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Letta Smothers’s apartment house was one of those buildings that Fly
Letta Smothers was a big, blowsy woman with multicolored hair—blond streaks, auburn streaks, and gray roots. She wore blue jeans that were too small for her and a sweatshirt that was too big. A cigarette was stuck in the corner of her mouth.
“I don’t normally like cops,” she told Fly
“I appreciate that,” said Leo Fly
“Didn’t make any sense for Ritchie to be out in the bay anyway,” Letta said. “He hated water. I even had to tell him to wash regular. He said water was for plants and fish.”
“I’m more curious about this friend of his—Frank something.”
“They weren’t friends, not like real friends.” Letta dropped the cigarette on the floor of the hall and ground it out with her slipper, which was fluffy and orange. “Frank just showed up one day. I don’t think Ritchie knew him before. They had some business deal—I don’t know what it was unless it was car parts. You know, buying and selling. You want to come in and sit on the couch?”
Fly
“That’s okay. It’s probably more private here in the hall,” said Fly
“Not much. He looked kind of strange, with this thin face all squeezed together like it had gotten caught in a press. He had a lot of energy, always moving. More’n once I had to tell him to take a load off his feet just to keep him from walking back and forth in front of the TV. And he liked jokes, he knew lots of jokes. He couldn’t shut up with them.”
“You remember any?”
“You hear the one about the queer nail? Laid in the road and blew a tire.”
Fly
“You know what you get when you cross a donkey with an onion? A piece of ass that makes your eyes water.”
“Any about Canucks?”
“You know what you call four Canucks in a Mercedes? Grand theft auto.”
“He must have been a lot of fun.”
Letta Smothers scratched her hair, then looked at her fingernails. “I don’t know, it got a little tiresome. Even Ritchie got sick of it, and he liked jokes. Poor Ritchie. And I had to tell Frank to watch his mouth in front of the kids. Like he couldn’t shut up.”
“This guy have any good points?”
A dreamy expression came over Letta’s wide face. “Bread. He’d make this fantastic bread. Muffins, cookies, cakes. Bread with fruit in it. Bread with chocolate chips. He liked doing it. Sometimes I thought he didn’t come over here to see Ritchie and me. He came to use the oven. He’d done baking in a vocational school someplace. It was a real gift.”
—
Jim Hawthorne got the call at six-thirty Tuesday morning. Clifford Evings was dead. Hawthorne had been shaving, and as he listened to the nurse’s voice he got shaving cream on the telephone’s black receiver. Alice spoke calmly but with a slight tremor. A breeze from the open bedroom window blew across Hawthorne’s bare skin as he stood in the living room dressed only in his pajama pants.
“The body’s cool. He must have died in the night.”
“Who else have you called?”
“The doctor, the Brewster police, the state police.”
“Why the police?”
“There’s an empty bottle of pills on the night table.”
“I’ll be right over.”
Hanging up, Hawthorne returned to the bathroom. The tile floor was cold on his bare feet. A faint gray light came in through the window. He finished shaving, then looked at his face in the mirror—his tired eyes, his drawn expression, his wet and uncombed hair. He took no comfort in what he saw, and in the lines on his forehead and at the corners of his eyes he felt he was witnessing the effect of his horror from the week before. His face looked tighter, bonier. Even as he stared at his reflection it seemed he could hear the notes of “Satin Doll.” Then he went to get dressed.
Clifford Evings was dead. Hawthorne would hear his nasal whine no more. Evings’s thi
There was frost on the grass when Hawthorne let himself out the French windows onto the terrace behind Adams Hall. The sun had yet to crest the eastern mountains and Hawthorne couldn’t tell if the day would be cloudy or clear. The sky and ground had an equal grayness; the distant trees formed a leaden curtain. Crows were calling. Hawthorne hurried toward the row of dormitory cottages. Shepherd, where Evings had his studio apartment, was the third, and all the lights were burning. Half a dozen kids in puffy down jackets stood on the grass looking up at Evings’s windows. Scott McKi
Hawthorne couldn’t bring himself to answer. Five boys and two girls looked at him with an excitement that seemed devoid of grief. Yet there was distress nonetheless. Hawthorne hurried past them up the front steps and opened the door. To the right of the hallway was the student lounge, where about twelve junior and senior boys were talking quietly. They looked at Hawthorne as if he might do something—erase their sadness or return Evings to life. Two were weeping.
Hawthorne greeted them, then used the house phone to call the kitchen. Breakfast wouldn’t be served for another forty-five minutes, but he didn’t want the boys to remain in the dorm. Gaudette answered and Hawthorne explained what had happened.
“I want to send about a dozen kids over to the dining hall. Give them some hot chocolate and juice or something, maybe get them to help you set up. Don’t let Frank tell them any jokes.”
“That’s fine. I got some muffins.”
Hawthorne told the boys to get their coats and go over to the kitchen. He tried to think what else he could do, but only the impossible came to mind—like removing those parts of their memories that hurt them.
Upstairs he found Alice Beech and Bobby in Evings’s apartment, a long room with a sloping ceiling and two dormers under the roof. Piles of books lined the wall across from the windows. Evings lay on his back in his single bed, fully dressed but with his shoes off. A pair of polished black wing tips stood side by side on the floor by the foot of the bed. Evings wore threadbare black socks and Hawthorne could see his long toes through the fabric. He wore a dark suit, white shirt, and blue striped tie, as if he had already dressed himself for his funeral and meant to cause as little trouble as possible. His hands were folded across his stomach. His eyes were slightly open, as if he were furtively watching the people in the room. There was a faint gleam from his teeth. The air smelled sweet. Hawthorne thought the smell was coming from Evings, then he realized that Evings had been burning incense.