The Heaven Stone Page 4

  “Looked it to me. He wasn’t his usual self. Seemed kind of uptight.” She ventured a tart smile. “The way I must’ve looked back there in the office a while ago.”

  “You handled it about the best way there was, Mrs.…?”

  “It’s Samms, but make it Cassie.”

  “Thanks. Mine’s Rasmussen. Alex.”

  “I’d have liked to tell the man what for, but I need the job.”

  “I know the feeling.”

  “The truth is it was my second late this week, which makes only two times ever. Generally my daughter’s tough as weeds, but the other week she went swimming and took an ear infection, so she’s home. I figure she needs me more for those few minutes than some company’s sheets and table linen do.”

  I nodded. “Mrs. Samms—Cassie—did Tran ever show any signs of drug use?”

  “Back to Bhuntan again, huh?”

  “Off the record,” I said, “I’m a private investigator. The person who hired me doesn’t think Tran used drugs.”

  “Him? Shoot, who the police kidding on that one? He was straight up. Put your mind to ease on that.”

  I sneaked through a yellow light, went past the old Boston and Maine depot and drew to a stop in front of the defunct Rialto theater. Cassie Samms opened the door. I said, “Are you looking for another job?”

  Some of the wariness sparked in her eyes again. “Kind of job?”

  “I can’t promise anything, but the assistant manager over at the Appleton Inn is a friend. She hires the staff. Would you consider talking to her?”

  The idea seemed to interest her.

  “Call there and ask for Nan Crawford.”

  On the curb, she thanked me for the ride and the job tip.

  “Use my name,” I said. “Then watch out for the doors swinging magically open.”

  * * *

  The office was in a lull, but the day’s mail told me I was a winner in a seven-figure sweepstakes. I didn’t call my broker. There was an offer to time-share in Mexico and a lingerie catalog addressed to a former tenant. I telephoned Ada Chan Stewart’s work number. An earnest young woman told me she was out visiting one of her clients but would be back later for a staff meeting. I left word that I would be in touch in the morning.

  I got a blank folder out of the top drawer of the file cabinet, reeled a strip of labels into the Royal, typed Ada Stewart’s name and affixed the label to the folder. Next I jotted notes on my conversations with the real estate agent, Ken Smith; the Azars; the young woman at River View Mortgage; and Perry Martin from the laundry. I left Cassie Samms’s observations to run around in my head for a bit. And while I thought of it, I called the Appleton Inn and got hold of Nan Crawford and told her Mrs. Samms might call. Nan was her usual spry self; in spite of the million and one details of inn-keeping, she made you feel that she had been sitting there all day hoping you would call. When I hung up I re-read the case file.

  All of that accomplished, I creaked back in my chair, beached on the downward slope of the afternoon, nothing else to do. Or nothing else I could think of to fill the time. I cranked up Joltin’ Joe and brewed a cup of same. The first mouthful hit my stomach and I decided I was jittery enough already.

  I used the hallway washroom I shared with Fred Meecham, an attorney who rented a pair of suites down the hall. I wet-combed my hair and poked a fresh dimple into the blue silk foulard, then told the man in the mirror he was out of excuses for stalling.

  5

  IT HAD BEEN two months since I had seen Lauren. Possibly I had started to get used to the idea, though I wouldn’t press it. Then, two nights before, she was on the phone. She wanted to see me. Dinner Tuesday night? It felt funny making a date with your wife. She picked the place, so I figured the choice of weapons was mine. I had splashed on some Tuscany and worn my gray suit. There wasn’t much to be done about the face.

  The 99 was a notch above the plastic-roof joints, with okay food and atmosphere if you caught it when the place wasn’t packed with the office crowd. I was early. I’m always early. As bad habits go, it’s not the worst. A private ticket without a little paranoia doesn’t last. I parked on a corner stool at the bar where I could see the door. The bartendress was thirty-something, with a smile full of shiny wire. I told her a Molson. It used to be you would see dental hardware only on kids; these days it turned up everywhere. The soul finally having proven imperfectable, we concentrated on the body now. I had news for us.

