewett’s nose.