  Being early was a mistake this time, as it only gave me a chance to worry about what changes two months might have brought. It was more than a year since Lauren had started to tell me we should split. When my counter-proposal began to sound like a recording, I said why didn’t she stay in the house; it would be easier for me to crash at my office for a while. But as the nights passed, the couch in my waiting room wasn’t getting any softer, and the recording only got scratchy from use. Ten months ago I bit the rent on an apartment over in the east end of town. I didn’t quit trying to change Lauren’s mind.

  “Drinking alone?”

  I had missed her coming in. I didn’t miss anything else as I bumbled to my feet and took in the newly crimped ash-blond hair, her tan, and the trimness the flower-print Belle France dress could only emphasize. As I bent to kiss her she tipped her face just enough so it caught her on the pert angle of her jaw. Charles of the Ritz hit me like a truck pulling out of Memory Lane.

  “How are you, Alex? You look okay.”

  “Not as okay as you.”

  She had not put her slim little purse on the bar yet and was taking me in with momentary appraisal in her cool, woodsmoke gray eyes.

  “Shall we get a table?” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m starved.”

  I was still feasting on this woman who for a lot of years had been my wife, when a busboy poured water clinking into goblets and asked if we’d care for a cocktail. I looked at Lauren. “Chablis?”

  “Cutty and soda,” she told him, and in just the way she said it my stomach went tight and my appetite dwindled. I ordered another beer.

  There were things you knew about people, the little dance steps you fell into with them which got comfortable. When one or the other partner changed steps, suddenly there were dislocations all down the line. Scotch was a new step.

  The early-evening light coming through the latticed window illuminated half of Lauren’s face. She wore thirty-eight well, like a suit of custom-fit clothes. She sparkled the way lots of women years younger couldn’t, the way, in my eyes, she always had and always would. But something had changed. I sensed it.

  After the drinks came and the waiter took our orders, filling his own young eyes with the way Lauren looked, we did the ritual with the glasses, but they were out of key. Lauren snapped open the little purse and found a deck of those women’s cigarettes that are as long as an eye pencil, and fitted one in her lips. Clumsily I scratched a restaurant match.

  “The rest of the population is giving up and you start?”

  She whiffed smoke to one side. “The habit is under control. I end up throwing away half the pack each week because they go stale.” Not that it was any of my business, she added without saying it.

  I kept it light and we played a little catch-up. Life, work, the mutual and separate friends, the neighborhood. I remembered and told her happy birthday, which was coming up. That struck a spark. She offered her tanned, slender fingers. “You didn’t see my birthstone ring.”

  It was hard to miss a ruby the size of a tail light, but I had. Shamus Rasmussen. “It’s great,” I said.

  The food came and Lauren went at it with zest while I picked at mine like a parakeet. I knew now what I had been hoping for from this, and I’d been wrong. Being wrong makes me defensive, which turns up my smart-ass setting. “Your name gets linked with a certain dry cleaning magnate’s lately,” I said. “Is that a habit you’ve got under control too?”

  Her eyes went a little stony. “Are you working?”

  “Per
sonal curiosity.”

  “You can ask, but I don’t have to answer.”

  I attempted a smile. “We’re in an old episode of Family Feud, right? Richard Dawson is going to walk in any minute, all puckered up for a kiss.”

  Her headshake told me I was being childish. I gnawed food and didn’t taste a thing. “I don’t hear your name on the grapevine,” Lauren said neutrally. “Are you seeing anyone?”

  “I’m married.”

  She lifted her shoulders. “That could be a problem. You’re thinner.”

  “The running. Thin is always in.”

  “Don’t get too thin.”

  “Is that concern I detect?”

  “Guilt maybe. Over bailing out the way I did,” she said, and for a moment we had slipped into honesty. “My timing wasn’t so great. I know that.”

  I gave her a few seconds to squeeze in more, but she didn’t. She stubbed the cigarette into the glass ashtray, where it looked oddly forlorn, alone in the tray with a delicate rim of lipstick on one end. Nothing from lips that pretty should die alone. I leaned closer. “The door swings back the other way,” I said, hearing the note of hope in my voice and not ashamed of it.

  “That’s why I called you,” she said.

  I felt my heart lift.

  “I wanted you to find out first from me,” she said, “not around town or in a gossip column. Joel has asked me to marry him, Alex. I want the divorce.”

  It was like fingers speared into the solar plexus. It is the most helpless feeling there is: you lie there buckled over, fish-eyed and gasping, waiting for the finishing blow.

  Lauren looked around, and the waiter glided over. “Same, please,” she said. The kid nodded and glanced my way. Seeing the green tinge maybe, he vanished before I could shake my head.

  “Why didn’t you just order a Molotov and throw that?” I said.

  She gazed out at the sparse traffic on 133, and the sunlight loved her face, like the waiter did, like I did, like Joel Castle must. “What did you expect, Alex?” she asked, turning back.

  “Time?”

  “Dammit, time ran out. I was ready for both of us to leave here, to go someplace new and start over. You insisted on staying.”

  “There is no place new in a situation like that.”

  “Isn’t there a point where you put your cards down and just walk away, regardless of what’s on the table?”

  “Not when it’s your name that’s being dragged through the ashes,” I said.

  She sighed. “So I’ll always admire you for sticking and trying to clear it. But maybe you should’ve done it another way, not sitting around in a little office with dust motes spinning in the air and waiting for business to find its way up the stairs. You got shafted, that’s the way it is. Everyone gets shafted sooner or later. You pull the shaft out and get the bleeding stopped and you go on. I was ready to do that if we went someplace else. You think it was any easier for me reading what the papers were saying about you, knowing what people were thinking? The ‘for worse’ and ‘for poorer’ clauses work all right in the beginning, but there’s got to be an upward curve.”

  “Like in the dry cleaning business,” I said, being stupid again.

  “Like in life. And what’s wrong with having money? What have you got against Joel anyway?”

  “I know him.”

  “And I don’t?”

  “You know his cleaned-up incarnation. I knew him before, when he was Joey Costello, spending his old man’s dough and not being a very good person. But that’s not—”

  “So I accept who he is now. Love can change people.”

  “Love is just a four-letter word,” I said. “Like ‘rich.’”

  As a credit to her intelligence she sipped her drink and ignored that. But I couldn’t. I said, “Okay, he’s got good taste, but it doesn’t work for Charlie Tuna, why should it work for him? Just because he gives you things and has money, doesn’t make it right.”

  “It’s righter than you sitting around feeling sorry for yourself. What’s pride worth?”

  “If you gotta ask…”

  She shook her head, truly pained. “Honest to God. I don’t know you anymore. What about respect? That’s the trouble with you, you respect nothing but some abstraction, some idea of honor that’s been wronged.”

  “Forget about that,” I said. “What happened to the couple who were going to stand by each other?” I had taken her hand in mine, but she drew it away, not roughly or abruptly, just away.

  “They changed, Alex. People do. Think about that.”

  She opened her bag, tossed the cigarettes in, took out a wallet and laid some bills on the table. I waved the money away. “Lauren, what if we—”

  She cut me off by rising. “I have to leave,” she said and hurried for the door.

  I signaled the waiter, who did not come running for me.

  6

  I BROKE THE TAX SEAL on the fifth of Gilbey’s and spilled some over ice, where it went to work like Prestone. Among an assortment of leftovers in my refrigerator, which were beginning to look like petri dishes, I found a geriatric liter of tonic and watered the gin. Then I took the glass, clinking in my hand, out to the apartment’s little screened porch overlooking woods and a slice of the Concord River.

  In theory it was romantic, but the river is a far cry from the one Thoreau rowed down with his brother John a hundred and fifty years ago, strangled now with soda cans, bald tires, shopping carts, and weekenders in rubber rafts. I sat there listening to the Red Sox on someone’s radio, and crickets, and every few seconds, the bitter crackle of an insect hitting the blue zapper in a nearby back yard. It seemed a cruel fate, rushing in, in the happy heat of yearning, then having your lights put out.

  I built another drink, still easy on the G, generous with the T.

  If I boned up on my Freud, maybe I could make a case for Joel Castle hitting on Lauren—some kind of childhood transference issue, or revenge for old and unremembered hurts done him—but I didn’t buy it, and with the fourth drink I futzed around the kitchen for awhile before I saw the drawer in the counter and knew I’d been coming to it all evening.

  It’s the drawer that collects everything, as basic to a home as a sink. I tugged it open and gazed in at twine, pencils with gnawed points, warranty cards that never got mailed, a tattered Lew Archer novel, packets of garden seeds, a jackknife, matchbooks (to which I added one from the 99, less a match), clipped recipes for quick ’n’ easy meals I hadn’t gotten around to making, expired coupons, assorted loose screws and nails, buttons, nail-clippers, chalk line, more pencils. In the back, under a postcard saying ‘Sun your buns in Jamaica,’ I found the flat, snap-lid box.

  The shield hadn’t been retired to the Crime Busters Hall of Fame, nor had anyone come to fetch it. I plucked it from the blue velour and tested it in my palm. I read the city motto printed above the city seal in good old English: Art Is the Handmaid of Human Good. I set the shield back. I looked at the three commendations, the ribbons a little more faded since the last time. The papers that went with them were around somewhere too. I closed the box and re-interred it in the drawer. I refilled my glass and went out on the porch. I thought about Lauren. I listened to the night chorus. Evening and a drink and time to sit and ponder. They were the small things you still had when you got derailed.

  For no reason I was aware of, I thought about Bhuntan Tran. I thought how he must have sat like this in his own little microchip of heaven and listened to the sounds, sounds he had traded in the screams and the gunfire of the killing fields for. But the trade-in had been revoked; someone had seen to that. His American dream had turned to nightmare. All at once, with the sudden brief clarity that booze brings, I realized that it was important to me to find out why Tran had died.

  I thought about this a little more, but the clarity soon blurred.

  After a while I went back inside and built another drink with a whole new blueprint.

  7

  THE TELEPHONE WOKE me at five
past eight, gritty-eyed and with teeth that felt like rocks in the old mill stream.

  “Ho ho ho, Merry Christmas. You awake?”

  “Whaa?”

  “I got some information you wanted,” Bob Whitaker, my photographer friend, said.

  “Uhnh.”

  “You sound like you could use some strong coffee.”

  “Can.”

  “The Owl in twenty minutes?”

  “Double it.”

  After I showered and got the moss scrubbed off, I put on a pale gray shirt, a black knit tie and my seersucker. Subdued seemed to be the hue of the day. Avoiding the debris in the kitchen where the Gilbey’s bottle sat on the table, as dry as the drinks I’d faded out with last night, I forged outside into light rain. I got the bomber going and put it up on the Connector, which was a ruby necklace of brake lights. The world seemed to be moving like I was this morning, a foot at a time.

  The small parking lot in front of the Owl Diner was crowded. Inside I found Bob Whitaker leaning at the cash register chatting with an orange-haired stringbean I hadn’t seen before.

  “Heeey,” he greeted. “Lazarus comes forth.”

  A booth opened up in a corner, and we took it. The place was busy with building tradesmen rained out for the morning. They sat and drank coffee and swapped tales of construction woe. Outside the damp wind flagged the green awnings, and in here the windows fogged and it was pleasant. Whitaker is a short, brown man with an afro and an ability to win friends anywhere. Favoring loose army surplus clothing in drab tones, he blends in. You spot him snooping around town with the Sun’s Nikons, but his true love is the old solid-body Leica he uses to shoot his own stuff.

  Doris, one of the regular waitresses, brought coffee. I ordered a bran muffin while Whitaker asked for the works. From the pocket of her apron, Doris slipped out a booklet called Zodiac Love Guide.

  “Hey, Rasmussen,” she said, “what’s your sign?”

  I didn’t have to think. “‘Quiet, Hospital Zone’ is one I’m into today.”